The Theatre Statues: Part Two (special preview)

Once I returned to the theatre, rehearsals got tougher. My mother wasn’t giving us any slack as the days drew closer. Since I had the solo, I was being wrung out twice as hard. Lately, I have been noticing Carmine sitting in the seats. Sometimes he’ll be out front, hidden in the shadows. Other times I’ll catch him from the corner of my eye in one of the boxes. My mother hasn’t said anything about him, but all the other dancers were talking about him. Some spoke of how he’s so handsome. Others whispered they felt Carmine went odd during his journeys.

Carmine only spoke to me. Between my rehearsals and his dealings with the theatre, and that was a rare occasion. We often met around the statues, he could hide behind them with ease, and I loved being near them anyways.

“Do you enjoy the statues?” The question came out of a pleasant silence we shared.

“Of course,” I answered. “Why? Do they bother you?”

Carmine’s eyes trailed down Tullio’s form. “When I was little, I used to have dreams about a figure wearing a mask with many faces.”

I had seen a figure fitting that description before the statues became unveiled. My pulse began beating faster, so I reached out and touched Tullio’s leg. “Then these must be frightening to you.”

Carmine gave me an astute look. “I never said I was afraid. I quite liked them. The figure would appear to me in the dark theatre, sometimes they would walk across the ceiling or down the walls. Sometimes they’d be in the high windows. But they were always there for me. They would do tricks for me and tell me stories. It was a strange dream, but it was never frightening.”

“Who were they?” I asked.

He looked me over, and his pupils dilated. “Dasamiza."

My breath caught in my chest. The statues had spoken that name before.

Carmine sighed. “They showed me so much of the world, but it all came within my dreams.” He tilted his head up to look at Tullio again. “These three, none of them look exactly like them, but they all remind me of them. There is something missing though.”

“Missing?” I wanted to hear more, but then my mother called for me from inside. I stood up and smoothed down my skirt. “Back to work.”

“You dance like a beast,” he said as I turned away. “I can’t wait to see you when there’s an audience.”

My cheeks felt hot as I looked at him and I scurried back inside.

Once when I was little, my mother was busy and I was left on my own within the theatre. I don’t think she meant for me to wander off, but I did. This was around the time my father was engrossed with the statues and he rarely left the house so mother was the one to deal with the business end of things.

I had gone quite a distance from the office, finding myself in a back room close to where they stored costumes. It was quiet back there, unearthly so. I was standing there at a fork in the road with two directions I could go. I considered turning around, but then I felt some strange pull at me. I looked down the left hall, where one of the lights didn’t work and so it flickered, making the hall change from something ordinary, to something frightening.

I was pulled down this hallway, following an instinct in me. It brought me to a door which I opened, and inside the room was mostly empty, save for a large covered slab on the floor. I stepped closer, kneeling down to see if I could look under the tarp without touching it. When I couldn’t see, I pulled back the tarp where there were large chips of paint and plaster, along with bits of stone. Under the tarp was a large carving of the traditional theatre masks of tragedy and comedy. It was broken and in horrible disrepair. The golden paint and plaster that had covered the rough stone was falling away and the masks looked undistinguishable. The carving, too, was so large that I crawled up on top of it to get a closer look. As I looked down upon the masks, I felt sad. I knew tragedy was meant to be forlorn, but the comedy mask seemed to be just as sad.