The Doctor (12) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
passesthrough) wrote2015-02-18 05:08 pm
passesthrough) wrote2015-02-18 05:08 pm
Entry tags:
[psl] for supertemp
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.
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.
no subject
His hand never touched her. The things had pushed through. They wheezed through slack jaws, staring at them with vacant eyes. Long organic cables extended from the backs of their necks and disappeared beneath the settling curtains. The Doctor's eyes moved rapidly, counting heads, taking note of the fact that more had crept to flank their sides.
They were the actors, or something that looked like them, anyway, and they were standing motionless now, as if waiting to take a bow.
no subject
"What's happened to them?" she whispered, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. She'd known several of them - not well, but their paths had crossed more than once, actors having a tendency to hang around the theatre and get underfoot even in their spare time. "They aren't them anymore, are they? They're all wrong."
"Is that what you were looking for?" Her eyes darted back to him for a moment before locking on the actors again; she didn't think he was dangerous (although she had no idea why she seemed so convinced of that fact, considering that she'd just met him sneaking about in a dark theatre), but the actors (former actors? actor-puppets?) definitely had an air of malice about them. "Not giant plague rats?"