[psl] for supertemp

[passesthrough]

A hush had fallen over the empty theatre. The lights were down, the stage was empty, the playbills left behind by careless patrons swept up and binned. A lonely thing at night, a theatre, or it should be. Not this one, though.

At night, this one breathed.

It was quiet, on the edge of hearing, a subtle suggestion of a sound that set hair on end and caused the janitors to hurry through their nightly tasks to clock out early and spend the rest of the night in the pub, drinking their nerves away. Haunted, they said, by the ghost of a performer that had died on stage a century ago.

Ghosts were not why the Doctor was using the sonic to unlock the backstage entrance. Not really, anyway. Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts, so what was causing all the fuss? Something was undeniably up, the matinee he'd attended previously was enough to convince him of that. There had been something subtly wrong with the performance. A woodenness that might have been attributed to nerves, if not for the fact that it swept through the actors like a wave, or, he suspected, like a signal traveling through a circuit.

The interior was dim, the few points of light serving only to give form to the darkness. Musty air carrying a hint of ancient greasepaint gusted warmly out the open door. The Doctor closed it quietly behind him. He stood still, listening attentively to the creaks and banging pipes of the old building as it settled.

There it was, the breathing. He was not alone.

Comments

[supertemp]

There was something fishy going on in the theatre - something more than the assignations between the stage manager and one of the understudies, the suspiciously inflated prop budgets. The actors had been acting strange, even for actors - or, rather, they hadn't been behaving like actors. Donna had become accustomed to their peculiar habits during rehearsals, the little superstitions each actor had, their individual quirks. A fortnight after the show opened, those had vanished entirely, one by one, and nobody else had paid it any mind.

Donna knew the theatre was supposedly haunted (it was in an informational pamphlet she'd read one afternoon when she'd been really bored), but one ghost couldn't possess an entire cast, assuming that there even was such a thing. Any sane person would have written the entire thing off and asked the temp agency for a different assignment, one less creepy. Certainly that's what she would have done a couple years ago. But, well, she didn't have much luck with assignments these days, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to get another if she turned her nose up at this one.

Which didn't explain why she'd stayed in the theatre well after hours. It'd been easy enough to hide; a theatre had nooks and crannies that nobody checked, and she'd tucked herself away in a corner of the wardrobe, hidden amongst dusty velvet dresses and scratchy moth-eaten furs. When she finally judged it safe to come out, she pulled her mobile out of her bag, using the dim illumination from its screen to make her way through the deserted corridors backstage. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but she hoped she'd know it when she saw it.

She caught a crack of light coming from the open door just before it shut again - definitely not ghosts, she decided, because why would ghosts need to open a door when they could just go through it? "Is someone there?" she hissed into the darkness, feeling incredibly foolish. For all she knew, it was a mass murderer who'd snuck into the abandoned theatre for the express purpose of slaughtering temps who were daft enough to think there was a mystery that needed solving.