The Rebirth of Wonder (7 page)

All the same, bringing a
book might have been clever. He would plan on dropping by the
library tomorrow morning and finding something good. Someone had
mentioned a couple of possibilities – had that been Jamie, during
rehearsals for
A Midsummer Night's
Dream
? Or George?

“
Ah, Arthur,”
Innisfree's voice said, “A pleasure to see you.”

Art started, and looked over his
shoulder.

The Bringers were on the stage behind him –
not just Innisfree, but several of them, perhaps all of them.

Art scooted himself off the stage and turned
to face them. “I didn't hear you come in,” he said.

“
Well, we didn't
want to disturb you,” Innisfree explained. “You looked so
thoughtful, sitting there.”

Art had not realized he was being
particularly thoughtful, and did not understand how he had failed
to hear the stage door opening and closing, had failed to hear
footsteps on the stage, had failed to see the sunlight when the
door was opened. He made no answer, but instead simply stood,
looking up at Innisfree, and the old woman, and the woman with the
braid – she wasn't in green today, but in a gown of maroon silk
that looked totally inappropriate for such hot weather.

“
What the devil are you staring at, boy?” the old woman
shouted. Her voice was
incredibly
piercing.

“
Nothing,” Art said.
“You startled me, ma'am, that's all.” She was, he noticed, wearing
either the same clothes as yesterday, or others equally dismal and
unmemorable. Like the other woman's, they were far heavier than was
reasonable on a hot August day.

“
That's no reason to
stare like a damned owl.”

“
Sorry.” Art blinked
and turned his gaze elsewhere.

Maggie was off to stage right, watching him;
she wore cutoff jeans and a red paisley halter.

“
Well,” Innisfree
called, “I think we're all here; shall we get
started?”

“
What, you expect us
to get anything done with this idiot staring at us as if we were
his television set?” the old woman demanded. “It's pretty clear he
doesn't have the wit for anything more complicated than
TV.”

“
Baba,” Innisfree
said, “leave the boy alone. You know why he's
here.”

“
All the same, sir,”
said the man with the elegant mustache, “I think we would all be
happier if he did not remain where he is, watching us from the
audience.”

Innisfree looked about, confounded, as a
general round of nodding and affirmative muttering greeted
this.

“
It's all right,”
Art said, coming to Innisfree's rescue, “I've still got some things
I can do down in the basement. If you need anything, you can send
someone down, or just call through one of the
traps.”

Innisfree's relief was obvious. “Thank you,
Arthur, you're a gentleman.”

“
You're welcome,”
Art said, as he headed for the steps up to the
stage.

Maggie met him there, and walked beside him
to the basement door; she glanced back over her shoulder, then
whispered, “Don't mind Ba... I mean, Ms. Yeager. She's just as
disagreeable with everyone.”

“
Yeager?” Art threw
the old woman a quick glance, which she nonetheless seemed to
catch. When he turned away again he was sure she was glaring at
him.

Maggie nodded. “Barbara Yeager. Her friends
call her Baba – if she has any friends.”

Art paused with his hand on the doorknob and
looked at Maggie, noticing the sweat on her forehead. He still
hadn't turned on the air conditioning, and the stage was hot.

“
I'd sort of like to
know who everybody is,” he said. “Nobody's ever done any real
introductions, and I don't like not even knowing any
names.”

Maggie blinked. “Well, you
know
my
name.”

“
That's true,” Art
admitted. “And I know Mr. Innisfree, but you people call him
something else.”

“
Oh – Merle, I guess
you mean. That's his first name. M-E-R-L-E, Like Merle
Haggard.”

Art nodded. “And the Chinese woman's name is
Fox? Like the animal?”

Maggie nodded. “I don't know her first name,”
she said, apologetically.

“
Are you two going
to stand there jabbering all day?” the old woman
demanded.

“
Just a minute,
Grandmother!” Maggie called back.

“
Is she your
grandmother, the one who said she was a witch?” Art asked,
whispering.

“
Oh, no, of course
not!” Maggie stifled a laugh. “No, we just call her that. I think
she likes it. She's Russian, you know, and 'Baba' is short for
'Barbara,' but it's also the Russian word for 'Granny,' so... well,
anyway, I don't think she really has any kids or grandkids of her
own, and none of us are directly related. Except maybe Merle and
Faye. I think they're connected somehow, cousins or
something.”

“
Who's
Faye?”

“
Faye Morgan, the
redhead with the braid.” She pointed.

Art glanced at the woman in maroon silk. Yes,
he'd heard her called Faye; it had slipped his mind. “What
about...” he began.

“
Maggie!” the
redhead called. “Could you come here?”

“
Go ahead,” Art
said, opening the door. “Thanks.”

Maggie turned to see what Faye Morgan wanted,
and Art switched on a light and descended into the relative
coolness of the basement.

He wondered how long it would be before
someone asked him how to turn on the air conditioning; he had
intended to do that, but had gotten distracted.

For the present, he didn't worry about it –
the basement was cool enough that he wouldn't suffer, and the
Bringers, as they had made abundantly clear, weren't his problem.
He found the dustpan and broom; the little heap of dust and wood
shavings was just where he had left it, waiting to be cleared
away.

He could hear footsteps overhead as the
Bringers went about their business – whatever it was. His playhouse
wasn't private anymore.

Down here, the theater's odor was just as
distinctive, but different – the hot attic smell of dry wood was
thin and faint, almost lost in the cool dark cellar fragrance of
earth and must and damp stone.

Cellars below, attic above, and nothing in
between; the theater was treasure house and playroom, but no one's
home.

He swept up the mound of debris and dumped it
in the battered steel drum that served as a trashcan. That done, he
returned broom and dustpan to their regular places, and then stood,
eyes closed, in the center of the big room.

Below him, he knew, was the pit in the stone
that he had told Maggie about; he remembered seeing it when he was
just a kid, maybe four or five years old. It had been a dark square
surrounded by gray stone that seemed to go down and down and down
forever, deep into the secret black heart of the world; it had
terrified and fascinated him. He remembered that he had thought it
smelled strange, and a faint draft had seemed to blow down into it,
as if something huge and moist and alien were down there, breathing
slowly in, trying to suck him down into the blackness.

He supposed that whoever built the church had
intended it as a crypt of some sort; it had been too big for a
well. So far as he had ever heard, though, no one was entombed
there; it was just a big square empty hole that later generations
had dumped trash into.

He hadn't seen any trash as a kid, so far as
he could recall, but all the grown-ups had told him it was down
there.

Maybe they should have left it open, he
thought, and gone on dumping trash down there until they filled it;
it would have been easier than hauling the steel drum out through
the big outside door every so often to empty it.

Now, though, with the new floor in place for
eighteen years, there was no sign that the pit existed, or had ever
existed. He couldn't feel any air moving through the cracks in the
floor, couldn't smell that strange scent over the ordinary stone
and moisture of the basement.

He opened his eyes and listened.

The Bringers were moving around overhead,
going about their business – whatever it was. He could hear voices
muttering, but could make out no words. He could hear footsteps as
they moved about, but no pattern, no organization. No one was
calling instructions, no one was moving sets.

He wondered just what sort
of a show this
Return of Magic
really was; was it a play, or a magic act, or
what?

Well, it apparently wasn't his business, and
nobody was calling for him to come turn on the air conditioning, or
to help hang lights, or to show them where anything was. Irritated,
he turned and marched out into the passageway, where he pulled the
key ring from his pocket and unlocked the first door on the
right.

He turned on the light inside the door and
looked at a long, tall, narrow room lined with shelves – to either
side the shelves were built onto the wooden walls, while at the far
end freestanding storage racks stood against the rough stone of the
foundation. Most of the shelves were filled with cardboard boxes; a
few held loose items, sometimes neatly stacked, sometimes shoved
onto the shelves in heaps.

This room was dedicated to small props and
set dressing – things like silverware and lampshades and vases.
Sorting through all this would, he was sure, keep him busy for
hours.

Maybe days.

An hour or so later he rolled the steel drum
in from the big room; the objects deemed too far gone to be worth
saving had overflowed the box he had chosen for their disposal, and
he had barely started.

Chapter Seven

It still seemed as if he had scarcely begun
when he heard Maggie's voice calling, “Art? Are you down here?”

He put down the chrome cocktail-ice mallet he
had been studying and called in reply, “In here!”

A moment later the witch's granddaughter
stuck her head through the doorway and smiled at him.

“
Hi,” she said.
“We're all done for today.”

Art glanced at his watch and read 5:44.
“Dinner break?”

“
No, we're finished
for today.”

“
Okay.” He looked
over the various objects he had pulled out of the box he was
working on, and shrugged. “I'll do the rest of this tomorrow, I
guess.”

“
What are you
doing?” Maggie asked, stepping into the room.

“
Sorting,” he
said.

Maggie looked at the rows of boxes. Some were
labeled, in a variety of different hands and using a variety of
implements, from charcoaled stick to fountain pen to felt-tip
marker, from crayon to pencil to paint; others were not marked in
any way. Some of the inscriptions were cryptic – “E Laws 3rd
C'nut,” for example – while others, such as “Cocktail set,
Christie's Mousetrap, 1973 production,” were clear. Many boxes bore
names, or dates, or descriptions of contents, or some combination
thereof; most of the names were unfamiliar, and the dates went back
at least as far as 1926.

“
What
is
all this stuff?” Maggie asked.

“
Props,” Art told
her. “If you need any for this show you're doing, let me know, and
I'll see if I can find them for you.”

“
Where'd they all
come from?”

Art shrugged. “They just sort of accumulated.
People would pick them up at yard sales for a show, or find them in
attics, or make them – ” he gestured at a foot-long prop dagger
made of wood painted silver, the wood cracked with age and the
paint flaking, ” – and then after the show, they'd just leave them
here in case someone needed them again later.”

Maggie nodded. “I think I see,” she said
slowly. “This explains a lot.”

“
It does?” Art
looked around, puzzled; he didn't see how the prop room explained
anything at all.

“
Never mind that,”
Maggie said briskly, in an abrupt change of tenor. “I came down to
tell you we're leaving, and we'll want to get back in tomorrow at
two o'clock.”

“
Two?”

“
Yup.”

Art looked around.

This could wait, he decided. He would have
plenty of time to get it done before the Bringers held their one
and only performance on August 30th. He picked up the ice hammer,
placed it atop the 1973 cocktail set box, then turned off the light
and herded Maggie out the door before closing and locking it behind
them.

At the top of the stairs, when they emerged
into the backstage area, Art was startled to realize that the air
was cool and sweet, the hot, dry, dusty air of the morning gone.
The Bringers must have figured out for themselves how to turn the
air conditioner on, he decided. He would need to check on that and
make sure they had turned it off again.

The only illumination came from the backstage
work lights; the stage was dim, the house dark, the lobby doors
closed, so far as he could see. Maggie, paying no attention, headed
for the stage door, while Art turned toward the steps.