The Vesta

Updated 10/1/2027 

CHAPTER 1

The best swears Lina knows come from Grandpa Bloom, which makes them a kind of inheritance. She cherishes them as such, and uses them more sparingly than her grandfather, who always cursed the governor and the weather and his pickup with the same indiscriminate flair that he used on the Vesta theater. To her, foul language belongs in foul circumstances, usually out of earshot of children, and only when no other words can accurately convey the emotion of the situation.

Like now, she thinks as she skids over a patch of black ice on her way into the Vesta Theater parking lot. Now is a good time to swear.

And so she fills the morning with oaths as she fights to regain control of her pickup. She is sliding right for the brick wall on the back of the Vesta, or perhaps for the Blue Ridge Haunts jeep—it could go either way, really—and bracing for impact. At the last possible second, her tires find bare pavement, bark across the dry place until she comes to a stop near the building, the very definition of cattywampus. She decides it’s close enough and steps gingerly out of her car. Takes a deep breath of the cold mountain air to steel herself for the day.

Before the sun had even tipped over the mountain, Beth Ann Nash had called to say that the power was out at the Vesta, which made it impossible for her Blue Ridge Haunts crew to finish recording for the segment they were doing on the theater. It was cold, she said, and too dark to get any meaningful B-roll footage. She had sent the rest of her crew to get breakfast at Ashby’s Diner until the problem was fixed.

“It’s probably just a breaker issue,” Lina had said. “I can talk you through it.”

“I don’t want to be fooling around with electrical in this—in a building this old. Can you come over?”

Lina stretched her thumb and forefinger across her brow, the way Grandpa Bloom used to do. Tears gathered her eyes. “Can we do this tomorrow? I still have a lot to get ready for the funeral.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth Anne had said, and sounded like she meant it. Lina thought she might follow up with all right, that’s fine, another day then. She did not. “Did I mention it’s cold?”

Lina had waited for the anger to wash through her before she reigned in her breath and allowed her heartbeat to slow.

“Hello?” Beth Anne said.

One last deep breath. “I’ll be right over. No problem.”

She breezes through the lobby by the emergency exit lights, but the stairwell to the basement is pitch black. She counts steps as she descends—eight in the first flight, two-step turn, seven more down to the concrete floor. She manages to unlock the mechanical room door by feel, despite the cold. The ghost must have blown out the pilots before she flipped the breakers. A clever touch. Lina curses her anyway.

The swearing was another of Grandpa Bloom’s tricks, albeit one they never admitted to Grandma Joyce. It was, he told her, a way to assert her confidence, to close the openings for dark spirits to prey upon her feelings—not to mention a tool for discerning who cared more about a little girl’s potty mouth than they did about real evil in their midst.

She thought he would never die. She still can’t believe that he did.

She reaches for the flashlight she keeps on an upturned five-gallon bucket by the door. She comes up empty the first time and so begins moving her hand around in circles, fingers splayed so each pass searches a wider area. All at once, the tip of her pinky finger grates across the wall, leaving bits of nail and skin on the unpainted cinder block.

That does it for Lina. And so she lets loose, her invectives flying in all directions at the wires and pipes and machinery that she knows lurk somewhere in the darkness. She curses the cell phone she left in her car, the call that had awakened her at this ungodly hour, the woman who summoned her for an errand she could have done herself. She curses Blue Ridge Haunts and the Vesta’s desperate need of the tourist bump an appearance on the channel might produce. She curses these cinderblock walls, this January darkness, this ridiculous human dependency on electricity. She curses her wasted thirties, her failed marriage, the lack of employable skills that forces her to be grateful to have even this sorry job at this crumbling tourist trap.

Most of all, she curses Grandpa Bloom and the ghost and their feud, which always seems to make others bleed.

The words hover for a moment, their echo more pronounced without the hum of the various appliances in the mechanical room. Lina winces at the word “foolfuckery.” Not her best effort, to be sure, but the cold is getting worse by the minute. She takes in a breath—in for three, out for three. Decides on a different strategy.

“Elyane?” she calls. “Elyane! He’s gone.”

The only reply is the reverberations of her voice off the hard walls. After that, a silence as definitive as the tomb. She puts her pinky to her mouth, feels the abrasion against her lips. She flexes and relaxes her aching little toe, still not quite healed from the cinderblock she kicked a month ago on this same errand. The bruising has faded, but the pain still flares up in the cold, a reminder to respect the obstacles and whatever forces slide them into her path.

The cold grips her now, and it will only get worse until she can get things turned back on. She blows on her free hand to cut the chill, then folds it into the warmth of her armpit.  Before she thinks to stop them, her fingers locate a tiny, hard mass in the soft flesh above the edge of her pectoral muscle.

No. Not now. Not this thing too, here in the black morning.

She pulls her hand away. Breathes in for three counts, out for three. One breath, then another, smooth and steady. That much she can control.

CHAPTER 2

Before everything went to hell on the express train, Grandpa Bloom would have been the one to slog through the darkness to set things right. He had joined the maintenance staff at the Vesta the day the new building opened, a part-time labor of love to go along with his new job teaching chemistry at the high school. Half a century on, he could diagnose most of the building’s issues at a glance. He liked to say he knew where all the bodies were buried, which Lina hoped was metaphorical. In point of practice, it meant he could navigate the building’s aging systems by rote, a mug of coffee in one hand and a sensibly sized flashlight in the other.

Managing the ghost was another matter. Until she took the job managing the Vesta, Lina had assumed the haunting was merely her grandfather’s metaphor for his struggles with the facilities, or perhaps a marketing device to keep the theater on the Spooky South bus tours that brought in no small percentage of their yearly income. Once Lina joined the staff, however, she could see up close the real-world damage Elyane LaSalle’s spirit could do. A sudden leak in the roof dumped enough snow melt in the balcony to require new carpet for that entire level. Power outages interrupted performances in the fall and froze pipes in winter. Grandpa Bloom dealt with the headaches and fielded the complaints and waited until he thought he was alone to grumble about the ghost.

But the gruff and grit he used to keep the Vesta together was not enough to keep his own body from decaying. Six months into her tenure, Lina noticed how much slower he moved, how forgetful he’d become. But her husband Shane had just moved out of the house, and their daughter Cassie was beginning her junior year of high school, and this tiny hard thing was growing in her chest. It wasn’t until he checked himself into Shady Pines Senior Care Center that she understood what Grandpa Bloom could somehow see: that he was fading from the earth, and no one could stop it.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her at Christmas.

“It’s not your fault.”

“Doesn’t make me less sorry.”

A week later, a stroke had taken all but his breath, which seemed all the more cruel. She could not say what liminal space her grandfather occupied, if any piece of him existed at all. She grieved his pending loss, feared a future without him in it. Feared even more that he might join Elyane in her haunting.

The scrape on her hand has stopped bleeding, but Lina doesn’t notice. Instead, she fingers the lump in her chest, trying to decide if it has grown in the first six weeks of the year. It hurts, which she knows means…something. Hopeful or ominous, she can’t say, and she has not dared search the internet her initial conversation with Bella. Maybe if it hurts, it isn’t cancer. Or maybe the opposite is true. Maybe it all depends on context. 

Stop. Focus.

When she at last reaches the breaker box, she feels for the one that governs the mechanical room, six down and one over from the top left corner. She presses her thumb against the switch but does not slide it over.

A sound has emerged—not sound, exactly. Pulses, quick and insistent, at a frequency so low that she does not so much hear as feel them in her chest. It enters her consciousness like a growl, raising goose flesh across her neck and back.

Something is out there. In the darkness.

Not out there. In here.

The muscles in her thighs and hips tense, ready to run. Let’s go, they tell her, we can make it just close your eyes and go and you won’t see it it can’t get you if you don’t see it.

But her body is wrong. She does not need the fluorescents to make out the dark silhouette of a woman on the floor, eight or so feet away, lying in a position that implies some form of injury. Her right hand extends forward, clutching something Lina can’t make out. The tiny hairs on her neck stand on end.

That is my body, she thinks.

And then, That is my daughter’s body.

The pulses quicken, the waves compressing into sound and finally speech—a woman’s voice, clear and cold as the air in these mountains.

You are weak.

You will die alone.

A sharp pain races up from behind her knee to her hip, a cramp brought on by holding so much tension. The time for running has passed. She wants to cry, wants to crumble, wants to give herself over to heaving sobs that would push her breath beyond her control. But she does not. Grandpa Bloom has taught her better.

Instead she lowers her hands until they are at waist-level, turns up her palms and stands as straight as her screaming hamstring will allow. She breathes slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, three counts each. At first, her body shivers involuntarily in time with her racing heartbeat. She sticks with it, reminds herself what she must say to the pulsating voice. My breath is my own, and you may not steal it.

When she opens her eyes again, the only sound is the faint ringing in her ears. The darkness has swallowed up the vision and the voice and whatever they belonged to. She reaches again for the breaker box. Counts the switches. Presses against one until it gives way. Before the pop! has faded, the overhead lights blink on. She flips another breaker with trembling fingers. Stops to breathe. In for three, out for three. In dark places, that’s how you stay alive.

She climbs the steps to the main level slowly, gripping the rail to maintain an anchor point. The visions have become more frequent since Grandpa Bloom’s stroke, and they take more of a toll. She will play it off as grief, should anyone from Blue Ridge Haunts spot her. She hopes she can get to the back door before they do.

A shrill beeping sound greets her in the lobby, however. She takes a deep breath and runs through the likely sources—a dead smoke alarm, faults as the sound system reboots, the refrigerator in back of concessions struggling to come online. She presses her forehead against the crack between the double doors that lead to the house’s main level. The alarm is moving nearer, nearer, as though descending from the rafters to the rows of floor seats. All at once the pattern changes, beeping out a droid-like tune until it falls silent at last.

“Beth Anne?” she calls.

No answer.

She cracks open the door to the theater. She knows she flipped the correct breaker, triple checked it even. Yet save for the red glow of the exit signs, the house is swallowed in darkness. She steals a tiny flashlight from the usher’s stand by the door and clicks it on as she moves further in, scanning the mezzanine and the balcony, thirty feet above her, and then back down to the floor. A second later, the beam hits the reflectors on The Bird, Beth Anne’s camera drone. It is more expensive than everything Lina owns combined, and she begins making liability calculations out of habit.

“Beth Anne?”

Another turn of her wrist, and the blue light illuminates something far worse.

The body that once housed Beth Anne Nash lies still in the center aisle, directly below the balcony. A fall then, and almost certainly mortal. In the Vesta, however, with its shadows and its ghosts, such things cannot be taken for granted. Lina moves quickly to the woman’s side, careful not to kneel in the pool of blood seeping onto the floor beneath Row FF, and presses her fingers against Beth Anne’s left wrist. Her skin is still warm, but no pulse emerges from her veins. Lina releases her grip gently, braces herself on the aisle seat as she stands.

Don’t, she tells herself. Don’t look for what you’ll wish you hadn’t seen.

Nevertheless she trains her flashlight onto the body, and it tells her what she already knows. She has endured this vision for weeks now, worried she was seeing Cassie’s death or her own. Now the very fulfillment of that horror lies at her feet, Beth Anne’s figure contorted as though drawn by a beginning art student. Her right hand extends forward, still clutching a small, dark object. Lina bends down, lifts the tiny green-black statue from the dead woman’s fingers—a stylized falcon, exquisite in its form and heavier than she expected. She weighs it in her palm, listens as a woman’s voice seems to emerge from it.

You are frail. You are weak. You will die alone.

Her hand cradles the statue, fingers curled as though it might wriggle free. Now that she holds it, she recognizes it. Recognizes the voice from thirty years ago, when she was only just awakening to the unseen world. Back then, she was a child, and all was curiosity. Now, as an adult, she feels the force of the threat, the terror of its fulfillment. And she knows, as surely as she is standing here in the cold theater over Beth Anne Nash’s body, who speaks to her through this dark talisman.

The form is a falcon.

The voice is Elyane LaSalle’s.