I turned on my flashlight and Leo and I went down the stairs together.
Meg looked up when we pushed open the door. The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes but I could still see how tired she looked. She pulled a pin from a costume and stuck it in the strawberry pincushion on the table and I noticed that her fingers were curled in, like they had been sewing so long they couldn’t go straight. I’d never seen them like that before. She was working so hard.
I wished I hadn’t taken the ring.
“So you’re ready to see the tunnels,” Meg said. “And maybe a ghost.”
I couldn’t find my voice so I nodded.
“I see you brought flashlights,” Meg said. “Good.”
It felt strange to look around the costume room and see it abandoned; almost as strange as it had felt outside when we crossed the empty courtyard. Everyone else in the world seemed asleep. Gone.
Meg took us out into the hallway where she’d let us through to the concessions area. But this time, she went to the doorway straight ahead and unlocked it. “Be back in half an hour. That’s when I’m leaving and I need to lock up.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” Leo said.
“I’m not joking,” Meg said. “If you aren’t back in half an hour, I’m still going home. I’ll lock up and get you in the morning. I’m exhausted from getting the Costume Hall put together and I need my sleep.”
Leo looked at me as if to say Would she really lock us in? and I tipped my head as if to say She could. Even though I didn’t think she would do it, there was no way I was going to be late. I couldn’t disappoint her again.
“I promise,” I said. “We won’t keep you waiting.”
8.
We were finally, finally, in the tunnels.
The rumors weren’t true about the ceilings being so low that we had to crawl, but there were times we had to duck our heads. There wasn’t room for us to walk side by side. Leo shone his flashlight around on the wall when we first started and found a light switch. When he clicked it on, fluorescent lightbulbs lit up all the way down the main tunnel, but everything was still dim and gray.
I’d pictured something ancient, rotting wooden beams, packed dirt for a floor. Something that felt like a mine, maybe, or the catacombs of Paris.
But it was only a narrow hallway with other small hallways branching off it and then ending. Dirty gray paint on the walls. Cement floor, cracked in places. Pipes on the ceiling.
It was even eerier this way.
I could imagine every bad thing happening in here. Old bad things. New bad things.
I opened my mouth to tell Leo that I was afraid, but he said something first.
“Do you think we’ll see her?” he asked.
I thought about what Meg had said. About how we’d only see Lisette’s ghost in the tunnels if we’d seen her there in person. I knew exactly what she meant. I saw Ben and my dad so many places even though I had never actually seen them since they died. It was hard to explain but easy to understand if you’d lost someone you loved.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“This is the way to the theater,” Leo said after a minute. “See?”
A black cardboard sign with gold printing said TO THE STAGE with an arrow on it. The edges of the cardboard were coming apart and looked soft, like a sponge.
“She could have hidden the ring anywhere,” Leo said. “Should we stay in the main tunnel? Or go off to the side?”
“Actually,” I said, “I know where the ring is. I’ll tell you. When we get to the stage.”
“What?!?” Leo said. “Tell me now!”
“Meg has it,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the rest later.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Leo said after a pause.
“Let’s try one of the side tunnels,” I said.
We turned left and felt our way down the walls, getting dust on our fingers and flickering our flashlights around. The tunnel ended in a cement wall. “Where do you think this went?” Leo asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, but it looked like it had been blocked off for decades, from before Lisette’s time. My hands felt smudgy with dirt.
“We don’t have a lot of time left,” I said. “Maybe we should go where we know she went. Out to the theater.”
“Right,” Leo said.
The actors and crew for the play would have walked back down the main tunnel only an hour or so before, when they finished the performance. But it didn’t feel like that, with the dim bulbs and the cracked tile and the quiet and the creaking. It felt like no one had been there in years.
We came to a sign, gold printing on black cardboard like before.
QUIET, it said. PERFORMANCE ABOVE.
“We’re right below the stage now,” I said. The tunnel opened up into a bigger space, with more pipes and a ladder and a door labeled DRESSING ROOM.