![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twobirdsonesongTitle: Ghostlight
Pairing: Chris/Darren
Rating/Length: G / 5,100
Summary: Darren is a fairly successful actor currently staring in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway. One night, after a show, all alone on the stage, he turns off the ghost light. What happens next changes his perspective and more.
Read on AO3
It doesn’t actually take that long for Darren to get cleaned up after a show. By “Wicked Little Town” most of his make up is lost to sweat and costume changes, and by curtain call he’s down to little black shorts and sneakers. It’s quick and easy to jump into the shower and rinse the last of the paint and glitter and sweat from his skin. It takes far, far longer to make him look like Hedwig Robinson than it does to make him look like himself again.
Post-show, he’s usually an odd convergence of exhaustion and adrenaline, and it takes time to find his equilibrium. Some days it takes longer than others. Darren lingers a little that Thursday night, chatting with some fans who’ve come backstage, and having an absurdly long talk with the PSM about the newest season of Downton Abbey.
The Belasco is generally quiet after a show. The crew is efficient at resetting the stage for the next show; most of them have already gone home by the time Darren grabs his jacket and his bag, and turns off the light in his dressing room. He knows he probably still has some people waiting for him outside at the stage door, but he pauses at the edge of the stage, staring out into the near-dark of the house.
He loves this theatre. The deep red seats. The Tiffany light fixtures. The intricate ceiling. It’s old and small and the recent renovations haven’t quite taken away the stale, familiar smell of decades of paint, burning lights, and soul rending aspirations. It feels like a different kind of home.
Darren carefully makes his way across the stage he just poured heart and sweat out on, cautious of the set pieces that remain on stage after curtain and the front half of a car he jumps into every night for a costume change.
Near center stage, mounted on a portable light standard is a single bulb, emitting a cold, white glow.
With the rest of the theatre dark and quiet, the stage is eerie and a little unnerving. The light of the single bulb just barely illuminates the front row of seats in the orchestra; the rest of the theatre melts into a depthless dark, with just the exit signs glowing bright. There are times during the show when Darren stands alone with a microphone under a single light, but it doesn’t feel like this. It doesn’t feel so empty, not with the hushed breathes of the audiences and a thousand beating hearts.
Darren turns around; the ghost light draws his attention and he walks towards it. His footsteps are oddly loud in the near silence. Somewhere outside on the street a siren cuts through, muffled and dim. Darren loves the stories behind the lights; loves how deeply entrenched they are in theatre culture.
There’s a simple switch at the back of the stand and he knows he shouldn’t. He knows it goes against every unwritten rule and superstition of the theatre. He knows it’s just a few steps down from giving name to that Scottish play, but Darren has always lived a little recklessly, perhaps a little carelessly. And what can it hurt, really?
The light goes out without a sound, throwing the stage into blackness. Darren blinks. The only lights in the theatre now are the exits signs and faint glows coming from somewhere backstage. Darren stands in the dark. The beating of his heart suddenly seems so loud in his ears when there’s little else to focus on. He breathes in and tastes the dust of the theatre, and, oddly, something sharp and bitter like electrical wire. Stranger still is the vanilla-laced scent of old, dry paper, like the inside of an antique bookstore that carries faintly across the stage. He breathes in again, slowly.
Somewhere in the Belasco something rustles, like the brush of paper, or skin against wood, and Darren startles. His fingers search for the switch, fumbling as his heart suddenly thuds fasters. It’s the same feeling he got as a child in the basement of his parents’ house, some unnamed terror that made him race up the stairs to the warm safety of the kitchen. Finally his fingers find their mark and the cold light illuminates the stage once more.
“Darren?”
He jumps at the sound and turns. One of the stagehands, Dana, is standing just off to the side, staring at him inquisitively. “Yeah?” Darren grunts.
“What are you still doing here?”
“Sorry, was just heading out. I uh, I thought I’d dropped something.”
Dana doesn’t looks like she believes him, but she nods and walks off anyway.
Darren exhales sharply and heads for the exit, but he pauses at the edge of the stage and looks back. The ghost light still stands and the theatre is still empty. The scent of paper and vanilla is gone. Darren leaves.
***
A few days later, Darren really does leave something behind in his dressing room – his keys. He only realizes it halfway through signing playbills and posters at the stage door that night after the show.
“I gotta get my keys,” he tells his favorite security guy, who rolls his eyes like he wanted to be home an hour ago. “Be right back.”
He means to make quick work of it. Run in, grab his keys, and get out. He’s got a crock pot of chili on a timer in his apartment and a stomach growling for food.
But as he comes around the corner from his dressing room he catches a glimpse of the darkened stage and the single light gently illuminating the boards. Unaccountably drawn to it, Darren finds himself standing before the ghost light before he realizes his feet have moved.
There’s no reason to do what he wants to do, no reason to turn off the light and tempt fate. Fate. It’s a funny concept. Darren believes in things like kindness, goodness, and the human spirit. He believes that hard work and honesty pay off, even if it takes time, and he believes that a single action cannot change the outcome of his life. There is nothing flicking the switch of the light could possibly do.
With nary a sound the light goes out and the stage goes dark. It is immensely, breathtakingly quiet. He can still hear the laughter of the crowd from that night, and the nights before, their delight and joy in the show. He can hear the bass and the guitar and the scrape of the microphone stand across the stage. It’s easy to stand there and let the warm memories wash over him.
A shimmer of movement on the edge of his vision has Darren gasping and spinning on his toes. But there is no one there. He squints into the dark. Searches for something. A stagehand. His security. A rat. Anything. Darren waits. Breathes. The dark is dark and there is nothing more.
There is something more. That faint smell of old books, of vanilla and dry paper.
“Jesus,” Darren mutters to himself, putting his hand on his chest over his rapidly beating heart.
He turns the light back on, but there is nothing else, no flash of movement revealed, no source of the scent.
***
That night, Darren dreams of the stage and actors in odd costumes, of boys with grease in their hair and girls in tattered lace.
***
Darren should leave well enough alone, but he can’t. Naturally, a week later, Darren is once again sneaking away from security at the end of the night. He knows he saw nothing, and he knows the smell must come from something in the theatre (even though he’s never smelled vanilla anywhere else in the Belasco). There are logical, rational reasons for it – his brain filling in the dark and the quiet with the random firing of synapses. It must be as simple as that.
He goes right to center stage and turns off the light, bold as brass even as nervous tension fills his belly.
Darkness descends and Darren waits.
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to leave the light on?” The voice comes from the deep dark of the back of the stage. The ghost light flashes back on.
Darren stumbles back in a burst of panic and surprise, and nearly falls on his ass.
Standing before him, where just a moment ago there was no one, is a young man.
“Jesusfuck!” Darren exclaims. His heart is hammering in his throat and he wonders if this is what a heart attack feels like.
The young man examines him curiously. His eyes are very keen. “Why did you turn out the light?” He asks.
“Who the fuck are you?” The young man looks to be in his early 20s, tall and fair. He is no one Darren has ever seen around the theatre before. Or the city.
“Chris.” The man responds. “Why are you dallying about the light? What do you want?”
“How did you get here?” Darren demands. His heart is calming, but he’s still sweating. “No one else was here.”
“I’m always here.”
“The show is over. The theatre is closed.”
The look Chris gives him is almost pitying and his eyes are the color of a deep and frozen lake. “Not to me.”
Darren blinks and looks harder at the young man, at Chris. There is something off about him, something odd. His skin is too pale and his clothing so peculiar, like he just stepped off the stage of Newsies. Loose fitting trousers sitting too high on his waist, and a button down shirt in an old-fashioned cut. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and his forearms are surprisingly thick for the slimness of his build.
He seems solid enough. Darren cannot see through him to the other side of the stage. But there is something weightless about him. He feels as though he might disappear at any moment. The edges of him are vague, almost as though Darren is seeing him out of the corner of his eye at all times. As though if Darren looks too closely at him he might blink away completely.
And the way he wasn’t there and then he was. In the space between a heart beat.
The scent of vanilla has returned, stronger now than it was before, and the sharp hint of something electrical. If Darren didn’t know he was standing in the middle of the Belasco he’d have said he was in an old used bookstore.
“No.”
Chris cocks his head. “I’ve said nothing you might disagree with or refute.”
“You can’t be.” Darren’s hands are cold, but his palms are sweating.
Chris smiles then, just a flicker. “Ah, so you’ve realized.”
Darren feels faint. He does not believe in ghosts. He doesn’t. The body dies and he doesn’t care what happens after.
And yet.
“No fucking way.” Darren reaches out, intending to touch Chris’ shoulder, just to see what might happen, but Chris steps nimbly away. His feet do not make a sound.
“That’s really rather rude of you,” the young man chides.
“Sorry, it’s just…” Darren doesn’t know what to say. It’s not every day he meets a ghost. He’s not completely sure he’s not dreaming, or hallucinating. Perhaps he fell off the riser during “Wicked Little Down” and all of this is a dream while he lies unconscious in a hospital room.
“First time?” Chris asks.
“Yeah, I uh, I think I need a minute.” Darren sits down heavily on the stage before he really does fall on his ass.
Chris hovers before him. He doesn’t hover; he stands. His feet certainly seem to be resting on the ground. Darren doesn’t understand. Whenever he thought about ghosts he thought of them floating off the ground, gliding and hovering about as they went. Not simply standing around like any other person. Living person.
“Were you not trying to summon me?” Chris asks. His hair is thick and brown, swept back neatly from a straight part along the left side.
“Summon you?”
“You turned off my light,” Chris says. “Usually when people do that they’re trying to get me to appear. Well, not me, but Mr. Belasco.”
Darren’s head swims and he thinks maybe he should lie down. “Mr. Belasco?”
Chris nods. “You know. The old man dressed like priest? Cavorting with impressionable young ladies at all hours? He’s the one everyone comes looking for.” Chris smooth the front of his shirt and the fabric seems to ripple like water.
“You don’t look like an old man dressed like a priest,” Darren points out.
“Well, I’m not the ghost of Belasco,” Chris sniffs. “But I am a ghost.”
“So what happened to the other guy?”
“Oh, he left these boards many years ago. His theatre became successful. His dreams fulfilled. Off he went.” Chris flicks his fingers towards the exit signs. A pinched, wistful expression flits across his fine features before disappearing into practiced calm.
“Well, I heard it was because a show featured full front nudity and he didn’t want to stick around to see what other shameful things were brought to his theatre.”
Chris lifts an eyebrow imperiously. “Are you going to believe a story? Or someone who was there?”
Darren grins for the first time since Chris…appeared. “You have a point.”
He feels steadier, somehow, and he stands up again, brushing the dust off his pants. He’s still not completely sure this isn’t all in his head, but if it is, it’s still a nice conversation. Even if it means he’s going to have to go to a doctor and possibly hand a couple of shows over to his understudy while he recuperates.
“So why are you still here?” Darren asks, and then frowns as Chris’ once proud shoulders slump.
“My dreams have not been fulfilled.”
“What does that mean?”
Chris shrugs. “Just what it means.”
Darren doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know what to say to anything. If this is real, he’s speaking to a ghost, and that’s something he needs time to process. And if it’s not real, he’s hallucinating, or worse. Either way, he needs to go home and get some sleep. Alone.
“I have to go,” Darren says.
“Of course you do,” Chris agrees. “Long life to live and all.”
“I’ll be back.”
Chris waves a pale hand. “No need for such pleasantries. You work here. I’ve seen you many times before; I’ll see you many times again.”
That takes Darren aback. How much has Chris seen? How often is he around? How much does he remember of his life and the years since? Darren wants to ask all that and more.
“Yeah, but will I see you?”
“It’s been 100 years; I haven’t left yet.”
“Will I need to turn the light out again or will you just–?” Darren waves his hands around.
“I’ll find you.”
***
To his great surprise, Darren sleeps deeply that night and does not dream at all. He wakes easily and for a moment does not remember Chris. The ghost. And then he does. Darren spends the morning puttering around his apartment, getting tea and breakfast and wondering what the ghost is doing – where is he now, where he’s been these last months.
He wastes five hours hunched in front of his computer, watching videos of alleged ghost sightings and reading through shoddily put-to-together websites about spirits, specters, and the afterlife. But none of it really makes any sense. Too much of it seems like hocus, hokum, and chicanery. Except Chris. He was there. Maybe Darren did not touch him, but he was there. There were no flickering lights or cold spots, only that faint scent of paper and vanilla.
He was real.
Darren slumps back against the couch and stares at the ceiling until he has to go to work.
***
“I like your Hedwig the best, you know,” Chris says. “And I’ve seen them all.”
Darren blushes a little at the compliment. He’s sitting in front of the drum kit, in his Yitzak’s usual spot. It had taken a few days to find a chance slip away from security and sneak back to the stage after the theatre closed, but Chris had appeared to him in moments.
“Is that what you do all day?” Darren asks. He’s sitting again in front of the drum kit while Chris paces the stage with smooth movements. He seems to like to move rather than stand still, and as he moves, however it is that he moves, the edges of him fade, almost imperceptibly.
Chris shrugs. “What else am I to do? Time passes differently for me, I think. Today. Yesterday. Five years ago. They are all the same to me. And yet…different, somehow. Somehow distinct if I try to separate them from one another, to pull the strings apart. But sometimes I lose days, weeks, even years to nothing.”
That seems terribly sad to Darren, who hates to waste even an hour of his life.
“Where do you go?”
“Nowhere. There’s nowhere to go. I’m just…not. And then I am again. I can explain it in no other way”
Darren frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Chris walks across the stage to run his hand across the top of the car. No sound comes his steps or his touch. “I’ve been dead a very long time. I might be a bit addled.”
Darren opens his mouth, but then Chris looks at him and winks, and Darren laughs.
“You’re fun, for a ghost.”
“You’re fun, for a living man,” Chris counters. “So many of you are…not.”
Darren can’t even fathom all the things Chris must know, all the things he must have witnessed.
“So how did you die?” He blurts it out almost before he finishes having the thought. “Sorry, that was rude of me to ask.”
Chris shrugs and walks around behind the drum kit. His fingers make no sound against the cymbals. “A fever. My sister and mother caught it too, but they survived. I think I must have suffered, some, because I remember their faces looking very sad. It’s one of the last things I remember from before.”
“I’m sorry.” Darren doesn’t know what else to say.
“It’s been a very long time. The wounds heal.”
“When did you die?”
Chris’ forehead creases adorably. “1922, I think. I was twenty-one at the time, unwed and still living in my parents’ home. I did not make enough money to set out on my own, and my mother welcomed the help with my sister. I was not…embarrassed to be at home, though many of my friends had already wed and begun their own families. But I was – well, I was always a little different than they were.”
Darren draws his legs up and rests his arms on his arms. He’s deeply enthralled with Chris, with the way he speaks in careful sentences, the way he carries himself with a straight back and nervous hands.
“What did you do?” Darren asks. “You know, for a job?”
A smile curves Chris’ lips and Darren adores the sight of it. “Oh, well I worked here.” A sweep of his hand takes in the whole of the theatre.
“At the Belasco?”
“Just so. A lowly stagehand was I.” Chris dips in a slight, deferential bow. “But I loved it. Everything about it. The costumes. The orchestra. The reverent rapture of the audience. It was thrilling to be even so small a part of it. But oh, the words.” Chris places his hand on his chest, over his heart, as his eyes drift closed. Darren cannot look away from him. “It was the words I loved the most. The cadence. The rhythm. The way a perfect sentence could bring a man to tears of sorrow or joy.” He opens his eyes again and Darren is struck by how blue they are.
“I wanted to be a writer, you see,” Chris muses and he sways gently, as though hearing music from long ago. “I needed to work to help support my family, but I wanted to write. Novels. Stories. Plays. I wanted to write plays the most. I learned so much just being in the rafters and backstage night after night, hearing the dialogue over and over, memorizing the way it sounded, the way it all worked. It was all so beautiful.”
Darren wets his lips. “Did you? Write, that is.”
Chris’ expression dims a little. “I did. I had pages and pages written out. My thoughts. My plays. My mother had made sure my penmanship was superb.”
“Where did it all go?”
Chris shrugs. “That I do not know. After I died I lost some time. Eventually, my parents disposed of my things. My sister could not wear my clothes, but she did take my beloved books.” Chris’ hands close as those seeking the comfort of the worn spine of a book.
A million and six thoughts flood Darren’s mind, so fast he can’t keep track of them. It seems so terribly sad that Chris’ work is just gone – never to be read again.
Though he often hates to admit it to himself, and certainly not to anyone else, Darren cannot completely deny that the thought of leaving behind a trace of himself after he is gone is one of many motivating factors for doing what he does. He may never leave a truly lasting legacy, he may be forgotten by most after he takes his final bow, but the idea that someone, somewhere will remember him and what he has done pushes what he does now.
“Why don’t you keep writing?” Darren asks. “Leave them for someone to find and read?” The thought blooms suddenly.
Chris smiles sadly. “Would that I could put pen to paper.”
“Oh.” Darren looks Chris over again, struck by how real he seems, how real he feels. Even with his old clothes and styled hair, his perpetual youth and the very fact that he is dead, Darren keeps thinking of him as alive.
“So…how does that work?”
“What?” Chris’ head cocks curiously.
“How…corporeal are you?”
“Not enough. When I feel strongly – as much as I can feel anymore – I can affect things. Certain things. Blowing a stack of playbills over. Making the curtains move. Little things. Silly things. And I can…” Chris trails off, and as his voice fades, so does the light emanating from the bare bulb on the stage. Dimming until it darkens completely.
“Shit,” Darren breathes, his eyes gone comically wide. His heartbeat has ratcheted up with the display of Chris’ true nature and he struggles to calm himself.
Chris laughs, but his chest does not move with the sound. “It is little more than a parlor trick,” he confesses, and the light glows bright once more. “Do not ask me to explain how it works. I do not know. But it took years to be able to control what little I can do. In the first years after my death I would…flare out, I suppose it the right word. When I was angry, or scared, or sad – so very sad – nearby candles would erupt, or splutter out. Bells would sound. Dogs would howl. Very disconcerting things, I promise you. I’ve got it mostly under control now.”
The ghost light dims again, like an amused wink, and Darren is enraptured.
If Chris were alive, if Chris were anything but a ghost, Darren would ask him out that very moment. He’d get his phone number and then take him out to a late drink right then; he wouldn’t even wait a day to ask. They’d go to one of Darren’s favorite late night spots, get a couple drinks, maybe get a little food, and talk.
Darren wants to talk to Chris for hours. He wants to know everything Chris knows – his one hundred years of experience, different though it is. Chris has watched the world change in ways Darren cannot even comprehend. All that time and life in one body, one mind. Darren is captivated by the mere thought of it. He wants Chris to tell him about his life and his plays. In time, he’d make Chris take him home and show him his work, his pages of writing. Darren would read the dialogue aloud, act it all out for Chris to make him blush and laugh, before taking Chris down to the floor and make him blush for a completely different reason.
But Chris is a ghost. He is not a man.
Darren exhales deeply as the fantasy he quickly built crumbles just as fast.
“I have to go,” he says, mournfully. It must be late, and he cannot have someone catch him talking to himself in the middle of the stage when he should be gone.
Chris pouts and the edges of him seem to flicker. “But I want to talk to you more.”
“I know.”
“Can’t you come back after the theatre is long closed?”
Darren shakes his head, truly regretful. “There’s a security system. Even if I had the keys I couldn’t deactivate it.”
“Well, I think you know where to find me,” Chris says and his eyes are fathomless. Darren is suddenly, hopelessly gone on him.
***
All the next week Darren has the same dream.
An empty theatre and a quiet boy under a single spotlight, unmoving on the stage while handwritten pages of a script swirl around him, carried by an unseen wind.
Darren wakes one Wednesday morning with an idea he cannot shake.
***
Darren vibrates with nervous energy the entire day, filled by the deepest urge to find Chris, to talk to him, to tell him what he came up with. He has to catch himself from rushing the show over and over. His movements are too big; his voice is too loud. He takes a woman’s eyeglasses from her and tosses them three rows away after licking the lens. He might have to apologize to her after the show, if she’s still around before he talks to Chris.
The stage door is crowded that night and Darren does his best not to rush through the people waiting. He smiles and chats and signs his name, and all the while he thinks he Chris’ pale skin and the bizarre fact of his existence.
Finally, the street outside the Belasco is empty and Darren slips back into the theatre. Anticipation makes his stomach clench and his heart flutter. He surreptitiously checks that everyone has gone home; he now knows a way out of the theatre without needing a key, though he can’t get back in the same way.
The ghost light is on and it beckons Darren across the familiar, groaning boards of the stage.
“Chris?” He calls out, keeping his voice low. “Chris are you there?”
“I’m always here.”
Darren turns around. Chris stands a few feet away, wearing the same clothes as always (the clothes he probably died in, Darren realizes suddenly), with his hair carefully combed as it always is. He is beautiful, Darren recognizes deep in his gut.
“Hi!” Darren exclaims, too loudly.
Chris smiles and his amusement is clear around his eyes. “Hello.”
“So, I had an idea. An epiphany, really.”
Chris raises an interested eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“I could write for you,” Darren blurts out, less eloquently than he intended too.
“What?”
“Your plays. I could transcribe them for you.”
A frown creases between Chris’ eyebrows. “And then what?”
“Publish them,” Darren says, the thrill of the idea bubbling up as brilliantly as it had when he’d awoken with it. “Produce them. I know a lot of people who are looking for new works to put on. New plays. I could help make it happen.”
But Chris does not look as excited as Darren had anticipated and it makes an odd worry settle across his shoulders.
“And…you would get all the credit.”
Darren’s stomach sinks. “What? No. I – your name would be on them as author.”
“But I am dead,” Chris responds, matter of fact, though he seems sad. “How would you explain where you acquired them?”
Darren realizes he had not really thought this all the way through. “I could say I found them in some archive. Or…an estate sale. Tucked away in some old house or something.”
“But they would look new,” Chris counters. “And I’ve seen the things you people write on these days. No one handwrites anything.”
Darren runs his hands through his hair in frustration. “I just, I want to help you, you know? You – you’re stuck here, but you can’t do anything. And I hate that. You had these big dreams of being a writer, but you can’t do something about it, and you died so young and it’s so incredibly unfair. Meanwhile there are idiots just popping shit out left and right. And here I am, and I’ve got two hands and I could write your plays for you and make sure your voice gets out there where it belongs and–”
Cool air brushes across Darren’s mouth, stopping his words, and he shivers.
Chris steps back and licks his lips curiously.
“Did you just–?” Darren feels chilled and warmed at the same time. This close he should feel the heat of Chris’ body, but he doesn’t.
Chris swallows. “I’ve never tried that before,” he whispers.
“Try it again.”
Chris closes his eyes, as though concentrating on something, and this time Darren feels the press of cool lips against his own, almost like the memory of a kiss he had some time ago.
“Oh, my,” Darren sighs.
“No one has ever offered what you are offering,” Chris says and he sounds awed.
“It might not work.”
“Perhaps not. But I…am willing to try. If only to get to spend more time with you.”
“Can you leave the theatre? Come to my apartment?”
Chris blinks slowly. “I think I want that enough to try. You, these plays, that would be my old life fulfilled.”
“But then you might – you might disappear,” Darren mutters, realizing that too for the first time. He has known since the beginning that Chris is but a ghost, a memory of a man, but somehow he has not thought of him as such. The idea of losing him to dust just as fast makes him cold to his bones.
But Chris kisses him again, and Darren almost feels the weight of it. Almost feels warmth. “We shall see. Life is long, Darren, and there are many ways to live.”
Pairing: Chris/Darren
Rating/Length: G / 5,100
Summary: Darren is a fairly successful actor currently staring in Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway. One night, after a show, all alone on the stage, he turns off the ghost light. What happens next changes his perspective and more.
Read on AO3
It doesn’t actually take that long for Darren to get cleaned up after a show. By “Wicked Little Town” most of his make up is lost to sweat and costume changes, and by curtain call he’s down to little black shorts and sneakers. It’s quick and easy to jump into the shower and rinse the last of the paint and glitter and sweat from his skin. It takes far, far longer to make him look like Hedwig Robinson than it does to make him look like himself again.
Post-show, he’s usually an odd convergence of exhaustion and adrenaline, and it takes time to find his equilibrium. Some days it takes longer than others. Darren lingers a little that Thursday night, chatting with some fans who’ve come backstage, and having an absurdly long talk with the PSM about the newest season of Downton Abbey.
The Belasco is generally quiet after a show. The crew is efficient at resetting the stage for the next show; most of them have already gone home by the time Darren grabs his jacket and his bag, and turns off the light in his dressing room. He knows he probably still has some people waiting for him outside at the stage door, but he pauses at the edge of the stage, staring out into the near-dark of the house.
He loves this theatre. The deep red seats. The Tiffany light fixtures. The intricate ceiling. It’s old and small and the recent renovations haven’t quite taken away the stale, familiar smell of decades of paint, burning lights, and soul rending aspirations. It feels like a different kind of home.
Darren carefully makes his way across the stage he just poured heart and sweat out on, cautious of the set pieces that remain on stage after curtain and the front half of a car he jumps into every night for a costume change.
Near center stage, mounted on a portable light standard is a single bulb, emitting a cold, white glow.
With the rest of the theatre dark and quiet, the stage is eerie and a little unnerving. The light of the single bulb just barely illuminates the front row of seats in the orchestra; the rest of the theatre melts into a depthless dark, with just the exit signs glowing bright. There are times during the show when Darren stands alone with a microphone under a single light, but it doesn’t feel like this. It doesn’t feel so empty, not with the hushed breathes of the audiences and a thousand beating hearts.
Darren turns around; the ghost light draws his attention and he walks towards it. His footsteps are oddly loud in the near silence. Somewhere outside on the street a siren cuts through, muffled and dim. Darren loves the stories behind the lights; loves how deeply entrenched they are in theatre culture.
There’s a simple switch at the back of the stand and he knows he shouldn’t. He knows it goes against every unwritten rule and superstition of the theatre. He knows it’s just a few steps down from giving name to that Scottish play, but Darren has always lived a little recklessly, perhaps a little carelessly. And what can it hurt, really?
The light goes out without a sound, throwing the stage into blackness. Darren blinks. The only lights in the theatre now are the exits signs and faint glows coming from somewhere backstage. Darren stands in the dark. The beating of his heart suddenly seems so loud in his ears when there’s little else to focus on. He breathes in and tastes the dust of the theatre, and, oddly, something sharp and bitter like electrical wire. Stranger still is the vanilla-laced scent of old, dry paper, like the inside of an antique bookstore that carries faintly across the stage. He breathes in again, slowly.
Somewhere in the Belasco something rustles, like the brush of paper, or skin against wood, and Darren startles. His fingers search for the switch, fumbling as his heart suddenly thuds fasters. It’s the same feeling he got as a child in the basement of his parents’ house, some unnamed terror that made him race up the stairs to the warm safety of the kitchen. Finally his fingers find their mark and the cold light illuminates the stage once more.
“Darren?”
He jumps at the sound and turns. One of the stagehands, Dana, is standing just off to the side, staring at him inquisitively. “Yeah?” Darren grunts.
“What are you still doing here?”
“Sorry, was just heading out. I uh, I thought I’d dropped something.”
Dana doesn’t looks like she believes him, but she nods and walks off anyway.
Darren exhales sharply and heads for the exit, but he pauses at the edge of the stage and looks back. The ghost light still stands and the theatre is still empty. The scent of paper and vanilla is gone. Darren leaves.
***
A few days later, Darren really does leave something behind in his dressing room – his keys. He only realizes it halfway through signing playbills and posters at the stage door that night after the show.
“I gotta get my keys,” he tells his favorite security guy, who rolls his eyes like he wanted to be home an hour ago. “Be right back.”
He means to make quick work of it. Run in, grab his keys, and get out. He’s got a crock pot of chili on a timer in his apartment and a stomach growling for food.
But as he comes around the corner from his dressing room he catches a glimpse of the darkened stage and the single light gently illuminating the boards. Unaccountably drawn to it, Darren finds himself standing before the ghost light before he realizes his feet have moved.
There’s no reason to do what he wants to do, no reason to turn off the light and tempt fate. Fate. It’s a funny concept. Darren believes in things like kindness, goodness, and the human spirit. He believes that hard work and honesty pay off, even if it takes time, and he believes that a single action cannot change the outcome of his life. There is nothing flicking the switch of the light could possibly do.
With nary a sound the light goes out and the stage goes dark. It is immensely, breathtakingly quiet. He can still hear the laughter of the crowd from that night, and the nights before, their delight and joy in the show. He can hear the bass and the guitar and the scrape of the microphone stand across the stage. It’s easy to stand there and let the warm memories wash over him.
A shimmer of movement on the edge of his vision has Darren gasping and spinning on his toes. But there is no one there. He squints into the dark. Searches for something. A stagehand. His security. A rat. Anything. Darren waits. Breathes. The dark is dark and there is nothing more.
There is something more. That faint smell of old books, of vanilla and dry paper.
“Jesus,” Darren mutters to himself, putting his hand on his chest over his rapidly beating heart.
He turns the light back on, but there is nothing else, no flash of movement revealed, no source of the scent.
***
That night, Darren dreams of the stage and actors in odd costumes, of boys with grease in their hair and girls in tattered lace.
***
Darren should leave well enough alone, but he can’t. Naturally, a week later, Darren is once again sneaking away from security at the end of the night. He knows he saw nothing, and he knows the smell must come from something in the theatre (even though he’s never smelled vanilla anywhere else in the Belasco). There are logical, rational reasons for it – his brain filling in the dark and the quiet with the random firing of synapses. It must be as simple as that.
He goes right to center stage and turns off the light, bold as brass even as nervous tension fills his belly.
Darkness descends and Darren waits.
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to leave the light on?” The voice comes from the deep dark of the back of the stage. The ghost light flashes back on.
Darren stumbles back in a burst of panic and surprise, and nearly falls on his ass.
Standing before him, where just a moment ago there was no one, is a young man.
“Jesusfuck!” Darren exclaims. His heart is hammering in his throat and he wonders if this is what a heart attack feels like.
The young man examines him curiously. His eyes are very keen. “Why did you turn out the light?” He asks.
“Who the fuck are you?” The young man looks to be in his early 20s, tall and fair. He is no one Darren has ever seen around the theatre before. Or the city.
“Chris.” The man responds. “Why are you dallying about the light? What do you want?”
“How did you get here?” Darren demands. His heart is calming, but he’s still sweating. “No one else was here.”
“I’m always here.”
“The show is over. The theatre is closed.”
The look Chris gives him is almost pitying and his eyes are the color of a deep and frozen lake. “Not to me.”
Darren blinks and looks harder at the young man, at Chris. There is something off about him, something odd. His skin is too pale and his clothing so peculiar, like he just stepped off the stage of Newsies. Loose fitting trousers sitting too high on his waist, and a button down shirt in an old-fashioned cut. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows and his forearms are surprisingly thick for the slimness of his build.
He seems solid enough. Darren cannot see through him to the other side of the stage. But there is something weightless about him. He feels as though he might disappear at any moment. The edges of him are vague, almost as though Darren is seeing him out of the corner of his eye at all times. As though if Darren looks too closely at him he might blink away completely.
And the way he wasn’t there and then he was. In the space between a heart beat.
The scent of vanilla has returned, stronger now than it was before, and the sharp hint of something electrical. If Darren didn’t know he was standing in the middle of the Belasco he’d have said he was in an old used bookstore.
“No.”
Chris cocks his head. “I’ve said nothing you might disagree with or refute.”
“You can’t be.” Darren’s hands are cold, but his palms are sweating.
Chris smiles then, just a flicker. “Ah, so you’ve realized.”
Darren feels faint. He does not believe in ghosts. He doesn’t. The body dies and he doesn’t care what happens after.
And yet.
“No fucking way.” Darren reaches out, intending to touch Chris’ shoulder, just to see what might happen, but Chris steps nimbly away. His feet do not make a sound.
“That’s really rather rude of you,” the young man chides.
“Sorry, it’s just…” Darren doesn’t know what to say. It’s not every day he meets a ghost. He’s not completely sure he’s not dreaming, or hallucinating. Perhaps he fell off the riser during “Wicked Little Down” and all of this is a dream while he lies unconscious in a hospital room.
“First time?” Chris asks.
“Yeah, I uh, I think I need a minute.” Darren sits down heavily on the stage before he really does fall on his ass.
Chris hovers before him. He doesn’t hover; he stands. His feet certainly seem to be resting on the ground. Darren doesn’t understand. Whenever he thought about ghosts he thought of them floating off the ground, gliding and hovering about as they went. Not simply standing around like any other person. Living person.
“Were you not trying to summon me?” Chris asks. His hair is thick and brown, swept back neatly from a straight part along the left side.
“Summon you?”
“You turned off my light,” Chris says. “Usually when people do that they’re trying to get me to appear. Well, not me, but Mr. Belasco.”
Darren’s head swims and he thinks maybe he should lie down. “Mr. Belasco?”
Chris nods. “You know. The old man dressed like priest? Cavorting with impressionable young ladies at all hours? He’s the one everyone comes looking for.” Chris smooth the front of his shirt and the fabric seems to ripple like water.
“You don’t look like an old man dressed like a priest,” Darren points out.
“Well, I’m not the ghost of Belasco,” Chris sniffs. “But I am a ghost.”
“So what happened to the other guy?”
“Oh, he left these boards many years ago. His theatre became successful. His dreams fulfilled. Off he went.” Chris flicks his fingers towards the exit signs. A pinched, wistful expression flits across his fine features before disappearing into practiced calm.
“Well, I heard it was because a show featured full front nudity and he didn’t want to stick around to see what other shameful things were brought to his theatre.”
Chris lifts an eyebrow imperiously. “Are you going to believe a story? Or someone who was there?”
Darren grins for the first time since Chris…appeared. “You have a point.”
He feels steadier, somehow, and he stands up again, brushing the dust off his pants. He’s still not completely sure this isn’t all in his head, but if it is, it’s still a nice conversation. Even if it means he’s going to have to go to a doctor and possibly hand a couple of shows over to his understudy while he recuperates.
“So why are you still here?” Darren asks, and then frowns as Chris’ once proud shoulders slump.
“My dreams have not been fulfilled.”
“What does that mean?”
Chris shrugs. “Just what it means.”
Darren doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know what to say to anything. If this is real, he’s speaking to a ghost, and that’s something he needs time to process. And if it’s not real, he’s hallucinating, or worse. Either way, he needs to go home and get some sleep. Alone.
“I have to go,” Darren says.
“Of course you do,” Chris agrees. “Long life to live and all.”
“I’ll be back.”
Chris waves a pale hand. “No need for such pleasantries. You work here. I’ve seen you many times before; I’ll see you many times again.”
That takes Darren aback. How much has Chris seen? How often is he around? How much does he remember of his life and the years since? Darren wants to ask all that and more.
“Yeah, but will I see you?”
“It’s been 100 years; I haven’t left yet.”
“Will I need to turn the light out again or will you just–?” Darren waves his hands around.
“I’ll find you.”
***
To his great surprise, Darren sleeps deeply that night and does not dream at all. He wakes easily and for a moment does not remember Chris. The ghost. And then he does. Darren spends the morning puttering around his apartment, getting tea and breakfast and wondering what the ghost is doing – where is he now, where he’s been these last months.
He wastes five hours hunched in front of his computer, watching videos of alleged ghost sightings and reading through shoddily put-to-together websites about spirits, specters, and the afterlife. But none of it really makes any sense. Too much of it seems like hocus, hokum, and chicanery. Except Chris. He was there. Maybe Darren did not touch him, but he was there. There were no flickering lights or cold spots, only that faint scent of paper and vanilla.
He was real.
Darren slumps back against the couch and stares at the ceiling until he has to go to work.
***
“I like your Hedwig the best, you know,” Chris says. “And I’ve seen them all.”
Darren blushes a little at the compliment. He’s sitting in front of the drum kit, in his Yitzak’s usual spot. It had taken a few days to find a chance slip away from security and sneak back to the stage after the theatre closed, but Chris had appeared to him in moments.
“Is that what you do all day?” Darren asks. He’s sitting again in front of the drum kit while Chris paces the stage with smooth movements. He seems to like to move rather than stand still, and as he moves, however it is that he moves, the edges of him fade, almost imperceptibly.
Chris shrugs. “What else am I to do? Time passes differently for me, I think. Today. Yesterday. Five years ago. They are all the same to me. And yet…different, somehow. Somehow distinct if I try to separate them from one another, to pull the strings apart. But sometimes I lose days, weeks, even years to nothing.”
That seems terribly sad to Darren, who hates to waste even an hour of his life.
“Where do you go?”
“Nowhere. There’s nowhere to go. I’m just…not. And then I am again. I can explain it in no other way”
Darren frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” Chris walks across the stage to run his hand across the top of the car. No sound comes his steps or his touch. “I’ve been dead a very long time. I might be a bit addled.”
Darren opens his mouth, but then Chris looks at him and winks, and Darren laughs.
“You’re fun, for a ghost.”
“You’re fun, for a living man,” Chris counters. “So many of you are…not.”
Darren can’t even fathom all the things Chris must know, all the things he must have witnessed.
“So how did you die?” He blurts it out almost before he finishes having the thought. “Sorry, that was rude of me to ask.”
Chris shrugs and walks around behind the drum kit. His fingers make no sound against the cymbals. “A fever. My sister and mother caught it too, but they survived. I think I must have suffered, some, because I remember their faces looking very sad. It’s one of the last things I remember from before.”
“I’m sorry.” Darren doesn’t know what else to say.
“It’s been a very long time. The wounds heal.”
“When did you die?”
Chris’ forehead creases adorably. “1922, I think. I was twenty-one at the time, unwed and still living in my parents’ home. I did not make enough money to set out on my own, and my mother welcomed the help with my sister. I was not…embarrassed to be at home, though many of my friends had already wed and begun their own families. But I was – well, I was always a little different than they were.”
Darren draws his legs up and rests his arms on his arms. He’s deeply enthralled with Chris, with the way he speaks in careful sentences, the way he carries himself with a straight back and nervous hands.
“What did you do?” Darren asks. “You know, for a job?”
A smile curves Chris’ lips and Darren adores the sight of it. “Oh, well I worked here.” A sweep of his hand takes in the whole of the theatre.
“At the Belasco?”
“Just so. A lowly stagehand was I.” Chris dips in a slight, deferential bow. “But I loved it. Everything about it. The costumes. The orchestra. The reverent rapture of the audience. It was thrilling to be even so small a part of it. But oh, the words.” Chris places his hand on his chest, over his heart, as his eyes drift closed. Darren cannot look away from him. “It was the words I loved the most. The cadence. The rhythm. The way a perfect sentence could bring a man to tears of sorrow or joy.” He opens his eyes again and Darren is struck by how blue they are.
“I wanted to be a writer, you see,” Chris muses and he sways gently, as though hearing music from long ago. “I needed to work to help support my family, but I wanted to write. Novels. Stories. Plays. I wanted to write plays the most. I learned so much just being in the rafters and backstage night after night, hearing the dialogue over and over, memorizing the way it sounded, the way it all worked. It was all so beautiful.”
Darren wets his lips. “Did you? Write, that is.”
Chris’ expression dims a little. “I did. I had pages and pages written out. My thoughts. My plays. My mother had made sure my penmanship was superb.”
“Where did it all go?”
Chris shrugs. “That I do not know. After I died I lost some time. Eventually, my parents disposed of my things. My sister could not wear my clothes, but she did take my beloved books.” Chris’ hands close as those seeking the comfort of the worn spine of a book.
A million and six thoughts flood Darren’s mind, so fast he can’t keep track of them. It seems so terribly sad that Chris’ work is just gone – never to be read again.
Though he often hates to admit it to himself, and certainly not to anyone else, Darren cannot completely deny that the thought of leaving behind a trace of himself after he is gone is one of many motivating factors for doing what he does. He may never leave a truly lasting legacy, he may be forgotten by most after he takes his final bow, but the idea that someone, somewhere will remember him and what he has done pushes what he does now.
“Why don’t you keep writing?” Darren asks. “Leave them for someone to find and read?” The thought blooms suddenly.
Chris smiles sadly. “Would that I could put pen to paper.”
“Oh.” Darren looks Chris over again, struck by how real he seems, how real he feels. Even with his old clothes and styled hair, his perpetual youth and the very fact that he is dead, Darren keeps thinking of him as alive.
“So…how does that work?”
“What?” Chris’ head cocks curiously.
“How…corporeal are you?”
“Not enough. When I feel strongly – as much as I can feel anymore – I can affect things. Certain things. Blowing a stack of playbills over. Making the curtains move. Little things. Silly things. And I can…” Chris trails off, and as his voice fades, so does the light emanating from the bare bulb on the stage. Dimming until it darkens completely.
“Shit,” Darren breathes, his eyes gone comically wide. His heartbeat has ratcheted up with the display of Chris’ true nature and he struggles to calm himself.
Chris laughs, but his chest does not move with the sound. “It is little more than a parlor trick,” he confesses, and the light glows bright once more. “Do not ask me to explain how it works. I do not know. But it took years to be able to control what little I can do. In the first years after my death I would…flare out, I suppose it the right word. When I was angry, or scared, or sad – so very sad – nearby candles would erupt, or splutter out. Bells would sound. Dogs would howl. Very disconcerting things, I promise you. I’ve got it mostly under control now.”
The ghost light dims again, like an amused wink, and Darren is enraptured.
If Chris were alive, if Chris were anything but a ghost, Darren would ask him out that very moment. He’d get his phone number and then take him out to a late drink right then; he wouldn’t even wait a day to ask. They’d go to one of Darren’s favorite late night spots, get a couple drinks, maybe get a little food, and talk.
Darren wants to talk to Chris for hours. He wants to know everything Chris knows – his one hundred years of experience, different though it is. Chris has watched the world change in ways Darren cannot even comprehend. All that time and life in one body, one mind. Darren is captivated by the mere thought of it. He wants Chris to tell him about his life and his plays. In time, he’d make Chris take him home and show him his work, his pages of writing. Darren would read the dialogue aloud, act it all out for Chris to make him blush and laugh, before taking Chris down to the floor and make him blush for a completely different reason.
But Chris is a ghost. He is not a man.
Darren exhales deeply as the fantasy he quickly built crumbles just as fast.
“I have to go,” he says, mournfully. It must be late, and he cannot have someone catch him talking to himself in the middle of the stage when he should be gone.
Chris pouts and the edges of him seem to flicker. “But I want to talk to you more.”
“I know.”
“Can’t you come back after the theatre is long closed?”
Darren shakes his head, truly regretful. “There’s a security system. Even if I had the keys I couldn’t deactivate it.”
“Well, I think you know where to find me,” Chris says and his eyes are fathomless. Darren is suddenly, hopelessly gone on him.
***
All the next week Darren has the same dream.
An empty theatre and a quiet boy under a single spotlight, unmoving on the stage while handwritten pages of a script swirl around him, carried by an unseen wind.
Darren wakes one Wednesday morning with an idea he cannot shake.
***
Darren vibrates with nervous energy the entire day, filled by the deepest urge to find Chris, to talk to him, to tell him what he came up with. He has to catch himself from rushing the show over and over. His movements are too big; his voice is too loud. He takes a woman’s eyeglasses from her and tosses them three rows away after licking the lens. He might have to apologize to her after the show, if she’s still around before he talks to Chris.
The stage door is crowded that night and Darren does his best not to rush through the people waiting. He smiles and chats and signs his name, and all the while he thinks he Chris’ pale skin and the bizarre fact of his existence.
Finally, the street outside the Belasco is empty and Darren slips back into the theatre. Anticipation makes his stomach clench and his heart flutter. He surreptitiously checks that everyone has gone home; he now knows a way out of the theatre without needing a key, though he can’t get back in the same way.
The ghost light is on and it beckons Darren across the familiar, groaning boards of the stage.
“Chris?” He calls out, keeping his voice low. “Chris are you there?”
“I’m always here.”
Darren turns around. Chris stands a few feet away, wearing the same clothes as always (the clothes he probably died in, Darren realizes suddenly), with his hair carefully combed as it always is. He is beautiful, Darren recognizes deep in his gut.
“Hi!” Darren exclaims, too loudly.
Chris smiles and his amusement is clear around his eyes. “Hello.”
“So, I had an idea. An epiphany, really.”
Chris raises an interested eyebrow. “Do tell.”
“I could write for you,” Darren blurts out, less eloquently than he intended too.
“What?”
“Your plays. I could transcribe them for you.”
A frown creases between Chris’ eyebrows. “And then what?”
“Publish them,” Darren says, the thrill of the idea bubbling up as brilliantly as it had when he’d awoken with it. “Produce them. I know a lot of people who are looking for new works to put on. New plays. I could help make it happen.”
But Chris does not look as excited as Darren had anticipated and it makes an odd worry settle across his shoulders.
“And…you would get all the credit.”
Darren’s stomach sinks. “What? No. I – your name would be on them as author.”
“But I am dead,” Chris responds, matter of fact, though he seems sad. “How would you explain where you acquired them?”
Darren realizes he had not really thought this all the way through. “I could say I found them in some archive. Or…an estate sale. Tucked away in some old house or something.”
“But they would look new,” Chris counters. “And I’ve seen the things you people write on these days. No one handwrites anything.”
Darren runs his hands through his hair in frustration. “I just, I want to help you, you know? You – you’re stuck here, but you can’t do anything. And I hate that. You had these big dreams of being a writer, but you can’t do something about it, and you died so young and it’s so incredibly unfair. Meanwhile there are idiots just popping shit out left and right. And here I am, and I’ve got two hands and I could write your plays for you and make sure your voice gets out there where it belongs and–”
Cool air brushes across Darren’s mouth, stopping his words, and he shivers.
Chris steps back and licks his lips curiously.
“Did you just–?” Darren feels chilled and warmed at the same time. This close he should feel the heat of Chris’ body, but he doesn’t.
Chris swallows. “I’ve never tried that before,” he whispers.
“Try it again.”
Chris closes his eyes, as though concentrating on something, and this time Darren feels the press of cool lips against his own, almost like the memory of a kiss he had some time ago.
“Oh, my,” Darren sighs.
“No one has ever offered what you are offering,” Chris says and he sounds awed.
“It might not work.”
“Perhaps not. But I…am willing to try. If only to get to spend more time with you.”
“Can you leave the theatre? Come to my apartment?”
Chris blinks slowly. “I think I want that enough to try. You, these plays, that would be my old life fulfilled.”
“But then you might – you might disappear,” Darren mutters, realizing that too for the first time. He has known since the beginning that Chris is but a ghost, a memory of a man, but somehow he has not thought of him as such. The idea of losing him to dust just as fast makes him cold to his bones.
But Chris kisses him again, and Darren almost feels the weight of it. Almost feels warmth. “We shall see. Life is long, Darren, and there are many ways to live.”
