Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in The Meridian Hall ·
The Hush Between Floors at Meridian Hall
A theatre usher at Meridian Hall is trapped in the old goods lift for forty seconds between the stage and the flies, and in that silence a voice asks her one question, the question she has been avoiding for twenty years, and waits for her answer.
Meridian Hall had a goods lift at the back of the stage, a wooden box on iron cables that carried scenery and props between the stage floor and the fly galleries above. It had been condemned in 1995 and repaired in 1999, and the stage crew had been warned never to use it alone. Maisie Hart was an usher, not a stage hand, and she had no business in the lift at all. But she had been sent up to the flies on the Thursday night to fetch a missing cable for the front-of-house lights, and the stairs were under repair, and she had stepped inside to save ten minutes.
The lift stopped halfway, between the stage and the gallery. The lights went out. The machinery gave a long, low sigh, and then all sound stopped.
It was the deepest silence she had ever heard. Not the quiet of an empty theatre, with its creaks and ticks, but a silence that seemed to press on her ears from every side, the kind a diver knows underwater. She could not hear her own breath. She could not hear the orchestra pit, though she knew the musicians were tuning on the other side of the wall. She could feel her pulse hammering in her throat, and then she could not feel it at all.
In the dark, a voice spoke.
It was quiet and calm, a little amused, the voice of someone sitting across a table from her in a warm room. It did not come from any direction. It simply was, inside the silence, the way a single note is inside a chord.
*Maisie. Why did you leave the Cathedral Sisters?*
She had not thought about the convent school for twenty years. She had left it at seventeen, on a snowy morning, without telling anyone where she was going, and she had never gone back. Her mother had written to her every month for a decade. She had never opened the letters.
She tried to answer. Her mouth opened and nothing came out. The silence swallowed her voice before it could leave her lips.
*You don't have to say it aloud,* the voice said. *Just think it. I'll wait. I've got forty seconds to spare, and it's a long time between floors.*
She thought about the sisters, and the chapel, and the single bell that rang at six every morning. She thought about the girl she had been, who had wanted to be a nun more than anything, and who had woken one night in the dormitory with a sudden, terrible certainty that she would never be able to pray again. She had run because she was afraid that the silence in her own heart was the end of everything, and that if she stayed, she would have to say so aloud, to the sisters, to her mother, to God.
She thought the answer very clearly. It was the first time she had ever thought it at all. *I left because I couldn't hear anything. And I was too frightened to ask whether anyone else could.*
The voice was quiet for a long time. Then it said, very gently: *Thank you. That's the question. I'll let you go now.*
The lift jolted. The lights flickered on. The machinery groaned, and the box began to move, and Maisie found she could hear the orchestra tuning through the wall, and the squeak of the stage door, and her own breath, ragged and loud in the close wooden space.
When the doors opened at the gallery she stepped out shaking, and the stage manager was waiting for her with a torch. He asked whether she was all right. She said she was. He asked whether she had found the cable. She said she had not, but she thought she knew where to look.
She has not been back to the convent. But on the first Sunday of every month, she goes to the small chapel at the end of Calder Row, where the bell rings at six, and she sits at the back and listens, and for the first time in twenty years she can hear, very faintly, under the hymns and the murmur of the congregation, a voice humming a tune between floors, waiting, quite patiently, for her to sing along.