Blue, his nom de theatre, traded in a confrontational, aggressive style that was reinforced by his towering frame and wrestler’s build.

  He’d chosen to introduce the newest member of our cast to his unique performing style. Method cunt, you might call it, in the Gasglow vernacular.

  I’ll say it again. Aladdin’s a boy—he’s in love with a hot princess—he’s not some simpering—there was a dot dot dot moment where Dez bodypopped into a grotesque and leering I’m a Little Teapot! posture.

  Then AAARGGH! His cartoon roar was loud enough to be visible, his gilded hands wringing the neck of the firmament as Dez “the Genie” Blue left the stage to call his agent. No one could be sure if he was expressing real feelings or testing an unrehearsed routine.

  Our director drifted toward me during a break, resembling, I must be honest, a crashing dirigible. The Hindenburg listing ominously toward the high-tension wires—played in this ghoulish reenactment by me.

  What’s your take on this?—Float barked. Less genuine inquiry, more how-to manual on the training of an unruly mastiff using voice commands.

  My take seemed obvious but who’s listening to me, not our portly “genius” director.

  Luda—he said, as if I hadn’t noticed. She needs to hold her own with these people. They smell blood and they’re like pajama fish, as my youngest calls them.

  Naturally, I was responsible for Luda.

  Why can’t she hit her marks?—he flapped, a turkey kicking up dust in the yard. Everybody has to hit their marks.

  He’s giving her a hard time, Dom, I said. You need to step in, or I will.

  Said the Domster—I don’t think she’s leveling up, Lu. I thought she could take him, honestly. I was certain she had what it took to put these fuckers in their places. That’s how it happens in the Phantom! I’ve taken a big chance here on your recommendation…

  My recommendation? I thought. Luda was his idea! As I’ve put all of you through great pains to make clear already, it was Dom Float himself, our director, who insisted, against my initial reservations, on offering Luda her shot at the big time.

  I couldn’t be bothered setting him right. He was too busy flapping his annotated bible in Blue’s direction.

  Skating close to thin ice, Dez!—he said. Give the girl a chance to recover.

  Look, I tell it like it is—Blue bellowed back. People like me have been silenced for too long.

  So, I said—What, genies? Or arseholes?

  Like Solomon judging the baby case, our Dom looked from Luda to Dez Blue and back again.

  I know you can knock it out the park, Lu. Let’s take five.

  I’m sure none of you could miss that “Lu” he tossed in. I know I didn’t.

  I asked Luda what was wrong, but she couldn’t explain.

  They’re just old-school assholes—I found myself opining, vis-à-vis Dez Blue and his geriatric partner in crime. A pair of pricks. He won’t pull any of that like that when the lights go up on opening night.

  On the way back from the Ladies with a steaming coffee, I interrupted a conspiratorial huddle that might as well have been two bashful male lovers, planning some assignation with childish titters and snorted whispers.

  The shifty two-man tether unraveled to let me through, lifting my coffee cup both to avoid spillage and to threaten it at the same time. I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoyed making those bastards cringe and retreat as I slopped scalding cappuccino mere inches from their faces.

  Get a room, boys!—I said breezily. A love like yours is nothing to be ashamed of.

  We were discussing the modernity and daring of casting a transgender rent boy Aladdin—Rhys drawled.

  Don’t get your hopes up—I smiled. They’ll be able to see them from the back row!

  Coming in at the top of the Cave of Jewels scene, Abanazar is offstage, yelling instructions to Aladdin, his pet thief, now deep in the gloomy cavern interior.

  The murk down there is so dense and absolute there appears no way Aladdin will ever find the Lamp. Given his notoriously short temper, it’s hardly a shock when the formerly avuncular wizard Abanazar grows increasingly agitated in his demands, driven to ever-more-hyperbolic extremes of frustration until he’s ready to go off like Krakatoa, west of Thailand.

  For Gofannon Rhys, this scene afforded a License to Kill.

  I think I’ve found the light switch!—Luda said flatly, her voice weak and lacking presence.

  In performance, when the lights come up, the audience sees the fabled Cave of Jewels for the first time: a dazzling storehouse of treasure blazing with flavors beyond measure; rainbow trash heaps of precious stones, every faceted gumdrop color you ever imagined, landslides of gold coins of different sizes, heaped under the watchful jade and cobalt eyes of profile portraits where unknown emperors and empresses were rendered in mosaics made of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamond. Or their paste and painted equivalents, endowed, by theatrical sleight of hand, with a majesty and magic that was entirely deceptive.

  If you hung around, some of the bejeweled stalagmites would even come to life at the end of the scene and dance around like an episode of DTs during the big act 1 closer.

  Now then!—came the voice of Abanazar. Can you see a fucking Lamp!

  I’d made a point of warning Luda about the old man’s tendency to lace every line in rehearsal with profanity. Opening nights, he’d switch to the clean version without apology or explanation—other than a brisk sniffy Tourette’s, darling—

  Armed with this detailed intel Luda was able to keep her cool as the sluice gates of filth and abuse were ratcheted open.

  Dazzled by the gem-light, Luda, as Aladdin, cleared away a rubbish spill of priceless coins to beneath expose a battered old oil lamp with a spout—it can’t be this cast-off, surely?

  There’s only some old piece of junk!—Luda called back, with a double-edged defiance in her deviance from script. She turned the lamp upside down. Long past its sell-by date! Full of nothing but dust and air!

  Why—why that’s the very object I seek, you tragic fucking twat!—cried Abanazar, tripping nervously on his tongue. B-buhbring it to me now, Aladdin, you brain-dead shitwit!

  As the story goes, Aladdin’s very reluctant; he’s thinking, why waste the precious storage space in his pockets on an awkwardly shaped, worthless lamp? Not when the floor is carpeted wall-to-wall in jewelry of every description, where stalactites are strung like diamond icicles dripping melted gold, and the walls glint with starlike super-precious minerals.

  What do you want a useless old lamp for?—says Aladdin. He’s too young to see the signature glint of the holy in the broken and profane.

  I’ve had enough!—Rhys howled with the reverb turned up. If you won’t do as you’re fucking told, you can stay here for ALL PISSING ETERNITY, you atrocious little spunkstain!

  A bass-heavy sound-effects rumble through the hall would cue the audience to an offstage rockslide sealing the cave and trapping Aladdin inside with no hope of escape!

  Unless—

  The lamp!

  Luda glanced over at me, eyes as wide as a frog in the terrible headlights of an SUV driven by a toad-hating sociopath who’s stayed awake all night on crystal meth and can’t tell the difference.

  Dodging between one juggernaut wheel and the next, she stroked the lamp, three times in a furtive manner, a conjuror hiding a trick in a gesture. She knew what was coming and she was right—

  Is that it?—Dez Blue protested, sputtering with exasperation as he waited to manifest. If you think that’s going to get the Genie aroused, you’re not even trying! Sensing another golden opportunity to road-test his stand-up act, he kept on going—Is it in yet? This is what I mean! It’s like she’s comforting a chinchilla with PTSD! Rub the fucking thing!

  And here he turned to Luda, towering over her slight frame like Goliath—Use your cock, if you’ve got one!

  You can’t deny this is bullying—I said to Float. You can get reported. You know how they feel about hate speech! We all sat through the seminar.

  Float held me back. He was waiting for some epiphany, some primal confrontation to spontaneously develop into art, releasing Luda from her freeze.

  The last thing we want is for Molly to rally—he said in a heartless manner that suggested the smooth running of a protection racket. Molly Stocking, as it happened, was recovering from her injuries with a courage and a speed that no one had dared suspect. She’ll return to our story soon enough in a startling new role, but this was Dom’s sly way of weaponizing her against me. I know she can do it—he said, meaning Luda, laying all responsibility at my back door.

  With a flash and a chip bag bang, Aladdin faced the Genie, drawing himself up on tiptoe to look the creature in the Adam’s apple.

  And who might you be? Luda peered at the Genie’s nipples. I’ve seen those eyes before—were you in a fight?

  My eyes are up here, puny mortal! For I am no less than the Genie of the Lamp! Your wish is my command!—said Blue with a smirk. Well, up to a point, love. I’m nonbinary but I won’t do anal!

  I sensed the presence of Death in the room.

  How about you?—the Genie leered.

  She didn’t seem to know what to say, so I said it for her.

  There’s no need to be a cunt, Dez, I said flatly.

  Float’s disapproving expression made me wish I hadn’t just brought up the penalties for hate speech. He dragged a finger across his throat…

  I don’t imagine you get up to much—said Luda. Being a eunuch.

  Who says I’m a fucking eunuch?—Dez protested as she hit a nerve and drilled down through the pulp with a killer smile.

  I’ve got their names and addresses but we don’t have all day—she said, watching the retort fall to bits on the tip of his tongue and waiting…

  There came a moment, an unscripted unrehearsed split second, pregnant with inexplicable significance. It was as if we all knew we were part of an interlocking sequence of events, where we were all waiting for the same thing to happen next, all fully aware there was no way to avoid any of it. As if all the things likely to take place were being rapidly sifted and discarded in favor of what was certainly about to occur…

  And BANG!

  Then followed a splintering, wrenching, rotten noise from the rigging—swallowed up by a whomping, whirling whiplash; the sound of death in the form of an owl or some new kind of spinning bomb; by the time you hear it you’re already gone.

  Trailing a rat’s tail of unraveled rope and cable, one of the overhead scoop lights exploded into component parts, dismantling violently upstage right, just three feet from where Dez was standing—he tilted his video-ready face up to the complicated scaffolding of pipe grids and rope, then leaped with a howl into the orchestra pit, as if that would save him.

  Instead, Blue’s reward for his rash escape strategy was a broken hip.

  A thin drizzle of coil chain, turnbuckle, and rivets sprinkled onto the still-fuming potpourri of metal, glass, and sparking element that was formerly the scoop.

  Maybe wait until opening night before we bring the house down—I suggested in an unwelcome attempt to lighten the mood as handymen ran around like cockroaches released from a tin can and Dez Blue screamed from the pit like a farmyard animal mid-slaughter.

  We each craned our individual necks to peer at the loading galleries high above our heads, where height became darkness. Were there signs of furtive movement there among the track and rigging?

  What about those ambiguous shifting shadows slanting against the rafters?

  Well—said Float, as if nothing had happened—might be a good idea to stop there.

  That was when we attended to Dez Blue, the all-powerful Genie of the Lamp, squealing like a dying trombone in the pit.

  Pain seemed to bring out the best in Dez. The paramedics could hardly stow him in the back of the ambulance for laughing. He posed for mad-eyed selfies, with the tears still drying on florid cheeks. He improvised a barnstormer of a routine as they juggled him into restraints, laughing at his own jokes before going out like a trouper, stage left, or bastard side as we call it in the biz.

  Morphine’s a miracle—Luda said, sounding more like me every day.

  Later, over free booze at McCloudie’s, the Vall bar, tense table talk took a turn toward the paranormal. We’d all seen what had happened. There was no rational explanation for it, Dee Jayashankar assured us, even though I could think of more than one.

  Luckily for the superstitious among us, the Vallhambra had no shortage of ghosts, including the unquiet afterglow of Ronnie “Ritz” Fervor, a popular television and stage impressionist from a few decades back. He’d quite literally died onstage when a massive stroke felled the massive entertainer like an overweight sequoia halfway through the middle eight section of an inadvisably rigorous performance of his signature tune, “I’ll Probably Die Laughing!”

  Wormy rumors persisted of a forgotten plague well beneath the theater, one of those subterranean sinks where diseased revenants still squirm and squirrel through the dirt in rotten smocks, a seething shoal of pale and lambent maggots with rancid human features.

  If we’ve offended the spirits here—and here, Dee shook her head disconsolately. We may have to expect reprisals.

  I couldn’t shift the cast away from the inevitable as the talk took its unavoidable turn to the Vallhambra Curse. The Halloween jinx laid on us by the theater’s ghost of ghosts. The prime postmortem suspect in our rigging misadventure was the man who’d started it all. The damned Romantic architect set in Eternity’s amber, shackled forever to his deformed creation.

  Who would deny the weird coincidences, the circumstantial boundary posts marking out some otherwise imperceptible karmic county line where the revenge plot of the Phantom of the Pantomime and our few scant misfortunes so far could be persuaded to overlap to spine-chilling storytelling effect?

  If we could lay blame for our near-death experience on any of the Vall’s many ghostly inhabitants, it was surely, reasoned the aforementioned Dayanita Jayashankar—in a proclamation to be cosigned by the morbidly superstitious Gofannon Rhys, eager-to-please Aiysha Dyce, and both halves of Buttercup, the pantomime cow—surely the work of the unquiet spirit of mad Murdo McCloudie.

  Dayanita, “Dee,” basked in the attention; she’d previously secured for herself a key role as the witchy one among the cast. Comfortable in this strange territory, her stature as our resident paranormal expert was elevated immediately. She’d had her cards done, and her bumps read, and she’d gleaned the ins and outs of the spirit world from extensive online investigation and a life-changing fortnight’s detox at some old ashram or other.

  Luci’s very into magic and the occult…—May Tang-Taylor drawled. So I’ve heard.

  Not really—I lied and waved my hand dismissively.

  If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll remember Murdo McCloudie as the architect who designed the Vallhambra Theatre, in whose mock-Deco-coco bar we now huddled, survivors of what was rapidly becoming “the Curse.”

  Dee regaled us with the often-told story of how, feverish, fueled by laudanum and a corrosive phobia of failure, McCloudie had taken his own life only three days after his first trip to the location of his masterwork.

  It had taken several gangs of workmen three and a half years to erect the three-thousand-seater auditorium and during all that time, or so went the story, the architect had neglected to pay even a single site visit, saving his moment of revelation until the opening ceremony.

  That explains why, when Murdo McCloudie stepped out of his carriage, anticipating the avalanche of rapturous applause he’d surely earned for his revolutionary, picturesque addition to Gasglow’s iconic lack of a skyline, there was no applause, no fanfare!

  Instead, into that claustrophobic silence came a porcine snort of laughter! First one voice, then two, then dozens, until the entire crowd was laughing. Laughing at him, in fact, and poor McCloudie only understood what was so funny when at last he raised his eyes to the magnificent façade of his greatest creation to discover that somehow, the carriage had dumped him at the back entrance! The very asshole of the building.

  And all the while the jeers, the whistles, and the insults grew in intolerable volume!

  As it turned out, the project’s foreman, a notorious imbecile, had worked his magic from carefully drafted plans turned upside down. As a result, he’d organized a squad of unhesitating navvies to erect the Vallhambra the wrong way round!

  Instead of a south-facing portico, as intended to overlook the river Dare like a pagan queen on her throne, the theater’s showy frontage was three stories up and opened north onto narrow Gargoyle Street, presiding over the strip-show red lights of the city’s sleazy entertainment quarter, the boho latitudes of Andersburn and Collegehill.

  As Sabbath bells of mocking hilarity pealed out, summoning the faithful to witness his public humiliation, McCloudie shriveled backward into the split leather of his carriage seat, they say, as though struggling to reverse time back to the womb.

  The architect’s wonderful day, the crowning pinnacle of a glittering career, now faced its own monumental deconstruction into raspberries and catcalls, boos and hisses, cries of stupid cunt! and asshole! as he became the first of many pantomime villains to call the Vall their home, the first of many pompous snobs to be humbled, heckled, and hissed offstage.

  The way I look at it, he was lucky they didn’t have some steampunk telegraph variation of the internet back then; it wouldn’t have taken him three whole days and seven bottles of absinthe to come to his decision if he could have read what everyone was livestreaming about him. Not these days. He’d scan the comments section and it would all be over in minutes!