Makedewa, Maine
Beaumont Theater

The Beaumont Theater sits more or less abandoned in the historic downtown of Makadewa. It's an old building with an art deco style the rest of the town has failed to maintain elsewhere. In its heyday, it would have been a true beauty. But its day is long past, and now the town planning commission is stuck. It's probably too expensive to restore, but it's also too important to the town to easily let it go, and so in this state it remains: derelict and rotting from the inside.

You can still see playbills and posters, faded with time, of the last time the theater was maintained, sometime back when Y2K was a looming threat, but that was only the last of many failed attempts at turning the theater into a booming business again. It has changed hands dozens of times since the last brick of the building was laid. Somehow, something always goes amiss. The theater is never open for long, and not even the town's few transients trust the building enough for even temporary shelter.

Nowadays, absolutely no one wants anything to do with the old thing, and on this particular evening, absolutely no one is around.


"It's perfect," says an absolute no one to himself.

It's absolutely perfect.

You slowly move an arm through the glass of the the window of the theater. It's thick stuff and caked in dust and grime, but you make your way through with little effort, and after that little experiment is ended, the rest of you follows.

You feel a delightful little chill as you finally step into the interior.

The inside is... well, obviously it has seen much better days, but... there's still something quite grand about the entryway. The ceilings are high, and its built to fit a crowd. It's easy to ignore the trash on the ground and the peeling paint on the walls.

This place is regal and grand and best of all, all yours.

There is just one little thing. You don't catch it at first, but one thing the theater isn't... is dark.

It's very dim, but some of the lights are on.

You listen for a response, but... you don't hear anything.

No, really. This building is almost eerily quiet for such a large structure left along for so long. You'd expect creaking floors and maybe an echo to your words. You would expect the sound of wind through the cracks of the roof, or howls through leaky windows. You would at least expect the low hum of electricity flowing through the building.

But there's none of that. It's quiet as death in this place, and maybe that would be appealing to you in another circumstance, but right now it's just... unsettling.

You wait.

Something moves the curtain. It looks like a gust of wind, but just like everything else, it makes no sound.

What do you do?

Victor, you look over the curtain, and try to stay as undetectable as you can, which normally is not that difficult.

It's probably just the wind, right? But you don't hear any wind. And it could be a squatter, but... no. That doesn't seem right. You've never been a man of intuition over logic, but being an actual, literal ghost has changed that aspect a bit. You've become a bit better at, say, "reading a room" ever since your untimely demise.

And what you're reading here is silence. Utter, absolute silence, and with it a stillness that could only come from an absence of life.

There's something here. It isn't moving and it isn't breathing, but it's very much awake.

Just like you.
...Exactly like you.

Something or someone is already haunting your haunt. There's another ghost here, and you can tell just by standing here that the claim it's staked on this theater runs far deeper than any you could currently match.

You aren't sure its detected you yet.
What do you do?

You shake at the curtain and...

Something about that was... off. Huh. You try it again, more forcefully. There's definitely something strange about this curtain but you aren't quite sure what it is.

One more time, and this time you actually pull the curtain to the side and open the rest of the stage.

And at first, nothing happens, but then the lights surge with power until the entire auditorium is lit, and the old spotlight beams to life, right into your eyes. It would have blinded you, if your vision still worked the way it used to. Small blessings. Then the light falls, down to your chest, to your feet, and then slowly tracks down into the center of the stage, where it stops, and the light itself takes on a form.

You see an approximation of a person. But only an approximation.

It's a figure far more spectral than yourself, like the swirling dust from the air taking shape in the beam of the spotlight, and into the staticy form of what you think might be a woman.

It-- she turns to you and tilts her head. Her mouth moves, but no sound comes out. And that's when you realize what was strange about the curtain:

It made no noise.

You haven't heard a single thing besides your own voice since you entered here. The lights, the curtain, the entire building... nothing's made a sound.

Everything is silent.

The spotlight tracks closer to you, and with it the woman. She seems to be awaiting your response to a question you could not hope to hear.

Something shifts.

You feel it in the air around you. It's almost like a wind, and it sets a chill down your spine. It's only like a wind, however. Natural air never felt quite so intimidating.

You go to ask for clarification, to charm and soothe this fellow ghost, but nothing comes out, this time. Your voice is as silent as the rest of the room around you. You try again, but it's not even muffled static. It's like the sound was never there at all. And you start to panic, because some part of you understands that this is something new. This place couldn't do this before. You'd heard yourself all those times you shouted and spoke in awe of this place, but now, nothing.

You almost try to move to leave, but the being speaks again, and this time... you don't hear it, but you understand. And what you understand is that something has gone wrong, and you can't move.

The ring of light on the stage tracks closer to you, and with it the ghost, before finally it jerks forward, and you're standing in the full light of the spotlight.

Victor, you've gotten in over your head.
That's a thought that comes to mind, unbidden, and you can't quite tell if it's your own... or not.

If you could, you would yell. But you can't.

You tried to make a deal with the devil, but you forgot that the devil could make a deal back.
And this devil, well, she's been around much, much longer than you have.

She's been waiting for someone like you to help her for a long, long time.

Gwendoline Hartford-Beaumont smiles, as she feels her reach extend beyond the theater that has been her gilded cage for almost one hundred years.