Page 23 of Specters & Spotlights

Elise didn’t respond right away. She’d learned long ago: in some theatres, darkness was an invitation. Some spirits needed the dark to move. Others just liked the drama.

But Jen didn’t need to know that. Not tonight.

The temperature plummeted.

Elise paused mid-brushstroke, every hair on her arm lifting. Her tattoos pricked slightly, and she scanned the room, breath held…

The far wall glowed slightly—no brighter than a glow stick—and Kevin slipped through, trailing a wisp of cold behind him. His outline sparked faintly in the low light, like frost catching a spotlight.

“Relax,” he said, in his usual dry drawl. “It’s just me.”

She glared at him, pressing a hand to her chest. “Kevin. You can’t just—haunt like that.”

“I am haunting like that. And besides,” he added, adjusting his ghostly cuffs with exaggerated care, “I bring updates.”

She waited.

“I found our shoelace-loving friend. Told him quick-change sabotage is strictly against the code. He swore he wouldn’t try to trip you again—so long as you leave out a pair of shoes. Laced, preferably. He’s been trying to learn for the past century.”

Elise blinked. “He… just wants to learn how to tie his shoes?”

Kevin nodded. “Died before he could. It’s been a whole thing.”

Her brush paused mid-air. Some people had final bows. Others had unfinished fights. This kid had shoelaces.

Something in her chest ached at the thought. “Of course I’ll leave some out.”

This wasn’t the first request she’d had from the other side. She cut a glance toward Kevin.

Most ghosts weren’t like him.

They were fragments. Replays. Echoes stuck on a loop, shaped by routines and regrets. You’d see them brushing phantom coats or checking invisible watch chains, and their eyes would never quite focus. No soul left. Just habit made visible.

Others, like Kevin, retained their sense of self. Elise had come to think of them as half-stuck souls. They hadn’t left—but they hadn’t fully stayed either. Bound by strange, patchwork rules that never made much sense.

And like most of the dead—aware or not—Kevin was bound. Most ghosts only needed one thing to keep them tethered: a place they couldn't let go of, or an object too saturated with memory to release. But Kevin was different. He needed both. A talisman and a stage.

They’d figured it out together, years ago, during a community theatre production where Kevin’s pocket watch had somehow found its way into the prop rotation. Elise had assumed he belonged to the theatre, at first. By closing night, she knew better: the watch was a tether, and Kevin went wherever it did.

Since then, they’d tested the limits. Take the watch outside a theatre? Kevin vanished, like smoke. Leave it in a museum or a school? Nothing. But bring it inside a theatre—even a rundown black box or half-built rehearsal hall—and Kevin popped right back into existence, opinionated as ever.

Why theatres? Even Kevin didn’t know for sure. He liked to speculate, of course. Maybe it was proximity to gossip and chaos. Or the heightened emotion. Or the fact that so many people bared their souls under stage lights. But Elise had her own theory.

In life, Kevin had been a dramaturg—a theatrical researcher, historical advisor, and subtext junkie. He wasn’t the one onstage, but he was the one who made sure the story worked, the world made sense, the choices had weight. He’d worked with companies up and down the coast, helping actors understand character motives, correcting corset choices, arguing about metaphor and blocking.

He hadn’t stitched costumes. He’d stitched meaning.

Elise sometimes thought he had simply left too much of himself behind, tucked into scripts, director’s notes, and dressing room arguments about Chekhov’s intentions.

The rules of the dead never seemed to follow physics. Or logic. They followed memory. Emotion. Kevin wouldn’t admit it, of course. But he loved the lack of structure. And Elise? She’d learned from the best.

He was the one who taught her that ghosts weren’t all chaos—they were choreography. Every haunting had an intention, a cue, a callback. You just had to learn to read the script.

Some people saw ghosts and panicked. Elise took notes.

She hummed quietly as she combed through a section of slightly damp hair, fingers moving with practiced ease. The rain wig—high-maintenance, temperamental, and undeniably glamorous—sat obediently on the block, slowly becoming itself again.

She folded a curling paper over the ends, smoothing them flat with a practiced tug, and reached for a roller. Starting at the tips, she began to wind the hair upward, gentle and precise. Each curl had to be coaxed into place. When the roller reached the base of the weft, she secured it with a silver T-pin, piercing through the roller and into the canvas block with a satisfying push.