No Great Magic

by Fritz Leiber

  IV

  ... to dream of new dimensions, Cheating checkmate by painting the king's robe So that he slides like a queen; --Graves

  I swung back to the play just at the moment Lady Mack soliloquizes,"Come to my woman's breasts. And take my milk for gall, you murderingministers." Although I knew it was just folded towel Martin wastouching with his fingertips as he lifted them to the top half of hisgreen bodice, I got carried away, he made it so real. I decided boyscan play girls better than people think. Maybe they should do it alittle more often, and girls play boys too.

  Then Sid-Macbeth came back to his wife from the wars, lookingtriumphant but scared because the murder-idea's started to smoulder inhim, and she got busy fanning the blaze like any other good little_hausfrau_ intent on her husband rising in the company and knowingthat she's the power behind him and that when there are promotionssomeone's always got to get the axe. Sid and Martin made this charminglittle domestic scene so natural yet gutsy too that I wanted to shouthooray. Even Sid clutching Martin to that ridiculous pot-chestedcuirass didn't have one note of horseplay in it. Their bodies spoke.It was the McCoy.

  After that, the play began to get real good, the fast tempo andexaggerated facial expressions actually helping it. By the time theDagger Scene came along I was digging my fingernails into my sweatypalms. Which was a good thing--my eating up the play, I mean--becauseit kept me from looking at the audience again, even taking a fastpeek. As you've gathered, audiences bug me. All those people out therein the shadows, watching the actors in the light, all those silentvoyeurs as Bruce calls them. Why, they might be anything. Andsometimes (to my mind-wavery sorrow) I think they are. Maybe crouchingin the dark out there, hiding among the others, is the one who did thenasty thing to me that tore off the top of my head.

  Anyhow, if I so much as glance at the audience, I begin to get ideasabout it--and sometimes even if I don't, as just at this moment Ithought I heard horses restlessly pawing hard ground and one whinny,though that was shut off fast. _Krishna kressed us!_ I thought,_Skiddy can't have hired horses for Nefer-Elizabeth much as he's acircus man at heart. We don't have that kind of money. Besides_--

  But just then Sid-Macbeth gasped as if he were sucking in a bucket ofair. He'd shed the cuirass, fortunately. He said, "Is this a daggerwhich I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" and the play hookedme again, and I had no time to think about or listen for anythingelse. Most of the offstage actors were on the other side of the stage,as that's where they make their exits and entrances at this point inthe Second Act. I stood alone in the wings, watching the play like abug, frightened only of the horrors Shakespeare had in mind when hewrote it.

  Yes, the play was going great. The Dagger Scene was terrific whereDuncan gets murdered offstage, and so was the part afterwards wherehysteria mounts as the crime's discovered.

  But just at this point I began to catch notes I didn't like. Twicesomeone was late on entrance and came on as if shot from a cannon. Andthree times at least Sid had to throw someone a line when they blewup--in the clutches Sid's better than any prompt book. It began tolook as if the play were getting out of control, maybe because the newtempo was so hot.

  * * * * *

  But they got through the Murder Scene okay. As they came trooping off,yelling "Well contented," most of them on my side for a change, I wentfor Sid with a towel. He always sweats like a pig in the Murder Scene.I mopped his neck and shoved the towel up under his doublet to catchthe dripping armpits.

  Meanwhile he was fumbling around on a narrow table where they layprops and costumes for quick changes. Suddenly he dug his fingers intomy shoulder, enough to catch my attention at this point, meaning I'dshow bruises tomorrow, and yelled at me under his breath, "And youlove me, our crows and robes. Presto!"

  I was off like a flash to the costumery. There were Mr. and Mrs.Mack's king-and-queen robes and stuff hanging and sitting just where Iknew they'd have to be.

  I snatched them up, thinking, _Boy, they made a mistake when theydidn't tell about this special performance_, and I started back likeFlash Two.

  As I shot out the dressing room door the theater was very quiet.There's a short low-pitched scene on stage then, to give the audiencea breather. I heard Miss Nefer say loudly (it had to be loud to get tome from even the front of the audience): "'Tis a good bloody play,Eyes," and some voice I didn't recognize reply a bit grudgingly,"There's meat in it and some poetry too, though rough-wrought." Shewent on, still as loudly as if she owned the theater, "'Twill makeMaster Kyd bite his nails with jealousy--ha, ha!"

  _Ha-ha yourself, you scene-stealing witch_, I thought, as I helped Sidand then Martin on with their royal outer duds. But at the same time Iknew Sid must have written those lines himself to go along with hisprologue. They had the unmistakable rough-wrought Lessingham touch.Did he really expect the audience to make anything of that referenceto Shakespeare's predecessor Thomas Kyd of _The Spanish Tragedy_ andthe lost _Hamlet_? And if they knew enough to spot that, wouldn't theybe bound to realize the whole Elizabeth-Macbeth tie-up wasanachronistic? But when Sid gets an inspiration he can be verybull-headed.

  Just then, while Bruce-Banquo was speaking his broody low soliloquy onstage, Miss Nefer cut in again loudly with, "Aye, Eyes, a good bloodyplay. Yet somehow, methinks--I know not how--I've heard it before."Whereupon Sid grabbed Martin by the wrist and hissed, "Did'st hear?Oh, I like not that," and I thought, _Oh-ho, so now she's beginning toad-lib._

  Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid andMartin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. Butthere were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to bemore uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at theactors to keep off a wavery-fit.

  * * * * *

  Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.

  _Macbeth_'s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone exceptMacbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches--or one of theThree Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or twoof the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there'd been moremultiple-parting than I'd ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncanbeard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with hisnormal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk,pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossibledouble of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for thelatter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor tohide his Banquo beard. He'd be able to tear it off, of course, afterthe Murderers got Banquo and he'd made his brief appearance as abloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, _My God, hasSiddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers toElizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue's gonenuts!_

  But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling andtripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freyaforfend) was becoming a ricketty patchwork illusion with everybodyracing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And thescenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I wasactually shivering by the time Sid got to: "Light thickens; and thecrow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droopand drowse; Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse."Those graveyard lines didn't help my nerves any, of course. Nor didthinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softlyfor her this time, "Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where.Think you 'tiz stolen?"

  _Greta_, I told myself, _you need a miltown before the crow makes wingthrough your kooky head._

  I turned to go and fetch me one from my closet. And stopped dead.

  Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in thegloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned atthat end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was MissNefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.

  Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, _Greta
, you imaginedthat last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer's simply unkinkedherself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. MaybeSid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybeshe just couldn't stand watching Martin give such a bang-upperformance in her part of Lady Mack._

  Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehowall I could think then--and I thought it with a steady mountingshiver--was, _We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. Iknow. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals.But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stageElizabeth ... who's the other?_

  And because I didn't dare to let myself think of the answer to thatquestion, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-coloredskirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I raninto the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York CityScreen.