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 +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | | This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, | | December 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any | | evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication | | was renewed. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+

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[Illustration]

NOGREAT MAGIC

by FRITZ LEIBER

ILLUSTRATEDBY NODEL

 The troupers of the Big Time lack no art to sway a crowd-- or to change all history!

 I

 To bring the dead to life Is no great magic. Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers And a live flame will start. --Graves

I dipped through the filmy curtain into the boys' half of the dressingroom and there was Sid sitting at the star's dressing table in histhreadbare yellowed undershirt, the lucky one, not making up yet butstaring sternly at himself in the bulb-framed mirror andexperimentally working his features a little, as actors will, andkneading the stubble on his fat chin. 

I said to him quietly, "Siddy, what are we putting on tonight? MaxwellAnderson's _Elizabeth the Queen_ or Shakespeare's _Macbeth_? It says_Macbeth_ on the callboard, but Miss Nefer's getting ready forElizabeth. She just had me go and fetch the red wig. "

He tried out a few eyebrow rears--right, left, both together--thenturned to me, sucking in his big gut a little, as he always does whena gal heaves into hailing distance, and said, "Your pardon, sweetling, what sayest thou?"

Sid always uses that kook antique patter backstage, until I sometimeswonder whether I'm in Central Park, New York City, nineteen hundredand three quarters, or somewhere in Southwark, Merry England, fifteenhundred and same. The truth is that although he loves every last fatpart in Shakespeare and will play the skinniest one with loyal andinspired affection, he thinks Willy S. Penned Falstaff with nobodyelse in mind but Sidney J. Lessingham. (And no accent on the ham, please. )

I closed my eyes and counted to eight, then repeated my question. 

He replied, "Why, the Bard's tragical history of the bloody Scot, certes. " He waved his hand toward the portrait of Shakespeare thatalways sits beside his mirror on top of his reserve makeup box. Atfirst that particular picture of the Bard looked too nancy to me--asort of peeping-tom schoolteacher--but I've grown used to it over themonths and even palsy-feeling. 

He didn't ask me why I hadn't asked Miss Nefer my question. Everybodyin the company knows she spends the hour before curtain-time gettinginto character, never parting her lips except for that purpose--or tobite your head off if you try to make the most necessary conversation. 

"Aye, 'tiz _Macbeth_ tonight, " Sid confirmed, returning to hisfrowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. "And I must play the ill-starred Thane of Glamis. "

I said, "That's fine, Siddy, but where does it leave us with MissNefer? She's already thinned her eyebrows and beaked out the top ofher nose for Queen Liz, though that's as far as she's got. A beautifuljob, the nose. Anybody else would think it was plastic surgery insteadof putty. But it's going to look kind of funny on the Thaness ofGlamis. "

 * * * * *

Sid hesitated a half second longer than he usually would--I thought, _his timing's off tonight_--and then he harrumphed and said, "Why, Iris Nefer, decked out as Good Queen Bess, will speak a prologue tothe play--a prologue which I have myself but last week writ. " He owledhis eyes. "'Tis an experiment in the new theater. "

I said, "Siddy, prologues were nothing new to Shakespeare. He had themon half his other plays. Besides, it doesn't make sense to use QueenElizabeth. She was dead by the time he whipped up _Macbeth_, which isall about witchcraft and directed at King James. "

He growled a little at me and demanded, "Prithee, how comes it yourpeewit-brain bears such a ballast of fusty book-knowledge, chit?"

I said softly, "Siddy, you don't camp in a Shakespearean dressing roomfor a year, tete-a-teting with some of the wisest actors ever, withoutlearning a little. Sure I'm a mental case, a poor little A & Aexisting on your sweet charity, and don't think I don't appreciate it, but--"

"A-_and_-A, thou sayest?" he frowned. "Methinks the gladsome newforswearers of sack and ale call themselves AA. "

"Agoraphobe and Amnesiac, " I told him. "But look, Siddy, I was goingto sayest that I do know the plays. Having Queen Elizabeth speak aprologue to _Macbeth_ is as much an anachronism as if you put her onthe gantry of the British moonship, busting a bottle of champagne overits schnozzle. "

"Ha!" he cried as if he'd caught me out. "And saying there's a newElizabeth, wouldn't that be the bravest advertisement ever for theEmpire?--perchance rechristening the pilot, copilot and astrogatorDrake, Hawkins and Raleigh? And the ship _The Golden Hind_? Tillyfally, lady!"

He went on, "My prologue an anachronism, quotha! The groundlings willnever mark it. Think'st thou wisdom came to mankind with the stenchfulrocket and the sundered atomy? More, the Bard himself was topfull ofanachronism. He put spectacles on King Lear, had clocks tolling thehour in Caesar's Rome, buried that Roman 'stead o' burning him andgave Czechoslovakia a seacoast. Go to, doll. "

"Czechoslovakia, Siddy?"

"Bohemia, then, what skills it? Leave me now, sweet poppet. Go thyways. I have matters of import to ponder. There's more to running arepertory company than reading the footnotes to Furness. "

 * * * * *

Martin had just slouched by calling the Half Hour and looking in hissolemnity, sneakers, levis and dirty T-shirt more like an underagerefugee from Skid Row than Sid's newest recruit, assistant stagemanager and hardest-worked juvenile--though for once he'd rememberedto shave. I was about to ask Sid who was going to play Lady Mack ifMiss Nefer wasn't, or, if she were going to double the roles, shouldn't I help her with the change? She's a slow dresser and theElizabeth costumes are pretty realistically stayed. And she would havetrouble getting off that nose, I was sure. But then I saw that Siddywas already slapping on the alboline to keep the grease paint fromgetting into his pores. 

_Greta, you ask too many questions_, I told myself. _You get everybodyriled up and you rack your own poor ricketty little mind_; and I hiedmyself off to the costumery to settle my nerves. 

The costumery, which occupies the back end of the dressing room, isexactly the right place to settle the nerves and warm the fancies ofany child, including an unraveled adult who's saving what's left ofher sanity by pretending to be one. To begin with there are theregular costumes for Shakespeare's plays, all jeweled and spangledand brocaded, stage armor, great Roman togas with weights in theborders to make them drape right, velvets of every color to rest yourcheek against and dream, and the fantastic costumes for the otherplays we favor; Ibsen's _Peer Gynt_, Shaw's _Back to Methuselah_ andHilliard's adaptation of Heinlein's _Children of Methuselah_, theCapek brothers' _Insect People_, O'Neill's _The Fountain_, Flecker's_Hassan_, _Camino Real_, _Children of the Moon_, _The Beggar's Opera_, _Mary of Scotland_, _Berkeley Square_, _The Road to Rome_. 

There are also the costumes for all the special and varietyperformances we give of the plays: _Hamlet_ in modern dress, _JuliusCaesar_ set in a dictatorship of the 1920's, _The Taming of the Shrew_in caveman furs and leopard skins, where Petruchio comes in riding adinosaur, _The Tempest_ set on another planet with a spaceship wreckto start it off _Karrumph!_--which means a half dozen spacesuits, featherweight but looking ever so practical, and the weirdest sort ofextraterrestrial-beast outfits for Ariel and Caliban and the othermonsters. 

Oh, I tell you the stuff in the costumery ranges over such a sweep ofspace and time that you sometimes get frightened you'll be whirled upand spun off just anywhere, so that you have to clutch at somethingvery real to you to keep it from happening and to remind you where you_really_ are--as I did now at the subway token on the thin gold chainaround my neck (Siddy's first gift to me that I can remember) andchanted very softly to myself, like a charm or a prayer, closing myeyes and squeezing the holes in the token: "Columbus Circle, TimesSquare, Penn Station, Christopher Street. .. . "

 * * * * *

But you don't ever get _really_ frightened in the costumery. Notexactly, though your goosehairs get wonderfully realistically tingledand your tummy chilled from time to time--because you know it's allmake-believe, a lifesize doll world, a children's dress-up world. Itgets you thinking of far-off times and scenes as _pleasant_ places andnot as black hungry mouths that might gobble you up and keep youforever. It's always safe, always _just in the theatre, just on thestage_, no matter how far it seems to plunge and roam . .. And the bestsort of therapy for a pot-holed mind like mine, with as many gray rutsand curves and gaps as its cerebrum, that can't remember one singlething before this last year in the dressing room and that can't everpush its shaking body out of that same motherly fatherly room, exceptto stand in the wings for a scene or two and watch the play until thefear gets too great and the urge to take just one peek at _theaudience_ gets too strong . .. And I remember what happened the twotimes I _did_ peek, and I have to come scuttling back. 

The costumery's good occupational therapy for me, too, as my prickedand calloused fingertips testify. I think I must have stitched up ordarned half the costumes in it this last twelvemonth, though there areso many of them that I swear the drawers have accordion pleats and theracks extend into the fourth dimension--not to mention the boxes ofprops and the shelves of scripts and prompt-copies and other books, including a couple of encyclopedias and the many thick volumes ofFurness's _Variorum Shakespeare_, which as Sid had guessed I'd beenboning up on. Oh, and I've sponged and pressed enough costumes, too, and even refitted them to newcomers like Martin, ripping up andresewing seams, which can be a punishing job with heavy materials. 

In a less sloppily organized company I'd be called wardrobe mistress, I guess. Except that to anyone in show business that suggests acrotchety old dame with lots of authority and scissors hanging aroundher neck on a string. Although I got my crochets, all right, I'm notthat old. Kind of childish, in fact. As for authority, everybodyoutranks me, even Martin. 

Of course to somebody _outside_ show business, wardrobe mistress mightsuggest a yummy gal who spends her time dressing up as Nell Gwyn orAnitra or Mrs. Pinchwife or Cleopatra or even Eve (we got a legalcostume for it) and inspiring the boys. I've tried that once or twice. But Siddy frowns on it, and if Miss Nefer ever caught me at it I thinkshe'd whang me. 

And in a normaller company it would be the wardrobe room, too, butcostumery is my infantile name for it and the actors go along with mylittle whims. 

I don't mean to suggest our company is completely crackers. To get asclose to Broadway even as Central Park you got to have something. Butin spite of Sid's whip-cracking there is a comforting looseness aboutits efficiency--people trade around the parts they play without fuss, the bill may be changed a half hour before curtain without anybodygetting hysterics, nobody gets fired for eating garlic and breathingit in the leading lady's face. In short, we're a team. Which is funnywhen you come to think of it, as Sid and Miss Nefer and Bruce andMaudie are British (Miss Nefer with a touch of Eurasian blood, Iromance); Martin and Beau and me are American (at least I _think_ Iam) while the rest come from just everywhere. 

 * * * * *

Besides my costumery work, I fetch things and run inside errands andhelp the actresses dress and the actors too. The dressing room's verycoeducational in a halfway respectable way. And every once in a whileMartin and I police up the whole place, me skittering about withdustcloth and wastebasket, he wielding the scrub-brush and mop withsuch silent grim efficiency that it always makes me nervous to getthrough and duck back into the costumery to collect myself. 

Yes, the costumery's a great place to quiet your nerves or improveyour mind or even dream your life away. But this time I couldn't havebeen there eight minutes when Miss Nefer's Elizabeth-angry voice cameskirling, "Girl! Girl! Greta, where is my ruff with silver trim?" Ilaid my hands on it in a flash and loped it to her, because Old QueenLiz was known to slap even her Maids of Honor around a bit now andthen and Miss Nefer is a bear on getting into character--a real PaulMuni. 

She was all made up now, I was happy to note, at least as far as herface went--I hate to see that spooky eight-spoked faint tattoo on herforehead (I've sometimes wondered if she got it acting in India orEgypt maybe). 

Yes, she was already all made up. This time she'd been going extraheavy on the burrowing-into-character bit, I could tell right away, even if it was only for a hacked-out anachronistic prologue. Shesigned to me to help her dress without even looking at me, but as Igot busy I looked at _her_ eyes. They were so cold and sad and lonely(maybe because they were so far away from her eyebrows and temples andsmall tight mouth, and so shut away from each other by that ridge ofnose) that I got the creeps. Then she began to murmur and sigh, verysoftly at first, then loudly enough so I got the sense of it. 

"Cold, so cold, " she said, still seeing things far away though herhands were working smoothly with mine. "Even a gallop hardly fires myblood. Never was such a Januarius, though there's no snow. Snow willnot come, or tears. Yet my brain burns with the thought of Mary'sdeath-warrant unsigned. There's my particular hell!--to doom, perchance, all future queens, or leave a hole for the Spaniard and thePope to creep like old worms back into the sweet apple of England. Philip's tall black crooked ships massing like sea-going fortressessouth-away--cragged castles set to march into the waves. Parma in theLowlands! And all the while my bright young idiot gentlemen spurtingout my treasure as if it were so much water, as if gold pieces were aglut of summer posies. Oh, alackanight!"

And I thought, _Cry Iced!--that's sure going to be one tyrannosaur ofa prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beatsme. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'dbetter give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some day whenyour nerves heal. _

 * * * * *

She was really getting to me, you see, with that characterization. Itwas as if I'd managed to go out and take a walk and sat down in thepark outside and heard the President talking to himself about thechances of war with Russia and realized he'd sat down on a bench withits back to mine and only a bush between. You see, here we were, twofemales undignifiedly twisted together, at the moment getting her intothat crazy crouch-deep bodice that's like a big icecream cone, and yethere at the same time was Queen Elizabeth the First of England, threehundred and umpty-ump years dead, coming back to life in a CentralPark dressing room. It shook me. 

She looked so much the part, you see--even without the red wig yet, just powdered pale makeup going back to a quarter of an inch from herown short dark bang combed and netted back tight. The age too. MissNefer can't be a day over forty--well, forty-two at most--but now shelooked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least adozen years older. I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character shedoes it with each molecule. 

That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her aquestion. Probably I was figuring that she couldn't do me much damagebecause of the positions we happened to be in at the moment. You see, I'd started to lace her up and to do it right I had my knee againstthe tail of her spine. 

"How old, I mean how young might your majesty be?" I asked her, innocently wonderingly like some dumb serving wench. 

For a wonder she didn't somehow swing around and clout me, but onlysettled into character a little more deeply. 

"Fifty-four winters, " she replied dismally. "'Tiz Januarius of OurLord's year One Thousand and Five Hundred and Eighty and Seven. I sitcold in Greenwich, staring at the table where Mary's death warrantwaits only my sign manual. If I send her to the block, I open thedoors to future, less official regicides. But if I doom her not, Philip's armada will come inching up the Channel in a season, puffingsmoke and shot, and my English Catholics, thinking only of MaryRegina, will rise and i' the end the Spaniard will have all. Allhistory would alter. That must not be, even if I'm damned for it! Andyet . .. And yet. .. . "

A bright blue fly came buzzing along (the dressing room has _some_insect life) and slowly circled her head rather close, but she didn'teven flicker her eyelids. 

"I sit cold in Greenwich, going mad. Each afternoon I ride, prayingfor some mischance, some prodigy, to wash from my mind away the bloodyquestion for some little space. It skills not what: a fire, a treea-failing, Davison or e'en Eyes Leicester tumbled with his horse, anassassin's ball clipping the cold twigs by my ear, a maid cryingrape, a wild boar charging with dipping tusks, news of the Spaniard atThames' mouth or, more happily, a band of strolling actors settingforth some new comedy to charm the fancy or some great unheard-oftragedy to tear the heart--though that were somewhat much to hope forat this season and place, even if Southwark be close by. "

 * * * * *

The lacing was done. I stood back from her, and really she looked somuch like Elizabeth painted by Gheeraerts or on the Great Seal ofIreland or something--though the ash-colored plush dress trimmed insilver and the little silver-edge ruff and the black-silvertinsel-cloth cloak lined with white plush hanging behind her lookedmost like a winter riding costume--and her face was such a pale frozenmask of Elizabeth's inward tortures, that I told myself, _Oh, I got totalk to Siddy again, he's made some big mistake, the lardy oldlackwit. Miss Nefer just can't be figuring on playing in Macbethtonight. _

As a matter of fact I was nerving myself to ask _her_ all about itdirect, though it was going to take some real nerve and maybe berisking broken bones or at least a flayed cheek to break the ice ofthat characterization, when who should come by calling the FifteenMinutes but Martin. He looked so downright goofy that it took my mindoff Nefer-in-character for all of eight seconds. 

His levied bottom half still looked like _The Lower Depths_. Martin isVillage Stanislavsky rather than Ye Olde English Stage Traditions. Butabove that . .. Well, all it really amounted to was that he wasstripped to the waist and had shaved off the small high tuft of chesthair and was wearing a black wig that hung down in front of hisshoulders in two big braids heavy with silver hoops and pins. But justthe same those simple things, along with his tarpaper-solarium tan andhabitual poker expression, made him look so like an American Indianthat I thought, _Hey Zeus!--he's all set to play Hiawatha, or if he'djust cover up that straight-line chest, a frowny Pocahontas. _ And Iquick ran through what plays with Indian parts we do and could onlycome up with _The Fountain_. 

I mutely goggled my question at him, wiggling my hands like guppyfins, but he brushed me off with a solemn mysterious smile and backedthrough the curtain. I thought, _nobody can explain this but Siddy_, and I followed Martin. 

 II

 History does not move in one current, like the wind across bare seas, but in a thousand streams and eddies, like the wind over a broken landscape. --Cary

The boys' half of the dressing room (two-thirds really) was bustling. There was the smell of spirit gum and Max Factor and just plain men. Several guys were getting dressed or un-, and Bruce was cussingBloody-something because he'd just burnt his fingers unwinding fromthe neck of a hot electric bulb some crepe hair he'd wound there todry after wetting and stretching it to turn it from crinkly tostraight for his Banquo beard. Bruce is always getting to the theaterlate and trying shortcuts. 

But I had eyes only for Sid. So help me, as soon as I saw him theybugged again. _Greta_, I told myself, _you're going to have to sendMartin out to the drugstore for some anti-bug powder. _ "_For theroaches, boy?_" "_No, for the eyes. _"

Sid was made up and had his long mustaches and elf-locked Macbeth wigon--and his corset too. I could tell by the way his waist was suckedin before he saw me. But instead of dark kilts and that bronze-studdedsweat-stained leather battle harness that lets him show off his beefyshoulders and the top half of his heavily furred chest--and whichreally does look great on Macbeth in the first act when he comes instraight from battle--but instead of that he was wearing, so help me, red tights cross-gartered with strips of gold-blue tinsel-cloth, agreen doublet gold-trimmed and to top it a ruff, and he was trying tofit onto his front a bright silvered cuirass that would have lookedjust dandy maybe on one of the Pope's Swiss Guards. 

I thought, _Siddy, Willy S. Ought to reach out of his portrait thereand bop you one on the koko for contemplating such a crazy-quiltdesecration of just about his greatest and certainly his mostatmospheric play. _

Just then he noticed me and hissed accusingly, "There thou art, slothyminx! Spring to and help stuff me into this monstrous chest-kettle. "

"Siddy, what _is_ all this?" I demanded as my hands automaticallyobeyed. "Are you going to play _Macbeth_ for laughs, except maybeleaving the Porter a serious character? You think you're Red Skelton?"

[Illustration]

"What monstrous brabble is this, you mad bitch?" he retorted, gruntingas I bear-hugged his waist, shouldering the cuirass to squeeze ithome. 

"The clown costumes on all you men, " I told him, for now I'd noticedthat the others were in rainbow hues, Bruce a real eye-buster inyellow tights and violet doublet as he furiously bushed out andclipped crosswise sections of beard and slapped them on his chingleaming brown with spirit gum. "I haven't seen any eight-inchpolka-dots yet but I'm sure I will. "

Suddenly a big grin split Siddy's face and he laughed out loud at me, though the laugh changed to a gasp as I strapped in the cuirass threenotches too tight. When we'd got that adjusted he said, "I' faith thouslayest me, pretty witling. Did I not tell you this production is anexperiment, a novelty? We shall but show _Macbeth_ as it might havebeen costumed at the court of King James. In the clothes of the day, but gaudier, as was then the stage fashion. Hold, dove, I've somewhatfor thee. " He fumbled his grouch bag from under his doublet and dippedfinger and thumb in it, and put in my palm a silver model of theEmpire State Building, charm bracelet size, and one of the newKennedy dimes. 

 * * * * *

As I squeezed those two and gloated my eyes on them, feeling securerand happier and friendlier for them though I didn't at the moment wantto, I thought, _Well, Siddy's right about that, at least I've readthey used to costume the plays that way, though I don't see howShakespeare stood it. But it was dirty of them all not to tell mebeforehand. _

But that's the way it is. Sometimes I'm the butt as well as the pet ofthe dressing room, and considering all the breaks I get I shouldn'tmind. I smiled at Sid and went on tiptoes and necked out my head andkissed him on a powdery cheek just above an aromatic mustache. Then Iwiped the smile off my face and said, "Okay, Siddy, play Macbeth asLittle Lord Fauntleroy or Baby Snooks if you want to. I'll neversqueak again. But the Elizabeth prologue's still an anachronism. And--this is the thing I came to tell you, Siddy--Miss Nefer's notgetting ready for any measly prologue. She's set to play QueenElizabeth all night and tomorrow morning too. Whatever you think, shedoesn't know we're doing _Macbeth_. But who'll do Lady Mack if shedoesn't? And Martin's not dressing for Malcolm, but for the Son ofthe Last of the Mohicans, I'd say. What's more--"

You know, something I said must have annoyed Sid, for he changed hismood again in a flash. "Shut your jaw, you crook brained cat, andbegone!" he snarled at me. "Here's curtain time close upon us, and youcome like a wittol scattering your mad questions like the crazedOphelia her flowers. Begone, I say!"

"Yessir, " I whipped out softly. I skittered off toward the door to thestage, because that was the easiest direction. I figured I could dowith a breath of less grease-painty air. Then, "Oh, Greta, " I heardMartin call nicely. 

He'd changed his levis for black tights, and was stepping into andpulling up around him a very familiar dress, dark green andembroidered with silver and stage-rubies. He'd safety-pinned a foldedtowel around his chest--to make a bosom of sorts, I realized. 

He armed into the sleeves and turned his back to me. "Hook me up, would you?" he entreated. 

Then it hit me. They had no actresses in Shakespeare's day, they usedboys. And the dark green dress was so familiar to me because--

"Martin, " I said, halfway up the hooks and working fast--Miss Nefer'scostume fitted him fine. "You're going to play--?"

"Lady Macbeth, yes, " he finished for me. "Wish me courage, will youGreta? Nobody else seems to think I need it. "

 * * * * *

I punched him half-heartedly in the rear. Then, as I fastened the lasthooks, my eyes topped his shoulder and I looked at our faces side byside in the mirror of his dressing table. His, in spite of the femaleedging and him being at least eight years younger than me, I think, looked wise, poised, infinitely resourceful with power in reserve, very very real, while mine looked like that of a bewildered andcharacterless child ghost about to scatter into air--and the edges ofmy charcoal sweater and skirt, contrasting with his strong colors, didn't dispel that last illusion. 

"Oh, by the way, Greta, " he said, "I picked up a copy of _The VillageTimes_ for you. There's a thumbnail review of our _Measure forMeasure_, though it mentions no names, darn it. It's around heresomewhere. .. . "

But I was already hurrying on. Oh, it was logical enough to haveMartin playing Mrs. Macbeth in a production styled to Shakespeare'sown times (though pedantically over-authentic, I'd have thought) andit really did answer all my questions, even why Miss Nefer could sinkherself wholly in Elizabeth tonight if she wanted to. But it meantthat I must be missing so much of what was going on right around me, in spite of spending 24 hours a day in the dressing room, or at mostin the small adjoining john or in the wings of the stage just outsidethe dressing room door, that it scared me. Siddy telling everybody, "_Macbeth_ tonight in Elizabethan costume, boys and girls, " sure, thatI could have missed--though you'd have thought he'd have asked my helpon the costumes. 

But Martin getting up in Mrs. Mack. Why, someone must have held thepart on him twenty-eight times, cueing him, while he got the lines. And there must have been at least a couple of run-through rehearsalsto make sure he had all the business and stage movements down pat, andSid and Martin would have been doing their big scenes every backstageminute they could spare with Sid yelling, "Witling! Think'st _that's_a wifely buss?" and Martin would have been droning his lines last timehe scrubbed and mopped. .. . 

_Greta, they're hiding things from you_, I told myself. 

Maybe there was a 25th hour nobody had told me about yet when they didall the things they didn't tell me about. 

Maybe they were things they didn't dare tell me because of mytop-storey weakness. 

I felt a cold draft and shivered and I realized I was at the door tothe stage. 

I should explain that our stage is rather an unusual one, in that itcan face two ways, with the drops and set pieces and lighting allcapable of being switched around completely. To your left, as you lookout the dressing-room door, is an open-air theater, or rather anopen-air place for the audience--a large upward-sloping glade walledby thick tall trees and with benches for over two thousand people. Onthat side the stage kind of merges into the grass and can be made tolook part of it by a green groundcloth. 

To your right is a big roofed auditorium with the same number ofseats. 

The whole thing grew out of the free summer Shakespeare performancesin Central Park that they started back in the 1950's. 

The Janus-stage idea is that in nice weather you can have the audienceoutdoors, but if it rains or there's a cold snap, or if you want toplay all winter without a single break, as we've been doing, then youcan put your audience in the auditorium. In that case, a bigaccordion-pleated wall shuts off the out of doors and keeps the windfrom blowing your backdrop, which is on that side, of course, when theauditorium's in use. 

Tonight the stage was set up to face the outdoors, although that draftfelt mighty chilly. 

I hesitated, as I always do at the door to the stage--though it wasn'tthe actual stage lying just ahead of me, but only backstage, thewings. You see, I always have to fight the feeling that if I go outthe dressing room door, go out just eight steps, the world will changewhile I'm out there and I'll never be able to get back. It won't beNew York City any more, but Chicago or Mars or Algiers or Atlanta, Georgia, or Atlantis or Hell and I'll never be able to get back tothat lovely warm womb with all the jolly boys and girls and all thecostumes smelling like autumn leaves. 

Or, especially when there's a cold breeze blowing, I'm afraid that_I'll_ change, that I'll grow wrinkled and old in eight footsteps, orshrink down to the witless blob of a baby, or forget altogether who Iam--

--or, it occurred to me for the first time now, _remember_ who I am. Which might be even worse. 

Maybe that's what I'm afraid of. 

I took a step back. I noticed something new just beside the door: ahigh-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were thoseof a table. The piano was just a box with yellowed keys. Spinet?Harpsichord?

"Five minutes, everybody, " Martin quietly called out behind me. 

I took hold of myself. Greta, I told myself--also for the first time, _you know that some day you're really going to have to face thisthing, and not just for a quick dip out and back either. Better get insome practice. _

I stepped through the door. 

 * * * * *

Beau and Doc were already out there, made up and in costume for Rossand King Duncan. They were discreetly peering past the wings at thegathering audience. Or at the place where the audience ought to begathering, at any rate--sometimes the movies and girlie shows andbrainheavy beatnik bruhahas outdraw us altogether. Their costumes werethe same kooky colorful ones as the others'. Doc had a mock-erminerobe and a huge gilt papier-mache crown. Beau was carrying a raggedblack robe and hood over his left arm--he doubles the First Witch. 

As I came up behind them, making no noise in my black sneakers, Iheard Beau say, "I see some rude fellows from the City approaching. Iwas hoping we wouldn't get any of those. How should they scent usout?"

_Brother_, I thought, _where do you expect them to come from if notthe City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Islandand on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronxboys have got pretty sharp scenters. And what's it get you insultingthe woiking and non-woiking people of the woild's greatest metropolis?Be grateful for any audience you get, boy. _

But I suppose Beau Lassiter considers anybody from north of Vicksburga "rude fellow" and is always waiting for the day when the entireaudience will arrive in carriage and democrat wagons. 

Doc replied, holding down his white beard and heavy on the mongrelRusso-German accent he miraculously manages to suppress on stageexcept when "Vot does it matter? Ve don't convinze zem, ve don'tconvinze nobody. _Nichevo. _"

_Maybe_, I thought, _Doc shares my doubts about making Macbethplausible in rainbow pants. _

Still unobserved by them, I looked between their shoulders and got thefirst of my shocks. 

It wasn't night at all, but afternoon. A dark cold lowering afternoon, admittedly. But afternoon all the same. 

Sure, between shows I sometimes forget whether it's day or night, living inside like I do. But getting matinees and evening performancesmixed is something else again. 

It also seemed to me, although Beau was leaning in now and I couldn'tsee so well, that the glade was smaller than it should be, the treescloser to us and more irregular, and I couldn't see the benches. Thatwas Shock Two. 

Beau said anxiously, glancing at his wrist, "I wonder what's holdingup the Queen?"

Although I was busy keeping up nerve-pressure against the shocks, Imanaged to think. _So he knows about Siddy's stupid Queen Elizabethprologue too. But of course he would. It's only me they keep in thedark. If he's so smart he ought to remember that Miss Nefer is alwaysthe last person on stage, even when she opens the play. _

And then I thought I heard, through the trees, the distant drummingof horses' hoofs and the sound of a horn. 

 * * * * *

Now they do have horseback riding in Central Park and you can hearauto horns there, but the hoofbeats don't drum that wild way. Andthere aren't so many riding together. And no auto horn I ever heardgave out with that sweet yet imperious _ta-ta-ta-TA_. 

I must have squeaked or something, because Beau and Doc turned aroundquickly, blocking my view, their expressions half angry, half anxious. 

I turned too and ran for the dressing room, for I could feel one of mymind-wavery fits coming on. At the last second it had seemed to methat the scenery was getting skimpier, hardly more than thin trees andbushes itself, and underfoot feeling more like ground than a groundcloth, and overhead not theater roof but gray sky. _Shock Three andyou're out, Greta_, my umpire was calling. 

I made it through the dressing room door and nothing there waswavering or dissolving, praised be Pan. Just Martin standing with hisback to me, alert, alive, poised like a cat inside that green dress, the prompt book in his right hand with a finger in it, and from hisleft hand long black tatters swinging--telling me he'd still bedoubling Second Witch. And he was hissing, "Places, please, everybody. On stage!"

With a sweep of silver and ash-colored plush, Miss Nefer came pasthim, for once leading the last-minute hurry to the stage. She had onthe dark red wig now. For me that crowned her characterization. Itmade me remember her saying, "My brain burns. " I ducked aside as ifshe were majesty incarnate. 

And then she didn't break her own precedent. She stopped at the newthing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers overthe yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: avirginals. 

She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning anenchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I toldmyself, the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths ofBallard and Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say shedidn't) one of his raids, that long long forefinger tracing crookedcourses through a crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling atthe dots of cities that would burn. 

Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings insidethe virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering ofGrieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King. "

Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a blackswooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, Ibeat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing acrossthe mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wantedto make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he'd seereality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronismof that menacing mad march music was shrilling in my ears. 

 III

 Sound a dumbe shew. Enter the three fatall sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a pair of sheeres. --Old Play

My sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls' thirdof the dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private. 

When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pastedand thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives mesecurity: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the_Times_ and the _Mirror_, a torn-out picture of the United Nationsbuilding with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, andhanging in an old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by WillyMays. Things like that. 

Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep melocated and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with myknees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines fromthe play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks andtables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listento them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtonesby their crooked trip. But they're always tense-making. And tonight (Imean this afternoon)--no!

It's funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren't goout into--no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though Iknow it from the Pond to Harlem Meer--the Met Museum, the Menagerie, the Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra's Needle and all the rest. Butthat's the way it is. Maybe I'm like Jonah in the whale, reluctant togo outside because the whale's a terrible monster that's awful scaryto look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a secondtime, yet reassured to know you're living in the stomach of thatparticular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifthplanet of Aldebaran. 

It's really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressingroom. The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders anddoughnuts in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts andhamburgers and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me rawvegetables--carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, andwatches to make sure I exercise my molars grinding them and get myvitamins. I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don't seemto think actors ever take baths, even when they've browned themselvesall over playing Pindarus the Parthian in _Julius Caesar_. And all myshut-eye is caught on this little cot in the twilight of my NYCscreen. 

 * * * * *

You'd think I'd be terrified being alone in the dressing room duringthe wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but thatisn't the way it works out. For one thing, there's apt to be someonesleeping in too. Maudie especially. And it's my favorite time too forcostume-mending and reading the _Variorum_ and other books, and forjust plain way-out dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the oneplace I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York thatterrorizes me, I'm pretty confident that it can never get in here. 

Besides that, there's a great big bolt on the inside of the dressingroom door that I throw whenever I'm all alone after the show. Next daythey buzz for me to open it. 

It worried me a bit at first and I had asked Sid, "But what if I'm sodeep asleep I don't hear and you have to get in fast?" and he hadreplied, "Sweetling, a word in your ear: our own Beauregard Lassiteris the prettiest picklock unjailed since Jimmy Valentine and JimmyDale. I'll not ask where he learned his trade, but 'tis sober truth, upon my honor. "

And Beau had confirmed this with a courtly bow, murmuring, "At yourservice, Miss Greta. "

"How do you jigger a big iron bolt through a three-inch door that fitslike Maudie's tights?" I wanted to know. 

"He carries lodestones of great power and divers subtle tools, " Sidhad explained for him. 

I don't know how they work it so that some Traverse-Three cop or parkofficial doesn't find out about me and raise a stink. Maybe Sid justthrows a little more of the temperament he uses to keep mostoutsiders out of the dressing-room. We sure don't get any janitors orscrubwomen, as Martin and I know only too well. More likely he squaressomeone. I do get the impression all the company's gone a little wayout on a limb letting me stay here--that the directors of our theaterwouldn't like it if they found out about me. 

In fact, the actors are all so good about helping me and putting upwith my antics (though they have their own, Danu digs!) that Isometimes think I must be related to one of them--a distant cousin orsister-in-law (or wife, my God!), because I've checked our faces sideby side in the mirrors often enough and I can't find any strikingfamily resemblances. Or maybe I was even an actress in the company. The least important one. Playing the tiniest roles like Lucius in_Caesar_ and Bianca in _Othello_ and one of the little princes in_Dick the Three Eyes_ and Fleance and the Gentlewoman in _Macbeth_, though me doing even that much acting strikes me to laugh. 

But whatever I am in that direction--if I'm anything--not one of theactors has told me a word about it or dropped the least hint. Not evenwhen I beg them to tell me or try to trick them into it, presumablybecause it might revive the shock that gave me agoraphobia and amnesiain the first place, and maybe this time knock out my entire mind or atleast smash the new mouse-in-a-hole consciousness I've made formyself. 

 * * * * *

I guess they must have got by themselves a year ago and talked me overand decided my best chance for cure or for just bumping along halfhappily was staying in the dressing room rather than being sent home(funny, could I have another?) or to a mental hospital. And then theymust have been cocky enough about their amateur psychiatry andinterested enough in me (the White Horse knows why) to go ahead with aprogram almost any psychiatrist would be bound to yike at. 

I got so worried about the set up once and about the risks they mightbe running that, gritting down my dread of the idea, I said to Sid, "Siddy, shouldn't I see a doctor?"

He looked at me solemnly for a couple of seconds and then said, "Sure, why not? Go talk to Doc right now, " tipping a thumb toward DocPyeskov, who was just sneaking back into the bottom of his makeup boxwhat looked like a half pint from the flask I got. I did, incidentally. Doc explained to me Kraepelin's classification of thepsychoses, muttering, as he absentmindedly fondled my wrist, that in ayear or two he'd be a good illustration of Korsakov's Syndrome. 

They've all been pretty darn good to me in their kooky ways, theactors have. Not one of them has tried to take advantage of mysituation to extort anything out of me, beyond asking me to sew on abutton or polish some boots or at worst clean the wash bowl. Not oneof the boys has made a pass I didn't at least seem to invite. And whenmy crush on Sid was at its worst he shouldered me off by gettingpolite--something he only is to strangers. On the rebound I hit Beau, who treated me like a real Southern gentleman. 

All this for a stupid little waif, whom anyone but a gang ofsentimental actors would have sent to Bellevue without a secondthought or feeling. For, to get disgustingly realistic, my mostplausible theory of me is that I'm a stage-struck girl from Iowa whosaw her twenties slipping away and her sanity too, and made the dashto Greenwich Village, and went so ape on Shakespeare after seeing herfirst performance in Central Park that she kept going back there nightafter night (Christopher Street, Penn Station, Times Square, ColumbusCircle--see?) and hung around the stage door, so mousy butopen-mouthed that the actors made a pet of her. 

And then something very nasty happened to her, either down at theVillage or in a dark corner of the Park. Something so nasty that itblew the top of her head right off. And she ran to the only people andplace where she felt she could ever again feel safe. And she showedthem the top of her head with its singed hair and its jagged ring ofskull and they took pity. 

My least plausible theory of me, but the one I like the most, is thatI was born in the dressing room, cradled in the top of a flattheatrical trunk with my ears full of Shakespeare's lines before Iever said "Mama, " let alone lamped a TV; hush-walked when I cried bywhoever was off stage, old props my first toys, trying to eat crepehair my first indiscretion, sticks of grease-paint my first crayons. You know, I really wouldn't be bothered by crazy fears about New Yorkchanging and the dressing room shifting around in space and time, if Icould be sure I'd always be able to stay in it and that the same sweetguys and gals would always be with me and that the shows would alwaysgo on. 

 * * * * *

This show was sure going on, it suddenly hit me, for I'd let myfingers slip off my ears as I sentimentalized and wish-dreamed and Iheard, muted by the length and stuff of the dressing room, the slowbeat of a drum and then a drum note in Maudie's voice taking up thatbeat as she warned the other two witches, "A drum, a drum! Macbethdoth come. "

Why, I'd not only missed Sid's history-making-and-breaking QueenElizabeth prologue (kicking myself that I had, now it was over), I'dalso missed the short witch scene with its famous "Fair is foul andfoul is fair, " the Bloody Sergeant scene where Duncan hears aboutMacbeth's victory, and we were well into the second witch scene, theone on the blasted heath where Macbeth gets it predicted to him he'llbe king after Duncan and is tempted to speculate about hurrying up theprocess. 

I sat up. I did hesitate a minute then, my fingers going back towardmy ears, because _Macbeth_ is specially tense-making and when I've hadone of my mind-wavery fits I feel weak for a while and things areblurry and uncertain. Maybe I'd better take a couple of thebarbiturate sleeping pills Maudie manages to get for me and--but _No, Greta_, I told myself, _you want to watch this show, you want to seehow they do in those crazy costumes. You especially want to see howMartin makes out. He'd never forgive you if you didn't. _

So I walked to the other end of the empty dressing room, moving quiteslowly and touching the edges here and there, the words of the playgetting louder all the time. By the time I got to the doorBruce-Banquo was saying to the witches, "If you can look into theseeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which willnot, "--those lines that stir anyone's imagination with their veiledvision of the universe. 

The overall lighting was a little dim (afternoon fading already?--a_late_ matinee?) and the stage lights flickery and the scenery still alittle spectral-flimsy. Oh, my mind-wavery fits can be lulus! But Iconcentrated on the actors, watching them through the entrance-gaps inthe wings. They were solid enough. 

Giving a solid performance, too, as I decided after watching thatscene through and the one after it where Duncan congratulates Macbeth, with never a pause between the two scenes in true Elizabethan style. Nobody was laughing at the colorful costumes. After a while I began toaccept them myself. 

Oh, it was a different _Macbeth_ than our company usually does. Louderand faster, with shorter pauses between speeches, the blank verse attimes approaching a chant. But it had a lot of real guts and everybodywas just throwing themselves into it, Sid especially. 

 * * * * *

The first Lady Macbeth scene came. Without exactly realizing it Imoved forward to where I'd been when I got my three shocks. Martin isso intent on his career and making good that he has me the same wayabout it. 

The Thaness started off, as she always does, toward the opposite sideof the stage and facing a little away from me. Then she moved a stepand looked down at the stage-parchment letter in her hands and beganto read it, though there was nothing on it but scribble, and my heartsank because the voice I heard was Miss Nefer's. I thought (and almostsaid out loud) _Oh, dammit, he funked out, or Sid decided at the lastminute he couldn't trust him with the part. Whoever got Miss Nefer outof the ice cream cone in time?_

Then she swung around and I saw that no, my God, it _was_ Martin, nomistaking. He'd been using her voice. When a person first does a part, especially getting up in it without much rehearsing, he's bound tocopy the actor he's been hearing doing it. And as I listened on, Irealized it was fundamentally Martin's own voice pitched a triflehigh, only some of the intonations and rhythms were Miss Nefer's. Hewas showing a lot of feeling and intensity too and real Martin-typepoise. _You're off to a great start, kid_, I cheered inwardly. _Keepit up!_

Just then I looked toward the audience. Once again I almost squeakedout loud. For out there, close to the stage, in the very middle of thereserve section, was a carpet spread out. And sitting in the middle ofit on some sort of little chair, with what looked like two charcoalbraziers smoking to either side of her, was Miss Nefer with a stringof extras in Elizabethan hats with cloaks pulled around them. 

For a second it really threw me because it reminded me of the thingsI'd seen or thought I'd seen the couple of times I'd sneaked a peekthrough the curtain-hole at the audience in the indoor auditorium. 

It hardly threw me for more than a second, though, because Iremembered that the characters who speak Shakespeare's prologues oftenstay on stage and sometimes kind of join the audience and evencomment on the play from time to time--Christopher Sly and attendantlords in _The Shrew_, for one. Sid had just copied and in his usualstyle laid it on thick. 

_Well, bully for you, Siddy_, I thought, _I'm sure the witless NewYork groundlings will be thrilled to their cold little toes knowingthey're sitting in the same audience as Good Queen Liz and attendantcourtiers. And as for you, Miss Nefer_, I added a shade invidiously, _you just keep on sitting cold in Central Park, warmed by dry-icesmoke from braziers, and keep your mouth shut and everything'll befine. I'm sincerely glad you'll be able to be Queen Elizabeth allnight long. Just so long as you don't try to steal the scene fromMartin and the rest of the cast, and the real play. _

_I suppose that camp chair will get a little uncomfortable by the timethe Fifth Act comes tramping along to that drumbeat, but I'm sureyou're so much in character you'll never feel it. _

_One thing though: just don't scare me again pretending to workwitchcraft--with a virginals or any other way. _

_Okay?_

_Swell. _

_Me, now, I'm going to watch the play. _

 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. 

 V

 Even little things are turning out to be great things and becoming intensely interesting. Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers? --The Maiden

Lying on my cot, my eyes crosswise to the printing, I looked from apink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tinydoll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread. Really they weren't covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole aninch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if myeye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I'd seen thetwo times I'd dared a peek through the hole in the curtain: a bevy ofladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charlesknee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch ofpeople and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes, humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from theirforeheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two andin one case that many heads--as if they were dressed up in our_Tempest_, _Peer Gynt_ and _Insect People_ costumes and some morebesides. 

Naturally I'd had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid hadwagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we'd beengiving performances for people who'd arranged a costume theater-partyand been going to attend a masquerade ball, and 'zounds, when would Ilearn to guard my half-patched pate?

_I don't know, I guess never_, I answered now, quick looking at aGiants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willy Maysbaseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I'd lookedat this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren'treassuring me at all. 

The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it, "What are you looking for? A spider?" when what should I hear comingback through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet butMiss Nefer's footsteps. No one else walks that way. 

_She's going to do something to you, Greta_, I thought. _She's themaniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with theboning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you atthe dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and theothers are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile andweave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And BirnamWood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men inarmor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or tornapart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon withoutbeing dressed for it or sent burrowing into the past to stifle in Iowa1948 or Egypt 4, 008 B. C. The screen won't keep her out. _

 * * * * *

Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it wasblack-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martinwas giving me one of his rare smiles. 

I said, "Marty, do something for me. Don't ever use Miss Nefer'sfootsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not thefootsteps. Don't ask me why, just don't. "

Martin came around and sat on the foot of my cot. My legs were alreadydoubled up. He straightened out his blue-and-gold skirt and rested ahand on my black sneakers. 

[Illustration]

"Feeling a little wonky, Greta?" he asked. "Don't worry about me. Banquo's dead and so's his ghost. We've finished the Banquet Scene. I've got lots of time. "

I just looked at him, queerly I guess. Then without lifting my head Iasked him, "Martin, tell me the truth. Does the dressing room movearound?"

I was talking so low that he hitched a little closer, not touching meanywhere else though. 

"The Earth's whipping around the sun at 20 miles a second, " hereplied, "and the dressing room goes with it. "

I shook my head, my cheek scrubbing the pillow, "I mean . .. Shifting, "I said. "By itself. "

"How?" he asked. 

"Well, " I told him, "I've had this idea--it's just a sort of fancy, remember--that if you wanted to time-travel and, well, do things, youcould hardly pick a more practical machine than a dressing room andsort of stage and half-theater attached, with actors to man it. Actorscan fit in anywhere. They're used to learning new parts and wearingstrange costumes. Heck, they're even used to traveling a lot. And ifan actor's a bit strange nobody thinks anything of it--he's almostexpected to be foreign, it's an asset to him. "

"And a theater, well, a theater can spring up almost anywhere andnobody ask questions, except the zoning authorities and such and theycan always be squared. Theaters come and go. It happens all the time. They're transitory. Yet theaters are crossroads, anonymous meetingplaces, anybody with a few bucks or sometimes nothing at all can go. And theaters attract important people, the sort of people you mightwant to do something to. Caesar was stabbed in a theater. Lincoln wasshot in one. And. .. . "

My voice trailed off. "A cute idea, " he commented. 

I reached down to his hand on my shoe and took hold of his middlefinger as a baby might. 

"Yeah, " I said, "But Martin, is it true?"

He asked me gravely, "What do you think?"

I didn't say anything. 

"How would you like to work in a company like that?" he askedspeculatively. 

"I don't really know, " I said. 

 * * * * *

He sat up straighter and his voice got brisk. "Well, all fantasyaside, how'd you like to work in this company?" He asked, lightlyslapping my ankle. "On the stage, I mean. Sid thinks you're ready forsome of the smaller parts. In fact, he asked me to put it to you. Hethinks you never take him seriously. "

"Pardon me while I gasp and glow, " I said. Then, "Oh Marty, I can'treally imagine myself doing the tiniest part. "

"Me neither, eight months ago, " he said. "Now, look. Lady Macbeth. "

"But Marty, " I said, reaching for his finger again, "you haven'tanswered my question. About whether it's true. "

"Oh that!" he said with a laugh, switching his hand to the other side. "Ask me something else. "

"Okay, " I said, "why am I bugged on the number eight? Because I'mpermanently behind a private 8-ball?"

"Eight's a number with many properties, " he said, suddenly as intentlyserious as he usually is. "The corners of a cube. "

"You mean I'm a square?" I said. "Or just a brick? You know, 'She's abrick. '"

"But eight's most curious property, " he continued with a frown, "isthat lying on its side it signifies infinity. So eight erect isreally--" and suddenly his made-up, naturally solemn face got a greatglow of inspiration and devotion--"Infinity Arisen!"

Well, I don't know. You meet quite a few people in the theater whoare bats on numerology, they use it to pick stage-names. But I'd neverhave guessed it of Martin. He always struck me as the skeptical, cynical type. 

"I had another idea about eight, " I said hesitatingly. "Spiders. That8-legged asterisk on Miss Nefer's forehead--" I suppressed a shudder. 

"You don't like her, do you?" he stated. 

"I'm afraid of her, " I said. 

"You shouldn't be. She's a very great woman and tonight she's playingan infinitely more difficult part than I am. No, Greta, " he went on asI started to protest, "believe me, you don't understand anything aboutit at this moment. Just as you don't understand about spiders, fearingthem. They're the first to climb the rigging and to climb ashore too. They're the web-weavers, the line-throwers, the connectors, Siva andKali united in love. They're the double mandala, the beginning and theend, infinity mustered and on the march--"

"They're also on my New York screen!" I squeaked, shrinking backacross the cot a little and pointing at a tiny glintingsilver-and-black thing mounting below my Willy-ball. 

Martin gently caught its line on his finger and lifted it very closeto his face. "Eight eyes too, " he told me. Then, "Poor little god, " hesaid and put it back. 

"Marty? Marty?" Sid's desperate stage-whisper rasped the length of thedressing room. 

Martin stood up. "Yes, Sid?"

Sid's voice stayed a whisper but went from desperate to ferocious. "You villainous elf-skin! Know you not the Cauldron Scene's beenplaying a hundred heartbeats? 'Tis 'most my entrance and we stillmustering only two witches out of three! Oh, you nott-patedstarveling!"

Before Sid had got much more than half of that out, Martin had slippedaround the screen, raced the length of the dressing room, and I'dheard a lusty thwack as he went out the door. I couldn't helpgrinning, though with Martin racked by anxieties and reliefs over hisfirst time as Lady Mack, it was easy to understand it slipping hismind that he was still doubling Second Witch. 

 VI

 I will vault credit and affect high pleasures Beyond death. --Ferdinand

I sat down where Martin had been, first pushing the screen far enoughto the side for me to see the length of the dressing room and noticeanyone coming through the door and any blurs moving behind the thinwhite curtain shutting off the boys' two-thirds. 

I'd been going to think. But instead I just sat there, experiencing mybody and the room around it, steadying myself or maybe readyingmyself. I couldn't tell which, but it was nothing to think about, onlyto feel. My heartbeat became a very faint, slow, solid throb. My spinestraightened. 

No one came in or went out. Distantly I heard Macbeth and the witchesand the apparitions talk. 

Once I looked at the New York Screen, but all the stuff there hadgrown stale. No protection, no nothing. 

I reached down to my suitcase and from where I'd been going to get amiltown I took a dexedrine and popped it in my mouth. Then I startedout, beginning to shake. 

When I got to the end of the curtain I went around it to Sid'sdressing table and asked Shakespeare, "Am I doing the right thing, Pop?" But he didn't answer me out of his portrait. He just lookedsneaky-innocent, like he knew a lot but wouldn't tell, and I foundmyself think of a little silver-framed photo Sid had used to keepthere too of a cocky German-looking young actor with "Erich"autographed across it in white ink. At least I supposed he was anactor. He looked a little like Erich von Stroheim, but nicer yetsomehow nastier too. The photo had used to upset me, I don't know why. Sid must have noticed it, for one day it was gone. 

I thought of the tiny black-and-silver spider crawling across theremembered silver frame, and for some reason it gave me the coldcreeps. 

Well, this wasn't doing me any good, just making me feel dismal again, so I quickly went out. In the door I had to slip around the actorscoming back from the Cauldron Scene and the big bolt nicked my hip. 

Outside Maud was peeling off her Third Witch stuff to reveal LadyMacduff beneath. She twitched me a grin. 

"How's it going?" I asked. 

"Okay, I guess, " she shrugged. "What an audience! Noisy as highschoolkids. "

"How come Sid didn't have a boy do your part?" I asked. 

"He goofed, I guess. But I've battened down my bosoms and playing Mrs. Macduff as a boy. "

"How does a girl do that in a dress?" I asked. 

"She sits stiff and thinks pants, " she said, handing me her witchrobe. "'Scuse me now. I got to find my children and go get murdered. "

 * * * * *

I'd moved a few steps nearer the stage when I felt the gentlest tug atmy hip. I looked down and saw that a taut black thread from the bottomof my sweater connected me with the dressing room. It must havesnagged on the big bolt and unraveled. I moved my body an inch or so, tugging it delicately to see what it felt like and I got the answers:Theseus's clew, a spider's line, an umbilicus. 

I reached down close to my side and snapped it with my fingernails. The black thread leaped away. But the dressing room door didn'tvanish, or the wings change, or the world end, and I didn't fall down. 

After that I just stood there for quite a while, feeling my newfreedom and steadiness, letting my body get used to it. I didn't doany thinking. I hardly bothered to study anything around me, though Idid notice that there were more bushes and trees than set pieces, andthat the flickery lightning was simply torches and that QueenElizabeth was in (or back in) the audience. Sometimes letting yourbody get used to something is all you should do, or maybe can do. 

And I did smell horse dung. 

When the Lady Macduff Scene was over and the Chicken Scene well begun, I went back to the dressing room. Actors call it the Chicken Scenebecause Macduff weeps in it about "all my pretty chickens and theirdam, " meaning his kids and wife, being murdered "at one fell swoop" onorders of that chickenyard-raiding "hell-kite" Macbeth. 

Inside the dressing room I steered down the boys' side. Doc wasputting on an improbable-looking dark makeup for Macbeth's lastfaithful servant Seyton. He didn't seem as boozy-woozy as usual forFourth Act, but just the same I stopped to help him get into achain-mail shirt made of thick cord woven and silvered. 

In the third chair beyond, Sid was sitting back with his corsetloosened and critically surveying Martin, who'd now changed to a whitewool nightgown that clung and draped beautifully, but not particularlyenticingly, on him and his folded towel, which had slipped a bit. 

From beside Sid's mirror, Shakespeare smiled out of his portrait atthem like an intelligent big-headed bug. 

Martin stood tall, spread his arms rather like a high priest, andintoned, "_Amici! Romani! Populares!_"

I nudged Doc. "What goes on now?" I whispered. 

He turned a bleary eye on them. "I think they are rehearsing _JuliusCaesar_ in Latin. " He shrugged. "It begins the oration of Antony. "

"But why?" I asked. Sid does like to put every moment to use when theperformance-fire is in people, but this project seemed pretty farafield--hyper-pedantic. Yet at the same time I felt my scalp shiveringas if my mind were jumping with speculations just below the surface. 

Doc shook his head and shrugged again. 

Sid shoved a palm at Martin and roared softly, "'Sdeath, boy, thou'rtnot playing a Roman statua but a Roman! Loosen your knees and tryagain. "

Then he saw me. Signing Martin to stop, he called, "Come hither, sweetling. " I obeyed quickly. He gave me a fiendish grin and said, "Thou'st heard our proposal from Martin. What sayest thou, wench?"

 * * * * *

This time the shiver was in my back. It felt good. I realized I wasgrinning back at him, and I knew what I'd been getting ready for thelast twenty minutes. 

"I'm on, " I said. "Count me in the company. "

Sid jumped up and grabbed me by the shoulders and hair and bussed meon both cheeks. It was a little like being bombed. 

"Prodigious!" he cried. "Thou'lt play the Gentlewoman in theSleepwalking Scene tonight. Martin, her costume! Now sweet wench, markme well. " His voice grew grave and old. "When was it she last walked?"

The new courage went out of me like water down a chute. "But Siddy, Ican't start _tonight_, " I protested, half pleading, half outraged. 

"Tonight or never! 'Tis an emergency--we're short-handed. " Again hisvoice changed. "When was it she last walked?"

"But Siddy, I don't _know_ the part. "

"You must. You've heard the play twenty times this year past. When wasit she last walked?"

Martin was back and yanking down a blonde wig on my head and shovingmy arms into a light gray robe. 

"I've never studied _the lines_, " I squeaked at Sidney. 

"Liar! I've watched your lips move a dozen nights when you watched thescene from the wings. Close your eyes, girl! Martin, unhand her. Closeyour eyes, girl, empty your mind, and listen, listen only. When was itshe last walked?"

In the blackness I heard myself replying to that cue, first in awhisper, then more loudly, then full-throated but grave, "Since hismajesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throwher nightgown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth--"

"Bravissimo!" Siddy cried and bombed me again. Martin hugged his armaround my shoulders too, then quickly stooped to start hooking up myrobe from the bottom. 

"But that's only the first lines, Siddy, " I protested. 

"They're enough!"

"But Siddy, what if I blow up?" I asked. 

"Keep your mind empty. You won't. Further, I'll be at your side, doubling the Doctor, to prompt you if you pause. "

_That ought to take care of two of me_, I thought. Then something elsestruck me. "But Siddy, " I quavered, "how do I play the Gentlewoman asa boy?"

"Boy?" he demanded wonderingly. "Play her without falling down flat onyour face and I'll be past measure happy!" And he smacked me hard onthe fanny. 

Martin's fingers were darting at the next to the last hook. I stoppedhim and shoved my hand down the neck of my sweater and got hold of thesubway token and the chain it was on and yanked. It burned my neckbut the gold links parted. I started to throw it across the room, butinstead I smiled at Siddy and dropped it in his palm. 

"The Sleepwalking Scene!" Maud hissed insistently to us from the door. 

 VII

 I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits, and 'tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges, You may open them both ways. --The Duchess

There is this about an actor on stage: he can see the audience but hecan't _look_ at them, unless he's a narrator or some sort of comic. Iwasn't the first (Grendel groks!) and only scared to death of becomingthe second as Siddy walked me out of the wings onto the stage, overthe groundcloth that felt so much like ground, with a sort ofinterweaving policeman-grip on my left arm. 

Sid was in a dark gray robe looking like some dismal kind of monk, hishead so hooded for the Doctor that you couldn't see his face at all. 

My skull was pulse-buzzing. My throat was squeezed dry. My heart waspounding. Below that my body was empty, squirmy, electricity-stung, yet with the feeling of wearing ice cold iron pants. 

I heard as if from two million miles, "When was it she last walked?"and then an iron bell somewhere tolling the reply--I guess it had tobe my voice coming up through my body from my iron pants: "Since hismajesty went into the field--" and so on, until Martin had come onstage, stary-eyed, a white scarf tossed over the back of his longblack wig and a flaring candle two inches thick gripped in his righthand and dripping wax on his wrist, and started to do Lady Mack'ssleepwalking half-hinted confessions of the murders of Duncan andBanquo and Lady Macduff. 

So here is what I saw then without looking, like a vivid scene thatfloats out in front of your mind in a reverie, hovering against abackground of dark blur, and sort of flashes on and off as you think, or in my case act. All the time, remember, with Sid's hand hard on mywrist and me now and then tolling Shakespearan language out of somelightless storehouse of memory I'd never known was there to belong tome. 

 * * * * *

There was a medium-size glade in a forest. Through the half-nakedblack branches shone a dark cold sky, like ashes of silver, earlyevening. 

The glade had two horns, as it were, narrowing back to either side andgoing off through the forest. A chilly breeze was blowing out of them, almost enough to put out the candle. Its flame rippled. 

Rather far back in the horn to my left, but not very far, were clumpedtwo dozen or so men in dark cloaks they huddled around themselves. They wore brimmed tallish hats and pale stuff showing at their necks. Somehow I assumed that these men must be the "rude fellows from theCity" I remembered Beau mentioning a million or so years ago. AlthoughI couldn't see them very well, and didn't spend much time on them, there was one of them who had his hat off or excitedly pushed wayback, showing a big pale forehead. Although that was all the consciousimpression I had of his face, he seemed frighteningly familiar. 

In the horn to my right, which was wider, were lined up about a dozenhorses, with grooms holding tight every two of them, but throwingtheir heads back now and then as they strained against the reins, andstamping their front hooves restlessly. Oh, they frightened me, Itell you, that line of two-foot-long glossy-haired faces, writhingback their upper lips from teeth wide as piano keys, every horse ofthem looking as wild-eyed and evil as Fuseli's steed sticking its headthrough the drapes in his picture "The Nightmare. "

To the center the trees came close to the stage. Just in front of themwas Queen Elizabeth sitting on the chair on the spread carpet, just asI'd seen her out there before; only now I could see that the brazierswere glowing and redly high-lighting her pale cheeks and dark red hairand the silver in her dress and cloak. She was looking at Martin--LadyMack--most intently, her mouth grimaced tight, twisting her fingerstogether. 

Standing rather close around her were a half dozen men with fancierhats and ruffs and wide-flaring riding gauntlets. 

Then, through the trees and tall leafless bushes just behindElizabeth, I saw an identical Elizabeth-face floating, only this onewas smiling a demonic smile. The eyes were open very wide. Now andthen the pupils darted rapid glances from side to side. 

 * * * * *

There was a sharp pain in my left wrist and Sid whisper-snarling atme, "Accustomed action!" out of the corner of his shadowed mouth. 

I tolled on obediently, "It is an accustomed action with her, to seemthus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter ofan hour. "

Martin had set down the candle, which still flared and guttered, on alittle high table so firm its thin legs must have been stabbed intothe ground. And he was rubbing his hands together slowly, continually, tormentedly, trying to get rid of Duncan's blood which Mrs. Mack knowsin her sleep is still there. And all the while as he did it, theagitation of the seated Elizabeth grew, the eyes flicking from side toside, hands writhing. 

He got to the lines, "Here's the smell of blood still: all theperfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!"

As he wrung out those soft, tortured sighs, Elizabeth stood up fromher chair and took a step forward. The courtiers moved toward herquickly, but not touching her, and she said loudly, "Tis the blood ofMary Stuart whereof she speaks--the pails of blood that will gush fromher chopped neck. Oh, I cannot endure it!" And as she said that last, she suddenly turned about and strode back toward the trees, kickingout her ash-colored skirt. One of the courtiers turned with her andstooped toward her closely, whispering something. But although shepaused a moment, all she said was, "Nay, Eyes, stop not the play, butfollow me not! Nay, I say leave me, Leicester!" And she walked intothe trees, he looking after her. 

Then Sid was kicking my ankle and I was reciting something and Martinwas taking up his candle again without looking at it saying with adrugged agitation, "To bed; to bed; there's knocking at the gate. "

Elizabeth came walking out of the trees again, her head bowed. Shecouldn't have been in them ten seconds. Leicester hurried toward her, hand anxiously outstretched. 

Martin moved offstage, torturedly yet softly wailing, "What's donecannot be undone. "

Just then Elizabeth flicked aside Leicester's hand with playfulcontempt and looked up and she was smiling the devil-smile. A horsewhinnied like a trumpeted snicker. 

As Sid and I started our last few lines together I intonedmechanically, letting words free-fall from my mind to my tongue. Allthis time I had been answering Lady Mack in my thoughts, _That's whatyou think, sister. _

 VIII

 God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been. It is more impossible than rising the dead. --Summa Theologica

The moment I was out of sight of the audience I broke away from Sidand ran to the dressing room. I flopped down on the first chair I saw, my head and arms trailed over its back, and I almost passed out. Itwasn't a mind-wavery fit. Just normal faint. 

I couldn't have been there long--well, not very long, though thebattle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily fromthe stage--when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin's usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stage-armorand carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martincame after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast thatbuttons flew. I thought automatically, _I'll have to sew those. _

They laid her down on three chairs set side by side and hurried out. Unpinning the folded towel, which had fallen around his waist, Martinwalked over and looked down at her. He yanked off his wig by a braidand tossed it at me. 

I let it hit me and fall on the floor. I was looking at that whitequeenly face, eyes open and staring sightless at the ceiling, mouthopen a little too with a thread of foam trailing from the corner, andat that ice-cream-cone bodice that never stirred. The blue fly camebuzzing over my head and circled down toward her face. 

"Martin, " I said with difficulty, "I don't think I'm going to likewhat we're doing. "

He turned on me, his short hair elfed, his fists planted high on hiships at the edge of his black tights, which now were all his clothes. 

"You knew!" he said impatiently. "You knew you were signing up formore than acting when you said, 'Count me in the company. '"

Like a legged sapphire the blue fly walked across her upper lip andstopped by the thread of foam. 

"But Martin . .. Changing the past . .. Dipping back and killing thereal queen . .. Replacing her with a double--"

His dark brows shot up. "The real--You think this is the real QueenElizabeth?" He grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the nearesttable, gushed some on a towel stained with grease-paint and, holdingthe dead head by its red hair (no, wig--the real one wore a wig too)scrubbed the forehead. 

The white cosmetic came away, showing sallow skin and on it a fainttattoo in the form of an "S" styled like a yin-yang symbol left alittle open. 

 * * * * *

"Snake!" he hissed. "Destroyer! The arch-enemy, the eternal opponent!God knows how many times people like Queen Elizabeth have been dug outof the past, first by Snakes, then by Spiders, and kidnapped or killedand replaced in the course of our war. This is the first big operationI've been on, Greta. But I know that much. "

My head began to ache. I asked, "If she's an enemy double, why didn'tshe know a performance of Macbeth in her lifetime was an anachronism?"

"Foxholed in the past, only trying to hold a position, they getdulled. They turn half zombie. Even the Snakes. Even our people. Besides, she almost did catch on, twice when she spoke to Leicester. "

"Martin, " I said dully, "if there've been all these replacements, first by them, then by us, what's happened to the _real_ Elizabeth?"

He shrugged. "God knows. "

I asked softly, "But does He, Martin? Can He?"

He hugged his shoulders in, as if to contain a shudder. "Look, Greta, "he said, "it's the Snakes who are the warpers and destroyers. We'rerestoring the past. The Spiders are trying to keep things as firstcreated. We only kill when we must. "

_I_ shuddered then, for bursting out of my memory came the glittering, knife-flashing, night-shrouded, bloody image of my lover, the Spidersoldier-of-change Erich von Hohenwald, dying in the grip of a giantsilver spider, or spider-shaped entity large as he, as they rolled ina tangled ball down a flight of rocks in Central Park. 

But the memory-burst didn't blow up my mind, as it had done a yearago, no more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had endedthe world. I asked Martin, "Is that what the Snakes say?"

"Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta, you have to _trust_. " He put out the middle finger of his hand. 

I didn't take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against histhumb. 

"You're still grieving for that carrion there!" he accused me. Hejerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over thestiffening body. "If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly inthe black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursingone lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Onlyto make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that allthe other consequences flow on. The Snakes' Elizabeth let Mary live. .. And England die . .. And the Spaniard hold North America to theGreat Lakes and New Scandinavia. "

Once more he put out his middle finger. 

 * * * * *

"All right, all right, " I said, barely touching it. "You've convincedme. "

"Great!" he said. "'By for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set. "

"That's good, " I said. He loped out. 

I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to thedeath of the two Macks, Duff and Beth. But I only sat there in theempty dressing room pretending to grieve for a devil-smiling snowtiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German killed forinsubordination that _I_ had reported . .. But really grieving for agirl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater with awhole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more thansubway bogies and Park and Village monsters. 

As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fellacross my knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young manin worn dark clothes. He couldn't have been more than twenty-three. Hewas a frail sort of guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyesthat saw everything. I knew at one he was the one who had seemedfamiliar to me in the knot of City fellows. 

He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on thereserve makeup box by Siddy's mirror. And I began to tremble. 

He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began totremble too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine. 

The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witchesfaintly wailing, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair--" Sid has them echothat line offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled. 

Then Sid came pounding up. He's the first finished, since the fightends offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache headof him and show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door. 

Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid. He moved toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at thesame time in breathy little rushes. 

 * * * * *

Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling upbehind him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so noneof them could get past. Their faces peered around him. 

And all this while the stranger was saying, "What may this mean? Cansuch things be? Are all the seeds of time . .. Wetted by somehell-trickle . .. Sprouted at once in their granary? Speak . .. Speak!You played me a play . .. That I am writing in my secretest heart. Haveyou disjointed the frame of things . .. To steal my unborn thoughts?Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world a stage? Speak, I say! Are younot my friend Sidney James Lessingham of King's Lynn . .. Singed bytime's fiery wand . .. Sifted over with the ashes of thirty years?Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth. .. Aye, and perchance hell too . .. Speak, I charge you!"

And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him, I think, but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time Iever saw it, glib old Siddy had nothing to say. 

He worked his lips. He opened his mouth twice and twice shut it. Then, with a kind of desperation in his face, he motioned the actors out ofthe way behind him with one big arm and swung the other around thestranger's narrow shoulders and swept him out of the dressing room, himself following. 

The actors came pouring in then, Bruce tossing Macbeth's head toMartin like a football while he tugged off his horned helmet, Markdumping a stack of shields in the corner, Maudie pausing as sheskittered past me to say, "Hi Gret, great you're back, " and patting mytemple to show what part of me she meant. Beau went straight to Sid'sdressing table and set the portrait aside and lifted out Sid's reservemakeup box. 

"The lights, Martin!" he called. 

Then Sid came back in, slamming and bolting the door behind him andstanding for a moment with his back against it, panting. 

I rushed to him. Something was boiling up inside me, but before itcould get to my brain I opened my mouth and it came out as, "Siddy, you can't fool me, that was no dirty S-or-S. I don't care how much heshakes and purrs, or shakes a spear, or just plain shakes--Siddy, thatwas Shakespeare!"

"Aye, girl, I think so, " he told me, holding my wrists together. "Theycan't find dolls to double men like that--or such is my main hope. " Abig sickly grin came on his face. "Oh, gods, " he demanded, "with whatwords do you talk to a man whose speech you've stolen all your life?"

I asked him, "Sid, were we _ever_ in Central Park?"

He answered, "Once--twelve months back. A one-night stand. They camefor Erich. You flipped. "

He swung me aside and moved behind Beau. All the lights went out. 

 * * * * *

Then I saw, dimly at first, the great dull-gleaming jewel, coveredwith dials and green-glowing windows, that Beau had lifted from Sid'sreserve makeup box. The strongest green glow showed his intent face, still framed by the long glistening locks of the Ross wig, as hekneeled before the thing--Major Maintainer, I remembered it wascalled. 

"When now? Where?" Beau tossed impatiently to Sid over his shoulder. 

"The forty-fourth year before our Lord's birth!" Sid answeredinstantly. "Rome!"

Beau's fingers danced over the dials like a musician's, or asafe-cracker's. The green glow flared and faded flickeringly. 

"There's a storm in that vector of the Void. "

"Circle it, " Sid ordered. 

"There are dark mists every way. "

"Then pick the likeliest dark path!"

I called through the dark, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair, eh, Siddy?"

"Aye, chick, " he answered me. "'Tis all the rule we have!"

 --FRITZ LEIBER

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