Post series: La Serenissima

She crept on cat paws past offices crammed with the sediment of theatre life; costumes, moth-eaten tutus, chipped headdresses with holes where rhinestones used to be, tattered feather boas that cast odd shadows in the light of her mobile torch. Cobwebs fluttered in the weak breeze her passing created.

“Kian,” she whispered as loud as she dared. In one of the rooms she found a back door that looked promising. To reach it she had to move the boxes piled in the way. She was almost there, the door almost uncovered, when she must have budged a broom. It fell with a deafening clatter. Holly stood trembling, hearing nothing apart from her own thundering heartbeat. Her only hope was that so deep in the bowels of the building the people at the front couldn’t possibly have heard her. After counting to hundred she went on dismantling the box fortress. The swirling dust twisted her nose and she muffled a couple of sneezes in her sleeve. She had just one more box to go. 

“Move away from the door and out to where we can see you.”

Holly felt like her heart would fall out at the bottom of her body. She was so close! There was no use resisting; there must have been at least a dozen of them. It was hard to tell in the glare of torchlights. She’d be lucky if she got away with just being kicked out of the theatre. 

They marched her back to the front. “We found her backstage,” the leader of the construction workers reported to the council suits. 

“Who is this?” one of them asked. 

“Just what were you thinking, lady?” the one that seemed to be the boss asked. 

There was nothing Holly could say. She was about to lose her job; they might even press charges against her for trespassing. 

Chief suit turned to her guard. “Call the police, they should sort this out.” Then he turned back to his phone, already forgetting about the whole incident.

Holly looked up at box 5. Where was Kian when she needed him the most? Was he just a figment of her imagination after all? The contractor nudged her towards one of the exits. Chief suit droned on behind them. Holly and the man were almost under the gallery, when his speech was abruptly cut off. The momentary silence was replaced by the frightened clamour of men as they nearly trampled each other on their way to the exits. Her escort turned to see what the commotion was about. The metallic twang was too soft to hear over the ruckus, but there was no mistaking the crossbow bolt sticking out of the chest of Chief Suit, his limp body draped on a seat, crimson flowers blossoming on his expensive white shirt. His right hand man turned to see the source of the confusion. 

There he stood on the stage, melting into the background apart from the gaily painted mask, the crossbow leaned against his shoulder casually. Holly’s companion stood rooted to the spot, his mouth agape. 

The remaining Head Suit lifted his hands. “Now mister, there’s no need–” 

He was cut short by the bolt in his throat. That was enough to jolt the contractor into action; he bolted and Holly was left alone under the glass ceiling lights. The smell of blood mixed with the building’s smell of dust and age. The silence was broken only by the gurgling noises coming from the dying man’s throat as he was slowly choking on his blood. She watched his thrashing and gradual quietening with a sort of fascinated horror. 

Kian leaned the crossbow back on his shoulder. “Figured you might need some help.”

Her whole body felt numb and strangely disconnected from her. “You killed them.”

“Would you rather they called the police on you?” He jumped off the stage and headed her way. She backed away. 

“Holly,” he stopped and reached out to her, “you have no reason to fear me. Told you they can’t raze my theatre to the ground.”

Harmless fool, my ass. She took another step backwards, her glance jumping between the mask and the extended hand. Four grotesquely tall and thin figures Holly had seen in the Underneath before separated from the shadows and carried the bodies away. 

 “They will send more people. Are you planning to kill them all?”

“There is no need.” He spread his free arm to encompass the building. “This old girl knows how to look after herself. Come.”

Holly didn’t move. She had a choice between a man who killed without a second thought, a possible sociopath, and… what? Nothing. 

“I can’t go back to my job,” she muttered, assessing the damage, rather than talking to Kian. “Or to my life. Not after this.” 

“I know. Come.”

Holly took in the clothes sack, the vibrant colours of the mask, the outstretched hand. On her way down she daintily stepped over the still glistening patch of blood. 

***

The construction of the new office building was carried out later that summer. It was riddled with malfunctions from the beginning, and all kinds of urban legends sprang up around it. There were some who claimed it was haunted, that it was built on an ancient graveyard or that there was possibly a portal to another dimension hidden somewhere deep within the cellars. There were whispers about freak accidents during construction, about forbidden, clandestine rituals. No matter how many times the bulbs were replaced in the surrounding street lamps, they all started blinking and died within a few weeks. Ghostly lights flashed in windows that nobody noticed during daytime, strange characters lurked in nooks that weren’t there before. In the twilight gloom the building didn’t look like an office building at all. It must have been because of the faulty street lights, but it looked like something completely different. 

The theatre wasn’t locked up yet. Holly raced up to box 5, then stood there waiting to catch her breath. 

“Kian, it’s an emergency, where are you?” she panted. “Kian!” 

The echo seemed to amplify the urgency bordering on panic in her voice. “Kian, this is important. Please!”

Was it all just a dream, after all? Was it just her imagination offering escapade from her bleak existence? It felt so real, but then don’t her dreams usually feel more real than reality?

“Kian!” There was a hysteric edge in her voice that Holly didn’t care for. 

“Alright, alright, no need to howl.” 

Holly startled with a small scream. His bodiless voice came from the pillar on her right, but he was behind her, sporting this time a plain white mask, that seemed to hover above his usual dark clothes sack.

Holly’s words came tumbling upon each other. “You guys have to move or do something, the council wants to demolish the theatre!”

Kian didn’t seem to be shaken. “Why don’t we discuss this in more comfortable circumstances?”

***

For the last twenty minutes he had been painting the mask with vibrant colours and glitter galore. He was a better hand at makeup than her, she had to admit. It was oddly comforting to watch him. Holly knew she’d eventually have to bring up the topic again, but for now she was content to admire his artistry.

“Kian.”

“Hmm?”

“Why do you put on such a wild makeup? It’s a bit drag-like if I want to be honest.”

He was applying golden fake lashes above the meshed-over eyeholes. “Because I’m flamboyant, that’s why.”

Holly hesitated. She had a hunch she was about to breach a touchy subject, but she had to know. After all she hadn’t even seen his eyes yet. “And your real face?”

Kian didn’t miss a beat as he proceeded to stick rhinestones on the hard white lips. By now it looked like a Venetian mask. “I’d rather forget about that.”

“What happened to you? Who are you?”

Kian turned to her, the painted glory of his mask in full view for Holly to admire. 

“Who are you, Holly?” He turned back to the mirror to brush some more blush on the cheeks. There was a stack of papers on his cluttered desk, that looked like a manuscript. Holly lifted the cover page. There was no author’s name, just the title in the middle of the sheet; 

A Load of Pish & Bollocks

“You seriously give that title to your work? What is this?”

Kian was putting a beauty spot above the lips with liquid liner. “It’s the Next Big Thing.”

She dropped the cover page back on the stack. “You’re not making any sense. Do you want to publish this thing?”

He admired himself in the mirror. “Of course. It’ll blow the masses away.”

Holly wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Kian, the council wants to destroy your home and build yet another modern garbage in its place.”

“Oh.” He turned this way and that to check the play of light on the mask from different angles. 

“Do you hear me? They–”

“What they want is irrelevant. They can’t touch us.”

“How do you know?” she snapped, “how do you mean to stop the bulldozers? You guys have to move.”

He proceeded to put away the make up and the glitter. “Where to?”

“I don’t know, just… maybe back to your family, or wherever you came from?” Holly fell silent. It sounded stupid even in her own ears. “What do you want to do then? Don’t you understand? They want to destroy the only home you know.” Her voice was raising steadily as she tried to get the message through. 

Kian contemplated her with maddening patience. “Have you seen nothing of this world?”

“What do you mean? I’ve seen what you’ve shown me and that was rather fragmentary, so I’m inclined to think the whole thing was a dream.”

“That so? Then why are you worried?”

“What?”

“They can’t destroy dreams, can they?”

“What are you talking about? This is an actual, physical place that they want to raze to the ground.”

“No need to shout.” He rose and before Holly could protest, he whisked her out of the room and into the whirlwind of colours, shapes and smells that she came to think of as the Underneath.

***

There were two weeks left until the bulldozers would erase the old theatre from existence. Two weeks, and her surreal adventures would be over for ever and the crazy characters she met in the Underneath turned out to the streets. Holly sat brooding in box 5. The golden paint chipped off the 5, and the velvet upholstery of the seats frayed, the filling spilling out from underneath. The cover must have been a rich, deep wine red once, but by now it was a uniform dirt colour. She listened to the secret life of the old building, the creaks and squeaks. 

“Why so gloomy?”

Holly flinched. She was still not used to Kian’s acoustic antics. “You scared me.”

“I can tell.”

He had the mirror mask on. Holly turned away; she contemplated the stage rather than her own morose mug.

“I wish I could stop them somehow.” She pulled on a loose thread of the parapet. “Or that I could escape into this world.” 

“So why don’t you?”

Holly looked up. She couldn’t tell if he was joking. Give up her colourless, flavourless life for the unpredictable mayhem of the Underneath?

“This place has no future. What am I gonna live from? What will I do?”

The mirror mask turned away. The sunlight bouncing off it painted spots of light on the patchy silk wallpaper of the opposite wall. “Office buildings have no future.”

Holly uttered a humourless bark of a laughter. “How I wish you were right.”

He was just a harmless fool, a daydreamer like the rest of them and they stood no chance against progress. 

***

On the day of the demolition she comforted herself by binge-watching How Far is Tattoo Far? on YouTube in the company of an XL pepperoni pizza with sour cream and garlic dip. The view from her window showed the littered parking lot behind the neighbouring cookie-cutter block of flats. The sky had the same nondescript dirt colour as the firewall of the building under all the graffiti. Holly dragged the nylon curtains shut. It was 10 am; she planned on spending the day in bed, ready to forget about the world. Yet she couldn’t help keeping a mental track of time; the machines would get there around noon. The dip dropped on the duvet cover. On the screen an upset chav revealed a busty lady on her belly that looked like the doodle of a preschooler. 

Had she done all she could? She’d talked only with Kian, not with Lady Cherlindrea or the gargoyle guy. Kian refuses to acknowledge the facts, but it might not be too late for the others. Holly slammed her laptop closed. She pulled on some clothes she found scattered on the floor, snatched her coat from the peg and stormed down the stairs. 

The area was closed off with yellow tape, but Holly spent enough time here to know where to sneak in unnoticed. People were standing in the corridors between the rows of seats, construction workers and some of the brass from the council, gesticulating towards the stage. She had to find the entrance to the Underneath, but she had never gone down by herself. Avoiding the creaky spots she sneaked down the shadowy corridor running along the two sides of the stalls. She slid behind the heavy curtain. From its shelter she watched the men as her fist closed around the handle of the door that led backstage. Please, let it be open, she sent out a silent prayer, and pushed. It stuck at first, but then yielded with a creak. There was a pause in the flow of speech at the front, but after some minutes the people went on talking. Holly blew out the air and slipped into the darkness beyond the door. 

If he was up to anything shady, he could have done it already, she kept telling herself as she followed him down a dark tunnel amidst fluttering cobwebs and blinking gas lamps. Holly had no idea such lamps were still being used anywhere in the city. Saltpeter flowered on the ancient bricks. Ahead of them she spotted a flaming head hovering in midair. “Can you see that?”

Her companion didn’t seem to be bothered by the apparition; he kept walking with the same long strides. Once they passed it, Holly saw it was just a random person going in the opposite direction with a lantern in hand.

“Who was that?”

Kian shrugged. For a while the only noise was the dripping of moisture and her shoes scraping on the paving stones. 

“How did you do that thing with the echo?” Holly asked after a while to break the silence.

“It’s pretty neat, huh?” Kian bragged.

Ahead of them light diffused the smoky gloom and soon they arrived to a gypsy’s den stuffed with all the clichès of the country fair fortune teller, down to the crystal ball, the candles and vials on the shelves. A curtain, embroidered with Kabbalistic symbols covered the wall on their left. 

“This is Lady Cherlindrea,” Kian gestured at the ample lady on the other side of the purple velvet covered table. “She’s a witch.”

“What’s up Gertie? Found a new mousie?” Lady Cherlindrea asked.

“Why does she call you Gertie?” Holly murmured under her breath. “Is that your name?”

“It’s her thing,” Kian murmured back. “She was Above, hollering to herself,” he said to Lady Cherlindrea. Holly felt her face burning. 

“Oh. She might be a perfect fit here,” the witch noted. She took a fat, black candle from the cluttered shelf above her head. “Do you want your future read?”

“Um, no, I’m good.”

Nonetheless Lady Cherlindrea went on lighting the candle. She swept the flame towards herself. “Oh yes, I feel a fair amount of dissatisfaction in you. Is everything okay?”

Holly pressed her lips together. “You said ‘others’,” she turned to Kian. “Who else?”

“She doesn’t want her future read,” he commented and dragged the curtain aside. Holly’s mouth fell open. They were on some kind of subterranean balcony. A whole city sprawled under them, teeming with people dressed in impossible costumes. Some of the mythical beasts looked more lifelike than costumes and masks would allow, but Holly didn’t want to go down that road. It was a cross between a bazaar and some kind of circus. Rope dancers balanced on the clotheslines between the houses, acrobats swung from one swing to the next, caught midair by their companions, trailing golden dust in their wake. Beautiful ladies and ladyboys contorted themselves on hoops. 

A pasteboard moon grinned its cheesy grin amidst a myriad of swirling, undulating stars above impossible shaped houses that leaned drunkenly towards each other above the meandering streets. 

Some of the cobblestones lit up under the feet of the motley crowd. They reflected the changing hues of the gas lamps, playing in all the colours of the rainbow and then some Holly didn’t have a name for. There was music too, alien tunes played on unknown instruments. The discordant tunes should have been jarring, but instead they created an odd kind of harmony. 

“What is this place?” she breathed.

Kian touched her arm. “Come.”

They snaked among the crowd in narrow little alleyways, absurd garments hanging from the cobweb of clotheslines above their head. Fire eaters perched on gables blew flames above them. No risk management at the workplace training for these folks, Holly mused. The buildings they passed looked like they could topple over at the slightest prod. One of them had a transparent wall that waved like water. She couldn’t resist touching it; she rubbed the moisture between her fingertips. One of the people inside looked up at her, and she hurried to catch up with her companion. 

“Kian?”

“Hmm?” he half-turned back to hear her better through the din. 

“Am I dreaming all this?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“You’re not helping, you know that?” she snapped.

He shrugged a narrow shoulder. “I don’t know about that. Am I supposed to help you with anything?”

Holly gave up. It was hopeless.

They passed a tavern. A gargoyle – must be some kind of birth defect, Holly thought feverishly, it’s not an actual gargoyle – waved at them. “Come on in, try our speciality wine. It tastes like all the colours of autumn and the song of the sirens.”

Kian stopped, his whole posture a wordless question. 

Holly spread her hands. “I don’t have the local money, whatever it is.”

“Don’t worry about that.” 

They entered the establishment and settled at a table. The gargoyle brought them two cups, or rather chalices; etched crystal panels set in a gemstone-studded gold filigree frame. Liquid the colour of sunshine bubbled in their depths.

Kian gestured towards her cup. “Will you just stare at it?”

Holly lifted the chalice to her lips. The heady scent alone felt strong enough to get her wasted. It tasted silver and scarlet on her tongue, like honey and cinnamon and cloves, like autumn bonfires built of fallen leaves. It covered her throat in liquid fire. She must not have been accustomed to strong booze or it was laced with something as from then on Holly couldn’t recall much of the night beyond fragments. 

At one point they were at a countryside fun-fair, with oddly alive-looking attractions. Kids were screaming behind the clown’s rictus at the front of the roller coaster, and the fluffy toys in the claw machine box seemed to scramble against the glass. 

Holly came to her senses next in the mirror labyrinth. She was alone; there was no sign of Kian. The walls seemed to rearrange themselves at every turn as she stumbled on aimlessly, but she was too doped to panic just yet. Her reflections moved out of phase with her, as if the walls were windows instead of mirrors, showing endless versions of herself, each of them having their own separate lives independently of her. Disoriented by the weird shapes, shadows and images, Holly was soon hopelessly lost. 

The next time the darkness lifted she found herself in a lavishly decorated chamber. Condensation glided down the sides of dewy champagne flutes. Crystal chandeliers rotated between embroidered velvet draperies showering the room with crumbs of light, gauze curtains led to invisible nooks at the back. 

A score of scantily clad girls swarmed around Kian, his hand pale on their gold-dusted skin. Not all of them were girls, or entirely human, neither of which lessened their appeal. Their slow dance was a counterpoint to that of the chandeliers, dizzying Holly with their opposing movement.  

From the opulent bordello she was hurled into the nightmare vision of a monstrous building gobbling up the landscape, a steel-and-glass beast trampling on everything in its way. It radiated an evil atmosphere and Holly just wanted to scuttle before it noticed her.

Cut; she was being carried in a tunnel. Shards of light penetrated the darkness, sounds got through to her muffled, as if she was wrapped in a layer of cotton wool. 

***

Lying in the darkness she didn’t know where she was, then she recognised the revolving chair in her bedroom, the towel she used to dry her hair a few days ago still draped over the back. Her flat was in one of the new housing developments, one of those blocks of flats pulled up in the last few decades, carefully devoid of colour, soul or character. 

The events of the previous night flooded Holly’s mind, flashing like the colourful panes from a stained glass window. 

She didn’t get a chance to go back to the theatre in the following weeks. She was buried under a mound of work at the council, sitting at the desk in her little cubicle all day – that’s how she came across the project in one of the group emails. It was a plan to pull down a ramshackle theatre in the 8th district to make room for a new office building, that might attract investors and pop-up businesses, launching a sort of economical renaissance in the area. The lockdown was due sometime over the course of the next month. Holly imagined a steel-and-grass monstrosity with a Starbucks or some other hipster haunt on the ground floor in place of the tattered velvet curtains and glitter trailing acrobats. I have to warn them.

Holly found the squalid little theatre during one of her urban exploration trips. She loved sneaking into houses in her free time; the more decrepit the building, the better. She had a particular fondness for attics and cellars – to her they felt like the secret heart of a house. Such ventures helped her get away from her life a bit, they offered a welcome variety to the drudgery of a dead-end job, the loneliness and the uniform days. 

Broken furniture cluttered the stalls. A tattered script with some of the letters missing hung in front of the mouldy velvet curtains, that read ‘Ope a Garn  r‘. The colourful panes were mostly missing from the stained glass ceiling lights, so the patterns didn’t make sense anymore. Spiderwebs fluttered in the air current coming through the holes. It was the decaying carcass of a once majestic building. 

“Hello?” Her voice echoed in the dusty void. Holly had been a fan of the Phantom of the Opera as a child, and this place fit the fancies of that long gone eleven year old perfectly. How many times had she and her best friend at the time daydreamed about being Christine, the object of the Phantom’s obsession, of being whisked away into his lair? They’d even planned a visit to Paris for the sole purpose of finding him. Holly let that child take the reins once more. 

“It’s Christine,” she trilled, “oh Phantom, are you here?”

Here… here… the echo replied. It had a weird hissing quality that Holly ascribed to the haphazard forms the sound bounced off, that messed with the acoustics. The dust motes swirled in a stray sunbeam. She went on a discovery tour, but the doors leading into the bowels of the building were locked. Holly left disappointed. 

Even so, she kept returning to the Paris Opera (she couldn’t think of it in any other way) in the following weeks. It inspired her in a way she couldn’t quite explain. It was almost like the gateway of another world, one that was probably messier, yet much more interesting than her own.

“Oh Phantom, come save me from my sad life,” she called out in a breathy voice. 

Life… life… life… 

She was lounging in box 5, reserved for the Phantom in the original story. Her fingertips left marks in the dusty velvet cover of the parapet. 

“Take me to wild adventures.”

Ress… ress… yess…

Holly sat up with a start. She searched the gloom. Did something move in the depths of the stage? She kept listening for some minutes with breath held, then decided it was just the building’s atmosphere and the peculiar acoustics playing tricks on her. Nonetheless she kept standing, her eyes darting from dark nook to odd shaped shadow, ready to bolt. “Hello?”

Hello… hello… hello…

Nothing moved apart from the cobwebs. 

“Is anybody there?”

There… there… there…

“I’m Holly, nice to meetcha.”

Cha… cha… cha…

A cloud swam in front of the sun and the auditorium darkened. Noises she didn’t notice before reached her ears; the rustle of some small creature burrowing under the debris, pigeons cooing outside the ceiling windows, creaks and groans, as the old building breathed around her. 

“Hello?”

Hello… hello… Holly…

She nearly fell off the gallery. Holly turned her head, trying to see all of the theatre at the same time, eyes so wide the white was visible all around her irises, heartbeat thundering in her ears. “Is anybody there?”

There… there… there…

The silence felt deafening. There was something, someone else here; she felt it in the prickling of her skin, in the hair that stood on edge on the nape of her neck. Holly didn’t know what has gotten into her; perhaps it was the predictability of her antiseptic, risk-free life, but she decided to play with it a little, whatever it was. On her best coquettish voice she called out. “Care for a dance?”

Dance… dance… yes…

It all happened too fast; before she could react in any way she was flying towards the rickety stage in the arms of a black-clad stranger. He held on to a rope and even through the clothes sack he was wearing, Holly could feel how thin he was. She held on for dear life, too frightened to scream. 

Before she knew it they were waltzing on the stage twisting, turning, the whole theatre spinning around them, colours she never saw before flashing in a crazy kaleidoscope, the other guiding her with a steady hand, sunlight glinting on the featureless mirror mask he was wearing. 

Once it ended Holly stood on the stage quivering, breathless, staring up at her own wide-eyed, distorted reflection.  

“Wh… who are you?” she finally managed.

“I am who I am. Who are you?” 

She couldn’t be absolutely sure it was a man judging from the voice alone. She decided to think of him as a ‘he’, but only for the lack of a better option. 

She stretched out a shaky hand. “Uh, name’s Holly. Sorry about the noise earlier, I didn’t think there was anybody here.”

Her reflection moved as the mask lowered a little, the person behind it contemplating her hand, then a pale, slender hand stretched out and grabbed hers. It was much stronger than it looked. 

“So, um, what can I call you?”

The other made a barely perceptible shrug. “Whatever you like.”

“You don’t have a name?”

Seemingly losing interest he was watching the auditorium, arms akimbo. 

Holly thought for a minute. She didn’t know if it was going too far, but she had to try; after all it was the Phantom’s real name in the novel. “Can I call you Erik?”

The minute she uttered the question she knew it was a bad idea. The mask turned back to her; Holly didn’t know how she knew, but she was sure the other was bristling against her suggestion. “Is that the best you can come up with?”

“Okay, how about, um,” she remembered some fanfic she’d read online. “Kian?”

“Will do.”

Holly cleared her throat. “So, Kian, what are you doing here?”

“I’m an artist.”

“What kind of artist?”

The mask tilted to the side the slightest bit. “Just artist. I live here with the others.”

She glanced at the auditorium, then at the catwalk above them. It was just as empty as before. “Others?”

He was already heading towards the wings; now he stopped and turned back to her. “Do you want to  come see?”

Holly considered. Did she really want to follow this stranger into whatever lunatic asylum he was about to lure her into? That was exactly how women ended up in some psycho’s torture chamber. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea actually.” She uttered a nervous snicker. “I mean what if you lock me up for the police to find my skeleton twenty five years later?”

He gave her a long look. At least she guessed that was what he was doing; he was just standing there motionless. She suppressed the urge to fidget under his gaze. “I said I was an artist, not a serial killer. But if you don’t want to see, it’s fine; doesn’t make a difference to me.”

“Alright, show me then,” Holly offered, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake.