“Pleased to meet you,” Art said.
“Thank you; it is an honor,” Karagöz answered, dropping Art's hand. “May I?” He gestured at the knife.
“Of course.”
Karagöz took the dagger and studied it carefully.
“It is not mine,” he said at last, handing it back, “but it is assuredly a fascinating item.”
More of the Bringers had arrived – though as always, Art hadn't seen them enter. He began to wonder about some secret entrance somewhere; had they cut a new door in the wall or something?
Wherever they had come from, they were interested in the knife, and he found himself passing it around, like a kid at show-and-tell.
At least this got him introduced to the remaining members of the group; the obese Oriental was Wang Yuan, the aging black woman was Tituba Smith, and the herculean black man was Mr. Rabbitt – no first name was given, and Art found himself without the nerve to ask.
None of them recognized the dagger, leaving him as baffled as ever about its origins.
While Granny Yeager and Dr. Torralva were studying it, Art took the opportunity to remark to Innisfree, “I tried to look up Merton Ambrose at the library, and couldn't find a thing.”
Innisfree's mouth quirked. “I am not surprised,” he said, his accent definitely Scottish for the moment.
“No?”
Innisfree looked sideways at Art for a moment, studying him. “I suppose I should explain, Arthur.”
Art did not reply, but simply looked at Innisfree, his eyebrows raised expectantly.
Innisfree sighed.
“The Bringers of Wonder,” he said, “are perhaps more nearly a philosophical society than a thespian troupe – or at least, they once were. And Merton Ambrose held the post I now hold. The Return of Magic was his masterwork, but it was only printed privately, not published to the general public. Among us, it's recognized as a classic, I would say, but virtually no one else has ever heard of it, and it can't be found in any ordinary town library.”
“Oh,” Art said. “Um. Then do you expect much of a crowd for your performance?”
Innisfree seemed surprised by the question; he eyed Art carefully before answering, “I believe those we wish to see it will come see it, and that will be enough.”
“Boy!” Ms. Yeager shouted before Art could think of another question. “Come take your damned gewgaw and get out of our way, we have work to do!”
“Yes, ma'am,” he said. He collected the dagger and a few apologetic glances from the others, and headed for the stairs.
Chapter Ten
That session was relatively short; Art was called upstairs at seven, and went home for a late dinner. Call for the following day was for six – Art had noticed the trend toward a later and later start, and he entirely approved. Six o'clock meant he ate dinner first, a little early, and arrived at the theater about a quarter to.
The day had not been one of the best he ever had; he had been thinking about driving into Boston, to see if the Boston Public Library had anything about Merton Ambrose, but he had wanted to take Marilyn along for company, and he couldn't find her anywhere.
By the time someone finally told him that she'd gone swimming with Anne and Susan, it was too late to make the trip to Boston by himself. Instead he had spent the afternoon wandering around town, looking at the shops and watching the tourists and sweating in the heat.
At a quarter to six it was still hot outside, and the inside of the theater was sweltering, but the sky had clouded over and he heard thunder rumbling in the distance as he let himself in. No one was in sight anywhere near the theater, inside or out.
He walked up to the box office and turned on the air conditioning; by the time he had crossed the lobby and re-entered the house, the Bringers were all waiting silently for him onstage.
He had actually been expecting that. He accepted without question the mystery of how they all appeared so suddenly and quietly; it had become familiar and contemptible. He waved brusquely to the group as he passed and headed wordlessly for the basement.
There was no point in trying to learn anything about what they were really up to. They weren't going to tell him, and he had other things to do than argue with them. He was in no mood to listen to old Ms. Yeager bitching at him.
He had completed his work on one wall of the prop room the day before; anything that had rotted, rusted, or torn he had pulled out and thrown in the trashcan, and the rest he had sorted out and put away again, using a fat felt-tip marker to label the boxes as clearly as he could.
All the prop guns were in one box, prop swords in another, prop knives in a third – except that that one particular wooden one with the peeling paint had never turned up.
He would have thought that someone had walked off with it, but that would mean that someone else had been down here, and that didn't make sense. No one had been down here while he was here, and the place was locked the rest of the time.
The stupid thing had probably gotten tangled in something and put in the wrong box.
It didn't matter, anyway. He was here because he had to be. It made no difference to him or to anybody else if some moldy old prop was mislaid.
Stepping up onto the steel frame against the stone wall at the outer end of the room, he reached up and pulled an unmarked box off the top shelf.
It was heavier than he expected, and he almost dropped it. Carefully, he held it over his head as he lowered himself to the floor. When he was standing safely on bedrock once again, he lowered the box and opened the flaps.
Junk. Old toys, mostly. He wondered what play they were from.
He reached in and pulled an item out at random, and found himself holding an old Star Wars action figure, a worn and battered storm trooper.
He smiled. He'd gotten one of these when he was a kid, when he was five or six years old and they'd just come out. He'd named it Charlie, Charlie the Stormtrooper, and he and Charlie had fought long wars against invisible Nazis on the floor of his bedroom.
He'd lost Charlie years ago, of course.
This one looked just like Charlie. Of course, all these mass-produced figures looked alike, but this one even seemed to be worn in the same places, had the same crooked angle to its head from getting bashed against the headboard of his bed during a brief period of Nazi success.
A coincidence.
He put the storm trooper aside and reached into the box.
A seashell, a shell the size of his fist – just like one he'd picked up on Cape Cod one summer. His father had told him what kind it was, but he didn't remember; a whelk, maybe? Whatever it was, it was about the most intact shell he'd ever found anywhere on the New England coast.
This one looked just like it.
He held it to his ear and listened in wonder to the roar of the sea – though he knew it was really the echo of his own bloodstream pumping.
He lowered it again and stared at it.
What had happened to that old shell of his, anyway? It had disappeared once when he cleaned his room, and never turned up again.
Strange coincidence, the shell and the stormtrooper both looking so familiar. He reached into the box again.
When his hand came back out, it slowed, and then stopped, his third discovery dangling before him.
It was Bear.
There was absolutely no possibility of a coincidence or a mistake; this was Bear, the ratty, mildewed teddy bear he had adored as a child, and then relinquished in an impromptu ceremony when he started first grade. The left hind foot was torn, and the pink patch his mother had sewn on had never quite covered the tear; the button eyes didn't match exactly because one was a replacement; a narrow wedge of the dark brown plush was pale gray where bleach had been spilled on it once in the laundry room.
It was, beyond any question, his very own Bear.
What the hell was it doing here?
Was this really Charlie, then? And his own lost seashell? He dumped the box out on the floor and began pawing through its
contents.
Several minutes later he sat back, confused and furious.
Everything in the box was something he had lost, something that had once been beloved and magical. Practically everything he had ever loved and had lost was in there. There were a few items he didn't really recognize on a conscious level, but they were old, heavily used baby things, and there could be little doubt that they, too, had once been his. A pacifier still had part of his name on it.
What the hell was all this stuff doing here? Who had put it here? Who had collected it all? How had they collected it all?
It couldn't have anything to do with the Bringers of Wonder; they wouldn't have known about any of this stuff, or been able to find it.
Had one of his parents found and saved all these old things without telling him? Had his father put the box down here for safekeeping, with the idea of hauling it out someday for the sake of nostalgia?
That didn't sound like his dad at all. He was nostalgic enough, maybe, but he'd have kept everything in the house, and he'd have told Art, he wouldn't have kept it a secret.
And whoever it was – what right did they have to muck around with Art's private past?
There were things here he'd have sworn were secret, that no one ever knew he even had – the ragged copy of Bizarre Sex #9 he'd kept hidden behind his bureau when he was ten, the foil-wrapped condom he'd picked up in the parking area on Hilltop Drive when he was thirteen. How had anyone found those?
And why would anyone collect all this stuff so indiscriminately?
It was crazy. It made him nervous.
He dumped everything back in the box, closed the flaps, and started to carry it back to the high shelf – then stopped.
Why should he put it back up there? After all, this was all his stuff. It didn't belong in the theater at all!
He took the box over to the door and set it down. All those lost treasures were going home with him.
So was one other item, he decided. He got the bone-handled knife from the shelf where he'd left it and put it on top of the box.
That settled, he pulled out the next box, a big one.
For a moment, he hesitated before opening it. What if this box held something else weird and mysterious? What if it held more lost things – someone else's, perhaps? Or an entire set of strange cutlery? Or something even more out of place?
Well, what if it did? It wasn't going to jump out and bite him.
He lifted the flaps and found a stack of cardboard imitations of Roman shields, a remnant of a production of Julius Caesar some ten years back. Those went over near the swords, of course.
He found no other oddities that evening.
It was about eleven when Maggie called him. She was waiting at the top of the stairs when he came trudging up, the box of lost treasures under his arm.
“What's that?” she asked.
“Oh, found some things I'd lost,” he replied.
She blinked at him, then smiled broadly.
“Already?” she said.
He stared at her, puzzled and angry, as he mounted the last few steps.
“What do you mean, 'already'?” he demanded. “What do you know about it? Did you have anything to do with this?”
“No, no,” she said, “I didn't mean anything.”
“Then why'd you say it?”
“Just... I don't know. It popped out. I didn't mean anything.” She turned away, toward the stage door.
He glared at her back. So the Bringers were involved after all – but how could they be?
“I've been meaning to ask,” Art said, trying to hide his anger. “Where are you folks all staying, while you're in town? You don't all live around here, do you?”
“Live around here?” Startled, she turned to look at him. “You mean us?”
“Sure, you know, in Concord or Bedford or wherever – I'm pretty sure none of you are from Bampton, are you?”
“Oh, no, none of us are local.” She managed an uneasy little laugh. “We came in from... well, from all over.”
“That's what I thought,” Art said with a nod. “So where are you staying?”
Maggie waved a hand vaguely. “Oh, different places,” she said. “I'm rooming with some distant relatives, third cousins or so.”
“Oh. Anyone I might know?”
“I don't think so.”
“In Bampton?” he persisted.
She hesitated. “I'm not sure,” she said.
That was ridiculous, of course; how could she not know what town they lived in? He glowered at her.
As he glowered, he was trying to figure out just how the Bringers could have known about all those lost things. It seemed clear that they must have local people working with them – but who? And why?
The whole thing was just crazy.
“I need to go shut off the air conditioning,” he said, putting down the box.
“I'll see you tomorrow, then,” Maggie said, smiling. “At seven, this time.”
“But tomorrow's Saturday, you can have all day...” he began. Then he stopped. “Oh,” he said. “Do you mean seven in the morning?”
“No, no – seven p.m. In the evening. Even if it is Saturday.” She opened the stage door and blew him a kiss, and then she was gone.
Chapter Eleven
The Boston Public Library wasn't any more help than the Bampton library, as far as Merton Ambrose and The Return of Magic were concerned, and his car overheated on the drive back. By the time he got home and rushed through a quick meal of leftover chicken it was five past seven.
He wasn't sure whether he expected to find the Bringers of Wonder waiting for him in the parking lot or not; it might be more in character for them to appear mysteriously once he was inside.
In the event, he found Maggie sitting alone on the porch, elbows on her knees, watching the sun set over old man Christie's fields. Christie's aging white gelding, Spanner, was in the nearest field, watching her in that vaguely puzzled way horses have. White birds were circling over her head; as Art approached they swooped away and seemed to vanish, like soap bubbles popping, in the shadows of the theater's eaves.
“Hi,” he called. “Sorry I'm late.”
She turned and smiled. “Hi, Art,” she said.
“Where are the others?”
“Oh, they saw you weren't here and went down the street to get a soda or something.”
He looked up at the sidewalk, but didn't see any sign of anyone else. “I guess they aren't in any hurry,” he said.
“I guess not,” Maggie agreed. “After all, everything's been going so well...”
“Has it?” Art asked, startled.
“Well, yes,” Maggie replied, equally startled by his reaction.
“But it's been almost a week, and you haven't built any of the sets, or hung any lights. Do you have costumes designed, or anything?”
“Well, no...”
“Then what's going well?”
Maggie hesitated before replying. “The performance,” she said at last. “The preparations. I mean, I guess we haven't done much on the... the technical side, but we've got the scripts all set, and I think everyone knows his part, just about.”
“Really?” He glanced up at the red-painted clapboards behind them. “I hadn't heard anyone rehearsing.”
“Have you been listening?”
“Um...” Art realized that for the past few days he had been far too busy in the prop room to pay any attention to noises overhead. For that matter, while one could hear what was happening onstage from the big room, from the prop room events upstairs were pretty inaudible.
“I guess not,” he admitted.
For a moment they stood silently on the little porch; then Maggie suggested, “Let's go on inside; they'll all be along in a minute, and if I'm not here waiting they'll know to come on in.”
“Right.” Art fished the key ring from his pocket and unlocked the stage door.
Inside, with the work lights on, he could see that a second, larger white c
halk circle had been added to the design on the stage, completely surrounding what had been there before.
“What's that?” he asked.
“What? Oh, that,” Maggie said. “That's just so we all know where to stand. See, over there, that red squiggle? That's my place. At the beginning, I mean, when the curtain goes up.”
“Blocking marks,” Art said.
“I guess,” Maggie agreed.
“Sort of funny ones,” Art remarked. “Fancier than usual.”
Maggie just shrugged.
Blocking marks, learning the script – that sounded normal enough. Maybe the group was legitimate after all, and just had some peculiar approaches to their business. Art looked over at the lighting equipment shelves, in the stage left wings. “Still haven't done any lighting work,” he remarked.
“No,” Maggie agreed. “I think we're still working on the staging. I mean, don't we need to know what's going to be where before we light it?”
“Yeah,” Art admitted, “you do. But you haven't started building the set, either – are you going to have a set?”
“The show doesn't call for much of one,” Maggie explained. “It's mostly supposed to take place in a single room, on a single night.”
“Still seems like you'd want to get that done and out of the way,” Art muttered.
Maggie shrugged again.
“What about costumes?” Art asked. “Did you people bring those with you?”
“Some of us,” Maggie admitted. “I haven't got mine yet, though.”
Art nodded.
Maggie was being relatively informative tonight, he thought, and in fact, everything was looking somehow far more normal than it had all week. Blocking marks, learning lines, going out for a drink before getting started, that was all the sort of thing he expected. He found himself feeling generous.
“If you like,” he said, “you can come down and look through the costumes downstairs, see if you find something you like. What sort of part is it?”
Maggie smiled wryly. “Oh, I play a witch,” she said. “Of course.”
Art smiled back. “I'd have expected old Ms. Yeager to play that part.”
“She's the old witch, silly,” Maggie said, grinning. She poked him in the shoulder. “I'm the young witch.”
The Rebirth of Wonder Page 7
