Jess

Jess

I stare at the girl on the stage. It’s her, the girl who followed me two days ago, the one I chased onto the Metro train. She stares back. The moment seems to stretch. She looks as terrified as she did when that train pulled away from the platform. And then, as if she’s coming out of a trance, she swings her gaze back to the audience, smiles, climbs back onto the hoop as it starts to rise upward—and is gone.

Theo turns to me. “What was that?”

“You saw it too?”

“Yeah, I saw it. She was staring right at you.”

“I met her,” I say. “Just after I spoke to you for the first time at the café.” I explain it all: catching her following me, chasing her into the Metro. My heart is beating faster now. I think of Ben. The family. The mystery dancer. They all feel like parts of the same puzzle . . . I know they are. But how do they all fit?

After the show ends the audience members drain the remainders from their glasses and surge up the staircase, heading out into the night.

Theo gives me a nudge. “Come on then, let’s go. Follow me.”

I’m about to protest—surely we’re not just going to leave?—but I stop when I see that rather than continuing up the stairs with the rest of the paying customers, Theo has shoved open a door on our left. It’s the same one we noticed earlier, during the performance, the one through which those suited men kept disappearing.

“Let’s try and talk to your friend,” he murmurs.

He slips through the door. I follow close behind. Beneath us is a dark, velvet-lined staircase. We begin to descend. I can hear sounds coming from below, but they’re muted, like they’re coming from underwater. I hear music, I think, and the hum of voices and then a sudden, high-pitched cry that might be male or female.

We have almost reached the bottom of the stairs. I hesitate. I thought I heard something. Another set of footsteps beside our own.

“Stop,” I say. “Did you hear that?”

Theo looks at me questioningly.

“I’m sure I heard footsteps.”

We listen for a couple of moments in silence. Nothing. Then a girl appears at the bottom of the stairs. One of the dancers. Up close she’s so made-up it looks like she’s wearing a mask. She stares at us. For a moment I have the impression that there’s a scared little girl looking out at me behind the thick foundation, fake eyelashes, and glossy red lips.

“We’re looking for a friend,” I say, quickly. “The girl who did that act on the swing? It’s about my brother, Ben. Can you tell her we’re looking for her?”

“You cannot be here,” she hisses. She looks terrified.

“It’s OK,” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “We’re not going to stay for long.”

She hurries past us, up the stairs, without a backward glance. We keep going. At the end of the corridor there’s a door. I put my shoulder against it but there’s no give. I suddenly have a sense of how far underground we are: at least two floors deep. The thought makes it harder to breathe. I try to swallow down my fear.

“I think it’s locked,” I say.

The sounds are louder now. Through the door I hear a kind of groan that sounds almost animal.

I try the handle again. “It’s definitely locked. You have a go—”

But Theo doesn’t answer me.

And I know, before I turn, that there’s someone behind us. Now I see him: the doorman who met us at the entrance, his huge frame filling the corridor, his face in shadow.

Shit.

“Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” he asks, dangerously, quietly, as he begins moving toward us. “What are you doing down here?”

“We got lost,” I say, my voice cracking. “I . . . was looking for the toilets.”

“Vous devez partir,” he says. And then he repeats it in English: “You need to leave. Both of you. Right now.” His voice is still quiet, all the more menacing than if he were shouting. It says, absolutely do not fuck with me.

He takes a hold of my upper arm in one of his huge hands. His grip burns. I try to pull away. He grips tighter. I get the impression he’s not even putting much effort in.

“Hey, hey—that’s not necessary,” Theo says. The doorman doesn’t answer, or let go. Instead he takes hold of Theo’s arm too, in his other hand. And Theo, who up until now I’d thought of as a large guy, looks suddenly like a child, like a puppet, held in his grip.

For a moment the doorman stands stock-still, his head cocked to one side. I look at Theo and he frowns, clearly as confused as I am. Then I hear a tinny murmur and realize that he is listening. Someone is feeding him instructions through an earpiece.

He straightens up. “Please, Madame, Monsieur.” Still that scarily polite tone, even as his hand tightens further around my bicep, burning the skin. “Do not make a scene. You must come with me, now.” And then he is steering us, with more than a little force, along the corridor, back up the first flight of stairs, back into the room with the tables, the stage. Most of the lights have been turned off and it’s completely empty now. No, not completely. Out of the corner of my eye I think I catch sight of a tall figure standing quite still, watching us from the shadowy recesses in one corner. But I don’t manage to get a proper look because now we’re being manhandled up the next flight of steps, up to ground level.

Then the front door is opened and we’re thrust out onto the street, the doorman giving me such a hard shove in the back that I trip and fall forward onto my knees.

The door slams behind us.

Theo, who has managed to keep his balance, puts out a hand and hauls me up. It takes a long time for my heartbeat to return to normal. But as I manage to gain some control over my breathing I realize that though my knees hurt and my arm feels badly bruised, it could have been so much worse. I feel lucky to be back out here gulping freezing lungfuls of air. What if the voice in the doorman’s ear had given different instructions? What might be happening to us now?

It’s this thought rather than the cold that makes me shiver. I pull my jacket tighter around me.

“Let’s get away from here,” Theo says. I wonder if he’s thinking along the same lines: let’s not give them a chance to change their minds.

The street is almost silent, completely deserted: just the blink of the security lights in shop windows and the echo of our feet on the cobblestones.

And then I hear a new sound: another pair of feet, behind us and moving quickly, quicker, growing louder as my heart starts beating faster. I turn to see. A tall figure, hood pulled up. And as the light catches her face just so, I see that it’s her. The girl who followed me two nights ago, the girl on the hoop, who stared at me in the audience this evening like she’d come face to face with a nightmare.