But end it did.
There was always an ending. And in the monster movies, the monster always died. （At least until the sequel.）
They watched the Bride with her amazing lightning-bolt hair reject the monster; she screamed and gave a terrible hiss, and the monster understood then, knew that he would always be alone. Iris gripped Vi’s hand tighter. “We belong dead,” the monster said, and he pulled the lever to blow them up, setting fire to the tower, killing them.
Iris began to cry, her whole body lurching and rocking with sobs. She made a low moaning howl that was quiet at first but got louder.
“It’s okay,” Eric said. “It’s just a movie.”
She was rocking and howling in earnest now, and people in nearby cars were starting to look.
They were not supposed to be noticed. They were supposed to slip in and out of the movie like shadows. Three kids no one saw.
Vi put her arm around Iris, said, “Come on, shhh, it’s okay. Let’s go home. We’ll go home, it’s okay.”
Iris didn’t answer, just kept crying.
A man stepped toward them, a little unsteady. Vi couldn’t see his face because he was backlit by the screen playing the intermission clip with dancing popcorn and candy bars, by the bright floodlights that had come on around the snack bar.
“Your friend okay?” he asked. Vi could smell the beer on him.
“Yeah, she’s my sister. She’s fine. Just scared. Never seen a monster movie before,” Vi said.
Vi got on one side of her, Eric on the other, and they walked her back to the fence, murmuring comforting words, and slipped through. The credits rolled behind them, and people headed for the snack bar and playground for intermission.
The man called out, “Hey, where are you going?” He took a few staggering steps toward the fence, and put his hands on the links.
Vi’s heart was pounding as they got on their bikes and pedaled hard away from the drive-in, from the man still standing at the fence, watching them.
They pedaled hard and fast until they were on the dirt road, and then they had to get off and push, because the hill was too steep and Vi couldn’t do it with Iris on the seat of her bike.
Eric could have kept riding, but he dismounted too and walked alongside the girls, pushing his bike.
“It was a sad ending, wasn’t it?” Vi said to Iris as they trudged uphill.
Iris had stopped crying and howling.
“I’m sorry,” Vi said. “We should have warned you.”
“They burned up,” Iris said.
“That’s how it is in monster movies,” Eric explained. “The monster always dies.”
“Why?” Iris asked.
Vi wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Because they don’t belong,” Eric said, voice low.
And Iris started to cry again, not great howling sobs, but quietly, like a puppy snuffling. “It isn’t fair,” she said.
Vi held the handlebar of her bike with her right hand, and reached out for Iris’s hand with her left. Iris let her take it, and they walked like that in silence, all the way up the hill, the moonlight behind them stretching out their shadows, turning them all into monsters.
The Helping Hand of God: The True Story of the Hillside Inn By Julia Tetreault, Dark Passages Press, 1980
Helen Hildreth was married while still finishing her surgical residency. Her husband, John Patterson, was a young chemist whom she’d met in a lecture hall. After finishing his dissertation and completing his doctorate at the University of Vermont, he was offered a job at a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia. The couple moved, and Helen found a position at Philadelphia General Hospital. She was the only female surgeon at the hospital—a groundbreaking role at the time.