Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  At moments when Sonya identified with the part of Evangeline’s maid like this Keri wondered why Rosalin, who took care of so many things, had arranged for this person to be alone with her in two performances a night, six nights a week. She hoped Sonya was aware how vital to the production her Evangeline was. Surveillance cams were everywhere but she wondered if they didn’t just offer a greater chance for immortality.

  So she gazed at Sonya with admiration and delight (and none could look with as much admiration and delight as she). “I’m amazed at the amount of research you’ve done. You have the makings of an actor,” she said.

  Then, as Evangeline, she motioned Sonya to go first, and said in a breathless child voice, “After Nance’s death rumors got in the papers. One of my dolls was supposedly found in the elevator with his corpse. It’s when the term ‘Angouleme Murder’ began being used. Servants testified that Nance had always taken an unnatural interest in his daughter.” Here Evangeline covered her eyes for a moment. But Keri managed to catch Sonya’s expression of both horror and sympathy.

  Their destination was the sixth floor. On the landing, they paused, heard a 1920s Gershwin tune played by a jazz pianist. Privately, Keri was certain Evangeline had killed her old man, who in every way deserved it. Life with him and after him had made her a manipulative crazy person. It was what Keri loved about the part.

  But she looked at Sonya and said with great sincerity, “I try to remember what that poor child-woman went through and put that into my performance.”

  Sonya held a light and a mirror like this was a sacred ritual. Evangeline’s haunted face—just a trifle worn—appeared. Keri Mayne did a couple of makeup adjustments, held the doll to her chest, and braced herself.

  Sonya opened the door and followed as Evangeline half floated into a hallway with distant, slightly flickering lights. Keri paused, listened for a moment, then wafted toward the music.

  Playgoers, drinks in hand, stared out a window into a hologram of a lamp lit street scene. A big square-built convertible rolled by with its top down and men and women in fur coats waving glasses over their heads, while a cop made a point of not looking. Flappers in cloche hats and tight skirts scurried to avoid getting run down. They gained the sidewalk and disappeared into the Angouleme’s main door downstairs.

  On the sixth floor it was 1929.

  It took a few moments for the well-upholstered crowd to notice the sleep walker and the woman in a maid’s uniform who guided her.

  Keri heard their whispered conversations:

  “. . . maybe down here trying to avoid her father?”

  “. . . a little older, this is long afterwards, when he’s dead and she’s still living here.”

  “We missed his big moment.”

  “. . . looks like she’s been on opium for years.”

  “Morphine, actually.”

  “Creepy, just like the Angouleme!”

  “But delicious!”

  “. . . like a ghost in her own hotel for decades after the murder.”

  The illicit, low-level whispering was the audience telling each other the story they’d seen and heard online. Cass had wanted that. “Makes it like opera or Shakespeare, where the audience knows the plot but not how it’ll be twisted this time.”

  On the sixth floor Keri was Evangeline in the long years after her father’s death and before she died in 1932 addicted, isolated. Even before the First World War the Angouleme was called “louche” when that was the word used by people too nice to mention any specific decadence.

  “She looks like she’s hurt!” murmured a playgoer in a lavish, shimmering suit as he moved toward Evangeline. Keri lurched the other way, Sonya got between them.

  Always in these audiences were ones like this who wanted to be part of the drama. If there was a long run, their faces would appear again and again. Certain people would start going out in public dressed like characters in the play. Great publicity, but a warning that no one should get too immersed in a part.

  “Oh, who are all these ghosts, Marie?” Evangeline asked her maid in a whispery child voice and looked around at the faces staring at her. “People like these weren’t allowed in the Angouleme when Father was here.” She held up the doll. “Mirabella was his last gift to me.”

  She could hear the crowd murmur at this, felt them closing in. And in that moment, the character Jacoby Cass’s script simply called “The Killer” came down the hall. This young man wore a leather jacket and a red silk kerchief tied around his neck. The butt of a revolver was visible in a pocket. The actor looked at Evangeline and the rest of the crowd with a cold, dead-eyed stare.

  “How did he get in here?” a man whispered. “Where’s security?”

  This amused his partner. “More than likely he’s a fugitive from the Jacky Mac Studio downstairs,” she said. “We must pay a visit.”

  For a moment all attention focused on The Killer. Evangeline wobbling slightly, continued to the jazz piano.

  By the 1920s, a louche, scandalous hotel had become attractive to certain people. Artists stayed at the Angouleme and entertained there: French Surrealists and their mistresses, wealthy bohemians poets from Greenwich Village, Broadway composers looking for someplace out of the way but not too far.

  Something between a party and a cabaret went on in the living room of Gershwin’s suite. Around the door, slender, elegant flappers leaned towards smiling men in evening clothes. The lights were soft; it usually took a couple of glances before someone would recognize them as manikins. But then the silvery figure, you were sure was a statue, would turn slightly and a pair of dark eyes would hold yours for a moment.

  Inside the room a musician who looked not unlike Gershwin sat at a baby grand and played the sketches that would become An American in Paris.

  The suite was set up as a speakeasy where audience members bought drinks, leaned on furniture, listened but also watched. Evangeline shimmered before them, exchanged a long kiss with the silver flapper. All eyes were on the two and Gershwin played a slow fox-trot. As they danced he turned from the piano, looked to the audience as though asking if they saw what he did.

  When theatergoers from the hall began to crowd into the room, Evangeline floated through a bedroom door and her maid closed it. When people opened it to follow her, they found the room was empty and the door on the opposite wall was locked.

  Some at that point would realize that the sixth floor was a diversion, a place to spend money and waste time that would have been better spent up in the penthouse or downstairs where a murder was brewing.

  Sonya brought Keri/Evangeline down to the third floor where her next scene would be. The maid character didn’t appear again in Sleep Walking. “I feel like I should stay with you,” she said, and opened the door.

  Keri grasped her arm, looked into her eyes and said, “You’ve done enough. You’re wonderful.”

  The next day Sonya was setting up antique wooden folding chairs in Studio Mac on the third floor. She said, “I wish my part was bigger. I want to be in every minute of this play. I know that’s how actors feel.”

  Rosalin believed the intensity could possibly be of use. “The Big Arena is a savage place, run for the very rich and full of the superfluous young. Most of them will never find something larger than themselves as you are doing. It takes a certain kind of personal sacrifice to fully achieve this. But it will live in others’ memories.”

  THREE

  In New York it was shortly before midnight of Halloween 2060. Over the years, this holiday had surpassed New Year’s Eve as the city’s expression of its identity. Especially at times like this when the legendary metropolis was short of cash and looking for some new idea to carry it forward.

  In the Angouleme it was time for a special midnight show. Playgoers entered Sleep Walking through the lobby. From there they either went up the stairs, waited for the elevators, or just looked for a place to sit while getting acclimated. Rosalin had managed to exploit the lobby’s disreputable, fallen majesty. I
t was a place made for loitering. Upstairs each floor was set in a different decade. The lobby celebrated the entire sordid past. Here, a cluster of 1960s rent boys lingered in the shadows next to the main staircase and several 1900s ladies of the evening in big hats and bustles stood near the ever-vacant concierge desk.

  Jeremy Knight waited in a side doorway of the building. At exactly five minutes after the final stroke of twelve he got the one-minute signal, walked a few feet down the sidewalk to the front of the hotel, and was flanked by security.

  They threw open the doors and Knight/Jacky entered the lobby: tall and wire-thin, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his blond hair in a ponytail down almost to his ass.

  Knight was irritated as he always was at this moment by the sight of Jacoby Cass, who, with his speech about the God-given 19th century being finished, was making a grand exit with his party. A few patrons tried to follow but found themselves blocked by Jackson and company.

  Jeremy Knight marveled at the number of scene-stealing opportunities Cass, that shameless ham had managed to insert into the script.

  Knight surveyed the crowd. The show was booked solid for the Halloween weekend. Advance sales were another matter and his guts turned cold whenever that crossed his mind. So he didn’t think about it.

  In fact, Cass’s distraction allowed Knight to be through the crowd before they were aware of him. He turned then to face them and they saw Jacky Mac—couturier, poet, playwright, in a classic outfit of his own design: V-shaped, slim-waisted jacket; bell-bottom trousers; a wide tie with bright pop art flowers that looked like faces. Jacky Mac had been known to wear miniskirts and silver knee boots, but not on this occasion.

  On cue, the public elevator’s doors opened. Customers hesitated as always about getting on board because of the legends surrounding the place.

  Of Jeremy Knight it had been written, “He was born to wear a costume; put him in anything from a 1940 RAF uniform to a pink tutu and he is transformed.” He despised the description but had found that in roles like this an actor grabbed inspiration wherever it could be found.

  Without missing a beat, Jacky Mac stepped backwards onto an elevator and seemed amused by the audience’s fear. “Oh, it’s safe!” He somehow murmured and shouted in the same breath. “And if it begins to fall, just do as I do: flap your arms and fly!”

  From the elevator doorway, Mac gazed at the manikins in the corner, saw something, and nodded. The audience watched fascinated as one of the figures, dressed in leather and a blood red kerchief stepped out of the shadows and walked unsmiling into the car. “I was crucified just now by his glance,” Jacky announced as The Killer joined him and the door closed.

  Alone, without an audience to overhear them, Jeremy and Remo, the young actor who played The Killer, didn’t exchange a word. Each got off on a different floor, and over the next hour made rehearsed appearances in dark halls and bright interiors.

  Forty minutes into the play, Jeremy Knight/Jacky Mac listened to Gershwin’s piano and heard Nance’s death scream. Ten minutes after that he did a huge double take when he passed the ghost of Evangeline on the tiresome seventh floor where it was always 2010 and the well-lighted halls were lined with display windows offering overpriced Sleep Walking souvenirs. Coming down the servants’ stairs five minutes later, he passed Sonya trudging up carrying costumes. He smiled and she looked at him as wide-eyed as any fan.

  Halloween week was great. Capacity crowds were willing and able to laugh and scream at every performance. On the third floor of the Angouleme two weeks later, at about an hour and twenty minutes into Sleep Walking, Knight/Jacky climbed onto the small stage in the Mac Studio and felt the difference.

  The Studio included a large performance space with sixty chairs set up. At the Halloween midnight show all seats had been taken and many more patrons stood or sat on the floor. Halloween had been a triumph. But it’s in the weeks between holidays that hit shows are revealed and flops begin to die.

  Jeremy Knight had that in mind as he pirouetted on the stage. He estimated thirty people in the seats. And this included The Killer, always the first to arrive. Remo was also Jeremy Knight’s understudy. He sat down front with his legs stuck out so far his booted feet rested on the stage. A little knowledge of history and one would be reminded of Jacky Mac’s fatal tastes.

  The under-capacity crowd bothered Knight. But he told himself that any audience of any size was fated to be his. And the people at these performances who sat on antique wooden folding chairs were willing extras.

  They were drawn to the Studio by the sounds and the lights flashing through the open double doors. Or they were told not to miss this by friends who had seen Knight/Jacky perform this monologue, one-man play, stand-up routine, whatever you wanted to call it. Jacky Mac’s writing was out of copyright and Cass had lifted big chunks of it for a play within a play called A Death Made for Speculation.

  Jacky leaned over the front of the stage, hummed a few bars of music, and said in a husky voice, “I’d thought of coming out in an evening gown and doing a Dietrich medley. But I’ve seen the way women look at me when I do drag. It’s the look Negroes get when a white person sings the blues. So I’m here to fulfill a secret dream. I’m playing a guy.”

  Rosalin had taken liberties with the decor but 1970 was a hard moment to exaggerate. Jacky’s loft had been described and shown in articles, books, and documentary footage. Like Warhol’s factory, it was iconic. On the walls and above mantelpieces were mirrors, which at certain angles turned into windows looking into other rooms. In those rooms doll automata played cards, a mechanical rogue and his partner cavorted, and one or both might look your way, indicate you were next.

  “When I was young,” Jacky Mac said, “I tried to make myself look beautiful. Later I tried to make myself look young. Now I’m satisfied with making myself look different.”

  In the lawless 1960s, the Angouleme Hotel was almost as famous as the Chelsea across town. When it was sold as co-op apartments and lofts Jacky bought most of the third floor of the building with the proceeds of his clothing line and his performance art. Jacky Mac was not, of course, his real name, which was boring and provincial Donald Sprang.

  For Jeremy Knight the task was making something as ordinary as homosexuality feel as mysterious, hysterical, and dangerous as Jacky had found his life to be. A brief film clip existed of Jacky Mac working out some of this material in the Studio, performing for an audience of friends in just this manner.

  Jeremy caught the odd, fluid near-dance of Jacky Mac, which he’d learned from old videos. On the walls Hendrix, Joplin, and Day-Glo acrylic nude boys and girls melted into a landscape of red and blue trees. A light show played intermittently on the ceiling. Deep yellow blobs turned into crisp light green snakes, which drowned in orange, quivering jelly. The color spectrum dazed the eye.

  Knight/Jacky leaned forward to show a once-angelic face now touched with lines and makeup and asked, “Why do men over thirty with long hair always look like their mothers?”

  On cue, The Killer down front swallowed a few pills, stood up, pulled a bottle from his back pocket, spat out, “Faggot” at Jacky and walked toward the door while taking a long slug. In the old-fashioned manner, Jacky Mac liked his partners rough. It would be the death of him.

  The audience watched the long, slow exit. Wrist limp, Jacky Mac gestured after him. “We have the perfect relationship. I pretend he doesn’t exist and he pretends that he does.”

  It wasn’t just the costume; Jeremy Knight had absorbed every bit of the lost manner and voice of someone society hated for what he was. Ninety years later it was hard to convey. For a few years in his teens Jeremy had been Jenna Knight, making the change because boys in school got neglected and there was an advantage to being a boy with the mind of a girl.

  Each day Knight felt closer to Jacky’s alienation. Saw it intertwine with his own fear of falling off a very small pedestal and back into the vast, penniless crowd in the Big Arena.

  The Kille
r stopped at the door and yelled, “IT’S YOUR TURN NOW, BITCH” at somebody no one could see.

  Jacky glanced his way, turned back to the seats and found everyone staring wide-eyed. “Dear me, are the snakes growing out of my head again? That Medusa look was so popular once upon a time!” He peered at the crowd and remarked half to himself, “Judging by your faces, I’ve turned you all to stone. Forgive me. My mother always said . . .”

  But few were listening. All eyes were on a figure in silks floating past the stage humming “Beautiful Dreamer” under her breath, while the audience whispered her name.

  Cass had invented a liaison in this hotel between a self-destructive artist and the ghost of a legendary suspected murderess. The character Jacky was haunted by Evangeline decades after she had died of an overdose.

  Once he caught sight of her he seemed to forget the audience completely and followed her out of the room. When audience members came after them, they found a locked door.

  But the room into which the two had gone was Jacky’s legendary mirrored bedroom. The ceiling, an entire wall, even the floor in places reflected the room and its outsize bed. One wall was a two-way mirror. Jacky was always aware of this, as were some of his bedmates.

  The Sleep Walking audience flocked around the glass, saw silhouettes dance in semi-darkness as Jacky tried to trap Evangeline or she ensnared him. One shadow seemed to pass through another. One or the other always had a back to the audience and both whispered so none outside could hear.

  “How’s the gate tonight?” she asked.

  “Seventy percent for this show, about the same for the midnight show,” he said.

  “Shit,” she said. “It’s going to fold.”

  “Needs a third act,” he said. “I have my eye out for especially unstable repeat patrons.”

  “A third victim,” she said. “Rosalin’s got one but Sonya scares me.”

  He shook his head. “She’s harmless.”

  “A suicide might do,” Keri said.

  “I volunteer my understudy, Remo.”