That evening, leaving the office after another depressing day, Aiden had looked up. The winter sun had set long before but no stars were visible through the murky reflection of south-west London’s lights. The moon was out, though, and Aiden had realized that the thin crescent shining directly above him was at precisely the same degree of waning as that in the image on the flyer. Nice touch, he had thought, and at that moment he had decided to take a chance on the show. It wasn’t as if he’d had other plans.
The playhouse address proved to be the back room of The Travellers’ Rest, a one-time coaching inn not far from Colliers Wood Tube station, towards the southern end of the Northern Line, and a few minutes’ walk from the tower that loomed over the high street there. Aiden had passed the pub before from time to time but had never been tempted to enter.
When he had arrived at the building he’d been a little surprised to find that the ‘Playhouse’ was indeed open tonight, given that The Travellers itself, with its doors padlocked and windows secured behind graffiti-daubed metal shutters, had clearly gone the way of so many pubs these last few years, the once-treasured social hubs now vanished or awaiting conversion into soulless shops, flats or office spaces.
Another surge, and the pressure of strangers’ flesh brought his wandering attention back to the present. Aiden was now only feet from the bouncer whose bulk filled the entrance he was guarding. The shaven head hadn’t looked up yet, hadn’t noticed the young man with his sensible haircut and office clothes. At the very least, Aiden knew he could expect a mocking raised eyebrow and a sarcastic inquiry as to whether he had the right place. He wished again he hadn’t come.
Then he was at the door. The bouncer whipped the flyer from his hand, and didn’t even glance up as Aiden was swept inside.
As the crowd filtered around him, he found himself in what he supposed would be described as an ‘intimate’ venue, at the foot of a low wooden stage. Its bare boards appeared to have been painted matte black once, lightened since then by years of trodden-in cigarette ash. The dirt dated the last time the place had been cleaned to an era before indoor smoking had been banned. Behind torn and faded posters the walls had been painted to match the stage, as had the ceiling and the floors. The room seemed to close in on him, like a predator’s throat working down a morsel of swallowed prey.
To his left, half a dozen rows of padded benches ranged up a shallow incline towards the rear wall. Almost all were already occupied. Pale, overly made-up faces regarded him with inscrutable expressions, white masks floating in the hushed gloom. He sensed waves of amusement emanating from those faces as they gazed at the awkward office boy in his cheap suit. He wanted to leave but those stares pinned him down.
If only he could have slipped in unnoticed and been able to find an anonymous seat at the back. He felt the weight of eyes heavy with mascara following him as he sought refuge in the nearest spare seat, an opening at the very foot of the stage between two women. They were dressed almost identically, although they seemed not to be together. Neither could have been much older than his own 19 years yet as he lowered himself between them he felt like a schoolboy.
The cool softness of their upper arms seeped into him, inked skin naked above long, glistening elbow-length gloves, pushing at the thin material of his suit jacket. He stared straight ahead and up at the stage, fixing his attention on the old cardboard box that stood there next to an indistinct shape hidden beneath a red cloth. He hoped nobody could see him blush as he fought against the pulsing awareness of those bare shoulders and the insistent pressure of hips and elbows and thighs, and the edges of heavy boots resting against his flimsy shoes.
And then he remembered his phone. The thought of it ringing during the performance, throwing him into the centre of hostile attention was terrifying. Painfully aware of the way his body touched his neighbours as he moved, Aiden reached into his pocket and eased out his mobile. He pretended to check it for messages, then switched it off and slowly, carefully, slipped it back into his jacket.
Around and behind, the audience was settling, still in subdued silence. The creaking of wood and leather and plastic was loud in the hush. The already low lights dimmed, and the shadows deepened, sucking the last sounds from the tense air.
Footsteps cracked hard and hollow against the wooden stage. A steady, measured pace: one step, then a second, a third, a fourth, and then a pause that lingered, daring the audience to make the slightest sound. A spotlight blazed to life. It drilled a shaft of gold through the dusty air, revealing a lone figure on the stage.
A man stood there, tall, loose-limbed, a quiet smile touching his lips. He was, Aiden was offended to see, wearing blackface make-up. His clothing had an anachronistic quality as well. Even to Aiden, who knew next to nothing about fashion, the cut of that formal evening wear seemed to belong to a bygone decade. The material itself was old too, shiny at the knees and elbows and fraying at the cuffs. Yet the man wore it well; it hung from his lithe frame in elegant folds.
He lifted a microphone to his mouth.
His smile became something between a grin and a sneer as he gave a lazy, knowing nod. When he spoke the voice that emerged was deep and rolled out with the languorous drawl of the American Deep South.
‘Yeah. Yogso tot….’
Aiden had no idea what the words meant but sly chuckling was rising all around him. A private joke, he guessed, feeling more out of place than ever.
The man – magician, Aiden supposed – lowered the microphone and gazed into the audience. He raised his empty right hand, covered in black make-up to match his face, extending an index finger that seemed to unfold further than a finger should. The nail at the end was long too, and Aiden knew there would be dirt crusted beneath it.
Slowly that fingernail was drawn through the air, searching the audience. Aiden tried to shrink into himself, praying he was not about to be chosen as a ‘volunteer’.
The finger stopped, pointing unwavering at Aiden. Slowly, the wrist rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, then the finger twitched, once, twice, summoning him to the stage.
ACT TWO
He shook his head, pleading with his eyes. He tried to smile, to apologize with an expression, begging not to be picked. The women to either side turned to look at him. They leaned a little more into him as they began to clap, softly at first then with increasing insistence. The applause was taken up behind him, swelling, the thick air inside the theatre rippling with the concussing waves. There were no calls, no words, nothing but the slapping of skin against skin. The sound seemed less encouragement than threat.
He stood. Adrenaline flooded in and his legs were trembling as they carried him forward to where a small staircase led up onto the stage. At the top step, his shoe caught the lip and he tripped, only just catching his balance as he arrived into the audience’s full view. The applause died away.
Heavy silence defined the void beyond that blinding spotlight. Aiden could see nothing further than the edge of the stage. He wondered how the magician had been able to see him, even in the front row.
Now though, Aiden was on full display. He looked down for somewhere neutral to put his gaze. The light picked out the stage floor in crisp detail: screwed-down sheets of wooden board, heavily scarred. His earlier impression proved correct in that decades of ground-in dust and ash had rendered the ancient black paint the forbidding grey of storm clouds.
He shuffled the final few steps that took him towards the centre of the stage. The magician stood motionless, waiting beside the box and whatever lay hidden nearby, beneath the blood-red cloth. In the heat from the spotlight an unpleasant aroma of mildew and sweat steamed from the magician’s clothes. Aiden stopped, keeping the box between them.
Looked at from above, the box was roughly half a metre square and it was barely more than that in height. It, too, gave off a faint smell of damp, although the thick cardboard looked sturdy. A supermarket logo was stamped on the sides, bleached almost to illegibility by exposure to sunlight. Inside, th
e four flaps that made up the base were secure. On top, however, the flaps gaped open, hanging limply away from the sharp-shadowed interior.
The emptiness within seeped out into the small theatre, and with that emptiness came a promise of something profound and imminent.
With a flourish, the magician whipped away the cloth. Beyond the spotlight the audience released a breath. A stand had been revealed, and it held a single sword. The blade was perhaps half as long as the magician was tall, and it gleamed in the harsh light, a light that threw a shadow along the blood channel that ran along the blade’s centre line. Tiny dark vees betrayed a handful of nicks marring a keen cutting edge.
The magician took hold of the hilt, and pulled. A metallic rasp attenuated to a sinister whisper as the blade slid free of the stand. Wordlessly, the magician changed his grip and reached across the box to pass the sword to Aiden, hilt first.
As he took the weight, Aiden was forced to use both hands to avoid dropping the weapon. The magician’s eyes glittered with something that was not quite humour as they urged him to test the sharpness of the blade. Struggling, Aiden managed to balance the hilt against his hip, steadying the sword with his left hand as he reached out with his right.
He ran his finger lightly along the edge, and felt nothing until he caught one of the nicks and jerked his finger back. A droplet of blood welled up from his fingertip, followed by another. As he watched, a razor-thin line of scarlet appeared. He almost put his finger to his mouth before the fear of infection stayed him.
Ignoring the magician’s sadistic chuckle, Aiden let the pointed end of the blade drop to the stage. It embedded itself in the wood, the sword resting against him as he fumbled a handkerchief from his trousers and pressed it to his finger. He glared at the magician, who only smiled and caressed the top edge of the box.
Aiden knew he should be angry, but that box was again demanding his attention. It drew his fury from him, into itself. It was hungry, and it knew the waiting was almost at an end.
When he could look away he saw that the magician was once again holding the microphone. The invisible audience shifted in eager appreciation. The magician spoke a single word.
The rich syllables crackled through speakers hanging unseen on walls out there in the darkness.
‘Teela.’
Sensing movement behind him, Aiden turned to see a young woman step out of the shadows at the rear of the stage. She was young, almost certainly no older than him. Was Teela her name, he wondered, or had that unfamiliar word carried another meaning?
She walked towards him, grimy boards creaking gently beneath the soles of her bare feet. A thin – almost sheer – gown of white silk sighed around her slender frame, reaching to her mid-thighs. It was gathered at the base of her throat, held there by a clasp, the delicate gold filigree of which enclosed a single small jewel of rich ruby red.
She was about the same height as the girl who had pushed past him on the Tube that morning.
As she stepped closer, Aiden realized just how beautiful she was. Her eyes were the green of dusty emeralds, and they glowed against honey skin. She stopped just inches away, positioning her body between him and that box.
She gazed out towards the blackness that hid the audience. She was so close that Aiden could feel her warmth. Her face was an impassive mask, but Aiden sensed she was nervous. She was forcing herself to breathe regularly, to hold down a rising fear.
The magician inclined his head. She must have noticed the cue out of the corner of her eye for, still gazing towards her audience, she held out her small hand to Aiden. He lowered the sword hilt to the stage and steadied her with his own injured hand as she lifted one slim leg and then the other to step into the box. Her gown rose as she climbed inside. When she was in, Aiden let go and wiped his suddenly sweaty palm against the back of his trousers.
She stood, not moving, as if battling her own reluctance to continue. Long seconds passed. Aiden desperately wanted not to be here.
She touched her hand to the clasp at her throat, twisted it, and the thin gown slipped from her slim body, falling without a sound into the box. She was naked.
An eager murmur rose from the audience. Aiden was appalled, the misogyny of the unfolding performance as repellent to his liberal sensitivities as the magician’s racist appearance had been. Yet he was trapped, an unwilling participant in a hateful show.
Still she held her pose, except that now, perhaps, her chin was raised almost imperceptibly higher, a touch of defiance, or so it seemed. Her nudity, her vulnerability, pulsated, throbbing in his temples, demanding his attention, but Aiden would not look down to her body. He stared into her green eyes, seeing what the audience could not: the fear and the effort of will it took for her to face what she knew was coming. But he also saw that that fear was overlaid by an ambiguous quality that mingled sadness and acceptance, and something else, something vital, a spark of what might be … excitement?
She closed her eyes, exhaled deeply, and with a smooth grace folded herself into the confines of the cardboard box. Standing so close, Aiden was horrified to see just how fully even her small body filled that unpleasant cell. If the magician’s act was about to proceed as he feared, she would have a terrifyingly small margin of error to get through it unhurt.
With grim inevitability, the magician started to fold the upper flaps down, sealing her inside. From somewhere he had produced a roll of packing tape, and now he ripped off long strips, wrapping them around and around the box, taping the top down tight. Close to Aiden’s leg, the box’s side bulged for a moment as a concealed arm, leg or other naked body part pressed against the interior. He dreaded what was coming.
The magician approached. He picked up the sword, deliberately dragging the blade against the wooden boards so that it rasped with menace. Then at once he forced the hilt into Aiden’s hand.
Leering, he gestured that Aiden should run the sword into the box.
Aiden shook his head, horrified. He had seen similar magic tricks performed and this wasn’t what was supposed to happen! It was always the magician who stabbed the box, his assistant having carefully contorted herself into a pre-arranged position. How was Aiden supposed to know where to insert the blade?
The magician’s grin widened. Standing behind Aiden, he reached around to fold Aiden’s other hand around the hilt, and with the two of them holding the heavy sword he guided it so that the tip rested against the side of the box. Then he let go, and the weight of the blade pulled the sword out of position. When Aiden had regained control he could no longer identify where the tell-tale bulge had been. Had he been supposed to see it and remember? And in any case, had it been a sign that he should avoid that area or aim for it? He tried to warn the magician that he hadn’t been paying proper attention, that he had missed the vital clue.
But the magician was looking out towards the audience. From above, the harsh glare of the spotlight blazed down. Aiden could sense the audience straining forward in their seats, urging him to act. He needed this to be over. He swallowed down his fear.
And he pushed.
The tip of the blade sliced into the cardboard. The sword slid forward and for a moment Aiden’s concerns evaporated into euphoria, then the blade met resistance and a solid ball of nausea imploded in his stomach. For an instant he was frozen, then his brain kicked back in, screaming frantic messages to pull the blade out.
He started to withdraw, but now the magician was behind him again, enfolding his grip with those long fingers and dirt-encrusted nails, and a greater strength was thrusting forward, hard. The sword stuck, then penetrated, pushed through, and slipped free to emerge from the other side of the box with the faintest sizzle of tearing card.
The magician stepped back. Shocked, Aiden let go of the hilt.
There had been only silence from within the box. Now Aiden heard, or imagined he heard, the heavy drip of thick liquid hitting the ground.
The magician laughed, a low triumphant rumble from the depths of his throat.
The spotlight snapped off. Strange afterimages danced in Aiden’s vision, silvery green wisps of luminescence waxing forth from the blackness.
His sense of reality teetered as the glowing forms coalesced into a shimmering arch, the shape emerging from the air above and behind where the box must be. As it gathered substance the shape became familiar: a pair of mirror-imaged lunar crescents, their upper horns resting against each other. He heard the scraping of feet, the rustle of clothes, the sound of movement from the audience as they stood. He heard the crowd’s footsteps mount the stairs, climbing up onto the stage. Bodies brushed past him in the disorienting darkness, and he caught fragmented glimpses of silhouettes passing through the shimmering arch, walking through and on towards – what?
He thought he heard the soughing of a thin wind blowing from somewhere, and he felt its chill as it blew through the emptying theatre. The breeze carried a scent he had never encountered before.
Only one silhouette remained. It paused and turned towards Aiden, tall and lithe, and it took a bow before it too passed through the arch. The illusion dissolved into drifting particles of dying radiance, the final sparks fading as the house lights hummed back on.
Aiden was alone on an empty stage in an empty theatre. Even the sword had gone. There was only him and a torn box. A hideous red stain had seeped into its cardboard walls and spread outwards in an abstract pattern of disturbing beauty. Around the base a dark liquid had pooled on the ash-stained black floor. As Aiden watched, a single large red drop swelled from the torn hole where the sword had exited and plopped to the floor.
He didn’t want to see what was inside but he needed to know. Pulse throbbing in his throat, hands trembling, he tore away strips of tape and opened the flaps. He peered inside.
There was nothing in there but a sheer gown that had once been white. Now it was soaked with blood.
Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror Page 13