The Old Deep and Dark

 

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For Jessie and Betty Chandler, with much love.

 

And welcome to our family, little Rocket.

 

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Cast of Characters

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Also by Ellen Hart

About the Author

Copyright

 

Cast of Characters

 

 

 

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

—Stephen King

 

1

SPRING 1978

He wasn't a boy. He hated it when people called him that, used the word as a way to define him, to minimize him. Okay, so technically, if that's what these judgmental jerks were aiming at, he wasn't a man yet either, but he was way beyond the boy stage. Kids didn't understand love, the romantic kind. The forever kind. He did. He hadn't told anyone close to him that he'd found the woman he was going to marry, mainly because they'd all laugh and tell him he was crazy. He didn't need small-minded, negative thinkers in his life.

Okay, so maybe there were a few hurdles. The age difference, for one. Not that it mattered. Love, as the poets said, would find a way. Kit was the most exquisite woman he'd ever seen. She was Catherine Deneuve, Candice Bergen, and Marilyn Monroe all rolled up into one perfect package, and someday, down on his knee, diamond ring tucked into a small black velvet box, he'd ask her to marry him. It made his stomach clutch and his heart race every time he thought about that moment, when he would make her his own.

Katherine—Kit—Haralson had been crowned Princess Kay of the Milky Way at the state fair two years ago. Eighteen years old, right out of high school. He'd seen her sitting there at the butter-carving booth, posing for her sculpture. She'd been told to keep still, but it was hard with people calling out questions, shouting her name. When the fair was over, she was given the butter statue of herself to take home. He wasn't sure what a dairy farm, where she'd grown up, would do with all that excess butter, although the neighbors would probably ask to see it, so maybe it would be fun for a while—until it melted. After she'd been officially crowned, she'd traveled the state representing the dairy industry. She was a natural beauty, with golden hair and a perfect milk-white smile. And tonight, he was going to meet her for the first time. Since his palms were sweaty, he was definitely
not
going to shake her hand.

It would work like this: During intermission, he would sneak backstage. He assumed that when Kit started acting around town, it would only be a matter of time until she was cast in a play at this theater, a place he knew well. The dressing rooms were behind the stage. Getting to them would be a piece of cake. The hard part, as always, was the waiting.

Tonight, finally, that wait was over. Kit was luminous, acting her heart out. He followed her with eager eyes and when she left the stage, even if it was only for a moment, he felt an emptiness creep inside him. He sat in the dark, mesmerized, gazing up anxiously as the curtain came down and people around him thundered their applause. He thundered right along with them.

Intermission would last fifteen minutes.

Edging his way toward the front of the house as everyone else headed for the lobby, he slipped through a dark velvet curtain held together at the top by a series of safety pins and stood for a moment, watching the crew hustle furniture off the stage. The lead actors were given individual dressing rooms along a back wall. The building was ancient. While the lobby was nothing to brag about, the backstage area, smelling like an old moldy sponge, was a mass of peeling paint, dirty, scuffed floors, battered walls, and a general dankness that totally fascinated him. Thankfully, nobody gave him a second look as he walked briskly into the rear hallway. He bent down and peeked through the first keyhole. Nope. Wrong room. The skinny man inside had stripped to his undershirt and boxer shorts and was searching through a bunch of clothes draped over a chair. Gross.

Moving to the next door, he leaned in and squinted. “Score,” he whispered. Kit, her golden hair swept back into a ponytail, was seated at the dressing table, the lightbulbs that surrounded an oversized mirror casting a hard light on her flawless features. Her red lips and white skin reminded him of his sister's porcelain doll. A bouquet of red roses tied with a ribbon spread across the table and claimed all her attention. She removed a tiny pink card, read the message, then smiled a moony smile.

“Hey, what are you doing there?” came a man's voice.

“Me?” He turned around.

Another man came along and grabbed the first man's arm. “We got a problem with the horse prop. Ten freakin' minutes before curtain and this thing goes and busts on me.”

As quick as that, they were gone.

After rubbing his palms along his jeans to wipe off the sweat, he gave a soft rap on the door with one knuckle. When he received no response, he tried again. Thinking that his beautiful Kit was lost in reverie, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door slowly inward, all the while rehearsing his words with his eyes shut tight.

“Kit,” he began, too frightened to even look at her. “You don't know me. My name is—” When he finally gathered enough nerve to force a smile and open his eyes, he gave an involuntary jerk. “Kit?” he said. This time he spoke her name as a question.

He inched forward. Turning full circle in the center of the room, he found no windows or doors. No closet. No trapdoor in the floor. There was nowhere to hide and no way in or out except for the door he'd just come through.

And yet?

He searched the air around him for the magician's puff of smoke. There could be no other explanation for why the flowers, the ribbon, the card, and his beloved Kit, had vanished.

 

2

PRESENT DAY

“The old deep and …
what
?” said Cordelia, tossing her rinestone-encrusted reading glasses on the restored Chippendale card table she used as a desk. A giant woman and a giant desk, one with huge claw feet, were meant for each other. At least, that's how the antique dealer had sold it to her. As the part-owner and artistic director of the newest theater in Minneapolis—the Thorn Lester Playhouse—Cordelia required an office that reflected her personality and status. Gilded Age, while not a reflection of her bank account, seemed the perfect fit. It was also the general era in which the theater—originally an opera house—had been built.

Across from her sat the University of Minnesota's preeminent Minnesota historian, Archibald Van Arnam, a friend and avid theatergoer. He had, on his own time and at his own expense, offered to look into the history of the theater for her. He'd come to her office at the crack of dawn this morning—nearly ten
A.M.
—to give her his initial findings.

“Yes, yes,” he said eagerly. “That's what they used to call this place. The Old Deep and Dark. Fascinating, isn't it? Fascinating.”

Archibald, when excited, tended to repeat himself. He was a naturally pedantic man, used to speaking in front of large crowds of disinterested college kids, and thus primed to talk more loudly than was strictly necessary. He was in his early fifties, with the face of an embittered Roman emperor—or a hired thug—the body of a wrestler gone to seed, and a comb-over that was so pathetic, Cordelia couldn't imagine how he could look at himself in the mirror every morning and not dissolve in a fit of hysterics. His eyes were sharp, covered by dark-rimmed glasses, and his crooked teeth were stained from years of too much coffee and too many cigarettes. She'd known him socially as a younger man and figured that some women—at the very least, his three wives—had once found him attractive. He was an inveterate gossip and a natural raconteur—the last a skill that Cordelia felt was becoming endangered in today's Internet culture. In her opinion, Archibald was the perfect dinner guest, always arriving with several bottles of excellent wine, ever willing to entertain.

“Yes, it's interesting,” she said, picking up her reading glasses and settling them back on her nose, “but even you have to admit, it's not exactly good news. ‘Let's get tickets to the Old Deep and Dark for a show tonight, sweetums.' Virtually every staff meeting I've had this week has devolved into a conversation about branding and positioning our new theater. Do we really want to
be
the Old Deep and Dark?”