Friday April 6, 2024

A little girl in a navy-striped white sailor dress and stocking ran past Amber carrying a lollipop. This did little to unnerve her, or trip her up in the tightly packed aisles between the theater chairs. All it did was remind her to check her blood sugar soon. Amber didn't bother to look where the girl ran, but instead, took a seat in the middle of the theater and closed her eyes.

"What do you see?" The static-distorted voice booms on her headset.

"Shh. Give me a moment." Amber had already seen her fair share for the day, but she had to be absolutely sure.

The silence was welcome, but not meant to last long. Even with her eyes closed and back to the balcony, she could tell someone was watching.

Was it him?

When she turned around and opened her eyes, she could see a man in a black suit and long trenchcoat standing in the balcony looking out as if searching for someone. His black hair was slicked back with enough wax to start a fire if the cigarette he was lighting was real. Amber could feel the cold prick of needles up her back as she watched him turn his head. His cold, blank eyes met hers. Though her eyes were locked on his, she could still make out the slight movements of his mouth.

Don’t scream. Don’t scream. He can’t really see you.

Amber shut her eyes tightly and opened them again. Nothing. No tall man stood in the cobwebbed balcony with its tarnished brass rails, moldering cushions and dusty old wood. There was no one at all up there, just as there hadn’t been for years. She could still see the beauty under the steady decay. She could almost understand why someone would want to stay here for what could very well be an eternity, perhaps even long after the wall crumbled down and the living stopped walking around.

Of course, this would have probably sounded completely stupid if she said it out loud. Then again, it wasn’t any more stupid than when she told her mother when she saw Grandma, not on her deathbed, but in the funeral parlor. After awhile, Amber had learned not to tell anyone that she saw people who by all rights, shouldn’t exist, at least not anymore. She told no one, except Max.

Maybe it was because they were twins. Maybe it was because they experienced similar head injuries as children. Maybe it was because their parents lived under power lines. Or perhaps they were both crazy. Either way, the twins were able to make a decent living off of their once-secret shame. It only made sense that she had the gift of sight and he had the gift of hearing the dead.

If only he were here now, Amber would have been able to understand the man in the balcony. Even with the distance, Max probably could have made out something. Like everything else, the acoustics in The Phoenix Theater probably weren’t exactly what they used to be. Even if this were the case, the dead were most likely able to bend or even break a few more laws of physics. Unlike the living, who seemed too preoccupied with the way things work in the world, the dead did not seem either fixated or fixed by natural law.

Sometimes Amber wished that she knew the history of the places she was paid to visit. Unfortunately, the code of ethics she and her brother had set into place had been set so that there would be no room for skeptics to pick apart the work which they had so heavily relied upon after their exile from the rest of the family. The rift only became larger once their duet became a solo act.

Amber stared at the tarnished brass railing above her. Of all places, why had she chosen to come back here? Sometimes she wondered if the wandering dead really did have more unfinished business than the living. Even if Max was here, why would he appear to her? If anything, he would have moved on just to spite her, just so when she had died, she would be forced to return here to look for him.

Nonetheless, it was still a gorgeous building. Even if it wasn’t as large as some of the former “movie palaces” she and her brother had seen in their tour across the United States, The Phoenix Theater did have a sort of allure which made it uncommon among other small-town sites. The clay-like outer walls reminded her of a golden sandcastle in the sunlight, but at night, they almost looked red among the other lights downtown. Only the turquoise neon light reading “The Phoenix” above the marquee set it apart from what was slowly transitioning away from being a red light district. She had only ever seen it turned on once, when the owner showed it to her and Max during their first investigation.

Even if Amber didn’t know the history of the people who had frequented it in life and dwelled in it in death, she knew the history of The Phoenix building itself. She knew about its seedy years, its foray into low-budget pornographic films just as much as she knew about its heyday as a movie theater and live theater when it first opened during prohibition and the Second World War. To her, knowing the building itself always seemed to bring her closer to the people in it, whether living or dead.

Amber let herself sink into the rotting cushions as she often did, felt herself sink into the woodwork. It was at the point where she believed she had become part of the building and it had become a part of her. Until Max’s death, The Phoenix was the place where she was the most comfortable conducting their “investigations.” There was no cause for this, especially since she had never been inside the building before it had been shut down. She had never watched a movie there with either a date or a family member.

“Amber, are you still there?” Matt’s voice boomed on the headset. “What did you see?”

Amber sighed and opened her eyes again. The little girl was over by the stage and disappeared into the torn velvet curtains. “Just the usual: the man, the little girl, but I haven’t seen the woman yet.”

“Ok.” Matt paused. “I know you probably need your concentration to meditate or do whatever it is that you need to do, but I would prefer being able to check on you so I know you’re ok.”

In all truth, the woman was the last person she wanted to see. She was one of the instances where Amber was glad she could not hear the dead, whether something as obviously horrific as their screams or something as subtle as a silenced final breath. The last thing she would have needed imprinted on her mind was the creaking of the rope against the brass rail as well as the image of the woman’s eyes bulging and mouth wide as if still gasping for air after all of these years. Sometimes before Amber went to sleep, she could almost hear that sound. All the sleeping pills in the world probably couldn’t drown that out. At least she could at least attempt to reassure herself that the sound in her mind wasn’t real, that it was only imagined since her brother was the listener, and she the watcher. Amber couldn’t help but wonder if the woman was the one the shellac-haired man was looking for. It would be a cruel twist of fate if they spent an eternity searching for each other in the same darkened theater.

Then again, it wasn’t fate that killed people and separated them forever. Someone had to have put the rope around that woman’s neck. Whether it was the woman herself or someone else, there was no use blaming something as abstract and intangible as “fate.” Fate wasn’t what pushed Max over that same balcony railing.

Amber slouched in the center seat and ran her hands through her hair. Even she didn’t feel “real” anymore. She took a deep breath and inhaled a lot of the dust on the floor. To her surprise, the musty results of years of regret didn’t make her cough. It was a welcome smell, warm as bread, but earthier. After that, The Phoenix would definitely become a part of her. She stood up from her seat and walked down the aisle again, carefully averting her eyes from the balcony. With how tight some of the seats were, Amber couldn’t help but wonder if all of the hormones in the food she ate now really did make people grow larger than their counterparts ninety-and-then-some years ago. She certainly couldn’t imagine herself or her brother seated comfortably and settling in for a couple of hours of entertainment.

What was the last movie they had seen together? In fact, Amber couldn’t remember the last remotely “normal” thing she did with her brother as a “family.”

She idly traced her hands along the ridged and raised edges of the hand-carved armrests as she walked toward the exit. How many times had she left her fingerprints there? How many dead skin cells had she shed there? How many dust particles had she inhaled? How long would she and the Phoenix Theater be so symbiotically intertwined?

Maybe not for much longer, especially considering how the city council had wanted to tear down the building in its “rejuvenation” of the downtown area. That wasn’t the only threat to the dead’s uneasy peace in the building. A crew of “scientists” was scheduled to tour the building to see if they could somehow quantify and substantiate what Amber had known for years. She knew Max would have been against it, but Max was beyond the point of caring about things like paying rent or eating. Besides, the “scientists” offered her good money regardless of how “credible” she proved to be. Amber once swore that if she had ever had the chance to meet Carl Sagan, she would give him a good punch in the jaw for uttering his famous phrase: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

As she pushed the lobby door open, Matt was standing at attention, ready for her report. Amber remembered hearing Matt say once that he envied her and her brother for their abilities. Matt once said that he wished he was able to help the souls trapped in his theater. Amber just wryly smiled and tried her best not to laugh. Help them? She could barely help herself.

“Anything new?” Matt raised the walkie-talkie in his hand. “I tried to talk to you, but I think the com is out.”

“No.” She gazed down at the floor.

When she looked up, Matt was still looking at her, as if a decision weighed heavily on his mind.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Matt turned around to head for the door and paused. Without turning around, he said, “Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe it’s for the best that you don’t find him here?”

Amber hadn’t expected this. She certainly didn’t remember saying anything about Max since she had first set foot in the lobby earlier that day. Her feet felt heavy against the floorboards beneath the worm-eaten carpet. At the same time, they barely felt large enough to fit inside her shoes. Nonetheless, she managed to move quickly for the door without saying anything.

“You want a ride back to your hotel?” She heard Matt ask. Before she could answer, the glass door had shut and she was already walking down the sidewalk.

As she curled up on the squeaky mattress that night, Amber couldn’t help but wonder what Matt would have thought if she had asked to spend the night at The Phoenix. He probably would have thought she was completely nuts, but most likely would have let her do it anyway. Maybe she’d actually be able to get something resembling sleep for a change.