lips. “So whoever it was had a month to set it up, I guess. I had to move from New York and everything. I just got the keys on Tuesday.”
“All right. So you came here unexpectedly—right after you got the keys—and walked in…”
“Right. I was walking down the main aisle in the house toward the stage, thinking about all of the energy and memories contained in this space, and how I wanted to— Well, anyway, I was walking down the aisle, and all of a sudden, there was this bright blue light on the stage.”
She’d been clambering up the ladder a little too fast for his comfort, then suddenly stopped. “Wait a sec. I remember something…I remember walking down the aisle and feeling something sort of give under my foot, like a soft spot in the floor, and I was thinking, oh crap, it’s going to be another repair—and then the lights came on.”
“So you’re thinking it might have been a sort of tripwire—or trip pad—that you stepped on that set it off?”
“Or some sort of alarm that signaled the, uh, what do I call him—the vandalizer?—to set it off, maybe remotely. Because it was right after that, almost immediately, that the light came on.”
Jake liked that theory, and he told her so as they reached the top of the scaffolding at the same time. “Good. So we can probably find evidence of that if you can remember where you were standing when it happened.”
“Right. And then I ran—I mean, I left the building because I was freaked out—”
“Understandably so.”
“And when I came back in—maybe ten minutes later—what I thought was painted words on the wall but was just a backdrop—a scrim, probably,” she added with a sly look that made his stomach bottom out then bounce up, “was gone. At the time, I thought it had just disappeared.”
“Which is probably what you were supposed to think. You were being fooled into thinking that the place is haunted by some horrible specter or gruesome phantom, but it was all a fake. Someone’s just messing with—”
Crash!
The sound of many large items colliding or falling somewhere in the building—backstage?—was sudden, loud, and ominous, and the metallic echo reverberated through the empty space.
Vivien’s mouth was open to either exclaim or scream; Jake couldn’t tell—and then his brain couldn’t even pursue that thought, because all at once, he felt the violent rush of cold.
It was like an actual Arctic front that enveloped him, as if he’d been plunged into a room of dry ice. The frigid air was accompanied by a dark, dank, unpleasant smell that he’d only experienced once before—when he got a whiff of something that turned out to be necrotic diabetic foot with wet gangrene during a stint in the ER. This was nearly as bad—and worse, he didn’t know what was causing it.
Vivien made a noise that sounded as if she were in distress—probably gagging—and it came out in a distinct puff of white in the freezing air.
The metallic cacophony ended as abruptly as it had begun, but the scaffolding, the catwalk, the rows of light pots above suddenly began to shake wildly. The lamps themselves began to flash erratically in blinding reds, greens, blues, and golds.
Jake didn’t need to shout for her to climb down from the rattling scaffolding; she was already halfway to the ground. He jumped most of the way, his own breath following in a trail of white as his fingers and the tip of his nose burned with cold. He grabbed Vivien by the hand with stiff fingers, and they half stumbled, half ran off the stage, away from the clattering, jangling mess, down the aisle past the rows of chairs.
They weren’t even down the aisle when the chaos stopped just as suddenly as it had begun: the lights, the violent rattling, the stench, the cold.
They staggered to a halt and turned around to look back at the stage. Then Vivien gaped up at him, her eyes so wide that he could see white all around her irises.
“Holy shit.”
Chapter Fourteen
Vivien’s teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, and it wasn’t because of the furious cold that had suddenly surrounded them.
What the hell was that?
She realized she was still gripping Jake’s hand, but she wasn’t quite ready to let go.
“That was…” he started, then simply squeezed her fingers as they stared into the theater at the silent stage.
The scaffolding was still intact, and nothing had fallen from above. The colored pot lights were all dark now, and the only