Phantom (30 page)

As she got closer, and her eyes became more adjusted to the light, she thought she saw a pair of legs. There was a short moment of panic before she realized it was probably just the dummy that they used during the play, a stand in for Joseph Buquet, the stagehand who was murdered by the phantom. The crew had probably thought they would give a scare to the new janitor, who was by no means any more mentally stable than poor Mr. Russ had been. Apparently, being mentally challenged was a prerequisite for a high school janitor.

The silly thought made Rebecca giggle to herself. She realized that she was just being overly dramatic. She was getting scared in the dark just like a little girl, hearing things and seeing things that weren’t really there. She hadn’t heard any more groans. She had most likely imagined it the first time. No one was hurt. That was impossible. This was her perfect night, and her perfect man was waiting for her just beyond that curtain. There was nothing in the world for her to be worried about.

At least she hoped there wasn’t. Her heart started to pound with an anxiety that she couldn’t hold at bay. Why hadn’t Justyn answered her when she called? Maybe he was running late. Or maybe he was too far back behind the curtains to hear her. Either way, she needed to see him, to make sure that he was all right. That was a better reason to rush backstage than the possibility of finding an invisible groaner.

Rebecca paused at the stage steps when she heard it again, louder this time.
Definitely
a moan of pain. No doubt about it this time. No wishing it away or making lame excuses. Someone
was
hurt. Someone needed help. And she was the one that was going to have to help them. But first she had to remember how to walk.

A slow, steady panic started to creep into her heart. It traveled like a slithering snake down her arms and into her legs, making them feel weak and useless, before finally settling as a tight knot in her stomach. Rebecca’s mind was doing an instant replay of the last six weeks. The curtain falling at the first rehearsal, the notes, the calls, the flowers, Wendy falling into the mirror, Mr. Russ, Jay’s accident. Some awful precognitive sense was telling her that all those events were leading up to
this
moment. This was going to be the climax of her own personal play. And for better or worse, it was going to end here. The villain would be revealed, but would the hero show up? Or would she, the heroine, wind up on the wrong end of a body bag? She wasn’t naive enough to think that every story had to have a happy ending. But would hers?

She probably should have run away then. If her life were a B-rated horror movie, this would be the part where everyone in the audience would be screaming at the television set for the stupid girl to run the other way. But those people didn’t understand the full power of morbid fascination, a thing Rebecca had become overly familiar with in recent weeks. They didn’t understand the driving force of the need to
know.
To know
why
. To know
who
.

With more bravery than she knew she was capable of, Rebecca flipped on the overhead lights of the stage, flooding the small area with brightness. Her eyes needed time to adjust to the sudden change. She blinked a few times, and her vision focused. She was finally able to see the stage, and the scene that was set there. She was able to see everything clearly. A little
too
clearly

Rebecca started to scream.

She screamed and screamed and screamed until she had no voice left to scream anymore. No strength left to stand either. Her legs turned to Jell-O and gave way, and she slipped into a helpless, blubbering puddle on the floor. Her stomach heaved and she knew that if she hadn’t already emptied it earlier, she certainly would have then.

She wanted to tear her eyes away, but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t stop gawking at the grotesque scene. She couldn’t stop staring. Couldn’t force her eyes to close or her head to turn the other way. Couldn’t stop herself from memorizing every single, terrible detail. The wide, unseeing eyes. The awful bloated tongue. It wasn’t like on television, where it looked so clean. Not like the movies where a hanging body still looked vaguely human, as if the victim had just fallen asleep. This was nothing like that. This was so,
so
much worse.

 If not for the blond hair and the designer jeans, Rebecca wouldn’t have even recognized the person whose body hung limply from the stage rafters. There was no beauty left. No cocky grin. No malicious glint in the eyes. Rebecca would have given just about anything for one nasty, resentful comment to come out of those swollen lips at that moment. But there was no way that those lips were never going to open again. Just like there was no way that Rebecca was ever going to forget the horror of what she had seen.

Wendy hanging. Wendy dead. Wendy
murdered.

Rebecca started screaming again.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Nobody came. Her screams didn’t alert the Calvary, probably because there was no Calvary. No white knights riding in on their stallions, either. Not for her. Rebecca was on her own—unless you counted Wendy. But Wendy wasn’t going to be offering any assistance any time soon.

She thought about trying to get her down. It somehow seemed horribly disrespectful to let her continue to hang there. Wendy would be angry if people saw her that way, looking less than
Barbie
doll perfect. She wouldn’t like that at all. The fact that Wendy was well past liking or caring about anything didn’t really register. Letting that register would mean accepting that Wendy was really gone, that she was alone with a corpse. And accepting
that
would probably shatter the thin layer of sanity that Rebecca was managing to hold intact.

It took a great deal of effort, but she managed to pull herself up from the floor. Almost as much effort as it took for her to get herself controlled enough to stop the desperate screams from pouring out indefinitely. She stood and examined the scene for a possible way to set Wendy free. As she did so, she meticulously wiped the dust from her pant legs, knowing it was ridiculous, that it was proof of her precarious grip on reality, but doing it just the same. She needed something,
anything
, however mundane to concentrate on so she didn’t think too much about what was happening around her.

 “Owwww.”

There it was again, another low groan. It was followed by what could only be described as a muffled, barely audible plea for help. Someone was trying to talk over some kind of obstruction. There was no way it was Wendy. Her mouth was forever frozen in that terrible grimace. So it could only mean one thing. Rebecca wasn’t alone. There was someone else, someone who was actually alive, in the auditorium with her.

Her breath came in short pants. Her knees threatened to buckle for the second time that night. She didn’t know what she should do. Move forward and see who was in trouble, assuming someone
was
in trouble. Or run, as far and as fast as her wobbly legs would carry her. Common sense told her to get out of there before she wound up like Wendy. A nagging sense of guilt pushed her forward. If someone else was in trouble, she
had
to help them. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it wasn’t. But at least if she died, it would be with a clear conscience.

The sound was coming from just behind the curtain. It was only a few feet away, but it might as well have been across a bottomless pit. It was intimating to take those few, shaky steps. It didn’t help that all she could hear was the constant creak of Wendy’s body as it swung slowly back and forth. That awful sound was far worse than fingers on a chalkboard. It was making it hard for her to concentrate on taking that scary leap into the unknown.

Creaakkk. Creaakkk.

She wanted to cover her ears before the awful sound pushed her over the edge and into the black abyss of insanity, but she needed her ears to guide her. She had to save whoever it was who needed saving. She had to focus on that.

“Hello?” Her voice was hoarse from screaming. She hardly sounded like herself at all. “Who’s there?”

Another muffled cry came in reply. Louder this time, with more infliction. It sounded almost like words, like a cry for help. And it was followed by a pounding that was very much like a foot banging against the hardwood floors in extreme agitation. It was insistent, determined. Whoever it was knew she was there, and they were calling to her in the only way they could.

Rebecca cautiously stepped behind the curtains. The lights were already on. It wasn’t as bright as she would have liked, but she could see clearly enough. There was barely room to walk in the small room; it was so overcrowded with props. The platform that Justyn had fallen from was pushed into one corner. Miss King had decided to cut it out all together after the accident, so no one had bothered to repair it. She could see where the wood had splintered, and it made her shudder a little. She turned her head away from it and looked over at the piles of costumes, candelabras, fancy dressing tables, and the painted backgrounds from the sets that filled every corner. There were lots of props, even a few mannequins in full costume. But no living, breathing people were anywhere to be seen. Rebecca was still alone.

She almost sighed with relief. Maybe she had been imagining the moaning after all. Maybe there was no one there, no one in trouble, and she could go get help for Wendy and put the whole terrible day behind her. Of course, that would have been way too easy.

“Hummph! Humph!”

Rebecca jumped. The cry came from her immediate left. So close that she almost expected a hand to reach out and grab her shoulder. If they had, she would have likely died from fright on the spot, her heart exploding in her chest. But no one touched her. Instead, they just continued their muffled cries until Rebecca spun around, desperate to figure out where the sound was coming from. She didn’t see anything but piles of discarded costumes. The room was empty.

She was just about to move a little further into the room when she noticed something out of place. The pile of clothes on the floor shifted ever so slightly. When it did, she saw a pair of white sneakers poking out from beneath one of Carlotta’s pink shawls. Even as she saw it, the shoe started to pound on the floor. She noticed that the sneakers were attached to a pair of legs covered in faded blue jeans. With a shocked gasp, Rebecca ran to the corner, and started tossing away dresses, capes, and ballerina tutus. Underneath the mess, she at last found what she had been looking for.

“Tom!” she cried out. “Oh my, God, Tom! Tom, are you all right?”

It was a rhetorical question. There was no way he was going to answer her. Even if he wasn’t dazed and only half conscious, with a stream of blood running from his forehead into his eyes, he was still gagged. A pair of nylon stockings were rolled into a ball and shoved into his mouth, making it impossible for him to do anything but mutter insensibly. When he tried to speak, it gagged him so badly, she was afraid he was going to choke to death on the spot. She quickly pulled it free, and waited impatiently for him to catch his breath.

“Tom, what happened? Who did this to you?”

Tom coughed, and gasped for what seemed like hours before he could speak. Even when he could, his words were broken and garbled. “Becca . . . we have to . . . we have to get out of here. Before he comes back. Jesus, Becca . . . he . . . he killed her.” His eyes were wide with the same terrible memory that haunted Rebecca. “He
killed
Wendy.”

“I know, I know.” Rebecca sobbed. She wasn’t even sure when she had started to cry. But now that she
had
started, she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to stop.

“Get me out of here!” Tom struggled with the ties that bound him to the dressing room chair. “Before he comes back.”

Rebecca’s hands were already fumbling with the complicated knots. They stopped working completely when the implications of that simple word, “he”, suddenly dawned on her. It seemed there was only one “he” that Tom could possibly be making a reference to. But still she needed to hear him say it. As much as she dreaded his answer, Rebecca had to know.

“Who did this to you, Tom?” she asked. She had no idea how she managed to keep her voice so calm and detached.

“He was wearing the mask, the whole phantom get-up. I didn’t see his face,” Tom told her. “But it
had
to be Justyn.”

Justyn. It
had
to be Justyn.

To say that her heart broke would have been the understatement of the century. It shattered, no it
ruptured
. There was nothing left in her chest, but a gaping, bleeding, open wound that throbbed and ached like nothing she had ever experienced. How could anything hurt so much when there was no physical indication of any injury? How could she hurt so much that she thought even death might have been a blessing?

“Becca!” Tom shouted. “Hurry up!”

Rebecca snapped back to present, to Tom. It wasn’t fair to let him go down with her. Her hands worked the knots like a robot. No longer her own hands at all. They were just mechanical appendages performing the task assigned to them. The rest of her body was numb. She had stopped crying, and she had fallen into a strange state that probably looked like calmness, but was really an agony so deep it had turned her into something of a zombie. But still, she was actually making some progress on Tom’s ropes.

Rebecca and Tom were so involved with the intricate knots; they didn’t even notice they weren’t alone anymore. He was silent as any ghost. He made no sound as he slipped into the room. In true phantom style, he made his grand entrance, perched high above them on the wooden platform, clad in the blood red coattails from the ballroom scene. The costume was called
Red Death
, and how fitting it was. The outfit was sewn in blood red velvet and complete with a full-faced mask in the shape of the grinning grim reaper. It completely hid the true face of the phantom from their view.