Sacrificial Magic (6 page)

“This is the person you mentioned before? The one Aros was afraid of?” Chess asked.

“Yes. Good memory. Anyway. They were in here
talking
, Vernal and three of his friends, when the ghost appeared. They said it came through the curtains there”—she pointed to the right—“and started moving along that wall. Then it apparently noticed them and came toward them, which is when they ran.”

“Did it follow them out of the theater? What did it look like, did they say?”

“It didn’t follow them,” Monica said. “And they said it looked like Lucy McShane.”

Chess looked at her blankly. It was always so cool when people expected her to know things there was no possible way she could know. Of course she was familiar with all of the famous ghosts and hauntings; the special
team that still lived in the Tower of London, for example, just to contain them all. Edward DeWitt, the ghost of a murder victim who was so hell-bent on revenge it took them four weeks to track him down and Banish him. And of course the Fallow Creek Five, and the suburb they’d turned into a literal ghost town back in 2007.

But nowhere on that list, and it was quite an extensive list, did anyone named Lucy McShane appear.

Either Beulah saw her blank look and sympathized, or Beulah saw her blank look and patronized. Whatever her motive, at least she told the fucking story. “She was a suicide from just after this building was converted into a school, maybe 1999, 2000? According to the story, she was in the school play and fell in love with the director. He seduced her, and then when she got pregnant he dumped her. So she flung herself from the lighting platform up there.”

Chess glanced up. Above her head a rack of lights hung in a gentle arc, white cone-shaped fixtures aimed at the stage. “She jumped off of that? How would she get up there?”

“There’s a catwalk,” Monica said. “Want to go up and look?”

Ugh, not really. Chess wasn’t afraid of heights, but the thought of depending on the rickety-looking metal walkway she could just make out near the ceiling didn’t appeal. But it was her job, so … “Yeah, sure.”

   The theater looked smaller from up there. So did Monica and Beulah, both of whom had used their skirts as an excuse for why they couldn’t accompany her. Not that she cared. Without them watching her quite so closely she could be more thorough.

They couldn’t watch her closely if they tried, in fact. When she stopped and looked down at them, the floor
almost seemed to spin so far below. A girl had jumped from that catwalk, thrown herself from it. Had her body cracked open on the seats down there, on the edge of the orchestra pit? Had she died instantly? How must it have felt for her, watching the ground come at her, knowing that she’d done it, she’d really taken that final step and it was really over, it would end and she wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, it—

Chess blinked. Her fingers convulsed on the railing. What the fuck had she been doing? Leaning over that rail, the empty space beyond. Not a good thing to do. She didn’t want to die, not that day. Work. That’s what she needed to be doing.

She’d grabbed a couple of small video cameras from the Church supply before she left, but she hadn’t expected she’d get the chance to use them. She grabbed one from her bag and affixed it to the light strip, so the stage filled the tiny screen. Good. It would start recording if it detected movement.

The catwalk stretched from the tiny booth at the back of the room all the way to where she now crouched, where the light strip hung from the ceiling. From that point it branched off; another walkway ran perpendicular to it, from one side of the room to the other. On her left it dead-ended at the wall. On her right … On her right it seemed to turn left again at the wall and head back, behind the curtain. An odd arrangement.

“Hey, why does the catwalk cross the stage over there?”

“What?” From Chess’s position Monica looked like a blob of shrieking plaid. Beulah had, of course, settled into one of the chairs, where she lounged as if she was about to light up a smoke and crack a beer. Or, not a beer; she didn’t appear to be much of a beer type. A wine spritzer or something equally girly.

“The catwalk,” Chess said. “Why does it cross the stage?”

“Oh. Not sure, really. I’ve heard that it’s a leftover from when this was a meeting room for dignitaries, or maybe it was built because they needed it for effects for some play.”

Weird. “Where does it go? Does it hit the back wall?”

“Um, I think so.”

Wow, she was helpful. Sure, she was an administrative assistant, but it still seemed to Chess that Monica might have some knowledge of the oddities of the building.

It didn’t matter. Whether or not she knew what it was for, she’d have to walk it all the way. So she arranged her bag more securely on her shoulder and started moving, her thighs aching from the peculiar squat-walk she was forced to use.

The catwalk rattled beneath her, which was just what she needed, but it seemed steady enough. After a moment or two she found a sort of rhythm, even, with one hand on the rail and the other on the floor to help keep her steady. In no time, it seemed, she reached the wall, made the left, and kept going.

Over the curtain, which seemed unusual, but then how else could it go, right? Right. Dust coated the top of the curtain so thick the color of the fabric was no longer visible; Chess only knew it was red because she’d seen it from the floor.

Backstage—well, it looked like every backstage Chess had ever seen. No, she’d never been in any school plays or anything—the very idea was ridiculous—but backstage areas were dark and private, the perfect place to skip class and get high or steal a few naked minutes with whomever she’d felt like giving the privilege to that particular day.

Tall canvas-and-wood flats rested against the wall; old desks and a battered sofa and other odds and ends
of furniture braced them up. Boxes of costumes, boxes of props, general dust, and detritus littered the floor. Typical.

What wasn’t typical was the faint odd smell in the air, and what her adjusting eyes could see was a stub of candle and a small tray on the floor.

Shit. She grabbed her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, but what she really needed to do was get down there and look. And she needed to do it without bringing either of the women with her; she didn’t want her discovery of the candle and tray—if they were even related, and not just left behind by some kids who came here to make out or whatever—to be noted. Never let them know you’ve seen anything of interest: one of the first rules of Debunking. That went double for this case, when one Debunker had already been driven away and the potential suspects numbered in the hundreds.

So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …

The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.

So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.

But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had
the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.

Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?

She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.

One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.

“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”

Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible
boing
, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.

The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.

So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.

She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school
was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.

She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.

Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.

So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?

Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.

When she blinked the image disappeared, and there was Beulah, with a look of concern that was either real or a pretty good approximation. And as Chess’s fingers loosened on the metal, she realized her own lips were curved into a grin. Now that she was alive, really alive and not likely to stop being so, adrenaline or relief or whatever the fuck it was coursed through her like the first rush of a line of crushed Nips. As if all at once she’d floated a couple of feet into the air and every nerve ending shivered in pure delight.

Except the ones in her chest and cheek, which still felt like someone had hit them with a hammer. But it didn’t matter so much.

She hauled herself up from the catwalk—catramp?—and picked her careful way down, ending up on the stage, where her joy evaporated. Where quite a bit of her joy evaporated, anyway.

Yes. A candle, and a tray filled with ashes and the charred ends of herbs. Right there where Beulah and Monica could see them.

And they did. Both of them had hurried to meet her, and both of them saw the items at the same time. Neither
of them mentioned them. Could be they knew the things existed. Could be they just didn’t think they were important. Either way, they both now knew something had been there, that something had happened, and she still had the presence of mind to be irked about that.

Especially since that unscheduled journey to the floor hadn’t been an accident. She’d watched the damn bolts come unscrewed, for fuck’s sake.

She cut off their worried interrogations. “What’s on the other side of that wall?”

They blinked. Monica started to stammer something, but Beulah cut her off. “Two floors. On the bottom is a science classroom, I believe. The top is the drama room.” Then, anticipating the question before Chess could utter it, “The stairs are there, at the far end backstage.”

Chess wasted a few seconds she really couldn’t afford navigating the fabric and steel now littering the stage floor. Whoever had decided to send her on a ride wouldn’t be in the classroom back there anymore, she knew that. But maybe there’d be someplace nearby they would hide. She flung open the stairway door, flew up the stairs in the darkness to the top, where another door barred her way. Another locked door. Fuck!

Beulah almost hit her from behind. “Is it locked?”

“No, I’m standing here for fun,” Chess snapped, but Monica had already tottered up the stairs, jingling a bunch of keys in her hand. At least Chess assumed it was keys. It was either keys, a very jingly weapon, or, what the hell, a bizarre S&M toy, Chess didn’t know and didn’t really care as long as it could open that door. Picking the lock would waste even more time.