Tracked by Terror

by Brad Strickland

  Rummaging around on the cluttered tabletop, he found cakes of theatrical makeup, sponges, bottles of lotions and jars of creams, and a few stubby pencils—eyebrow pencils, he supposed. He took one of these, and he took one of those ever-burning candles from a wall sconce outside the dressing room.

  In its pale yellow light, he could see a bulletin board hung over with hundreds of pieces of paper. Inspecting them, Jarvey found lists of actors and parts for hundreds of plays. He didn’t recognize a single title: The Roman’s Revenge; Hearts in Conflict; Rollo’s Seaside Holiday; The Sorrowful History of King Harold; The Play of Ghosts and Shadows; others by the dozen. Some of the papers looked fresh and crisp, but many others had curled and yellowed with age.

  Jarvey pulled four or five of the playbills down from the board, choosing ones that had been concealed by layers of later ones. The backs of the lists were blank. He had a pencil, and now he had paper. Maybe he could leave notes for Betsy. Maybe she would find them and then find Jarvey again.

  After all, if she had stumbled into a doorway opening off that maddening corridor, she just might wind up here. Come to that, Jarvey thought, she might even have found her way out of this odd theater, if it had a way out.

  He shivered, remembering how the crowd of people had abruptly, impossibly, evaporated into thin air. How the doll-creature had shattered and yet had tried to drag itself after him with its crumbling arms, crawling over its own fallen jaw.

  Jarvey’s imagination was racing again. What if the theater wasn’t real at all? What if the people were spirits, what if...

  What if it was all just a theater of ghosts and shadows?

  4

  Merely Players

  Hours of searching led Jarvey to only one discovery. He opened a door backstage and found himself in the same corridor he and Betsy had started in. There was the door to the loo, just opposite. If Betsy had stumbled onto this doorway, she had stepped right into the shadows behind the stage. And what had happened to her?

  Jarvey knew she was resourceful, quick and smart. He told himself she could get out of any trouble, that she could handle danger. He couldn’t help smiling when he remembered how, back in Lunnon, Betsy was such an expert thief that she could steal food right off the table without anyone’s noticing. She’d be all right on her own. She didn’t really need him to help her survive. Still, he needed her, and he didn’t know what he would do if he couldn’t find her again.

  The Grimoire knew. It whispered to him to open the book, to get out of here, to leave her behind.

  “No,” he said to himself, not to the Grimoire. That was one thing he couldn’t do. But he was tired. He found a place to hide, crept into it, and curled up to grab what sleep he could.

  A stranger haunted his dreams, a man with thin arms and a bloated face, an evil face. In all the dreams, Jarvey hid from the man, and the stranger searched for him, swiveling his head, his eyes glaring. The dreams took place nowhere that Jarvey could identify, just shadowy landscapes. And in each dream, the evil man seemed to come a little closer. In the last, Jarvey seemed to be standing behind a tall chain-link fence, like the one on the baseball field where his team played. He heard the links jangling, and looked off into the distance to see the dark-suited man clinging to the opposite side of the fence, creeping along like a human spider, his white face turning from side to side as he looked for Jarvey.

  Jarvey woke with a gasp and then realized it was just another nightmare. He took a few deep breaths, turned on his side, and hung in that warm, drowsy place between sleep and awareness, wondering who the man in those disturbing dreams could be. He had the strangest feeling that he should have recognized the face, yet—

  A voice from outside his hiding place broke into his thoughts: “Now remember, all, the key with comedy is to keep it moving fast and believe in your parts. You must never show that you think the play is funny. Leave that to the audience.”

  Two younger voices said in chorus, “Yes, Father.”

  Jarvey crawled out from where he had dozed, beneath a row of seats halfway back from the stage, and risked a peek. The Roman street had vanished, and in its place was a set that looked like the deck of a sailing ship. At this distance the illusion struck Jarvey as uncannily real: The masts reared up, the ropes and shrouds ran up to the yardarms, and the sails billowed and fluttered in what seemed like a salty ocean breeze.

  More than a dozen people stood on the deck. The leader seemed to be a tall, strongly built man in the uniform of a sea captain. He was talking to the others: a woman who looked as if she were about the man’s age, forty or so, a young man of about eighteen and a girl who might have been a year or so younger, and a semicircle of men and women who seemed strangely quiet and motionless, like a row of department-store dummies. The man said, “Very well. Let us begin with the first scene of Act Two. Floriel and Yolanda have taken passage upon my ship, not realizing that I am the father of Isidor. Isidor has disguised his sweetheart Mariane as a young sailor, and no one knows this except for the countess. Places, please.”

  The semicircle of immobile actors came to life then, moving across the stage, some going into the wings, others taking their places at the ship’s wheel or on the deck. A couple climbed up into the rigging. Peering through the crack between two seats, Jarvey watched the rehearsal with a growing sense of puzzlement. The actors seemed to anticipate laughter from their audience because they often paused in their lines or in their actions, but as far as Jarvey was concerned, nothing was terribly funny.

  Finally, the captain said, “And then curtain, the interval, and we’re into Act Three. Very good. It is time for lunch, and after lunch we shall finish Acts Three and Four. Thank you, all.” He put his arm around the waist of the woman who had played the part of the countess. “A grand performance, as usual, my dear,” he said.

  She giggled. “And you were wonderful as well. Your gifts truly shine, Mr. Midion.”

  Jarvey gasped at the name and felt like drawing his head back, like a turtle retreating into its shell. If the actor was a Midion, then this strange theater must be his creation, from his part of the book. As the cast all trooped offstage, Jarvey slipped out of his hiding place and hurried down to the front. The last thing he wanted was to follow the actors, but that was exactly what he had to do.

  He dropped into the orchestra pit as quietly as he could manage, then climbed the metal ladder onto the stage. The actors had gone off in the direction of the dressing rooms. He stepped into the dark wings of the theater and heard a loud laugh coming from the last dressing room, the one down on the far end of the row.

  Jarvey ducked sideways through another open doorway just in time. The young man who had played the role of Floriel came out of and walked away from the last dressing room and disappeared down a hallway. Jarvey sighed in relief at not having been noticed.

  And then he turned around and almost yelped in surprise. Six women sat rigidly in six chairs at the makeup table, all of them staring silently at their reflections. “I’m sorry,” Jarvey said in a hoarse voice. “I didn’t know—” he broke off. Not one of the actresses had turned to look at him, had even seemed to notice him. The one nearest him had played the role of Yolanda. She sat like a statue, as did the others. Jarvey couldn’t even see them breathe.

  He cautiously approached Yolanda. She didn’t stir, didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even turn toward him when he stood at her shoulder. “Hello?” he said. He waved his hand in front of her face. She did not even blink. Jarvey gulped and thought back to the rehearsal, remembering one of the many unfunny jokes. He gave the actress her cue: “Oh, Yolanda! Your father is a hard man!”

  Immediately her dead face came to life in a simpering smile, and in exactly the same tone she had used earlier onstage, she said, “No wonder, for in his youth he was a stone mason.” That said, she froze again, placidly staring at her own face in the mirror.

  Close up, Jarvey could see there was something not right about her. Her skin was too smooth, too pink at the c
heeks. She looked more like a life-sized doll than a person. She was like a newer version of the terrible crumbling, creeping thing that he had mistaken for Betsy. “Are you some kind of robot?” Jarvey asked.

  The actress did not answer.

  Jarvey backed away. He checked to make sure the coast was clear and slipped into the next dressing room, where half a dozen men sat staring into their own mirror. Jarvey could recognize them from the rehearsal. One was young Isidor, the sweetheart of Mariane. Another was old Bellibone, Yolanda’s father. They were just as lifeless as Yolanda had been.

  But in the last dressing room, matters were different. Jarvey didn’t dare get close enough to peek in, but the door stood ajar and he could hear voices.

  “Excellent sandwiches, Mrs. Midion.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Midion.”

  “I wish Augustus would come with the tea!”

  “Patience, my dove. Your brother will be back soon.”

  “He’s always such a slowpoke, Father. I don’t see why we can’t have a nice little place for making tea right here in our dressing room.”

  “Honoria, you know quite well that a home is a home,” the woman who had played the countess said in a firm voice, “and the theater is the theater. We do not perform in our living room, and so we shall not cook in our dressing room.”

  Honoria grumbled that tea wasn’t really cooking, but Jarvey heard only a little of her complaint, because he had retreated into the men’s dressing room, where he could peek out from reasonably good concealment, and before long he saw the younger man returning, carrying a teapot and a basket. “Father,” he said as he entered the last dressing room, “I have the strangest feeling that someone has been in our kitchen.”

  The older man’s voice broke into a laugh. “Hardly any chance of that, Augustus! Now, boy, you can get a much bigger laugh on your exit line—yes, pour the tea, do.”

  Jarvey bit his lip to keep himself from laughing in relief. He could guess who had been in their kitchen, all right. Someone who was an expert at snitching food right out from under the noses of its proper owner.

  It had to be Betsy.

  5

  Master of the World

  Betsy slipped out of the cupboard where she had folded herself up into an astonishingly small space, getting her breath back again. The boy had almost caught her.

  She had been munching a slice of bread spread with a little honey, and she finished her sticky meal as she made her way out of the apartment. For about the hundredth time she wondered how she was going to find Jarvey again. Ever since she had discovered the secret doorway in the corridor wall, she had been moving through this endless building. Strange, she had been sure that Jarvey was right behind her at first. She had heard his footsteps following her when she first came out into the darkness that filled the backstage of a huge theater, but when she turned, he wasn’t there at all. Worse, she’d heard people approaching, and before she’d found her bearings, she’d had to scuttle away, hiding from them. Now she had no idea of where the doorway back to the marble corridor was, just that it must be one of the dozens in the backstage part of the theater.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she told herself, wiping her sticky fingers on the hem of her dress. “Jarvey will have to wind up in the theater sooner or later.”

  Because that’s all there was.

  Betsy was convinced of it. She had explored for hours, and so far as she could tell, this whole world consisted of the apartment kept by the actors of the Midion family, their small backyard garden (not that it was really so small to someone from crowded Lunnon), and all the rest of it was taken up in long corridors surrounding that enormous auditorium.

  Once she’d had a look around, Betsy’s sense of direction was unerring. From the apartment she turned away from the direction leading to the stage and followed a short hallway down to the garden door. It had no lock. In fact, there were none on any of the doors here. She supposed that the father of the acting family, or maybe the mother, was the one who had created this world, and he or she would be sure that no enemies were in it. No enemies, no need for locks. Not like Lunnon, she thought, where no one quite trusted anyone else.

  She opened the door and slipped into the garden, glad for a sight of the sun. She stood on what seemed to be the floor of a kind of rectangular crater. Except for the one door, the marble walls rose up from the soil unbroken on all sides. Terrace on terrace reared all around, each one a little more set back than the one it rested on.

  The garden was all the greenery in this whole world, as far as she could tell. It might have stretched a mile or a mile and a half on a side. A little stream meandered through it, rising from a mound of stone in one corner and running to a pool in the opposite corner. One whole section grew thick with pear and apple trees, and other areas had been planted with grains, vegetables, and some plants Betsy could not recognize.

  She had hidden in the orchard earlier that day and watched the four members of the Midion family come out to pick vegetables and to rehearse songs. At first she had wondered how this garden, big as it was, could possibly support a whole population, but gradually she had come to realize that these four were the whole population. The other actors and actresses, the audiences, were all illusions, conjured up by the Midion magic. None of them were real. The actors were some kind of walking, talking dolls, and the audience members were more like spirits or ghosts.

  And you don’t need to eat or drink if you’re only a doll or a ghost.

  But Betsy was neither, so she ate some fruit, then slipped back through the only door leading out of the garden. She made her way through the dim hallways until she heard the actors rehearsing their parts out on stage. She peeked inside the first dressing room, found it empty, and scavenged a few remnants from the actors’ meal. Wherever Jarvey was, she hoped he was not starving.

  About forty feet away, Jarvey crouched in the women’s dressing room. Only one of the actresses remained there, apparently waiting for some cue. Jarvey tried talking to her and found that she, like the other woman, would do two things: recite her lines if given the right lead-in line and talk about the theater. Now, in an urgent whisper, he asked, “But just what is this theater?”

  The actress-doll turned her glassy eyes toward him. Prettily, she chirped, “The world is a theater. The theater is a world!” And she giggled, but then looked distressed until Jarvey softly clapped his hands.

  He had figured out that applause was the key. The strange actors and actresses would speak, in their fashion, as long as you rewarded them by clapping. They seemed to be hungry for that sign of approval. The doll-creature daintily inclined her head in a symbolic bow.

  “Listen, have you seen a girl?” he asked.

  The actress-doll did not answer. “Her name is Betsy,” he added urgently. “She has really red hair, a lot redder than mine—”

  He broke off as another actress-doll, an older woman, came into the room and took her place at the end of the long makeup table. She was murmuring something softly, echoing what Jarvey had just said: “Redder than mine. Give me wine,” she said in a low, despairing voice, “wine as red as a young woman’s lips, and redder still than mine. Let me drink of it, as I drink of sorrow.” A tear rolled down her right cheek.

  Jarvey resignedly clapped for her, and she thanked him with a little smile and a slight bob of her chin. He muttered, “Well, thanks for nothing, anyway.”

  He edged past her and peeked out, but no one stood in the wings. Onstage the actors, both the real ones and the doll-things, were singing heartily, a song with a lot of “Yo-ho’s” in it and a lot of high soprano trills from the ladies.

  Maybe if he went the other way, went down the hallway where the boy had gone to fetch the tea—

  Jarvey opened the door and whooped in alarm, and a hand clapped over his mouth at once. Betsy grabbed his wrist and hauled him down a long corridor. “Come on!” she growled. “You’ll have them all on us, cully!”

  They pounded out a door and into
dazzling sunlight.

  Jarvey blinked, not daring to believe his eyes. “You found the way out!”

  “Don’t wave the flag yet. Come on, duck down low and get into the wheat—no, you goose, the wheat, the tall grassy stuff! Lower!”

  She put a hand on his back and forced him to lie on his stomach, while she hugged the ground next to him. A moment later, the door they had come through opened again, and the older man and the boy stepped out. “Nothing,” the man said. “Augustus, what is the matter with you? You know that an actor should never break character—”

  “I heard someone call out,” Augustus doggedly insisted. “I know I did, Father.”

  The man looked at his son for a long time, shaking his head.

  Jarvey’s breathing was painful, because inside his shirt the Grimoire pressed hard against his chest, and he was trying to push himself right down into the dirt. If the two looked the right way, they’d spot him for sure, he thought, wishing he had chosen a spot with better cover. Betsy was more well hidden than he, with tall clumps of wheat growing all around her. Jarvey lay more or less between rows.

  However, neither of the two figures glanced his way. The older actor sighed and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps you did hear something at that. Katrina Three has been behaving oddly these past few months, missing cues, even ad-libbing laughter now and again. Perhaps it’s time I retired her to become an usher and created a replacement.”

  “I don’t think it was her.”

  The older man clapped the younger one on the shoulder in a fatherly gesture. “She, my boy. The proper way of saying it is ‘I don’t think it was she.’ ”

  Jarvey could see Augustus’s expression, and from it he judged that Augustus didn’t much care what the proper way of saying it was. He looked angry and a little dangerous, as if he wanted to hit something, anything.