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My watch had stopped at five minutes past twelve. In the theater the rotting velvet curtains that once covered the screen hung crooked. They are so covered with dust and cobwebs that they original color is indistinguishable. Dust motes dance in the beam of my flashlight, only to pouf up again with every step I take. I am alone. So alone, yet I feel that I am being watched.
I came here on a dare. In order to join the Blood Ravens, a gang down town, I have to spend one night in the old White Way theater. Before I was left here, I was told al sorts of things about ghosts and spooks and things. It was easy to laugh in the crowded car on the way here, with five others packed in with me, but here in the lonely dark I'm beginning to believe in ghosts. This prickling on the back of my neck persists.
It's just my imagination.
It's just my imagination.
If I keep saying that maybe I'll believe it. I spin around, but there's nothing there. Feeling some what foolish I resume my exploration of the theater. The floor of the balcony creeks and wobbles with each step I take. In the silence the noise is deafening. I try to walk as silently as I can for fear that they will hear. The moment the thought enters my mind, I try to dismiss it, but still the idea persists. The beam on my flash light wavers and dims. For a moment I stand, terrified, but slowly it brightens. I turn around and head for the lobby where I have stashed my back pack and some spare batteries. My flash light is dimming noticeably. suddenly it fades altogether. I stand frozen, in the dark.
Slowly my eyes adjust to the dark and I find that I can see. I look around and freeze. In the ground floor below me, among the seats with their torn and rotting cushions, stands a woman. She is small, delicate and ethereal, clad in a 1920s flapper dress, she seem to glow with her own internal light. She stares dead at me and reaches her hand towards me as if in a silent plea for help. She looks so sad and beautiful that my heart went out to her. I stand filled with a kind of awe and stare at her.
Her lips move and I hear a voice in my mind, like the wind through dead leaves, whisper,"Go". I stand perplexed.
"GO!" It was a scream in my mind. Suddenly she clutches at her breast. I see blood, black in the darkness, stream though her grasping fingers. Her silent scream fills my mind and she crumples to the floor. I see the flash of a knife and a shadow, concealed in the general darkness of the theater, turns and I swear it looked right at me.
I drop my flash light and run blindly, tripping in the dark, to the lobby. I find a stair way and hide under it, trembling. I stay that way for hours, curled up and shivering in that small damp, musty place. I don't move until the first gray light of dawn fills the theater and the morning mist swirls about the floor. Slowly I uncurl myself and crawl out from my concealment and stand. the mist swirls about my feet an for a moment, parts. at lies an old news paper, somehow preserved for the elements. I bend and pick it up. The head line says: "White Way theater to close due to the Daisy Martin murder. The killer is still at large." Below it is a picture of a woman. I recognized the figure from the theater. It was dated March 15th,1924. She had been dead for 80 some years.