Chapter 25

Oh, Horror, Horror, Horror!

Rehearsal was brutal. I just watched the first run-through, writing down each female character’s blocking (onstage movements) in my script. It was a ton of work, especially since so many of the characters appeared onstage at the same time, like when Dorothy and Glinda met, or when the Wicked Witch of the West and Dorothy had their showdown. After a fifteen-minute break, we ran the show again. This time I walked through as Glinda, script in hand. It didn’t go particularly well. I didn’t have very many lines, but getting in and out of my bubble spaceship gracefully wasn’t as easy as it looked. And though Glinda’s song, “I Am Spacey (But Pretty and Nice)” had a familiar tune (“I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story), and Candy had mostly sung/talked her way through it, I couldn’t get through it without my voice cracking. My cold was interfering in other ways too, mostly by wearing me out, and making me spacey (but pretty and nice, I hoped).

So I was especially thankful for our dinner break. Besides, I really needed to do some sleuthing. All I’d been able to think about during rehearsal was lines and blocking and music. So I waved off the invitation to join some of the cast for dinner and trotted down to the dressing rooms. I went into Candy’s dressing room, now ostensibly mine too. I searched it thoroughly, picking up every bit of glitter off the floor, shaking the costumes to see if anything fell out, and pawing through every piece of paper in the trash. Hmm. A half-torn receipt from Ricky’s salon. Must be Candy’s. I dug around—maybe there were other receipts that could tell me where Candy had been. One from Burger King. It could have belonged to Candy, but wow, it was a lot of food. Maybe she was with someone? Or maybe it wasn’t her receipt. Candy shared the room with the Wicked Witch of the East/Auntie Em. Well, not anymore. Since Eden was playing those roles now and still working as costumer, she used the costume shop as her dressing room. Candy was probably pretty happy about having a dressing room to herself. Especially if she was taking blue pills.

Bits of torn paper covered the bottom of the wastebasket. I shook them out and placed them on the dressing room counter, putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. The date and time were smudged, but I could tell it was a receipt for drinks at the hotel next door. Who would Candy have been meeting?

Suddenly the windowless room was plunged into darkness. Absolute darkness. What the hell? A flicker of light appeared in the mirror—a candle? From where? I turned around. No one in the room with me. A soft moan. It grew louder as the candle grew brighter and closer. Wait, was there a face illumined by the candle? Yes, it was...

“Boo!” said Logan. “Ha. Gotcha.”

I dropped into one of the dressing-room chairs. My heart was beating so fast all I could say was, “How?”

“I used another mirror—a hand mirror— to reflect the candlelight in this one.” He pointed at the dressing room mirror. See?” Logan stepped out of the room, and held up a mirror angled to reflect the burning candle he held in his other hand. “Then when I got close enough you could see me in the dressing room mirror, I took away the small mirror and used the candle to light my own face. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah.” It was cool, even though I nearly peed my pants. “What are you doing here?”

Logan flipped on the light switch and blew out his candle. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m the new understudy. This is now my dressing room.”

“So you’re not looking for Candy?”

“That too. Do you have any ideas?”

“I think all the attention and the accidents freaked her out. She probably just left by a back way and wants some time alone. You’ve seen those journalists. Can you imagine being hounded by them?”

“Wait, a back way? Can you show me?”

“Sure.” He turned the lights off.

“Hey.” I trailed Logan down the hallway. “How did you turn off the dressing room lights without me seeing you? Before the candle trick, I mean.”

“I didn’t do that,” he said.

“The lights turned off all by themselves?”

A shiver ran down my back, interrupted by Logan. “Happens all the time here. Old wiring, you know. Okay, so there are several ways to get out of the building. She could have left through the stage door...” Logan started down a narrow staircase.

“She would’ve had to sign out.”

“Or through the house and out the lobby doors.” He hit the bottom of the stairs and turned left.

“No one remembers seeing her there.”

“There are also the emergency exits, but those would’ve tripped alarms. And there’s an exit—a tunnel—to the hotel.”

“Really?” We made another turn into yet another hallway. Sheesh. I’d need a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way out of this place.

“This theater and the hotel next door were designed and built during Prohibition. There’s a secret space in the basement—”

“A speakeasy?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty small, just enough room for a couple of tables for people from the hotel or theater to have a drink after the show.” Logan stopped in front of a door. “You ready to see it?”

“Of course.”

He opened a door and pulled the string that hung from a bare bulb in the ceiling. “In here.” He grabbed a silver flashlight from a shelf, pushed aside some brooms and buckets—it was obviously a cleaning supply closet—then leaned on a built-in shelf that ran across the back of the closet. Then he leaned some more. “This door sticks sometimes.” Finally the wall swung open and revealed the dark mouth to the passageway.

“After you,” said Logan.

“No, I’ll follow you.” I surreptitiously checked my pocket for my cell phone and pepper spray. Both at the ready. I wasn’t completely sure about following anyone into a secret passageway. I mean, I knew and liked Logan, but you could never be too safe. Besides, if he went first, he’d get any spider webs in the face before I did.

Logan slipped through the door into the dark. I followed just a few feet behind. The brick passageway felt cool and smelled damp, unusual for Phoenix. A few bulbs were spaced at intervals along the low ceiling, but none of them were lit, so Logan used his flashlight to lead us. He didn’t have to brush aside any cobwebs. Oh, there were plenty of them, but they hung in tatters along the side of the hallway, not in front of us. Huh. Had they recently been disturbed? The passageway began to slope slightly downward, and the dust that coated the concrete floor made my nose tickle. “Aflooey!” Wait, dust...

“Stop,” I said to Logan. “Shine your light ahead of us. I want to see if there are footprints.”

He did, and there were. But not Candy’s. Big men’s boots.

“Just mine,” said Logan. “I come down here every so often.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’ll see.” With that, he ran a few steps and was gone, turned around a bend. I could hear his footsteps but couldn’t see him.

“Logan?” The light from his flashlight grew dimmer and dimmer. I turned the corner and the light was snuffed out. No flashlight, no Logan, the passageway ahead black as midnight. I fumbled for my cell phone. “Logan?” I said again.

“Here.” By the sound of his voice, he was within a stone’s throw.

“Why did you turn off your flashlight?”

“Drama,” he said, and turned on the light.

Oh my god. How many horror movies had I watched? I knew better than to go into the basement, and now I’d done it. With a serial killer. I backed up slowly, away from the bodies, the blood, the severed limbs...

“DAHHH! Duh duh duh duh duh!” The organ music from The Phantom of the Opera echoed off the walls. “Welcome to my Nightmare.” Logan spread his arms in welcome. A knife glinted in his hand.

I moved my hand from my cellphone to my pepper spray.

“Cool, huh?” Logan bounced on his feet like a little kid. “It’s my workshop. What do you think? They’re pretty lifelike, right?”

Right. And once again I was thankful for my bladder control.

The knife was actually Logan’s flashlight, and the headless bodies and body-less heads that littered the room were just props. The former speakeasy was a small space with a wide arched entrance that opened onto a slightly bigger room with brick walls, sort of like a civilized cave. “No front door?” I asked Logan.

He shrugged. “I guess they figured if you made it down this far, you were okay. Maybe they kept guards at the hotel entrance and the door in the closet.”

I turned on my phone flashlight so I could see better and walked into Logan’s Nightmare. An elaborately carved coffin held a place of honor in the middle of the room, and red-tinged implements of terror, like chainsaws and hooks, hung from the wall. A skeleton shivered in one of the corners. A monstrous spider waited for its prey, its enormous web spread over most of the ceiling.

“So?” he said. “I’m good, right?”

“You designed these?” I ran a finger along a gargoyle carved into the coffin, which was made of some lightweight material but painted to look like wood.

“All by myself. I’ve been working at haunted houses for years now. Really perfected my craft in college. I’ve been working especially hard lately. I, um, think there may be a good...um, opportunity coming my way.”

Logan was usually pretty direct. I wondered why he wasn’t saying exactly what was on his mind. Could be he didn’t want to jinx something.

“Did you happen to put a severed head in one of the other backstage hallways?”

“What? Oh yeah, I forgot about it. I was playing a joke on one of the new techies.”

“You might want to get it. It’s covered in cockroaches.”

“Not surprised. They love it here in the dark.”

I pulled my hand away from the coffin.

“But that’s also a cool idea. ‘Head with hair made of insects,’” Logan said, tapping a note into his phone.

“You’re really good.” Even close up, Logan’s bodies looked real, with glistening blood and gushy-looking brains.

“Thanks,” he said. “I made everything except the skeleton. That was already here. A leftover prop, probably.”

I crept closer to get a better look. The skeleton’s empty eye sockets stared at me. I ran a finger along its bones. They felt dry, with little cracks running through them, and clacked against each other as my hand bumped along the ribcage.

“It’s real,” said Logan.

“Ahh!” I jumped back. “Oh, good one.” I smiled at him.

“No, I mean it. It’s real.”

Too creepy. I backed way away from the skeleton/dead body/former person.

“I’m especially proud of this.” Logan walked toward a bloody surgical scenario. Red-spattered curtains hung around the hospital bed, open just enough that I could see the bed inside. It had a bloody finger stuck to it. “Pretty awesome, right—Aaah!” Logan screamed, pointing at a door in the back corner of the room. “Oh my God!”

A misty white figure filled the open doorway. She writhed, as if in pain, a long scarf trailing from her neck.

My mouth went dry. “The Lady in White,” I whispered.

“Cool, huh?” The image was gone.

“Omigod, Logan, was that you too? I am never coming down here with you again.”

Logan did a little dance, like a football player who just made a goal. “Come see.”

I did not move.

“No, really. I promise I won’t scare you again. Don’t you want to see how I did it?”

I did, so I walked over to Logan. “See, I’ve covered this doorway with a scrim.” The lightweight fabric was tacked to the top of the doorframe, like a see-through curtain. Logan held it aside. Behind the door was a short hallway with another door directly in front of us, an old-fashioned wooden one, with a shelf mounted above it. Logan pointed to a small cube-shaped metal object on the shelf. “I can operate that mini video projector by remote. Hardest thing was creating the video of the Lady, but it all turned out pretty good, don’t you think?”

“So the video is rear-projected on the scrim?”

“Exactly. Genius, right?” Logan could hardly contain his glee. “Right?”

“Yeah, okay.” I was still annoyed at being scared, but the effect was pretty impressive.

“It’s even creepier when you know what’s behind that door.” He pointed at the wooden one. “That’s the spring room in there. Where the Lady in White drowned.”

Bong. Bong. Bong. Dang. I’d set the alarm on my phone earlier to make sure I made it back to the green room in time for the evening rehearsal. I really wanted to see the spring room, and to explore the rest of the backstage passages. There was a small likelihood I’d find a clue about Candy’s disappearance, but a better one that I would find a passage that led behind the one-eyed portrait, and maybe some clues to who had rigged it to spurt blood on Babette. Logan was a likely candidate, but why would he do it? Just because he hated Babette? Maybe I could weasel that out of him later. “Dinner break’s almost over,” I said. “Show me the spring room tomorrow?”

“You bet. And Ivy, all of this is sort of secret. I’m not sure the powers that be would appreciate...”

“I won’t say anything,” I said. “Every artist needs a studio, right?”