Stacia Kane - Sacrificial Magic

“I can unlock it.” Beulah pulled a set of keys from somewhere. Where she had room to hide them in that skirt Chess had no idea, although she had to admit the skirt was gorgeous. Either “community outreach” paid awfully well, or Beulah had a sugar daddy. Or simply lived beyond her means. Checking her financials would probably be a good idea.

Monica moved out of Beulah’s way a little too fast, as if she was afraid Beulah would mow her down. Funny. They’d all seemed perfectly friendly when Chess walked into the office.

The door opened with a creak right out of a horror film. For fuck’s sake, was the school budget really so tight they couldn’t afford a can of fucking WD-40? Chess had never seen a building so creaky in her life. Another note to make.

Through the open door she saw only darkness; the air breathing out at her smelled stale and felt cold against her skin. An air conditioner still hummed somewhere inside.

“No one’s been in here? Why? And for how long?”

Monica answered, standing right behind her. “It’s been about three weeks, I guess. Well, Aros might have been in here without telling us, but three weeks since any of us have been inside.”

If Aros had entered the theater without even bothering to lubricate that hinge, then something was seriously wrong with the man. Oh well. “Because of the haunting?”

“Of course.” Beulah pushed past both of them. For a moment her head and lower body disappeared, her white blouse just a faint glow in the gloom, before something slammed like metal against metal and the lights came on.

Not that it made much difference. Shadows still lurked along the walls and between the rows of seats, which rose stadium-style from the sunken stage at the front to a small booth in the center at the back. It wasn’t a large room, really, but then it wasn’t a large school. Maybe a hundred seats, a hundred and fifty? Drama didn’t seem to be a popular activity at Mercy Lewis. It hadn’t been at any school Chess had ever attended.

Beulah walked toward the stage, her slim figure appearing and reappearing between the rows like a lion through tall grass. “A few students were in here after school, about three weeks ago.”

“Where they shouldn’t have been,” Monica muttered.

“They were hanging out on the stage,” Beulah continued, ignoring Monica. Ignoring, too, Monica’s next snide interruption, which was the word “Drinking.”

Beulah glared at Monica. “Talking. According to Vernal.”

“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.