The Hush in the Orpheum

The bus coughed salt into the air and left Maya on the corner facing a facade that pretended it still mattered. The Orpheum's letters were brass once, now scabbed green, and a gull had built a nest in the O. The town around it smelled like fried clams and damp rope. She stood there with her roller case and the black hard shell for her microphones and tried to imagine the sound the place used to hold. A theater is never quiet, not really. It keeps its own pulse.

A woman waved from the steps, bundled in a gray coat and municipal lanyard. 'Maya? Denise Klein. Public works. Sorry about the front door. We had to chain it last month after the roof tiles came down.'

They went around the side, shoulder to damp brick, past a mural of a singing whale. Denise worked a ring of keys, the chain tapping the metal like a little metronome. 'You sure you don't want a hard hat?' she asked.

'I brought one.' Maya adjusted the strap and took in the alley. The wind banged a shutter somewhere up in the fly tower. Her ears pinged once, a brief clear tone that only she heard. It was always like that at first, when she stepped into a new room. The tinnitus checking in.

Denise got the padlock open and shouldered them into a lobby full of old perfume and mouse droppings. Velvet rotted sweetly. Sun through the dusty, stained glass made rust-colored bands across the floor. Dust motes drifted like slow applause.

'You’re here to measure how dangerous it is,' Denise said. 'Also how much will it cost to make it not fall down on the next nor’easter.' She laughed, a small sum that didn't echo. 'God, listen to me. I used to sing chorus here in high school. We marched across this lobby like we owned it. After that thing in seventy-five, they said they'd fix it. They never did.'

'What thing?' Maya asked, though she already knew a version. Her email had said only: structural survey, acoustic mapping, do not plan on power in the main hall.

Denise's eyes flicked to the line of framed portraits along the wall, all cracked glass. 'Just… it's an old story. People still won't clap inside after dark. They say the last ovation never ended.' She handed over a heavy ring with the old brass tag: ORPHEUM MAIN. 'Take what you need. Don't stay when the streetlights come on. I'm serious.'

Maya smiled like people do when superstition is a wind at their back and not a wall. 'I'll be out by five.' She lifted her case. It bumped her knee with a familiar weight. She could feel the microphones in there the way a violinist feels a bow.

Denise left her with a last look at the deep red curtain across the inner doors. 'Call if anything… weird.' Then her footsteps crossed the tiles, out into the wet bright day. The theater took the silence back greedily.

Maya put her hand on the inner door. It was cold, even through her glove. The wood flexed a little under her palm, as if it were holding breath.