'Different' Part 2. September 19th 2005

September 19th 2005. Eva

It is my secret. Whenever I’m sad, or angry, or even just bored, I can run away and mess around in my theatre. It might as well belong to me, every single warped beam and red brick of it; no-one else wants it.

It was shut down, abandoned years and years ago, back in the days when my mum and dad were young. Since then, apparently, it’s been a cinema, a building for church meetings and briefly a theatre again, but every time someone sets up there, thinking they can breathe new life into the bare boards and fill the rows of empty seats, the venture fails. It’s been left vacant for five or six years now. Some say it’s just an unlucky place; there’s even a boy in my French class who says it’s haunted. I don’t believe that though.

Today I stop there on my way back from school, climbing out of the rain and in through a shattered back window. I won’t be long, or my mum will start worrying and I’ll get in trouble. I only want to sing a little, shake out all the stress, try out a silly dance on the stage. Here I can be anyone I want to be, and not be overshadowed by my stupid sister, or shouted out for forgetting my Algebra homework, or teased for not having…

My cheeks burn crimson and I go all squirmy and hot inside just thinking about it. Suddenly I don’t feel like dancing any more. It seems so…so silly, so childish. I feel angry with myself. Fiddling with the end of my plait, I stare around in the semi-darkness of the vast, echoing hall, looking for something more appropriate to do.

The grand piano sits deep in the orchestra pit, embedded in a scatter of broken chairs, the intricate scrollwork blackened where vandals, or maybe homeless people, have tried to start a fire. Cautiously I climb down, the rotten wooden steps giving beneath my weight, and lower myself onto the piano stool. The velvet of the seat smells slightly musty; its unexpected coldness soaks like a spreading dampness through my thin school skirt and chills my legs. I raise a tentative finger to the yellowed ivory and push down. There is a dull chime as the sluggish hammers struggle into motion; the wood judders with the effort. It makes me sad, in a strange way. Nevertheless I plod away at a few half-hearted scales. I don’t have my sister’s musical ability. Tears of self-pity well up in my eyes; I brush them away in impatience. Some of the keys stick and I forget the occasional accidental, my cold fingers cramped and clumsy. It makes an eerie sound; music from another lifetime, as I play to an audience of ghosts...
There is a sound.

A human voice, a footfall. It comes from above me, and my head shoots up, my mouth dry, searching. Hundreds of empty seats gape back at me like open mouths; the mouldy velvet curtains stir in a haze of red.

It must be rain falling through a hole in the ceiling, a breeze coming through, I tell myself, though my hands are clenched into fists in my lap and I am sat straight and stiff as a poker. The blood is roaring like a tide in my head; all my parents’ warnings- never go into unknown places alone-

“Hello?” I yell to drown them out. The footsteps carry on, uncertain, and then a figure appears on the stage. The tension floods out of me; I can breathe normally again.

It is a boy about my own age, small and thinly-built, dressed in dark jeans and a sodden T-shirt. Rain drips from his dark hair; he is panting, as though he has been running.

Made bold by my relief, I clamber out of the pit and up the side steps to join him on the stage. “You startled me! Nobody ever comes here, except me.”
He is backing hurriedly away, an expression of horror in his eyes. My smile trembles and fades. His outstretched hands touch the furthest wall. He has nowhere to go. A trapped animal. Our shadows loom and flicker like flames on the opposite wall.
“What is it? I won’t hurt y-”
“Stay away from me.”
Struck by the urgency of his tone, I gape dumbly at him. His eyes are grey the grey of a storm, of a raging tide, of iron. He raises an arm as if to shield himself, or to push me back, I don’t know which.
“I’m serious. Get away, as far as you can. I’m- I’m dangerous.” He is trembling now, his expression pleading. A violet bruise stands out against the white skin of his neck.

I want to obey him, but how can I just leave him when he looks so scared? I extend my arms as if I myself am pleading; the back of my hand brushes his. “If you just tell me what this is about I can try and help-”
“NO!"

There is a sudden terrible ringing sound; the sound you get when you run a damp finger around the rim of a glass. It echoes and throbs like a demon heart, getting louder and louder and louder-
The stage beneath us is vibrating. I cannot run, cannot move. I shout “What’s happening?” an inch from his ear. He yells something in response, but I don’t catch it. Years of dust and grit swirls up in a great howling vortex from the carpet, the curtains, the seats; a phantom-pale sandstorm. An incredulous gasp escapes me, drowned out in the cacophony.

Finally, finally, the boy, the madman, the magician, looks directly at me. His eyes are bird-bright and he is deathly white, inhuman. I don’t hear what he says but suddenly I just know, as if he has dropped the words directly into my mind.
Look what else I can do.

With a sudden burst of fury his face becomes distorted in a yell. A torrential wind rips through the theatre. Broken chairs and patches of ceiling plaster shatter against each of the walls in a series of nerve-shattering crashes which echo around the space like gunfire. Dust in my throat, I am screaming, terrified tears running down my face. Still the paralysis holds me firm, refusing to let me run for my life, away from this madness and out into the real world.

“STOP IT! FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP IT!”

One of the heavy plaster embellishments falls from the ceiling, exploding into powder inches from us. For a split second everything falls still, but the air shivers with latent danger. Instinctively I close my eyes and cover my head, just in time to hear the world being torn apart at the seams.
The stage lights have shattered in terrible unison and needle-sharp shards rain down like razor rain as we are plunged into velvet blackness. Then all is finally still. My knees buckle; I lower myself onto my hands and knees and feel tiny fragments piercing the unprotected skin.

I always had a secret fear that the lights in here would cease to function one day. That’s why there is a torch in my bag- if I can only find it. Guided by the dim silver light filtering down from the hole opened up like a wound in the ceiling, my senses strained, I manage to scrabble back down to the pit and direct the beam, lighthouse-style, at individual parts of the wreckage, and then in a wide arc all around me. I feel numb.

The stranger is lying motionless in the dust and broken glass. There is blood on his face. I don’t dare to touch him. It is not cowardice. I simply can’t.

Now I am more scared than I was during the mad, senseless destruction. It feels quiet and wrong here; the theatre is the scene of a crime. I was never meant to be here. I cover him with the fallen curtain and run out into the light without a glance back.