The Old Theatre - From The Madness Of The Number Man

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Part Seven

“I don’t understand why he would be coming over for any other reason than to get inside your head.”

“That’s exactly what I thought.” Much to Richard’s dismay, the way over to the WBCT on their bikes that morning was fairly quick. He had noticed that Petunia’s bike appeared to have some modifications on the frame, and it looked as though she had mounted a small motor on the back of it as well. They were wearing their matching black jackets, and although Petunia’s jacket had small handmade patches all over it that were decorated with small handmade pictures, Richard’s was bare for the most part, with the exception of two small patches on the right shoulder.

Agatha Gip had made him two patches that she very quickly sewed on before they left from her house that morning. One of the patches had a small picture of a broken mechanical snake and the other was a black patch ringed in yellow with two red eyes in the middle of it.

Petunia had explained to Richard that her mother loved hearing stories about her investigations, and for some reason, it had crept into Agatha Gip’s electronic brain that she needed to make her daughter, and now Richard, little awards to commemorate said investigations. Petunia saw Richard’s face go white at the black patch with nothing more than the two eyes on it, and she understood why, but she had found that one quite unique and creative and was now thinking it was her favorite patch that her mother had made so far.

Petunia had also noticed that Richard’s face was turning from white to almost green the closer they came to the old theatre, and his trepidation was taking some of the fun out of the moment as far as she was concerned. She had missed Richard the last month, and she had found herself almost on the verge of tears many times while she was making the large sketch on the south wall of her lab, but she was driven by something in her mind that wouldn’t let her do anything other than dwell on the theatre and the mystery surrounding that unsettling bit of graffiti.

As they turned left off of the north road that led out of town and into the mountains, the building was coming into focus, and even though Petunia had been pouring over the plans and she knew all of the dimensions backwards and forwards, it still seemed much larger than what the measurements were.

“Gosh it’s big.”

“And ugly. We’ll go around the back to the bar. I’m sure Marty’s here. He’s always here.” They crested the slight rise in the driveway and then the red brick building sprawled out in front of them. Petunia slowed to a stop and took in every detail that she could; no matter how detailed the plans had been, there was nothing like seeing the real thing. Before she had enlisted Richard’s help in her investigations, she had mostly done research with very little field work, but ever since they broke into Ronald Lucas Intermediate, Petunia had found that she liked the field work more and more, no matter how dangerous it might become. Richard coasted to a stop right next to her and didn’t even bother to ask why she was waiting; he knew she was taking it all in and that suited him just fine because it meant prolonging the inevitability of having to walk back into the place.

The Wicker Bush Community Theatre was one of the oldest buildings in town, and it had sat on its perch overlooking the town of Wicker Bush in its present form since 1916, however much of the building had sat there for far longer. It had originally been constructed as the home of Sinclair Daniels, the father of the town, and that’s about the extent of its original history as far as anyone in the town knew. In 1916, it had become one of the more prominent theatre houses this side of the Rockies, and its prominence reigned supreme until the advent of television, which had nearly decimated attendance of its live performances. It had briefly closed its doors as a professional theatre in the early sixties, only to reopen again in the late sixties by the commitment of a few prominent locals who gave their time and energy to keeping the spirit of art alive in the community.

Some would say these individuals saved the theatre and gave much of themselves for the betterment of their town, but none would know exactly how much of themselves were given over in the process.

The building itself was Victorian in style, a red brick two story behemoth with various shades of green spread over its shutters and white facia boards with many white metal framed windows. Behind the windows were white curtains, and behind the curtains were small lights that flickered like candles at night, and behind those lights were boxes constructed for the sole purpose of never letting natural light penetrate into the building itself.

There had been many stories over the years of people being seen looking out from these windows, even people that knew that there was no possible way for anyone to fit into the shadow boxes that had been fashioned on the backsides. In many of the little junk shops along the highway leading in or out of town, you could find its image printed on t-shirts or sweatshirts, but those t-shirts and sweatshirts, much like the theatre itself, always stayed right where they were. To tourists, the very sight of the building gave them a sense of unexplainable unease, whether it was the real thing or merely printed on cotton.

Wicker Bush could, in the strictest sense, be considered a tourist town, but it was actually more of a pit-stop on the way to the various other sites and destinations around it which I will not mention here, as it should be very obvious what those sites and destinations are from the various hints I have supplied in the first part of our story.

Tourists were quick to leave the town, unlike the volunteers who tended to the theatre, who never seemed to leave. Many people who had merely been curious about participating, had walked through the theatre doors with enthusiasm and a sense of awe and excitement and then very shortly become driven by some urge within themselves to give the place more and more until they became shells of their former selves, living only to serve something they thought was a higher purpose, but in reality, was anything but.

Suffice it to say, Petunia knew everything about the building on paper, and indeed she had seen it looming in the distance from many points in town, and not once had she ever had a sense of foreboding or apprehension about going anywhere near it, but now that she was sitting on her bike within a stones throw of the place, she felt her stomach turn to a slight unease and she could feel the hair on the back of her neck begin to rise. She stole a quick glance at Richard who looked as if he would rather be anywhere else than by her side.

“Are you ok?”

“I hate this place. The door should be open around the back.” Richard pedaled his bike slowly, all the while keeping his eye on the building to his right. Petunia followed, and in spite of the unease she felt, she couldn’t help but admire the beauty of the building itself. There was a long porch on the second floor which ran along the length of the entire facade, and its iron railings were topped off by a planter box which spilled short green vines down onto the railings below. In the morning light, it was easy for Petunia to tell that the second story windows were now merely decorations that were blocked off from the inside by small wooden walls not more than two feet behind the glass, but through the door to the second story, she could see a small bit of a hallway beyond it.

As Petunia turned her bike to the right around the corner of the building, she realized that it looked much like the front, but on this side there was only one window with the word, Bar, painted across the width of it in a tasteful block lettering that had faded into a dull green, and beyond that, a small door at the corner. The last time she had looked at that window, she had seen it from the other side; inside the building where someone had written her name for some reason.

There was a smaller parking lot on this side of the building that wasn’t kept quite as nice as the lot out front, and there was a beaten brown truck parked in the space closest to the building. Richard hopped off of his bike and leaned it against the building underneath the bar window and he motioned for Petunia to do the same.

“This is where everybody from the theatre parks. This is Marty’s truck.” Richard took a deep breath and Petunia wasn’t sure if he was getting ready to explain something to her or if he was trying to keep himself from hyperventilating. He was doing both. “So, Marty can be a little strange, but he’s a really nice guy. Actually, he’s the nicest guy here. I don’t know why my mom likes it here. I’m glad she’s not coming anymore.” The reason for her not going there anymore came back into Richard’s mind, and he squinted his eyes and took a deep breath at the thought of his father.

“Aren’t we going in?”

“Yeah, I’m just kind of getting ready.” Petunia indulged Richard’s reticence for a few seconds, but she had been waiting for this moment for a while now, and as it became clear that she was going to have to be the one to take charge, she stepped past Richard and opened the green door that led inside the theatre. Richard swallowed hard and followed her.

It’s at this point that an author who is an adept storyteller would take the time to go into great detail about everything Petunia and Richard were seeing inside the theatre; indeed in the last story, I suppose very little time was spent on the description of the interior of the WBCT, and in the first part of our story, one could guess that the details and history were being saved for the next part of the story, and one would be correct in that assumption, however this part of the story belongs exclusively to Petunia and her intentions of hearing the history of the building itself. With that being said, Petunia and Richard walked through the bar that had many interesting things to look at.

Music was playing inside the entire place, and as Richard walked past Petunia, and began to call out for Marty, he had to shout in order to be heard above the sounds of Ragtime music. Petunia followed Richard through the open door of the bar and into the lobby of the theatre, and she marveled at how different the place was on the inside compared to the outside. Everything about the outside had been deliberate and beautiful, right down to the placement of the rose bushes in the garden, but inside it looked as though everything had been patched together. From the wood trim, to the paint on the walls, to the haphazardly placed pictures of old productions sitting in frames of different styles and colors, to the frayed carpet which was almost threadbare in some of the corners, to the drop-down grid ceiling… the place was a jigsaw puzzle of furnishings that were second, third, and fourth hand.

“MARTY?!” Richard walked through another door adorned with two curtains on either side of it. As Petunia was about to walk through the curtains, she saw that above the doors there was a small brass sign that simply said, “Sinclair Daniels Auditorium”.

The sound of Scott Joplin was so loud in the auditorium that it forced Richard and Petunia to hold their hands over their ears. The light was dim, but Petunia started to make out little details as her eyes became accustomed to it. Unlike the bar and the lobby that she had walked through, this room seemed to hold some of the grand charm that it had at one time, although the signs of age were apparent. The floor was sloped and even in the present lighting, Petunia could tell that the concrete of the floor had been decorated with some kind of a stain, making it look as though it was taken from the face of a great stone and placed here, where it had been polished to a high shine, giving it the appearance of being underneath a very thin layer of glass. There was a great swath of old individual seats, row after row, taking up the center of the auditorium, flanked on either side with two smaller sections of seating. While Richard was busying himself with yelling, Petunia walked to the row of seats nearest to her. Each of the seats had a very small brass placard on the backrest which had numbers stamped into them; the one Petunia was placing her fingers on was numbered 376.

The wooden chairs did not look very comfortable to Petunia, but she had to admit that they were very interesting to look at with their sturdy construction. They were scratched here and there deeply into the wood, but care had obviously been taken to ensure that each scratch was treated with some kind of oil in order to make them blend into the rest of the unblemished wood. There were two worn cushions on each chair; one on the seat and one on the backrest. Most of the cushions in the whole place had been ripped at one time or another, and the costume designers who had worked throughout the years spent just as much time stitching the seat cushions back together as they did making costumes.

Sylvia Radmacher, who was the costume designer when Petunia and Richard entered the theatre that day, had been doing the job for almost twenty years, and she had become quite the master at stitching those cushions so well that one could hardly tell they had been stitched at all. Sylvia was far more talented at it than the previous costume designer had been, but that can hardly be blamed on the old costume designer, Cynthia Miles, as she had only given three years of her life, and ultimately, lost her life due to the theatre. Had she not died, she may have been able to hone her skills in the art of cushion stitching and been even better at it than Sylvia Radmacher, bad sadly Cynthia Miles was found dead in the auditorium early one morning nineteen years before Petunia and Richard walked through the back door of the theatre.

The walls of the auditorium were a deep red and they were decorated with drapes of nearly the same color with gold fringe around their edges. There were long runs of white wooden trim that broke up all of the red into large rectangles that measured ten feet high, and along the tops of each rectangle was a tarnished brass wall sconce that illuminated everything underneath it. The lights were capable of being much brighter, but Marty Cayer preferred it just light enough in the auditorium to see; electricity was costly, and Marty was always conscious of keeping running costs as low as they could be, but at the same time, Marty was just like anyone else who worked long hours in the theatre alone, no one wanted to be inside without all of the lights on, no matter how dim.

Petunia looked down onto the stage, a vast wooden thing that was lit by a single overhead light from somewhere behind the proscenium arch. The arch was in the process of being painted to resemble stone, and even with the light the way it was, Petunia could recognize the talent of the painter. The boards of the stage were also being painted to resemble a cobble stoned street, and half-painted flats were set up to look like a late 19th century London.

Unbeknownst to Petunia, the theatre was currently rehearsing their fall production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Marty Cayer had fallen behind on the construction of the set due to his constantly changing image of it in his head.

“Marty?!” The music in the auditorium was turned down very low, and Richard turned and looked up at the wall above the door to the auditorium. Petunia followed his gaze and saw that there was a large window set into the back wall. Marty Cayer, a rather well fed and well bearded individual, was sliding the window open.

“Richard! How are you, young man?”

“I’m good. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“I’ll be right down. Go grab yourself a pop in the bar if you want to.” Richard turned and walked quickly back to the bar, happy to get a little closer to the exit, while Petunia stood fast, transfixed by the stage, and the feeling of strangeness that seemed to come off of it in a wave.