Double Booked for Death

by Ali Brandon

  To her left, Darla could hear the periodic clang and hiss of steam over the distant sounds of speech and applause from the theater above. This section of the basement was strictly functional, serving as combination boiler room and storage space. Beyond the boiler, she could see barrels and crates piled high, along with what appeared to be fixtures from the old club, and random machinery likely left over from the days when the place had been some sort of factory. For all she could tell, Jimmy Hoffa might have been stuffed in some far corner, too.

  The floor was cold beneath her stockinged feet, but she didn’t dare pull on her pumps again lest the echo of her footfalls against the rough stone signal their presence. Feeling the nylon beneath one foot snag on an uneven spot in the flooring, she accepted the fact that her twenty-dollar pair of pantyhose was not going to survive the night.

  Of course, all that mattered was that Hillary did.

  Jake, meanwhile, put a finger to her lips and pointed up toward the stage above them. Perhaps thirty feet directly ahead was a second entryway, its interior faintly glowing against the shadows that crept from beyond the boiler and other forgotten equipment.

  “She went in there. C’mon.”

  Darla barely could hear Jake’s low whisper, but the swift jabbing of her finger in that direction got the point across. She fell into quiet step behind her friend, grateful for Jake’s unflappable presence and feeling unwilling admiration for Hillary, who had traversed the basement alone. An uneasy air clung to the place; the brick columns that revealed the building’s mechanical underbelly also served to conceal. Perhaps that black and yellow caution tape on the floor was there for reasons other than mere workplace safety. Maybe the theater workers knew that something worse than an OSHA breach lurked beyond the stripes.

  Darla felt her scalp tingle as she pictured some unknown being lurking in the shadows ready to pounce from behind a column as they passed. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that the theater’s actors had encountered unexplained activity late at night when they ventured down there alone. Neither could she shake the odd feeling that she’d been in this particular basement before.

  Then it abruptly occurred to her that, in a manner of speaking, she had.

  She realized she was walking her way through virtually the same basement that was found on the other side of the Janitor’s closet in the Haunted High books.

  Scenes from the most recent novel flashed through her mind. In one, Lani discovered phosphorescent footprints that hinted the Janitor had survived his exorcism in the second book. In another, a squad of ghouls dressed as cheerleaders captured one of Lani’s living friends and held her hostage, threatening to devour the terrified girl if Lani did not surrender to them. And, in still another, Lani learned that the new vice principal had a taste for both handing out detentions and sipping fresh blood.

  These and several other of the book’s more chilling incidents had all taken place in a fearsome subterranean level that lay somewhere beneath the fictional Lani’s high school. Some of the book’s characters believed the spot to be a portal to hell; others claimed it was simply a way station for the dead. Accessed by way of the Janitor’s closet, that supernatural basement had become Book Three’s battleground where Lani and the Janitor squared off as each sought to gain control of the school’s various paranormal entities. Nothing good happened there, and the physical description of the place—at once terrifyingly otherworldly and laughably mundane—described this theater’s basement as well.

  So who would they encounter tonight, she wondered with a shiver: Morris, the kindly old Janitor, or Morris the sharp-toothed demon?

  They halted at the entry, and Jake peered cautiously around the splintered jamb. The dialogue from the stage above was more distinct here, and Darla could follow the actors’ progress by the sound of their footsteps atop the boards. She waited until Jake gave an all-clear signal, and then joined her to take a look.

  The area was larger than she expected. As best she could judge, it ran the width of the entire basement and encompassed not only the basement space under the stage but also that beneath the entire backstage area. Practical rather than architecturally stylish, this section had been walled off from the remaining basement by means of a sturdy wooden framework covered in bare sheetrock. The lighting here was only marginally better, but sufficient to make out the storage room’s layout.

  Plywood had been laid over the stone floor to provide a more stable surface for a series of vertical racks, and had also been used to create shelves and pallets. These storage systems, which took up large segments of the available floor space, held all manner of old backdrops and stage props, from furniture to statuary to artificial trees. Under other circumstance, Darla would have enjoyed the chance to poke around there, but the seriousness of their mission did not allow for exploring this veritable graveyard of plays past.

  Had they kept walking straight ahead, they would have found themselves on a ramp that rose to stage level and likely led right past the main stage to the backstage area. Dressing rooms and costume storage would be up there, along with areas for the props and set decorations used for the current run of plays. Would they find Hillary and Morris there, or were the two of them together somewhere here in this netherworld of theatrical discards?

  “Damn it, Morris, where are you?”

  The sound of Hillary’s peevish voice answered the question as to her location. The voice came from somewhere beyond the large vertical rack just inside the doorway where Darla and Jake had swiftly concealed themselves. They could hear the sound of her impatient heels tapping as she paced the plywood floor. Darla peered through one of the gaps between the canvas and wood-framed backdrops standing on end like books on a shelf. She could see a flash of pink as Hillary walked past. Yes, where is Morris? Darla wondered, aware that her palms had begun to sweat a little in nervous anticipation. She shifted her shoes from one hand to the other and blotted her free palm on her skirt.

  “Damn it, Morris!” Hillary called again, “I’m not going to play games with you. Let’s finish this.”

  “Let’s not.”

  The sound of a second voice made Darla jump, even though she had been expecting it. The speaker was Morris. His words came from what seemed to be a spot well beyond where Hillary waited. Darla could hear a man’s faint yet solid footsteps crossing the plywood floor, though she could not spy him from her vantage point.

  She exchanged a look with Jake, who signaled her to hold tight. She nodded and peered again through the slatlike gaps in the backdrops. Now, she could hear Hillary moving in the direction of where Morris seemed to be, her staccato steps revealing her agitation.

  “Where are you? What do you mean, ‘let’s not’?” she demanded. “We had a deal.”

  “I’ve reconsidered.”

  Morris’s voice seemed a bit more distant, as if he were leading her deeper into the basement. Looking grim, Jake gestured Darla to follow behind her. They moved softly in the same direction as Hillary’s footsteps, using the props and backdrops as cover. The sounds from the actors above masked any noise the two of them made, though Darla suspected that Hillary’s only focus was Morris.

  “Damn it, Morris,” she repeated, “quit running away from me. I want that money, or I’m going to reveal everything.”

  The woman’s footsteps stopped abruptly. Jake and Darla halted, too, crouching behind a small grove of fake bushes that served as a handy screen for them. The light here was dimmer and seemed to flicker. Peering between the leaves, Darla frowned a little in surprise.

  They had stumbled into what appeared to be the stage crew’s private lounge. Someone had arranged armchairs and a small love seat around a glass coffee table. Two accent chairs covered in red velvet sat a short distance beyond this cozy scene, pulled together as if the previous sitters had been involved in a tête-à-tête. An abandoned paperback novel lay open on one of the seats, while a couple of fast-food-chain drink cups sat on the table.

  Hillary flung herself on
to the love seat. “Five seconds, Morris,” she snapped, “and if that money’s not in my hand, I’m out of here.”

  “I wouldn’t leave just yet, Hillary . . . not until you hear me out.”

  The lights began to flicker again as Morris’s voice continued, “You think you hold all the cards here, but I assure you that you don’t. You think you have the ability to ruin me, to keep me from carrying on my sister’s legacy now that she’s dead. You think the readers will abandon the series if they find out that someone besides Valerie actually wrote the Haunted High books. Someone like me.”

  Darla and Jake exchanged quick looks. So the threats that Hillary had been making weren’t about Valerie’s accident. Darla allowed herself a moment of cautious relief, for this likely meant that Morris hadn’t killed his sister. Still, it seemed she’d been right about Morris being the true author of the book. The deception didn’t much bother her, but apparently Hillary saw it as a game changer, an issue worthy of blackmail. Darla wondered why.

  The agent quickly answered Darla’s unspoken question.

  Hillary’s voice took on a nasty edge as, leaping to her feet again, she shot back, “Just who do you think your readers are, Morris? Most of them are teens, impressionable children. What do you think will happen when their parents find out these bestselling young adult books were written by a man who spends his nights dressed as a woman? Your books will be in the remainder bin faster than you can say Kate Gosselin.”

  She snorted at her own joke and added, “It doesn’t matter to me . . . I’ve made my money off you, and I can always find another Valerie Baylor somewhere. But what about you?”

  Her tone grew even harder.

  “Oh, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the parents won’t care that little Susie and Jimmy are reading books written by a cross-dresser. And maybe I’m wrong about the fans, the thousands who dressed up in black capes and stood in line for hours for an autograph in every major city. Maybe they won’t feel betrayed because the author they worshipped never really existed. And all those major review publications who gave Valerie Baylor starred reviews? Maybe they won’t feel like idiots for praising a woman who once stole other writers’ work because she couldn’t get her own published. And maybe Mr. Pinter won’t feel like you and Valerie pulled a fast one on his company, putting her out there as the brilliant talent that came up with the Haunted High series. Maybe all of them will forget, and you can keep on writing those books of yours forever.

  “But, then, you know what that means, Morris?” She gave a cold, tinkling little laugh—the kind of laugh that, to Darla’s mind, could have come straight from the Janitor’s closet. “It means that you’ll have to face your biggest fear. You’ll have to make all the public appearances, do the television interviews, show up at national conferences and speak in front of hundreds—even thousands—of people. You’ll have to do all the things that Valerie did for you. Oh, yeah, she couldn’t write a shopping list if her life depended on it, but she loved the limelight, craved it, while you hate it. That’s why you dress up as a woman, so you can hide your true self from everyone . . . even from yourself!”

  Darla exchanged swift, troubled looks with Jake. Hillary was far more intelligent than she’d ever given her credit for being, Darla realized. Now that the agent had put it out into the open, the whole Morris-Valerie collaboration with the Haunted High books made for an odd if understandable symbiosis. One twin had the talent, while the other had the looks, the presence. Together, they were Valerie Baylor. And Hillary had seen what Darla had guessed at: that the Mavis persona was Morris’s way to walk among the living, so to speak, rather than keep himself locked away from the world in some personal Janitor’s closet.

  But what didn’t make sense—at least, from what Darla had heard—was why Hillary had such great enmity toward the pair. No matter the deception, hadn’t she managed a sweet cut of their pie?

  “Morris, why don’t you answer me?” the agent demanded, sounding peevish now. “Oh, that’s because I’m right, isn’t it? So if you want me to keep your secret, I need some quid pro quo. Maybe I’ll even put in a good word for you with Mr. Pinter, tell him you’re just as talented as your sister, so you can keep writing under Valerie’s name. And I’ll even write you a juicy new contract that says you never have to make a public appearance if you don’t want to.”

  “But why should I pay you anything,” came Morris’s voice in reply, “when your secret is far more damning than mine?”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  The spiteful tone abruptly fled her voice, replaced by uncertainty as she straightened in her seat and gazed about her, looking for Morris. “I don’t have any secrets.”

  “To the contrary, I think that you do.”

  The sound of his footsteps grew louder now, though Darla still could not see him from her vantage point.

  “You found out that I wrote the Haunted High books, not Valerie, and you thought you could use that and my personal life to your advantage.” His voice took on a faintly mocking tone. “Morris is rich . . . he’ll pay me to keep my mouth shut, to keep the status quo. But you forgot that rich people hate to part with their money, just like everyone else. And you also thought that Valerie didn’t know about the blackmail. But she did.”

  He paused a beat and then added, “And she didn’t like it.”

  The lights that had been flickering almost imperceptively as he spoke now abruptly blinked out. As they were plunged into darkness, Hillary gave a little scream.

  “I know what you’re trying to do, Morris!” she shrieked, while Darla choked back a reflexive gasp of her own. The woman’s tone was so shrill that Darla wondered if she could be heard through the stage floor. “You’re trying to scare me into going away. But it won’t work. So turn the lights back on and give me my money!”

  Then a few things happened simultaneously. A light slowly flickered on near the two red velvet chairs tucked away in the far corner, while the pungent odor of cigarette smoke abruptly wafted toward Darla. The surrounding air seemed colder all at once, so that Darla hugged her stole more closely to her and wished she dared pull her shoes back on. Even the sounds from the theater above seemed suddenly muted, as if even the cast had halted to learn what was happening there beneath their feet.

  And then a woman’s voice—not the agent’s, but uncannily familiar—spoke.

  “Hillary, you always were a greedy little bitch.”

  The lights near the chairs flickered again and dimmed, while a figure wrapped in a hooded black cape abruptly materialized. Morris? Darla thought in confusion, squinting for a better look. Surely this was some sort of trick that the man was playing to unnerve the agent . . . except that the figure before them was oddly transparent. Staring at the phantom image, Darla felt the hair on the back of her neck leap to attention. A bit desperately, she reminded herself that she didn’t exactly believe in ghosts, herself . . . that was, if she didn’t count the strange footsteps that had wandered her store and the unseen force that had stacked books into nice neat columns on her living room floor.

  Then the figure reached graceful hands up to push away the concealing hood, revealing a spill of black hair and a pale face with bright red lips that was straight from the author’s photo on the Haunted High books.

  “V-Valerie?” Hillary quavered, taking another step back. Then, seeming to rally, the woman protested, “I don’t believe it. That’s you, Morris, dressed up like your sister! Don’t think for a minute that I’m going to fall for your silly disguises.”

  The figure chuckled, the soft sound of amusement edged with what sounded like anger. Still, his—her?—tone was conversational in reply. “What, aren’t you happy to see your favorite client again? And here I dragged myself out of that nasty coffin just so we could have this little chat.”

  In a casual move, the figure sat upon one of the red chairs . . . except that instead of sitting, she hovered a good two feet over the cushion, the lines of the chair still visible through her transparent form.
The sight of the floating image seemed to drain the last of the fight from Hillary. In a small voice, she said, “I don’t want to see you. Turn on the lights so I can get out of here.”

  The phantom Valerie shook a reproving finger.

  “Not yet, Hillary. Not until we talk about how you followed me out of the store the night of the autographing. You thought I was Morris, didn’t you? You’d been harassing him for money to keep the secret. But Morris had told me what you were trying do. I didn’t want to believe him, so I told him I wanted to hear your threats myself.”

  “I-I really didn’t mean it,” the agent whimpered. “I just needed a little cash. My mom is sick, and—”

  “Bullshit,” the ghost replied in a distinctly earthly manner. “Morris checked. Your parents are fine back in Ohio, and they had no idea that their darling daughter has a nasty little habit involving white powder.”

  “That’s not true! I might have tried it once, but—”

  “Can it, Hillary. You’re hooked, and you know it. But your drug of choice doesn’t come cheap. So you’ve been digging in other people’s pockets to support your drug habit.”

  Darla shot an astonished look in Jake’s direction, wishing she could make out the other woman’s expression in the dark. So it wasn’t only money, but drugs that made Hillary’s world go around. Maybe this explained the agent’s apparent affection for her old rich boyfriend at the memorial service. She’d found yet another cash cow—or, likely in the old man’s case, cash steer—and was going to hang onto him for as long she could, no matter what it took.

  Darla swiftly turned her attention back to the scene before her, however, as the phantom Valerie continued speaking.

  “Your habit and your greed made you stupid, Hillary.”

  The ghost gave a disgusted snort as she stood again and paced, walking through the velvet chairs now. The odor of cigarette smoke was growing stronger, and Darla could swear this part of the basement was growing even colder.