By Clyde

Gray dry sticks in the well-worn path crackled as he made his way past the light from the window in the brown house silhouetted against the still black night sky. The outline made an interesting pattern of empty space he had seen many early mornings just before dawn, but today was not to be the same.  

It was the things he had not seen or learned about that made his steps a little bit quicker as he turned the corner by the tumble-down board fence and gates where the carriage maker had lived. Varmints could easily crawl right through there, using their noses to push open loose nails along the baseboards. How could he retrace his steps in case of a fall of mishap? But, that wasn’t on his mind, because Thomas Nelson had lived all his life, more than sixty years, in the rear on Bank Street.  

His adult life was working odd jobs, deliveries, fetching groceries or ice in exchange for peoples’ tips. He even took around black-ribboned funeral notices to friends and families. His mother, Martha, had worked for the Halls and afterwards, old Mrs. Dr. Hall, his grandparents had manumitted out but shoes to stay around town where they had relatives to depend on and people they knew, who needed them.

As the day broke, he went in the back door of old P.P. Meroney’s theater, where he had been caretaker, doing whatever he could and they depended on him to keep things going. Today’s job was to get the furnace going after the first sign of cold night air this fall. Most of the shows that traveled through town stopped here, halfway from Washington to Atlanta.  

The famous and the infamous, presidents, John Phillip Sousa who had heard about the Divine Sarah Bernhardt being there, but he wasn’t even born yet when she strolled into the station in her private varnish coach. “Nothing was ever to surpass the sumptuousness of sets or the magnificence of costumes; an art nouveau vision in serpentine robes and a headdress of rare orchids.”  She kept an alligator, a wolfhound, a monkey and all kinds of exotic birds, and slept in an empty casket.

Tom had been backstage a lot, although he had never met the actors to shake their hands. He went under the alley door outside every year about this time, to fire up the furnace. Thomas knew all about the idiosyncrasies of the behemoth machine from ol’ man Harris’ Boiler Works. The heat from the laundry at the old hotel was piped under the street to help out with the heat for the high ceilings and box seats.  

Looking behind the clanking furnace there was a door that he had really never noticed before. Grabbing the white porcelain knob, he dared to give a hard pull and it came right open. A chamber with what seemed to end in a tunnel with red dirt walls that went into the darkness.

The old klieg light didn’t give enough light to see where it went, so he went back. The wooden bead-board walls were covered with posters and pictures of movies, plays and names of actors and actresses maybe, he didn’t know, scribbled on the walls.  

The dressing rooms were underneath the stage and a tiny narrow stair led up to the stage right and left. As he walked in, it seemed to call him and he could feel the presence of those who might have traveled this way before. It had been sealed for over 100 years and nobody bothered to trace its history. The air was heavy, acrid and a cold vapor. If these walls could talk, he thought, at which time he did hear the smallest moan.  

Maybe it was him breathing heavily, as he tried not to exhale. It continued to breathe. Should he go on? He stopped, when from the deeper dark there came a whisper “Come see me” clear as a bell. Mesmerized, he followed the call. The ceiling seemed to be lowering and it was full of bricks, laid in a pattern with threads of mica, glittering like diamonds in the sky. His attention was suddenly drawn to where his steps seemed to almost stumble over dry shells that crushed under his feet. Throwing the light downward beside an old dilapidated trunk, he gasped to see long bones with finger phalanges intact and followed them above to a complete skull looking straight back at him. 

Jumping over his discovery, he dashed ahead through a passageway to find metal stairs that hopefully would lead to safety. At the first flight, a solid door opened to a hallway with teal-blue wallpaper. He recognized it as the kitchen where he had made deliveries there before. It was the dumbwaiter inside the Empire Hotel which going through the lobby opened to the street. He was never so lucky as to come back to life in the middle of town. He ran to the first person he saw — to confirm to himself that he was indeed in Salisbury and he had been underneath, never to go back there again.

And the Boston ivy leaves had turned the same color of red as the old log house.

Clyde is a Salisbury artist.