A Night at the Theatre.
Years after the Jovannan National Theatre in Citadar closed its curtains for the last time, its ghosts, cloudy, ashen memories suspended in time, could still be felt, hanging palely from the rafters eaten by insects, just like the only survivor, Drake Adrianas, maintained until the day he died that the audience were.
'And that old, black piano, the one that Amadis used to sit on every night while she sang, it opened up, and swarms of insects poured from it,' gasped Adrianas, half-asleep in his deathbed, gaunt, and permanently giving the impression that the curtains in front of his ghostly eyes were on the brink of closing for the last time. His doctor, Claudio, checked the old man's pulse once again, before looking deep into his eyes and saying, 'Drake, you told me that this morning. It never happened.' Adrianas' eyes struggled to focus, squinting at the tiny, withered hands that he swore used to belong to him, swore used to be attached to strong, muscular arms, before a deep, rattling cough erupted from his bony chest. He choked down the urge to vomit, fearing the bile of his nightmares, fearing coughing up the swarms of insects that he'd tell anybody who walked past his bed had killed all three hundred of the audience and actors inside the theatre that night.
'The curtains, were like sunbursts, warm, and'- he spluttered a terrifying cough – 'and then the insects.' He started to weep, still coughing, a death of indignity, and muttered, 'they killed them all! The insects' -he choked once more on the world- 'they're in my hair!' The old man struggled against the weight of death on his body, scratching frantically at the last grey wisps of hair on his head. Claudio restrained him with ease, pushed his shoulders down and said, forcefully, 'Drake, listen to me. You're sick. Please, try to get some rest.'
Slowly, the old man retreated into his tired soul, and as his coughing settled, he took one, giant, deep breath, the breath of a man hanging by a vine to the edge of a cliff face, and stared at Claudio with fire in his grey, bloodshot eyes as he clutched the doctor's hand with both of his. 'I tell you, Claudio. Listen to me. The insects. They...'
The doctor stood still for a moment, frozen in the silence, before taking his hand from the lapsed grasp of Adrianas' hands, removed the sheet from beside Drake's bed, covering the corpses' face, and left the room, closing the door behind him. He walked down the white, sterile corridor, and sealed the door of the Angeli Wing at the Citadar Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He looked back towards the secured room, and saw two cockroaches crawling along the walls towards Drake's room. From the corner of his eye, he picked out the piano in the patients' communal room, and allowed himself to wonder, just for a second, if Adrianas had been right for all these years. Â
