There was the sudden sound of the television set from inside the bungalow, just now switched on—the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. Good. That would be Jenny, safely inside. He looked east and saw that there were people on the sidewalk, walking down toward the ocean, and so he stayed put for a moment until they’d disappeared behind the doughnut shop. Then he waited out three cars before hunching out of the shrubbery and making his way across ten feet of lawn to the back edge of the porch, where he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled in behind the night-blooming jasmine. He ducked his head under the porch and squinted into the darkness, but the sun had been too bright, and he could see nothing. He crawled a few feet under and felt over his head, discovering that he could sit up comfortably, the floor joists just skimming his head.
Sunlight shone through lattice at the front of the porch, and he was already able to see things around him. He looked around at the once-familiar space, at the cobwebs and the soft dirt, the chunks of rock and the dead Bermuda grass along the perimeter. He heard the muffled sounds of a commercial on the television now, and realized that there was someone walking in the house—he was surprised at how loud it was—and then the screen door slammed, and the footsteps scuffed on the porch over his head. Jenny descended the steps and walked out onto the lawn. He could see her standing there—the backs of her legs—and he wondered suddenly what he would do if Jenny chose that moment to come down into the hidey-hole with him. That was something he hadn’t anticipated.
Very carefully he shifted his legs out from under him and crawled backward, pressing his back against the wooden slats along the end of the porch, far enough back into the shadows so that if she crawled in past the jasmine she wouldn’t see him until she was all the way in. She would be facing away from him, too. He would let her come in, all the way in, and then slip his hand over her mouth.
He looked around for a gag. Something to tie around her eyes, too. He didn’t want to hit her. He didn’t hit little girls. But she mustn’t see him under there. She mustn’t recognize him. She mustn’t scream. He looked for her through the lattice again, but she wasn’t there. He pressed himself against the wall, listening for her footsteps, for the sound of her pushing the limbs of the jasmine out of the way.
But then there was the scraping of shoes on the porch again, and the screen door banged shut. From inside the house came the sound of the television program, Gilligan and the Captain shouting at each other. He let out his breath, taking the paper sack out of his pocket with a shaking hand, and then bending forward to crawl through the dust again, deeper under the porch. He found a perfectly square patch of ground illuminated by a patch of sunlight. It happened that the illuminated area stood adjacent to an upright post—the same that he had tied Casey to all those years ago, when the dirt around it had been watered with his brother’s tears….
Carefully he built a card house, tilting two cards together as a foundation, and then adding cards at either end, finishing the wall at one end and leaving the other end open. The cards reeked of lighter fluid. He set the plastic doll on top of the house roof so that her back leaned against the wooden post, tilting her back so that she rested against it, the sunlight glowing on her silken hair. He studied her carefully for a moment, and then arranged her forearms so that they covered her breasts. Then he twisted her head to the side just a little, as if she were listening, as if she had been sunning herself in privacy, but had heard something, someone approaching perhaps. He ran the little Matchbox truck in through one open wall of the lower story, piling eucalyptus bark and leaves around it, resting more bark against the rough wood of the riser. Finally he laid the open, fuel-soaked lunch sack against the leaves and bark. With any luck the fire would climb the riser and ignite the porch, maybe burn the whole house down—instant eviction.
He realized then that the Night Girl’s doll was hot in his pocket, and he was struck with a sudden fear of its bursting into flame right there, igniting his clothing…. He fumbled it free, hurriedly setting it against the post, directly across from where Jenny’s doll sat sunning itself. The two of them stared at each other, the card house neat and trim, the little truck just visible inside. Edmund took the bag away. It looked like trash sitting there. He crumpled it up, swept the twigs and leaves aside, pressed the crumpled sack against the post near the Night Girl’s doll, and put the debris back around it. He took another appraising look, then rearranged it subtly.
It was perfect now, his little collage. The truck, of course, was Collier’s truck. The card house was the bungalow. The doll on top … Well, it wasn’t Anne entirely, not Anne the person…. It was representative, symbolic of the Day Girl aspect of Anne’s persona. Both of them were present—the Day Girl and the Night Girl. The Night Girl’s dark passion might at any moment ignite the entire collection, and it would consume the Day Girl with the flame of its own intense heat.
He saw now the totality of what it was he had created, and he was amazed at it. The entire thing was accidentally brilliant, stupefyingly brilliant. He had awakened early that morning with a mere compulsion—the vague urge to look around Collier’s yard for something to use against him. And then, entirely by accident, he had found these odds and ends of junk and had taken them home, knowing they were right but not knowing why, bringing the nylon doll along with him, because it was right, too. And now he had fashioned this … this tableau; and out of nowhere this thing that he himself had fashioned had derived meaning. In effect he had summoned that meaning out of nowhere, just as he had summoned the Night Girl from that same realm.
It dawned on him then that perhaps all art was accidentally brilliant in just this same way. Certainly the greatest art was. An artist was simply open to the suggestion of meaning and form. Artistic genius was nothing more than a door, a door to which there was a secret key. He had unwittingly opened that door once again. He thought of the coming of the Night Girl, pictured the spirit door in the wall as it opened onto darkness. He breathed heavily, a little surprised at this sudden powerful insight coming at a time like this, in a place like this. It was a damned shame that he had to burn this little work of genius. But then he saw the inevitability of that, too. The fire of inspiration would become a literal fire—art fabricated out of nowhere, out of energy and passion, gone again into nowhere, and the world of these small people irrevocably changed by it.
He sat for a few more moments thinking, waiting for his mind to keep rolling, to develop the concept even further. He was onto something here, something immense, but he couldn’t think any longer because of the insane chatter coming out of the television up in the house. The entire Gilligan’s crew was shouting at once, and he could hear what sounded like the jabbering of monkeys and the Captain hollering for everyone to settle down, settle down, settle down. Listen to him, Edmund thought, and instantly there was peace on the television, as if they had responded not to the powerless and ineffective Captain, but to Edmund’s command.
The wind suddenly ceased to blow outside, and as if he had been touched by an unseen hand, the hairs on his neck pricked up, and his heart leaped with an abrupt fear. He felt it again—the same presence he had felt in the storage room a couple of days ago, when he had rummaged through Anne’s possessions, and out in the parking lot when he had burned Collier’s truck. It was she, coming to him here! He listened for the telltale footsteps … and he heard them!—subtly now, like the beating of his own heart, the rushing of blood through his veins. Step, step, step, the leathery scrape of a nameless thing drawing closer to him, footsteps that doubtless only he could hear.
The space around him seemed abruptly close and restrictive, the small door almost infinitely far away. He realized that he was sweating, although the air beneath the porch had grown cooler, refrigerator cool. He felt claustrophobic, crushed by the pressure of the porch overhead. He took the matches out of his shirt pocket and pushed himself up onto his knees, hunching forward, leaning on his elbows to steady himself. He struck a match shakily, the head breaking off and fl
ying away into the dirt like a tiny comet. And at that moment the Night Girl’s doll, three feet away from the burning match head, ignited abruptly in an impossible whoosh of flame, singeing his arm and the side of his face. The flame seemed to roll out along the bottom of the porch floorboards like an angry wave, and he slapped at his smoking arm, smelling the stink of burning hair and choking on the sudden outpouring of smoke and fumes. Pulling his coat over his face and breathing through it, he backed away in fear and astonishment, watching as the flames engulfed the card house and the plastic doll, whose hair burned like sparklers. Her features stretched, melting in the heat. No longer strong enough to hold her arms across her breasts, she uncovered herself, exposing her flesh to the flame. Despite the heat, he watched her with avid concentration as she slowly tilted sideways and fell onto her side, turning her back to him. The card house collapsed in a low sheet of flame, the slips of bark and leaves burned higher, the flames shot up the dry wooden post. The Night Girl’s doll was simply gone, consumed by the flames.
Edmund backed all the way out to the opening in the slats now, throwing the matchbook and the lighter fluid can back into the darkness and taking one last look at the collapsed and burning tableau.
He saw her then in the smoke—the girl who had helped him burn Collier’s car. And he knew absolutely that she was the Night Girl herself; he could simply feel it—the presence of the same distilled emotion in the air, the dark passions, the terrible source of her desire, the sound of her footfalls as she walked through the hidden caverns of his own mind. She hovered in the air, illuminated by flame, made impossibly solid by the smoke itself. Her eyes stared straight through him, as if in that instant she had assessed his worthiness, and he was possessed with the sudden urge to bow down before her, to adore her….
In his fascination he inadvertently breathed in a lungful of smoke. He lurched forward, retching and coughing, his eyes watering. In a sudden panic he pushed himself backward, cracking his head on the framing of the porch, fighting to wedge himself out through the secret entrance. Something jerked him to a stop, caught him, held him. He whimpered out loud, coughing, flailing with his arm, watching the still-hovering face of the girl in the smoke, the flames running out along the porch beams, darting toward him, dying back, springing up again.
His coat ripped, and suddenly he was free, crawling out in the open air again, only to find himself entangled in the jasmine branches. He fought his way clear and reeled wildly into the side yard, where he steadied himself against the wall of the house, shading his eyes against the glare of the sun.
1
THE INTERIOR OF THE OCEAN THEATRE WAS DIM, EVEN with the house lights and stage lights on. The windows were painted black to darken the theatre during matinees, and draperies of heavy black velvet cast broad areas of the Mack-painted wooden stage into even further shadow. To Anne, the old, decrepit theatre was just about perfect. The tattered curtains were heavy with the ghosts of hundreds of shows, and that ghostly magic echoed in the sound of the footsteps on the boards of the stage and hovered in the still air of the empty house and in the hot and dusty smell of the stage lights. She remembered dozens of trips to the theatre with her mother after Elinor’s death, and what she remembered most was the enchanted moment of anticipation right before the play began, when the house lights dimmed, the music rose, and the stage lights were visible as a golden line beneath the hem of the curtains.
Just over the past few days she’d found that she had fallen instantly and comfortably into the world of this strange little beach city theatre, as if that’s what she had been pursuing in her long drive south from British Columbia. And now, absurdly, it struck her as the most natural thing in the world that she was tying two half hitches into a rope that secured the head of a cloud-faced baby to an overhead pulley. She yanked the knot tight and then waved at Dave, who hauled the head into the air.
“Higher!” Collier shouted from a seat in the middle of the house. The four-hundred-seat theatre was lined with old cushionless mahogany seats with wire hat racks underneath each one, relics of a bygone age. A double aisle led back through a pair of heavy doors to a narrow lobby. Collier waved his hand toward the ceiling, and Dave pulled on the rope, the baby’s face lifting another couple of feet into the air.
Anne walked to the edge of the stage, near the open door of the side entrance to the theatre, where a woman with gray hair had just come in from outside.
“Hi,” Anne said to her. “I’m Anne Morris.”
“Lydia Nyles,” the woman said. “I’m glad to meet you.”
“Are you in the play?” Anne asked. “An actor … ?” She still had met only a few members of the cast.
“No, I’m afraid not. I’m just here on business, to talk to Mr. Collier.”
“Isn’t he absolutely the best?” Anne asked. “He and Earl Dalton are such a pair when they get going. And Jenny’s tops, too. She’s lucky to have a grandfather like Collier. He has so much enthusiasm. You should hear Jenny do the scene where Cordelia and Lear have their big fight. Collier’s taught her nearly all of Cordelia’s part, word for word. It’s unbelievable. I think she even understands most of it, you know—she’s not just parroting the lines.”
“That’s remarkable,” Mrs. Nyles said. “It seems a little unstable, though, doesn’t it? Growing up in a theatre around all these eccentric people?”
“I guess it depends on how you define stable. This place is … It’s got so much history and magic in it. And it’s a part of something really grand and colorful. Jenny’s only about five years old and already she’s a part of something that’s understood all over the world. She’s quoting Shakespeare, for God’s sake, at her age. Maybe that’s not stable like most people would mean stable, but I guess it’s a kind of stable that I admire. And she’s like Collier’s shadow, too. They’re a team. Maybe since I didn’t have a father around when I grew up, I kind of envy that. And I guess I like eccentric people.”
Mrs. Nyles was silent for a moment, watching the work on the stage. “What’s the point of these enormous heads?” she asked finally.
“I’m a little hazy on it,” Anne said. “Collier says they’re a metaphor for the one-time innocence of Lear’s three daughters. He also refers to them as ‘spectacle.’ He told me all about the theatrical value of ‘spectacle.’ “
Mrs. Nyles nodded, as if she understood perfectly well.
Collier walked all the way to the back of the house now and sat down again in order to get another audience-eye view of the stage. “Another foot!” he shouted, and Dave hauled on the line again, the head rising until it hung just below the bottom edge of the teaser curtain. “That’s good!” Collier shouted, and Dave tied the rope to a cleat and then climbed the ladder to put a stop on the rope so that the head would always descend to the same level, dead even with the other two heads.
Right then the Earl came up the stairs from the basement carrying a handful of colored gels for the lights. He shuffled through the plastic slips, finally holding one of them up and peering through it toward one of the house lights.
“Mrs. Nyles!” he said, as if he was amazingly happy to see her.
She nodded pleasantly at him and shook his hand.
“Too much green, maybe,” he said, waving the gel in her direction. “Give me a critical appraisal. Collier tells me you used to direct a play or two.”
“He’s exaggerating,” Mrs. Nyles said.
“We could use some help around here. Our man on the light board is threatening to go to Kansas for his daughter’s wedding. You ever run a light board?”
“Not in years,” Mrs. Nyles said. “Maybe some other time. Really.” She smiled at him in such a way as to put an end to the idea.
“Bring it outside,” Collier said to the Earl, coming up onto the stage. “You can see it more clearly in the sunshine. It’s too damned dark in here. Well, Mrs. Nyles! What a pleasure. I’ve asked her to take a part in Lear,” he said to Anne and the Earl, “but she turned me down flat.”
“That’s our loss,” the Earl said. “Won’t reconsider?”
“Not this time,” Mrs. Nyles said.
“Excuse us.” The Earl nodded at Anne and Mrs. Nyles both. “We’ll be back in a second.”
Anne watched as Collier went out through the parking lot door. The Earl followed, but in the doorway he dropped a half-dozen of the gels and then stooped to pick them up. Anne started to speak to Mrs. Nyles again, but she was interrupted by a sudden wild shout from outdoors, followed by the sound of running footsteps and then another shout, more distant.
40
EDMUND STRAIGHTENED UP, HIS COUGHING FIT OVER, AND immediately he spotted Collier running straight toward him across the theatre parking lot, shouting something incoherent.
“Fire!” Edmund yelled at him, and he waved his hands over his head, as if he was purposefully trying to attract Collier’s attention. Collier was old and fat, and he almost looked comical, coming along with his arm-swinging gait. Edmund set out around the side of the porch at a run, shouting nonsensically now, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and pointing wildly at the house. Clearly Collier was insane with rage. His face was a mask of anger.
“Inside!” Edmund screamed at him. “Jenny!” There was surprisingly little smoke, the freshening wind blowing most of it back in under the bungalow. Collier didn’t know what the hell was going on. He had seen someone reeling out of the bushes, recognized who it was, and had gone crazy….
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