Huddling between the shelves, Claire felt hot, wet breath roll across the back of her neck causing shivers to dance up and down the length of her spine. In that instant she imagined a rabid dog, its yellowing teeth bared, a growl waiting to erupt from the back of its throat just before it lunged.

The thought caused the fine hairs on her arms to stand on end and goosebumps to prickle up across bare flesh.

Claire knew she should run. The toned muscles in her legs were wound tight, ready to launch her through the darkness to safety, but a paralyzing fear gripped her. It held her in place as though her very bones were made of heavy iron. Claire could no sooner move herself than she could move a mountain.

With growing dread, she became aware of a heavy weight falling to rest against her bare shoulder, and of the sharp, bony points of fingers digging into her skin. As the claw like protrusions squeezed, Claire couldn't help but wonder if this was how she was going to die.

Two hours earlier...

"Great show tonight guys!" Claire called as she hung the last discarded tutu onto the long rack of glittering, finely crafted costumes. The rest of the dressing room was a total wreck and would take several hours to straighten up, but cleaning was the furthest thing from Claire's mind.

She continued to move around, idly organizing and reorganizing the same stations while waiting anxiously for the remaining dancers to leave. Finally, the last of the lot slipped out into the cold, snowy night without a backwards glance.

Claire wasn't complaining.

Once she was certain she was alone, Claire pulled her bag down from one of the lockers and carried it with her onto the stage. The bag had seen better days, but Claire hadn't been able to part with it for sentimental reasons.

The auditorium, which had been filled to capacity just an hour before, now sat dark and empty which was just the way Claire liked it.

Sitting in the center of the stage, Claire pulled out her cell phone, a speaker, and a pair of well used ballet slippers, and set them down beside her. Raising her arms over her head and arching her back, she did a few stretches, easing the tension of running back and forth all evening from her muscles.

Once Claire was satisfied she had worked out the worst of the tightness, she reached for the slippers and pulled them on one by one. They were old, well worn and made of sturdy canvas. She took a moment to connect the speaker to the phone and to search the device for a song. In the end she settled on one of her favorites, Andalouse from Le Cid, and took to the stage.

There was something about dancing that Claire found utterly freeing. It didn't matter what sort of mood she was in, or what sort of day she'd had to endure, when the music began, the world in its entirety seemed to melt away.

Well, mostly.

Claire's mother had always said that she was a natural, but Claire knew that Nathalie Belmont's greatest disappointment was her daughter's inability to take the stage in front of an audience. Ever since she was young, Claire had wanted nothing more than to dance center stage, but no matter how loud the music was, or how bright the lights shining down, nothing could block out the feeling of the eyes that watched her expectantly, waiting for her to succeed -- or to fail.

Failure wasn't the part that worried her, the criticism and the harsh commentaries that followed were. Ballet was a cutthroat business and one false step, one failed leap, could end a budding career in an instant.

For Claire, dancing was like breathing and it wasn't worth the risk of having something she loved tainted in such a way.

She wasn't certain how long she had been dancing when she first heard the noise, but a thin sheen of sweat had formed across the surface of her skin. She paused just a moment before she hurried over to the speaker, turned off the music and stared out into the darkness.

Normally, she would have assumed it was one of the janitorial staff, but it was Christmas Eve and there would be no one else in the building until the day after Christmas. She waited a few more seconds to see if the unidentified sound repeated itself and when nothing happened, she assumed it was something echoing in from the street, resumed the music, and returned to center stage.

Claire had only made a few movements when she heard the sound again, this time louder and closer. Frowning, she switched the music off again and moved to the edge of the stage. The lights shining down on her made it nearly impossible to see out into the empty rows of seats, but she tried anyway, her eyes squinting.

"Is someone there?" she called out.

Perhaps one of the dancers had forgotten something and had returned to retrieve it. She waited a moment to see if she got some sort of response and when she was met with silence, she started to feel more annoyed by the interruption than scared that there might be an intruder.

"The theatre is closed," she called again, and added, just for good measure, "I'm going to call the police, so I suggest you leave before they get here."

Silence seemed to stretch on and just as Claire began to relax, a booming chime resonated throughout the auditorium causing her to shriek in surprise. Another followed, and then another, until twelve chimes had sounded out from the grandfather clock being used as a prop for the company's rendition of A Christmas Carol.

Claire stood there as the vibrating hum of the final chime faded away, and then she began to laugh. The sound was quiet in comparison to the chimes from the clock, but it helped to calm her fraying nerves.

Deciding it was probably best that she headed home, Claire gathered her things. She would worry about cleaning up the dressing room in the morning, all she wanted to do was get out of there.

Just as she started towards the back of the stage, the bright white and colored lights overhead went out, abruptly plunging her into darkness.

Real fear gripped her causing her heart to go still in her chest. She fumbled around in her bag in search of her phone, drawing it out once she'd found it. She used the light from the screen to illuminate the area around her in a dim whitish-blue glow. If it weren't for the fact that she could see the lights on in the lobby through the open door at the far end of the auditorium, Claire would have convinced herself it was just a power outage and nothing to be concerned about.

Since this was not the case, Claire was worried and distant memories of stories told by other dancers drifted to the forefront of her mind. Haunted, they claimed, by ghosts of failed and forgotten ballerinas, or disgruntled composers displeased with the company's rendition of his work. Claire has never believed any of it and, until tonight, has never experienced any sort of ghostly encounters.

Still, she wasn't about to take any unnecessary chances. Hurried steps carried her upstage and towards the crossover. She intended to exit stage right where she could return to the dressing room and get the rest of her things. As she neared the door, she heard the sound again, this time much louder and much closer. It was a skittering sound, like marbles bouncing across a glass table top, or the claws of a dog scrambling for traction against a polished wood floor.

Panic swept over her like a wave and she swung around with the light held out in front of her. She fully expected to see her coworkers there, to expose some childish prank. As the light swept over the stage behind her, however, Claire saw no one. As she turned back towards the dressing room door, she swore she saw a flicker of a shadow shrinking back, moving beyond the ring of light. The movement was accompanied by a sharp, high pitched hissing sound which had Claire, who was normally quite graceful in her movements, tripping over her own two feet in her haste to get away.

Dashing into the dressing room, Claire slammed the door closed behind her and struggled to catch her breath. Minutes slipped by and the silence lingered for a long while. Claire began to question what she had seen and heard.

Had she just imagined it?

A heavy thump against the door suggested otherwise and Claire stumbled backwards in the darkness. Her foot got tangled in an unseen costume left abandoned on the floor, no doubt by one of the dancers, and she fell, crying out in both pain and anger.

The impact was jarring and had caused the phone, her only source of light, to pop free of her hand and clatter across the floor. She searched desperately for it as another loud bang reverberated through the dressing room. Finally, she found it, unfortunately it hadn't survived the impact with the floor. She could feel the cracks and splinters of glass as she stabbed at the device with her finger, trying to bring life back to the dark screen.

The sound of the door crashing open had Claire on her feet. She started in the direction of the door that would lead out to the street, but stopped short before reaching it. To get out that way meant going back towards the door through which some unknown force was now creeping.

Dropping the broken phone back to the floor, Claire turned and ran towards the back of the dressing room. There was another way out but it meant going through the prop room which would be hard to navigate in the dark. Realizing she didn't have much of a choice, Claire tried to move as quickly as she could, feeling around in the darkness until she found the wall. Hurrying along, she had to choke back frustrated yelps as time and time again she banged her knees or stubbed her toes against heavy tables and storage chests.

Whatever was pursuing her had much less trouble and sounded as though it was simply knocking things out of its path. Claire could hear clothes racks crashing down and tables banging into walls behind her, the space in-between filled with that bone chilling skittering sound.

As she neared the back of the prop room, Claire quickly found herself lost in a maze of tall wooden shelves burdened with a wide variety of items used by both the ballet company and the acting troupe that shared the theatre. The sounds of pursuit had ceased the moment she entered the narrow space between the shelves which only served to make her that much more paranoid. She knew without a doubt that something else was there, why then had it stopped?

Hands extended in front of her, Claire felt her way down the aisle, only to stop short when she realized she had reached a dead end. It wasn't unusual, there were many narrow aisles that ended similarly. Claire had often wondered if whoever had organized this room had done it this way as a joke. Normally she didn't mind, she would just go back and duck down another aisle. In that instance, however, it felt as though the entire world was crashing down on her.

Turning in defeat, Claire pressed her back to the wall and slid down to sit on the cold, worn wooden floor. Shelves rose up on either side of her, the spaces between stored items opening up into impenetrable black. For a long while the only sound to fill the darkness were her own short, uneven breaths as she attempted to calm herself down. Perhaps whatever it was had gone off somewhere else, she hadn't heard any movement to suggest it was still there.

Closing her eyes, she tried her best to calm her nerves. She counted backwards from ten as her mother had always suggested whenever Claire had made an attempt to go on stage, before she had given up on it entirely. It always seemed to work in the moment, giving her hope that this time would be different, but the calm it brought had always shattered the moment she faced the audience.

The skittering sound was faint at first, so faint that Claire almost missed it. As it grew louder, however, Claire's eyes fluttered open.

It was back.