an: i had a lot of fun with this one, so i hope you like it. :) thanks for all your great reviews. happy happy.

disclaimer: mcfly have owned themselves since the beginning of time. or, well, er..

FOURTEEN - GHOSTIES IN THE THEATRE

It seems hard to swallow
You keep your thoughts by your pillow
Just so you can adore them
And just so we can ignore them

I guess I must have fallen asleep at some point during one of the many movies we had been watching because the next thing I knew, Tom was gently nudging me in the shoulder while saying, "Dara, are you asleep?"

"That's kind of hard to do," I replied, but I kept my eyes shut. When he went to nudge me again – just because, I assumed – I grabbed his hand, even with my still shut eyes. "Would you stop it?" I kept my hold on his hand while I sat up properly in my theatre seat.

"You're no fun," he pouted, pulling his hand free of my grasp. "By the way, your phone's been going crazy for the past ten minutes or so."

"Oh," I said while reaching for the device that was resting on the seat between us that we had managed to rig so it would stay down so we would have a place to put some of the snacks, rather than just our laps or the floor – no matter how unused a theatre is, the floor is a terrible place for snacks! "What did I miss?" I added, rubbing my eyes of the sleep, talking about the movie.

"Oh, not much. This one ended in much the same way as the last. Girl gets boy. Except, the other one was murdered about twenty minutes to the end, so everything was kind of messy there for a bit before she realised he was murdered because he was a bad guy in a gang, and the first guy was the one in love."

"I guess Lo really likes her love stories. I guess I haven't watched a proper movie with her in a while to realise it. Or maybe she just had all the love stories together – that's what I'm hoping," I supposed, opening the messaging system on my phone, only to find about a bunch messages from none other than my best mate.

Hey, just got home. You're not here, obvs. Where are you? Just wondering.

Pixie. A note would have been nice you know. We're starting to worry about you!

Pix – where are you. Josh and I are really worrying about where you've gotten to! xox

ADARE! YOU ANSWER ME THIS MINUTE. IF YOU DON'T IN THE NEXT 10 MINS, I'M CALLING THE COPS!

ADARA PALMER, YOU BETTER HAVE A GOOD EXPLAINATION AS TO WHY I HAVEN'T HEARD FROM YOU. LIKE YOU FELL OFF THE EDGE OF THE PLANET.

They all came at various intervals, all mixed in with some missed phone calls from her mobile, Josh's mobile, and our landline. I noticed that I was running out of time before she called the police on me, so I quickly pushed out a reply:

SORRY DIXIE! I fell asleep. I'm with a mate, don't worry your pretty little butt about me, I'm perfectly fine – don't call the cops, okay? Hope your date's going well! Love you!

Looking back up from my phone, Tom was watching a little bit at the end of the credits. "You know," I said when it finished as I felt another chill run down my spine, "this place is giving me the creeps. I think there may be a ghost running around here. I mean, someone has to have died in here at some point! It's so old that it's not possible that no one's died here."

Tom just looked at me, a confused look on his face before he started laughing. "Have you been watching and or reading up on too many ghost stories? Or are you always like this?"

I thought about that. "Maybe a little of both?" I admitted. "But, seriously. How old is this place again? Like almost 125 years? C'mon! Someone's had to have died here in that time! I'm sure of it. And there's bound to be someone haunting this place – I mean, it's pretty big!" I was serious, and as soon as Tom took one look at me, he stopped laughing, finally giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Pocketing my phone, I dragged Tom out of the theatre room, down the stairs, and into the main lobby area. "Where should we start our search?" I smiled.

"How about through there?" Tom suggested, and we headed for the door across the lobby.

Pulling open the heavy door revealed a smaller theatre, this one still equipped with a rather old looking stage. Venturing in, we spent the next half hour wandering around the room, pulling open doors that if you didn't know were there, you wouldn't have seen and looking into any and every room we could.

"Well, that was exciting," Tom sighed as we walked out through what we had originally thought was the door we had entered the room in. Except, it wasn't. "Where are we?" He turned around, trying to get back to the door, just as it was swinging shut. Trying to push it back open proved useless.

"See? Ghosts!" I gasped, excitement – as well as a bit of fear – taking over every bit of me. "It's supernaturally locked!"

"Dara. The door closed because it's heavy. And it won't open not because of supernatural forces" – I could feel my face dropping a little at his words, so honest and clear – "but because it's locked from the other side."

"Oh. Right. I knew that." I guess I had just been a little more excited by the prospect of having actually encountered a ghost – not that I had a fascination with them or anything, I just thought it might have been cool. But with how Tom had just explained it, it all made sense. The door was pretty heavy. And a lot of the doors had been locked when we had tried to open them.

Tom pulled out his mobile. "No signal," he mumbled, and then pushed a button, and the dark room was awash with the bright light. After taking a quick spin around the small room, he turned back to me. "There's no other door." I hadn't realised he'd been looking for another door, but it made sense to look. He then tried the door again, without any more success than the first time – none.

"There is, however," Tom paused, looking pointedly at me, "an air duct."

"Where?" I looked around the room in search of this 'air duct', whatever that was – I'm kidding, I know what an air duct is… kind of.

Chuckling, he tilted my head up and shown the light up at the ceiling.

All I could do was gulp. I might not have been afraid of heights, but knowing it might be our only way out, since no one really knew where we were, and because of where it was, I knew it would be up to me to get us out of the room. It was, after all, mostly my fault we were even stuck.

"Give me a sec," I sighed. Preparing myself to get ready to go into the air duct, I took a few deep breaths – I wasn't afraid of small spaces, either, but it was the prerogative of that matter, too. "Okay, get me up there."

Next I knew, I was sitting on Tom shoulders. And when I still couldn't reach the air duct, I carefully – with Tom's help, of course – maneuvered so I was standing instead. Finally, I was able to reach, but just barely. I got the grate open so I could crawl inside, and a few minutes later, I was lying on my stomach, panting after all the exertion I had just used, taking a quick break.

When I was good to go, I pulled out my phone, turned on the light, and started creeping through the smallish duct I was now in. About eight minutes – according to my mobile in front of me – I came to the end. The getting up had been one thing, but now seeing the end, I was even more freaked out before having come up. I had forgotten about getting back out once I was up – I was pretty high up, so the drop would be far.

"Everything alright?" I could hear Tom calling to me.

"Yep," I called back shortly, my panic clear even in my own ears. "Finally got to the end. Tom? It's far!"

There was a moment's silence before I heard him again. "C'mon, Dara, it's the only way. If you come back, we'll just be stuck in here all over again. I know you can do it!"

Hearing his words brought a new strength, straining out some of the panic.

"You can do it! I know you can!" he added, and I maneuverer around in the duct so now my feet were in front of me, kicking open the grate. I heard it bang accusingly against the wall behind it, and then I started inching towards the opening, slipping my phone back into my pocket. I was still able to hear Tom's encouraging chant as I took a deep breath, and slipped out of the air duct.

"Aaahhh – ooww!" I gasped upon my landing. I had landed on my feet – I knew that was a complete no-no in falling having taken quite a few spills over the years – and it hadn't been pleasant, before quickly falling over, coming to rest on my side. I remained there for a minute.

"Adara?" Suddenly, Tom's faint voice could be heard coming from the air duct far above me.

Pulling together what little strength I had left after having crawled through the duct and having taken the fall from it, I stood – only to crumble on the floor again, my ankle protesting in pain. Stealing myself against any more pain, I made my way on hands and knees – or, I should say knee, as in only one, since I ended up kind of dragging the leg of my injured ankle – to where the lookalike door stood. Reaching up, I pushed the lever and the door opened.

I heard Tom's relieved sigh, and then he turned on me. "Dara? Are you alright?"

"High fall. Hard fall. Land on feet," I said in the best George of the Jungle impression I could manage at the moment, producing a small round of giggles.

"Let's get you out of here." Without another word, he had me up and in his arms. While I worked through the pain running through my ankle and up my leg at the sudden movement, he worked on finding the correct door.

When he reached the other side of the room, he carefully pushed through the door, checking to make sure we were in the right place this time, before walking the rest of the way out into the lobby. "I'm just going to go grab our things and shut off the lights and all that and I'll be back in a minute," Tom explained as he sat me down on a random sofa in the large room, and then rushed up the stairs.

I wasn't sure if I liked being alone in such a big place, but seeing as I wasn't in any condition to move by myself and Tom was nowhere around at the moment and no one else was here, I was stuck. And I was going to have to deal with the fact that I still thought there was at least one ghost in the building – even if I hadn't actually seen any – on my own.

Yet another chill was running down my spine when Tom came running back down the stairs. Just as he was approaching me though, the lights blinked off.

"See! I told you there was a ghost!"

"Dara, there's bound to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this," he retorted, "like a blown fuse."

"I honestly cannot believe that you don't think there's a ghost in here, let alone more than just one," I said as he navigated through the dark and out the door. "What with where you lot got your name from and the fact that you mentioned one of your favourite movies of all time is 'Ghostbusters', it's highly unbelievable."

"Oh, no, it's not that," Tom explained placing me in the car. When he returned from making sure the main lights were turned off and the door locked, he continued, "It's just we've spent lots of nights in here, looking for the no-show ghosts." He smiled. "I was just humouring you."

song: hard to swallow by you me at six

an: there you have it. ;)