Nothing. So he followed her into the theater and put down the eerie, caved-in headpiece on a table.
“The scaffolding is back here,” she said, leading the way into a spacious workshop with a thirty-foot ceiling and a massive garage door. There were walls lined with worktables and hung with tools, including an old table saw, piles of ratty paint cloths and sawhorses, trash cans, and acres of scrap wood. It was a lot cleaner than it had been yesterday, though.
“If you help me wheel it out, we can look up at the flies and see how they’re attached, and maybe how they were manipulated. And at the very least, take them down for evidence.”
“Flies? You mean the backdrops?”
“Right.”
They muscled the scaffolding out and wheeled it onto the stage with little trouble but some godawful wheel squeaking. It was metal and had been tucked behind a bunch of old set pieces, so Jake was reasonably sure it hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, he insisted that they check every step and bar before putting any weight on them, even though he was certain Vivien would have done so anyway.
“So, I was thinking about timing,” she said as they worked their way slowly up the steps, one on either side of the scaffolding. “When and how those events happened…either someone was watching and knew when to set the creepy effects off, or there was some other sort of trigger that launched the, uh, shows.
“When it happened the first time, I was here alone. I had just come into the building by myself, and no one knew I was going to come here; I didn’t even know it myself. I’d just gotten the keys, and the news that the bank approved my loan for the improvements, and I was so excited that I came right here. So that first littledisplayhad to have been set up and ready well before I arrived. Heck, maybe even the second one had been set up at the same time—how would I know? I wasn’t looking for scrims up in the house ceiling—probably wouldn’t have realized what they were even if I saw it up there—and as you saw, there are a bunch of flies, backdrops, still hanging up there above the stage.”
“So you’d literally just gotten the loan to buy the place and the first thing happened right away?” He looked at her from between the bars of the scaffolding.
“No, I closed on the actual building a month ago. The loan was for the improvements and renovation.” She pursed her lips. “So whoever it was had a month to set it up, I guess. I had to move from New York and everything. I just got the keys on Tuesday.”
“All right. So you came here unexpectedly—right after you got the keys—and walked in…”
“Right. I was walking down the main aisle in the house toward the stage, thinking about all of the energy and memories contained in this space, and how I wanted to— Well, anyway, I was walking down the aisle, and all of a sudden, there was this bright blue light on the stage.”
She’d been clambering up the ladder a little too fast for his comfort, then suddenly stopped. “Wait a sec. I remember something…I remember walking down the aisle and feeling something sort of give under my foot, like a soft spot in the floor, and I was thinking, oh crap, it’s going to be another repair—and then the lights came on.”
“So you’re thinking it might have been a sort of tripwire—or trip pad—that you stepped on that set it off?”
“Or some sort of alarm that signaled the, uh, what do I call him—the vandalizer?—to set it off, maybe remotely. Because it was right after that, almost immediately, that the light came on.”
Jake liked that theory, and he told her so as they reached the top of the scaffolding at the same time. “Good. So we can probably find evidence of that if you can remember where you were standing when it happened.”
“Right. And then I ran—I mean, I left the building because I was freaked out—”
“Understandably so.”
“And when I came back in—maybe ten minutes later—what I thought was painted words on the wall but was just a backdrop—a scrim, probably,” she added with a sly look that made his stomach bottom out then bounce up, “was gone. At the time, I thought it had just disappeared.”
“Which is probably what you were supposed to think. You were being fooled into thinking that the place is haunted by some horrible specter or gruesome phantom, but it was all a fake. Someone’s just messing with—”
Crash!
The sound of many large items colliding or falling somewhere in the building—backstage?—was sudden, loud, and ominous, and the metallic echo reverberated through the empty space.
Vivien’s mouth was open to either exclaim or scream; Jake couldn’t tell—and then his brain couldn’t even pursue that thought, because all at once, he felt the violent rush of cold.
It was like an actual Arctic front that enveloped him, as if he’d been plunged into a room of dry ice. The frigid air was accompanied by a dark, dank, unpleasant smell that he’d only experienced once before—when he got a whiff of something that turned out to be necrotic diabetic foot with wet gangrene during a stint in the ER. This was nearly as bad—and worse, he didn’t know what was causing it.
Vivien made a noise that sounded as if she were in distress—probably gagging—and it came out in a distinct puff of white in the freezing air.
The metallic cacophony ended as abruptly as it had begun, but the scaffolding, the catwalk, the rows of light pots above suddenly began to shake wildly. The lamps themselves began to flash erratically in blinding reds, greens, blues, and golds.
Jake didn’t need to shout for her to climb down from the rattling scaffolding; she was already halfway to the ground. He jumped most of the way, his own breath following in a trail of white as his fingers and the tip of his nose burned with cold. He grabbed Vivien by the hand with stiff fingers, and they half stumbled, half ran off the stage, away from the clattering, jangling mess, down the aisle past the rows of chairs.
They weren’t even down the aisle when the chaos stopped just as suddenly as it had begun: the lights, the violent rattling, the stench, the cold.
They staggered to a halt and turned around to look back at the stage. Then Vivien gaped up at him, her eyes so wide that he could see white all around her irises.
“Holy shit.”
