The Book Of Shade (Shadeborn 1) (4 page)

Curtain Up

Baptiste Du Nord mounted the stage after an out-of-sight orchestra had played him an introduction. The theatre was about half full in the ground floor stalls, but the applause the MC received echoed like it had come from thousands of adoring fans. The elegant Frenchman gave a bow and waited for the clapping to ebb. He had no microphone and only one simple spotlight illuminated him against the still-wavering curtains behind his tall frame, but when he spoke his voice reverberated loud and clear into the space above his patrons’ heads.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome and welcome back to the Theatre Imaginique. We kindly remind you that what you will see tonight is not recommended for the faint hearted… or the weak bladdered.” There was a grim chuckle amongst those who had clearly visited the place before. Baptiste gave a Cheshire cat grin. “If you are at all disturbed by the proceedings this evening, you are quite free to exit via the door to your left. We only ask that you do not disrupt the performers during their displays. They can be… somewhat temperamental.”

Lily let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding in. The music from nowhere struck up again and the curtains finally parted to bring on the first act of the night. Baptiste introduced ‘Secrets of the Somnambulist’, a performer who back-flipped repeatedly onto the stage in a burst of music and energy. When he suddenly stopped, the wild cacophony of notes swiftly settled into a tentative lullaby. It was only when the acrobat revolved, slowly on one foot, to face the crowd that Lily realised he was asleep. She gasped at the sight of his drowsy puppy-dog eyes, taking in his jungle-style shorts and the tattooed words all over his dark-skinned body, before letting her eyes race back to his shadowed face.

“Oh my God,” she whispered to Jazzy. “I know that guy. He’s in my history class.”

There were white circles painted around his closed eyes and matching lines along his cheekbones and jaw, but it was definitely Lawrence Seward beneath the paint. The impossibly tall frame was now performing superb acts of balance on the stage. He pivoted on one strong hand with his legs in the air, all with his eyes gently shut, whilst the audience applauded every trick and spin. Lily wondered how he could possibly know where the edge of the stage was with his eyes closed, indeed the audience gasped several times when they thought he was about to flip right off the brink and land in the pit with the unseen orchestra. But every time he approached danger, Lawrence managed to stop perhaps only an inch or two from the precipice.

“He’s so buff,” Jazzy whispered back, her eyes gleaming at the sight of his graffiti-coated six-pack. Lawrence began to juggle a variety of deadly-looking knives, despite having no way to see them rising and falling. “Is he a nice guy?”

“Yeah, actually,” Lily answered. She realised now why he had left in a hurry when Professor Havers had begun to criticise the integrity of the show, but even then he’d been polite enough to say goodbye. “Want me to introduce you sometime?”

Jazzy grinned, never taking her eyes from his muscular torso. “Please.”

After the shock of seeing her new study partner nearly knife himself in the eye with one final daring juggling trick, the sultry dance act that followed was a welcome relief from suspense. Two women in green leotards performed an elegant display, and Lily felt her heart-rate slowing as they wound their way across the stage. One of the women was a tall, impossibly thin creature with wispy blonde hair and a pale, bony face, whilst the other was a fuller-figured exotic beauty, who made eyes at every man in the audience as she contorted her body into various shapes. Michael wolf-whistled when this dark damsel took her last bow.

The Bladeplay act he had described was as exciting as he’d promised. A set of burly, hairy twins, introduced as Rasmus and Erasmus, executed perfectly symmetrical motions with razor sharp swords, cutting through fruit in mid-air to display the force they used before turning their blades on one another. They fought with vicious energy that kept the audience gasping; many people turned away after one of the pair drew a little blood from the forearm of the other. Lily couldn’t tear her eyes from the twins, fascinated by their speed and skill, until they were moving so swiftly that she could hardly concentrate on either one. They blurred into a moving mass of flesh and steel, with a crescendo of music guiding them to a final deadly double-stabbing, before the lights went out.

After that came the turn of the gypsy Michael had also spoken of, but there were no holograms of dead people tonight. The old Madame went by the name of Lady Eva and she took to the stage, working herself into a trance that she claimed would reveal the messages from the dead relatives of people in the audience that night. She was a round Hispanic woman with dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle, who wailed like fury into the echoing theatre, calling on the ‘gitanos of the past’ to aid her, whatever they were. Lilt thought it was rather laughable, but nobody else was laughing. In fact, a lot of the older people in the audience were paying terribly close attention, waiting on her words in a silence that would have made a pin think twice about dropping.

Lady Eva passed messages that shocked some of the audience members into sudden tears, one older woman even rushed out of the exit door after the gypsy had given her a man’s name and a few simple words. The Madame stayed only ten minutes or so on the stage before her messages for the night were complete, but the whole atmosphere of the space had swiftly changed by the time Baptiste returned to the boards. It was time to announce the final act of the night, the headliner. After all that she had seen, Lily could hardly remember what the act was from the playbill.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your raucous applause, if you please, for the sensational Monsieur Novel!”

The audience obeyed the MC’s command, but when Baptiste had vacated the spotlight, nobody came to the stage. It wasn’t until the last clap died, some moments later, that Lily heard footsteps clicking along the old theatre boards. The illusionist stepped from total blackness into the shadow at the edge of the stage, and even craning her head only afforded Lily the frame of a man in a long Victorian coat. The tense air in the dated theatre was thick enough to be sliceable, and every spectator breathed in their portion of that heavy air, in anticipation of the moment when the odd Monsieur would step into the spotlight.

Novel did not disappoint them. A shock of lightning appeared from nowhere at all and in the split-second that it flashed he appeared for the waiting patrons to see. It seemed as though the contents of the theatre gasped as a single being, even those who must have seen him before were transfixed in shock. His eyes were cast into black, shadowy sockets by the bright white spotlight pouring down from above. Skin pale as a spectre’s was exaggerated by the darkly drawn eyebrows arching into points above those gloomy hollows. His lips too were black as coal, a superb effort in stage makeup that reminded Lily of a haunting cross between a French mime and a black-and-white movie serial killer. She didn’t know which to be more afraid of.

Perhaps more astonishing still was Monsieur Novel’s hair. It was long enough to be combed behind his ears, though it did not grace his neck, and in the dusty spotlight it appeared to be totally white. It was a strange whiteness, for even through his make-up, Lily thought that the gentlemen couldn’t be more than ten years her senior. The illusionist’s black mouth stretched into a serious sneer as he surveyed the awestruck crowd. He held out one pale hand with a slow and deliberate grace. Tiny blue sparks grew in his palm as he swept the hand from left to right in welcome.

“Good evening,” he purred in the darkest of tones.

And this time the lightning came straight from his palm when it exploded into life.

The dumbstruck crowd suddenly applauded in a blast of appreciation, but Lily’s hands remained still, clutching the sides of her chair. Novel stalked the very edge of the stage like a patient predator, the invisible orchestra striking up as the beams of lightning shot about the cavernous space in time to the music. He appeared to be controlling them, but his thin frame and well-fitted suit left no space in which to hide any apparatus on his body. Occasionally, he seemed to lose control of the larger forks of electricity which shot out towards the audience in frighteningly loud snaps. The patrons flinched as the whip of energy crackled above them.

All the while Monsieur Novel’s expression remained dark and thoughtful. Not once did his lips rise into a smile. They simply sneered continually at the power he was controlling, parting for him to suck in precisely choreographed breaths when he turned in his display of perfect grace, avoiding every spot the forks could hit. A few patrons in the front row, perhaps those who had never seen him before, were starting to panic at the multitude of power growing rapidly on the stage before them, with no reasonable explanation in sight. It looked like a major fire hazard for sure. One of them tried to get up.

“I would kindly recommend you stay in your seat for this performance, good sir,” Novel said loudly over the buzz of the lightning strikes. “It could be rather nasty for you, if you don’t.”

There was something foreign lurking in the shadows of his accent. Perhaps he had been living in England a long time, but he definitely wasn’t from around these parts. His voice had an amused kind of youth in it that didn’t suit his skeletal pre-modern look, and though he gazed upon the terrified patron as he sat back down in his chair, he still didn’t let the mirth in his warning show on his face.

All at once the lightning stopped. Novel stood in the dead centre of the stage, looking down at his feet with his shadowed eyes. Lily caught her breath as the flicker of hot white energy grew beneath his feet, sparking and growing into a ball of buzzing power. He thrust out his pale hands, raising them upwards as he slowly began to levitate into the air. Lily could see no wires to hoist him, and his clothes didn’t move as though they were under any strain. He simply rose up in a slow, straight line as the lightning ball grew larger and larger in the space where he’d been standing. In his ascent, his face was lit from under his chin and Lily finally saw a pair of pale blue eyes glowing out of the black sockets on his face.

And they glowed directly at her.

She started in her seat, shocked to find his gaze so blatantly fixed. She would have sworn the floating man had raised one of his black eyebrows at her, but a moment later the lightning ball exploded with a deafening crack that made the entire contents of the theatre sink down into their seats and clutch their heads in wild panic. When Lily looked up again, Monsieur Novel was gone. Someone behind Lily broke the shocked silence of the audience by starting to applaud. Gasps erupted as some of them looked beyond her to the source of the clap, then suddenly everyone was giving an ovation.

Lily craned her head around, almost jumping out of her skin when she realised it was Monsieur Novel sitting in the seat directly behind her. He had started his own applause. He sat with a casual grace, an elegant hand accepting the praise as he slowly got back to his feet and straightened out his beautiful clothes. Once more his frosty blue eyes snapped to Lily. She wanted to look away, but it just didn’t happen. Novel inclined his head to the rapt audience without breaking his stare, then swiftly retreated up the theatre aisle, his long coat billowing in another invisible gust of air.

O
CTOBER

How to Win Friends

The Illustrious Minds didn’t only occupy their time with visits to the Theatre Imaginique. They quite often did normal things, like nights out at Guttersnipes and visits to the cinema, which so far Lily had managed to avoid by virtue of the first massive assignment for Professor Havers being due on October 13
th
. She got acquainted with the library, in which the research computers were even more temperamental than her fuzzy-screened laptop, and printed herself a huge pile of junk to read that kept her busy as she crafted a careful appraisal of Georgian crime and punishment, both aiming and praying for a decent starting grade in the module.

Jazzy’s degree path was a double-stranded English Language and Literature and, though she had no assignments due until December, she did have a reading list that had probably destroyed an acre of Brazilian rainforest to print and bind. She wasn’t a big fan of e-books, so said reading list was taking up space under both hers and Lily’s beds until she’d got through it all. Michael called them boring for wanting to study, but Molly was a great comfort when she explained that all second year students tended to erase from their memory the ‘Nerdy First Term’ where they gave it their best shot at doing well in class. Lily was sure that she’d be able to settle better into the social side of Pike U once this first paper was out of the way. And once she knew for sure that she was up to standard with Professor Havers and not likely to be kicked out on her ear come Christmas break.

On the hand-in day for the paper, Jazzy waited outside the lecture hall for Lily as planned. After Jazzy had changed her mind at least fifty times, she had finally agreed to meet Lawrence, provided that Lily could sort-of bump into him casually after class. It wasn’t as though they didn’t have anything to talk about, what with him being a sleepwalking, knife-juggling acrobat and all. Lawrence was still in the hall getting his paper signed off when Lily came out and stood nonchalantly with Jazzy at the door.

“He’s coming, he’s coming!” she whispered excitedly. Lily shushed her quickly, stepping forward again into the doorway.

“Oh, hi Lawrence!” She said the words as though she hadn’t just been in the room with him and ignored him a moment ago. “Bet you’re glad to get that paper out of the way.”

“Yeah,” he said shyly, his big eyes slipping to glance at Jazzy now and then. “I’m not really a book guy. Research is harder than I thought actually.”

“Well you should meet my friend Jazzy here,” Lily said, pulling her forward when she didn’t come on her own, “she’s an expert at book stuff.”

Jazzy wasn’t really an expert, but more of an avid fan of research. Her haphazard approach wasn’t always productive, but it was probably better than Lawrence’s, so technically that made Lily’s words true.

“Cool,” Lawrence said, nodding to Jazzy. She smiled at him but still didn’t speak. “It’s nice to meet you,” he added awkwardly.

“We saw you at the theatre you know,” Lily said to break the tension. “You should have said you were into all that cool stuff.”

He looked a little embarrassed at that, rubbing the back of his neck with a grin. “Oh, uh, did you like the show?”

“You were totally amazing!” Jazzy suddenly blurted out, all nerves and pink cheeks. “I mean, it all was really. You know, everything… but also you.”

Lily could see the silent prayer escaping her friend, that the earth might oblige by opening and swallowing her up right about then, but Lawrence seemed to relax at her words. He gave her a much more earnest smile, his eyes shining at her.

“You know if you liked it so much, I could maybe show you around the theatre one afternoon?” He let one sandaled foot scratch the back of his other leg, looking up at the wall nervously whilst he asked the girls the question.

Lily flashed Jazzy a grin. “We would so love to do that,” she replied. “What day’s good for you?”

When everything had been arranged, Jazzy was practically bouncing on the heels of her converse all the way back to the dorm. For her part, Lily was pleased that she’d been able to do something nice for her friend, but the prospect of peeking around a real Victorian theatre also held its own selfish temptations. There would surely be catacombs and secret passages to find and explore, plus all the usual areas that people who weren’t performers never got to see.

And I can poke around in the magic props to find out how Monsieur Novel does his tricks.

‘Lightning and Levitation’ had been bothering Lily for quite some time, and she had found it hard to push the wonderings to the back of her mind whilst she was writing her Modern History paper. On a few of her tea breaks from studying, she had tried to google how magicians fly on stage, but none of the methods she found seemed to match with what she had seen. The especially impossible part being the speed at which Novel had gotten into the seat behind her, from being ten feet above the stage a moment before. Jazzy told her it ruined the mystery if you went snooping online, but Lily carried on searching until she ran out of possibilities all the same.