Short Fiction - Fritz Leiber (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

to play all winter without a single break, as we’ve been doing, then you can put your audience in the auditorium. In that case, a big accordion-pleated wall shuts off the out of doors and keeps the wind from blowing your backdrop, which is on that side, of course, when the auditorium’s in use.

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

I hesitated, as I always do at the door to the stage⁠—though it wasn’t the actual stage lying just ahead of me, but only backstage, the wings. You see, I always have to fight the feeling that if I go out the dressing room door, go out just eight steps, the world will change while I’m out there and I’ll never be able to get back. It won’t be New 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 to that lovely warm womb with all the jolly boys and girls and all the costumes 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, or shrink down to the witless blob of a baby, or forget altogether who I am⁠—

—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: a high-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were those of 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 this thing, and not just for a quick dip out and back either. Better get in some practice.

I stepped through the door.

Beau and Doc were already out there, made up and in costume for Ross and King Duncan. They were discreetly peering past the wings at the gathering audience. Or at the place where the audience ought to be gathering, at any rate⁠—sometimes the movies and girlie shows and brainheavy beatnik bruhahas outdraw us altogether. Their costumes were the same kooky colorful ones as the others’. Doc had a mock-ermine robe and a huge gilt papier-mâché crown. Beau was carrying a ragged black 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, I heard Beau say, “I see some rude fellows from the City approaching. I was hoping we wouldn’t get any of those. How should they scent us out?”

Brother, I thought, where do you expect them to come from if not the City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Island and on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronx boys have got pretty sharp scenters. And what’s it get you insulting the 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 Vicksburg a “rude fellow” and is always waiting for the day when the entire audience will arrive in carriage and democrat wagons.

Doc replied, holding down his white beard and heavy on the mongrel Russo-German accent he miraculously manages to suppress on stage except when “Vot does it matter? Ve don’t convinze zem, ve don’t convinze nobody. Nichevo.”

Maybe, I thought, Doc shares my doubts about making Macbeth plausible in rainbow pants.

Still unobserved by them, I looked between their shoulders and got the first 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 performances mixed is something else again.

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

Beau said anxiously, glancing at his wrist, “I wonder what’s holding up the Queen?”

Although I was busy keeping up nerve-pressure against the shocks, I managed to think. So he knows about Siddy’s stupid Queen Elizabeth prologue too. But of course he would. It’s only me they keep in the dark. If he’s so smart he ought to remember that Miss Nefer is always the last person on stage, even when she opens the play.

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

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

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

I turned too and ran for the dressing room, for I could feel one of my mind-wavery fits coming on. At the last second it had seemed to me that the scenery was getting skimpier, hardly more than thin trees and bushes itself, and underfoot feeling more like ground than a ground cloth, and overhead not theater roof but gray sky. Shock Three and you’re out, Greta, my umpire was calling.

I made it through the dressing room door and nothing there was wavering or dissolving, praised be Pan. Just Martin standing with his back 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 his left hand long black tatters