Chapter 63: The Theater (7) |
Rebecca moved quickly. After asking around in the exorcists’ group chat, she soon sent over a screenshot of a reply from one of the big names in the group.
[An inverted pentagram formation falls under the category of black magic. It must be disrupted using items that possess inherent sacred power. Holy water blessed by at least one bishop-level cleric, sap from an olive tree over 100 years old, white crystal powder that has absorbed moonlight for seven consecutive full-moon nights, the menstrual blood of a pure virgin, tears of a unicorn… Any of the above can be used to interfere with the formation’s normal operation.]
Everly: [Is this person reliable?]
Rebecca: [Of course. With so many people in the group, if he were wrong, someone would’ve refuted him.]
Everly: [OK, got it. Thanks.]
In a hurry to get moving, Everly forwarded the screenshot to the Micano police.
After going through both the Megan Clinic case and the witch case, Everly had come to a conclusion: the police in this world could be divided into two types. One type consisted of staunch materialists who scoffed at anything supernatural—these were often new recruits or incompetent officers who rarely handled serious crimes. Any officer who had served for a while or dealt with cases involving supernatural forces would, more or less, believe in mysticism.
Thanks to the witch case—particularly Kelly’s act of retaliation—the entire Micano Police Department, except for the rookies who had joined in the past two years, now firmly believed in the existence of supernatural powers. So when Everly sent the message, the Micano police quickly replied that they were already contacting the psychic practitioners who cooperated with the department and were preparing to gather the necessary materials.
Seeing their response, Everly let out a sigh of relief.
Seeing the two people ahead of her crawling farther and farther away, Everly quickly shook off her stray thoughts, slipped her phone back into her pocket, and sped up to catch up.
The farther they crawled, the more masked figures passed beneath them. It seemed the masked men had already finished collecting the bodies from the audience seating area and had shifted their focus to backstage. From their conversations, Everly gathered that the evil god they worshiped delighted in fear, absurdity, chaos, slaughter, and death. Therefore, they planned to gather the corpses of the troupe’s actors backstage, dress them in costumes, apply stage makeup, and arrange them in grotesque poses atop the pile of bodies—making the “corpse mountain” look even more “majestic and magnificent”—all to please their “Lord.”
To avoid the people below, Old John had to lead the group weaving through several interconnected ventilation ducts, stopping from time to time to lie still and wait for those passing underneath to move on.
In this way, a distance of barely a dozen meters took them a full seven or eight minutes to crawl.
According to the evacuation map, the props room was a large storage space of about sixty to seventy square meters. The vent’s exit was located on the inner side of the warehouse. Everly passed the mirror to Old John, who used it to take a careful look. The door to the props room stood open, and blood was splattered everywhere inside. Clearly, when the riot broke out, someone had fled in here hoping to hide, only to be killed by the masked men.
The masked men responsible for collecting bodies had likely already been there—only blood remained on the floor, no corpses in sight. Between the vent exit and the room’s door stood several rows of shelves, crammed full with all kinds of miscellaneous props. As long as the three of them could climb down quickly enough, they would be able to use the shelves for cover once they reached the ground.
Of course, that was assuming they could get down successfully in the first place.
The metal grating of the ventilation duct was packed too tightly. Even Misha, who had the slimmest fingers among them, couldn’t manage the complicated sequence of “reach fingers out → unscrew the bolts → remove the panel.” Using the saw blade from the Swiss Army knife would make too much noise and risk attracting the masked men.
Left with no other choice, Old John lay flat at the vent opening and pressed his thumb hard against the welded joints of the metal grating, testing them one by one until he found a loose spot. Grabbing the steel bar, he bent it inward with all his strength.
It was no easy task. The grating was made of thin metal strips, and the pressure point on his fingers was tiny. Old John strained with everything he had; veins bulged along his arms, his teeth clenched tight as he endured the pain. At last, at the cost of splitting his fingers and drawing blood, he managed to wrench one of the bars free from the frame.
With one bar removed, a gap of less than three centimeters opened between the remaining strips. Old John’s hands were too large for the next step, so he crawled forward into the opposite duct and made way for Misha, whose hands were the smallest of the three.
Misha nodded, her face set and serious. Lying prone against the panel, she held a compact mirror in one hand and threaded the other hand through the narrow gap. Using the mirror’s reflection for guidance, she carefully worked the screwdriver tip of the Swiss Army knife against the screws around the vent cover, loosening them bit by bit.
As she worked, she kept her ears pricked for any movement outside the door. Whenever footsteps sounded, Misha would start like a startled bird, swiftly pulling back the mirror and knife and lying perfectly still until the steps faded away. The whole process was more nerve-racking than stealing. After all, if a thief got caught, they would just end up in jail. If she got caught unscrewing this panel, she might be sent to meet her great-grandmother in heaven.
Fortunately, unlike the men’s restroom, the props room wasn’t humid, so the four screws around the panel were in good condition. As long as she aimed carefully and applied the right amount of force, removing them was much faster than it had been in the restroom. Five minutes later, with a soft click, the final screw came loose under Misha’s hand.
“Done.”
She whispered excitedly, pulling the panel into the duct and backing away to make space. Old John gripped the sheet metal on either side of the opening and dropped lightly to the floor like a cheetah.
Once all three were safely on the ground, they followed the plan they had discussed inside the ventilation duct. Keeping low, Misha crept to the door of the props room and hid in the corner behind it, keeping watch for the other two. She held the compact mirror tightly in her hand—if anything happened, she would use its reflective surface to signal them immediately.
Taking advantage of this window of time, Everly and Old John split up and began searching the props room for the possible location of the sewer entrance.
According to the information sent by the officers, the manhole had originally been located in the open space behind the theater’s back door. Later, due to adjustments in urban planning, the sewer line was abandoned. Thirty years ago, when the Xinkalan Theater expanded outward because its original space was too small, the abandoned manhole was incorporated into the theater building. The former open space was thus turned into the props room.
Naturally, such a large manhole couldn’t simply be left exposed on the floor. The props room had been fitted with wooden flooring to conceal the manhole cover and block ground moisture. Police officers were already positioned below in the sewer. According to their description, there had to be additional heavy objects placed on top of the wooden floor, because no matter how many times they tried, they couldn’t lift the cover from underneath.
Using an imprecise layout map as reference, Everly and Old John had to locate the hidden manhole cover beneath the floor in the vast props room. It wasn’t an easy task. Fortunately, they weren’t the only ones working at it—the Micano police were assisting as well.
Separated by a layer of manhole cover and wooden boards, the people below could faintly hear footsteps from above. They relayed the distance, volume, and frequency of the sounds through a radio set up in the sewer, passing the information to officers, who then called Everly with updates. Through this roundabout method, the grandfather and granddaughter gradually marked off a specific area on the floor.
The good news was that this area was located at the very back of the props room. Unless someone deliberately walked into the room, no one outside would be able to see Old John and Everly working there.
The bad news came after they had exhausted themselves moving the heavy shelving unit off the top of the spot and prying up the wooden floor beneath with a crowbar (don’t ask Everly why there happened to be a real crowbar sitting on one of the shelves). They did indeed find the manhole cover—but on top of it was a sturdy metal grate secured with a combination lock.
The grate was welded from steel bars as thick as fingers, and the combination lock on it was the size of an adult’s fist—not something that could be casually broken. Everly couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would have installed such a thing in the first place. Were they really trying to keep Dio Brando out?
Everly took a photo of the situation and sent it to the officers, who were clearly stunned. Apparently, they hadn’t known about this in advance.
“…”
Well, the U.S. police had been unreliable for more than a day or two—it was best to just get used to it.
Old John, who had some knowledge of lockpicking, crouched down and examined the combination lock. He tugged on the surrounding grate, then shook his head at Everly. “No way. This type of lock cylinder can’t be forced open; the only way is to try every possible combination. Maybe shooting it could destroy the lock, but I can’t guarantee it. All I have is a handgun, and its destructive power is limited.”
Although TV dramas often show a single bullet shattering a lock, in reality it doesn’t work that easily. A high-powered rifle might pierce a standard lock, but a handgun relies heavily on luck. Factors like the bullet’s energy, shooting angle, and the lock’s structure all affect the chances of success.
So, the gun couldn’t be used recklessly—at least not yet. After the initial massacre, the theater had fallen into an eerie silence, punctuated only by the occasional gunshot from executing a hostage. Firing a shot backstage now would be like announcing their exact location to the masked men. Even if the lock were destroyed, the greater risk was that they themselves could end up dead if the shot failed.
The best solution, of course, was to get the combination.
All the theater’s management had been captured—there was no one to ask. The police could only try to track down the construction manager responsible for the theater’s expansion thirty years ago, hoping to learn the password from them. But after all these years, it was uncertain whether the person was even still alive. Even if they were, they might not remember or know the combination. It was all a matter of luck.
The faint glimmer of hope they had clung to suddenly dimmed again.
The grandfather and granddaughter waited anxiously for a call from the police. But before the phone rang, heavy footsteps echoed down the hallway outside the door. Misha, hiding at the entrance, lifted her mirror and flicked it toward Everly and Old John. The two exchanged a glance and, reluctantly, had no choice but to lay the wooden boards back down. They then grabbed a piece of cloth to cover the marks left from prying and moving the floor panels.
Once the traces were concealed, they hunched their bodies, breathed quietly, and froze behind the shelving.
Fortunately, the people outside were just passing by and soon moved on.
When the footsteps faded, they didn’t dare relax. Everly immediately signaled for Misha to return. The three of them climbed atop the shifted shelves, gripped the vent opening, and one by one slipped back into the safer confines of the ventilation ducts.
All they could do now was wait.
Wait for the police to find the combination. Wait for a miracle.
But would a miracle really come? What if the construction manager was dead? What if they had long forgotten the combination? What if they didn’t even know about the lock? What if…
Time stretched endlessly in the waiting. The longer they waited, the heavier the unease grew. Anxiety and dread coiled through Everly’s chest like dark, creeping vines, wrapping around her heart, pulling her little by little into a bottomless abyss of despair.
And then, at that exact moment, a series of piercing screams echoed from the distant front of the theater.
From the conversations she had overheard in the hall earlier, Everly realized it: the masked men’s second round of “executions” had begun. After slaughtering the second batch of hostages and uploading the videos online, the number of people gathering around the theater was bound to increase even further.
The theater was too large, and Micano was just a small city—the police didn’t have enough personnel to evacuate the crowd. Once enough people had gathered outside, the masked men would activate the sacrificial formation. At that point, the remaining hundreds of hostages inside the theater—her, Old John, Misha, the police outside, and the onlookers—would all become offerings to feed the evil god, stepping stones for the masked men to ascend to a higher level.
She couldn’t just wait any longer. Maybe, in this “movie,” there wasn’t even a hero capable of saving everyone.
While there was still time, she had to act—she had to stop all of this!