Free Theater Macabre by Kealan Patrick Burke Page B

course there was. Perhaps it was only the muddle-headedness of lingering sleep that kept it from her, or perhaps it was not a purpose she wished to embrace. Perhaps she was here because it was a hiding place. But if so, from whom or what had she been hiding.
    She forced a smile.
    You're being silly.
    Yes, most likely that was all. After all hadn't Chad always said—
    Chad! She seized on the name like a swimmer clutching a lifeline, and for a moment his face resolved itself from the gloom before her—a pale oblong briefly illuminated by cold light from a distant moon through rents in the rotten roof above. Then it was gone, scattered like dandelion seeds on an unfelt breath. She watched them drift away until they were swallowed by the shadows stretched across the debris-laden hallway floor.
    Upstairs, a soft groan as the floorboards in a deserted room recalled the passage of a long-dead tenant. Then once more, the house remembered quiet.
    Alone in an empty house, with nothing but the night and the solitary blade of blue moonlight that, freed of a cloud, sliced its way through the hole in the roof above her head, narrowly missing her slender arm, Evelyn sighed.
    Although she was not afraid of where she had found herself, she was afraid she would never remember why and so be forced to remain here playing at being a ghost while her stricken mind struggled to remember... why? Why was she here? Had she fallen while exploring, perhaps striking her head in the very place that retained the memory of such intrusions? Gingerly, she probed the back of her skull and found only cobwebs, dirt, and what felt like the spine of an old dead leaf, which she plucked free and tossed away. There was no pain, no bruises, no dried blood, and now that consciousness had had time to return in full, no disorientation but for the obvious gaping hole in her recollection.
    Lack of any apparent motivation for her ending up in such a curious place led her to consider briefly the possibility that it was all a dream, albeit an odd one in which she apparently had little to do.
    Do I know this place? she wondered, and peered at her surroundings in the gloom.
    Most of the stair steps were broken, the old red carpet that had once lent it a regal aspect now shredded, worn, and in places, torn away. Leading away from the stairs, slivers of old marble tile could still be glimpsed beneath a chaos of plaster, broken furniture and the remains of an old chandelier. Through the resulting hole in the hallway ceiling, she could see straight up through the jagged teeth of broken floorboards to the room above and beyond its own shattered ceiling to the night sky, speckled with straining stars washed out by the moon. Strands of ivy hung down from the hole like hangman's ropes.
    The main door of the house had once held glass in the upper half of the frame, but that was long gone, as were the boards that had been nailed to fill the hole.
    Evelyn stood, tired of waiting for memory to catch up, and turned, the stairs creaking under her feet. At the top of the stairs, where the moon could not reach, the darkness was thick and unwelcoming, but Evelyn reasoned that if anything here meant her harm, it could have satisfied its need while she'd slept.
    She moved up the stairs, carefully avoiding broken bottles and syringes left here by teenagers seeking a safe haven in which to become acquainted with Hell, and reached the landing. The hallway ahead was narrow, flanked by doorways in which the doors themselves had been removed, sold perhaps as antiquities to grace the jambs of newer places.
    In one of the bedrooms lay a soiled mattress, sagging in the middle from the weight of heaving young bodies, the homeless, and the rain.
    In another, a bureau had been relieved of its drawers, and the glass from its oval mirror, though some enterprising soul had collected the fragments of the latter, and, together with multicolored pieces of glass from shattered beer bottles, used them to fashion a