Entity story · 3 min read · Set in The Regal ·
The Stored Quiet at the Regal
The projectionist at a closed cinema in Calder finds a jar of absolute silence on the booth shelf, and each person who whispers into it leaves the jar a little heavier and the cinema a little more crowded with the sound of things that were never said.
The Regal Cinema on Calder Row closed in 1986, when the new multiplex opened across the river and the old picture house was left to rot. For most of its life the building kept its secret quietly. A bank of dusty seats, a torn screen, a projection booth at the top of the stairs with the lamp still wired and the spools still racked along the wall. Duncan Mahr had been hired to clear it for redevelopment, and on his second day he found the jar.
It stood on the shelf above the old carbon arc, a glass jar about the size of a bread bin, sealed with a brass lid that had gone green. Inside it there was nothing at all. Not dark, not empty air. The silence in the jar was so complete that when Duncan leaned close he felt his ears go numb, and his own breath seemed to stop short of his mouth.
There was a card tied to the handle. The writing was faded but legible. *For the matinée. Speak into it softly, and it will keep what you said. Do not open it in the presence of the house.*
Duncan laughed, and then wrote down the words on the card in his notebook, and put the jar on the bench to show the site manager. That was when he noticed the seats below the booth window were not empty.
They were full of people sitting very still, in the dim grey light that came through the dirty glass, looking up at the screen. Men in old overcoats, women in headscarves, a row of children with their hands folded in their laps. They did not turn when he moved. They were all looking at the dead screen, quite calmly, as though waiting for the film to begin.
Duncan went down the stairs very slowly and out of the building, and sat on the kerb on Calder Row for an hour before he could make himself go back. When he returned to the booth, the jar was on the bench where he had left it. And the card had been turned over, and a new line had been written on the back in a steady hand: *Thank you. It is kept now.*
He did not tell the site manager. He told his sister, who said he should go to a doctor, and then asked him, rather oddly, whether he had heard anyone whispering in the old cinema. He said no. She said she had, when she was a girl, going to the Saturday matinée. She said everybody at the Regal had whispered their secrets into the dark, back then. Nobody had known why. It had just seemed the right thing to do.
Over the following weeks, Duncan began to hear whispers in the building that were not his own. In the stalls. Up in the circle. Behind the screen, very close, the soft rise and fall of someone confiding in a friend. He would go to find them and find nothing, only the dust and the seats and the silence in the jar. The jar, meanwhile, had grown heavier. He could not lift it now without a grunt. The glass had a faint grey bloom on the inside, like breath on a window.
On the last day before the demolition crew came, Duncan climbed the stairs one more time and found the booth door open. Inside, the jar stood on the shelf, lid off, and it was full, right to the brim, with a sound so faint and so intricate that he had to hold his breath to hear it. A whispering crowd, a thousand small confessions, all overlapping in the dark. He leaned down, and he could not help himself, and he whispered into the jar the one thing he had never told anybody.
The silence closed over it, kindly, and kept it. He felt a weight lift off his chest. Then he heard the seats below creak, one by one, as the audience stood up together and filed quietly out of the Regal into the street, and he did not look down to see whether they were leaving or arriving.