Speaker 1: At nine seventeen, one rainy Thursday night. I ducked through
the steel scaffold and drate the cross Market Street, and
pushed through the warp doors of the Imperial Theater, clutching
my recorder in a bout a notebook against my chest
as if they might fend off the dust and echoes. Inside.
The foy air tasted faintly chemical, the fume of strip
varnish mingling with the older, heavier scent of velvet rot.
A crew of full recent vested laborers, faces slack with fatigue,
huffled past me, trumbling sacks of pastor and coils of
wire toward the mounting bins outside. Beyond them, the main
house yonned open and cavernous, latticed with scaffolds, awash of
the boom of ventilators. Lantin swung from balustrades, spreading a
weak brassy glow on to the gold leaf orins and
silk decay. I was there officially for a commission piece
on the city's restoration efforts, a human angle story for
the Tribune. Ostensibly my interest was the people behind the project, foremen,
plaster wizards, scenery crews, who knew every inch of crown
molding and fly rays. The city press liaison had told
me to call on Foreman Hartley, who was tall, laconic,
and built like a forgotten carnival strowman. Hartley was in
the main aisle gesturing a damage masking the curve of
the proscenium fresh break. He sat tracing the ragged water
bloomed edge with a knowing frown pipe behind here went
flood to three feet deep up stage. Moles will take
weeks if we're lucky. Footstep stop from the shadows behind me,
stolen the interview, I turned to find a younger man
in black wet brutes and a faded magic lighting T shirt,
dangling a coil of led strip lights from one hand.
His eyes darted over the crew, then flicked at me. Hey,
you're the newspaper guy right. There was weariness in his posture,
as if expecting ridicule names. Me el I do lighting
rigs and clean up. He hesitated, studying the ashes world
parqet beneath our feet. As the generator's thirded overhead, he
leaned in voice, pishlow a secret squating between us. Look,
don't think ham nuts or anything. Okay, I started getting
these weird texts after midnight, about a week back, always
after graveyard shift. He handed over his phone screen, trembling
in his brain. Ecosted images filled the display, all taken
from somewhere high above, as if the viewprint hovered near
the dumb watching anonymous above the stage spotlet. Hayes blurred
the faces below, technicians fussing with cables, an actor in
a faded clip, pacing alone, but each photo frame peculiar
shadows congregating along the handrails, human shades press flat by
the ankles in the gloom, alking just behind the balconies
and stirring straight down. I detected in one lowber shot
a mask of light slash cross a hollowed profile. Me
L's hand shook. There was no rehearsal scheduled, The stage
was dark, place was locked. His voice lodged in his throat.
But this he tapped a thumb nail against the screen,
magnified the uppermost here. That's the third balcony, and nobody
can get up there, and not since they welded the
stairs and sealed it off for all that asbestos. He
glanced over his shoulder. The photos keep coming, always from
that level. Someone with something keeps watching us work. I checked.
I swear every entrance is chained. His face was ashen
under the led payal spill man, I don't want trouble.
Just watch your step upstairs, all right? That was That's
all he'd say. He vanished back into the maze of
cable spowls, leaving a faint osm within the faded beam
of his flashlight, dragging shadows over the auditorium seats. The
lecture from Hotley resumed, but the interview went in fits
and starts. After that. I caught myself flancing up each
time the ancient scaffold and creaked, unable to forget the
shapes custard in the mobiles. Photographs salent ringed around the
upper balcony and blinking. People think journalists tune out go stores.
That's a myth when they are offered with this much caution.
You listen. My name is Thomas Urge. I've spent most
of my professional life entangling the knots of urban legend
and knights like these. Theater dust and nervous unfinished stores
passed along, and a cover of darkness returned to me
in the small lyres with more force than even the
cleanest headline. I first came to the Imperial Theater three
weeks before, when it reopened for restoration after a laning
dormant nearly forty years. The assignment arrived in my inbox
with a modest feet and an undertone of right place,
right time. The city council was eager to sell the
public on there Art deco dual box revival, eager for
citizens to picture gold trim seat and orchestras, and the
shimmow of new chandeliers were now only birds nested. They
were less eager to talk about them as steps, the
three failor pairs, two burglaries, the stoled sbaestos, abatement, and
whatever disease of secresy made even city officials frown at
the word balcony. I cultivated routines, showing up at six
most mornings before the laborer's thermoses cooled, before the sunlight
managed to break through the smoke plastic of the dumrot.
My focus was collecting oral histories, not chasing ghost tales.
I kept taped into views friendly banter in the makesift
break room with its plastic folding tables, wished under the
ghost of a vanish chandelier there amid the mug racks
and batted theater chairs rescued from escape bin, the real
stores unspoiled, a stone cover whose right hand was scalped
by nearn Sander grew up on these boards. And a
set painter, Jeanine, who regaled me with ancient star gossipathy
Imperial footlights once pot when Sinatra whistled on opening night,
how a child act to got stuck in the flyoft
and came down with white hair. There was coffee, sometimes
grady and burnt, sometimes sweet with the last of somebody's
condensed milk. City officials Breeze threw, always clutching member folders,
assesscardy at the town's and official historian dropped by on
Monday's toe away, whatever what of over heaps of faded
programs the city archevis had left waiting. I love these yrs.
The Imperial vibrated with stories that had nothing to do
with ghoes. The paint hasprowred catalogs of touch of colors,
A fussy debate over just how gold original goldly fought
to be, the hum of argument about what period appropriate
men in an air allergic to us best disdust it
was only as a kind of garnish, or perhaps a
ritual that ghost stores surfaced veterans worn. You come as
not to whistle back stage. It draws the dead leads,
and a persistent rumor claimed any rehearsal begun on or
Wednesday would close before the Saturday matinee. They talked about
the doom shows of nineteen seventy eight, the year the
Imperial locked its doors because the city ran out of money.
According to Missus, Grady spoken with the careful neuphality of
someone who didn't believe it but declined to elaborate. Brady
herself was a breed apart lively blazer dripped in August,
quick to offer timelines, but faster to deflect. When asked
about the haunted wings or the official reasons for the
building's closure, she told anecdotes in brisk, cheerful tones, like
a woman clicking through slides already out of date. It
was easy, too easy, frankly, to forget the strangers at
the building's periphery. I kept I owned out moodest Ostensibly,
the third balcony, sometimes called the gallery Guard's roost by
the older hands, had been closed since seventy nine. Partly
repeated the warnings about code violations to any one who
lingered near the sealed stairwells. The official rush Nawal's toxins
species behind them, molding, brittle wiring, steel supports pitted by
moisture and salt leeching in off the lake. Nobody was
sense tright to go near it. Yet around the edges
of my interviews, oddities gathered. Every day. At about four,
the glare would angle just so through the fracture glass
of the dome above the main house, painting weird shadows
across the tarnished box seats, the lobby's deccho horses trailed
cover reflections across the marble in the half light, sometimes
forcing me to look twice. Once, in the dead hush
of the main aisle, the boom of a drop wrench
overhead seemed to echo from the wrong direction. These fragments
are noted because that's the only way to see a
pattern if it's there still. Until me OL's nervous confidence
in the break room, I never once considered the possibility
of being watched from above. My job required skepticism, but
I admit fear in low doses makes a better column
routine held me steady for a time. Each morning, I'd
not to the night watchman Elijah, and then settle in
the balcony rail to observe the evolving patchwork. In the auditorium,
I'd compile notes Pesti craftsmen for details Soaka barkab press releases,
and record audio in the bone Dry Hush Temple. One
of the painters was proudest of the chorus box restoration.
Jeanine cataloged each bit of scuffed hard board for posterity.
In this way, I convinced myself the Imperial's real drama
was renovation, human hands against entropy, persistence, carving elegance from
mold and plaster. The shadows were just that, a function
of bad lighting, nostalgia and imagination. That delusion was comfortable
until working late one Thursday, I saw the first proof
no narrative device could explain away. It happened as I
sat on the edge of the old orchestra pit logging
interviews on my batted laptop. I was transcribing miss Esquerade's
remarks about mayoral meddling in seventy seven, when a faint,
sourceless luminescence crawled along the uppermost rim of the house.
That first, I thought it came from a misplace lanton
or contractor's phone light. But it hovered paler than fluorescence
and flickered with a deliberate rhythm, sum thing closer to
code than to mechanical fault. Breath held, I watched as
the glows swam along the sealed balustrade of the third balcony, slothe,
then fast. With the uncomfortable sense of searching, I squintid
a trying to pinpoint its sores through the gloom. At intervals,
the beam snapped off entirely, then blinked on in the
far corner, as a fleet frigging between vantage points. When
the phenomenon repeated, I called to Elijah, who was propped
on a folding chair by the north vestibule, reading an
old detective novel in the spill of his pocket. Touch
He listened, shrugged, and told me, weirdest thing. It blinks
on like that once, a weaker pattern like at once
to be noticed, but no way to get up there
stairs welded fire exa chained, and the city never gave
us keys. Suspechioniged at the base of my skull. I
pulled out my phone attempted to snap some photos of
the anomaly. What I captured was smadged, indeterminate images, ghosted
trails of light hovering above the seats, the faintest wedge
of what might have been a figure leaning forward. Nothing
that would convince any one, least of all myself. But
I saved them thumb through me Hell's text again. His
images and mine overlapped in mood, but not in substance.
That night, in my memo app I wrote and precent incidents,
light photos, no access, same balcony, every time possible. Ink.
The next afternoon, I caught an electrician in the lobby
prepping for a city code walk through. Sorry, he grumbled,
squinting through back of bulbs. That gallery floor, all juice,
cut breakers, torn up wires clipped at the min box.
City may damn sure to be thorough. I followed him downstairs,
watched him point out the tag terminals, dead as disco.
I wanted there to be an explanation, a string pole
tight enough to tire these events together into something pedestrian,
something fit for a brief item below the fold. I
didn't find one. I left that day with a persistent
and knease knotted at the base of my throat, and
an impulsive promise. Next occurrence, I tried for a closer look.
Whatever it took, sleep eluded me. That night I replayed
Meell's nervous warning in my mind, the whispered suspicion in
his voice. At odd ires, ID paged from my photo file,
looking for something new in the old pixels of face,
a pattern anything me Al sought me out the following Monday,
sequestering me behind a roused stack of velvet seats discarded
for pickup. He'd gotten more messages, he said, each stranger
more brazen than the last. He pressed his phone into
my hand, if vibrated as I held it. A fresh
expansey into the key at one fourteen a m time,
stamped only minutes prior, despite our being in the same building.
The message was another photograph, angle downward from the third balcony,
showing a crescent of works costed in the orchestra pit.
My own hunched figure glowed on the edges, feast splashed
paler by the screen light. The sense of being observed
by someone within the sealed space close enough to see
detail send cold shivered down my arms. Curiosity, temper dread.
I asked me how to pull up his coal locks.
We squinted together at the number burner prepaid, already inactive
when dialed, no trace on any public registry. When I
tried to call, only silence answered. That night, I shadowed
me as he did his rounds. Both of us tens
each time a phone screen lit up. Sometimes shadows fluttered
in the dome above, impossible to distinguish from tricks of light.
Our mutual discomfort bred camaraderie. His explanations grew wilder, then
more subdued, as reluctance crept in. I began gently probing
the other workers for stray memories. In the break room,
Blue uniform Crue leader Lisa recounted how her father stayed
hand here in the Sixtis. Once described a gallery watcher
prowl in the upper railings when the house was empty.
He never went up after six, she said, robbing pain.
Fleck Knuckles said it felt like someone waited for you
to slip. A junior carpenter, as Darting muttered about stories
circulating since before the renovation, figures climpsed where nobody alive
could stand. Everyone had a version always just out of focus,
always ending in a sentence trailed into silence. Nobody claimed
first inexperience, or if they did, they refused to elaborate.
A cornered Missus Grady one afternoon in the dam faded
green room, pressing her for what she left and said
about the nineteen seventy eighth Clodre, she avoided my gaze,
stirring sugar into ancient block tea. The city has always
been careful about what it remembers, she murmured, lets trembling
slightly at the rim of her cup. Sometimes you let
things rooms, stores, floors, des colos s wounds can heal.
That sounded less like folklore and more like a warning.
I redirected my energy. If the physical doors were sealed
in history blurred, perhaps paperwork would yeald answers, but Holy
pressed for kis or stable access insisted. Only code inspectors
can get to those levels, even they don't hang around
up there, and there's nothing but old dust and busted
sports anyway, Still, the mystery crawled after me. Between interviews,
I sat in the echoing silence of the City Library,
cycling for spools at microfiche, the Imperial's Public record was
full of gaps. Temporary theater closure due to budget constraints
nineteen seventy eight, bart Deco gem to reopen maybe nineteen eighty.
Nothing about a third balcony, no coverage of any accidents,
no gossip columns, drop hents. If something happened up there,
the paper never marked it. I found two faded headlines
from the winter of nineteen seventy eight, emergency repairs ongoing
at Imperial Theater. The articles themselves offered only vague reference
to structural problems. Nothing pointed to why forty years later
city code would have welded staircases and forbidden re entry.
It was much, but it felt oddly final, as if
any trace of what once happened up there had been
methodically erased. And yet every time I returned to the
southern cott, a neuflicka from above war me has phone
vibrated with another impossible midnight snapshot. That sense of being
boxed by someone else's deliberate omissions grated, the weird silent,
pushed to leave something unspoken, sealed behind velvet and steel.
One afternoon, intent onpening down the hard fat beneath ruma
I could hold the city records clock inaffable man with
sharp elbows and a fondness for crosswood puzzles into letting
me examine the restoration plans under a del fluorescent glare.
I mroll tissue, thin sheets, intricate diagrams of beams and staircases,
careful notations of exit routes, rows of seat markers in
tidy pencil. My heart hammered. The original blueprints, stated May
nineteen twenty four, listed only two balconies, orchestra and dress circle.
No third gallery, not even as a label boy, but
there was no mistaking it. In a building right where
the plans ended. The third balcony sat brooding high overhead,
bolted behind ghosts stairs and caution tape that in congruity
warmed under my skin. I brought a photo of the
present Dave Floplin showed the site manager for confirmation. He
s quainted, then laughed and easily, as if confronted by
a magic trick he couldn't quite unravel. Well, there it is,
he admitted, pointing to the now welded landing visible from
the stalls. But hell at what shows from the top tier.
As a kid, place was always packed for the holidays.
Two balconies would have barely held fifty more folks, and
we routinely sold out at twice at number. I pressed him,
are you absolutely sure? He shroud gaze, flicking away. I
worked concessions knights, sold bags of popcorn to the third
row for five years running. Can't explain the plans, but
it was real. Meanwhile, younger workers in the city code
experts insisted the structure couldn't exist, no foundation footprint for
a third balcony, not in any of the post war models.
Yet standing together in the orchestra hit we could all
see its outlined, grime streaked handril tier had see thick
with us behind cambus shrouds, the faint glimmer when light
bounced just right. I broached the notion of missing workers,
just to provoke a response. Recalling the tales of accidents
during the earliest days of the renovation, Whispers sparked around
the breakron table. A laborer who'd gone home without clocking
out the plaster found a conscious at the top of
the winding stairs, with no memory how he got there.
On those nights, the band are fell quiet, and everyone
glanced up at the hem of darkness above the proscenia.
No one was willing to go on record. Each climed
up after sharing enough for a story. The contradiction grew
unhappy by the minute, official documents raising reality, lived testimony
refusing to disappear. This wasn't a run of the mill
haunting or superstition. It was a blind spot stitched into
the fabric of the place and the cities hush around.
It had the brittle totness of nerves, not nostalgia. The
turning point came not in daylight, but late one Friday evening.
As I finished notes in my cramped office of a
shuttered wine bar, the rain, persistent guttered against my panes.
A soft hat at the door stollowed me when I
opened it. The hallway was deserted, Brascon's flickering in empty space.
At my feet, a battered yellow artifact had been slid
just clear of the threshold of thin paper, devilishly fragile,
spattered from the leaking stawell. I bent to retrieve it.
It was a playable embossed with the Imperial's Emerald loger
dated February nineteen seventy seven, on the back page to
night only third Balcony seating sold out. I recognized the
signature gradies back when she was house manager. The ticket
stubs were still stile and rouse. The artifact trembled in
my hands while the city rained to find the official record.
As plainly as the sealed darkness above the vestibule, some
one intentionally or not wanted this evidence to be found.
I press a playble flat on my desk, smoothing the
torn corners. A show persisted in my fingers, despite the
radiator's steady is. In that moment, I knew, however, temporarily,
the mystery wouldn't let go easily. The shape of an
eras floor, a sealed wound had begun to press out,
and I was already in too deep to walk away
with this strange gift. The questions redoubled. If the third
balcony was never on the plants, why did so many
insisted at hosted hundreds, If the city had erased the records,
who remembered who had left the plable? And why risk
waking old trouble. Behind my closed eyes, I imagined the
dust swelling at the eaves, flick of a phantom light
drawing lines from the ceiling to the orchestra pit, searching
for someone, anyone willing to see what had been left behind.
I still thought at that point that chase in the
outlines of a ghost was a matter of collecting facts
and filling gaps. Yet already the theaters and quiet star
ory had begun spilling unstoppably into the living world. Yet
already the theater's and quiet story had begun spilling unstoppably
into the living world. The play was sat on my
desk overnight, while the city pressed on outside highways, hissing,
beny slick rain gloss sodium lamps. I barely slept each
time I stared the memory of that artifact, trial physical,
defying every city' schematic out reviewed, demanded fresh scrutiny. I
rose before dawn and turned it over in my hands
beneath the cheap brass desk lamp. The cards stock was
thinner than most programs wader Walk, but still crisp at
the edges. A survivor of some forgotten order, Grady's lipping
script was unmistakable, her signature tucked into the bottom margin
near the staff acknowledgments. The performance listed wasn't one I
recognized benefit for stage Hen's widows February twenty third, nineteen
seventy seven, with a cast of names, mostly unfamiliar, now
faded into the haze of time. I returned to the
Imperial while the city was gray with their early mist,
if only to remind myself that the theater, even with
all at quarks, remained rooted in dry, observable reality. The
same tarch drooped from the scaffolding, the samehuddles pulled on
the steps, but the feeling had shifted. It wasn't of her.
Nothing had been rearranged, not a single sign move. Yet
walking those tiled floors felt subtly like intruding, as if
my presence now pulsed against some invisible bruise. Inside the
bracroom was quite but for the persistent drip of rain
off in exposed beam. Jeannine the painter, hunched over a sketchbook, sharpy,
flickering and steady arcs as she mapped at the day's work.
Her radio said eternally to low mumbled some late night
phone in about neighborhood noise complaints. I must have looked
out of sorts. She offered me her thermus. The coffee
inside black as cut slate and hard enough to raise
a sweat on my palms. Long night, she asked, eyebrow
poised as though detecting my unsettled edge. I shrugged, just
thinking through the balcony mess. You ever see a play
from up there? Jeanine up in the gallery, she paused,
pen keeping time against the sketch book. Not officially, but
I snuck up a couple times in high school nineteen
seventy seven, seventy eight, some sort of charity thing. The
grown ups gussed up. My uncle slipped me and past
the fire stairs. Seat was hard, as help at the
angle was great. Why my heart picked up? Do you
remember hearing about anything odd? Accidents? Folks getting lost? She
set the pen down. Not directly, my cousin said there
was a fire at one rehearsal. I just remember the
doors up there, tafas bank faults once there's locks turned.
That's where I learned you could get scared just by
listening to the whole house breathe roof creaking. Never went
back up, honestly felt wrong, even before anyone called it haunted.
Miel appeared at the door just then, still jettering, before
never leaving his clenched fist, he shot me a look
somewhere between apology and warning, and disappeared into the tool storage.
The room fell silent save for the radio and the
intermittent clack of Jeanine's pen. Later that morning, I caught
forem and Hotly in the wings, drilling this windoor back
onto its ancient hinges. I waited until the climber faded
before asking you hear about a benefit performance right before
seventy eight third balcony completely sold out. He leaned on
the drill expression, narrowing hell that rings about strangers thing.
There aren't supposed to be records of attendants up there
after seventy five, building code, asbestos whatever. Yet I remember
my old man grumbling about clinging to the raft. There's
that winter, no paper trail like the city where the
plenty of folks remember those shows, though nobody wants to
say why they ended it. A plans I press, but
it never include that third tier. Hotly just shook his head,
eyes fixed on the work. You know how it is.
Things get built, rebuilt, abandoned, sealed off. Sometimes the building
gets ahead of the paperwork. I carried the playboll with
me as both shield and proof, sharing it wearily with
those who might remember, but never venturing so far as
to copy her photographic just yet. The beat felt personal,
a favor from the shadows, or a test. That afternoon,
while contractors debated the merits of restoring a ruinscance, I
slept away to catch missus Grady as she left the site,
hand back snug against her side and scoffed, streaming in
the wind. I jogged to catch up playble hidden at
a Manila folder, miss Es Grady, do you recall this program?
I'd offered attentively. She took it, lipped, parting at the
signature where I was drawing together out for a shock.
My word, I never this should have been lost with
the box office records burn. Surely, her fingers trembled. She
wouldn't meet my eyes. Did something happen that night? I
kept my voice as gentle as possible, all my practicipations
focused in the small, closely guarded spaces behind her eyes.
She hesitated, looking for the escape patch into conversation. The
city closed the upper balcony for repairs were that's officials announced,
but that evening there was confusion. Lots of people packed in,
Folks finding themselves in the wrong seats. They said it
was overbooking, but she paused. Let's creasing into careful silence.
There were incidents. Some people never came downstairs, but the
recoes were incomplete, and after the shut down, the council
just wanted it all forgotten. Most families didn't ask questions.
You have to understand of these Willian times, folks took
work where they found it. Accents were in a common
but upstairs things were different. Something in her tones often
now hinted at more than simple fear, something akin to
grease lawn memory. I asked if she knew who might
have kept the playbill or left it for me. She
shook her head, returning it with fingers pinched at the corners,
like a relict, to potent to touch for long. The
building's secrets weren't meant for daylight, mister Verge. That was
all she would say. The walk back to her car
was silent. She offered only a brittle smile, then was gone,
engines sputtering into the flow of late morning traffic. As
the iOS slid by, my list of contacts grew longer.
Stage hands whose unions are dissolved, City clerks with half
forgotten drawers of permits, carpenters, hue shuffled stores like battered
playing cards. They disagreed above almost everything, whether the theater
had ever truly been safe, whether it deserved restoration, who
benefited from its elegant decay or resurrection. But none could
square the existence of the gallery with the absence of
its records. The odd thing I noticed was that everyone's
memory pressed right up to the age huge sol tickets,
who'd cleaned the rails, hued carow props for the annual
pantomimes atop those stairs. But when asked about the year
it closed, specifics of its final night, the facts scattered
away like startled birds. I returned to my notes, cross
referencing timelines, plotting returns to the scene at different hours.
Meadew's phone became almost a participant in these efforts, coughing
up a new message every other midnight, sometimes send a
truly impossible IROs. The images grew increasingly specific. A shot
of Heart standing unaware on the edge of the pit,
a warehouse window blown out by rain, and once a
near ille clear close up of Janine's paint stained bench,
as if the photographer coroach in the galley overhead. The
digital world, it seemed, was faithful to the haunting's logic,
delivering impossible evidence from beyond the sealed doors. Each photo
bore closed an angle that made sense only if taken
from above, a town sound that overlapped precisely with a
moment I recalled, looking up, feeling observed. One particularly sharp day,
I finished a string of interviews in the theaters mean steps,
and turned towards city Hall. The wind sliced off the water.
After clearing the security check, I navigated to the dull,
green expanse of the record's office. The cleric Darius greeted
me with his usual blend of patience and ironic humor.
Back for more ghosts, he teased, raising a single brow.
Not ghost such as puzzles, I said, the ever hero
of a program called The Widow's Benefit nineteen seventy seven.
Upper balcony sold up crowd. He rifled through his ledger,
flipping familiar pages with bored professionalism. Nothing showed me permets
for the winter months. Nothing marked the floor, nothing flagged
a special use. Whe lingered over the box labeled Imperial
seventy Archive. In a inflorescent haze, I eased out reams
of correspondence, fadd box office, talelis four cupped, city membos,
urgent mine, electrical fire, prompt, attendance required. But about the
balcony nothing, No seating maps, no guest lists, no incident reports,
legal invisibility. I pressed, Darius rubbed his jaw as of
calculating risk check fiscal year seventy eight expenditures. There's something
he glanced until lock drawer and Quiety pushed a brown
envelope across the desk. H you didn't see this here inside
to quintin at the xeroxes as spotted entrant with entire
budget lines marked remediation gallery closure consultants only do not
itemize the dates lined up, not with the well publicized
water main break, but with the stewies of insurance withdroals
in late winter. Why, I wonder had the repairs focused
on a part of the building that, within official lines
didn't exist outside the city had begun to throw with
rain again, the sidewalks gleaming beneath head lights, my mind
fluttering between superstition and bureaucracy. On a hunch, I dialed
the oldest former union rep I could find. Mister Crane
Now living in one of the bungalow suburbs just beyond
the river. It took patience and then a promise of
coffee and silent about the particulars before Crane let me visit.
His living room was crammed, carpet sticky, with three generations
worth of toys and dog leashes. The walls gallery of
union photos and faded bowling trophies. When I finally broached
the topic of the balcony, Crane side. We all worked
that upper tier, even when the signs sat and safe.
You don't forget ladders as steep as that. There was
a collapse small officially, but he eye may hoarse, voice lowering.
I know they called a bad luck or of capacity,
or whatever fit the contract. What the city didn't say
is that some men stayed up there, passed the fire watch.
A couple never came down. Others just left the business, angry, silent.
We sat in the gloom, the TV flickering with me
to daytime news. His tone thickened by memory or regret.
The papers stay quiet. Everyone had reason to let it ride.
Some got their severance. Nobody asked questions, do you remember
who was in charge? I press not expecting a real land.
Cranes lets twisted, uncertain A grady ran the house for
the audience, but backstage belongs to no one pasted a
point nobody was willing to bear witness for long. It
was a story I had heard in very guises again
and again, the city's procedural Nina's closing up over or
whatever spill had occurred. I emerged with my notebook brimming,
my heart, strained by the feeling of PURSUITOV being led
through mazes built from erasure as much as fact. Returning
to the theater, I found the mood subtly changed the
day's tasks. The sanding, buffing wiring continued, but every eye
darted upward whenever footsteps echoed from overhead. Twice a glove
worker from the asbestos crew haused head cocked as if
expecting voices from the darkness far above. The proscenium meelstock
closed by Jeanine. His phone kept in airplane mode while
he worked, but the unees had lodged so deep it
was part of the air. Even hotly. Usually gruff and
dismissive kept a flasklight on his person at all times,
now never lingering at the base of the gallery stair.
By Thursday, the frequency of odd events had escalated. While
I locked dialog beneath the proscenium arch, a shuddering vibration
rippled through the upper walls, like a large crowd shifting
in their seats. Workers dismissed it as thunder, but the
sky was dazzlingly clear. One of the carpenters, a new Hire,
blanched and nearly quit on the spot. In the afternoon,
the backstage circuit breaker trip twice, both times at precise
one fourteen p m And one fourteen a m, corresponding
with the time stamps on the ells and coming photos.
I checked my own foam locks at one fourteen that morning,
as if onnkyre, I've woken inexplicably, heart racing the digitized
memory of the flickering balconyl like crisp in my mind.
Another photo had appeared, this time as grainy as ever,
but showing my own desk, my coffee cup, my open
lapped up glowing on the screen. The angle could only
have come from just behind my shoulder. But I'd locked
the office, double checked the windows. A panicky logic started
to spiral inside me. Either someone was playing a fantastically
sophisticated punk one that involved hacking, secret access, un keen,
psychological manipulation or else what havever lingered upstairs was less
interested in hiding than in being seen, even acknowledged me Ellen.
I huddled over printets, his mood shrinking with each new message.
This isn't supposed to happen at block number. Wipe my
phone twice, but they keep coming, always from above. Always
when we were alone, we shared a silent shape by dread.
It wasn't just fear of the unknown any more. It
was the fear that the unknown new both of us,
our habits, our vulnerabilities, and our limits. In those last
days before the major turin, the effects deepened, almost as
if the theater itself responded to the investigative pressure. Elijah
stoked most nights, began reporting strange disruptions during his watch.
Tools moved radios, turning on the sound of applause echoing
in the Daddy was where no one should be on
any floor but the ground. Jeanine stopped staying late, sighting
headaches and a creepy suspicion that her borer pane brushes
would be lined up in new on familiar patterns. Each morning,
I caught Hotly in a rare moment of candor as
he locked up nar midnight. He leaned close, whispering, we're
nearly done with this lobby paneling. Once that's done, sitio
call for final inspection. But I heard from a friend
up at building safety, the counties dragging its heels without
saying why. Someone spooked, maybe even up stairs. He offered
me a rough knod keyes jangling as he turned away.
I lingered to watch the house lights fatably, the faint
outline of the third balcony limin high and shadow, impossible
to ignore even in darkness. Searching for certainty, I set
up one vinyl camera in all dsl R, hidden near
the stair as heart lace wore was the only possible
access to the gallery. I left a live feet running
set to log any movement or change in light. That night,
thunder again rattled the sky, the city flashing with heat, lightning.
As I chasse sleep in my apartment. At two seven
a m my phone quivered the weak coms upload hit
my inbox, ashort, jittery clip. It began in darkness, the
ruinous hush of the empty theater. Then for just six seconds,
a light bloomed at the uppermost landing forcus like a
signal in the grain. I caught the edge of something,
a hunched figure, glimmering as if partly translucent, staring and
blinking through the lens, and then dissolving in a smear
of static flush. A hip pause, rewind frame by frame replay,
but the image blood into artifacting before contacts could solidify. Still,
the sensation that someone or something had locked eyes with
the camera with me was undenable. I printed the best, still,
folding it carefully beneath the playble. In my files, each
piece of evidence. Armed with latent discomfort, Hattens formed a
logic of attention, of warning of an finished business. Unwilling
to remain closed. The city's high places, court room, records, office,
union all seemed co conspirators by day's end, as eager
to wash their hands at the third balcony, as the
ghosts themselves might be to remain hidden. I pressed for
code inspection logs, but unce is dried up fast. One
inspector quoted me dryly. We don't go up past the
second circle. If you've got work up there, best to
wait for a complete demo, No point risking bodies on
paperwork ghosts. Later, as a last attempt, I tried retracing
the Metropolitan Reviews edatorial occurres, fishing for a columnist who
might have mentioned the balcony in the strange silent years.
What I found were only veiled references old ghosts demand
a heavy toll in the House of Laughter, one wrote
months after the closure. But the column ended abruptly, as
if further lines had been reducted. Friday afternoon, the rain gone,
a pale sun roused glamers from the city's window glass.
I left the theater and wandered Market Street, hungry for normalcy,
drop by drop. Even so every step looped me back
to the problem at the Imperial every busker's melody, every
towers windows seen to gesture up towards some secret, faster
than the sky line itself. Later, ringing with frustration, I
nearly missed an envelope in my office mail coby typed
and signed it stationary, lifting a faint scentd of oze
in its content. Simple a single sheet copied from a
long gone city map showing block plans from nineteen twenty eight.
Two things leaped out the Imperial drawn in bold lines,
with two balconies marked auditorium, and then a faint pencil
addition's loppy handwriting, plus Cord's gallery here final construction, not
on master plan, under lined three times in some buried
bureaucrat's script. The reality of that hidden floor had cried out,
unwilling to be suppressed. I leaned back in my batter
chat city humming outside as fixed on the puzzle pieces
now masked in my lap, the playbill, the work imprint,
the city map with its protest edge cost time. I
realized the story was no longer about renovation, a lost history,
or even ghosts, if they truly existed. It was about
a wound the city had tried and failed to stitch closed,
a wound that bled through in flickering lights, phantom texts,
and haunted records. On sitting with my archive, I understood,
on a level beyond evidence or intuition, the unfinished business
of the thing. Our balcony was reaching for any one
who dared name it, demanding a witness at last, even
if all it could offer were static shadows and mornings
in the sleepless doock. I took a breath, resolved, to
see it through. If the boundary between memory in fact
was thin in the city, and perhaps for one restless witness,
it was about to be breached. The following morning, as
I closed my note can reject my recordings, a sense
of looming disclosure pressed down like an approaching storm. I
gathered the play built the photos, the map, and slipped
them into my satchel hoart, ratcheting with both fear and resolve.
Whatever waited on the other side of that well did
stare and welded silence. I knew it would not remain
secret for long. The playbill never left my back after that.
It rode at my head through restless, overcast days, the
corners softening and curling, as if whatever secrets aboard needed
the friction the ceaseless roby against my curt and thigh
to rise to the surface. In the theater, signs of
change crawled in subtle overtones, a kind of brittle, watchful tension.
Before the restoration had been in elaborate miss pain dust
in the light, workers bickering about trim the opera singer's
laugh echoing up through plaster dust. But that week kies
tract movements, hands worked with unconscious haste, and the brigroom
fell quiet when anyone slipped, and unexpectedly, Mill was the
first to show the switch. He'd become a fixture, always
drifting at the periphery of groups, but now he hardly lingered.
I caught him once late at night, coiling keebles like
bandages beside the green velvet steps. He startled at every sound,
jumping when my soul scraped against the marble. His phone,
once his life line, now sat mutely on airplane mode,
and whenever its green flickered in the gallery's direction, he flinched,
as if expecting a blow. The rest of the crusteered
clear of the balcony as soon as dusk fell. One
new apprentice refused outright to work past sundown. Even Janine,
whose resolve I trusted, stored her paints down stirs to
all being only what sunlight could reach. Nobody spoke directly
about what had happened the night the anonymous program slid
under my door, but everyone seemed to operate in a
careful choreography around the subject. My own habits hardened routine
became arma. I arrived early reviewed notes, obsessively checked that
playable in my bag at intervals, confirming it was real
that its curls and creases hadn't changed. A ma all
applied overnight. Some mornings I half expected to find extra lions,
a new name written in destro faindash, But the air
itself crackled with and asked questions. The city so fond
of its veils and silence, as began pushing back. Some
one was rought in the order. The bureaucracy's reflect was
always to paper it over, to let time and normalcy
swallow what could not be explained. The next morning, in
the theater, astirred with hotly beneath the winter I scaffolding.
He didn't bother with the usual jokes or running critique
of the city's clumsy management. Leave the dum, don't touch
what isn't listed on your invase, he grumbled to two laborers.
If the light's liquor up there, just clock out. A
new edge marked his tone. The veneer of workplace superstition
had been peeled away, revealing nerves raw and unvarnished. A
city inspector and steel toad boots rolled in a ten
clip board clushed to his chest, where closing access to
the second balcony for the week. He announced, no warning,
no explanation, pending some structural review. Jeanine muttered something about
ghost project managers, then packed up, early, trailing and nervous.
Drom Elijah. The night walk sidled up as I gathered
my things, looking drawn and older than the week before last.
Night lights in the north stairs kept tripping. It always
lines up with the ire of the photos arrive. He
didn't need to ask if I'd seen anything new. We
both shared the same bruised exhaustion. I told him about
the playbill, what it seemed to confer him, and how
the city's records didn't just omit. The accident there made
the floor itself. He absorbed this in silence. Here's something
wants remembering, he said. At last, it'll keep knocking luncheon.
The brick room shifted from easy camaraderie to quiet chewing
and half finished stores. I tried bringing up concrete details.
Who'd work the third gallery back when it was open?
What the fire could said in the seventies, but the
roomor treated on itself. Let it be, Lise insisted, her
voice flat and fine, don't stir what can't be set right?
I felt the pressure build and un spoken or else
in the thickening air. I kept at my research, followed routines,
crossed names offless, But each time I touched the playbe
or reviewed a new photo, the sense of acceilaration intensified. Miel,
who once relished exploring old circuits and locked up rigging,
now skirted the orchestra pit, then huddled by the doors,
too restless to sit, too frightened to flee. The number
called again. He whispered on Thursday, eyes flicking with dread.
It just static on the line. Was something behind it?
Not music, not talking, just waiting. The dread was catching infectious.
My email feld with cryptical lines from the Tribune office Legal.
Is reviewing your notes? Stone proceeding history too hard? I
answered in half truths, omitting playbiles and phone recos too,
conscious of the thin eyes beneath us all, I kept
logging events. The flickering light, once weekly, now came every
other night or more. Sometimes it winked on during daylight,
when the sun's angle made it nearly impossible to miss
if you happened to glance upward at the right moment.
I caught at once a quarter to three mid interview,
as if it watched us the same way we craned
down next to watch it. Elijah reported finding tools displaced,
often stacked in precise columns by the north doors. I
checked the fee from my hid and camera out every
so often. The virtual silence would be broken by that
solow bloom in the balcony, brief and angry, flaring with
a natural precision. Half the images were marred with dropouts.
Digital stafle at my nerves andhammered the drums of the
story I still tried to shape. I cycled endlessly through
my archive playbell blueprint photos. This comatic mailed without sender
each time I laid them out. The third floor's absence
lim ladder. All proof was indirect, circumstantial, never quite enough
for citation, impossible to deny when stacked end to end.
By the week's close, it became clear something in the city,
perhaps even the city itself, didn't want the balcony or
its shadows exumed. Late Friday, rain fell again, drumming the
don giving the auditorium a submarine glow. Clean up cruise
milled about temp ashore, everyone eager to escape the encroaching gloom.
I kept an eye out for me, l hoping he
hadn't slipped away, and was relieved to spot him nervously
pacing near the side exit, hood up, face tight would worry.
He passed me a folded nakin on which he scrawled texts.
Came at one fourteen again, this time the foots of
green room door jar. I unfolded it. The image was
faint askew, nearly empty but foreshadow, and a single sharp
triangle of light hitting the floor, the kind that only
the third floor balcony could have cast. I tried calling
the number again, still defunct, no signal, no feedback. For
all our technology, all our due diligence and codes, we
remained squarely at the mercy of an older stranger. Logic
evidence had to be found or made. The play built
the map. The furtures were only breadcrumbs, not the substance itself.
That night, unable to sleep, I spread everything on my
kitchen table, lined up together blueprint, play built the unnotated map,
still sticky polaroid prints, a thumb drive of my interview tapes.
The pieces didn't fit, not quite. The story defied the
usual grid every time I carraled it towards some neat conclusion,
plumbing accident, electrical fire, lost records, another clue elbowed out
the plausible for duncanny. I needed to go back up
above the gallery landing, when no living feet had trodden
forty years. Safety codes or no evidence from a distance
would never suffice. I had to see it, touch it,
get inside the story fully, even if it meant breaking
with scents and rules. The following day, a Saturday, the
theater home, more quietly than usual, partly had cleared, the
crews blaming a burst pipe in the stalls, but I
saw right through it. He wanted quiet for the City
inspector special walk through the min house limped a necro
and dust, plastic sheets shining in the updraft. While the
city Inspector and Hartly prowled the lobby, I drifted into
the gloom of the gnaw vestibule, waiting for any one
who might have information or courage to chance the sail stair,
the scent of all MoU rosen waves mingling with wax
and feign ammonia for months of attempted cleaning. Busy da
to be poking around, said a scratchy voice behind me.
I swung around to find Elijah, hands deep in his
old park at a flasc light, holsoed at his belt.
He looked like hell. I told him I needed to
see the service stairs, anything leading to the gallery. He
considered a moment mouth of flat line. I'm not supposed
to go hotly will kill me. But if you want
to look, you can't go alone. Take me, ill take me.
At that moment, Mia drifted out of the beam of
the west, exsits signe ies, darting faced the color of tallow.
He must have judged Delig's resolve. I'm in, he whispered,
but only if we're quick. I can't do another midnight
text and so packed with resolve and the bristling fear
the city had pressed into us. We waited for the
inspector to finish, then lingered as the sight locked down
for the nay. Hartly gave a terrace wave when he passed,
not questioning our prisons, perhaps glad someone was as obsessed
as he refused to be. As the main door was
click shot, Ldjah led the way with only a cough
in the look of grim resolve. The house entered of
its normal noise. Crew suddenly prayed to little sounds. Our steps,
the quiet navigation of the dark, the shift and shiver
of tarts prisoned in every breath. Mitel's hands never stopped shaking.
He tucked his phone into his deepest pocket, as if
hoping distance might shield him if whatever watched us were
sensitive to electronics. The three of us moved with a
keffel intent to the rear of the lobby, where a
brick up entrance to what had once been a cocheck
can faintly be traced in a cracked plaster. This is
where my daddy used to slip and smoke us during intermission,
A larger murmur tracing a finger along suit darkenstone. He
always said there was a service landing on the other
side that to take you to every floor, including a gallery.
Miael pressed his ear to the wall. You hear that,
he whispered. It was true, faint, regular, as if it
ran somewhere deep behind the wall, or perhaps as if
feet paced just beyond sight. None of us was eager
to be reckless, but driven by a desperation that lent
its own urgency, we went to way with borrowed crowbers.
Elijah and me elprid at the rotted wall board bordering
the old archery, plaster creek crap. The air filled with
the dry, liquorid smell of years of dust disturbed beneath brickwork,
badly moored a decades before gave way to careful chipping.
Light filtered around their knees. Sweat beaded my scalp, more
from nerves than exertion. I filmed what I could, though
my hands jumped almost as much as me ELL's Elijah.
After two dozen blows, braced back. If someone asks, we
say we saw a burst pipe, team outed, then pride
the last chump free. The opening was barely wide enough
for an adult, but the gap yoned into a stacas,
plummeting up into darkness, narrow and twisted like a spinal column.
Flask light in hand, boots scraping omless stone, I led
the way. The air on the steps was colder, thick
with the mineral tang of old wire and scorched upholstery.
Each rise had grown beneath us, the sound trap between
stone and the silence that had grown accustomed to decade
alone on the steps. Decades of dust chewed at our throats.
All paints may as lined the walls, some trailing in
wavering ox, others forming vague ham prince laborers may have
groped blindly for the past sixty years before. Every so often,
the decayed like bulb casing's overhead clicked in the faintest breeze.
Half way up, Mihal stopped so abruptly I nearly crashed
into him. You see that he whispered, breath frosting in
the air. Up ahead, a trail of brightness puls from
beneath a scuffed door, the same rhythm as the light
we'd seen from below, and an heavy, impossible photograph blija
inch close flatter light, trembling in his grip. This wasn't
here in eighty five, he insisted, as if the fact
could change what waited on the other side. We climbed together,
the darkness and a compass presclose at our backs. Finally
we reached a rusted portal, as glass cracked through with
fractal silver. The blow inside flicked bread, then dull white,
as if a tide bulb fought failing wiring. I pressed
the door gave, exhaling the dry stink of a disturber.
The gallery unfolded beyond, and we stepped into pocket frozen
out of sequence with every other part of the building.
What struck me first was the stillness, more absolute than
anything the main house could generate. The tiered seats, each
clerked in a skin of brittle dust form tight rose
to the rail. I counted at least fifty, every one
pitted and popped, but largely intact. A ring of railings
hem that dropped to the orchestra pit fobular. And yet
despite four decades of abstinence, the air felt thick, inhabited.
I scanned with my light and caught the edge of something.
Figures half lost, a shadow hunched together along the railing,
not statues, not quite illusions, blurry and moving, blurred again
and again at the edge of the beam, as if
caught on interlacing frames of old film. The al whimpered,
knuckles white on my sleeve. Don't point at them, you
awake them, ignoring him upon the flat white, catching the
holy reflection of old breastplate. Along the seatbacks. Near the
center rose a heap of cables, fuse and burned, charred insulation,
strong in criscressing patterns. Old union labels, scorched and pealing,
dangled from knots. The signature deifns of hurried improvisation, an
emergency that froze at its own relics crossed the span.
When my angle aligned with the photo's metal had received,
I saw a narrow window that looked directly down to
the stage and orchestra pitt hiss slit not marked on
any plan, shielded from below by a slatted blind. From here,
those impossible photographs, the midnight shots that delivered ray to
our phones, could have been composed. I drew clothes. A
thin pattern of so painted the sills. The glass was hailine, fractured,
one corner blackened as if from a vanished flame. I
set my recorder on the ledge, checked my heart, which
hammered like a fist in my throat, and gazed through
the dusty rectangle at the stage. Without warning, the light
flared pure stuttery and agony of fizzing brilliants that cut
to the retinal ecstatic. The figures of the railing shadowed,
then stood as one, a motion out of concert with
gravity or time. Melback guddled into Elijah's arms. Get back,
get back, he whispered in panic, But the air vibrated
a chorus of soft mechanical wines grow inaudible through the floors.
The shapes that the railing flickered, resolving and distorting in
rhythm with the light. Old work lights, lamped top alled
in ancient nests. One reflected patterns overhead in a sudden
and stoppable moment, the gallery filled with motion, the smell
of scorching via the hot slap of panic and sweat.
Suppose it was memory played in the verge of reality,
or restu left to rot by neglect. It was there
this well as any assembly of flesh and bone. The
past asserted itself, overlaying the present in a haze of agony.
I saw workers, too many for the real balcony, dressed
in uniforms from decades past, hammering, shouting, faces mashed and
profiled behind their raised hands, waving down up people who
could never look up. Some tried to run, but found
it at the stairs edge. Others melted, pixelated, their forms,
taking on the silvered uncertainty of old negatives. The final figure, Toller,
bearing the flicker of a reflective vest, turn to face us.
Its face was impossible to pin ies deep poles of
static mouth working in silent supplication in the soundless room.
It spoke my name, Thomas hissed, in a voice made
granular by thirty years of electric come. Every inch of
me went numb. The air press so heavy I wondered
if we collapse beneath the gallery, And this was the
last suffocating its hil before blocking out. Miael's fawn in
his forgotten pocket vibrated and let up on the screen.
Another forto arrived. The three of us captured in the gallery,
Our faces stretched into rictuses of shock and terror that
broke the trance. The spell collapsed, the figures gut out,
The light was seated to a pinpoint, and then died altogether.
We rushed blindly back to the stairs, noise and heat
and cold merging into one inarticulate need to escape. Our
hands scraped and nun fell from the rails, and we
tumbled through the breached wall board with the force of
new fugitives. In the lobby, all lights were on and
footsteps rattle from the far end. City Inspector's returning, drawn
by the racket, heartless voice, bellown and confusion o rage,
Elijah fumble for an explanation. Miel retreated, white eyed into
a corner cradling as fun as if it might bite.
Instinct took over. I grabbed both companions by the sleeve
and hustled them toward the nearest eggsit before questions could form.
The last thing I heard as the door shut on
the cathedral like khush, was the inspector's muttering about an
authorized access and a dangerous precedent. Outside the skypoles laid orange,
our hearts, hammered, breast steaming. Each of us found any silence,
one forged not from dread of uncertain fate, but the
knowledge that the line had been crossed. The boundary between
witness and participant dissolved. The next day brought retribution. The
city arrived in force. Security taped chevron across ever free
entrance to the north stairs. I watched from across the
street as the Inspector's crew bricked the gap, shot and
dusted their hands, as if closing the opening would don
the rising tide. Meete, I'll quit the job. By text, sorry,
can't not safe. Elijah handed in his keys, left a
brief note at the vesputasory good luck. Jeanine stopped returning calls.
Lisa wouldn't meet my eyes. My inbooks at the Tribune
grew heavy, legal flagged my draft. The cities developed a
cold with veiled threats. Were run this and the community
loses the grant. You understand. The site manager deactivated my past,
citing insurance irregularities. Misses. Grady turned up in the hospital,
struck with pneumonia that stunned even y Are. When I
asked about visitors, the nurse shrugged, just family, older women stressed,
nothing odd. But I moved my playbow deep into the
back of my closet, as if proximity was it self contagious.
The audio files I took that night, when transferred to computer,
immerged graut. My recorder studded static, chew tape noise. The
digital files gurgled with echos of voice shouting my name,
mechanical laughter, the fiss of the galleries impossible light. Still,
I kept copies of everything fort grass, camera feed tangles,
blueprints and playbook, burnt wiring and timelines, scanning the faint,
impossible residue into folders labeled the third floor. Rumors took
to place of progress, the restoration ground to hold. Neighbors
whispered about the city's sudden halt. Newer age groups sent
prayer vigils to the lobby. Teenagers dared each other to
knock against the breaked up wall. Council members doct eye
contact were asked at forums. The Imperial became less a
thing heeled by at tension than increasingly hungrily visible. I
wound openly weeping, unable to close for my own part.
The more I tried to write, the more the story
circled itself, like water gathering around a drain. I could
not finish a sentence, not without me Al's fearful gaze,
or the image of the gallery figures gesturin desperate to
be seen, flooding through my thoughts. At night, in dreams,
I'd find myself standing again in the third balcony, the
wall below spinning, my niemecking from everywhere. At once, I
told myself only facts matter. But somehow the facts themselves
had shifted to come from a by what had called
us to witness, what had bound us all into an
old cycle neither Polisin nor architecture could ever mend. It
was midweek, days after the encounter, that the second envelope
landed at my door, bulky battered no return address. The
Imperial's green, black lad had peering through old rain stains
inside a flask. Drive on it one file a new photograph,
time stamped for the night we broke through, showing me
in full hunched under the glow of the galleries impossible light.
There was nothing more to pursue within the theater's walls.
The rest, the baleful flickering aftershocks, would have to play
out in me, in the city, and the lord that
took root whenever anyone's courage failed in the face of
the high balcony, the sealed of truth, pressing outward. Stage
five final action. Late one night, enable to sleep, I
opened my apartment window to the east, watching the city's
dim grid, and the imperials were refined, draw hard against
the night. A slow, searching pulse flared up from the
dome's glass, impossibly high, tracing the silhouette of the balcony
that should not exist on my desk. The final text
came a grainy photo arriving from the same muted number,
showing me below the gallery's glare, surrounded by the spectral assembly.
In that moment, I ignored the urge to shut the window,
chosen stead to copy every file, every scan and send
them to every contact to had a press, city survivor's groups,
anyone whose he miller trusted my own hands tremble but
a press end. Then sat in the silent dock, watching
the blinking light on the theater resolve and vanish into shadow.
Closing the city fell Quiet Street. Lant painting pale poles
along Market Street as the Imperial solhouette faded back into anonymity.
From my window, I could just make out the edges
of its roof line, the spot where the third balcony
ones pressed forward out of history. As the light faded,
in my in books stayed silent, I felt the final
lingering impulsive that hidden room, and sensed simply that some
thresholes are cross only. Once the city fell, Quiet Street,
Luans painting pale poles along Market Street as the Imperial
so wet faded back into anonymity. From my window, I
could just make out the edges of its roofline, the
spot where the third balcony ones pressed forward out of history.
As the light faded and my in books stayed silent,
I felt the final lingering pulse of that hidden room,
and sensed simply that some threshols are crossed only once.
For several uneasy days, lingering consequences played themselves out across
the city's fabric. In my own life, the Tribune called
a horrid meeting, remote, short and pointed. I gave the
facts their edges, now worn down by the repetition of
having to justify something that most listeners could not or
would not believe. The managing additor's face, boxed in the
corner of the screen, betrayed nothing but a habit of risk, aversion,
stick to the renovation work. Anything else might get us
in legal trouble. Not to mention rattle our advertisers, he said,
the coal already drifting to its next agendered item. As
he spoke, Miel left town. He didn't say goodbye. His
cosin texted a forwarding address and the word sorry, with
no further explanation. The Lijah quit his rounds on the
theater circuit, switching to custodial shifts at a distant school. Shanin,
who used to leave sketches wedged in the backs of
my notepads, moved on to another job across the river.
The close knit group unmarveled, everyone drifting to new or
safer ground. The Imperial like a woman that had bled
them all dry of certainty and camaraderie. Officially, the city
placed the restoration on indefinite pause unexpected structural complications, awaiting
revised assessments and an engineering review. The fence around the
main archway was raised twice. Padlocks added to the doors
on every remaining external stair. I heard in broken fragments
that the buildings developer was threatening to pull out entirely.
The local business association shrank back, unwilling to answer for
the projected losses. Meanwhile, in half shadowed rooms and small
back offices, rumors multiplied. The theatre's recent history grew more
mythic by the Irish story that invaded daily conversation. Some
said to contractors that uncovered remains up in the gallery.
Others insisted city officials were suppressing the truth for fear
of lawsuits or electoral embarrassment. The photonic spike of the
strange I displayed at local teens sward they'd seen streaking
the sky one night was written off by the city
as a fluke but not a soul. Scene quite convinced,
the substantiating evidence pressed against its own boundaries of acceptability,
Even though I trusted to consider objectively Darius at the archives,
the Cescride's niece stopped answering my calls. Still the play
believed in my destroer, humming with a disagreeable life. The
flash drives sat in a safety deposit box under my name,
its images of the impossible gallery and of myself caught
revocably in the flat of that other worlds, shielded from
the elements, but not, as suspected, from the underlying infection
of memory. New messages did not arrive, but my phone
developed quirks. The wallpaper would blur and resolve into fragments
of that same burnt plaster pattern. The ring I would
sound once at one fourteen am before falling. Silent screens
in my apartment would flicker as if tapped by a finger,
and scene or the light bulb overheadould briefly glow with
that weak and steady pulse. A new tee will. With
the renovation halt, The Imperial's block quickly lost its bustle.
The worker's presence had masked the building's old silence. Now
passers by avoided a cub even delivery. Beck's cut to
the opposite side of the street on the rare occasion.
I lingered nearby. I noticed city caps slowing by the
cub triver's eyeing the building, and then speeding up in
grocery lines. The theater became both parh and carnival act.
Everyone had a cousin or a grandlother who knew someone
who had been in the balcony the night something happened.
No one, though, claimed to have seen the event themselves.
It was as if proximity to remembering remained its elf
a risk, a hum The disquiet deepened. Sleep arrived only
in fits. Each night, I drift from city dreams into
quicksilver places, the galleries, crotchy rails beneath my fingers, the
taste of dust and BoNT wiring thickening the air, the insistent,
sturdy blinking that I knew to interpret now as a
kind of pleading. I grasped at details, but they edded
away each time daylight found me fragments only of recollection
and threat, never solid enough to reclaim. In the waking world,
in the absence of answers, I tried distractions, errands, long
walks since at borrowed desks in temporary newsrooms. I even
drafted blind feature columns, filtering out everything except mundane restoration updates,
but none of these held. Each time I mind idle
the third balcony intruder, persisting as an ache in the
shape of unfinished stores and stores unfinished for reasons rooted
deeper than apthy or loss of funding. It was in
one of these restive afternoons, with rein glazing the east
facing windows and all news coals handled, that a knock
came at my door four sort of wraps. When I
opened it, a city official stood waiting, bearing an envelope
and a clipped, ambiguous smile. He handed me the letter
without a word, a cease and assist notice, the bureaucratic
equivalent of a slap, threatening legal action if further material
relating to the Imperials Upper Galleries should find its way
into print. The implication was explicit. Whatever live upstairs now
belonged to the city Silence, and my part in the
tale would be ended by any means required, financial or otherwise.
That night, I sat long after midnight reviewing materials won
by one of their details, growing both sharper and crueler.
In isolation, the gallery had infected the record. No evidence
would ever satisfy outside witnesses. Each clip and corner, each
digital art fact poor a trace of the uncanny, unprovable
by conventional means. What had seemed at first a local haunting,
a quirk of light and memory, had now laid open
the entire machinery of erasure and ghostly persistence that girded
the city and myself alike. The moment a full reckoning
arrived and did not as explosion, not as theatrical confession,
but in the form of a self acknowledged defeat. I
could publish nothing more. But the evidence had done its work.
The imperial was no longer a matter of speculation or
even history, but of present, open winded disruption, too persistent
for platitude, a shadow no amount of tape or brick
could truly walway. Immediate fall up from those days was
swift and practical. The dev e helper abandoned the project
within a week of the story's abrupt halt, citing a
reconcilable code complication to local press. The substitute work crew
came and left Clemy in safe conditions. After ires on site,
the city council tabled all motions for further funding, shifting
their attentions to waterfront developments and safer, less visible projects.
Even the local ghosts tour guides usually eager for tales
of woe to climb requests for Imperial visits, citing on
resolved safety issues with appointed look to anyone who pressed
for more. Meanwhile, the Imperial's edifice, deteriorated by inch, is
a little more broken glass, another layer of dust at
street level, and a stauben infrequent but undeniable blinking from
men accounted up a balcony. Younger kids began deetering around
the block. The city's silence took on an edge of
defeat final action. On the final Monday of the Lost Spring,
I found myself alone in my apartment, just as dusk
lifted in the metallic cush of evening set in across
the city. The Imperials outline stood in deep silhouette, further
than ever from the bustle of work crews, now hemmed
only by chain link and rumor. That night, for reasons
I couldn't explain, perhaps just old Tabithaioh opened the Winter
before Sleep and sat in the half dark with a
mug of thick black coffee and the battle playbill open
on my lap. The air hummed with the discontent particular
to cities after a storm, as if the well did
itself eate for something to find lepal free. Then in
the blink between midnight and out the imperials crimb flared
with an unquiet pulse, so possibly bright for a second,
as if every long dear bobolon the third balcony had
powered on. At once. The outline sharpened aglow with interior lightning,
and for just a moment I saw them all the
gallery curded edge to edge, those figures at glimpsedon panic
and fever, now clear, woven from shadow and refracted light.
Their faces were not monstrous, but nearly were the whole
eyes that seemed to sweep the city, hungry and endless.
Caught on the silent distance between witness, and remembered the
phone as if called to service, buzzing with the precision
of the old pattern one fourteen a M. I reached
for it with a dread resigned calm of somewhae, resigned
to the rolls of a deeper order. There waited a
new message, arriving from the same vanished number. The attachment
was a single image, blurry but unmistakable of myself standing
under the third balconis impossible glare around me, the audience costard,
half formed, waiting. There was nothing to do but press end.
I attached my files, the pictures, the notes, everything, and
sen Coppie to every friend, editor, and survivor. I'd count trust.
The app was both confession and surrender. I closed the
computer and sat until dawn, watching as the Imperial's feeding
poles faded in the world's noises returned to Cat's engine
and neighbour's heated radio. I waited, but no reply came.
The story closes quietly, now, in a hush before summrise.
The Imperial subsides into silence, its forbidden gallery, once again
hidden by city glare and denial. Some intentions, once released,
ripple on in every darkened seat, and every life brushed
by memory and forgetting at There in the city's fabric,
the third floor persists, neither vanished nor contained, but endlessly watching,
seeking the one among a still willing or doomed to
see