by Logan Jacobs
“What a pity,” I said.
“But it’s quite a pleasure indeed to run into you here,” Slade said. He was smiling as he said it, but there was concern in his eyes. I suspected he wasn’t as pleased to see me and my friends as he claimed. “What do you all think of the show so far?”
“It’s quite engaging,” I said. “I’ll probably hear The Milkmaid’s Lamentation in my head every time I bite into a steak for quite a while after this.”
Slade gave me a polite chuckle.
“I just hope they catch the devil that’s running amok and causing all the problems,” Elizabeth spoke up as she arched an eyebrow at Slade. Maybe she was coming around to my theory that he was the Shadow Knight, then.
“I’m sure they will, my dear,” Slade replied after staring at her for a moment. “Very soon.”
I glanced at my watch. Intermission was supposed to last for half an hour, and I needed to detach myself from Slade so that we’d still have time to go investigate backstage and see if we could find any clues about what Mayhem might be up to.
Norma was watching me and was the first to notice that gesture. She really didn’t seem to want to look at Slade. I got the feeling she didn’t like him because, although he’d never intended to be anything other than polite to her, it was fairly obvious that next to Elizabeth and me, he consistently overlooked her to the point where he couldn’t even remember her name correctly. As soon as she saw me glance at my watch, she gave me a tiny smile and then announced to the group, “I’m going to go get in line for the ladies’ room before it’s too late. I bet it’s hundreds of people long by now.”
“Good point, I’ll come with you,” Dynamo said.
“Guess I’ll hit up the men’s,” I said. “Although we don’t hang out in there for fifteen minutes chatting and fixing our hair so I should make better time than you two. Well, good to see you, Slade-- catch you later!”
I started hurrying away before he could ask again where we were sitting or attempt to make further plans. Norma and Dynamo clicked after me on their heels.
“Text me!” Slade shouted after me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment without turning back.
“What do we do now?” Norma asked. “How do we get backstage? Through the theater? I think there was a door next to the stage.”
I had noticed the same door, but that door was in sight of hundreds of people, even during the intermission when a lot of them were out of their seats. Then, I spotted one of the ushers in the tuxedo uniform of the opera house unlock and dart through a different door leading from the lobby. I pointed him out to the girls and asked, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“We knock out a couple of the ushers and steal their uniforms?” Norma asked eagerly.
I blinked at her. “Well, that’s one option, but I was thinking we could just cause a diversion and sneak through that same door. I bet it leads backstage. Elizabeth, you know how to pick a lock, right?”
She nodded.
“And Norma,” I said, “do you think you can cause a diversion to let us slip in?”
Norma considered for a moment. Then her brown eyes, including the puffy one, lit up, and she nodded. “I got this one, Miles. Give me your pocket square?”
I passed it to her. She raised it to her blackened eye and rubbed off the concealing makeup.
Then, while Dynamo and I edged our way over to the door that had locked behind the usher and Dynamo pulled out two pins from her hair to get to work, Norma clutched her eye and let out a yell.
“He just punched me!” she shrieked indignantly.
Everyone in the vicinity turned to stare at her in shock.
Some of the women tried to comfort her while other people yelled, “Who? Who just punched you?” and looked around wildly for the culprit.
“My ex-boyfriend-- he… ” Norma buried her face in her hands and started fake sobbing.
“Got it,” Elizabeth whispered in my ear. I glanced around and saw that no one was paying the two of us any attention. They were all busy huddling around Norma or looking for her phantom abuser, and the fact that I was accompanied by a woman rather than being a lone male and did not appear agitated or at all interested in Norma’s woes seemed to excuse me from suspicion.
We darted through the door and closed it behind us.
“Wonder how Norma’s going to get herself out of that one,” the brunette said under her breath.
We were in a dim, narrow, carpeted hallway. There was only one way to go, so we hurried forward and just had to hope we wouldn’t get stopped by anyone. For that person’s sake.
“You know what, I think she’ll manage just fine,” I said. “I’m proud of her. I thought that black eye would be a liability tonight, but she’s turned it into an asset.”
“I think it means a lot to her that you’re one of the few people who sees her potential,” Dynamo said.
“Well, I’m one of countless who saw yours,” I said. “So, I just about won the lottery managing to recruit you.”
“Just recruit me?” she asked with a smirk.
“Not just that,” I conceded and went in for an ass grab. Elizabeth giggled and started to turn toward me, but then she stopped, and we both grew serious as someone stepped out from around the corner into the hallway with us.
It was a bloody cow.
The baritone whose character had died getting stabbed by a demon in the first act, who did not seem to have changed out of his black and white spotted costume yet.
He stared at us slack-jawed.
“Do you know where the restroom... ” I started to say, and then trailed off, because there just wasn’t any change of expression in his face. It was like he didn’t even hear me. Actually, it was like he didn’t really see me and Dynamo, or at least didn’t recognize us as humans or process the fact that we were trespassing somewhere we didn’t belong.
He just made a decidedly unmelodic grunting sound, and then he stumbled past us and pushed us aside impatiently, not as if we were people or threats to him, but just as if we were inanimate objects that happened to be in his way.
Elizabeth and I exchanged glances.
“I don’t think he should be allowed to go mingle with the crowd in this condition,” I said.
My girlfriend ran up behind him, locked her forearm against his throat and used the other arm for leverage to choke him out as he gargled. Then when he went limp, she lowered him carefully to the ground, slid him over, and propped him up into a seated position against the wall.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it,” I said. “He was acting like a zombie.”
“He didn’t seem murderous though,” Dynamo pointed out. “And everyone else that got the mind control chips implanted in them started trying to kill people, right?”
“The mind control chips don’t necessarily invoke homicidal impulses, though,” I said. “That could just be how Mayhem chose to use them so far. But maybe that singer just hadn’t received any instructions through his chip yet. Or maybe, he was on his way to do something bad to the crowd, and he didn’t really react to us because there weren’t any instructions that applied to us.”
“Well, let’s go check on the rest of the cast,” Dynamo said grimly.
We continued down the hallway and turned the same corner that the cow singer had come around. There was an open door further down and when we peered in we saw what looked like pretty much the whole cast in a room filled with tables and chairs and dressing mirrors and costumes on racks.
There were corseted women, foppish looking men, a handful of demonic looking figures, a few humans dressed as barnyard animals, and a few angels in robes with golden headdresses. I had no idea what the rest of the plot of The Demon’s Delight was going to be, but based on the demeanor of this colorful cast of characters, I somehow didn’t think it was going to unfold as originally intended.
They weren’t chattering, rehearsing, doing vocal exercises, touching up thei
r makeup, or whatever it was that opera performers were supposed to do during intermissions. Instead, they were milling aimlessly about the room or slumped over catatonically, with glazed expressions in their eyes, just like those of the bloody cow in the hallway.
“Fuck,” I said. “Mayhem has definitely been here.”
“Miss, what’s going on here?” Elizabeth asked the nearest opera singer, who was costumed as either a rather scandalous princess or a rather ornately dressed courtesan, I wasn’t sure which. “What happened to all of you? We’re here to help.”
The opera singer she had addressed stared directly at her with her head cocked and an air of faint confusion. Then the singer stuck her own white gloved hand into her red lipsticked mouth and started absentmindedly gnawing on her fingers.
“It’s like they’ve been lobotomized or something,” Elizabeth whispered. “This is horrible.”
“Seen a sickly looking man with blue hair and acne scars?” I asked them hopefully without expecting a reply. There wasn’t one. If these people had been turned into puppets, then they were empty puppets without a hand currently operating them.
Then somewhere not too far away I heard the creaking of the massive curtains being rolled back and a rain of light applause from the audience.
Intermission was over, and the real show was about to begin.
Chapter Ten
The members of The Grayville Opera Company stirred themselves as if in response to these cues, got up, and trooped past us toward the stage. I looked at each one as he or she passed me, but even with all the stage makeup, I didn’t think any of them could be Mayhem.
Then I got an idea.
“Elizabeth,” I said as I turned to her, “the way they’re all ignoring us suggests that the mind control chips only have one way feedback. Mayhem can make these people do whatever he wants, but it doesn’t seem like he receives all the information that their senses process. Like our presence. So, in order to control them as effectively as possible, wouldn’t he want to be in a position where he could see all of them?”
“The lighting control box,” she said. “Or whatever they call it. But that room where the guy in charge of the stage lights sits.”
“That’s a good idea, we’ll check there,” I said and then spoke into my cuff line to communicate with Norma. “Hey, if you’re done with your performance now, could you go around and double-check all the boxes? I did look at them through my binoculars, and everyone looked normal, but check just in case Mayhem is crouched down hiding in one of them, or something.”
“Yup,” she replied cheerily in my ear.
“But if you find him, don’t engage him,” I warned her. “Tell me and Dynamo and wait for us to get there.”
“Got it,” she replied.
“Okay, the control room is probably opposite the stage,” I said to Elizabeth. “We’d better head that way.”
As we made our way through the interior, employees only halls of the opera house in a vaguely counterclockwise direction, no one stopped us. I wondered if Mayhem had already dealt with whatever security the opera had hired for the night, which probably wasn’t anything too serious anyway.
Through the walls, we could hear the loudspeaker enhanced voices of the opera singers apparently beginning the second act of The Demon’s Delight. Without our brochure translations and without the visual clues onstage to go by, I had no idea what they were singing about.
“Speak any Italian, by any chance?” I asked Elizabeth. “Your surname, Avenati--”
“Nope,” she replied. “That was many generations ago. I was born in the States.”
I knew that Norma would understand at least the majority of the words, but I didn’t want to interrupt her stealthy search of the private boxes in order to ask her.
Then, there came a sound that was universally understandable in any language. Human screaming.
It started right after an aria ended, and it didn’t sound like the melodious pseudo-screaming of an opera performer, it sounded like genuine screams from the audience. But then the screams died down. There was a hubbub of excited voices. And people started applauding. Then the singing resumed.
“Norma, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Well, I think they’re staying on script,” she said, “but there was a murder written into the script, and I think… they did it for real. A beheading. But everyone seems to think it was just special effects.”
“Fuck,” I said. “How far ahead in the brochure did you read? Do you know if there are any other murders coming up?”
“Yes,” Norma said. “A lot of them. The second act has a lot to do with the demon… erm… reaping souls, and being delighted about it. And recruiting some embittered humans as, um, apprentice demons or something. Like the milkmaid from the first act, she’s on a killing spree now too.”
“What is she saying?” asked Dynamo, who couldn’t hear Norma’s voice in my earpiece.
“That we need to hurry up,” I replied.
A minute later we came upon a narrow staircase that had a chain and a DO NOT ENTER sign across the bottom. That was a pretty good indicator that it might lead to the control room.
Another pretty good indicator that the control room might currently be manned by someone unauthorized was the fact that the person standing in front of the chain wasn’t clothed as a security guard. Instead, the person was clothed in a cow costume, or a dead cow costume to be more precise, powdered with black to represent lightning scorch marks, and clutching an assault rifle. Guess this is what Norma’s favorite bovine was up to in the afterlife.
I wasn’t too happy when I saw that since opera house security protocols had prevented me from bringing a weapon of my own or wearing my bulletproof supersuit, but Dynamo seemed to be less fazed, I suppose because first of all she was a human weapon and second of all she could heal from basically any wound short of an instantly lethal one.
As I warily walked up to Mayhem’s guard cow saying, “Hey man, I loved you in the show tonight, my assistant said you were her favorite cow,” my superhero companion flew past me in a blur of raven hair, dark green fabric, and white limbs.
The cow tried to point the rifle at her, but he was far too slow. Dynamo grabbed the muzzle and jerked it down toward the ground, and it fired a hole into the carpet. Then she grabbed the pistol grip with her other hand and yanked the rifle upward vertically so that the butt slammed into the cow’s chin and clacked his teeth together so hard that he toppled backward unconscious.
I sure would’ve hated to not be on Dynamo’s side, I thought as I stared at her. That was a compelling reason not to give in to my more violent impulses.
“We shouldn’t harm these people unless we have no other choice,” Dynamo said sternly to me. “Since they’re not acting of their own will.”
“Fair enough,” I said with a little chuckle as I pointed to the unconscious opera singer. “Are you sure that counts as not harming?”
“Any more than necessary to neutralize them,” Dynamo qualified as she handed the rifle off to me. “Here. I’m better at hand to hand combat, and you’re just as good of a shot.”
“Better, actually,” I corrected her.
“Just as good,” Dynamo snapped as she started marching up the stairs. I hurried to pass her, since I was the one with the gun now.
As we reached the top of the stairs audience screams echoed throughout the opera house again and Norma announced in my ear, “And another one bites the dust.”
Then we got to the landing, and I tried the door and realized that it was locked.
“Can you pick this lock too?” I asked Elizabeth as I turned to her.
“Probably, but I won’t,” she replied. Then she backed up a few steps, ran forward, and delivered a kick right next to the door handle that busted the door down. I didn’t know many guys who would have been able to do that, and fewer girls, and fewer girls still while wearing stilettos. Although to be fair they were Warden-issued weaponized heels.
&nbs
p; The dark room had one-way tinted windows across the front and a bunch of screens and keyboards from which technicians could control the sound and lighting on stage. It had a couple of swivel chairs, and one held a scrawny, bald, acne-scarred man who looked faintly vampiric in his ill-fitting off the rack tuxedo. His bulging pale blue eyes stared at us with the expression of a trapped rat.
He was pointing a rifle at us in trembling hands while he cowered behind a plump middle-aged woman with clownishly rouged cheeks, hair piled into a beehive, or maybe it was a wig, and a horrible ruffled yellow dress that looked like something Norma would pick out.
The opera singer being used as a human shield had no expression whatsoever, but she tracked Elizabeth and me with her eyes and shifted her feet slightly to remain directly in my line of fire so that I couldn’t get a clear shot at Mayhem.
“Thank you for the invitation tonight,” I told Mayhem. “It’s been a real pleasure.”
“I-- I thought you were a businessman,” he stammered in a voice that was fairly normal but slightly high-pitched and currently had a whiny tone. “Not some kind of superhero. And who the fuck is she?”
It hadn’t escaped his notice that my date had been the one to deliver a flying kick to the door, so I guessed that was why he looked nervous about her, even though he had a gun and she didn’t.
“The two occupations are not mutually exclusive, you know,” I informed him. “Actually, the super industry is very lucrative, I’ve heard… although that’s not why I’m in it. This is more recreational for me, really.”
“Well, I’ll shoot the chick,” Mayhem announced. It was typical for superheroes to disregard their own safety, and to back down and yield their weapons when their love interests were threatened, so that was a rational move on his part, given that he seemed to have mistaken me for a superhero. “Unless you drop the gun and get on your knees with your hands behind your head. Now.”
“No, thanks,” I replied nonchalantly.
