The Performance Hall |
| During my last year in college, I performed as a dramatic soprano with the university opera company. I was thrilled to make it into the company, which in the previous year done a fantastic production of "The Magic Flute," when I was too busy with academics to audition. Dramatic sopranos typically get fun roles where they get to do things like fall into unrequited love and commit suicide onstage, but I wasn't so lucky this year -- they chose to perform a badly-translated German atonal opera. Bleh. The only thing I liked about it was the wild costuming. I had five costume changes during the performance and had to make them all in an upstairs practice room because I'm deathly allergic to hairspray and couldn't dress in the green rooms underneath the stage with the other performers. No problem, though; being an athlete, I run fast. |
 On the night of the next-to-the-last performance, I had a group of friends come to see the
opera. After the performance we stood talking outside the stage door for a long time. We
finally split, agreeing to meet up for an off-campus party, and I dashed off to the restrooms
to wash off my makeup and then to the practice rooms to change into my street clothes. By the
time I came back down to drop off my costumes in the green room, everyone else had left! The
stage door was closed and locked. My arms full of costumes, I walked my bike around to the main
doors, which were also locked. I wasn't about to bike all the way home with five delicate
costumes! That would ruin them, and they were so bulky that I couldn't think about bicycling
while carrying them, anyway.
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| The performance hall was adjacent to the music department office. Underneath the department office were some professor's offices, more practice rooms, and a second stage door leading to a corridor behind the orchestra pit to the green rooms beneath the stage. The door leading down to the underground offices was unlocked when I tried it, so I parked my bike by the door and went inside, down the flight of stairs, and through the bright florescent corridor. At the end of the corridor was the second stage door and an elevator which led to a loading dock behind the stage. The stage door was still propped open. Woo-hoo! If my luck held, the green room doors would also be open, or at least someone would be around to unlock them in there so I could safely store my costumes until the next night's performance. |
 When I passed through the stage door, it took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Since it's
directly under the stage, the area was kept deliberately dim, painted black, and had a single,
overhead bulb for the entire hallway. The hallway had two turns in it. I rounded the first
corner and was disappointed to see no one left milling about. The entrance to the orchestra
pit was on my right, the men's dressing room immediately to my left, and beyond it, the
seamstress' room and the women's dressing room. The women's dressing room has two doors; the
one closest to me usually was kept locked even during performances (I don't know why), so I
just headed past it to the other one, which was down the hall beyond the seamstress' room and
around the other bend.
|
| I walked down the corridor just past the door to the seamstress' room... and froze. I simply stopped and couldn't move forward any more, like I'd hit an invisible wall. I tested my balance and found that I could go backwards, but not forwards, so I took a couple of steps back and tried again. The same thing happened: I froze mid-stride in the same place that I had the first time. I looked all around the corridor in front of me. Nothing looked odd or out of place, it was just an empty, institution-type corridor. More than a little puzzled, I turned around to try the door to the women's dressing room that I had just passed, instead. As I was walking back past the seamstress' room, I realized that if anyone was still around this late after the show, it would likely be her, so I stopped to knock on her door. |
| The seamstress had been in town for years. She was well-liked, and well-known, and she and I knew each other since I'd performed in several venues around town. As I raised my hand to knock on her door, though, a very strong feeling suddenly washed over me. It was tangible; I could feel it travel from my head to my feet, as if someone had dumped a bucket of something over me. The feeling was a horrible sense of dread and carried a very clear message: don't knock. It was so clear that for a moment I thought someone had spoken the words aloud, but there was no one in the corridor except for me. Confused, I let my hand drop to my side. I tried to shake off the weird feeling and lifted my hand to knock again and the same feeling washed over me even more strongly, with the same message. This time felt the message felt as if it were coming from behind the door, inside the seamstress' room. Something was going on in that room... something was being planned. Something bad. There were several someones, or somethings, in there, and they did not want to be interrupted. Whatever they were up to, I did not want to redirect their attention at me. Okay. Clear message. Got it. |
| You know how sometimes you know there's someone with you in a room even before you turn around? You don't just merely suspect someone's there, you just know. Suddenly I got that feeling. I wasn't alarmed, though, just relieved. I knew who it was: the music director of the show, Michael. At least I thought it was him because I had a sense that it was a tall, slender man in his mid-forties with graying hair. That fit Michael's description. I was so sure it was him that I began talking to him before I even turned around. |
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"Hey, Michael, do you know where I can--"
But no one was there. No one at all. I was alone in that dark corridor. The strange, naked bulb was directly above me, stretching out shadows in all directions. |
| The bulb began to sway. |
| I bolted. |
| Running as fast as I could, clutching the costumes to my body, I tore back down the corridor. There was Something behind me, pursuing me, rushing me out. It was fluid, liquid, and growing, filling up the corridor as quickly as I passed through it. It was Something Very Bad. |
| I rounded the corner and the doorway and office corridor came into view. The Thing behind me was rising like a wave, cresting over me. My legs pumped and my heart pounded. I was almost at the door... Everything ached. I think I was yelling. At least it felt like my body was screaming, I wasn't sure I was actually making any noise. I couldn't hear anything but my blood pounding in a deafening roar in my ears. |
| Suddenly I burst through the stage door and into the brightly-lit hallway beyond. The feelings of the Thing behind me just... vanished. They disappeared completely when I crossed the threshold into the office hallway. I didn't stop. I ran down the corridor, half blinded by the too-bright florescent light. I charged up the stairs and through the doors and burst out into the cool night air. |
I crashed right into my bike, which was parked by the door, and the both of us and all of
my costumes went sprawling to the cement sidewalk. 
I pulled myself up on my knees with the help of a
a planter and promptly threw up into it. I just kneeled there, panting, soaked with sweat, certain
that my heart was going to burst out of my chest, it was pounding so hard. I wiped my face.
It was wet with tears and sweat. The noise of my crash into my bike had attracted the notice of
a campus security
officer (a student who patrols campus at night, locking doors and keeping an eye out for
mischief), who came over to see what was going on. She asked me if I was okay and if I wanted some help
getting home (inferring, incorrectly, from the vomit, that I was drunk). I shook my head.
She asked if I was sure and I just nodded and waved her away. She left, but I figured I had
better get out of there before she called the campus police (real cops). My costumes lay in
crumpled heaps all around me, crushed and dirty. I rolled them as best as I could into
a large ball and sort of tucked
them under one arm. Then I shakily got on my bike and rode home.
|
| The cool night air and familiar rhythmic pumping of riding my bike helped calm me down a little. When I got home, I washed my face and laid out my costumes and cleaned and pressed them as best I could. I was still shaking when I called a friend, one of the other performers, an hour later, and related the story. He came over and stayed up with me through the night since my roommate was gone for the weekend and I was there alone, and was hardly going to get any sleep. I finally slept a little the following afternoon before returning to the performance hall for the final night's performance. He met me outside the theater and we went down into the green room area together. The corridors were filled with bustling, costumed performers, faces flushed with closing night giddiness. I didn't feel any of the awful sensations I'd felt the night before aside from some residual nausea. We asked around to see if anyone had been around that late last night, but no one said they had. The seamstress had been long gone to a coffeehouse with several of the other staff by the time I had come down. We never did come up with any explanation for what had happened. |
| I did go down to the green rooms several times after that night, for other performances with other groups, but never, ever alone. |
�1997, Kelley Collins |
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