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Douglas Pinball Emporium

The Douglas Pinball Emporium is a neon-lit pinball arcade in Radford, Virginia, set in a former laundromat across the street from the Lonely Mountain Diner. It is the scene of the abduction of overnight worker Elizabeth George and of a gray-van raid in The Radford Horrors.
Type Location (arcade)
Aliases The arcade; Pinball Emporium
Region Radford, Virginia
Owner Douglas Douglas
First appearance Radford Horrors 02 (seen from the diner; first entered in Radford Horrors 03)

Description

The arcade occupies the former laundromat, now painted black and topped with a neon "Douglas Pinball Emporium" sign (Radford Horrors 02). Inside are neon carpet and black lights, a staff bathroom, a break room or lounge with an attached security office, and a front porch with a rain overhang and a dome camera. A heavy back maintenance door has no camera at all. A fence at the back of the lot has been cut and rejoined (Radford Horrors 03).

Further details emerge in the next episode. The front windows have been fixed after an earlier break-in. A man-sized office window onto a side alley is unlocked and has no screen. The loading dock is padlocked and there is a back service door. Neighbors are the post office and a failed tourist shop, and across the street are the diner, a small library and a gas station (Radford Horrors 04).

The arcade is about six months old: Elizabeth George has worked there "pretty much since the place started." Douglas Douglas says the lawsuit he won over his earlier job at the mountain vacation-home community, where he was kept from leaving and the team lent him toilet paper and the Department of Labor phone number, paid for it (Radford Horrors 03).

Notable places within

  • The Flash Gordon machine. Left opened up on the floor mid-repair by Elizabeth George, who was working on it when she vanished (Radford Horrors 03).
  • Staff bathroom and break room. The hand towels were missing from the bathroom and the first-aid kit from the break room (Radford Horrors 03, Radford Horrors 04).
  • The front porch camera. Its tape had been replaced with a partly overwritten tape from another day (Radford Horrors 03).
  • The office window. The route the intruder used, marked by a rotten compost smell like the Radford Moth and a dollop of opalescent slime above the sill (Radford Horrors 04).

History of events there

Elizabeth George's disappearance

The Radford Horrors 03 opens with a cold open along a dark aisle of chiming pinball machines: a struggle, a Taser crack, a woman's limp arm, and a man in a black balaclava carrying her out (Radford Horrors 03). Sheriff Molly Underhill then drives the team to the arcade. Douglas reports that his overnight security and maintenance worker was gone at opening, and that a letter on her door says she is in inpatient psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles (Radford Horrors 03).

Kurt Larson luminols the floor and finds a broken Taser tine with blood in the carpet, a blood smear and a single head hair on a machine corner, no fingerprints, and a faint bleach smell. There is also a bloodstain in the parking lot. Kurt finds that a section of the back fence was cut, a vehicle driven through, and the fence reattached (Radford Horrors 03).

Kurt recalls that other missing Radford people were officially said to be in drug or psychiatric facilities in Los Angeles, and the team treats the letter as the same cover story (Radford Horrors 03).

The gray van raid

In Radford Horrors 04, Kurt wins over the diner waitress Sheila and she repairs her "on the fritz" camera. It shows a gray van arriving at about 4 to 5 a.m. Five men get out, one with a long brown ponytail and the rest with military haircuts, some with covered faces. A non-human shadow moves in the emporium window, and one man opens the lock, possibly with a bump key. After a scuffle, three men carry out two bags, others carry out equipment, and the van speeds away (Radford Horrors 04). See Diner security tape. The waitress adds that gray vans began appearing a couple of months earlier, around the "right to roam" dispute over the woods and possibly tied to the Safe Environment Fund (Radford Horrors 04).

Back at the emporium, Kurt finds that the shadow stood at the left of the front window, where the floor had been recently cleaned. He concludes the office window was the way in, and that the emporium intruder was a smaller moth-related being, since the full-size moth could not have fitted through. His working theory is that a juvenile moth or a thrall was in the arcade, that the gray van crew came for it, and that Elizabeth, repairing the machine, was caught in the crossfire and taken to hide evidence. Zack floats the idea of a hidden recording device inside the machine (Radford Horrors 04).

It is never established in the recorded episodes what became of Elizabeth.

Inhabitants

Trivia

  • In Radford Horrors 03 Andre stumbles over the worker's name ("Lizbeth Geor... Sorry, Elizabeth George"), and in Radford Horrors 04 she is called "Lisbeth George"; the name is spelled variously.
  • Douglas Douglas, whose guard shack is filled with vintage pinball machines, first appears at Stately Acres (Radford Horror 07).

Appearances