The Dandolo Theatre House

I remember the times when my mother and father figured out that I had a talent in literary arts. They’d say that my name is written in the stars, bound to shine and haunt as if I was some kind of a Shakesperean newborn. How inversely the fate could turn after all? My world was not ought to be a stage but the stage was ought to be my world. Tragedy could made me bleed on paper and nail on me on the stage. Back then I did not know, I was actually fated to live tragic endings rather than to write them. There would lay upon a voice in my ears that I had to give my stories a happy ending. I should’ve listened. I gave a piece of myself to these stories and now my endings depend on theirs. A God-like perpetual gift, I had the ability to shape my own fate. A self unfulfilled prophecy this all had become. My ever crafting hands haunted my paper. Beware the holder of the pen that will carve it now.

-           Year 1924, Cassandra Dandolo’s last piece of work, presumably from her play book / diary

‘’Were you out of your mind while taking this book out of the evidence room? You can actually get fired or worse, put in a prison or something.’’

‘’Sure, but I’ll live. So far these are just the worse case scenarios, you know? This can actually work, I’m telling you.’’

‘’You can not be sure though I wonder what will happen..’’

‘’Well… Just as she said I have the ability to shape my own fate. Fate can be resourceful quite like this, giving me the certainty that this place has something special after all.’’ I just nodded while looking carefully to the drive-way.

The road to Dandolo theatre house was a bit bumpy and the view so far was covered with somewhat of a folkloric mist however there was something beautiful in the uncertainty of it. I only could see more when we passed through the tunnel connected to the riparian road, the ambit stretched out to the plains and I witnessed more beautiful scenery than I could have wished for. When I thought I was getting close to the theatre house, I paused, put the car in a suitable place and looked around to see if there was anything I could see beyond the estates the Dandolo family once owned. Taking advantage of the rainy weather, I put on my favorite brown leather jacket with pockets and put his cheap camera and my small notebook in one and a pen in the other. I pinned up my bangs because I thought it was going to be a long night, and tied the rest of my hair, which was starting to grow over my shoulders. From a distance the theatre house looked quite small, but as I got closer, I could see that it was a large living space.

The Dandolo theatre house was built mostly of wood, and although the woods were dark brown, the doorposts and window sills were maroon. The windows of the theatre house were not completely transparent. The moon had risen on the sky already therefore It was not sunny, but the dark glass seemed to hide the inside of the house even in the sun. There was no lock on the front door. No one was here since the incident other than wonderers like us. It was hard to imagine Cassandra Dandolo living here. Her aesthetic narrative and rich tastes were evident in every one of her works, but I wondered how this setting could have inspired her. The theatre house had a stillness in almost no whirlwind. The garden was long and full with different kinds of trees. Cassandra would romanticize chaos in her plays and use the metaphor of a vast castle, despite the wealth, and we could never see beyond the castle windows. The villains would be inside the palaces, frowning with hatred within the four walls, while the good characters would be outside, free and without dams to hold them back. I wondered where Cassandra saw herself on this spectrum, she had loved theatre to her death that she had a house just for her stage cast and herself.

I approached to the door of the theatre house while fuelled by my previous thoughts, and tried to push it a few times in the hope of opening it, instead an unexpected voice came from behind me.

“That door is definitely not going to open unless you think you can actually break it down with baby punches.”

There was Mac with his hands wrapped around my waist, laughing off to my frightened face. I had for a second that forgotten he was right behind me. He was here to shoot one of his ‘haunted house’ videos and though I’d never join to his extragavant pretending act, I actually was intrigued about the house. If I could actually get the stories I wanted, I would have a path into the mind of a great artist. I could clutch her art, decipher the secret to her fateful fame.

‘’Come on, Beth. You do not have to over play it. We haven’t even opened the camera.’’ My eyes rolled themselves before his jester like presence.

‘’No need to be offended. I already know. You write and I play. I am like one of those theatre actors, all dramatic, backed up with effects and fake astonishments. You already know so well.’’ I took out his camera and give it to him after a slight laugh to his mumbling. As he opened the door, he gave me the diary to hold it. There was something about the diary when I held it. I was a writer, I had something in me that gave meaning to artifacts.

‘’Can you tell me what happened here, again?’’ I whispered as if there could’ve been people listening. I have been focused on the art itself rather than the artist that I had to remember the vicious story of hers again.

‘’This theatre house was built with the Dandolos’ money which belonged to pretty rich people back then like Rothschilds, you know? They took interest in diverse areas of economical uprisings and perhaps made a deal with the devil himself. Who knows? All rumors. Their daughter, Cassandra was gifted, as the rest of the world had said. She could write great plays, realistic stories with trauma.’’

‘’They were not quite realistic with the witches, phantasms, hallucinations and other things…’’

‘’They were real on tragedy, that’s for sure.’’ He went on as we were pacing through the place. As he was talking to me, he was also talking to the camera. We went through the cast rooms, looked through the cabinets. He was desperate to find something haunted. I was kind of disappointed about not being able to find what I was looking for. I heard the sound of metals clanging through wood and a silver shine through the mirror in front of me. I saw the vague figure of something, one of the figures used in the theatre staring at me. I turned around and saw nothing, there was just an opaque window that I could only view as I got closer. There was a tree, swaying with the wind in complete silence. Then a sound came shaking the cabinets as the rough drift does to the tree. As if the windows weren’t locked in here... The stars have been shining upon the dark sky and they all seemed like eyes behind the glass.

‘’Mac?’’ I turned to my right with the painful ring in my ear in its direction. I saw gray eyes staring at me and piercing through my skin. Cold and sharp. I screamed but with a grin, Mac took out the armed head. I punched him right on the shoulder, his face did not change.

‘’You are a fool. Definitely not the best suit for a knight in armor.’’ I almost hissed. He pretended to be hurt and take out the fake dagger he put in his pockets to play as if the words stabbed him to his heart.

‘’Go on. Go on.’’ I said and followed him to the next room where he left his camera open to probably get some shoots of what he pulled and me as a scared shame-faced cat.

‘’Some said Cassandra had the ability to ‘aveda kedavra’. Not the Harry Potter way but in some ancient way.’’

‘’You mean ‘abracadabra’. I create as I speak. However she created as she wrote, or both ways. A gift.’’ Mac scratched his head as he was calculating his knowledge all over again. He shove his shoulder against mine and gave an inglorious wink.

‘’A curse.’’ he corrected with a ghostly wail that echoed through the main hall.

‘’No. She actually sounds like she was living the dream.’’ As we entered, the room beneath my feet felt like it was spinning for a slight second. There were blood all over the halls of it, not even color of the blood have been vanished with the past. There was a stage full of fallen decors and thrown chairs on the side. Another buzz hit through my ears like a hag’s stracher bray, only I assumed they were crows alerting the world around me.

‘’That ends up to be a nightmare. One day, the whole cast was standing right on this stage, going through the play that was written in the book you hold. A bloody book for sure. Ugh-’’ I heard a tumbling and turned my head around to see what he was wailing for. A splash of liquid wetted through my skin, warm and dense. My left eye started to burn and I had to hang onto his shirt to protect my posture. His shirt was soaking through, I could barely see my hands colored in dark red. He hold me so tight that I screamed again.

‘’I needed this to be as haunted as it gets.’’ he said with another laughter. There was a tube of fake blood in his hands that was squeezed till the last drop. I sat down on the stage and did not talk to him for a second there. He had his camera in his hands patroling in the stage, talking about the rest of the story while I opened the book and tried to imagine what had happen.

‘’The play was full of tragedy and murder, so was the cast’s own lives. There were complex relationships, especially between Cassandra and her knight of the night. One night, on a Friday full moon such as this, they all gathered around for their first full-on rehearsal for the play that is in your hands. Otis M. was in a relationship with Cassandra and he was also in another relationships behind the curtains and in the cast rooms. Cassandra had known that for months and It was a disgrace to her home and stage.’’ As I was following his words and the book, I added:

My knight falls in the night, I can see him for who he is now. For once, beneath his armor made of my lines, I can see the devil that lies within. My words gave him to me, my words will take everyone else from him until there’s only me and him. The world and the stage all comes down to us. Let the stage bleed for our love. Let the stage be only for us.

‘’What happens after that is decimation. All started with the girls that have been getting intimate with him. They were dressed as hags, hags of the Crow Eye. They bleed from their internals to their outer parts and fell down in the stage like dead birds. Then It happened to everyone else, though I do not exactly know who else takes place in a theatre.’’

If his love is true, make the dagger in his hands real. Let the devil out and let him get to me. I have been only to glad to die, knowing his love was true and It was on me to glorify. Love kills all things, It could kill me.

As I read the words out loud, I heard the crow sounds turning into wails rather than laughs. My ear buzzes turned into little knives through my head. The wind raged toward the entire room and broke through a window. The other thing I saw was Mac’s eyes looking deadly at me with his dagger on my left side. I scooped and tried to stand back.

‘’What are you doing? I am so sick of your jokes!’’ I yelled. He did not laugh this time, his smile lines were ghost trails on his face.

‘’You are the world, I can not break free.’’ His eerie wail was now a cold disdain. He raised his hand over my face, covering my left cheek with fake blood prints. The sounds were coming in different forms and alerting my skin. I saw shadows sprinting around the room.

‘’What are you talking about?’’ I left the stage as he made another sway with the dagger and as it cut through my right shoulder I knew It was real. The windows kept breaking one to another like stage lights would do. I tried to grab one of the window pieces and I hold it even though I felt it cutting through my skin.

‘’You own the stage? You own me?’’

‘’Will you stop? Please!’’ I tried to say between hiccups, whatever kind of joke he was trying to pull, I knew I was just done with it. There was not a single grin on his face, for the first time in my life, Mac was coming after me with a grave act. I tried to laugh, tried to broke him down. Everytime he moved, I heard metals clicking to another. As he was moving slow, he kept circling around the stage like a twist doll toy. I came closer to him.

‘’You don’t own me. I am the stage. I shall own you!’’ he hissed at me with another dagger sway as I stood on the ladder of the stage. The glass in my hands flew away. I saw the camera and It had a flickering red light.

‘’You are joking, right?’’ I asked again. His eyes darkened and he took a shallow breath.

‘’I am not a jester, I am not a fool. I am the knight of the night!’’ he shouted so loud that I could feel my body tremble. A part of me still wanted to believe that It was an act.

‘’You are the pen.’’ he kept on going with spats of blood dripping from his mouth. I was the pen. He was the play. If, Cassandra did write her own stories, that meant she could write the stories of the ones around her.

My world was not ought to be a stage but the stage was ought to be my world.

A God-like perpetual gift, I had the ability to shape my own fate. A self unfulfilled prophecy this all had become. My ever crafting hands haunted my paper. Beware the holder of the pen that will carve it now.

He raised his dagger again almost cutting through my hands that grabbed the book from the corner of the stage. I found myself running from him as I went through the door. I scorched through my jacket to find my pen. When I opened the book, I could not see anything. I have tried to get to the Moon to see while hearing his voice amongst other voices. I kept hearing the same wails, foot steps and metal clangs. The wind went through the book’s pages and I’ve been looking for the last page that I read.

If his love is true, make the dagger in his hands real. Let the devil out and let him get to me. I have been only to glad to die, knowing his love was true and It was on me to glorify. Love kills all things, It could kill me.

I used the pen to cross over the words ‘dagger’, ‘devil’, ‘die’ and ‘dead’ but I couldn’t. The ink was stronger than my pen. I kept thinking and trying. I could hear the ground beneath me shaking.

Love kills all things, It couldn’t kill me. I looked through the window to see if he was the same. I felt hands over my waist and I turned back. He had a grin on his face, now.

‘’Have you been joking with me?’’ I asked. He kept smiling in a way that made me want to throw up while he nodded as a ‘No’. I took a relaxed breath but I did not know what for. He had his camera in his hands, I showed him the footage of all that happened.

‘’This is great!’’ he shouted. ‘’This is haunted! I knew this would worth it!’’ he was so delighted.

‘’Are you crazy? You can not show that to anyone. ‘’

‘’Oh, I will. This is everything to me.’’

‘’No. I won’t take a part in this. I’d rather forget.’’

‘’Sorry, Beth. I have to.’’ His smile disappeared.

‘’Then I swear I’ll tell everyone that you keep pretending. I’ll tell that all is a lie.’’ He opened up the page and looked at what I wrote with the pen. I took it from him. I saw the blood smudged ink from my pen right before I could feel the cold metal nailing through my flesh.

‘’You don’t know but you are not that good with the pen. I am good with the play. The world is a stage and now I am out of it.’’ I only heard.

MY GIRLFRIEND GOT KILLED IN THE DANDOLO THEATRE HOUSE (PROOFS IN THE VIDEO)

-           Year 2024, the caset title of Mac Montag’s last video