The conversation wandered away from the theater, but Marilyn's question lingered, and that night, as he pulled the first Fresnel off the shelf, Art asked Myrddin, “Do you guys want an audience for this thing?”
“Why do you ask?”
Art shrugged, and one of the shutters on the lighting instrument rattled. “Just curious,” he said.
“Well, as it happens, we need an audience – and we expect to have one,” Myrddin told him.
“Really? You haven't done any advertising, have you?”
Myrddin grinned at him. “I never said the audience would be human,” he replied.
Art decided not to ask any more questions just yet.
He couldn't stop thinking about it, though, as he clamped the lighting instruments in place.
He had decided on a simple design that would reflect the mystic circles that made up much of the play; a ring of Fresnels gelled warm gold and pale pink would flood the center of the stage with light, and an outer ring of licos gelled medium blue would provide background and accent. Specials were set for each upstage corner, for the scenes when characters popped up there unexpectedly. The downstage corners and the outer edges were left dark – they weren't used, and he didn't have the equipment to spare for them.
Never said the audience would be human, Myrddin had said. Art looked down from the catwalk at the Bringers in their places, running through the dialogue. They had never said the audience would be human, but there they were, going through their paces, untroubled by it. He looked at their shadows on the stage and remembered his business.
Real strip lights would have been nice, but the theater didn't have them and he'd never gotten around to making any. If he got lucky, and didn't need a week just to eliminate unwanted shadows, he might still have time to do something about that. For now, though, he expected he would have to resort to the same trick he'd been using for the past ten years, taping unframed gels over the onstage work lights and cutting a dimmer into the circuit.
If not human, then what? What else was there? As he climbed down the stage-left ladder a flare of enchanted flame lit the wall around him, which was no comfort at all.
Back at the equipment shelves he counted the Fresnels. He would have one left over; now, where could he put that to do the most good? He looked out at the stage as the magicians stepped back in simulated surprise at the High Mage's anger.
Myrddin hadn't meant magicians; all the magicians in the world were in the show, not the audience, and besides, they seemed human enough, generally speaking.
They didn't really have a curtain-warmer; that should properly take at least three instruments, and he wasn't going to have any leftover licos, not after he rigged the specials for the corners, but a lone Fresnel with the shutters wide open would be better than nothing, especially if he angled it across. He'd need to think about which side to put it on; the show was just about the most symmetrical he'd ever lit, which didn't help. He slipped out onto the downstage corner to look the situation over, carefully avoiding Baba Yeager as she made her exit.
Here he could look out over the empty house, and wonder what would be in those chairs. Not magicians – what else, then? Magical beings of some sort?
He forced himself back to business. If he hung the Fresnel at stage left, it would partially light the steps at stage right; if he hung it stage right, they'd be in complete darkness. The show didn't use the steps, so ordinarily he wouldn't want to call the audience's attention to them, but this wasn't ordinary. He looked out at the house again.
He didn't know what the audience would be. Gods? Demons? Fairies? Elves? Gryphons, dragons, unicorns? Would they care about the steps? Would the cast want to be able to see the steps in case something went wrong?
Elves, fairies – and there was a door to Faerie downstairs. Was that where the audience would come from? He looked out into the darkness and tried to imagine elves and fairies sitting out there.
Hang it at stage right, he decided. Whatever the audience was, he thought he'd be happier emphasizing their separation from the events onstage.
Separation – an idea stirred somewhere in the back of his mind as he went to the shelves and lifted down the instrument he wanted.
He stood for a long moment with the Fresnel in his hand, looking up at the iron lighting frame mounted to the right side of the proscenium, but the idea wouldn't come clear. Instead, a question came to him.
Why was he doing this?
Why was he hanging these lights when he hadn't yet decided whether he wanted to help out?
If he refused to go along, would they cancel the show, or would they try it without him?
Would just having hung the lights be enough cooperation?
Did he really want to unleash wild new magic on an unsuspecting world? As before, a surge of terror hit him at the thought – and something else underneath it.
Real magic.
Kier Kaye muffed a line and burst out laughing; Yeager called a rude comment, and Dr. Torralva gently reprimanded them both.
They didn't seem worried by the prospect of dying before the year was out – but then, they expected the ritual to work.
Could they be so sure, though? Shouldn't they be more worried than this?
Yeager was still in the stage-left wings; she wouldn't reenter the action for a few minutes yet. With the Fresnel still in his hand, Art ambled over to talk to her.
“Go away, boy,” she told him.
“Ms. Yeager,” he began.
“Pah!” she snapped, followed by something in a language he didn't understand. It sounded like Russian. It also sounded insulting. “If you must talk to me,” she said, reverting to English, “at least use my right name, now that you know who we are, and not that stupid lie they made up for me. It's Yaga, not Yeager – I'm no damned German!”
“I'm sorry,” he said.
“You should be.”
“I wanted to ask, though...”
“Then ask.”
“About this... this performance. What if it doesn't work?”
She turned and stared at him, with yellowed and terrifying eyes. After a moment of silence, a moment in which Myrddin's onstage dialogue could be clearly heard, she snorted.
“If it doesn't work,” she said, “the world will be a sad, drab place, and I won't much mind missing it.”
“Missing it?”
“Well, I'll be dead and gone, won't I, chick? We all will. By Christmas. They told you that, I'm sure – even if that little ninny who calls herself a witch forgot, Myrddin wouldn't miss a chance.”
“You're sure?”
“Are you questioning me?”
“Oh, no!” Art protested. “Nothing like that!”
“Well, then.”
“When you say the world will be sad... how do you mean that? What will change, really?”
Again, she took her time about replying.
“Having second thoughts, are you?” she demanded at last.
Art didn't answer; he didn't even try.
“Well, I'll tell you, I don't know what it'll be like, really, any more than the rest of 'em. I don't suppose it'll be as different as all that – but who knows? You can't use magic to see a world where magic isn't possible. I suppose you people will go on just as you have these last few centuries. You probably won't even miss it.” She grinned, revealing hideous teeth, yellow and sharp. “Or maybe you'll all drop dead, or turn to apes – maybe your minds are all magical. Who knows?”
Art hesitated, trying to think what to ask next, while the old woman was in a reasonably talkative mood, but just then her cue came, and she turned away, returning to the stage.
Art stood for a long moment, holding the Fresnel, then headed out to hang it.
Chapter Eighteen
Four days later, on Friday, Art had the lights hung, aimed, gelled, and shuttered, and he had still not decided whether to go through with the ritual.
He had argued with Marilyn without really knowing why, and had left her on the ver
ge of tears with no clear understanding of what she was upset about.
He had, however, retrieved the idea that had come to him.
The Bringers were supposedly doomed to die because the world would no longer have any magic in it – so why not find them another world?
If they all went through that door in the basement, stepped through into Faerie, and just stayed there when the door disappeared, wouldn't they be safe enough? Faerie wasn't going to vanish when the magic from Arizona died; Faerie must still have magic. How else could it be Faerie?
And the normal, everyday world would still be intact, without any wild magic turned loose. Bampton would still be a quiet little suburb. Art's life could continue undisturbed, and there wouldn't be any worries about New England becoming the next Atlantis.
He wished he had come up with this when he had still been working on focusing lights, using various members of the group as lighting dummies – that would have made conversation convenient and natural. Right at the moment, the Bringers were onstage discussing something among themselves – he couldn't hear what, and although he was now allowed to watch rehearsals, and was accepted as a necessary part of the performance, he was still not a full member of the group.
Not that he particularly wanted to be. He was a techie, not a magician.
Well, sometime soon he and the director would need to sit down together and go over the lighting cues, and he could bring up his idea then.
“Arthur!” Myrddin called, almost as if he had heard Art's thought. Art looked up from the lighting board, startled. “Arthur, lad, come here a moment, would you?”
Puzzled, Art came.
“We've been talking it over, the lot of us,” Myrddin explained. “We've been looking at the lights you've got up there, and we were thinking that it might be nice if we had some sets, as well – I mean, if we're really going to do this up as a play, and not just use that as an excuse, we might as well get it right, eh?”
“But it is a play...”
“Well, I wrote it that way, but that was so we wouldn't have any trouble over it. I wrote it up as a church service, too – if we'd come out with a place where there was a church available instead of a theater, we'd be doing that version.”
“Really?”
“Really. I wrote it half a dozen ways. Now, what do you think about some sets?”
“Well, but, I mean, the sets are all supposed to be in place before the lights go up – I'll have to refocus everything.”
“Will you?”
“Yes!”
Myrddin looked up at the lights, then back at Art. “Well, that'll give you something to do for the next two weeks, then, won't it?”
Art's mouth opened, then snapped shut.
So much for building proper strips. Maybe he could do that this winter, if there wasn't enough snow to keep him busy.
“Anyway,” Myrddin went on, “we wanted to ask your advice. We don't need new sets – Maggie tells us you have old ones in the cellars, same as you have those over there.” He pointed at the leftovers from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which still hadn't been moved to the basement.
“Well, yeah,” Art admitted.
“Splendid! We'll just take a look at them, then, and choose the ones we want...”
“Mr. Innisfree,” Art interrupted desperately, “you don't need to do that.”
“Ah, but we want to, lad! Add a bit of your stage magic to our own, we will – and all the better for making new magic, I'm sure!”
“You don't need new magic, though.”
Myrddin stopped his speech abruptly and stared at Art; so did several of the others.
“What you say there, child?” Tituba Smith demanded.
“Art, that's the whole point,” Maggie called.
“New magic for old, new magic for old!” Granny Yaga chanted, parrotlike, before bursting out in a raucous cackle.
“But you don't,” Art insisted. “If the world loses its magic, you can all still go live in Faerie.”
Myrddin blinked solemnly at Art.
“How are we supposed to get to Faerie?” Morgan asked, her hands on her hips.
“Through the door in the basement,” Art replied, startled by the question.
Morgan glared, first at Art, then around at the others. “Is this true?” she demanded. “Nobody told me about any door in the basement!”
“We didn't?” Maggie said, as startled as Art had been.
“Morgan,” Myrddin said, a hand raised in a calming gesture, “I'm sorry, I admit it, that was my doing. I didn't trust you – you know why. I feared if you knew of the door that you'd leave us, and I don't know if we could succeed without you at this point.”
Morgan glowered at him, and Myrddin faced up to it.
“I'll not flee to the Other Realm,” Rabbitt announced. “This world is my own, and I'll live or die in it.”
Several voices murmured, and worried eyes turned toward Morgan.
“Oh, I'll stay,” Morgan said, “until the spell is cast. Then I'll go back where I belong, where I should have been these past two centuries.”
“I'd prefer Earth, if I have a choice,” Kaye remarked. “But if anything goes wrong, I'd prefer Faerie to death.”
“What's it like in Faerie, now?” Karagöz asked. “Who did you see?”
“No one,” Maggie said. “Just an empty meadow.”
An uneasy silence followed this, broken a moment later when Tituba asked, “You didn't see no one? Not even off in the distance?”
“I thought I saw towers,” Art said. “Beyond the trees. And there were birds. And butterflies.”
“In all my years, I've never heard of anyone entering Faerie without encountering its inhabitants,” said Tanner.
“Maybe it is dead,” Wang suggested. “Maybe their magic ran out even before ours.”
That possibility had not occurred to Art.
“But the door...” he began.
“The door is in our world,” Rabbitt pointed out. “Conjured by the spells we've begun here.”
Art stared at the magicians. His great idea had not resolved his dilemma; instead it had created even more questions.
“We'll have to explore,” Morgan said. When several voices started to protest, she raised a stilling hand and added, “Once the ritual is done, that is.”
“And if the spell fails, perhaps we can slip through before the door fades, as the young man suggested,” Wang pointed out. “That would surely be preferable to certain death.”
That evoked a general chorus of agreement – but Art noticed that Myrddin and a couple of the others didn't join in. He stared at them all hopelessly.
Maybe he had found them a way out – but maybe he hadn't.
And that meant he still didn't know what to do, whether to help them unleash chaos, or to refuse and see what happened.
At least he'd reduced it from eleven murders to a mere gamble with eleven lives. He sighed. He'd tried – and they'd chosen to take the risks.
At that point Myrddin decided the time had come to drag the conversation back to its original track. He said, “Now, about those sets...”
Chapter Nineteen
The stage was a phantasmagorical clutter of mismatched elements, but that didn't seem to trouble any of the Bringers of Wonder at all. A castle wall loomed in the upstage right corner, a flowering hedge upstage left, with an art deco triumphal arch, originally intended for a nightclub set, between them. The chalk circles had been redrawn on a sloping platform originally built for a production of The Roar of the Greasepaint that had been one of the first shows Art had worked on. Roman columns adorned either side of the stage, alternating with Victorian streetlamps, the entire array supporting a glittering mesh, draped in graceful swags in two long arcs, one on either side.
The whole effect was supremely weird – not mystical so much as just plain strange. It resembled an architectural warehouse more than a wizard's laboratory.
For two weeks, Art had been desperately reworking his ligh
ting to suit this new, cluttered stage, and all the while, as he worked, he was trying to decide, trying to think – and trying not to think.
He had not gone near the mysterious black door in the basement again, but some of the others had – Karagöz, Tanner, and Kaye had ventured in, in a cautious little group. Morgan had not accompanied them; everyone agreed that she knew Faerie better than anyone on Earth, but she had declined the invitation to join the exploratory party. She preferred not to risk the temptation she knew she would feel to stay in the Twilight Lands.
Upon their return the explorers reported that magic still worked in Faerie – but differently. They couldn't explain that. And they hadn't yet met any of the inhabitants. Due to the time differential between Earth and Faerie they had not dared venture far, lest they miss the performance – everyone knew that an hour or two in Faerie might easily turn into days or weeks back on Earth.
That left more mysteries, made every guess about the future more difficult.
And other manifestations of the supernatural had arisen to keep Art's attention divided. Something was definitely alive in the pit beneath the basement, for one thing; Art could hear it snuffling and slithering about. Sometimes it thumped against the wooden floor.
It didn't seem particularly annoyed or dangerous, though, and the thumps sounded more like random explorations than an attempt to break out. Art had told the others about it; no one had any idea what it was, and after much debate they had resolved to leave it alone.
Also, there were small glowing things that drifted about in the basement sometimes. Nobody had gotten a good look at one. They came in three colors, red, green, and gold, and they were beautiful. Art often glimpsed them from a distance, or from the corner of his eye, or vanishing around a doorway, and every time he stopped and stared, and every time they were gone before he could see more than a vague impression of colored light, of something small and delicate and graceful moving through the air, glowing brightly.
Art thought they might be fairies – after all, if the land beyond the door was Faerie, why not? Not the lordly fey folk of A Midsummer Night's Dream, of course, but little winged creatures, the sort in Victorian children's books, or Disney's Fantasia. Why not?
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