The Rebirth of Wonder (4 page)

There were about a dozen, and at first he saw
them as an undifferentiated mass. Gradually, though, individuals
emerged.

To one side, crouched against the proscenium,
fingering the ancient velvet of the curtain's edge, was a bent old
woman, her white hair straggling out around a red kerchief; she
wore a drab brown skirt and sweater and a frayed white apron.

Near her stood a woman Art judged to be in
her thirties, tall and straight, in a dark green gown, red hair
swept back from her face and bound in a single thick braid.

An immense black man in a brightly colored
shirt and faded jeans stood beside the woman in green.

A short, swarthy woman with curly black hair
could have passed for a gypsy fortune-teller; she wore a white
blouse and leather slacks, though, rather than the traditional long
skirt. Art wondered why on earth anyone would wear leather in
August.

A middle-aged black woman in faded jeans and
a floral-print blouse knotted at her midriff stood with her hands
on her hips, arguing amiably with a rather smug-looking, mustached
man in black slacks and a Hawaiian shirt.

An obese Oriental wearing only a pair of
brown shorts stood panting in center stage, looking up at the
flies.

Two swarthy men, one in a turban, were
talking together well upstage, where Art couldn't see them
clearly.

And a woman, or maybe only a girl, with light
brown hair and a summer dress, sat on the edge of the stage,
smiling at him.

They were an even more motley crew than most
theater troupes, Art thought. He also wondered whether this was the
entire company; Bampton Summer Theatre usually had twice this
number.

But then, Bampton Summer Theatre was purely
amateur.

Most of the others had turned when Ms. Fox
leapt up on the stage, looking to see what the commotion was about.
What desultory conversation they had been pursuing now died away
completely as the entire company turned to stare at Art.

“
Hi,” he said,
standing in the aisle feeling foolish.

Behind him, Innisfree cleared his throat.

“
My fellow... ah,
thespians!” Innisfree announced. “This is Arthur Dunham, our
landlord's son. We are to make him welcome, as a requirement of our
rental here!”

Most of the smiles that had been present had
vanished. “You think he's no trouble, Merle?” the black woman
asked.

“
Ah, my dear Tituba,
trouble or no, what choice have we?” Innisfree called
back.

“
I won't be any
trouble,” Art said, annoyed. “I've worked here for years, done more
than a dozen shows. I know where everything is, how everything
works.”

“
You do not know how
we
work,” the man with the mustache
retorted.

Art shrugged. “I'll learn. And I'll stay out
of your way, if that's what you want.”

“
That is indeed what
we want,” the big black man replied. “We mean you no ill, Mr.
Dunham, but we have our own ways.”

“
Well, that's fine,
then,” Art said, trying to hide his annoyance. “But my dad wants me
here to keep an eye on the place, and Mr. Innisfree agreed, so here
I am. Now, is there anything I can help with? Anything I can tell
you about? Maybe show you somewhere you can put those things?” He
pointed out the Duke of Athens's stage and the fairy queen's
bower.

Several of the Bringers of Wonder turned to
look where he pointed, as if noticing the retired sets for the
first time.

“
Can we use those?”
the woman in green asked, directing her question not to Art, but to
Innisfree.

“
We don't need
them,” the black woman replied.

Innisfree turned up empty hands. “If you
like, Faye, I'm sure we can find a use for them.”

“
Everyone already saw them in
A Midsummer Night's
Dream
,” Art pointed out.

“
Then we'll
transform them,” the woman in green said, “and none shall recognize
them.”

“
Suit yourselves,”
Art said. “But if you'd rather just get rid of them, there's
storage space in the basement, and there's a trapdoor upstage there
that we can lower them down through – it'll take about five men,
I'd say, two up here and three downstairs.”

“
Boy,” the old woman
in the kerchief snapped, startling Art, “haven't we told you to
mind your own business? If we want 'em stashed, we'll do it
ourselves!” Her voice was no weak old woman's quaver, but sharp and
strong; it cut through the theater like an oar through
water.

That was
one
person who would
have no trouble projecting to the back of the theater, Art thought.
“I'm sorry, Ma'am,” he said, “but it
is
my business – anything to do with
this theater is.”

“
Merle,” the old
woman said, glowering at Innisfree, “if I'd known this place came
with its own built-in twerp, I'd never have agreed to
it.”

“
Peace, Grandmother,” said the man with the turban.
“Where
else
would we go?”

“
Any number of
places, you little snot,” the old woman retorted. “To Hell, for all
of me. I didn't say I'd have gone elsewhere – I might just have
gone home and said I'd have none of this whole lunatic
production.”

“
Oh, no,” said the woman in green, “you don't mean
that! We
need
you!”

“
She's right,” the
turbaned man agreed. “We can't do it without you,
Grandmother!”

“
Listen,” Art said,
“I'm sorry; I don't want to cause any trouble. I can just sit here
and mind my own business, if that's really what you want.” He
stepped into a row of seats.

“
I
don't want you
anywhere
, nitwit,” the old woman
answered. “I don't need some punk watching me.”

The others were uncomfortably silent for a
moment; at last Innisfree suggested, “I think that Ms. Yeager means
we'd prefer to have no audience until we've got a little farther
along.”

“
All right,” Art
said. “Then I'll go work on cleaning the basement. If you need
anything, just come on down.”

He marched down the aisle, hopped one-handed
up onstage – if Innisfree could do it, so could he – and found his
way through the players to the stairway door in the stage right
wing.

The Bringers of Wonder watched him pass; then
the woman who had been sitting on the stage got to her feet and
called, “Hang on a minute, I'll come with you. I'd like to see
what's down there.”

He turned and smiled at her.

“
Thanks,” he said.
“I'd be glad of the company.”

Chapter Four

“
My name's Maggie,”
she said as they descended the narrow steps, “Maggie
Gowdie.”

“
Art Dunham,” Art
said, reaching for the string that would turn on the dangling bare
light bulb at the foot of the stair.

“
Pleased to meet
you. It's a long way down, isn't it?”

“
Yes, it is. Watch
your step.” He stepped off the bottom stair onto the rough stone of
the floor and turned to offer Maggie a hand. She accepted it and
stepped down beside him, then looked around.

They were in a small room, perhaps eight feet
square, with brown plank walls and a single door. Art pulled the
key ring from his pocket, found the one he wanted, and unlocked the
door; he opened it, reached inside, and flipped the light
switch.

“
Come on,” he
said.

Maggie followed him through the door into the
basement's central corridor. Three lights in wire cages lit the
ancient plaster walls of the narrow passage, walls that had been
painted white once, long ago, but were now covered with scrapes,
stains, and graffiti. At the near end the passage ended in a
sliding door; at the other it turned a right angle into darkness.
Closed doors were spaced along either side. The floor was raw
granite; the foundations had been cut into the living bedrock. The
ceiling, too, was stone, which startled Maggie. It was also some
fifteen feet up.

“
What a strange
place!” she said.

“
Yup,” Art agreed.
“Come on, we'll start at this end.” He turned toward the sliding
door, and Maggie followed.

“
This seems like a
lot of basement for a little old theater,” she said, as he rolled
the door aside. “And it looks different, too. I mean, upstairs is
all wood, and down here there's stone.”

“
That's because the
foundation's a lot older than the rest,” Art explained. “Originally
this place was a church, but it burned down. The crypts weren't
damaged much, but everything else was a total loss. That was about
1910; it was a ruin until 1923, when someone bought it and built
the theater.”

Maggie looked over Art's shoulder into the
gloom of the large room below the stage; he could smell the sweet
odor of her hair. Light spilled in from the corridor and seeped,
here and there, through cracks and knotholes in the floor overhead;
there was no ceiling to hide the joists. They could hear voices –
not well enough to make out words or even tell who was speaking,
but enough to know when someone was talking. The air of the room
had a cool, earthen feel, and Maggie could smell dry dust and moist
soil.

Then Art flipped the light switch, and half a
dozen wall fixtures came on, illuminating a strange and cavernous
chamber.

Where visible, three of the walls were
rough-hewn stone, while the floors above and below were simple
plank – a sort of reversal of the corridor. When Maggie leaned
forward to peer in she could see that the wall with the door in it
was plaster, like the corridor. The wooden floor was a step down
from the solid bedrock of the passage, which seemed completely
unreasonable – why would anyone have cut farther down into the
stone to make room for flooring?

Whatever the reason, they had done exactly
that. Maggie continued her examination.

Stone columns were spaced along the three
stone walls, curving over at the top as if to support a vaulted
ceiling, but then ending in broken stumps. The stage floor above
them rested on huge wooden beams, not on stone.

Between two of the columns, off to the right
and well above the floor, was a huge double door to the outside,
perhaps four yards square, held shut with a heavy wooden bar that
rested in black iron brackets. A chain and padlock held the
brackets closed and kept the bar in place.

Most of the wall space, and in fact almost
half the total floor area, was filled with pieces of old sets –
staircases and window seats, balconies and pulpits, all packed in
together however they would fit. The dark greens of haunted forests
shaded the vivid pinks and purples of nightclub stages, while staid
floral wallpaper showed through Gothic arches. In the center of the
chamber was a scattering of debris – Titania's wrap, Bottom's mask,
Moon's lantern and thornbush – from the most recent production;
cleaning that up was Art's major excuse for coming down here.

“
This part was built
about 1850,” he said. “This end of the church fell in during the
fire, which is why there's no ceiling. It's handy for the traps.”
He pointed to three trapdoors in the stage. Then he indicated the
big door in the right-hand wall. “That's where we bring in lumber
and so forth – it opens on a ramp up to the parking lot.” He
dropped his hand and pointed to the floor. “And there's another
level underneath here, but we closed that off when I was a little
kid – a lot of trash fell down there during the fire, or got thrown
down there when the place was abandoned, and it wasn't much more
than a stone pit to begin with, so when the old floor rotted we
didn't replace the ladder or the door, we just put the new floor in
over it.”

“
Your family's owned
this place a long time, then?” Maggie asked.

“
Oh, yes,” Art
agreed. “My grandfather bought it back in the forties, during the
postwar housing shortage. He wanted to convert it to a house and
sell it, but he couldn't raise the capital.”

“
So he left it a
theater.”

“
Right.” Art cleared
his throat. “Anyway, you're welcome to use any of these old sets,
if you like. And you can store stuff down here. It's a little musty
at this end – might have something to do with the pit, I suppose –
but then there are plenty of storerooms under the house. The people
who built the theater put walls in under each of the main support
arches, and then ran that corridor down the center, so there are
nine separate rooms, not counting the one with the
stairs.”

Maggie nodded.

“
And down the far
end, around the corner, is where the water main and the electricity
and phone lines come in.” He pointed back down the corridor.
“There's a small fuse box, too, for the outside lights. The main
fuse box is upstairs near the light board,
though.”