Chess blinked. Her fingers convulsed on the railing. What the fuck had she been doing? Leaning over that rail, the empty space beyond. Not a good thing to do. She didn’t want to die, not that day. Work. That’s what she needed to be doing.
She’d grabbed a couple of small video cameras from the Church supply before she left, but she hadn’t expected she’d get the chance to use them. She grabbed one from her bag and affixed it to the light strip, so the stage filled the tiny screen. Good. It would start recording if it detected movement.
The catwalk stretched from the tiny booth at the back of the room all the way to where she now crouched, where the light strip hung from the ceiling. From that point it branched off; another walkway ran perpendicular to it, from one side of the room to the other. On her left it dead-ended at the wall. On her right … On her right it seemed to turn left again at the wall and head back, behind the curtain. An odd arrangement.
“Hey, why does the catwalk cross the stage over there?”
“What?” From Chess’s position Monica looked like a blob of shrieking plaid. Beulah had, of course, settled into one of the chairs, where she lounged as if she was about to light up a smoke and crack a beer. Or, not a beer; she didn’t appear to be much of a beer type. A wine spritzer or something equally girly.
“The catwalk,” Chess said. “Why does it cross the stage?”
“Oh. Not sure, really. I’ve heard that it’s a leftover from when this was a meeting room for dignitaries, or maybe it was built because they needed it for effects for some play.”
Weird. “Where does it go? Does it hit the back wall?”
“Um, I think so.”
Wow, she was helpful. Sure, she was an administrative assistant, but it still seemed to Chess that Monica might have some knowledge of the oddities of the building.
It didn’t matter. Whether or not she knew what it was for, she’d have to walk it all the way. So she arranged her bag more securely on her shoulder and started moving, her thighs aching from the peculiar squat-walk she was forced to use.
The catwalk rattled beneath her, which was just what she needed, but it seemed steady enough. After a moment or two she found a sort of rhythm, even, with one hand on the rail and the other on the floor to help keep her steady. In no time, it seemed, she reached the wall, made the left, and kept going.
Over the curtain, which seemed unusual, but then how else could it go, right? Right. Dust coated the top of the curtain so thick the color of the fabric was no longer visible; Chess only knew it was red because she’d seen it from the floor.
Backstage—well, it looked like every backstage Chess had ever seen. No, she’d never been in any school plays or anything—the very idea was ridiculous—but backstage areas were dark and private, the perfect place to skip class and get high or steal a few naked minutes with whomever she’d felt like giving the privilege to that particular day.
Tall canvas-and-wood flats rested against the wall; old desks and a battered sofa and other odds and ends of furniture braced them up. Boxes of costumes, boxes of props, general dust, and detritus littered the floor. Typical.
What wasn’t typical was the faint odd smell in the air, and what her adjusting eyes could see was a stub of candle and a small tray on the floor.
Shit. She grabbed her camera and snapped a couple of pictures, but what she really needed to do was get down there and look. And she needed to do it without bringing either of the women with her; she didn’t want her discovery of the candle and tray—if they were even related, and not just left behind by some kids who came here to make out or whatever—to be noted. Never let them know you’ve seen anything of interest: one of the first rules of Debunking. That went double for this case, when one Debunker had already been driven away and the potential suspects numbered in the hundreds.
So she’d have to go back to the booth where the catwalk started and get backstage alone. The alone part wasn’t a worry; she had the authority to tell them both to fuck off back to their offices, and she had no problem doing so. But the turning around …
The catwalk narrowed here, and the way it jiggled beneath her as she started to turn made her muscles tense. Had it been that jiggly when she’d first climbed up? It hadn’t seemed so but—maybe it was just the way she was moving.
So, move differently, right? Her feet shifted slowly, her thighs aching, as she gripped the rails harder. Boots were not the best choice for this sort of thing; she would have liked more mobility in her ankles. If she’d known tightrope walking—or, okay, catwalk walking—would be on the menu, she would have worn her Chucks.
But she hadn’t, and she focused on keeping the damn metal from bouncing beneath her feet. It seemed to be bouncing no matter what, though, and no sooner had the thought registered in her mind than another one did, one much darker and more unpleasant, which was that it was bouncing like that because someone was bouncing it.
Even the dim light in the theater was enough to show her that no one stood at the far end, and she was close enough to the back wall—only fifteen feet or so away—to see that no one stood there, either. What the fuck?
She’d shoved her small flashlight into her pocket. Its beam made a pale spot over the plates and bolts connecting the walk to the back wall.
One of the bolts was moving. Someone at some point had scraped off some of the dull patina on the metal, leaving a naked streak that shone bright silver; it caught the flashlight’s beam, spinning in ever-faster circles as she watched.
“Miss?” Monica’s voice, tinged with panic, flew up from the floor below. “Are you okay? The walk is shaking.”
Yeah, no shit. Not just the walk, and not just the bolt. Wires connected the catwalk posts to the ceiling. One wire released with a horrible boing, the kind of sound that was practically an announcement that she was about to die.
The bolt dropped. The catwalk jerked crazily to one side. And Chess, who’d been standing there staring like some kind of fucking moron, started running.
So what if she fell, right? She was going to fall anyway. Maybe running she had a shot at falling closer to the floor. Monica and Beulah’s shouts and screams or meows or whatever the hell useless noises they made just barely hit her ears above the sound of her feet pounding on metal, slipping as the catwalk twisted.
She had just enough time to think that of all the ways she’d ever pictured herself dying, tumbling fifty feet and breaking her back on a fucking chair in a fucking school was one she’d never considered before, when the other side of the walk gave way with a snap that should have been a lot louder, a lot more dramatic, than it was.
She threw herself forward, already bracing herself for the fall. Already picturing the City, already terrified, already furious that she finally had something real in her life besides work and the Church, someone real, some reason for living that wouldn’t disappear after she’d ingested it, when the metal beneath her slipped with an awful groaning sound. The far end broke the curtain rod, knocked it down with a crash, and hit the floor.
Her face hit the walkway itself, the metal grid biting her cheek and slamming her chest hard enough to make her momentarily picture her breasts—what there was of them—exploding like smashed balloons. The air in her chest left in a gasp, and she lay there, fifteen feet or so off the ground, on the catwalk that had now become a ramp.
So much for the impending death. Not that she was sorry or anything, but really. That was it?
Monica and Beulah milled around below; in her dizzied mind it appeared at first there were several of each of them before her vision snapped back into place. For a second she thought Beulah was smiling.
Chapter Seven
When questions arise, the Church is the first place to which one should turn. Always.
—The