Silence was a thing of death. At least it seemed that way to Kit. Silence hovered around gravestones in cemeteries, hiding in the dark places and haunting the shadows. It toyed with one’s senses. It had filled the historical Barlowe Theater with its presence. Not even the ticking of a clock could be heard.
The little red light on Tom’s camera was blinking.
Avery stayed close behind Kit, and while it was only ten in the morning, it seemed as if were late at night, with the dead awakening inside the structure.
Evan stood shoulder to shoulder with Kit, a truce called between them given the mutually shared events of the week.
Heather led them past the nonworking marble fountain that rose from the checkered, black-and-white tile floor of the theater’s lobby. The ornate glass doors that led into the horseshoe-shaped foyer surrounding the auditorium were closed. Heather opened them and slipped through, with Tom motioning for the rest to follow.
They’d been instructed to be silent. To listen and watch. The air felt oppressive the moment Kit’s feet landed on the theater’s red carpet. The electric lights had been dimmed, probably to add ambience as they filmed. The arched doorways into the auditorium were covered with heavy velvet curtains that Kit knew were normally left open, the curtains tied back with golden tassels. The place was like a tomb, one that captured old memories, then suffocated them, refusing them as they drifted away to the land of the forgotten.
“What do you see?” Tom prompted Heather, who treaded quietly toward the curved stairs that led to the second floor.
She held up her hand and paused at the bottom step, cocking her head to the left, her eyes narrowing. She was watching something—someone.
Kit felt Avery’s arm slip through hers.
Heather’s voice broke the silence. She spoke in a low monotone, describing to Tom and the camera what she was seeing. Her eyes had taken on a strange sheen. Her pretty face seemed marred by the effects of the spirits she claimed were hovering in the air.
“There’s a woman . . .” Heather took a deep, controlled breath. “She is dressed in a white evening dress.”
“From what time period?” Tom asked. It seemed it was part of his job to inquire because Heather answered immediately and without irritation.
“I think late eighteen hundreds? Or early turn of the century maybe? It’s long, sweeping, narrow at the waist, and fairly straight down in the skirt. I’m going to guess probably 1910, 1915? She says she’s ‘the woman in white.’”
Woman in white? Kit mouthed the name to Evan. He nodded, his eyes widening. In Alpharetta Green’s book, the woman in white was an old ghost story that swirled around the theater. Kit hadn’t paid it much mind, but she knew it was one of the stories Madison had used to entice the TV show to the theater in the first place.
Evan sidled up to Kit and lowered his mouth to her ear, whispering quietly, “Heather hasn’t been told of the theater’s history or legends. She wouldn’t know about the woman in white.” Kit could see the skepticism already brewing in Evan’s eyes. “But she could’ve heard about the story from someone else.” He turned back toward Heather.
Heather was slowly climbing the stairs, the red carpeting beneath her feet original to the theater, worn and threadbare now. Her hand skimmed the iron railing. “The woman is taking me up the stairs,” she explained, “to the ladies’ sitting room. It’s where she goes to find respite.”
“Respite from what?” Tom asked, making sure the camera was focused solely on Heather and then sweeping it in an arc to take in the stairs and the gaping doorway at the top that led into the sitting room.
“I don’t know. She won’t say . . .” Heather’s face contorted into a confused expression. “She’s mumbling and . . . crying. Softly. She keeps asking where her baby is. ‘My baby, my baby,’ she says. Over and over again.”
Kit felt numb. It was too real, too dark, even though she couldn’t see anything ahead of Heather to indicate there was any spirit communicating with them, any woman in white.
The legend was that a woman in white had accidentally dropped her baby from a box seat. Some argued it had actually happened, while others blamed a person in the crowd, a different woman who struggled with mental illness. Regardless, supposedly the woman in white still haunted the theater, searching for her baby. People had reported seeing her, shimmers of white, and sometimes even hearing the distant cry of an infant.
They’d arrived at the sitting room. This room was a mere whisper of its former elegance. The theater had poured what little grant monies it had into preserving the main auditorium and hall. Upstairs had suffered. The women’s sitting room was where ladies in attendance had retired during breaks in the performance. At one time, mirrors would have adorned the walls surrounding the sofas and chairs, with giant potted palms gracing the corners near the two windows now shuttered from the view of the street and the marquee below. The wallpaper was stripped back on one wall. Three layers of it. The gold-embossed paper on top hid a floral rose beneath, and under that a faded yellow floral paper with emerald stripes, also faded by time.
Heather stood in the room, staring at the radiator along the far wall. Though the radiator was cold, at one point it would have heated this room, causing it to feel stuffy, together with the scents of ladies’ Parisian perfumes, flowers from corsages, and hairpieces.
Kit could sense the distant past as it rose from the grave to meet them here. Avery clutched Kit’s arm as though being pulled into the other, unseen world while not wishing to leave the seen world, that which was familiar. Kit’s glance at Evan revealed his intense concentration focused solely on Heather.
“Boys,” Heather stated bluntly.
Kit jumped.
Tom and the camera lens pressed close to Heather’s face.
“There were boys.” Heather took a few steps into a side room that was probably a bathroom at one time. Now it had cardboard boxes stored in it, an old lamp, and cobwebs. She placed a hand against the wall. “They’re inside the walls.”
“Who?” Tom asked.
“The boys,” Heather answered without taking her eyes off the wall. She ran her hand along it, down to a vent in the floor. Crouching, she pushed her fingers into the cast-iron grate of the vent. “Like the one that followed me the last time. They’re lost.”
“Are they related to the woman in white’s baby?”
“I don’t know.” Heather’s face twisted into a look of worry. She wrapped her arms around herself and stood up, looking at Tom. “I don’t like this. I’m hearing words. I don’t like the words.”
“What are the words?” Tom inquired.
“They’re cruel. They’re implying someone is suffering from mental instability. I-I don’t know that . . . No, the woman doesn’t want me to say them. I can’t say them. She won’t let me.”
Kit couldn’t help but take a step closer to Evan. And pray. She started to pray. Something was evil here. Something was darker than anything Kit had ever even attempted to approach, let alone entertain.
Heather whirled, her eyes wide and landing on Kit, but no—she was looking past Kit. “The basement. It’s there. It’s all there.” She pushed past them with Tom close on her heels. A new urgency seemed to fill Heather, but also an intensity that set her apart from them all. “There’s the boy,” she whispered.
Hurrying, Heather scampered down the stairs, Tom in close pursuit.
“What does he look like?” Tom pressed as they walked.
Kit couldn’t help herself. While Avery clung to her arm, she reached out and groped for Evan’s hand. It was there. As if he’d been expecting her fear. His fingers wrapped around hers, and in another moment—in another world, it seemed—Kit might have admitted she enjoyed the warmth his hand offered. But not now. Now she just wanted his security.
Heather hadn’t answered Tom. Instead, she led them down the narrow hallway, past archways and into the main part of the theater, then to the back stairwell that took them to the basement. It was the same stairs Heather and Tom had descended the night Madison vanished.
Coldness spread through Kit’s limbs. She hesitated, but Evan tugged on her hand, and Avery urged her forward. At the bottom of the steps, a vintage floor-to-ceiling mirror still hung on the wall. It was the “final look” mirror used by the performers before they climbed another set of stairs onto the backstage.
Heather froze partway down the hall, in front of the door she and Evan had stumbled through after losing sight of Madison. She stared at it and pointed. “He went in there,” she hissed.
“The boy?” Tom asked. His camera light cast a faint red glow across the wall.
“Yes. He ran through the doorway and disappeared.” Heather took a few hesitant steps. “I see . . . Oh my.” She entered the dark abyss, Tom close behind, and Kit regretting every step she took to follow them.
Blackness engulfed them. Kit saw Tom’s form outlined by the dim light from the hall behind them. He fumbled for the wall with his free hand. No light switch.
“You bring a flashlight?” Tom whispered to Evan.
“Nope.”
“Great.” Tom fiddled with the camera’s LED screen, and Kit noted the film went into night vision.
Now Heather looked like an apparition herself. Her skin pale white. Her eyes hollow and glowing. She stared into the camera lens. “I see blood. On the floor. And flower petals. The boys are playing in the flower petals.” She tilted her head. “And there . . .” Heather took off into the depths of the basement.
Kit had never been beneath the theater. No one needed to go down here. The eleven dressing rooms were in the winged hallways behind them. This was the underbelly. Storage, she’d been told when she was younger. The furnace system. A network of pipes.
“We need to stay together,” Heather mumbled. Only the light from the camera led their way forward.
Tom looked over his shoulder at them to see if they were following.
Avery pulled on Kit, who turned to see what she wanted. Avery shook her head wildly. “I-I can’t do this.”
“It’s okay,” Kit soothed, although she wasn’t entirely convinced of that. “It’s just the theater’s basement.”
“No. I need to get out of here. Now. Where there’s daylight. Madison isn’t down here, and I can’t . . .” A sob caught in Avery’s throat.
“I’ll go with you,” Kit reassured her. She could hear Heather muttering her observations to the camera. Evan had moved on a few steps, releasing Kit’s hand, but now he waited in the dark.
“No.” Avery backed away toward the door and the promise of light. “I’ll be fine.” She whirled and sped from the basement.
“Evan?” Kit’s voice wobbled. She pushed her hand into her jeans pocket. Feeling her phone there, she pulled it out and played with the screen to flick on the flashlight.
A blessed shaft of light shone forth.
Evan was gone.
Heather and Tom had ventured deep inside the basement’s cavern. She could hear Heather.
A pipe creaked.
Something overhead clanged.
A dank, musty smell permeated the air. Was it the same air as in the days when the woman in white was alive?
Kit spun around. Nope. She would follow Avery. Evan had gone ahead, so there was no reason to—
Ice-cold fingers wrapped around her wrist, the skin soft. Then nails like claws dug into her skin. Kit froze, flashing her phone’s light in the direction of the hand, the pale-skinned arm that stretched from the dark innards of the theater’s basement.
The hand released her.
The flashlight illuminated a maze of copper pipes, green at their joints, and a puddle of water on the floor beneath. Red water . . . like blood. Or was it just tainted with iron?
Kit felt the brush of something against her cheek. A brush of silk. Evening gown silk.
A white face flashed in her peripheral vision and then was gone.
Everyone was gone.
It was only Kit.
Alone in Barlowe Theater’s basement, with the woman in white and the lost boy’s pool of ghostly blood.