Brothers of Brimstone: Axel

Prologue

In the eyes of the public, Victor Humphry may have only been an usher at the playhouse, but there was more to him and his job than meets the eye.

The attendees mistook him for a dull guy who simply ushered them to their seats, but they had no clue who he was after the last curtain call.

He was not handsome but charming by all accounts. His bedposts were full of notches left by actresses who began their careers in the theaters before becoming starlets in the silent films.

There were hushed whispers about talking films, but Victor was sure that it was a bunch of flim-flam. Even if talking films were possible, he doubted that they would hold the same mystique as the live-action performances that unfolded on the stage.

Tonight’s performance at The Profit’s Playhouse was a musical called The Chicken or The Hen. Even with a name that lacked dramatics, the house was packed. From the closed doors of the theater, Victor could hear the final song play, signaling the upcoming intermission.

He posed by the door, prepared to release theatergoers who had refrained from using the facilities out of fear that they would interrupt the performance.

The song scheduled for the half-act was an upbeat solo sung by Veronica Cramer, one of the theater’s up-and-coming stars. However, as Victor pressed his ear against the door, he noticed that the song was being sung offkey, and even the string music sounded funny. He assumed that the singer and the small orchestra were just having a bad night, and he was sure they would recover in the second act.

After the song ended, he waited precisely sixty seconds, just as he had been trained to do, before he threw open the doors and stepped aside, expecting a rush of theatergoers to rush into the lobby.

When Victor opened the doors, the only thing that emerged was a foul odor.

Victor covered his nose with a handkerchief, peeked inside the theater, and was stunned in disbelief.

The seats were still packed, but the healthy bodies that had entered the theater no longer occupied them. Instead, the chairs would fill with rotting corpses.

A sound drew Victor’s attention to the stage, where a skeleton, wearing the costume that Veronica Cramer had been wearing only moments before, began to collapse.