Act 1
THE CHORUS:
“And so there the watchmen stood
In crooked bow and gloomy mood
Tumult and thoughts in silent brew
In shadow, amongst the stony few.”
“Vigil” in manuscript, author unknown, Act I, Scene 2.
The Black Rose of the theatre was a lean brunette beauty, draped in lace and ritzy beads, dark eyes a-flutter like the curtain of some unfathomable dwelling. She stood as a lake of ice, skin pale and smile frozen in place like a mask, her perfume wafting over the stage to drown me in the smell of buttered tuberose. The charmeuse flow of her shawl curled like a minx around her delicate throat as the stage light was shut at last. Behind, I heard the grinding of gears and the rustle of curtain slapping across heavyset wood. A shadow slunk backstage–a thin fellow with brackish features, but he did not matter, for he soon vanished hastily into the tungsten blackness of the exit.
Only she mattered.
She soon found me in the audience–a hue in the dark, amongst the scuffed maple seats and swell of carpeted steps. I was alone. As was she.
And we both knew it.
I tipped my head. “Ma’am.”
A feint of emotion creased her skin as she drew close. In a listless breath, she said as courtesy, “Why, hello again, Detective.”
Feeling inclined, I said, “Lovely performance.”
“And yet here we are,” she mused, “two fellows in the dark. Tell me, Josiah Arthur. What foul deed brings you to darken my doorstep once again?”
It was an easy answer. I looked her straight in the eye and said, “Murder.”
The marcasite brooch stilled across her breast. She became dutifully vacant–a familiar mask of sorrow and shock. A faraway sigh eased itself from her songbird throat. She said at last, “What an ugly word I have received, and on this fine day. I see from your eyes that the curtains shall not rise to sate the crowd tonight. Of whose death do I grieve? Esther, my Hermia? Or Jack, the poor Lysander. For I know they have not come in as of late and it has been whispered both have made off with the other like thieves in the night.”
“It is an ugly word,” I said, “for the ugly death of your Puck.”
To that, she had nothing to say. Her eyes rounded like the gleam of the moon in the pitchest black sky. A shadow darted from side to side, rosy-painted cheeks cinched up tight like a vice on a crooked bolt. And in that hazy yellow light, I saw the crack in her veneer. There was a peculiarity to heartbreak, for it tended to seize in the spur of a moment and jiggle like a ragdoll in a bull terrier’s mouth–a quiver, a tremor. As surely as I had taken a knife to her strange soul.
“My Puck,” she murmured. “Yes. I suppose he was.”
The tenderness, though ragged as piker cloth, passed.
“At what time did he last depart from your company?”
“Last night. At a half hour to twelve.”
“From bed?”
My eyes roved up the divot of her neck as her lips parted in sharp breath. Her mouth tightened in rebuke. “From respectable company.”
“His parting words?”
“To rest.”
“Did he confide in you where he was headed?”
“I am not his keeper.”
“And what of his demeanor?” I pressed.
“Weary,” she remarked, “for it had been a late hour.”
Not too late an hour, apparently, for the late Mister Monte Mayfield to don a slicker and leave his silent paramour behind. For all her clever words, I could see the inclination of fresh thoughts being formed and discarded in those eyes, shadows skirting the silver gleam of her kohl and lash powder. And I knew then, that although she was guilty of a great many things, she was a lamb at the fate that had befallen him. I became convinced that there was nothing left for me here and stood to leave, wingtips scuffing against the grimy boards.
She stopped me.
“You had better come backstage, detective,” she warned. “The company will want to be informed. It’ll be taken better,” with a queer note in her voice, “coming from you.”
What else could I do but acquiesce?
My hand captured in propriety, she led me up the stairs and into the maw of the stage; a hidden set of teak doors creaked in displeasure, startling a rodent into scurrying across the rafters above. A portion of the alabaster stucco lay in pieces. But the sconces… though a faded gilt, stubbornly shone light against the molding of faces in the grey plaster – that fresco of muses and masks, with hues so striking that it could either be mistaken as a wretched portrait of divinity or madness. Beauty in blood and carnage. A Venus in chariot amidst a cochineal sea.
She glanced at me and asked shrewdly, “Do you find it alluring?”
“There is no poetry in suffering or death.”
“And yet I have made a career of it,” she said, “because humanity revels in both.”
“But do you?”
“I thrive off it,” she ushered me through, shutting the doors, “and so do you.”
Act 2
THE CHAPLAIN:
“Then wear thine satin thread-
In solemnity and pride denied
For where thou art to tread
Is to death, my ghastly bride!”
“Rites” in manuscript, author unknown, Act V, Scene 4.
There was little in this world that I still guarded my soft heart for: cheap rye whisky, the rain-slicked streets of Saint’s Mercy, a good Jazz record, that shit tar-coffee in the office, and I supposed Parker Yang–the other half of Arthur & Yang, PI and my partner in judiciary crime. He rarely ever parted from that tweed waistcoat of his, all tucked in and proper, even if he often ruined the visage by bounding around with a disarming grin and rumpled umber duster. He wasn’t Oriental, not exactly, half something else. At a distance, the most striking thing about him was a mop of pale flaxen hair, lit golden in the midday sun.
I knew little of his family, but he had invited me once to his home to a small lodging nearby the rail yards. His mother had welcomed me as warmly as she could muster, naming herself Ayi Lim, as she dipped her body shallowly. Smoke from the joss sticks behind mingled with the grey streaks of her head. She hid it well, but I could tell she was afraid of me.
Parker had her eyes.
After I left the Regent theatre, I met with him at the downtown diner. He was seated at a round white table at the corner, chosen for the wall to his back and an unimpeded view of every walk-in man, woman, and child–though the joint remained scarce as the dusk waned. Old habits died hard. He also had his girl with him, an olive-skinned beauty with a charming smile. But benign as she appeared, a slip of a thing in a faux silk dress and wool coat, Kitty Mercer was also a notorious hustler in several black-hour clubs. She’d robbed Parker of about half a grand, a roulette, a glass of bourbon, and then finally, his heart. I was no saint myself, and so it was an easy company of three to fall into.
“Josiah!” He stood in fervent delight, and welcomed me with a humid embrace of peaty Scotch and sandalwood. He was quick to pull up a seat, hand clasped to my back–thoughtless and trusting–as he pushed me down ever so gently.
“Evening, Josiah,” Kitty said, warm as a hearth.
The waiter came over then, balancing hot plates and mugs. A half-eaten plate of pie, apple from the smell of it, was already the centerpiece of the table–amber crusted and dusted in faint sugar, but still wafting heat. I declined a slice, instead taking a long sip of churned coffee.
Parker exchanged a low murmur with Kitty, something sweet from the look of the pinkness dusting both their cheeks, and then turned to me. “So,” he said, “how did the lead go?”
I exhaled. “Didn’t pan out. Yours?”
“Nothing either,” he said. “Mayfield is as clean as they come. No name in any ledger. No file at the station. Not so much as a hint of wrongdoing.”
“Mhmm,” Kitty said, gaze flicking to mine. “I wouldn’t quite say that. Monte, right? Dead-on-the-docks Mayfield?” She continued without pause, already reading the answer in my expression, “He was a silent and fearful man, with fingers that quivered with every card he dealt and a breath rotted with gutter pour. A man like that is always on the lam from something or other, and evidently, it caught up to him.”
She stopped, seeing the look on Parker’s face.
He raised an eyebrow. “You played cards with him?”
“I played cards with him,” she said, with a crooked grin.
“When?”
“Last week. Though it wasn’t exactly a card table. More of a–private arrangement. Himself and a couple of gentlemen friends at Ashbury.” I shared a glance with Parker, for that street was a mere walk away from the theatre. She continued, “The matter is that someone showed up right before he left. Skinny fellow. Tall. Crooked nose that had taken one too many hits. I got his name because he took a fancy–called himself Sanders. He talked to Mayfield in private, don’t know ‘bout what. But it left the poor man shaking so badly that he dropped his glass.”
A gleam entered Parker’s eyes. “Say,” he said, “could you pick him out in a crowd, darling?”
“As easy as a cinch,” she said. “Where to?”
“Regent,” I answered.
There was something in her expression, like a spook of surprise. “Huh,” she said, reaching into her wool coat and rustling around the fleece, “that’s real funny.”
“Kit?”
She produced small slips of paper then and slid three across the table with two fingers to the light. It was tan cardstock–the edges rough and creased, the typography ornate to the eye. I picked up a ticket stub, which among many other things, declared upon it in bold ink, “THE GRAND REGENT, ADMIT ONE -50¢. NO. 43”. A dead man’s seat? Surely not, for I knew he would stand in the light of the curtains and not the shroud of the house crowd. A shiver ran through me then, a dark thought straying my mind like a whisper hot against my throat; and although I cast it aside in haste, I would find no rest for the remainder of that week.
“Strange coincidence,” Parker murmured darkly.
“He pressed it into my hands as he bid farewell,” Kitty said, brows furrowed, “claiming it ‘a token given in goodwill and auspice by fortune’s fool.’ I did not understand what he meant, and cared little to ask. I figured it was simply grandeur bunk, and that he hocked the tickets off to the first person he could.”
Silence befell then, the air stagnant with strange breath. But whether by the ploy of a dead man or by curious happenstance, I was pointed in a direction at least.
“You’re going,” Kitty observed, “As am I.”
Parker said nothing. He watched me as keenly as a falconer, already in await.
My body moved of its own volition, raising a mug of black dregs, as I spoke a-wry, “And so we shall, once more unto the breach–or whatever wears its face come tomorrow. Sláinte! To the late Monte Mayfield and justice to be brought!”
Bouts of ghastly rain seized the week’s end; a gust of great gale battered down every brownstone and warehouse up to the river, while ozone gathered in the air like an oil drum slick awaiting a spark. In the meantime, a sycamore snapped in two and decided to crush a poor sod’s head at Jarmy’s pool hall. But around here, ill-fortune was as close a friend as one’s bread-and-butter. It was little deterrence to the sedans and coupes cruising down the asphalt streets, splashing puddles of black water against disgruntled pedestrians; suffice to say, the foul elements did not disrupt the rhythm of life in any meaningful way.
So there I was–in the thick of it, with a trilby pulled down low and hunched into an overcoat, while the cold winds set to work on blistering my face. I was damp up to the knees. Occasionally, the grey fog would be chased away by the streetlights, which bled a mangy yellow glow in fits and spasms.
I entered the Regent with a stumble, nudged by the wind and a throng of bodies seeking the distraction and dryness the theatre offered–even if the price was 50¢ and countless hours of tedium. All were dressed up in gladdest rags; all similarly ruined by the weather, with its masters resigned to that fact. A young lad with sooty curls and knobby bones darted to cut my queue. I glanced around for his minder and found none–he was quickly lost to my sight within the darkness of the floor seats. The air was rife with stale perfume and cigarette smoke; it pressed upon my chest like some manner of black beast.
I soon came to the realization that my seat was numbered to be that of the balcony. It took a narrow set of winding stairs and a wall of broken burlap backing to find myself on an elevated timber deck. There at last, I found them–Parker in his best fitting clothes and shadowed smile, and Kitty with a card-counter’s gaze surveying the room. I took my place in silence, tensing as the seat teetered despite being bolted to the planks. Parker turned then, but it was for naught, as whatever words he spoke were lost to the sudden thundering of applause and the swivel of stagelights below.
It had begun.
The actor of Theseus strode across stage, the prop of a sword prodding at a milky white doublet; an argent circlet upon a halo of black mane, as he cried out like a man possessed, “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace. Four restless moons shall summon forth another moon–yet, O, how slowly fades this pale light. She perches above us still; watching, lingering, an unwilling pale spirit to depart. Like some cold and gaunt dowager, long withering out a young man’s revenue.”
In Greek tunic and laurel crown, his false bride answered sweetly, “Four days shall steep themselves in night. Four nights shall quickly dream away the time. And then the moon, like to a silver bow, new-bent in heaven shall behold the night of our solemn rites.”
To which Theseus uttered, “Go, Philostrate. Bestir the Athenian youth from rest. Awake the pert and nimble spirit of revelry. Turn melancholy forth from funeral; the pale shade is not for our pomp. Yet now I shall wed thee in another key–” to the fraction of a beat, “with right, with ritual, and revelling!”
And so it continued, the first half a tale of duty and wrongful lovers–the relatable follies of fictitious noblefolk put to pen by history’s faceless bard. A Lysander and a Hermia did indeed appear; young things in thin hangings, unrecognizable in face paint and heavy mask, with shared pale eyes and snub nose. Hardly eloped lovers, but perhaps a replacement for such. I thought about the nature of theatre then. Names didn’t matter. It was the same lines, same smile, and same fall when the cue hit; death was nothing more than choreography. Heartbreak the same.
It was only when the curtains lifted anew that the breath was robbed wholly from my lungs. There she stood–the Black Rose. A sharp silhouette of regality that did not belong to this earth, for she was luminous in veils of ivory tulle and sculpted gown. Trailing her was a train of fae attendants that paled entirely in presence–pale, smoky wisps of soft skin and demurity. The King emerged in synchronicity, albeit from the left wing, and moved with mimicked poise as the costume sat on him like a borrowed thing. He held himself with set shoulders and when he turned to deliver his line, his teeth flashed white as a knife in the dark. Something caught at the edge of my memory like a splinter.
“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” Oberon said grimly.
“What, jealous Oberon?” she answered, as fair and feather-light as the mummer’s breeze, “Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company.”
“Tarry, rash wanton,” he grunted, “Am not I thy lord?”
He moved like a boar against her elegance.
“Then I must be thy lady.” Her gaze found mine unerringly then, cutting across the swath of theatre steam-fog and distance. “Yet I know when thou has stolen away from Fairyland, and in the shape of Corin sat all day, piping enchantments through the gathering gloom and biding poor Phillida with snares of vow and verse.”
Parker’s mouth found my ear. “Looks like the lady has eyes for you,” he jested, though not fully carefree.
“So she does,” I murmured.
I was distracted by something else. I knew not if it was merely a trick of roving shadow, but there it was–when she moved with haste, I glimpsed the discoloration of her skin where the white silk gloves had ridden down her arm. And there. A tear in the knuckle. I watched her face and listened to her voice, attuned keenly to every breath that slipped past her lips. Then far too soon the interval was announced, and the spell broke imperfectly. The crowd was roused back to lucidity without pity, coaxing cries of complaints, as sleepers blinked tearily in the sudden glare of stained yellow lights.
The concession stand was mobbed by all manner of sticky-fingered children and youngsters; the hard amber of candies and caramel corns persevering even at the late hour. Meanwhile, myself and Parker were called over with urgency to a hidden backroom by Sir Willam Browning–the director and theatre proprietor that had initially hired us to investigate Mayfield’s ill-timed disappearance. The squirrelly man was in visible distress, and even more so than when I had informed him of his actor’s grisly death.
“I’ve got a new job for you,” he said grimly, making two circuits of the vacant room before pacing over to a desk covered in the detritus of old playbills and receipts, “as something terrible has occurred.”
“Another missing man?” Parker drawled.
He dismissed without taking offence, “That would be a trivial matter, if rather unfortunate. No. This is a disaster of the highest order. I have been robbed, detective. The manuscript is gone–the original, the spine upon which the entire production is built. It was irreplaceable. A legacy. My legacy! And now it is gone.” He spoke that last word with all the gravitas of a man on death row.
“Your actors seem already well-versed in their lines.”
Willam affixed Parker with a defiant look, then muttered, “Not all of them.”
An unsettling pause followed his claim. I held up a hand. “Peace. How long have you had the manuscript, Sir Browning?”
“It matters not,” he answered. “But for the sake of indulging your curiosity, detective, I have had the heirloom willed to me by an old friend’s estate after his passing–thirty years ago to this day.” He laughed then, dry as wheat, “It has sentimental value, as well as a great deal of monetary one. A gift? Yes. Many have tried to ease what they claim burden from me… to their folly. To their undoing. I am a man not to be trifled with.”
“Did Monte?” Parker asked glibly, and I choked on a groan.
Willam gawked for a handful of seconds, before breaking out into peals of that same mad laughter. “A marvelous twist! If only I was fool enough to hire sleuths to investigate a murder committed by these very hands… you have imagination, Mr Yang, and I admire that! Alas, I am innocent in that regard.” He sobered hastily after that. “Mayfield was a good performer. It is difficult to find talent like that. I would rein him in by other means, rather than carve up the man like an animal on a salt-ridden pier and risk the full wrath of the law.”
I asked in turn, “Do you harbour suspicion that both crimes are one and the same?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” he said, “but I do wonder. For even though I have meticulously curated each and every performer, I know in my heart that the thief walks freely among this stage. It is someone who has learnt my schedule and habits. It is someone I have trusted. It is someone who has stolen a key around my neck, whilst I slumbered in a fit of weakness. Besides,” his voice dropped to a cold whisper, “there are too many eyes for an outsider to enter unseen.”
“Is there anyone in particular that weighs on your mind?”
“None, and yet all of them,” he said bitterly.
I had a thought. I kept it trapped in the calcite and iron of my mouth.
“We’ll need a list of your company,” Parker conceded, “as well as-”
“Nonsense,” Willam interrupted, “I have a better proposal. The role of Oberon is vacant as of late, with my fleeting arrangement proving most unsatisfactory.” He narrowed in on me, a sudden predatory gleam in his eye. “But you, you could take his place. Every door made open. You would have unfettered access to every member of his company… every murmur, every rehearsal, and every dark corner. There would be little suspicion if you pose your questions cleverly, and I don’t doubt you are a clever detective indeed! You strike me as no stranger to wearing roles.”
“That is a generous offer, Sir Browning,” I began, “but-”
“He can do it,” Parker said.
“Parker.”
He settled his hand in between my shoulder blades, fingers nipping at the nape of my neck. The smile was audible in his voice, to the point that Willam reciprocated. “Sir Browning over here has got a point. I’d do it myself, but nobody’s heard of a chink fairy king, eh?”
“Too true!” Browning boomed with a chuckle.
I liked him even less and less. Joy.
Parker’s smile stayed where it was, flashing thin for only the fraction of a second. “He’s a natural, this one,” he addressed the man, “A good fellow, with a face like putty if the situation calls for it. Saved both our lives too. He’s talked the ears off armed gunmen and sleazy coppers. Good cop, bad cop… he’s played them both to silver laurels. Hell, he’s a regular wardrobe of masks!”
Gee, thanks. In regular Parker-fashion, he’d thrown me out to the sharks–but knowing full well that I could swim. I always had trusted him enough to have faith in even the most asinine schemes. Catching onto his cue, I put up a token protest and little else. There was satisfaction in Browning’s expression as I signed away on a paper contract; the terms were reasonable enough on a skim, as was the wage. It was a surprisingly generous amount for an institution half-sunken in derelict straits. Mayhaps this was why.
“Don’t look so despondent.” Willam tutted. “The king sees everything from the woods. Is that not what you need?”
I, Josiah Arthur, the numinous fae King. It was a laughable thought.
No one laughed.
There was a dark-haired stranger in the mirror of the dressing chamber–an eerie fellow wearing a double-breasted suit and charcoal cravat that fit like a glove, every seam and stitch trying to meld to skin. Within the hour, a stout angry seamstress called Cassilda had marshalled me like an animal in an enclosure, plying upon my face all manner of powder and contouring until I was ashen with the effort of it. Adorned in onyx and cinder, I was scarcely recognizable–every trace of familiarity scrubbed away by the woman’s relentless ministrations.
I soon felt the burden of a presence, then the sultry scent of hellebore.
Dainty skin caressed mine.
“Then I must be thy lady,” the Black Rose murmured as she emerged, and in her hands a crown of elk antlers, of which she crowned me from behind. She was still clad in gloves and the rest of Titania’s finery, but no longer was there a gulf of distance to protect her from close scrutiny.
For I saw it then–a splash of candle wax, stark against her veil of ivory tulle.
There was something alluring about the shedding of self and sense. From the moment the ink dried, my days were spent in the malaise of the old theatre–in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, I found myself deriving solace in the rehearsals staged periodically. The callboard placed a notice at the most irregular hours. Odder still, the Regent had shut its doors to the house crowd after that opening night; as if urged by an ambition to orchestrate every gesture and utterance to an exactness, as directed by Browning. It was a maddening endeavour that had me swallowing my tongue.
I never saw the whole company at once, except on that stage. I knew that, in the eyes of many, I was little other than the capricious and bitter Oberon himself–a black-haired, black-eyed interloper who had taken the place of one of their own. But it had its uses, for I had long since learnt that people sung like canaries with a pinch of salt pressed down in a wound. I soon gathered that Browning was not as well-liked as he’d hoped and that, in truth, his grip was tenuous. It seemed the fair Queen was reaping the yield of her retinue, having sown her seeds years in the making.
Perhaps the oddest of characters was Quincy, who played the donkey-headed Fool. He rolled a matchstick between his fingers incessantly and parroted the last line of whatever words spoken to him–but only outside of the production. I’d seen him once in the alley behind the theatre, lighting cigarettes and chewing it to the smoldering tip. When he realized he was no longer alone, he gave a big toothy grin that revealed the holes in his gums.
“He is a charmer, isn’t he?”
I was broken out of my reverie by the Black Rose, who approached from behind with lithe grace to join me at the balcony’s edge. She ventured closer then and laid a hand over mine where it rested against the rails. I did not turn to regard her. I was instead watching the miniscule forms of Flute and Starveling scurry across the stage like wine-drunk ants below. Quincy had transformed into a half-ass in a sculpted mask. There was something painfully childish in his delight, as he clapped his hands and pranced around in that rumpled tunic and wooden hooves.
“If that is charm,” I said, “then I shall have to rethink my definition of the word.”
She looked amused. “Then it is pity,” she said, “that softens your eyes.”
“Spend a lot of time looking into my eyes, do you?”
“Of course,” she said, her face straight as an arrow. “Come now, husband. Do our hours together mean nothing?”
“Sure it does,” I replied. “About, say, five bucks an hour at the current rate.”
A quiet exhale spilled out, nearly the ghost of a laughter, and she looked more like the young woman I had once known before our son’s infant death. I let my gaze fall, heavy as a stone, to Quincy’s caricature of braying and Flute’s aggressive half-steps as he chased after him. My voice felt borrowed as I asked, “Why here? Of all the theatres in Saint’s Mercy, why steer Browning to the Regent? It’s a good location, sure, but it is also adverse in every conceivable way. The lofts are gutted. The paint is lost. Rent’s not cheap either.”
“Some things are ruined,” she said, “because they have been loved.”
It set in my chest a hot flicker. “By whom?” I said derisively, “By you? It is a castoff, no matter how fond you may be of this theatricality.”
She bored into me then, like she was peeling back the layers of my skin and what she found was not bone but sin. “You always were quick to forsake what did not belong to you and what you did not understand. I have raised something truly-” she stopped. The word didn’t come. Left with little else to offer, she drew back the curtness over herself like armor–though it now ran with the bite of live steel. “You would never understand. You never have. Not even when it mattered the most.”
I laughed then, an ugly sound. “But I am not Quincy the fool. I understand more than you believe, beloved, for it is you who has erred in your haste.”
Her eyes blazed, and she said in gall, “Then speak!”
It is only because the walls had ears and eyes that I seized her then, lowering my voice to the caress of a whisper as I found her ear. “You have lowered yourself to a thief and made off with the manuscript in the dead of night,” and to her credit, she did not flinch, “but the timing is what has damned you. It was right before the performance, was it not? It wouldn’t rattle a soul to have you haunt the corridors backstage nor the upstage lofts. But you still scraped against a nail and splashed hot wax upon your hands, for you tarried in your haste.”
“And yet I walk free,” she said sharply.
“Go, damn you! Disappear into the night and I can make you a ghost, one that no one ever finds.”
“You would make me nothing again,” she said, low and fierce, her fingers snaking into my hair as she wrested me down to her level, “when it has finally given me back everything I have ever lost. My greatest love is here! Not in skin and sinew, so appallingly weak and fleeting. This court is mine to command. I called, and it answered. I wept, and it listened. And now it heeds my every breath.”
“Your court is a farce.”
“No,” she said, “but yours is. You have no power here, my king in name-and-nothing-more.”
I suddenly became aware that there was an animal in my chest–a starved beast pacing behind battered ribs, black with heat and wrath. With every word out of her mouth, I could feel myself steadily losing composure. A mask cracking, or maybe it was my face behind it that was doing the splitting. It was not mine. It was not mine. Nevertheless that inferno seethed and smoldered, collapsing all rational thought into a desire to hurt above all else. Somehow, through a white haze, I managed to take a breathful of cinders and doused it in the bile of my gut.
Flee. Flee, you fool.
Come hither. I am here.
“A man is dead. A man you have taken as a lover,” I said with a tremor. “Death follows you.”
She said cuttingly, “And you follow it.”
I left before she could see what won. God help me, I went.
I should have walked away.
The paper of contract was scarcely a chain when I already had left a string of broken promises and oaths in my wake. Perhaps it was a remnant of love that bound me. Perhaps it was willful defiance. Even though I tried, I knew I was not a good man. Ever since that quarrel with Titania- with her, my time at the Regent took a decidedly hostile turn. The costume pricked invisible pins. Cold drafts left red marks on my skin in rooms that had no opening. The indifference of the company had become ill will. The most unsettling incident occurred on my way home one evening–a deformed crow hopped the ferry turnstiles and cried in agonized pitch, “Wrong! Wrong!”
That night, I dreamt.
A wooden room. I was in plain clothes and sitting upon the bed. The pallet was hot beneath, as if warmed by the same timber I could hear crackling downstairs. In my hand was- Saint Jude. The medal was a tarnished pewter and the shadows cast his face in sickly light. I could see the cradle that I carved. It rocked and cooed on its own, the black tree outside reaching with crooked arms. I could not move. It was night and silence and my chest that pushed an airless plea, “Who is here?”
“Well, hello there, Artie.”
It was Parker’s voice, pleased as punch, that I heard first. The bed dipped. Footsteps scraped against the black planks. Then the silhouette placed an arm around me, and I found myself gladly suffocating in the routine haze of sandalwood. But that comfort was fleeting. He held too long. Too tight. And beneath the tarp of his skin, I could feel a jumble of bones in the wrong shape. The winds tinged with ferment. He said mildly, “You look like hell.”
“Feel like it too,” I said, forcing a ghastly smile.
“I don’t blame you.”
“No,” I agreed. “Parker wouldn’t.”
There was a dead man’s fingers pressing against my spine–as delicate as a moth’s hollow wings pinned to cork. I could see his face in the moonlight now. It was as ruined as the night he’d bled out on the docks. The meat of his flesh was swollen in bloat, but the arctic paleness of his eyes found mine unerringly. A red grin sat upon his slit throat, stretched from ear to ear. He spoke in a gurgle, cracked lips unmoving, “Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong, made senseless things begin to do them wrong.”
“A torment born of the mind,” I said bitterly. “A wretched consequence, but one all the same.”
“A million fail, confounding oath on oath,” he said. The agony of his expression crumbled loose like a handful of gravel, giving way to a vacant gentleness, “pleading for a lover’s fee. For she- she never had so sweet a changeling.”
“Leave me be, spirit!” I cried.
“You have come too soon and too late,” the spectre said, and I too tasted his sea-salt grief then. It sat on my tongue like a verdict. “They are dead. They are dead. What fools! What willing, wanting fools! The graves all gaping wide, and every one shall take his bride. Wake! Wake, king of shadow! Wake!”
Somewhere-
The crow found me. It descended in a hail of razor wings, black as a shroud, and screamed as it tried to peck out my eyes, “Wrong! Wrong!”
I awoke with a violent shudder.
I was upright. I was barefoot on grime and cold boards, shivering and without clothes. It was the reek of cedar and greasepaint that told me exactly where I was–even before my eyes adjusted to gloom, I knew with a sickening lurch that I was in the belly of the Regent. A fit of panic seized me and I staggered blindly, hitting my side against a protruding timber joist. The resulting blow knocked out my air and drew thin beads of blood. It was only through some miracle or other, I found my way to an old dressing room; evidently abandoned, but stocked in linen garments that I hastily put upon myself. It was thin hangings.
But a comfort, no matter how meagre, was a solace all the same.
Gathering myself, I ventured back out.
There was no sense of direction in the dark. It was an oppressive pall that swallowed me whole–pinning my limbs with lead and reducing me to a quivering wreck. For how long I was in that living cerement, I did not know; time itself was nothing more than whittled dust. As I wandered those corridors, I kept my right hand on the wall, feeling around for the sunken hollow of locked doors and gypsum cracks–a futile endeavor, for there was nothing there but an uneven veneer. The sounds of my breath gradually became too loud; an agonizing wheeze and gasp that pitched in turmoil, like the hell I was in.
I was lost, and became convinced that I would die here tonight–in this tomb.
To my shame, I sank against the wall in despair and defeat in a manner befitting a mewling child. What God could see my face in this forsaken firmament? What mask was left to me, what pretense, what scrap of dignity? Nothing. Nothing! I was a hollow echo, a sound rung back by the bones of the black tarry night.
But then I heard it.
Come hither.
I knew that voice.
It lured me with a trance into the husk of a star dressing room. There must have been more cracks in the plaster here, for a faint light began to fill my sight. It was then my mind began to clear. I saw a small chamber that pooled with velvet curtains and cloth-draped portraits; an alcove within hid a gilt-framed mirror, the glass grey from vapor that leaked freshly from the exposed pipes above. A modest dressing table sat hunched with a string of bulbs–every ounce of amber warmth smashed in with savage. Signed playbills and journals were scattered upon a desk, which also housed a putrescent bouquet of burgundy, saucer-shaped flowers in a crystal vase.
It was not what had caught my attention.
There was a half-used candle on the ground.
In a fog, I knelt beside it and, using the matchbox left nearby, struck a small flame onto its wick. It did not take long to realize that the planks were loose. I pried a corner up with ease, grunting softly as I cut my palm open against the splintered edge. Paying no heed to the dark trickle of blood that flowed in stilted gush, I pulled up an antique travel chest. It was fastened with a lock, but that too had been disturbed recently. It barely took effort to open–just a slight pressure and twist of fingers.
The billow of musk and stale vanilla filled my senses, followed by a small swarm of moths that sent me ducking with a curse. With my heart thudding in my chest, I looked inside. A folded costume. A scarf. A bundle of letters. Feathers, buttons, and sequins spilled freely in between. A coal-haired wig soon followed.
Then I reached the underside and stilled, withdrawing sharply with a guttural moan.
It was there. The manuscript she had stolen.
Though I fully expected to find what I did, the sight of it still sent a white jolt through my system. It was unassuming at first sight, but the longer I was in its presence, the greater the disquiet grew. It was a vellum stack bound with cord–annoted in English script, while archaic latin on the front declared with pomp ‘Somnium Midsommaris Noctis’. I quashed both the stirrings of veneration and hesitation, and began to pore through the ivory-toned pages. Ever so silently, my thoughts blurred the deeper I looked.
Something was not quite right.
The first pages were familiar–that first act. The mortal lovers in the woods. Titania’s speech. Then mine own. I must have given life to those words a dozen times over by now; it was a well-worn path that my tongue knew to take. It was familiar and right.
But it was not the spoken words that gave me pause.
It was first the stage directions.
Measurements. Timings. The precise angle of candlelight. The tilt of a head. The pitch of a throaty bray. A set of instructions not for the actor’s eyes, but instead the one who conducted him. All of which could have been chalked up to mere eccentricities, if not for the annotations between the lines–addressing things that no director could ever control. The depiction of thought, as fanatical as a liturgical act. For instance, one such direction read: “The King enters of his own free will. He cannot be bought. He cannot be told. He must simply arrive.”
Another claimed: “Performed lament will not suffice.”
The margins were the worst of it.
There were names. Dates. Different inks spanning the course of centuries in a senseless array; stained by blots of ink and scorched portions. Someone had evidently tried to burn the index and failed, leaving both crisp edges and words ghosting through the brittle brown marks. I recognized the spidery cursive of Browning’s gold-trimmed pen, carving out a new section below the fourth act. Though penned long before my time, I knew those names at once.
Monte Mayfield.
D. Spencer.
Jack Donoghue. Esther O’Rourke.
It was the most recent entry that I lingered on, though I did not have long to mull numbly in a haze, for the door opened then. I closed the book on that final name–Josiah Arthur, inked in a foreign and regal hand–and turned to face my estranged wife. She was grand and untouched in Titania’s finery, but dishevelled in every other way; nearly a ghost in pale flesh and barren eyes. Her mouth moved in artless elation, “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” then snapped shut. Her breath caught, and when she spoke once more, her voice was as strained as sandpaper. “Put it down, Josiah. Please.”
I did not. “What madness is this?”
“It is mine,” she said, “and yours.”
“No.” I said, still holding the wretched thing. I looked past her then, and into the darkness that roved around the fading candlelight. “It is bigger than that.”
She began to approach, moving as warily as a lamb circling a bush of thorns. She was affixed upon the manuscript. “I knew it would be you,” she murmured, “and you came. But it is too late.”
“Yes. It is.”
But it was not I that answered.
Act 3
THE FOOL:
“A most rare vision–a dream
Past the wit of man, it does seem
Methought I was, and methought I had breath
But now I see, I shall sing it at our death!”
“Sight” in manuscript, author unknown, Act iv, Scene 1.
A man with a crooked nose stood at the threshold.
He was tall. Brackish. I understood that it was the man Kitty knew only as Sanders. It was a name that rhymed with something lost. He was not alone–encircling the room with him was all manner of shapeless men, their features inscrutable in the dim. Each wore the same style of clothing that Willam Browning favoured–an ash grey tunic, accentuated by occasional strips of bone-white seams. I drew her behind me in a swift motion, and held the manuscript to flame in the other. But it was not concern that flickered in the other man’s eyes, but instead a glint of mirth.
“Too late an hour, too late a thief,” he said.
“I will burn it,” I said, “unless you leave us be to depart.”
“Many have tried before,” he said. “Many have died before.”
Shivers racked my back; not mine, but hers, for she was still pressed up close. She knew the same thing that I did then–that we were glancing into the face of the man that had butchered her late lover. I sought to stall and so asked, “What was his crime, if not a thief?”
“He broke his word,” came the answer, “writ in ink.”
“And I?”
“You perform your lines to the script still–precisely as promised.”
The flames of the candle crept higher on its own, carmine heat lapping at the manuscript. It staunched the cut and seared my skin, but did nothing to mar paper. After a while, I surrendered the taper holder to the table. I did not relinquish grasp of the bound pages, instead tucking it close to the tabard over my chest. I may have lost a bargaining chip, but I still had one more card to play. I said, feigning as much ice as I could muster, “You need me willing.”
“Yes.”
“Then there is room to negotiate. I know what you want.”
“A performance,” Sanders agreed, still speaking in that strange tenor, “when the final curtains call. The roles played as written. The lines spoken as given. And in return, the fool Titania is released–her debt paid and name removed from the cycle.”
Her composure fractured, like glass under pressure. She trembled with fearful rage, “That isn’t what was promised.” Then she turned and fixed her attention entirely on me. Her lungs were shallow and sharp, the motion graceless and wrong. She tightened her grasp on my arm and urged, “Don’t.”
I silenced her with a hand over hers, not realizing it still bled. “And Oberon? What happens to the King at the end of his final bow?”
“Come now,” Sanders said, “you know the tale. He returns to the woods.”
I could not answer immediately. I could not look at her.
“Done,” I said.
He smiled.
ANTE ACT IV
OBERON in the woods. Alone.
Three acts did pass without mishap or mar
Well know I this, for through the alder walls
There came unto mine ear each heeded line,
Spoke true and fair with such exacting art.
Within the wings stood I and kept my watch,
Patient as any shadow for summons meant for me.
It came at length
In sweet sorrow and ruinous love
In the scene henceforth.
ACT IV
SCENE II. The same. LYSANDER, DEMETRIUS, HELENA, AND HERMIA lying asleep. TITANIA and BOTTOM sit in their enchanted lover’s embrace.
BOTTOM
I had rather have a handful or two of dried peas.
But, I pray you, let none of your people stir me: I
Have an oppression of sleep come upon me.
TITANIA
Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.
Exeunt fairies.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Slowly entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm
O’ how I love thee! How I dote on thee!
They sleep. Enter PUCK.
OBERON
Welcome, good Robin.
See’st thou this sweet sight?
Her dotage now I do begin to pity:
For, meeting of her late behind the wood,
Seeking favours from this hateful fool,
I did upbraid her and fall out with her.
And now I have the boy, I will undo
This hateful imperfection of her eyes:
Think no more of this night’s accidents
But as the fierce vexation of a dream
But first I will release the fairy queen
Be as thou wast wont to be;
See as thou wast wont to see:
Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower
Hath such force and blessed power.
Now, my Titania; wake you, my sweet queen.
TITANIA
My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamour’d of a beast.
OBERON
There lies your love
Della Spencer,
And as you are still mine.
Later, I would not be able to say where it started.
The sconces went out.
And I was awoken for one final time.
The first thing I knew was that I was not Oberon. Not anymore. I wrenched the crown of antlers from my head and cast it onto the ground, upon which it cracked with a terrible clatter. Sander’s mirth had fled. His face had become pallid, skin stretching like clay in the heat that billowed from thin air, my vision wavering. He stared at me as if I was a firstborn of flames made flesh with fear and hatred, as unearthly devastation became clear all around.
It was not an empty performance. There had been a crowd, a full house in fact, but I did not recognize anything of humanity in that rabble–they had clapped in perfect unison and uttered not a word. I also could not shake the feeling that there was something deeply wrong with their eyes; as if merely a caricature, a silhouette painted over in haste, to cover the vacancy of a soul. None stood in fright as the earth gave a most terrible groan and the confines of the Regent began to quiver.
Della cut a beautifully tragic figure as she gazed up at me with eyes the color of which I had forgotten. She reached out to grip the hand I offered and allowed herself to be held close. Half of her retinue ran towards the exit; the majority of actors and bedecked cultists stood pinned in place. I glimpsed Browning below the rafters–he was half-hung over the railing, mouth agape and gasping as black blood gushed from his throat and eyes. His coat sprawled open like the misshapen wings of a raven. The light was already fading, and I knew that it was there that he would die–a Faustian promise fulfilled, always to the one who expected it the least.
I remember little of how we made it outside.
It was raining heavily. The air was ashen from soot and filled with the incoherent shouts of bystanders and performers alike. The theatre had crushed in upon itself, sinking into an impossible pit underneath the sable ground. Della herself had keened over, a sob finally breaking from her throat, as I knelt beside her in absent embrace. She uttered his name then, just once, into the squall. I was seized with the sudden urge to tear Oberon’s clothes from my skin, but it was hardly a rational thought.
I knew Parker would turn up, soon or later. But it was getting cold.
I helped Della to her feet and made for shelter. All the while, my likeness in the storefront window smiled gently at me with a pity I did not have.
Illustrations by Adriel Ashvin
Written by: Trishta
