Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (22 page)

I didn’t say anything, but my face must have answered for me at least to such a student of expressions as the Governor—for he smiled and said,“You needn’t worry. I wouldn’t be angry with him. In fact, the only other time I know of that Props drank spirits by himself in the theater, I had a great deal to thank him for.” His lean face grew thoughtful. “It was long before your time, in fact it was the first season I took out a company of my own. I had barely enough money to pay the printer for the three-sheets and get the first-night curtain up. After that it was touch and go for months. Then in mid-season we had a run of bad luck—a two-night heavy fog in one city, an influenza scare in another, Harvey Wilkins’ Shakespearean troupe two weeks ahead of us in a third. And when in the next town we played, it turned out the advance sale was very light—because my name was unknown there and the theater an unpopular one—I realized I’d have to pay off the company while there was still money enough to get them home, if not the scenery.
“That night I caught Props swigging, but I hadn’t the heart to chide him for it—in fact I don’t think I’d have blamed anyone, except perhaps myself, for getting drunk that night. But then during the performance the actors and even the union stagehands we travel began coming to my dressing room by ones and twos and telling me they’d be happy to work without salary for another three weeks, if I thought that might give us a chance of recouping. Well, of course I grabbed at their offers and we got a spell of brisk pleasant weather and we hit a couple of places starved for Shakespeare, and things worked out, even to paying all the back salary owed before the season was ended.
“Later on I discovered it was Props who had put them all up to doing it.”
Gilbert Usher looked up at me and one of his eyes was wet and his lips were working just a little. “I couldn’t have done it myself,” he said, “for I wasn’t a popular man with my company that first season—I’d been riding everyone much too hard and with nasty sarcasms—and I hadn’t yet learned how to ask anyone for help when I really needed it. But Billy Simpson did what I couldn’t, though he had to nerve himself for it with spirits. He’s quick enough with his tongue in ordinary circumstances, as you know, particularly when he’s being the friendly listener, but apparently when something very special is required of him, he must drink himself to the proper pitch. I’m wondering…”
His voice trailed off and then he straightened up before his mirror and started to unknot his tie and he said to me briskly, “Better get dressed now, Bruce. And then look in on Guthrie, will you?”
My mind was churning some rather strange thoughts as I hurried up the iron stairs to the dressing room I shared with Robert Dennis. I got on my Guildenstern make-up and costume, finishing just as Robert arrived; as Laertes, Robert makes a late entrance and so needn’t hurry to the theater on
Hamlet
nights. Also, although we don’t make a point of it, he and I spend as little time together in the dressing room as we can.
Before going down I looked into Guthrie Boyd’s. He wasn’t there, but the lights were on and the essentials of the Ghost’s costume weren’t in sight—impossible to miss that big helmet!—so I assumed he’d gone down ahead of me.
It was almost the half hour. The house lights were on, the curtain down, more stage lights on too, and quite a few of us about. I noticed that Props was back in the chair behind his table and not looking particularly different from any other night—perhaps the drink had been a once-only aberration and not some symptom of a crisis in the company.
I didn’t make a point of hunting for Guthrie. When he gets costumed early he generally stands back in a dark corner somewhere, wanting to be alone—perchance to sip, aye, there’s the rub!—or visits with Sybil in her dressing room.
I spotted Monica sitting on a trunk by the switchboard, where backstage was brightest lit at the moment. She looked ethereal yet springlike in her blonde Ophelia wig and first costume, a pale green one. Recalling my happy promise to the Governor, I bounced up beside her and asked her straight out about the Ouija business, pleased to have something to the point besides the plays to talk with her about—and really not worrying as much about her nerves as I suppose I should have.
She was in a very odd mood, both agitated and abstracted, her gaze going back and forth between distant and near and very distant. My questions didn’t disturb her at all, in fact I got the feeling she welcomed them, yet she genuinely didn’t seem able to tell me much about why she’d been so frightened at the last name the board had spelled. She told me that she actually did get into a sort of dream state when she worked the board and that she’d screamed before she’d quite comprehended what had shocked her so; then her mind had blacked out for a few seconds, she thought.
“One thing though, Bruce,” she said. “I’m not going to work the board any more, at least when the three of us are alone like that.”
“That sounds like a wise idea,” I agreed, trying not to let the extreme heartiness of my agreement show through.
She stopped peering around as if for some figure to appear that wasn’t in the play and didn’t belong backstage, and she laid her hand on mine and said, “Thanks for coming so quickly when I went idiot and screamed.”
I was about to improve this opportunity by telling her that the reason I’d come so quickly was that she was so much in my mind, but just then Joe Rubens came hurrying up with the Governor behind him in his Hamlet black to tell me that neither Guthrie Boyd nor his Ghost costume was to be found anywhere in the theater.
What’s more, Joe had got the phone numbers of Guthrie’s son and daughter from Sybil and rung them up. The one phone hadn’t answered, while on the other a female voice—presumably a maid’s—had informed him that everyone had gone to see Guthrie Boyd in
Hamlet.
Joe was already wearing his cumbrous chain-mail armor for Marcellus—woven cord silvered—so I knew I was elected. I ran upstairs and in the space of time it took Robert Dennis to guess my mission and advise me to try the dingiest bars first and have a drink or two myself in them, I’d put on my hat, overcoat, and wristwatch and left him.
So garbed and as usual nervous about people looking at my ankles, I sallied forth to comb the nearby bars of Wolverton. I consoled myself with the thought that if I found Hamlet’s father’s ghost drinking his way through them, no one would ever spare a glance for my own costume.
Almost on the stroke of curtain I returned, no longer giving a damn what anyone thought about my ankles. I hadn’t found Guthrie or spoken to a soul who’d seen a large male imbiber—most likely of Irish whisky—in great-cloak and antique armor, with perhaps some ghostly green light cascading down his face.
Beyond the curtain the overture was fading to its sinister close and the backstage lights were all down, but there was an angry hushed-voice dispute going on stage left, where the Ghost makes all his entrances and exits. Skipping across the dim stage in front of the blue-lit battlements of Elsinore—I still in my hat and overcoat—I found the Governor and Joe Rubens and with them John McCarthy all ready to go on as the Ghost in his Fortinbras armor with a dark cloak and some green gauze over it.
But alongside them was Francis Farley Scott in a very similar getup—no armor, but a big enough cloak to hide his King costume and a rather more impressive helmet than John’s.
They were all very dim in the midnight glow leaking back from the dimmed-down blue floods. The five of us were the only people I could see on this side of the stage.

F. F. was arguing vehemently that he must be allowed to double the Ghost with King Claudius because he knew the part better than John and because—this was the important thing—he could imitate Guthrie’s voice perfectly enough to deceive his children and perhaps save their illusions about him. Sybil had looked through the curtain hole and seen them and all of their yesterday crowd, with new recruits besides, occupying all of the second, third, and fourth rows center, chattering with excitement and beaming with anticipation. Harry Grossman had confirmed this from the front of the house.

I could tell that the Governor was vastly irked at F. F. and at the same time touched by the last part of his argument. It was exactly the sort of sentimental heroic rationalization with which F. F. cloaked his insatiable yearnings for personal glory. Very likely he believed it himself.

John McCarthy was simply ready to do what the Governor asked him. He’s an actor untroubled by inward urgencies—except things like keeping a record of the hours he sleeps and each penny he spends—though with a natural facility for portraying on stage emotions which he doesn’t feel one iota.

The Governor shut up F. F. with a gesture and got ready to make his decision, but just then I saw that there was a sixth person on this side of the stage.

Standing in the second wings beyond our group was a dark figure like a tarpaulined Christmas tree topped by a big helmet of unmistakable general shape despite its veiling. I grabbed the Governor’s arm and pointed at it silently. He smothered a large curse and strode up to it and rasped, “Guthrie, you old Son of a B! Can you go on?” The figure gave an affirmative grunt.

Joe Rubens grimaced at me as if to say “Show business!” and grabbed a spear from the prop table and hurried back across the stage for his entrance as Marcellus just before the curtain lifted and the first nervous, superbly atmospheric lines of the play rang out, loud at first, but then going low with unspoken apprehension.

“Who I ss there?”
“Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.”
“Long live the king!”
“Bernardo?”
“He.”
“You come most carefully upon your hour.”
“’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.”
“For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart.” “Have you had quiet guard?”
“Not a mouse stirring.”
With a resigned shrug, John McCarthy simply sat down. F. F. did the

same, though
his
gesture was clench-fisted and exasperated. For a moment it seemed to me very comic that two Ghosts in
Hamlet
should be sitting in the wings, watching a third perform. I unbuttoned my overcoat and slung it over my left arm.

The Ghost’s first two appearances are entirely silent ones. He merely goes on stage, shows himself to the soldiers, and comes off again. Nevertheless there was a determined little ripple of hand-clapping from the audience—the second, third, and fourth rows center greeting their patriarchal hero, it seemed likely. Guthrie didn’t fall down at any rate and he walked reasonably straight—an achievement perhaps rating applause, if anyone out there knew the degree of intoxication Guthrie was probably burdened with at this moment—a cask-bellied Old Man of the Sea on his back.

The only thing out of normal was that he had forgot to turn on the little green light in the peak of his helmet—an omission which hardly mattered, certainly not on this first appearance. I hurried up to him when he came off and told him about it in a whisper as he moved off toward a dark backstage corner. I got in reply, through the inscrutable green veil, an exhalation of whisky and three affirmative grunts: one, that he knew it; two, that the light was working; three, that he’d remember to turn it on next time.

Then the scene had ended and I darted across the stage as they changed to the room-of-state set. I wanted to get rid of my overcoat. Joe Rubens grabbed me and told me about Guthrie’s green light not being on and I told him that was all taken care of.

“Where the hell was he all the time we were hunting for him?” Joe asked me.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
By that time the second scene was playing, with F. F., his Ghost-coverings shed, playing the King as well as he always does (it’s about his best part) and Gertrude Grainger looking very regal beside him as the Queen, her namesake, while there was another flurry of applause, more scattered this time, for the Governor in his black doublet and tights beginning about his seven hundredth performance of Shakespeare’s longest and meatiest role.
Monica was still sitting on the trunk by the switchboard, looking paler than ever under her make-up, it seemed to me, and I folded my overcoat and silently persuaded her to use it as a cushion. I sat beside her and she took my hand and we watched the play from the wings.
After a while I whispered to her, giving her hand a little squeeze,“Feeling better now?”
She shook her head. Then leaning toward me, her mouth close to my ear, she whispered rapidly and unevenly, as if she just had to tell someone, “Bruce, I’m frightened. There’s something in the theater. I don’t think that was Guthrie playing the Ghost.”
I whispered back, “Sure it was. I talked with him.”
“Did you see his face?” she asked.
“No, but I smelled his breath,” I told her and explained to her about him forgetting to turn on the green light. I continued, “Francis and John were both ready to go on as the Ghost, though, until Guthrie turned up. Maybe you glimpsed one of them before the play started and that gave you the idea it wasn’t Guthrie.”
Sybil Jameson in her Player costume looked around at me warningly. I was letting my whispering get too loud.
Monica put her mouth so close that her lips for an instant brushed my ear and she mouse-whispered, “I don’t mean another
person
playing the Ghost—not that exactly. Bruce, there’s
something
in the theater.”
“You’ve got to forget that Ouija nonsense,” I told her sharply. “And buck up now,” I added, for the curtain had just gone down on Scene Two and it was time for her to get on stage for her scene with Laertes and Polonius.
I waited until she was launched into it, speaking her lines brightly enough, and then I carefully crossed the stage behind the backdrop. I was sure there was no more than nerves and imagination to her notions, though they’d raised shivers on me, but just the same I wanted to speak to Guthrie again and see his face.
When I’d completed my slow trip (you have to move rather slowly, so the drop won’t ripple or bulge), I was dumbfounded to find myself witnessing the identical backstage scene that had been going on when I’d got back from my tour of the bars. Only now there was a lot more light because the scene being played on stage was a bright one. And Props was there behind his table, watching everything like the spectator he basically is. But beyond him were Francis Farley Scott and John McCarthy in their improvised Ghost costumes again, and the Governor and Joe with them, and all of them carrying on that furious lip-reader’s argument, now doubly hushed.
I didn’t have to wait to get close to them to know that Guthrie must have disappeared again. As I made my way toward them, watching their silent antics, my silly mind became almost hysterical with the thought that Guthrie had at last discovered that invisible hole every genuine alcoholic wishes he had, into which he could decorously disappear and drink during the times between his absolutely necessary appearances in the real world.
As I neared them, Donald Fryer (our Horatio) came from behind me, having made the trip behind the backdrop faster than I had, to tell the Governor in hushed gasps that Guthrie wasn’t in any of the dressing rooms or anywhere else stage right.
Just at that moment the bright scene ended, the curtain came down, the drapes before which Ophelia and the others had been playing swung back to reveal again the battlements of Elsinore, and the lighting shifted back to the midnight blue of the first scene, so that for the moment it was hard to see at all. I heard the Governor say decisively,
“You
play the Ghost,” his voice receding as he and Joe and Don hurried across the stage to be in place for their proper entrance. Seconds later there came the dull soft hiss of the main curtain opening and I heard the Governor’s taut resonant voice saying, “The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,” and Don responding as Horatio with, “It is a nipping and an eager air.”
By that time I could see again well enough—see Francis Farley Scott and John McCarthy moving side by side toward the back wing through which the Ghost enters. They were still arguing in whispers. The explanation was clear enough: each thought the Governor had pointed at him in the sudden darkness—or possibly in F. F.’s case was pretending he so thought. For a moment the comic side of my mind, grown a bit hysterical by now, almost collapsed me with the thought of twin Ghosts entering the stage side by side. Then once again, history still repeating itself, I saw beyond them that other bulkier figure with the unmistakable shrouded helmet. They must have seen it too for they stopped dead just before my hands touched a shoulder of each of them. I circled quickly past them and reached out my hands to put them lightly on the third figure’s shoulders, intending to whisper, “Guthrie, are you okay?” It was a very stupid thing for one actor to do to another—startling him just before his entrance—but I was made thoughtless by the memory of Monica’s fears and by the rather frantic riddle of where Guthrie could possibly have been hiding.
But just then Horatio gasped, “Look, my lord, it comes,” and Guthrie moved out of my light grasp onto the stage without so much as turning his head—and leaving me shaking because where I’d touched the rough buckram-braced fabric of the Ghost’s cloak I’d felt only a kind of insubstantiality beneath instead of Guthrie’s broad shoulders.
I quickly told myself that was because Guthrie’s cloak had stood out from his shoulders and his back as he had moved. I had to tell myself something like that. I turned around. John McCarthy and F. F. were standing in front of the dark prop table and by now my nerves were in such a state that their paired forms gave me another start. But I tiptoed after them into the downstage wings and watched the scene from there.
The Governor was still on his knees with his sword held hilt up like a cross doing the long speech that begins, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” And of course the Ghost had his cloak drawn around him so you couldn’t see what was under it—and the little green light still wasn’t lit in his helmet. Tonight the absence of that theatric touch made him a more frightening figure—certainly to me, who wanted so much to see Guthrie’s ravaged old face and be reassured by it. Though there was still enough comedy left in the ragged edges of my thoughts that I could imagine Guthrie’s pugnacious son-in-law whispering angrily to those around him that Gilbert Usher was so jealous of his great father-in-law that he wouldn’t let him show his face on the stage.
Then came the transition to the following scene where the Ghost has led Hamlet off alone with him—just a five-second complete darkening of the stage while a scrim is dropped—and at last the Ghost spoke those first lines of “Mark me” and “My hour is almost come, When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames Must render up myself.”
If any of us had any worries about the Ghost blowing up on his lines or slurring them drunkenly, they were taken care of now. Those lines were delivered with the greatest authority and effect. And I was almost certain that it was Guthrie’s rightful voice—at least I was at first—but doing an even better job than the good one he had always done of getting the effect of distance and otherworldliness and hopeless alienation from all life on Earth. The theater became silent as death, yet at the same time I could imagine the soft pounding of a thousand hearts, thousands of shivers crawling—and I
knew
that Francis Farley Scott, whose shoulder was pressed against mine, was trembling.
Each word the Ghost spoke was like a ghost itself, mounting the air and hanging poised for an impossible extra instant before it faded towards eternity.
Those great lines came: “I am thy father’s spirit; Doomed for a certain term to walk the night…” and just at that moment the idea came to me that Guthrie Boyd might be dead, that he might have died and be lying unnoticed somewhere between his children’s home and the theater—no matter what Props had said or the rest of us had seen—and that his ghost might have come to give a last performance. And on the heels of that shivery impossibility came the thought that similar and perhaps even eerier ideas must be frightening Monica. I knew I had to go to her.
So while the Ghost’s words swooped and soared in the dark—marvelous black-plumed birds—I again made that nervous cross behind the backdrop.
Everyone stage right was standing as frozen and absorbed—motionless loomings—as I’d left John and F. F. I spotted Monica at once. She’d moved forward from the switchboard and was standing, crouched a little, by the big floodlight that throws some dimmed blue on the backdrop and across the back of the stage. I went to her just as the Ghost was beginning his exit stage left, moving backward along the edge of the light from the flood, but not quite in it, and reciting more lonely and eerily than I’d ever heard them before, those memorable last lines:
“Fare thee well at once!
“The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
“And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire;
“Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.”
One second passed, then another, and then there came two unexpected bursts of sound at the same identical instant: Monica screamed and a thunderous applause started out front, touched off by Guthrie’s people, of course, but this time swiftly spreading to all the rest of the audience.
I imagine it was the biggest hand the Ghost ever got in the history of the theater. In fact, I never heard of him getting a hand before. It certainly was a most inappropriate place to clap, however much the performance deserved it. It broke the atmosphere and the thread of the scene.
Also, it drowned out Monica’s scream, so that only I and a few of those behind me heard it.
At first I thought I’d made her scream, by touching her as I had Guthrie, suddenly, like an idiot, from behind. But instead of shrinking or dodging away she turned and clung to me, and kept clinging too even after I’d drawn her back and Gertrude Grainger and Sybil Jameson had closed in to comfort her and hush her gasping sobs and try to draw her away from me.
By this time the applause was through and Governor and Don and Joe were taking up the broken scene and knitting together its finish as best they could, while the floods came up little by little, changing to rosy, to indicate dawn breaking over Elsinore.
Then Monica mastered herself and told us in quick whispers what had made her scream. The Ghost, she said, had moved for a moment into the edge of the blue floodlight, and she had seen for a moment through his veil, and what she had seen had been a face like Shakespeare’s. Just that and no more. Except that at the moment when she told us—later she became less certain—she was sure it was Shakespeare himself and no one else.
I discovered then that when you hear something like that you don’t exclaim or get outwardly excited. Or even inwardly, exactly. It rather shuts you up. I know I felt at the same time extreme awe and a renewed irritation at the Ouija board. I was deeply moved, yet at the same time pettishly irked, as if some vast adult creature had disordered the toy world of my universe.
It seemed to hit Sybil and even Gertrude the same way. For the moment we were shy about the whole thing, and so, in her way, was Monica, and so were the few others who had overheard in part or all what Monica had said.
I knew we were going to cross the stage in a few more seconds when the curtain came down on that scene, ending the first act, and stage lights came up. At least I knew that I was going across. Yet I wasn’t looking forward to it.
When the curtain did come down—with another round of applause from out front—and we started across, Monica beside me with my arm still tight around her, there came a choked-off male cry of horror from ahead to shock and hurry us. I think about a dozen of us got stage left about the same time, including of course the Governor and the others who had been on stage.
F. F. and Props were standing inside the doorway to the empty prop room and looking down into the hidden part of the L. Even from the side, they both looked pretty sick. Then F. F. knelt down and almost went out of view, while Props hunched over him with his natural stoop.
As we craned around Props for a look—myself among the first, just beside the Governor, we saw something that told us right away that this Ghost wasn’t ever going to be able to answer that curtain call they were still fitfully clapping for out front, although the house lights must be up by now for the first intermission.
Guthrie Boyd was lying on his back in his street clothes. His face looked gray, the eyes staring straight up. While swirled beside him lay the Ghost’s cloak and veil and the helmet and an empty fifth of whiskey.
Between the two conflicting shocks of Monica’s revelation and the body in the prop room, my mind was in a useless state. And from her helpless incredulous expression I knew Monica felt the same. I tried to put things together and they wouldn’t fit anywhere.
F. F. looked up at us over his shoulder. “He’s not breathing,” he said. “I think he’s gone.” Just the same he started loosing Boyd’s tie and shirt and pillowing his head on the cloak. He handed the whisky bottle back to us through several hands and Joe Rubens got rid of it.
The Governor sent out front for a doctor and within two minutes Harry Grossman was bringing us one from the audience who’d left his seat number and bag at the box office. He was a small man—Guthrie would have made two of him—and a bit awestruck, I could see, though holding himself with greater professional dignity because of that, as we made way for him and then crowded in behind.
He confirmed F. F.’s diagnosis by standing up quickly after kneeling only for a few seconds where F. F. had. Then he said hurriedly to the Governor, as if the words were being surprised out of him against his professional caution, “Mr. Usher, if I hadn’t heard this man giving that great performance just now, I’d think he’d been dead for an hour or more.”
He spoke low and not all of us heard him, but I did and so did Monica, and there was Shock Three to go along with the other two, raising in my mind for an instant the grisly picture of Guthrie Boyd’s spirit, or some other entity, willing his dead body to go through with that last performance. Once again I unsuccessfully tried to fumble together the parts of this night’s mystery.