Meet Emmett Crane, who ran the Bijou on weeknights and the creature feature on Fridays

Third of seven. Ohmsville is invented; the kit is real — a board of springs, a drawer of parts, a manual of projects. I am Nate Pruitt, I write these, and I am working through the seven people who narrate this site one a week.

The Ohmsville Bijou is the cinema at the top of the strip, and Emmett Crane ran the projector in it on weeknights. On Friday nights he was somebody else: Mr. Static, the man in the cape who introduced the creature feature on Channel 9 from a set made of two coffins and a fog machine. The fog machine was a kettle. Everybody in town knew it was Emmett and everybody pretended they did not, and that is the whole arrangement. He does the Halloween trailers here. This interview was recorded in the projection box, which is hot.

Nate: You came here for the pictures. What kept you?

Emmett: What was behind them. A projector the size of a wardrobe, a marquee somebody has to climb up behind, house lights on a bank of switches, and a buzzer under the usher's desk. A cinema is a building wired to make a room feel something on a particular second. That is the job. The films come and go and the wiring stays, and the cape is costume.

Nate: The manual you keep under the counter. Which booklet?

Emmett: Relay Logic, the fourth one, and the relay is the reason. A relay is a small electromagnet sitting next to a switch: put a little current through the coil, the magnet pulls, and the switch slams over and turns on something much bigger that the little current could never have managed by itself. One thing decides, another thing does. That is a house-lights bar, a buzzer under a desk, and every single cue I ever ran, in one part the size of a sugar lump. The booklet has it inverting things, remembering things, ringing a bell and setting off an alarm, which between them cover everything I did for a living.

Nate: And a mission?

Emmett: The Bijou, which is my own house, so you may discount me. It builds up a lamp, a motor and a shutter, and when you have those three you have every machine that has ever shown a picture that moved, including the one behind me. A shutter is just a disc with a slot in it, spinning: light, no light, light, no light. Your eye fills in the gap and calls it movement. The mission gets you to the point where you can slow the two apart and see the cheat.

Nate: The build you would hand a stranger.

Emmett: Tripwire scream. Keep a lamp on the little grey cell — a light-sensitive resistor, which lets current through easily in the light and hardly at all in the dark — and the room stays as quiet as a church. Cross the beam with your hand, the cell goes dark, the relay lets go, and the thing finds its voice. Half the town came up off the sofa the Friday somebody actually wired the prop on our set instead of just standing it there.

Nate: Did it work first time?

Emmett: It did not. Finest pause of my career and the box sat in the dark saying nothing at all. A wire had come off a spring. Nobody at home was any the wiser, and I have never once admitted that on air until now.

Nate: Why do you like the dark so much?

Emmett: Because a room that cannot see is a room that is listening. You have about two seconds of that before people start talking again, and everything I know is about what to do with the two seconds.

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Emmett is a character. The stories are ours. His page is Emmett Crane, the Halloween pack is where most of his work ends up, and the street the Bijou stands at the top of is the town of Ohmsville.

Next week: Vera Holcomb, who pushed four desks together on a Thursday and started the Builders' Club.