Daniel had always loved abandoned places. His friends called him reckless, maybe even suicidal, but he told himself he was just curious. Urban explorer, he liked to say, though most of the time he was trespassing where no one else dared go. The theater had been closed for half a century. Once, it had been the pride of the city, its velvet curtains and chandelier dazzling audiences on opening nights. Now, it was a ruin: windows boarded up, the roof sagging, rats nesting in the wings. But it wasn’t decay that lured Daniel there with his camera and flashlight. It was the stories.
People whispered about the phantom cat that haunted the rafters. A grinning thing with yellow eyes, always watching from above, sometimes dropping down when the moon was right. Teenagers dared each other to go inside, but few lasted more than five minutes. They came back pale, muttering about the smell of wet fur and the sound of laughter echoing across the stage. Daniel wanted proof.
He slipped through the back door just after midnight, the camera strapped to his chest. The smell hit first—mildew, rot, and something faintly coppery. He switched on his flashlight, the beam cutting through dust thick as fog. His steps crunched over broken glass as he moved deeper inside. The theater was vast even in ruin. Rows of seats stretched into darkness, their cushions torn open like gutted animals. The stage yawned ahead, the curtains tattered like giant cobwebs. Daniel lifted his camera, recording. His voice sounded strange in the emptiness.
“Midnight, September twelfth. Abandoned Orpheum Theater. Looking for the Cat in the Rafters.”
His laugh was nervous, thinner than he wanted. He turned in a slow circle, panning the light upward. The rafters were a skeletal mess of beams and rusted scaffolding. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. But then, a low vibration rumbled through the ceiling. Not mechanical. Not human. A purr. Daniel froze, heart slamming. He swung the flashlight upward again. Two eyes blinked open.
They weren’t human eyes. They glowed sulfur yellow, slitted like a predator’s. And they weren’t alone. A second pair appeared, then a third, until the rafters glittered with them like stars in a void. The sound came next. Laughter. Not quite a cat’s yowl, not quite human. A horrible fusion of both, as if a throat were tearing itself apart just to mimic mirth. Daniel backed up.
“Okay,”
He whispered, the word shaking.
“That’s enough proof. That’s……”
The flashlight flickered and died. In the pitch black, the laughter grew louder, surrounding him. He fumbled with the camera light, but his hands wouldn’t obey, clumsy with terror. He could hear them shifting above, claws scraping wood, tails brushing metal beams. When the light snapped back on, he wished it hadn’t. A smile hung in the rafters. Not attached to a face just a vast, crescent grin suspended in the dark. Its teeth gleamed wetly, far too many of them, sharper than any human mouth should hold.
“Lost?”
The voice asked. It was like velvet and broken glass all at once, sliding directly into his ears without moving the air. Daniel staggered back. The rows of seats behind him seemed to stretch further, twisting, rearranging, turning the theater into a labyrinth. He ran, but the aisles elongated like rubber, the doors sliding farther away. His breaths came ragged, recorded forever on the camera strapped to him. Above, the grin followed. It stretched wider and wider, until Daniel could see nothing else.
“Found you,”
It whispered. The last thing the camera caught was his scream. Long, tearing, cut short with a wet crunch. The police entered two days later after a neighbor reported strange noises from the building. They found the camera on the stage, still recording. The battery should have died hours ago, but the screen glowed with static.
When one officer replayed the footage, he frowned. The sound was warped, muffled by interference. Yet beneath the static, if you turned the volume high enough, you could hear it: A steady, throbbing purr. And laughter. So much laughter.
