Lot Fourteen

TThe woman from the city handed me the keys to the Halloway Theatre in a Ziploc bag.

“There are thirty-one of them,” said Priya Nair, holding the bag out at arm’s length like it might go off. “Nobody knows what eleven of them open. Our office has a theory that a few of them don’t open anything, they were just put on the ring to make it heavier. Congratulations.”

I took the bag. It weighed about as much as a small dog.

“Thank you,” I said. “For a dollar, I feel like I got a deal.”

“You paid a dollar and the back taxes and a buyer’s premium and the title search.”

“And the buyer’s premium on the dollar,” I agreed. “Ten cents. I paid it in a dime. The auctioneer gave me a look.”

Priya laughed, and then looked like she wished she hadn’t, because she was a city employee standing on a city sidewalk on the first Monday in August, and I was the lunatic who’d bought a hundred-and-fourteen-year-old vaudeville house at a municipal auction on the strength of one blurry photo because I’d had a bad week.

To be fair, it had been a very bad week.

The Halloway took up most of a block of Mathewson Street, a narrow canyon of brick between Westminster and Washington. From the outside it looked like a wedding cake somebody had left out in the rain for half a century. Cream terra-cotta gone the color of old teeth. A marquee that still said, in about four surviving letters, A ON CL S D. Above it, three tall arched windows, boarded, and above those, carved into a stone panel, a woman in a Greek dress holding up a lyre to the sky, with no nose, because at some point in the last forty-seven years somebody had shot it off with a pellet gun.

I loved her immediately. You have to respect a woman who keeps holding up the lyre with no nose.

“You’ve read the covenant,” Priya said.

“I’ve read the covenant.”

“Out loud, then. For my peace of mind.”

I sighed and recited it, because I had read it, standing in the kitchen of my sublet in Somerville at two in the morning with a beer I wasn’t drinking. “Under the terms of the Dollar Deed program, the buyer shall bring the property into compliance with all applicable codes for a place of public assembly, and shall hold at least one public performance in the building on or before the thirty-first day of October, two thousand twenty-six. Failing which, title reverts to the City of Providence, and the buyer gets nothing back, not even her dime.”

“The dime part isn’t in it.”

“It’s implied.”

“Twelve weeks,” said Priya. She was about my age, in a blazer too warm for August, with a lanyard and a face that kept trying to be professional and kept failing because underneath it she was a theater kid. I could always tell. Theater kids look at a building like the Halloway the way normal people look at a puppy. “I want to be clear that nobody in my office thinks you can do it. Not because of you. Because of the building. The last owner who tried was a development company from Boston with forty employees. They lasted nine days. They said the building had a mold problem.”

“Does it?”

Priya hesitated a fraction too long. “It has a problem,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s mold.”

She unlocked the padlock on the chain across the lobby doors herself, because it was the city’s padlock, and then she stepped back onto the sidewalk and did not step forward again.

“You’re not coming in,” I said.

“I’ve been in.” She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. “Good luck, Ms. Whitlock. Truly. Call me if you need anything. Just—maybe don’t stay after dark the first few nights. Until you get the lights working.”

“It’s a theater,” I said. “Being in the dark is basically the point.”

I should explain about the bad week, since everybody does eventually ask.

I’m a stage electrician. I’ve been one since I was twenty-one. I hang lights, I focus lights, I program the boards that run the lights, I climb things you shouldn’t climb with a wrench on a lanyard around my wrist, and for the last six years I’d done it on national tours: big musicals that roll into a city on nine semis, load in, play eight shows a week for a month, load out at two in the morning, and do it all again in Cleveland. I was good at it. I was the person they called when the moving lights went dark in the middle of the second act and the touring electrician was throwing up in a bucket. I like being that person. I like knowing where everything is in the dark.

In May, our tour folded in Baltimore. One afternoon there was a notice on the call board, and by the next morning there were nine semis going back to a warehouse in New Jersey and seventy people looking at each other in a hotel parking lot. I came home to Boston with a duffel bag and a truck and no job, and on Tuesday of the bad week my landlord sold the building, and on Wednesday the guy I’d been seeing told me, kindly, over tacos, that I was “an amazing second,” like I was a backup generator, and on Thursday my sister Nora called from Maine to tell me she and her fiancé had finally set a date.

“Your fiancé who used to be a ghost,” I said.

“Maggie.”

“I’m just saying it out loud so the universe knows I know.”

“He’s not a ghost now.”

“I know. I’ve had dinner with him. He’s lovely. He folds napkins like they owe him money.” I was sitting on the floor of my empty sublet. “Go pick your flowers.”

She’d paused, the way Nora pauses, which is the way a surgeon pauses before an incision. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” I said. “I’m a great second.”

And on Friday night, at two in the morning, scrolling through the City of Providence’s surplus property list for no reason except that my brain does things like that when it can’t sleep, I found the Halloway. The photo was a single blurred shot of the auditorium, taken with a flash from the back of the orchestra seats: rows and rows of torn red velvet, a ceiling like a jewelry box, and, far away at the bottom of it all, on an empty stage, one small white light.

Lot 14. Minimum bid: one dollar.

I’d driven down to the auction on Saturday morning in my truck, with my ladder still on the rack, telling myself I just wanted to look.

Nobody else bid.

That was the last Saturday in June. The deed took five weeks to close, and until it did, the city let me inside exactly four times, always with Priya, always in daylight, never further than the back row of the orchestra, because the city’s insurance said so. I saw the house from the back, by flashlight. I saw the little white light on the stage, far away. That was all.

And each time, when we came out the stage door into the alley at the end of the day and Priya locked it behind us, I heard something through the steel. One person, inside, clapping. Slowly. Priya said it was the pipes. I called Nora from the truck and told her about it, laughing, the way you tell a ghost story at a sleepover, and she didn’t laugh back.

The lobby smelled like a church that had been closed in a hurry. Dust and pigeon and wet plaster, and underneath that, faintly, something sweet. Popcorn, I thought, which was impossible. Forty-seven years.

I clicked on my headlamp.

Marble floor under a skin of grime. A ticket booth like a little brass birdcage. Two staircases curving up to the balcony like arms. Posters behind cracked glass: BEN-HUR, THE STING, JAWS. The Halloway had been a movie house for most of its life, I knew that much from the listing, but it hadn’t started as one. Above the inner doors there was a painted frieze of jugglers and dancers and a man in a top hat sawing a lady in half, and over it all, in faded gold, the words:

THE HALLOWAY · VAUDEVILLE · NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE

I walked through the inner doors and into the house, and stopped.

I’ve been inside a lot of theaters. Old ones and new ones, Broadway houses and high school gyms, a converted church in Pittsburgh, a hockey arena in Winnipeg. I’d like to say I’m hard to impress.

The Halloway was enormous and broken and so beautiful I forgot to breathe.

The auditorium rose away from me in a great horseshoe, the orchestra seats running down in their torn red rows to the edge of the stage, and above them the balcony curving round like a cupped hand. The ceiling was a dome, painted with clouds and gilded stars, half of them fallen. Four boxes hung beside the stage, two on each side, stacked like opera glasses, their gilt plaster fronts carved with grapes and masks. Water had come through the roof somewhere above the balcony and left a long brown stain down the wall like a tear. Everything was gray with dust.

And it was not dark.

That was the first thing that was wrong, although it took my brain a second to catch up with my eyes. My headlamp was on, but I didn’t need it. There was a soft, steady, colorless light washing the whole house. Not much of one. Enough to see the seats by. Enough to throw my shadow long behind me up the aisle.

It came from the stage.

The great gold frame of the proscenium arch stood open, curtain gone, and beyond it the stage went back and back into blackness, deeper than I’d expected, deep as a barn. And in the middle of it, about ten feet back from the edge, there was a ghost light.

If you don’t work in theaters: a ghost light is a single bare bulb on a stand. You leave it burning on the stage when everybody goes home, so the last person out and the first person in doesn’t walk off the edge into the orchestra pit and break their neck. Every theater has one. Every theater person has a story about one. We say it’s for safety, and it is. We also say it’s so the ghosts can see to perform, and half of us are joking.

This one was old. A tall iron pole on a three-footed base, a wire cage around the bulb, the cage rusted the color of dried blood. The bulb inside it was an old-fashioned clear one, the kind with the glowing wire you can see, burning a steady white.

I stood in the aisle and looked at it for a long time.

The city had shut off the power to the Halloway in July of 1979. I knew that for a fact. It was in the listing. It was in the inspection report. It was in Priya’s email: Please note that there is no electrical service to the building and has not been since 1979. Do not attempt to energize any circuits.

I took out my phone and opened the voltage app I use with the little clip-on meter, because I’m the kind of person who carries a clip-on meter, and then I walked down the aisle to the edge of the orchestra pit, and climbed up the little iron ladder at the side of the stage, and walked across the boards to the ghost light, and crouched down by its base.

There was a cord. Old cloth-wrapped cord, thick as a thumb, running from the base of the stand across the stage and into the darkness of the wings, stage left. I followed it with my headlamp, the light bobbing over the scarred boards, past a heap of old canvas, past the dark wooden bulk of something that might have been a desk, to the back wall.

It ended at an outlet. An old brass stage outlet set low in the back wall, the kind with a hinged lid.

The plug was lying on the floor beside it.

Not plugged in. Not even close. The two brass blades were green with age.

I looked back at the bulb. It burned, white and steady, ten yards away in the middle of the stage, connected to nothing.

“Okay,” I said out loud. My voice went out into the huge empty house and came back to me small. “Okay. That’s a thing.”

I’m not a nervous person. I want that on the record. My sister lived for a month in a house with a murdered cabinetmaker and came out of it with a fiancé; my sister’s best friend lives in a lighthouse with a man who walked up out of the sea in 1942. I have, in the last two years, had to recalibrate a lot of my opinions about what is and isn’t possible. You’d think that would make me braver. Mostly it makes me tired.

I put the plug back down on the floor, very carefully, exactly where it had been.

Then I went to look at the rest of my theater.

I spent the whole afternoon in there. I forgot to eat. I’ve done that before in old houses, but never like this.

Stage left, I found the pin rail, a long heavy timber running the depth of the stage at waist height with dozens of old wooden belaying pins stuck through it, and tied off to the pins, ropes. Hemp ropes, gray and furred with age, running straight up into the dark of the fly loft, to battens somewhere far above. A hemp house. I’d only ever seen one working once, in a summer stock barn in Maine, and the old man who ran it wouldn’t let anyone under sixty touch it. Old theaters ran on rope and sandbags, like sailing ships; that’s where half our words come from, and why you never, ever whistle backstage. Some of the ropes still had sandbags tied on, hanging in the dark like fat sleeping bats.

Further back, a spiral of iron stairs went up to the dressing rooms, a corridor of little doors with stars painted on them. I opened one. A mirror ringed with empty light sockets. A dressing table. A box of greasepaint sticks, Leichner, in a tin, half used. A powder puff gone hard as a stone.

There was a big double door to the alley, chained. And beside it, on the wall, the call board.

I stopped there for a long time too. It was a slab of cork in a wooden frame, gone dark and crumbly, and it was still covered with paper. Notices, in typewriter and pencil. NO WHISTLING ON STAGE OR IN WINGS. NO GUESTS BACKSTAGE AFTER HALF-HOUR. ACTS WILL NOT STAND IN THE PROMPT CORNER. A list of acts with times penciled next to them: THE FLYING DELAURIERS 8.04. MR. ARCHIBALD PIKE AND HIS MARVELOUS DOGS 8.19. COOPER & KEANE, SONGS AND NONSENSE 8.31. MISS LILA DARE 10.40.

And in the middle, pinned at all four corners with brass tacks, a sign-in sheet.

You’ll know one if you’ve ever been in a show. Every performer signs in when they arrive, so the stage manager knows who’s in the building. This one was printed on stiff cream card, HALLOWAY THEATRE — COMPANY SIGN-IN across the top, and a date written in ink: Saturday, October 24th, 1931. Two columns: IN and OUT.

The IN column was full of names. Signatures, all different, in brown faded ink. Lila Dare, with a big loopy L. A. Pike. Wm. Cooper. Somebody called Hap Delaurier, three times, for himself and two brothers. Near the top, small and neat, T. Marchetti — Stage Mgr.

The OUT column was empty. Not one name.

I stood and looked at that and felt the hair on my arms lift, and I didn’t know why, exactly. It was just a piece of card. It was just a night when the show had gone so long that nobody had bothered to sign out.

There was a pencil on a string, tied to a nail at the side of the board. A real one, a short yellow stub. I don’t know what made me do it. I’d been alone in a huge dark building all day, I was tired and hungry, and I’d just found out I owned a light that ran on nothing, and I think some stupid, defiant part of me wanted to put my name on the place. Like writing it on a cast.

I picked up the pencil and wrote at the bottom of the IN column, in big block capitals: M. WHITLOCK — OWNER (LOL).

Then I laughed at myself, and dropped the pencil, and it swung on its string and tapped the wall twice, tock, tock, like somebody knocking.

It was after nine by the time I realized it had gotten dark outside. I only knew because I came down from the dressing rooms and the light through the cracks around the alley door had gone from gold to gray to nothing.

The ghost light was still burning. It had gotten brighter, or the dark around it had gotten darker, so that it seemed to stand in a little island of white in the middle of the huge black stage, and the rest of the theater had gone to shadow. The boxes were black holes. The balcony was a black line. Out in the house I couldn’t see the seats at all.

I walked out into the light. I don’t know why. It was the only light there was.

I stood beside it and looked out at the dark house, and for a minute I let myself imagine it. All fourteen hundred seats full. The gilt glowing. The orchestra in the pit, tuning. The hush when the house lights go down, which is the best sound in the world, a thousand people all holding their breath at once.

I’d stood on a stage like this one exactly once, in front of an audience, eight years ago. I don’t think about it. I’m just telling you so you’ll understand why I stepped back out of the light pretty fast.

And out in the dark, somebody clapped.

I’d heard it before, through a steel door in July. It was different on this side of the door.

Once. A single clap, flat and loud, the sound going up into the dome and coming back down.

I froze.

Then again. And again. Slow. A pause between each one, long enough to count to three. The deliberate applause of somebody sitting alone in a theater who wants you to know they are not impressed, but they are watching. It came from the left of the stage, from up high. From the lower box on the left, the one nearest the stage, which in theaters like this was always the owner’s box.

Clap.

Clap.

Clap.

“Hello?” I said. My voice did not come out the way I wanted it to. “Who’s there? This is private property. I own this. I mean, I just bought it. You should—the city has a padlock—”

Clap.

I did what I always do when I’m scared, which is get louder and funnier and worse.

“Thank you,” I shouted at the dark. “Thank you very much. I’m here all week. Try the veal.”

The clapping stopped.

The silence afterward was worse. It went on and on. I could hear my own heart. I could hear, very faintly, a sound up in the fly loft above me, a creak, slow and long, the sound a rope makes when something heavy hangs from it and turns.

And then a voice said, from the wings, close and urgent and low: “Lady. Whatever you do, don’t stand there.”

I spun round.

The creak came again. Above me. Right above me.

I looked up, and my headlamp beam went up and up into the dark of the fly loft, past ropes and battens and hanging canvas, and caught, high up, a long pipe hung across the stage, swaying gently, though there was no wind. It had something painted hanging from it, a big flat shape on canvas. A moon. A huge pale painted moon, cracked down the middle, turning slowly on its lines.

“Step back into the light,” said the voice. “Back toward the bulb. Slow. Don’t run, you’ll trip on the cable. That’s it. That’s it, Boss. Atta girl.”

I stepped back. One step, two, into the white circle of the ghost light, close enough that I could feel its warmth on the back of my neck.

The rope creaked once more. Then went still.

I looked into the wings.

There was a man standing just at the edge of the light, stage left, by the old wooden desk. Not quite in it. The light came to the toes of his shoes and stopped. A young man, my age or a little younger, in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and a pair of braces over his shoulders and trousers with a crease in them you could cut yourself on. Dark hair curling over his forehead like he’d been running his hands through it. A pencil tucked behind one ear.

He was looking past me, at the call board by the stage door. Where the yellow pencil was still swinging, very slightly, on its string.

His face did something complicated. Something that started as relief and went straight past it to dismay.

“You signed in,” he said. “Aw, Boss.” He shut his eyes. “You signed in.”

II’d like to tell you I handled it smooth.

Ninety-five years I’d been in the wings of the Halloway. I’d seen vaudeville die and talking pictures take its place, and the talkies go to color, and color go to the big wide screens that came in with the fifties, and then the long slow slide down to the last night in 1979, when there were eleven people in a house built for fourteen hundred and the projector broke in the middle of the second reel. I’d seen a lot of people walk out onto my stage. Ushers on a dare. Teenagers with flashlights, and later with telephones that were flashlights. A man from Boston with a clipboard who stood exactly where she was standing and said, Gut it. Keep the facade. Condos, and then left in a hurry the next night without his clipboard, because Mr. Halloway does not care for that kind of talk.

Ninety-five years, and I’d never once said a word to any of them. I’d made it a rule. You keep out of sight in the wings, you keep the show running, and you never let the house see you. That’s the job.

And then this girl walked out under the old moon drop on a Monday night like she owned the place, which, turned out, she did, and I opened my mouth before I could stop it.

So no. I didn’t handle it smooth.

She stood in the light by the bulb and stared at me. She had a lamp strapped to her forehead with an elastic band, like a miner, and it shone straight in my face. She was tall for a girl, taller than me nearly, in a pair of men’s work trousers covered in pockets and a sleeveless undershirt and boots that laced up past the ankle. Her hair was red-brown and tied up on top of her head in a knot that had given up. She had a wrench hanging off her belt and a little knife in a leather case and freckles on her arms, and a face that was going white under the freckles and trying very hard not to.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Who the hell are you?”

“Could you maybe point that thing somewhere else?”

She didn’t. “Who are you? How did you get in here? The doors are chained. The city has a padlock. Are you a squatter? Because I’m not going to call the cops on you, I’m really not, but you need to—”

“I’m the stage manager,” I said.

That stopped her. For about a second.

“The stage manager,” she said. “Of what? There’s no show. There hasn’t been a show here since 1979.”

“There’s always a show,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t, because it sounded like the kind of thing you’d stitch on a pillow. “Look, Boss. Miss. It doesn’t matter who I am right now. What matters is that you signed the board.”

“Signed the—what?”

I nodded past her at the call board by the stage door. The pencil had stopped swinging. Even from where I stood I could see her name at the bottom of the column, those big square letters. M. WHITLOCK — OWNER (LOL). I didn’t know what LOL meant. I’ve since been told. I’m still not sure I approve.

“That’s not a thing,” she said. “It’s a piece of card. I was being stupid. You can’t be—” She stopped. She’d turned to look at the board, and her lamp had gone with her head, and the beam had swept off my face and across the wings, and come back.

I knew what she’d seen. I’d watched people see it before, from a distance.

When the light from her lamp went across me, it didn’t stop. It went through me and lit up the dusty old prompt desk behind me, the brass speaking tube, the hook where I used to hang my coat. Like I was a window somebody had forgotten to clean.

She made a small sound.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’m sorry. I’d have broken it to you gentler.”

She didn’t faint, I’ll give her that. Ushers faint. The fella with the clipboard just about wet himself. Miss Whitlock stood there in the light for a long, long minute with her hand over her mouth, and then she took her hand away and said, in a completely flat voice, “Do the thing again.”

“What thing?”

“The—you know.” She waved a hand through the air. “The see-through thing.”

“It’s not a party trick, Boss.”

“I’m not asking for a party trick, I’m asking for data.” She marched, actually marched, across the stage toward me. She stopped right at the edge of the ghost light’s circle, where the white stopped and the dark started, a yard from me. Up close she smelled like sweat and dust and the stuff mechanics use on their hands. She had a stubborn chin and very gray eyes. “Put your hand out.”

I put my hand out. Into the light.

That’s the strange part. The part I’d never been able to explain even to myself. Inside the circle the bulb throws, I’m almost all there. Solid, mostly. A bit cold. I can lift a pencil, hold a rope, turn a page. Step back out of it and I go thin, then thinner, until out in the far wings I’m nothing but a draft and a feeling. And I can’t go out into the house at all. Past the edge of the stage, past that gold arch, is the house, and the house isn’t mine.

My hand went into the light and stayed a hand.

She stared at it. Then, very slowly, she reached out and poked it with one finger. Like you’d poke a sleeping dog.

“You’re cold,” she said.

“Generally.”

“You’re solid.”

“In here. Mostly.”

“And out there?” She pointed into the wings with her chin.

I took my hand back and stepped sideways, out of the edge of the light, and watched her face as I went. I knew what she was seeing: me going pale and gray, like a photograph left in a window, the old desk showing through my chest.

She swore. It was very colorful. I’d heard worse, but not since the Flying Delauriers, and they swore in French.

“Okay,” she said, finally. “Okay. You’re a ghost. There’s a ghost in my theater. Of course there’s a ghost in my theater. My sister’s going to laugh so hard she’ll pull something.” She took a long breath. “What’s your name?”

“Teddy,” I said. “Teddy Marchetti.”

She looked at the call board again, and I saw her find it. T. Marchetti — Stage Mgr. Small and neat, near the top, in ink gone brown. I’d signed it at half past six on the twenty-fourth of October, 1931, with my pencil, because the pen had run dry, and then gone over it in ink after, because Mr. Halloway liked the sheet to look nice.

“T. Marchetti,” she said slowly. “Stage manager.” She looked at the empty OUT column. “You never signed out.”

“No,” I said. “I never did.”

I told her as much as I could, that first night. Not everything. I didn’t know everything, and some of what I did know I wasn’t ready to say out loud to a stranger with a lamp on her head.

I told her I’d been stage manager of the Halloway from 1925, and before that callboy, and before that a kid from Atwells Avenue who swept the stage for a nickel and the chance to watch the acts from the wings. I told her I’d died here. I didn’t tell her how. I said there’d been an accident on the last night of vaudeville, and she looked up, involuntarily, at the cracked moon hanging up there in the dark, and I didn’t say anything to that.

I told her about the company.

“The acts,” I said. “From the last night. They’re still here. They come back every night and do the show. They don’t know they’re dead, most of them. Or they know and they don’t mind. It’s a lot of hoofers and singers, Boss, they were never what you’d call deep thinkers. Hap Delaurier still thinks he’s getting paid.”

“Every night,” she said.

“Every night but Monday. Monday’s dark. Always was. Old superstition.” I tried a smile. “You picked a good night to show up.”

“And they do the show for who? There’s no audience.”

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t look out at the house. I didn’t have to. I could feel him out there, in his box, the way you feel a draft from a door somebody’s left open. He’d gone quiet when I spoke up. He didn’t like it when I spoke up.

“There’s an audience,” I said. “Of a kind.”

She followed my look anyway. Out into the dark, past the gold frame, to the lower box on the left, the owner’s box, where the gilded grapes on the front were just catching the edge of the ghost light.

“The clapping,” she said.

“Mr. Halloway,” I said. “Cornelius Halloway. He built the place. He had it built for himself, really. Nineteen-twelve. He used to sit in that box every night and watch, and when an act was good he’d clap like that, slow, so they’d know he was the one deciding.” I swallowed. “He’s still deciding.”

“Can he come up here?”

“No. He can’t come on stage. That’s the house, and this is the stage.” I nodded at the edge of the boards, the line where the gold arch met the floor. “He doesn’t cross that line. I don’t cross it the other way. That’s how it’s always been.”

“So what does he want?”

That was the question, wasn’t it. I’d had a long time to think about it.

“He wants the house never to go dark,” I said. “He wants the show to go on forever. And he wants a star.” I looked at the call board again, at her name in pencil, and something in my chest that I’d thought had stopped a long time ago turned over. “And you just signed on with the company, Miss Whitlock. On a night with nobody in the cast list after your name. I’d say that makes you the most interesting thing that’s happened to him since Eisenhower.”

She didn’t believe me, about the signing. Not really. You could see her deciding not to, the way you’d decide not to believe a bad review.

“It’s pencil,” she said. “I’ll erase it. Watch.”

She went over to the call board and licked her thumb and rubbed at her name. Nothing happened. She rubbed harder. The card was old and crumbly and should have torn under her thumb; it didn’t. Her name sat there in its big square letters, and as I watched, and as she watched, the gray of the pencil went faintly, faintly brown at the edges. Like ink drying. Like ink that had been drying for a very long time.

She took her thumb away.

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“Neither am I,” I said, “and here we are.”

She stood very still. And then she did something I hadn’t seen anybody do in that building in ninety-five years. She picked up the pencil on its string and tried to sign herself out.

The pencil wouldn’t touch the paper. I watched her try. Her hand stopped a quarter inch above the OUT column every time, like there was a sheet of glass there. She pushed until her knuckles went white and the lead snapped, and then she stood there holding the broken stub.

“Okay,” she said, in a very small voice. “That’s a thing too.”

“Go home, Boss,” I said. I said it as gentle as I knew how. “Go home tonight. Get some sleep. In the morning call the city and tell them you’ve changed your mind. Sell it back. Let the next fella from Boston have it. And don’t come back after dark.”

“Will that fix it? If I don’t come back?”

I wanted to say yes. God knows I wanted to.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody’s ever signed in before. Not since that night.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked out at the house, at the black hole of Box A, and squared her shoulders. I’d seen that before, too. I’d seen it on acts who’d been booed off in Pawtucket and come back the next night anyway.

“I paid a dollar for this place,” said Maggie Whitlock. “And a dime.”

And she picked up her bag of keys and walked out the stage door into the alley, and I heard the chain rattle, and her boots on the cobbles, and the growl of some kind of automobile starting up, and then nothing.

Out in the dark, slowly, Mr. Halloway began to clap.

She came back the next night, of course.

I knew she would. I’d have bet my stopwatch on it, if I’d still had my stopwatch. I’d watched her all day Tuesday from the wings, which I’m not proud of, though in my defense I’ve got nothing else to watch. She came in the morning with a man from the city who wouldn’t come past the lobby and a man from an insurance company who wouldn’t come past the second row. She spent the afternoon up a ladder with her lamp on, poking at the old wiring and talking to it like it was a horse. She talked to me too, a bit, though in daylight I’m not much more than a cold spot. “Morning, Teddy,” she said when she came in, to the empty wings, like she was trying it out. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going to see if your switchboard’s going to kill me.”

It didn’t kill her. It thought about it.

And then it got dark, and she didn’t leave.

“Go home,” I said. It was ten o’clock. She was sitting on an upturned crate at the edge of the ghost light, eating cold noodles out of a carton with two sticks. “Boss. It’s Tuesday. It’s not dark tonight. Go home.”

“I’m going to see it,” she said. “Your show. If it’s real, I want to see it. If I’m crazy, I want to know that too, so I can get it in writing before I spend my savings on a roof.”

“You don’t understand—”

“So explain it.”

I couldn’t. That was the trouble. I didn’t know what would happen. Every night since 1931, the company had come back and done the show, and every night I’d stood at my desk and called the cues, and every night it had run until the moment it always ran to, and stopped, and gone dark, and I’d come back to myself in the wings by the bulb, and done it all again. Nobody living had ever been inside it. I didn’t know if she’d see it from outside like a movie, or walk through it like a fog, or—

At half past eleven, the callboy knocked on the dressing room doors.

You won’t hear it, if you ever go in there. Or maybe you will. It’s a knock on each door down the corridor, rap rap, and a kid’s voice, cracked and eager, calling: “Half hour, please. Half hour, ladies and gentlemen. This is your half-hour call.”

Her head came up like a deer’s.

“What was that?”

“Boss,” I said. “Listen to me. Stay in the light. Whatever you see, whatever happens. Stay by the bulb. In the light, I can reach you.”

She stood up. The carton of noodles fell over and nobody picked it up.

And the Halloway came alive around us.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s like a house when you come back to it after a long time away, and somebody’s lit the lamps. First the sounds. Feet on the iron stairs. A woman laughing up in the dressing rooms. Somebody running scales on a trumpet in the pit, a little flat. The thump of the Delauriers’ trampoline being carried in from the alley, and Hap swearing at his brothers. Dogs barking, small and excited: Mr. Pike’s dogs, all six of them, little white fox terriers with ruffs round their necks. Then the smells, greasepaint and cigarette smoke and the hot-metal smell of the big carbon spotlights warming up in the booth at the back of the balcony. And then the light changed. Not the ghost light. Something warmer, coming up all round us, yellow and old-fashioned. The footlights. The border lights overhead. The great house lights in the dome, coming up out in the auditorium, so that for a moment the whole place glowed gold and new and every one of the fourteen hundred red velvet seats was whole.

And full.

They were all out there. I never look, if I can help it. Rows and rows of them. Men in boaters and women in cloche hats and children in their Sunday collars, ladies with fox furs round their necks with the little glass eyes, all of them sitting still, perfectly still, with their faces turned toward the stage. A house of the dead. And in the lower box on the left, in evening dress, with his white gloves folded on the velvet rail, Cornelius Halloway, looking straight at her.

She grabbed my arm.

She was standing at the very edge of the light, and I was standing at the very edge of the dark, and she grabbed my arm, and her hand closed on cold and something like cloth, and she held on so hard it would have hurt, if I could still be hurt.

“Teddy,” she said. “Teddy, what—”

“Stay in the light,” I said. “Stay with me. Don’t let go.”

Somebody was pressing past us. Lila, in her silver dress, smelling of violets, nineteen years old forever, giggling about something with the Cooper boy. “Evening, Teddy,” she said as she went by, the way she said it every night. “Big house tonight.” She didn’t look at Maggie. They never did, not the first night.

Except one of them did.

It was the wardrobe mistress. Mrs. Kowalczyk, who’d done the costumes since the Halloway opened, sixty years old and built like a coal stove, with a mouthful of pins and a tape measure round her neck. She stopped dead in front of us and looked Maggie up and down with her little black eyes, and took the pins out of her mouth.

“You,” she said. “New girl. You’re not dressed.”

“What?” said Maggie. “No. No, I’m not—I’m not in the—”

“Overture in twenty minutes and she’s standing about in her underthings,” Mrs. Kowalczyk said to me, disgusted, like it was my fault. Which, as stage manager, I suppose it was. “Teddy Marchetti, what kind of house are you running? Come along, dear. I’ll find you something.”

She put out her big red hand and took hold of Maggie’s wrist.

And Maggie let go of my arm.

I don’t think she meant to. I think it was the way Mrs. Kowalczyk pulled her, firm and kindly, the way she’d pulled a thousand chorus girls into a thousand dresses. Maggie’s hand slid off my sleeve. She took a step, just one, out of the white circle of the ghost light and into the warm gold light of the show.

“Boss,” I said. “Maggie—”

She turned and looked at me. And I watched it happen. Her face went soft and puzzled, like someone who’s walked into a room and can’t remember why. The lamp on her forehead flickered and went out. And then Mrs. Kowalczyk was leading her away up the iron stairs to wardrobe, and she was going, quietly, like a sleepwalker, and I couldn’t follow, because the stairs were out of the light and I was nothing out there, nothing at all.

“Places, please,” called the callboy. “Places for the overture.”

And God help me, I went to my desk, and picked up my pencil, and called the show. Because that’s what I do. That’s all I’ve ever known how to do.

She came out at the very end, in the finale. Twenty to eleven by the clock on the prompt desk; it’s always said twenty to eleven at that point.

She came out in the chorus line behind Lila’s big number. Six girls in a row in silver and white, with feathers in their hair, kicking in time. She was the fourth from the left. She was in one of Mrs. Kowalczyk’s old dresses, ice-blue, beaded, cut for some girl who’d been six inches shorter, with her red-brown hair pinned up in finger waves and her face painted like a doll’s, and she was kicking in time, and smiling, and her gray eyes were empty as two windows.

I watched her from my desk all the way through the number and I couldn’t do a thing.

And then the show ran on to where it always runs to. The finale. Lila in the silver dress, center stage, under the painted moon, coming to the end of the second verse of the waltz, the breath before the last chorus. The moment I never let myself look at.

The house went dark.

I found her at three in the morning, lying on her side in the middle of the stage, curled up next to the base of the ghost light like a kid asleep by a fire.

She was still in the ice-blue dress. The beads were cutting into her arm. Her feet were bare and black on the soles. There was greasepaint on her face, a smear of red on her mouth, and her hair had come out of its pins and was all over the boards.

I knelt down beside her, in the light, where I was solid enough to kneel. I didn’t dare touch her.

“Boss,” I said. “Maggie. Come on. Wake up.”

Her eyes opened. They were gray again. They were hers.

She looked at me. Then down at the dress. Then at her bare black feet. Then, slowly, out past the gold arch into the house, where the dark was back, and the seats were torn and gray and empty, and nothing moved at all.

She was humming. I don’t think she knew it. Under her breath, very softly, she was humming the last bars of Lila’s waltz. A song nobody living had heard sung on that stage since Hoover was president.

“Teddy,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “What did I just do?”

“You did the show,” I said. “The finale. Fourth from the left.” I tried to smile and didn’t make it. “You were good. You were always a beat behind on the kicks. But you were good.”

She stared at me. And then, sitting there on my stage in a dead girl’s dress at three in the morning, Maggie Whitlock started to laugh, and the laugh went wrong halfway through and turned into something else, and she put her painted face in her hands.

And out in the dark, in Box A, one pair of white gloves began, very slowly, to applaud.

IIn the morning, I made a list.

That’s what I do. When a show is falling apart, when the truck’s late and the rigging’s wrong and the star’s throwing up in a bucket, somebody has to stand in the middle of it with a clipboard and write down, in order, what has to happen next. I’m good at that. I’m a lot better at it than I am at feelings.

I sat in the cab of my truck in the alley behind the Halloway at seven in the morning, still in the work pants I’d changed back into in the dark at four, with a bottle of water and a gas station muffin and a legal pad on the steering wheel, and I wrote:

1. Roof.

2. Power. (National Grid, new service, permit.)

3. Fire marshal.

4. Rigging inspection. (Hemp?? Who even inspects hemp.)

5. Egress lights, exit signs, panic bars.

6. Seats. Fourteen hundred of them. Lol.

7. A show. Any show. By October 31.

8. Am I losing my mind.

I looked at number eight for a while. Then I crossed it out, because I’d already established I wasn’t, and wrote underneath it:

8. Ghost.

9. Dead people’s show, nightly, except Mondays.

10. I was in it.

My hands were shaking a little. I put the pen down and drank some water and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. There was still a trace of red at the corner of my mouth, greasepaint, the old waxy kind that doesn’t come off with anything short of cold cream, and I’d scrubbed my face in the theater’s one working sink with industrial hand soap until it hurt.

I’d hung the ice-blue dress on a nail in the dressing room corridor before I left. I hadn’t known what else to do with it. It belonged to somebody.

At eight I called my sister.

Nora picked up on the second ring. I could hear the sea behind her. She and Elias live in the house on the cliff in Maine, which is an inn now, with guests and a website and reviews that say things like wonderful hosts, beautiful woodwork, the innkeeper’s husband is so old-fashioned, it’s adorable!!!, which kills me every time.

“You’re up early,” she said. “Are you in Providence?”

“I’m in Providence.”

“How’s the theater?”

I opened my mouth to tell her. I really did. I had the whole thing ready, the light with no power and the slow clapping and the man in braces who went see-through when my headlamp hit him. Nora of all people would believe me. Nora had stood in a burning house with a ghost.

What came out was: “It’s big.”

“Big how?”

“Big like it has fourteen hundred seats and a hole in the roof and a hemp fly system from 1912 that I’m pretty sure was rigged by pirates.”

She laughed. “Elias says he wants to see it. He’s been reading about it since you told me. He thinks the plaster’s original.”

“Everything’s original. That’s the problem.”

“We’re coming down in September,” she said. “Labor Day weekend, when the summer people have gone and the inn’s quieter. Two weeks. He wants to help. I think he’s bored, honestly, he’s rebuilt every cabinet in this house twice and he’s started looking at the barn.” A pause. “Mags. Are you okay? You sound tired.”

There it was. The pause. I could feel her leaning toward the phone the way she’d lean toward a crack in a wall, wanting to know how deep it went.

And I thought about two Octobers ago. About driving up to Port Ellery in the sleet because she’d stopped answering her texts, and walking into that freezing beautiful house and finding my big sister pale as paper, with her hands like ice and three hours of every day gone missing, telling me in a calm voice that she was in love with a dead man and that she was fine. I’d been so scared. I’d been so angry. I’d stood in the kitchen of Wren Hollow and yelled at a ghost I could barely see, and then I’d put her in my truck and driven her out of there, and she’d turned around and gone back anyway, and it had all worked out. It had worked out because she was Nora and he was Elias and the universe owed them one.

I’m the one who shows up. That’s my whole deal. I’m not the one who needs showing up for.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just not sleeping much. New place. You know.”

“Maggie.”

“Nora. I’m twenty-nine. I own a theater. Go make somebody a scone.”

Ten minutes later my phone buzzed. A Nova Scotia number I had saved as ROSIE (NORA’S LIGHTHOUSE FRIEND), from one phone call last Christmas.

Nora says you bought a theater with a light in it that shouldn’t be on. I lived next to one of those for a while. If you ever need somebody who’s been there, I work nights, I’m always up. — R.

I didn’t answer it. I meant to.

The office of the Providence Redevelopment Agency was on the fourth floor of a building that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated joy. Priya Nair met me in a conference room with a tray of coffee and a binder.

“Okay,” she said. “So here’s the good news.”

“I love good news.”

“You don’t have to bring the whole building up to modern code by October thirty-first. Nobody could do that. Nobody could do that with a hundred million dollars and a time machine.” She opened the binder. “The covenant says one public performance. We can get you a temporary certificate of occupancy for a single event. Limited capacity. Fire watch on site. Every exit working and lit. Panic hardware on every door. Emergency lighting. A fire marshal inspection. An electrical permit and a sign-off from a licensed electrician on a new service. And a rigging inspection on anything that hangs over the stage or the audience.”

“That’s the good news?”

“That’s the very good news. The bad news is it’s still impossible.” She slid a sheet across the table. “This is the city’s rigging inspector. Frank DeLuca. He’s very—thorough.”

“How thorough?”

Priya considered. “He failed the Christmas tree at City Hall last year because the angel wasn’t load-rated.”

I put my head down on the table.

“For what it’s worth,” said Priya, more quietly, “I want you to do it. I grew up seeing the Halloway from the bus. It was already closed. I used to make up stories about what was inside.” She hesitated. “Did you—stay late? Last night?”

I lifted my head and looked at her.

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“No reason.” She tapped the binder, not meeting my eyes. “The Boston people said they heard music. Their site manager said it was the radio from a car in the alley. He said it every day for a week. Then he quit.”

I needed to eat something that wasn’t a gas station muffin, so I drove up to Federal Hill.

You come up Atwells Avenue under an arch with a big bronze pine cone hanging from it, which I later found out is the Italian sign for welcome, and then it’s three blocks of restaurants and bakeries and little shops with the Italian flag painted on the doorframes and old men sitting outside on folding chairs arguing in two languages. It smelled like garlic and espresso and bread. It smelled, honestly, like a place where people stayed.

Marchetti’s Bakery was small and narrow, with a striped awning and gold lettering on the window: MARCHETTI’S · EST. 1911 · PANE E DOLCI. Inside, a long glass case full of cannoli and sfogliatelle and pignoli cookies and those little rainbow cookies with the jam in them, and behind it, a woman in her forties with dark hair in a clip, flour on her forearms and a phone pinned between her ear and her shoulder, telling someone very firmly that no, the Feast of San Gennaro order could not be moved to Tuesday because she was one woman, not a factory.

She hung up. “Sorry. What can I get you?”

“Coffee,” I said. “And one of everything.”

She looked at me properly, then. At my work pants and my boots and the circles under my eyes and, I’m pretty sure, the faint trace of red greasepaint I hadn’t quite scrubbed off.

“You want to sit down, hon?” she said. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“I own the Halloway,” I said. It just came out. “As of Monday.”

The woman put down the tongs she’d been holding.

“Get out,” she said.

“Not yet. I’ve got until Halloween.”

She came round the end of the counter and pulled out a chair at the one little table in the window and pointed at it, and I sat, because you didn’t argue with that finger. Then she brought me a coffee and a plate with a cannoli on it and a sfogliatella and two pignoli cookies, and sat down across from me, and stuck out a floury hand.

“Gina Marchetti,” she said. “You bought the Halloway. For real. The one on Mathewson.”

“For a dollar.”

“I saw it in the paper. I said to my husband, who’s the crazy person. And it’s you.” She shook her head, smiling. “You know my family’s got a history with that place.”

My heart did something. I made my face stay where it was.

“Yeah?”

She pointed behind me.

There was a wall of photographs by the door, the way there always is in places like that. Weddings and First Communions and a framed dollar bill and a signed picture of somebody who’d been on a cooking show. And in the middle, older than the others, in a cheap black frame gone silver at the corners: a young man in shirtsleeves and braces, standing in front of a brick wall, squinting into the sun with his hands in his pockets and a pencil behind his ear. Grinning like somebody had just told him a joke he was too polite to laugh at.

Underneath, on a strip of card in old fountain pen: Zio Teddy. 1903–1931. Halloway Theatre.

I stared at it. I must have stared at it for too long.

“My great-uncle,” Gina said. “Teodoro. Teddy. My grandmother’s big brother. He worked at the Halloway from when he was twelve. He was the stage manager.” She said it the way you’d say he was a doctor. Proud. And then her face changed. “He died there. There was an accident, the last night of the vaudeville. Something fell.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded strange in my own ears.

“Ah, it was a hundred years ago.” She waved it off, but she was looking at the picture. “My Nonna Lucia was sixteen. She worshipped him. Every year on the anniversary she put a candle in the window, right here, all night. Till she died. My mother kept doing it. Now I do it.” She shrugged. “Family’s family.”

“What happened?” I asked. “The accident?”

Gina’s mouth went tight.

She got up and went into the back, and I heard drawers opening, and when she came back she was carrying a shoebox held together with a rubber band. She took out a piece of newspaper, folded small and brown and soft as cloth, and unfolded it on the table in front of me, very carefully, between the cannoli and the coffee.

It was a clipping from something called the Providence Evening Star. October 26, 1931.

STAGE HAND’S DRINKING BLAMED IN THEATRE TRAGEDY

The death of Teodoro Marchetti, 28, stage manager at the Halloway Theatre on Mathewson Street, on Saturday night was the result of his own intoxication, according to the theatre’s proprietor, Mr. Cornelius Halloway. Marchetti was struck by a falling batten during the final number of the evening’s bill. Mr. Halloway stated that the young man had been “drinking freely” backstage throughout the performance and had neglected his duties in the securing of the stage rigging, with tragic results. “I am heartbroken,” said Mr. Halloway. “I treated the boy as a son. But the theatre is an unforgiving master, and it does not forgive carelessness.” No member of the audience was injured. The Halloway, which has been operating at a loss, ended its vaudeville bill with Saturday’s performance and is expected to close its doors at the end of the month.

I read it twice. Then I read it again.

“My great-grandmother never went out of the house again, hardly, after that,” Gina said quietly. “The whole Hill read it. You know what that means, here. A drunk. A Marchetti, a drunk, who got himself killed and nearly killed a girl. My Nonna said it was a lie. She said Teddy never touched a drop, not even wine at Christmas, because their father drank and Teddy hated it. But who’s going to believe a sixteen-year-old girl over Mr. Halloway?”

I thought of a voice in the dark saying, Step back into the light. Slow. Don’t run, you’ll trip on the cable.

I thought of a slow single clap from Box A.

“I believe her,” I said.

Gina looked at me, surprised. Then she laughed and wiped her eyes with the back of her floury wrist. “Listen to us. I don’t even know your name.”

“Maggie.”

“Maggie. You need somewhere to stay, Maggie? You can’t sleep in a truck in the alley behind that place. I’ve seen that alley. There’s a room upstairs. It’s small, but it’s clean, and it smells like bread.”

I went back to the Halloway that night with a box of cannoli and the clipping folded in my shirt pocket, and he was waiting for me.

You couldn’t see him, at first. Not until the sun had gone. In the daytime he was a cold spot in the wings, a pressure, the feeling you get when somebody’s reading over your shoulder. But as the light through the cracks went gray, he came up out of the dimness by the old desk like a photograph coming up in a tray of developer, first the shape of him and then the shirtsleeves and then the face, and by nine o’clock he was standing at the edge of the ghost light with his arms folded, looking at me the way my mother used to look at me when I came in after curfew.

“I told you to go home,” he said.

“I went home. I’ve got a room now. Above a bakery.” I held up the box. “I brought cannoli.”

He looked at the box. Something happened in his face. I saw it, even in that light. It was there and gone, fast, like somebody flinching.

“Where’d you get those?”

“Marchetti’s,” I said. “On Atwells.”

He didn’t say anything.

I put the box down on the edge of the light. I took the clipping out of my pocket and unfolded it and held it up, so the light fell on it, so he could read it from where he stood.

He read it. It took him a long time. I watched his eyes go down the column, and stop, and go back to the top, and come down again.

“Lucia kept this?” he said finally. His voice had gone rough.

“Your sister. She kept a candle in the window for you every year, on the anniversary. Gina still does it. Gina’s her granddaughter.” I swallowed. “She says Lucia always said it was a lie. That you never drank.”

He turned away. He walked off into the dark of the wings, out of the light, and went gray and thin, and then he was just a darker shape against the dark by the pin rail with his head down and his hands braced on the old timber.

I let him be. I sat down on my crate at the edge of the ghost light and waited.

After a while he came back. He stood at the very edge of the light, the toes of his shoes just touching it, and said, very evenly, “What do you want, Boss?”

“I want to know what happened.”

“No. I mean what do you want. With this place. Why are you here? You could walk away. You could sell it back to the city tomorrow.”

“I told you. I paid a dollar.”

“That’s not an answer.”

I looked out at the house. The dark, and the gray shapes of the seats, and the black hole of the box on the left where nothing moved.

“I want to open it,” I said. “I want to bring the lights up in here. I want there to be people in those seats who aren’t dead. I’ve spent eight years making other people look good in the dark, and I’m really, really good at it, and just once I’d like it to be my house.” I took a breath. “And I’m not leaving you alone in here with him. Not after I’ve read that.”

He stared at me. Then he looked down at the box of cannoli by his feet, and then back at me.

“You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“So tell me. And while you’re at it, tell me how to make your hemp rail not kill a fire inspector named Frank, because I’m going to need all the help I can get.”

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth went up. It was the grin in the photograph. The one about the joke he was too polite to laugh at.

“Okay,” said Teddy Marchetti. “Okay, Boss. A deal. I know every rope in this house. Every pin, every line, every sandbag, every wire your switchboard ever ran. I’ll teach you. I’ll help you get your lights up and your inspector happy.” He held up a finger. “One condition.”

“Name it.”

“You don’t open on the thirty-first. You open on Saturday the twenty-fourth of October.”

I frowned. “Why? That’s a week early. I need every day I’ve got.”

“Because that’s the night,” he said, and his voice had gone quiet, “and it’s a Saturday this year. Same as it was. It’s come round on a Saturday a dozen times since I died. Every time, the house was showing pictures, or it was shut up dark with nobody to open it.” He looked at the call board, at the long empty OUT column. “Something has to finish, Boss. And I think that’s the only night it can.”

“What has to finish?”

He just looked at me.

“Okay,” I said. “The twenty-fourth. Deal.”

I held out my hand. He looked at it. Then he stepped forward, into the light, and took it, and his hand was cold and solid and rough with old rope burns, and he shook it once, firm, like a man closing a contract on a handshake in 1931.

He made me leave at eleven. He walked me to the stage door, as far as the light would let him, and stood in the wings and watched me go.

“Don’t come back tonight,” he said. “Whatever happens. Lock your door.”

I drove back up the hill to Gina’s and climbed the narrow stairs to the little room over the bakery that smelled of bread, and locked the door, and put a chair under the handle for good measure, and lay down on the narrow bed with my clothes on. Somewhere below me in the dark, the big ovens were ticking as they cooled. I thought I’d never sleep.

I woke at four in the morning on the stage of the Halloway, in the ice-blue dress, with my feet bare and black and a feather in my hair.

He was kneeling beside me in the light again. His face was the color of the old plaster.

“I locked the door,” I said. My voice was a croak. “I put a chair under the handle.”

“I know,” said Teddy. “I know you did.”

Later, after I’d changed in the dressing room with my hands shaking so badly I couldn’t do the hooks, after I’d walked out into the gray alley and sat in my truck and watched the sky go pale over the roofs, I took out my phone. I don’t know why. To check the time. To touch something from the twenty-first century.

I opened my photos.

I’d taken a lot of pictures the day before, for the insurance people. The roof. The switchboard. The rows of seats. One of me, dumb, a selfie in the lobby under the gold frieze, grinning, holding up the bag of thirty-one keys.

They were all there. Every one of them had gone brown.

Not a filter. I checked. I checked the settings and the originals and the cloud. Every photo I’d taken inside the Halloway had turned the soft yellow-brown of an old print left in a drawer, faded at the edges, with a scatter of white specks like dust on the lens.

And in the selfie under the frieze, the woman holding up the keys was still me. Same face, same freckles. But her hair was pinned up in finger waves. And she wasn’t grinning anymore.