Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(30)
Now that there’s color in the world, I can see that the patches on the walls are definitely mold, and that mushrooms are growing through the floor in the corners, making this cavern of cinematic wonders more like something from a horror show. Brenda looks around, and her eyes are sad.
“Must’ve been nice when it was new” is all she says. She doesn’t keep her voice down. I shoot her a startled look, and she smiles, holding up a hand to indicate the cloud of light around us. I can see specks of dust dancing in it, like chaff coming off the fields. “Light costs. I’m trading sound. You can hear me, but no one outside the glow can.”
“That sounds less like a payment and more like another advantage.”
“The laws of magic, like the laws of nature, are not always as balanced as they might seem.”
I don’t say anything. I just stare. I’ve been dead for forty years. I’ve met dozens of witches, even if I’ve chosen to hide from most of them rather than risking them grabbing me and stuffing me into a mirror. This—this glow, this cornfield shine that fills the room—is the most real magic I’ve ever seen. Even Sophie’s rats can’t compare.
Brenda looks around again. “This is your place, not mine,” she says. “Where would they be?”
“They’re not in the projection booth; no one’s touched that rope in years,” I say. Even if Danny could pass through it, his witch couldn’t. I don’t think. Maybe some witches can fly, or turn into smoke, or burst into flocks of birds. All those things feel impossible, things out of fairy tales, but the room is bright when it should be dark. Magic is real. Once magic is real, nothing is entirely out of the question.
“If he was working with a weather witch or any sort of bird witch that involved flight, they’d have gone for the highest available point,” says Brenda, and I realize she’s been running down a list this whole time, checking off the things that don’t fit our situation. You don’t find subway witches at street level, and you don’t find sky witches on the ground. Everything we find eliminates another hundred possibilities. Maybe that won’t be enough to get us to the truth before it’s right in front of us, but it’s enough to make the choices narrower, and that can equip us both better for what’s to come. “Where do the doors go?”
“Um. There are two auditoriums, assuming there was never any renovation.” I point to the appropriate doors. “That’s the manager’s office, and that’s the supply closet. They keep, you know, the popcorn and butter and stuff in there.” Or they did, back when this was a theater and not a crypt. If I drifted through that door now, I’d find a monochrome horror of either rotting food or empty shelves. Nothing I’d want to see or remember. It’s a relief knowing they probably won’t be in there. The space is too small to be comfortable, and while Danny might be fine with a standing coffin of a hideaway, I doubt his witch would be.
Brenda’s thoughts follow the same trail as mine. She dismisses the pantry and focuses on the other three doors. “Are there bathrooms?”
“Back of the theater. Not big. They always smelled sort of like swamp water, even in the middle of the summer, when you’d figure that they’d dry out all the way.”
“So that’s not a good hideout. Is there a back door?”
“There’s the service door on the other side of the pantry. It feeds into the alley next to the building. That’s probably how they’ve been getting in and out without attracting attention from the rest of the town.” Danny can float through walls, but I’ve never heard of a witch with that particular power, and if that were a risk, Brenda would have said something by now. I hope.
“All right,” says Brenda. “Let’s go.”
The first auditorium is empty of everything but ripped red velvet seats, now stained with patchwork swirls of mold, and the blind eye of the old movie screen, which stares in eternal, silent judgement over the room. A rat squeaks, startled by our presence, and runs by at the back of the stage that supports the screen. I wrinkle my nose.
“Ew.”
“They’re not here,” says Brenda, and we move on.
The second auditorium is in worse shape than the first. Someone—vandals, or a hopeful salvage company—ripped half the chairs from the floor before abandoning them in the corner where they remain, filthy and strewn with cobwebs. Naked, rotting hardwood slats sit where the chairs used to be bolted to the floor. I can see through into the tarry blackness of the basement below, and I am all too aware of the weight of our steps on the rotten wood. Sure, I’m already dead, but that doesn’t mean I’d enjoy the fall. I’d need to turn insubstantial halfway down or risk making a racket that could bring this whole house of cards tumbling down.
There’s a sleeping bag on the corner of the stage, incongruous in its modern nylon brightness. A camp lantern sits next to it, bulb dim. Brenda lifts the handle with one finger. When she lets it go, it clinks back down against the lid with a dull, tinny sound, like a fork being hit against the side of a can of peaches.
“Someone here’s alive,” she says. “There’s no food. Either they’re out scavenging, or this is just a way station and they’re not staying here full-time.”
It feels like there should be a third option, like I’m missing something. I inhale, and the room carries the faint, distant smell of swamp, just like the bathrooms always have. There’s something beneath the dank slime-scent of rot and mud and loam, something that belongs here and shouldn’t be here at the same time. I breathe in again, and frown. It smells green. It smells like Brenda, and the corn.