The Midnight Theatre in the Alley

Here's a rather peculiar short story I wrote a few years ago:



by James Albert Barr

It felt like an eerily vivid dream, until some hooded giant slapped a blood-red coloured ticket into my hand so hard, the sting ran straight up my right arm with a fiery jolt. It remained numbed for the rest of this strange, unfathomable witching hour that I can't seem to recall ever actually having, yet the experience felt so damned real! So real, in fact, that I could swear it happened just now. But how is that possible when I'm sitting right now, at this moment, during the twilight hour, at my desk, in my room, at my downtown apartment, writing these very words?!

How did I end up in that darkened alley at the stroke of midnight, with a luminous, crescent moon resting atop of the roof of an immemorial theatre building I mysteriously entered, seemingly with inside compulsion and outside coercion in equal measure? There was a wicked, fierce wind blowing against me as I slowly made my way towards the backdoor entry. I thought it exceedingly gusty for such a narrow, enclosed passageway between two buildings about four storeys high.

The building next to the theatre was an especially seasoned bookstore operating since the 1890s, I discerned, called Temple of Jupiter Books. I never entered the store, but knew it specialised in occult books and vintage editions dating back a couple hundred years or so. The earliest edition I somehow seemed to remember catching sight of, perhaps as I looked through the front window display while strolling past one dream, dated back to the 1760s, I believe. I couldn't quite make out the book's title, but it was a history book of some sort, I intuited.  

As I finally arrived at the backdoor entrance to rudely receive my exclusive ticket from an eight-foot tall brute whose face I couldn't see, I noticed two other people ahead of me. I didn't know them personally, but they seemed familiar to me nonetheless. One was an older, thickly moustached gentleman wearing a top-hat and cloak, and the other was an attractive, young woman with bright, long flaxen hair, like a 1940s Hollywood starlet, and garbed in an elegant, red evening gown. She also wore high-class, white gloves. Her beautiful hair had the faint scent of juniper berries, and she had a striking ring of amethyst on her left index finger. The mere sight of this ring suddenly induced within me a sense of intoxication, curiously enough. They were together, because she had her right arm inside his left as they entered the theatre. 

The couple were seated to the right of the ornately decorated stage. In fact, the entire theatre was magnificently resplendent in its decor. I couldn't, for the life of me, pin-point its apparent style period, because it featured refined details from several, disparate periods throughout the past four or five centuries, from the Elizabethan Globe Theater to Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. There was just a single usher; a pimple-faced teenaged boy, tall with a lanky build, short brown hair, with a noticeably nervous disposition. He awkwardly guided me to my mid-row seat, which was located to the left of the stage. Where I was sitting, I could easily see the couple across from me and down about two or three rows.

The man was in the aisle seat. The woman's left hand rested upon the man's right leg. I could still make out her amethyst ring from where I sat. It sparkled from the various lights in the theatre. Astonishingly, the scintillations bouncing off the ring from the auditorium lights appeared to me as morse code. But I don't remember ever having learned morse code before! Regardless, I could actually decipher the apparent message being sent to me. It said: "In fortitude with the triumvirate, you will witness the master statement of the new density of being". The words just lit up in my mind without a second's doubt!

There was a balcony in the background above where the mysterious couple sat. I could see three masked figures sitting together with their heads turned towards the stage. Their masks looked Venetian, and they wore 18th century attire, including powdered wigs: one had a white wig, another had a black one, and the third figure wore a crimson red one. All three had opera glasses lifted towards their masked faces, as if anticipating the curtains would open imminently, but they didn't. They then, in unison, slowly turned their collective gaze in my direction, still holding up the theatre binoculars. They held their gaze towards me for what seemed like an altogether unnerving eternity. Yet I returned the gaze and held it there along with them until they finally broke away, again in unison, and turned back towards the still curtained stage. 

Suddenly, at last, there was an introductory burst of brass music, with piano chords being jarringly banged out by an obvious novice, and then the curtains began to slowly open. Upon the stage there was a park bench with a single sycamore tree to the left of it (and to the spare audience's right), and seated on that bench was a lone man. Damned if it wasn't the 19th century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche! I knew that formidable moustache instantly, and those burning, penetrating, wild eyes! He was reading a copy of the Yellow Book when, to the left of the stage, entered a Roman emperor on horseback. It was Caligula! wearing a haughty and supercilious expression on his fresh, young face. The white horse he rode, however, was bleeding profusely from apparent stab wounds.

No longer able to sustain the notorious Roman on its back, and the loss of blood, the poor horse collapsed right in front of Nietzsche. Caligula toppled over the horse and picked himself up. He was barefoot. He then fell to his knees coughing up what seemed like blue blood, but in powder form. Nietzsche then got up from the bench, sternly walked over to Caligula and viciously kicked him directly off the stage. He then went over to the dying horse and wrapped his arms passionately around the suffering creature, and then started to inconsolably sob. I felt tense. The stage then went instantly dark, as if an electrical fuse box had been blown out. 

The sudden darkness was then quickly followed by successive, blinding flashes of excruciatingly bright light, each flash corresponded with a polychromatic scheme, one colour after another until my retinas could take no more. I forced my eyes to close and held them closed for a solid two minutes. When I opened them again a new scene had begun on stage. Without me hearing any movement while my eyes were closed, there was an entirely new set-piece put on stage. It appeared to be a scene from 19th century French poet, Stephane Mallarme's Rue de Rome apartment, where he held his famous Tuesday gatherings, where he and his many distinguished guests talked about the mystical virtues of poetry.

I could see Mallarme himself leaning against the mantelpiece of his fireplace, smoking his ever-present pipe and exhaling the billowing smoke that danced, exotically, like Salome, upwards to the vast ceiling of the theatre. Instead of the usual guests known to have attended these storied meetings, Mallarme's interlocutors, on this particular stage, in this particular time and space, were ancient Greeks - pre-Socratics, in fact. This felt right to me for some palpable reason.

Then the stage went black again. The harsh, bright, coloured light scheme returned, but in reverse order. Despite having my eyes closed, I just knew this was the case. When I opened them again, the couple had disappeared. The curtains had closed. And the three figures in the balcony had unmasked themselves. They were all me from three different stages of my life, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. And the "me" who was sitting in the general seating area had suddenly grown old! I was gingerly escorted towards the exit by the timid usher. 

When I walked beyond the threshold of the theatre's backdoor, I suddenly awoke in my room, sitting at my desk, one minute past one, looking at a blank screen on my Gateway laptop, shaking my right arm downward to recirculate the blood to stop the pins and needles sensation from having slept on it. All the while the aroma of juniper berry incense lingered in the air even though I hadn't any to burn! Then I began to type...