by Fritz Leiber
VI
I will vault credit
and affect high pleasures
Beyond death.
—Ferdinand
I sat down where Martin had been, first pushing the screen far enough to the side for me to see the length of the dressing room and notice anyone coming through the door and any blurs moving behind the thin white curtain shutting off the boys’ two-thirds.
I’d been going to think. But instead I just sat there, experiencing my body and the room around it, steadying myself or maybe readying myself. I couldn’t tell which, but it was nothing to think about, only to feel. My heartbeat became a very faint, slow, solid throb. My spine straightened.
No one came in or went out. Distantly I heard Macbeth and the witches and the apparitions talk.
Once I looked at the New York Screen, but all the stuff there had grown stale. No protection, no nothing.
I reached down to my suitcase and from where I’d been going to get a miltown I took a dexedrine and popped it in my mouth. Then I started out, beginning to shake.
When I got to the end of the curtain I went around it to Sid’s dressing table and asked Shakespeare, “Am I doing the right thing, Pop?” But he didn’t answer me out of his portrait. He just looked sneaky-innocent like he knew a lot but wouldn’t tell, and I found myself think of a little silver-framed photo Sid had used to keep there too of a cocky German-looking youth actor with “Erich” autographed across it in white ink. At least I supposed he was an actor. He looked a little like Erich von Stroheim, but nicer yet somehow nastier too. The photo had used to upset me, I don’t know why. Sid must have noticed it, for one day it was gone.
I thought of the tiny black-and-silver spider crawling across the remembered silver frame, and for some reason it gave me the cold creeps.
Well, this wasn’t doing me any good, just making me feel dismal again, so I quick went out. In the door I had to slip around the actors coming back from the Cauldron Scene and the big bolt nicked my hip.
Outside Maud was peeling off her Third Witch stuff to reveal Lady Macduff beneath. She twitched me a grin.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Okay, I guess,” she shrugged. “What an audience! Noisy as highschool kids.”
“How come Sid didn’t have a boy do your part?” I asked.
“He goofed, I guess. But I’ve battened down my bosoms and playing Mrs. Macduff as a boy.”
“How does a girl do that in a dress?” I asked.
“She sits stiff and thinks pants,” she said, handing me her witch robe. “’Scuse me now. I got to find my children and go get murdered.”
I’d moved a few steps nearer the stage when I felt the gentlest tug at my hip. I looked down and saw that a taut black thread from the bottom of my sweater connected me with the dressing room. It must have snagged on the big bolt and unraveled. I moved my body an inch or so, tugging it delicately to see what it felt like and I got the answers: Theseus’s clew, a spider’s line, an umbilicus.
I reached down close to my side and snapped it with my fingernails. The black thread leaped away. But the dressing room door didn’t vanish, or the wings change, or the world end, and I didn’t fall down.
After that I just stood there for quite a while, feeling my new freedom and steadiness, letting my body get used to it. I didn’t do any thinking. I hardly bothered to study anything around me, though I did notice that there were more bushes and trees than set pieces, and that the flickery lightning was simply torches and that Queen Elizabeth was in (or back in) the audience. Sometimes letting your body get used to something is all you should do, or maybe can do.
And I did smell horse dung.
When the Lady Macduff Scene was over the Chicken Scene well begun, I went back to the dressing room. Actors call it the Chicken Scene because Macduff weeps in it about “all my pretty chickens and their dam,” meaning his kids and wife, being murdered “at one fell swoop” on orders of that chickenyard-raiding “hell-kite” Macbeth.
Inside the dressing room I steered down the boys’ side. Doc was putting on an improbable-looking dark makeup for Macbeth’s last faithful servant Seyton. He didn’t seem as boozy-woozy as usual for Fourth Act, but just the same I stopped to help him get into a chain-mail shirt made of thick cord woven and silvered.
In the third chair beyond, Sid was sitting back with his corset loosened and critically surveying Martin, who’d now changed to a white wool nightgown that clung and draped beautifully, but not particularly enticingly, on him and his folded towel, which had slipped a bit.
From beside Sid’s mirror, Shakespeare smiled out of his portrait at them like an intelligent big-headed bug.
Martin stood tall, spread his arms rather like a high priest, and intoned, “Amici! Romani! Populares!”
I nudged Doc. “What goes on now?” I whispered.
He turned a bleary eye on them. “I think they are rehearsing Julius Caesar in Latin.” He shrugged. “It begins the oration of Antony.”
“But why?” I asked. Sid does like to put every moment to use when the performance-fire is in people, but this project seemed pretty far afield—hyper-pedantic. Yet at the same time I felt my scalp shivering as if my mind were jumping with speculations just below the surface.
Doc shook his head and shrugged again.
Sid shoved a palm at Martin and roared softly, “’Sdeath, boy, thou’rt not playing a Roman statua but a Roman! Loosen your knees and try again.”
Then he saw me. Signing Martin to stop, he called, “Come hither, sweetling.” I obeyed quickly. He gave me a fiendish grin and said, “Thou’st heard our proposal from Martin. What sayest thou, wench?”
This time the shiver was in my back. It felt good. I realized I was grinning back at him, and I knew what I’d been getting ready for the last twenty minutes.
“I’m on,” I said. “Count me in the company.”
Sid jumped up and grabbed me by the shoulders and hair and bussed me on both cheeks. It was a little like being bombed.
“Prodigious!” he cried. “Thou’lt play the Gentlewoman in the Sleepwalking Scene tonight. Martin, her costume! Now sweet wench, mark me well.” His voice grew grave and old. “When was it she last walked?”
The new courage went out of me like water down a chute. “But Siddy, I can’t start tonight,” I protested, half pleading, half outraged.
“Tonight or never! ’Tis an emergency—we’re short-handed.” Again his voice changed. “When was it last she walked?”
“But Siddy, I don’t know the part.”
“You must. You’ve heard the play twenty times this year past. When was it she last walked?”
Martin was back and yanking down a blonde wig on my head and shoving my arms into a light gray robe.
“I’ve never studied the lines,” I squeaked at Sidney.
“Liar! I’ve watched your lips move a dozen nights when you watched the scene from the wings. Close your eyes, girl! Martin, unhand her. Close your eyes, girl, empty your mind, and listen, listen only. When was it she last walked?”
In the blackness I heard myself replying to that cue, first in a whisper, then more loudly, then full-throated but grave, “Since his majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth—”
“Bravissimo!” Siddy cried and bombed me again. Martin hugged his arm around my shoulders too, then quickly stooped to start hooking up my robe from the bottom.
“But that’s only the first lines, Siddy,” I protested.
“They’re enough!”
“But Siddy, what if I blow up?” I asked.
“Keep your mind empty. You won’t. Further, I’ll be at your side, doubling the Doctor, to prompt you if you pause.”
That ought to take care of two of me, I thought. Then something else struck me. “But Siddy,” I quavered, “how do I play the Gentlewoman as a boy?”
“Boy?” he demanded wonderingly. “Play her without falling dow
n flat on your face and I’ll be past measure happy!” And he smacked me hard on the fanny.
Martin’s fingers were darting at the next to the last hook. I stopped him and shoved my hand down the neck of my sweater and got hold of the subway token and the chain it was on and yanked. It burned my neck but the gold links parted. I started to throw it across the room, but instead I smiled at Siddy and dropped it in his palm.
“The Sleepwalking Scene!” Maud hissed insistently to us from the door.
VII
I know death hath
ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits,
and ’tis found
They go on such strange
geometrical hinges,
You may open them both
ways.
—The Duchess
There is this about an actor on stage: he can see the audience but he can’t look at them, unless he’s a narrator or some sort of comic. I wasn’t the first (Grendel groks!) and only scared to death of becoming the second as Siddy walked me out of the wings onto the stage, over the groundcloth that felt so much like ground, with a sort of interweaving policeman-grip on my left arm.
Sid was in a dark gray robe looking like some dismal kind of monk, his head so hooded for the Doctor that you couldn’t see his face at all.
My skull was pulse-buzzing. My throat was squeezed dry. My heart was pounding. Below that my body was empty, squirmy, electricity-stung, yet with the feeling of wearing ice cold iron pants.
I heard as if from two million miles, “When was it she last walked?” and then an iron bell somewhere tolling the reply—I guess it had to be my voice coming up through my body from my iron pants: “Since his majesty went into the field—” and so on, until Martin had come on stage, stary-eyed, a white scarf tossed over the back of his long black wig and a flaring candle two inches thick gripped in his right hand and dripping wax on his wrist, and started to do Lady Mack’s sleepwalking half-hinted confessions of the murders of Duncan and Banquo and Lady Macduff.
So here is what I saw then without looking, like a vivid scene that floats out in front of your mind in a reverie, hovering against a background of dark blur, and sort of flashes on and off as you think, or in my case act. All the time, remember, with Sid’s hand hard on my wrist and me now and then tolling Shakespearean language out of some lightless storehouse of memory I’d never known was there to belong to me.
There was a medium-size glade in a forest. Through the half-naked black branches shone a dark cold sky, like ashes of silver, early evening.
The glade had two horns, as it were, narrowing back to either side and going off through the forest. A chilly breeze was blowing out of them, almost enough to put out the candle. Its flame rippled.
Rather far back in the horn to my left, but not very far, were clumped two dozen or so men in dark cloaks they huddled around themselves. They wore brimmed tallish hats and pale stuff showing at their necks. Somehow I assumed that these men must be the “rude fellows from the City” I remembered Beau mentioning a million or so years ago. Although I couldn’t see them very well, and didn’t spend much time on them, there was one of them who had his hat off or excitedly pushed way back, showing a big pale forehead. Although that was all the conscious impression I had of his face, he seemed frighteningly familiar.
In the horn to my right, which was wider, were lined up about a dozen horses, with grooms holding tight every two of them, but throwing their heads back now and then as they strained against the reins, and stamping their front hooves restlessly. Oh, they frightened me, I tell you, that line of two-foot-long glossy-haired faces, writhing back their upper lips from teeth wide as piano keys, every horse of them looking as wild-eyed and evil as Fuseli’s steed sticking its head through the drapes in his picture “The Nightmare.”
To the center the trees came close to the stage. Just in front of them was Queen Elizabeth sitting on the chair on the spread carpet, just as I’d seen her out there before; only now I could see that the braziers were glowing and redly high-lighting her pale cheeks and dark red hair and the silver in her dress and cloak. She was looking at Martin—Lady Macy—most intently, her mouth grimaced tight, twisting her fingers together.
Standing rather close around her were a half dozen men with fancier hats and ruffs and wide-flaring riding gauntlets.
Then, through the trees and tall leafless bushes just behind Elizabeth, I saw an identical Elizabeth-face floating, only this one was smiling a demonic smile. The eyes were open very wide. Now and then the pupils darted rapid glances from side to side.
There was a sharp pain in my left wrist and Sid whisper-snarling at me, “Accustomed action!” out of the corner of his shadowed mouth.
I tolled on obediently, “It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.”
Martin had set down the candle, which still flared and guttered, on a little high table so firm its thin legs must have been stabbed into the ground. And he was rubbing his hands together slowly, continually, tormentedly, trying to get rid of Duncan’s blood which Mrs. Mack knows in her sleep is still there. And all the while as he did it, the agitation of the seated Elizabeth grew, the eyes flicking from side to side, hands writhing.
He got to the lines, “Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”
As he wrung out those soft, tortured sighs, Elizabeth stood up from her chair and took a step forward. The courtiers moved toward her quickly, but not touching her, and she said loudly, “’Tis the blood of Mary Stuart whereof she speaks—the pails of blood that will gush from her chopped neck. Oh, I cannot endure it!” And as she said that last, she suddenly turned about and strode back toward the trees, kicking out her ash-colored skirt. One of the courtiers turned with her and stooped toward her closely, whispering something. But although she paused a moment, all she said was, “Nay, Eyes, stop not the play, but follow me not! Nay, I say leave me, Leicester!” And she walked into the trees, he looking after her.
Then Sid was kicking my ankle and I was reciting something and Martin was taking up his candle again without looking at it saying with a drugged agitation, “To bed; to bed; there’s knocking at the gate.”
Elizabeth came walking out of the trees again, her head bowed. She couldn’t have been in them ten seconds. Leicester hurried toward her, hand anxiously outstretched.
Martin moved offstage, torturedly yet softly wailing, “What’s done cannot be undone.”
Just then Elizabeth flicked aside Leicester’s hand with playful contempt and looked up and she was smiling the devil-smile. A horse whinnied like a trumpeted snicker.
As Sid and I started our last few lines together I intoned mechanically, letting words free-fall from my mind to my tongue. All this time I had been answering Lady Mack in my thoughts, That’s what you think, sister.
VIII
God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been.
It is more impossible than rising the dead.
—Summa Theologica
The moment I was out of sight of the audience I broke away from Sid and ran to the dressing room. I flopped down on the first chair I saw, my head and arms trailed over its back, and I almost passed out. It wasn’t a mind-wavery fit. Just normal faint.
I couldn’t have been there long—well, not very long, though the battle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily from the stage—when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin’s usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stage-armor and carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martin came after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast that buttons flew. I thought automatically, I’ll have to sew those.
They laid her down on three chairs set side by side and hurried out. Unpinning the folded towel, which had fallen around his waist, Martin walked over and looked down at her. He yanked
off his wig by a braid and tossed it at me.
I let it hit me and fall on the floor. I was looking at that white queenly face, eyes open and staring sightless at the ceiling, mouth open a little too with a thread of foam trailing from the corner, and at that ice-cream-cone bodice that never stirred. The blue fly came buzzing over my head and circled down toward her face.
“Martin,” I said with difficulty, “I don’t think I’m going to like what we’re doing.”
He turned on me, his short hair elfed, his fists planted high on his hips at the edge of his black tights, which now were all his clothes.
“You knew!” he said impatiently. “You knew you were signing up for more than acting when you said, ‘Count me in the company.’”
Like a legged sapphire the blue fly walked across her upper lip and stopped by the thread of foam.
“But Martin…changing the past…dipping back and killing the real queen…replacing her with a double—”
His dark brows shot up. “The real—You think this is the real Queen Elizabeth?” He grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the nearest table, gushed some on a towel stained with grease-paint and, holding the dead head by its red hair (no, wig—the real one wore a wig too) scrubbed the forehead.
The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a faint tattoo in the form of an “S” styled like a yin-yang symbol left a little open.
“Snake!” he hissed. “Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent! God knows how many times people like Queen Elizabeth have been dug out of the past, first by Snakes, then by Spiders, and kidnapped or killed and replaced in the course of our war. This is the first big operation I’ve been on, Greta. But I know that much.”
My head began to ache. I asked, “If she’s an enemy double, why didn’t she know a performance of Macbeth in her lifetime was an anachronism?”
“Foxholed in the past, only trying to hold a position, they get dulled. They turn half zombie. Even the Snakes. Even our people. Besides, she almost did catch on, twice when she spoke to Leicester.”
