Act I. Someone Else’s Stage

Veronica tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear and leaned towards the mirror to check that her eyeliner hadn’t smudged. The cramped dressing room smelled of hairspray, makeup, warm electronics and damp clothes. A jumble of brushes, lipsticks and bracelets lay scattered across the table beside a crumpled setlist she already knew by heart. Instrument cases and other people’s bags were piled against the wall, and a costume splattered with fake blood hung from the only unoccupied chair. Beyond the thin door, drums rumbled, a guitar answered, and a low chord reverberated through the old walls.

The organisers had certainly chosen a fitting venue for Halloween. The building had once been a church, and even after its conversion into a concert hall, its former purpose remained unmistakable: tall, pointed windows, dark stone walls, massive doors and traces of carved ornament around the stage, all bearing witness to a time when very different voices had echoed beneath its roof. The organisers had made the most of the architecture, hanging black fabric from the walls, setting out pumpkins with glowing eyes, winding artificial cobwebs around the pillars and lining the staircases with electric candles. The effect was atmospheric enough, though Veronica suspected the place would have looked grim even without the decorations.

Out of habit, she called the holiday by its older name: Samhain. She was interested in ancient rites more as a lyricist than as someone seriously expecting to encounter the supernatural. She liked the idea of a night when the boundaries between worlds grew thin and the darkness beyond the windows concealed something more than empty streets. There was plenty of inspiration in that—and no need to believe there was anything real behind it.

She straightened, gave herself a careful once-over and nodded in satisfaction. Black dress, heavy boots, a few silver rings and a thin chain at her throat. The dark makeup brought out her eyes, and deep wine-red lipstick completed the look. Veronica had no intention of becoming a motionless prop just to suit the theme of the evening. On stage, she would sing, move, smile at the audience and give the performance everything the music demanded. A corpse-white face and fake stitches on her cheeks would hardly help.

She picked up a bottle of water and took a few sips, listening to the muffled sounds beyond the wall. She had two performances that night. First, she would stand in for her sick friend Annette as the lead vocalist of Lanewin. Then, after several other bands had played, SilverCast would take the stage closer to midnight. It was her own band’s set that made her particularly nervous. They had recently finished their new album and were about to perform it in full for an audience for the first time. Months of rehearsals, arguments, reworked arrangements and sleepless nights were finally going to come together—not through studio headphones, but in front of a live crowd.

She loved the album’s opening track more than any of the others. “Samhain Is Coming” established the mood for the entire record: rain sweeping across heather-covered hills, a road vanishing into mist, a lone lantern and a voice calling someone home. There was something unusually personal about the song, even by her standards. Some of its lines seemed to have existed long before she had sat down to write them; her only task had been to get them onto paper before they faded. Veronica saw nothing mystical in that. She had long since realised that her best ideas came to her in dreams, when the mind stopped policing every word and allowed imagination to mingle freely with stray impressions, half-remembered books and scraps of emotion.

Sometimes she woke from those dreams with the uncanny feeling that she had just lived someone else’s life. Unfamiliar streets, unfamiliar clothes, a stranger’s touch, the aching grief of parting from someone she had never met—all of it lingered after she opened her eyes. She could even recall the smells and sounds: damp earth, wind moving through tall grass, distant footsteps on a stone road. Impressions like these often became songs, and afterwards she might spend weeks searching for music that could capture the mood of a dream that ordinary words could never quite explain.

That was how “Samhain Is Coming” had begun. Veronica couldn’t remember which dream had inspired it; perhaps several had gradually merged into a single story. She remembered the hills, the mist and a lantern glimmering in the distance, along with the feeling of waiting—as though someone had promised to return but had been delayed so long that time itself had changed. The lyrics spoke of Jack and Jill, of a meeting across an impenetrable night, and of a road that could never be travelled twice. She liked the almost fairy-tale simplicity of those names and the faint unease beneath them. They suited the melody. That was all that mattered.

Or so she had thought.

The previous night, she had dreamed of the road over the heather hills again. The wind had stung her face, rain had trickled down inside her collar, and a lantern had burned at a crossroads ahead. The man holding it stood motionless, as though he were waiting for her and no one else. She couldn’t see his face, but his voice was familiar—so familiar that hearing it had hurt. He had spoken a single name: Jill. Veronica had woken before dawn.

Naturally, her first thought had been of the song. Jack and Jill, the lantern, the rain, the road: all of it was already woven into the lyrics, the musical transitions and the band’s discussions about the album’s atmosphere. It was hardly surprising that the names had found their way into her dreams. As for the voice sounding so real, that proved nothing. Memory could assemble convincing experiences from the most unlikely scraps.

Veronica was willing to accept that the world might contain things people couldn’t yet explain. She wrote enough mystical lyrics not to assume that her own understanding of reality was the only possible one. But finding mysteries in books and songs was one thing; finding them in her own life was quite another. Connecting herself to a name from her own lyrics would be absurd.

She set the bottle aside, hummed a few notes to check her voice and mentally ran through Lanewin’s setlist. Performing someone else’s material demanded concentration even when every song was familiar. She had to sing without a hitch while respecting the style Annette’s audience expected. Veronica could bring her own phrasing to the performance, but she had no intention of turning her friend’s songs into a showcase for her own voice. She had been trusted with the job, and she meant to do it properly.