She wasn’t worried about Happy. Wasn’t worried at all. The actors would look after him.
She moved back and forth before her control boards, swaying sensuously, checking sensor displays and energy readouts, fine-tuning things here and there and having a perfectly wonderful time. Everything in the lobby seemed entirely normal, all conditions as expected. Not even a hint of a cold spot, or an energy spike; no electromagnetic fluctuations; and not even a murmur on the EVP dead-radio channels. Melody looked cheerfully round the lobby…and then something caught her eye. There were posters on the lobby walls. Large, colourful posters, leftovers from the theatre’s past triumphs. There were half a dozen of them, scattered around the lobby, and Melody had to turn around in a complete circle to take them all in, in turn. Melody’s good temper was gone in a moment, her smile replaced by a slowly deepening scowl. Because she couldn’t for the life of her remember whether the posters had been there before. She hadn’t noticed them when she first entered the lobby, or when she was putting her instruments together; but then she often didn’t notice unimportant details like that. Unless someone pointed them out to her or she had nothing else to look at.
Melody came out from behind her carefully arranged semi-circle of equipment and walked right up to the poster in front of her to take a closer look. The poster was a good five feet tall and maybe two or three feet wide, a clear, firm image on good-quality paper, with colours so bright and shiny they bordered on gaudy. The image before her was a portrait of a handsome young woman in a full-length wedding gown of a spotless white so dazzling it was almost painful to the eye. The bride had thrown her filmy veil back over her long jet-black hair, to reveal a grinning, sparkling-eyed face. She was hurrying down a long, curving staircase, perhaps half-way down…looking out at the viewer. Melody frowned. It was a pleasant enough image; but what was it for? Was it on display to promote a play, or a character, or some forthcoming production? There were no words anywhere on the portrait, not even a title— nothing to indicate its purpose.
Melody moved on to the next poster, on her left. Just as big and as colourful, this second picture showed an old-fashioned, even traditional image, of a clipper sailing-ship, far out at sea, dashing through the waves with sails full of wind and a proud prow raised high into the air. There was no name anywhere on the ship. Uniformed sailors were captured in traditional poses and occupations, all over the ship. Several were set high up in the rigging, pointing out ahead, at something only they could see. Dark blue waves rose out of the ocean, bonneted with foam, and overhead the sky was a clear and empty blue under a perfect summer sun. Again, there was no lettering or information anywhere on the poster. It seemed to Melody that you might expect to see a painting like this on some office wall but not in a lobby. So why was it here? Strange…
She moved on, around the exterior of the lobby, vaguely aware she was drifting always to the left, anti- clockwise; widdershins. Anywhen else, anywhere else, that thought might have worried her. But here she only had eyes and thoughts for the fascinating posters.
The next portrait was of a quartet of fine young fellows, dressed in the formal clothing of the early twentieth century. They stood companionably together, filling the whole portrait, toasting the viewers with brimming glasses of red wine. All four young men looked very smart and very handsome, young gentlemen out on the town, perhaps, smiling winningly at the viewer. Melody decided…that she didn’t care for them. She deliberately turned away from them and moved on.
The fourth portrait showed a pleasant young woman in a fashionable evening gown, complete with long evening gloves, all in the same faintly disturbing shade of buttercup yellow. The young woman stood beside a half- open door, pulling it back to receive someone. She looked very smart, almost aristocratic, and very pretty, with bobbed blonde hair, innocent blue eyes, and a flashing smile. Whoever she was greeting, she was clearly very pleased to see them. So why did Melody think the woman in the portrait looked scared?
The next portrait was a winter-time country scene. A long, narrow lane sweeping between two fields piled high with a fresh covering of snow. There were no other details. No trees, no stone walls to mark the fields’ boundaries, no animals or animal tracks to be seen anywhere on the fields. No snow in the narrow lane; only a beaten earthen track. And up above, a grey and lowering sky with a threat of thunder and maybe an approaching storm. Melody leaned in close. She could almost feel the bitter cold of that winter day on her face. And there, off in the distance, right at the far end of the narrow lane, a small, dark figure, trudging down the lane, toward the viewer. So far off he was little more than a dark shape. There was a sense of…anticipation about the scene. As though if you watched it long enough, something might happen. Melody slowly turned her head away and moved on.
The sixth and final portrait was a close-up of a stuffed fox’s head, mounted on a wall plaque, set high on some anonymous wall. The fox’s head was huge, filling the portrait, depicted in amazing detail. Melody could make out every individual strand of hair in the russet grey fur. The eyes weren’t the usual glass marbles you’d expect to find in a stuffed animal; instead, they looked dark and alive and full of a terrible fury. The lips were drawn back on the muzzle in an endless snarl, revealing sharp, vicious teeth.
Melody moved away and found herself back where she’d started, facing the first poster. She slowly turned around on the spot, still widdershins, letting the posters fly past her eyes in a circle. She didn’t even glance at her precious equipment. She only had time for the posters. What were they? What were they for? Advertisements, perhaps, for long-forgotten products? But if that was the case, why were there no words anywhere, no information, no details on the products the posters were promoting? Could they be…perhaps pieces of art, produced by patrons of the theatre, donated to cheer the place up? No. Whatever these images might be, they weren’t cheerful. Melody didn’t like them. Didn’t like any of them.
She was about to return to the safety and security of her instruments when she stopped abruptly and looked again at the first poster. Something was wrong. Something was different about the image before her. She slowly moved forward, drawn almost against her will, staring intently at the poster. The young bride in her wedding gown was now standing at the very bottom of the long, curving stairway. Not in the middle, where she had been. As though she’d walked all the way down while Melody had walked around the lobby, making her circuit of the posters. And the expression on the bride’s face had changed. She was still smiling out of the poster at the viewer, but now it was a hard and nasty, openly malicious, grin. Her teeth were broken, all sharp and jagged points. Her eyes were narrowed and fixed on Melody.
Melody made herself move on, drifting almost listlessly left, to the next poster. To see if that had changed, too. And, of course, it had. The clipper ship was sinking. As though it had hit something, unseen and unsuspected in the time it had taken Melody to come around to it again. The sunny skies were gone, replaced by a raging squall. The masts were all broken, the sails split and torn, the rigging in tatters. The ship was already half-under, and uniformed sailors were throwing themselves into the dark and choppy waters.
In the next poster, the four young men toasted Melody with glasses half-full of fresh and foaming blood. There were dark crimson stains on the rims of the glasses and around the mouths of the fine young men. Their skin was the colourless pallor of the grave, and their eyes were dark and knowing. Thin, dead lips had pulled back in a rictus, revealing razor-sharp shark’s teeth. Patches of grave mould showed clearly on the formal clothes they’d been buried in. The fingers wrapped around the fine glasses were broken and split, from where they’d had to claw through their coffin lids to get out.
In the fourth portrait, the woman in the butter yellow dress was still standing in her doorway, but now the door had been thrown wide open, and the dress was soaked in blood because the woman didn’t have a head any more. Someone had ripped it right off. Blood had coursed down from the ragged stump, down the whole length of her dress, plastering it to her body with ghastly red stains. More blood had splashed across the open door, coating it from top to bottom. The woman stood where she was, in the exact same pose, as though she hadn’t yet understood the terrible thing that had happened to her.
The fifth poster was the same wintry scene as before; but now the dark figure was running down the narrow lane towards her. Already it had covered half the distance, and something about it suggested the dark figure was approaching at fantastic speed. Legs pounding, arms flailing wildly, it was running right at Melody; and she knew it meant to do awful things to her when it finally reached her.
By the time she got to the sixth and final portrait, again, all she could feel was shocked and numb. The way everything kept changing had knocked her off-balance. Kicked her feet out from under her. She couldn’t seem to find her mental bearings. Every time she thought she knew where she was, it had changed. There was nothing she could count on, nothing she could depend on. The whole world had become fluid, unreliable, untrustworthy. Because if an image could change, so could anything. The floor might become the ceiling, her precious controls might grow teeth and snap at her fingers. Left could become right, and real become unreal. Sanity and madness could flip-flop, and you wouldn’t even know which was which. She looked at the image of the stuffed fox head; and it laughed
