Chapter Text
Yuri Lowell, proud member of Zaphias’ finest ghost hunting team, did not believe in ghosts. Some clients claimed this was like being a deer hunter who thought the concept of deer was an invention by Big Hunting, but Yuri figured there was no better person to make a conclusion about the existence of ghosts than someone who spent all their free time looking for them. Besides, if they advertised their true purpose, a homeowner convinced they had a haunted house worthy not only of a movie deal but a whole damn cinematic universe would not contact “Zaphias Carbon Monoxide and Drafty Attic Inspectors.”
Not that everyone on the team was on the same page. Yuri’s walkie-talkie crackled and Karol’s voice came through clear enough to reveal his nerves. “Are you sure you don’t want me or - or someone else to go get it with you?”
“Nah, don’t waste your time.” Yuri held the walkie-talkie with one hand as he used the other to shove the heavy, grime-encrusted backstage door open. “Help the others load up the van and I’ll be down in a minute.”
It was almost four in the morning and Mountain Dew could only repel Yuri’s drowsiness for so long. He would be glad to get home soon, especially because it had been one of those boring nights where nothing allegedly supernatural had happened and all they’d done was screw around in a dark building for five hours.
His Majesty’s Theatre in downtown Zaphias had supported rumours of ghosts for as long as anyone could remember. Considering it had been built almost 150 years ago, that was plenty of time to acquire a ghostly sighting or two. Audience members sometimes claimed to have seen a shadowed figure lurking in a top box, and actors hated being alone backstage due to the alleged feeling of being watched. Brave Vesperia had been at the theatre since ten o’clock, after getting special permission from the owner to be there overnight, but they hadn’t experienced any of the alleged phenomena. Rita didn’t even have any interesting heat signatures or EMP readings to find an explanation for.
The most supernatural thing that had happened all night was that Yuri could have sworn Flynn had already brought video camera number three down to the first floor. Apparently he had not, because it was still unaccounted for when Flynn went through his checklist at Raven’s van five minutes ago.
“Where is number three, anyway?” Yuri asked the walkie-talkie once he was shut inside the dark hallway. His hand slapped the old plaster wall until it landed on the light switch. Fluorescent lights sprung to life one-by-one down the hall, illuminating the doors to various dressing and storage rooms.
Karol’s reply came through quickly. “Uh…. Hold on, let me ask Flynn.”
Moments later, Karol’s voice was replaced by Flynn’s. “That was the one I put on the catwalk, remember? To film into the top balcony box?”
“’Course it is.” The one at the very top, naturally. Damn, he was too tired to climb all the way up there. He regretted offering to go back for the camera in the first place.
“I can get it if you want,” Flynn offered.
“No, don’t worry about it - I’m already in here.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”
Yuri rolled his eyes. Typical Flynn, tripping over himself to be helpful. “Sit your ass in the van and I’ll be down with it in ten.”
The hallway ended in a door leading to public areas, with a staircase sitting perpendicular to the hall. They’d been tromping up and down it all night, but it was only now that he was alone in the building that Yuri noticed how loud his footsteps were. The wooden steps creaked with every step, and something about the shape of the hallways made his steps echo, as if someone else was climbing the stairs right behind him.
The stairs let out on an open space in the wings of the stage. Yuri flicked on the light, which bled past the curtains and onto the stage proper. The main curtain had been drawn back to facilitate their investigation, but the single lightbulb in the wing wasn’t enough to make it past the stage and reveal the seats. It did, however, illuminate the dark metal stairs that zigzagged thirty feet up to the catwalk over the stage.
Footsteps on the stairs behind him brightened his spirits. Thank god, one of his friends has come to get it instead, and by the height and weight of the presence that stopped just behind him, it was probably Raven.
Yuri spoke as he turned. “Here to relieve me, old-?” Yuri paused mid-turn and blinked at the empty stairwell. Goosebumps ran down his spine. He’d been certain he felt the presence of another human standing right behind him, so he impulsively pressed his back against the wall, closing the space where something could lurk.
“Anybody there?”
The cavernous emptiness of the dark stage magnified the absence of a response. Damn, it must be late if even he was getting jumpy. Usually that was Karol and Rita’s job.
Yuri shook his head and directed himself to the stairs. They rattled as he made his way up to the first landing. He paused on the grating for just a second, and then the light turned off. “Oh, come on,” he muttered and felt in his pocket for his cellphone. Grumbling to himself about property owners and burnt-out bulbs, he turned on the flashlight function. The tiny light from his phone was just enough to show where his feet needed to go.
Clang, clang, clang.
The whole staircase rattled as he moved up, each step echoing. Except, that didn’t make sense, because his steps might be rattling but nowhere near loud enough to echo. That wasn’t an echo, but a second set of steps shadowing him up the stairs. Yuri froze - silence. No phantom climbing the stairs. He rubbed his eyes and kept moving, ignoring the second set of steps he swore he heard right behind him.
The stairs let out on another metal mesh of a landing. Here, a wall of circuits, outlets, and plugs stood beside the actual catwalk that stretched over the stage. With only his tiny phone light and the light from the first floor hallway leaking in from below, the catwalk looked like a bridge over a black sea. Halfway across, red light still recording, was the camera on a tripod.
In search of more light, he grabbed the cord that hung from the wall in a loop for the stage lights and plugged it in. Blinding light forced him to shut his eyes after being in the dark for so long, leaving a human silhouette emblazoned in the fuzzy colours blurring on his eyelids. It made his heart skip a beat and he opened his eyes as soon as he could, squinting across the catwalk at… nobody. He saw nothing but a mess of dangling cords, ropes, and sandbags. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and hesitated at the edge of the platform. He really had been awake for too long if his mind was playing this many tricks on him.
Still staring at the empty space along the catwalk, Yuri lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Flynn? You’re sure no one else was in the building tonight, right?”
He waited for a response. By the time his eyes had adjusted to the bright lights, he still hadn’t heard one. “Flynn? Are you there?”
The walkie-talkie crackled with bits and pieces of Flynn’s voice breaking through the static. Yuri slapped it, but when percussive maintenance failed to clarify Flynn’s voice, he clipped it to his belt and pulled out his phone. He typed out a quick message to Flynn - walkie’s acting up, be down soon - and then watched the little status say sending for a good thirty seconds until it gave up and spat back an error message.
By now, Yuri was too annoyed to do anything but slip his phone back in his pocket and and set off for the camera. The same electromagnet frequencies that tended to create “ghost” sightings also had a habit of interfering with cellphones, which was why they always used walkie talkies on investigations. Yuri had never experienced both devices failing, but by the time he figured out why his phone was acting up or why the walkie talkie suddenly decided it couldn’t pick up Flynn’s voice from just outside the building, he could have grabbed the camera and gone down to speak with Flynn in person.
The catwalk was old, having been built back when the theatre was new. Yuri walked across worn wooden planks that creaked under his feet and ran a hand over the rough iron railing. He glanced through the slats to the stage far below. Then the lights switched off.
Yuri froze, hand on the railing, blurs of colour swimming before his eyes in the sudden darkness. “For fuck’s sake.” He pulled out his phone to renew the flashlight and peered back at the landing. The plug controlling the lights had slipped from the outlet. Yuri turned around to go back to the landing, and wasn’t sure why he checked over his shoulder as soon as he turned his back on the darkness further along the catwalk.
Yuri rested his phone on the ground and used the freed hand to run his fingers over the outlet, searching for a sign it was broken. What he found were three jagged, parallel lines scored into the metal. They ran from about two inches above the outlet down to the plastic casing and seemed to get deeper as they moved down. Nail scratches? A raccoon, maybe? He could have sworn they hadn’t been there the last time he was here, but what animal could have clawed at the outlet this aggressively and gone completely unnoticed?
The hair on the back of his neck rose and once again, he instinctively looked over his shoulder. Something was… wrong. Yuri did not believe in ghosts, but he did believe in subsonic frequencies or undetectable vibrations that could trigger a feeling of danger. One of those was no doubt responsible for why he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was on this platform with him, staring intently at his back.
Movement in the corner of his eye made his heart lurch, but a quick check at the space over the stage showed that it was only some of the dangling loops of cord swaying gently.
He still had the plug in his hand. He pushed it into the socket and then left the landing, hoping to leave the feeling of being watched behind. He did, for about five seconds. Then, when he was almost within reach of the camera, darkness plunged around him.
“Fucking hell,” he seethed. This time, he didn’t bother going back to what was clearly a broken outlet. Instead, he turned his phone flashlight on and stuck it in the pocket of his jeans. Just enough of the phone stuck out that he had a bearable amount of light.
It took two hands to turn the camera off, pick it up, and fold the tripod together. This would be easier in proper light, but he wasn’t totally blind and they could pack it up properly outside. Tripod over his shoulder and camera in hand, Yuri finally began the walk back to the van.
His pool of light bounced wildly over the floorboards with every step. Yuri made himself slow down so that he could see the narrow catwalk confidently, ignoring the untraceable urge to run and get out of here as fast as he could. He was so intent on just getting out of here that he jumped when the walkie-talkie crackled. He waited to hear Flynn or Karol, or even one of the others, but all he got were spurts of static.
He paused to rest the tripod against the railing and pressed the button. “Flynn? Can you hear me?”
Static. Yuri was about to start walking again when the static cut off. There was a moment of listening to the soft fuzz of a silent connection, until it was replaced by a soft exhale. Yuri stared at his walkie-talkie with a confused frown as he listened to someone steadily breathe in and out.
“Flynn? Is that you?” Flynn was terrible with technology, but Yuri didn’t think he was so incompetent that he’d turn the walkie-talkie on without realizing. “Karol?” Except Flynn and Karol were by now sitting in the van with everyone else, chatting about the night and getting ready to go home. Yuri would hear the others in the background, instead of this eerie silence filled only by steady breathing. “Knock it off, Judy. I’m not in the mood for a prank tonight.” When the breathing didn’t stop, Yuri switched the walkie-talkie off.
The catwalk creaked as he kept walking. A hanging loop of electrical wiring smacked his forehead as he failed to duck around it. His dim light gleamed on the metal of the platform only a few metres away, and the plug that was once again lying on the floor. Didn’t it seem like it was slightly too far from the outlet to have fallen naturally? Yuri thought about this for only a split second before his next step caused his phone to shift, pushing the light deeper into his pocket and blinding him.
Yuri stopped, put the tripod down, reached for his pocket, and then gasped as something closed around his throat. He dropped the camera as both hands snapped to the ligature around his neck.
His fingers clawed at a rubber-coated cord that dug into his throat. Shouts for help fizzled out into choked gasps and sputtering. He kicked, he elbowed backward, but there was no one behind him - no apparent source for the cord already making his vision fuzzy. He tried to dig a finger under the cord to release the pressure, but it was too tight. Yuri’s head thrashed as he tried to throw the invisible attacker off.
There was something behind him, but it wasn’t physical. Pure, condensed malevolence pressed against his back and Yuri fought to throw it off. His heart raced with panic, throbbing against a chest taut with the need for air. His mind had never raced so fast, but all it could race around was the idea that he was going to die, with no time to spare on wondering why this was happening or how. All he could think, over and over, was, I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here!
Pressure pounded in his skull. He floated on the edge of consciousness, held aloft only by his panic. Blood rushed past his ears, making the loud crack sound like it came from far away. Then there came another crack, and the floorboards splintered. He had half a second to heave in a great gulp of air before plummeting to the ground.