The Phantom of Oz

by Cindy Brown

  “Munchkins-slash-flying monkeys,” said the guard. “The kids play both roles. The tour began awhile back in LA, from what I hear, but I guess a couple of the kids outgrew their contracts.”

  Outgrew their contracts? I’d have to ask Candy about that.

  “That Giry guy is even here.” It was unusual for directors to come back to a show once it was up and running. “Guess he likes to handle auditions himself. Plus,” the guy leaned so close I could smell the mint gum he was chewing, “that Babette woman is here too. Looking for her next big star. They got a ton more kids auditioning cause of that.”

  “Babette from The It Girl? Babette Firmin?”

  I felt a chill and a thrill simultaneously. I couldn’t stand The It Girl. The reality TV show promised to groom hopeful actresses to be the next big star, but it seemed mostly like a vehicle for Babette’s no-nonsense approach to the business of star-making (i.e. ability to make grown women cry). I hated the show—and I would have given anything to be on it. Ah, the vagaries of show business. “But why would Babette be here looking for munchkins?” I asked the guard.

  “Guess she’s gonna have a new show for kid actors: Itty Bitty Star. Get it? It Girl, Itty Bitty?”

  I chuckled. He was working so hard for it.

  “That’s why the kiddos are auditioning this late. Guess Babette’s a night owl.”

  “But wait,” I said. “They’re having auditions? Candy said they were rehearsing.”

  “That too,” said the security guard. “The Wizard show has to work in the guy who replaced the Scarecrow after that accident. They say the first actor’s gonna be all right, but...” He shook his head. “You think they woulda made that straw flameproof.”

  “Candy,” I said into my phone as I walked down the hall, “I’m lost.” I swear I had gone the direction the guard had pointed, but these old theaters were like hives backstage. Instead of brightly lit dressing rooms, I passed by shadowy niches filled with sweating pipes and shelves full of tools and props, including an especially lifelike-looking severed head.

  “What?” she said. “You’re breaking up.”

  “What floor are the dressing rooms?” I said loudly. I reached out to touch the head. Its hair must have been hair-sprayed half to death, because it was crunchy and...alive? “Aah!” I screamed. “Cockroaches! Cockroaches on the head!”

  “Aah!” Candy screamed back. “Cockroaches on your head?”

  I shook my head violently, just to make sure nothing was on it, and backed up into a better lit section of the corridor. “Not my head, a prop severed head...Why is there a severed head in The Wizard of Oz in space? Are there even cockroaches in space?”

  “Probably,” said Candy. “Stowaways. Like rats on ships. And there’s not a severed head in our show, though I did think about killing the guy who used to play the Scarecrow. Where are you?”

  “I must have taken a wrong turn. The floors in this hall slope down. I must be somewhere in the bowels of the—”

  The lights flickered. An icy hand touched my shoulder. I whipped around. No one there. Or was there? I swore I felt...A small figure stepped out of the darkness. A child. He held up something that glittered in the light. Scissors. With blood dripping from them. “Join us,” he whispered.

  “Ivy?” said Candy’s voice from my phone. “Are you okay?”

  “Join us, Ivy,” said the hollow-eyed little boy. He ran past me, cackling, brushing against me as he went.

  “What? What the hell is going on?” I reached out a hand toward the wall to steady myself, but…“Aah!” I yelled again. “Cockroaches!”

  “On somebody’s head?” asked Candy.

  “On the wall.” I backed away. A sickening crunch under my heel. “And on the floor.” The creatures skittered away. Probably to a new hiding place where they could run out and scare me again.

  “Ivy, darlin’, they’re just big bugs.”

  “No ‘just’ about it,” I mumbled.

  “Think of ’em as June bugs.”

  “I live in Arizona. I’ve never seen a June bug. If they’re anything like cockroaches, I’m not a fan. And there was some creepy kid...”

  “Darlin,’ this theater is full of creepy kids right now. And even scarier stage mothers. Listen, skip the dressing rooms. Try to find your way to the stage. Once you’re there, there’s a door to the house stage right.” The house was the audience section of the theater. “We’re going to meet out there for notes in...”

  Candy’s voice abruptly died. I looked at my phone. No signal. The lights flickered again. Electrical interference, maybe. That would explain why the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. And it could explain the cool air that swept through me: just an air conditioner kicking on. Nothing to be frigh—a wave of cockroaches skittered past me, as if on the run. I followed suit and propelled myself out of the dark passageway.

  Chapter 3

  That Strange, Wan and Fantastic Face, With the Hollow Eyes

  I found a door marked “stage” and composed myself, which basically meant smoothing my hair to make sure I wasn’t carrying any stowaway cockroaches. I pushed open the door and stepped inside. Munchkin hopefuls were buzzing in the blue lights of backstage. A piano began a musical intro. The lights and sounds of the theater felt soothing and familiar.

  A small girl with curly blonde hair stood in the middle of the stage and sang, “The sun’ll come out...tomorrow...”

  “Hold it. Stop,” said a woman’s strident voice from the audience. “Really? Do you know how many times we’ve had to sit through ‘Tomorrow’?”

  So maybe some of the sounds were too familiar. I headed toward some stairs that led to the house, through a bunch of wannabe munchkins waiting their turn in the wings.

  “Do you have another song, sweetheart?” asked a man’s comforting voice from the audience.

  “’Cause I’m going to puke if I hear that damn song one more time,” added the woman. “Do you want to make me puke?”

  “N...n…no.” The munchkin burst into tears and ran offstage.

  “Babette’s mean,” a small girl whispered to her mom beside her.

  “That’s right,” said a boy in back of her. His hair was perfect. “So you’d better suck it up and stop being such a baby.” The little girl stuck out her bottom lip, its trembling visible even in the darkness backstage.

  “Avery John,” said the boy’s mother. I slowed down so I could hear the kid’s well-deserved scolding. “Don’t you dare break your concentration by talking to the competition.”

  Guess Babette wasn’t the only mean one around. “Next!” she yelled from her seat.

  I trotted down the stairs and pushed open the door to the house. Then I stopped, startled into stillness.

  Oh my. I’d only been in the Grand Phoenician once before, when I’d worked on a variety-show fundraiser for the ARC, a non-profit that supported people with cognitive disabilities like my brother Cody. During that show, I was either onstage with the stage lights in my eyes, backstage in the dark, or out in the lobby, schmoozing with guests. And though the lobby was Art Deco-elegant with an enormous stained-glass Phoenix firebird rising from the ashes, it was nothing compared to the theater’s house.

  If a director had decided to set Romeo and Juliet in a Maxfield Parrish version of Arizona, the result would be the Grand Phoenician. Nearest the stage were twin Italianate walls with twisted gilded columns and grinning heads of Pan, their arched niches almost hiding the banks of organ pipes within. Murals of craggy bare mountains and sunlit canyons under deep blue skies swept across the wall, ending at the back of the theater with a balcony fit for a hundred Juliets. Several curved rows of seats were backed by a row of arches topped with a red tile “roof,” like a cloister in an Italian monastery. But the theater’s literal crowning glory was above the red velvet seats and inlaid tile floors. The ceiling was painted like
a sky, not just one blue sky, but the sky over the length of a day, so the east section had a rosy glow that transformed to turquoise at the center of the theater, then blazed sunset orange before deepening to violet with small silver stars glimmering in the westernmost corners. And in the middle of it all was the grandest chandelier I’d ever seen, massive and sparkling, with blown glass ornaments shaped like the large cupped blossoms of the saguaro cactus and—

  “Hey you, blonde chick with your mouth open. Get outta my sight line, you’re distracting me. All those teeth.” Babette’s highlighted hair gleamed, even in the dim light. She sat in the middle of the audience, her trademark red cowboy boots propped up on the back of the seat in front of her. And she had noticed me. She hadn’t been exactly flattering, but she did notice me.

  “And kiddo?” Babette said to the kid onstage. “Avery Joseph, is it?”

  The boy nodded eagerly.

  “Beat it.” So there was some justice in the world.

  I walked up the theater aisle, out of Babette’s way. She sat next to Arrestadt Giry. I recognized him from internet photos: the classic profile, fine features, and longish hair, swept back from a widow’s peak on his forehead. “Babette,” he said, “if you would please wait until we’ve had a chance to discuss the actors auditioning—”

  “Oh please. You weren’t honestly thinking about that kid,” Babette said. “He looked like a turkey from the side. No chin, just wattle wattle wattle.”

  “Still, before you chew them up and spit them out, it’d be nice if I could—”

  “Have a taste? Is that what you want, Arrestadt? A taste?”

  “I don’t even know how to reply to you half the time.” He pushed the hair off his forehead. “Could you just be civil to them? They’re only kids.”

  “They’re actors. They’d better get used to rejection.”

  I scooted into an aisle and sat directly behind them so there would be no chance of being in anyone’s sight lines. Also because it was exciting to sit close to famous people.

  “How many more potential munchkins do we have tonight?” Arrestadt addressed a woman dressed in black who stood on the lip of the stage. Probably the stage manager.

  She consulted a clipboard. “Ah, seven more.”

  “Give them fifteen while I give notes to the cast.”

  The stage manager must’ve given the Wizard cast the nod, because the door from the stage to the house opened and people began to file out. The actors were all still in costume. Dorothy was dressed in the expected blue pinafore, but other than her the cast wore space-age costumes that looked vaguely familiar. I swore I saw a Wookiee.

  Actors didn’t usually wear costumes for pick-up rehearsals. I suspected they did so because these particular costumes probably made movement difficult. The munchkins, for example—who were all kids rather than little people—wore shiny green outfits with hoops sewn into the middle, so that they looked like futuristic bouncy balls.

  I scanned the group for Candy, my excitement overriding the worry I felt earlier. I didn’t have a ton of girlfriends. I blamed my jobs. Most of the people I met in the course of PI work weren’t exactly the type of people you wanted to establish close relationships with. And though I considered my Uncle Bob a friend, he wasn’t a girlfriend. A liverwurst-eating, trivia-loving, crack PI who’d risk his neck for me, but not a girlfriend. And theater friendships were often short-lived. Casts bonded like they’d love each other forever, then two weeks after the show closed the actors would move on to the next theater family. I’d been lucky with Candy. Even after she moved out to LA, we’d stayed in touch, mostly via texts and online stuff, but also with regular soul-baring phone calls, where we’d complain about casting couches and congratulate each other on getting auditions and commiserate about our love lives and...Oh.

  Maybe that was why Candy had been so distant. She used to date my boyfriend, Matt. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but she swore it was fine with her. She’d broken up with him almost a year before we began seeing each other, and besides, I’d introduced them in the first place, when Matt was working at my brother’s group home. Still...

  I tried to connect the dots in my head. Did Candy grow distant before or after I told her about Matt and me? And where was she? Cast members were sitting down in the seats around the director, plopping down one by one like spiders onto Miss Muffet. Ew. Guess I was still creeped out by the cockroaches on the severed head. Which didn’t belong in The Wizard show. Touring theater companies didn’t usually leave props behind when they moved to another town, so what was the head doing in the hallway?

  “Can I sit next to you?” A girl of about eleven stood in front of me dressed in a munchkin outfit. “It’s easier to sit near the aisle, because of...” She pointed to the hoop in the middle of her costume.

  “Sure, as long as I can save the seat on the other side of me for Candy.”

  “Candace, you mean,” said an actress sitting a few seats down—the Wicked Witch of the East, if her red and white striped stockings were any indication. “Late as always. Probably taking care of business, as usual.”

  “Business?” I said. “What sort of—”

  “Don’t listen to her,” said the little girl. “She really is a witch.”

  The witch gave her the finger. The girl stuck out her tongue at her. “I’m Madison,” she said as she balanced on the edge of the seat next to me.

  A blonde woman from the row behind us stuck her head in between ours. “Honey,” she said to Madison, “didn’t I tell you to sit close to Babette?” At first I thought I knew the woman, but it was just that she looked like so many actresses these days: carefully highlighted hair, tight jeans worn with high heels (I never did get that—weren’t jeans for comfort?), and a figure that looked like a lamppost had sprouted high firm boobs. “Honey.” She had a high breathy voice that sounded like it belonged in a porn movie. Kind of creepy when used to addressed a child. “Madison. Did you hear me?”

  “She must have, because I sure did,” Babette said without turning around. “And if you think having your kid sit close will make me more likely to look at her, you got another thing coming. There’s nothing to look at.”

  Madison’s mother turned crimson. “Babette’s a witch too,” Madison whispered to me.

  “I know,” I whispered back. And God help me, I still wanted to be on her show.

  A skinny redhead navigated herself around Madison’s belly hoops and slid past me, facing away. She was dressed like one of the babes in the old Star Trek series in a white pleather mini dress and was so thin I didn’t even have to move my legs. She started to sit down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m saving the seat for—”

  “Your best friend?” The emaciated woman turned to face me, a big smile on her face.

  “Omigod,” I said before I could stop myself. “Candy.”

  “I know. Great costume, right?” She posed with one leg in front of the other as if to show off her silver go-go boots, but all I could see were thighs the same size as her calves, with bony knots for knees.

  Candy sat down, took off her red bouffant wig and wig cap, and scratched her head. “Ahh.”

  I stared. Candy’s naturally curly hair was straight, cut in the same style as Madison’s mom and Babette. Unlike theirs, her locks hung dull and lifeless around her face, like the tatty mane of an old horse.

  “So good to see you, darlin’.” Candy smiled. Her teeth had a grayish tint and her lips looked gummy.

  I couldn’t look away. The last time I’d seen Candy in person was down in Mexico. She’d bounced into the room like usual, brown curls soft against tan shoulders, voluptuous body swaying past the tables full of men, who all sighed as she walked by, like in that song about the girl in Ipanema.

  Now Candy’s eyes had an unnatural brightness, but she had no shine. She spoke quickly with that harsh edge I’d caught on th
e phone, a rushed brittle sound that starkly contrasted with the leftovers of her Southern accent.

  “Why, girlfriend, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Candy.

  Madison turned to me, wide-eyed. “Did you see the ghost? The Lady in White?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re not a baby anymore.” The Wicked Witch of the East was certainly living up to her name. “You know there’s no such thing as a ghost.”

  A little boy in front of us turned around and smiled. He had hollow eyes.

  “Hey,” I said to him. “Were you—”

  The chandelier flickered, then went dark.

  “See,” said Madison. “She heard you. The Lady’s upset that you—”

  “Lady Schmady,” said the Witch. “This theater—and its wiring—must be a hundred years old. And now—” she directed this to the stage manager, who was walking down the aisle—“if we could please get to notes before I grow any older waiting. For God’s sake, let’s get this show on—”

  And the sky cracked open.

  Chapter 4

  It Came down with a Smash!

  “Move!” I knocked Candy to the ground, shoved her under a seat, and scrambled underneath the one next to her. Just in time. The ceiling let its load go with a shriek. People screamed and glass shattered and shards of light scattered in the darkness like flames.

  Then silence, except for the tinkling of glass, like a macabre music box.

  I turned my head. Candy’s eyes were inches from mine, huge with fear. I tried to ask if she was okay, but the plaster dust that filled the air clogged my throat. All I could do was cough. Candy must have understood, though, because she nodded. I pushed myself out from underneath the seat and got to my knees. I quickly checked myself. Nothing hurt, nothing bloody.

  The shock wore off, and the crying and howling began. I found my voice. “You okay?” I asked again.

  “Yeah,” Candy said from beneath her seat. “But I don’t think I can look.”