by Tess Lake
Inside the theater it was certainly no better. We were sold out, the crowd murmuring excitedly. Behind the scenes it was chaos. Aunt Cass was missing, we were due to start in less than fifteen minutes, and she still hadn't put her makeup and costume on. Everyone was rushing everywhere like headless chickens. I was desperately trying to corral teenagers, stop some from crying, calming down Anton who was sweating so much his oversized prop nose kept coming unstuck, and also trying to keep myself calm and not run immediately to the fire alarm, hit it and then say everyone had to evacuate the building.
I was checking the racks of costumes by the side of the stage when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I whirled around, my heart in my throat, but then relaxed when I saw it was only Jack, Molly and Luce.
“Hey, came to say good luck and, you know if anything happens, let me know. I'll just be out there,” Jack said.
“Okay, thanks,” I said, still somewhat out of breath and not really listening.
“Yes, good luck,” Molly said.
“Same here,” Luce said. They were looking around, distracted, not paying any attention.
“Are you guys looking for something?” I asked.
“Is Aunt Cass around?” Molly asked.
I was about to say no, but as though she'd been summoned by the sound of her name, Aunt Cass appeared. In her arms was the mesh cage that she had constructed and in the bottom was a small pink lizard no larger than the palm of my hand.
“I got it! I knew as soon as that love potion was gone out of the water I'd be able to track it down,” she said. She was grinning at the four of us who were standing there somewhat stunned.
“What? Where was the salamander?” I finally said.
“It was under the theater. It had set up a nest there. It must've been all the teenagers with all their hormones and love and adventure and excitement and anger and fury and everything that's been going on here. Of course it would be drawn here! I found one of those trapdoors and went down there and it was amongst all that rubbish that someone's been dumping, all those spirit gum bottles and whatever,” Aunt Cass said.
“Spirit gum?” Luce asked.
“Yeah you know, for costumes, makeup, that type of thing. There's enough down there that we could put a costume on everybody,” Aunt Cass said.
“There's magic in the mayonnaise of the Magic Bean sandwiches,” Molly blurted out to Aunt Cass.
“What? How do you figure that?” Aunt Cass asked.
“It's easy, we used one of those testing strips you gave us. It went pink straight away. They're using magic in their sandwiches. We hardly had any customers today. They're going to ruin us and they're using magic, some witch is doing it,” Molly complained.
Aunt Cass shook her head.
“Or the strips also detect tarragon, which is probably what it found,” she said. “Here, take this out and lock it in your car. I've sealed its magic away so its effect should start to recede fairly soon. Just make sure it doesn't escape,” she said, thrusting the cage on Molly and Luce.
Henry G appeared, grabbed Aunt Cass by the arm and dragged her off to the dressing room to put her into makeup.
“Oh, tarragon,” Luce said.
“Damn,” Molly said.
They walked off with the salamander between them, leaving Jack and me alone.
“I have no idea what that's about, but if I was to guess, possibly there was a break-in at the Magic Bean?” Jack said.
“I have no comment, but possibly yes,” I said, realizing that although I had intended to tell Jack, it must have slipped my mind.
Jack gave me a quick kiss and then looked at me seriously. “If you see anything suspicious, hit that fire alarm, get people out of here. Sheriff Hardy sent a sample of Olivia's blood to a friend of mine who works in toxicology. They're putting a rush on it. There's someone around here doing something dangerous with poisons and we can't have any more deaths,” he said.
I gave him a kiss and then he went back out the front to find his seat. Everything was moving too fast for me to worry about what someone with murderous intentions might do. Somewhere on the other side of the stage Hans was shouting at the top of his lungs, probably at some scared teenager. I saw Henry G rushing around in the dark getting costumes ready, and then one of the production assistants lowered the house lights. We were down to our three-minute warning, about to get started.
It seemed we went from chaos to calm in a minute flat. All the costumes were in place, the teenagers were ready, even Aunt Cass appeared dressed in her full makeup looking like the drunken old Tinker. Marcus started playing the piano and then we were away.
We were halfway through the first act when a ghost appeared right in front of me and I stifled a scream. It was Olivia. She saw me and she knew that I'd seen her.
“You can see me! Why is everyone else ignoring me?” she asked, her voice ethereal and haunting.
I moved away from the side of the stage so I couldn't be heard.
“You're dead Olivia, they found your body,” I stammered trying to keep my voice low. Normally I'd be much more sensitive with a ghost but I was too shocked by seeing her appear.
“No, I'm not dead,” she said and frowned.
“Where did you go yesterday? Did you visit anyone?” I asked. Olivia turned around and looked across backstage. There in the distance was Henry G. He was doing something with the prop swords.
“I thought he loved me,” she whispered and began to move across the stage towards him. I saw Henry G grab a prop sword and rush off into the darkness in the direction of the dressing rooms.
I got a sudden sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I rushed off, sprinting through the dark behind the stage as fast as possible. I crashed into a teenager, someone I didn't recognize in their costume and heard of a burst of noise. It sounded like a horse right by my ear neighing. I pulled the stunned teenager up off the ground and walked into the darkness. In my pocket, my phone buzzed and for some reason I pulled it out although I had a fear running in the back of my mind that if Hans saw me with a phone out during a performance he would kill me. It was a message from Jack.
'Harlow, it's a frog toxin. Whoever killed Olivia owns frogs and probably snakes.'
In a blur, I typed my message in return.
'Come to the dressing rooms, bring Sheriff Hardy.'
I felt that awful twisting intuition again. The prickles up my spine. There had been guards everywhere, looming about the place but after the ones out the front had been arrested they were now more widely dispersed. I ran down the corridor until I reached Hans's dressing room. I shoved open the door only to find Hans alone, sitting at his desk with his arms crossed and a sour look on his face.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
I quickly checked the room but he was the only one in it. Wherever Henry G had gone it wasn't here, if indeed it had been him who was up to something.
I couldn't see where Olivia's ghost had gone either.
“You're in danger. I think someone is going to poison you,” I gasped.
“It's the stage. It has to be dangerous!” Hans proclaimed.
“No, you're really in danger, someone's going to –” I saw the copy of Hans's autobiography sitting on his desk and remembered a page showing a photo thirty years ago where people had given themselves absurd professions. I lunged over to the desk and opened it to the picture. There it was, Hans as chief snackologist, beside him Viola MacBeth as junior assistant to the junior herpetologist.
“Who is she to you? Who is Viola MacBeth? A herpetologist has to do with snakes right?” I said, pointing at the book with a shaking finger.
“Viola MacBeth? No one. I mean that quite literally. She's gone. She's nothing. She was nothing then and she is nothing now,” Hans said, venom in his tone.
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it,” Henry G said as he stepped out of the dark.
I whirled around, standing between the two men.
He
nry G had apparently appeared from nowhere. In his left hand he held the prop sword that was looking decidedly sharp. In his right he had a gun and it was pointed directly at Hans.
“You're not going to do anything,” Hans sneered.
Henry G frowned at Hans, lifted the gun and pointed it at his head.
Olivia floated into the room.
“But I loved you, why did you kill me?” she said to Henry G. She drifted by me and I felt her cold fingers touch my shoulder.
I heard a faint echo of frogs croaking, a snake hissing.
“What are you doing with that gun Henry?” Hans sneered. Henry G leaned the sword against the wall, reached up and grabbed his face… and tore it away. Strands of rubbery material stretched and snapped, his face peeled off, along with his hair. Underneath was a woman, her hair cut short, an aged version of the face that was peering out from the photo in Hans's autobiography.
She picked up the sword again.
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions,” she said.
“You're not going to do anything Mary, you never could,” Hans sneered.
Henry G or Viola or Mary or whatever her name was, lifted the gun.
“Use my real name or you'll die,” she said, gritting her teeth.
Hans looked afraid for a moment but then returned to his calculated sneering front.
“Very well, Viola MacBeth. I care not what you call yourself, a pile of garbage by any other name would smell as bad.”
“Henry G was a woman? What?” Olivia said. I was the only one who could hear her.
“You don't have to do this Viola. I know that he hurt you,” I said, desperately stalling for time and guessing what Hans had done to her.
Viola looked at me and peeled away the last remnants of the Henry G mask over her face. Her left ear was a ruin of scar tissue from old burns.
“He did more than hurt me. He ruined my reputation when he killed those people. His sabotage destroyed me. He made me into nothing and now I'm going to do the same to him,” she said.
“You're still telling that lie Viola?” Hans said, mocking her.
Viola slipped the gun into her pocket and brought the sword to bear.
“I am merely going to do to you what you did to me. I hope you enjoy it,” she said. She lunged, so quick, the sword passing by me by a whisper. It pricked Hans in the shoulder. He leaped up from his chair, shoved into me and I crashed against the door, falling to the floor. They wrestled, Hans getting this sword off her and Viola getting cut across the hand.
Whatever poison Viola had put on it was fast-acting because before I could get up off my feet she had collapsed and so had Hans.
I ran over to them.
“Under the theater somewhere there will be a bomb,” Hans whispered.
“Why would she do that?”
“Because I did it to her,” Hans said before passing out.
I stood up and turned towards Olivia who was floating in the darkness where Henry G, or Viola, had emerged. There on the floor was an open trapdoor, a hidden one that she had climbed from.
I was almost at it when the door to the dressing room crashed open and Jack came pelting in.
“Harlow!” he called out.
“Tell Sheriff Hardy there's a bomb! Get everyone out,” I said and jumped down into the darkness.
I heard Jack shout something, probably at Sheriff Hardy who was likely right behind him. I landed at the bottom of a ladder in the pitch darkness. I quickly summoned a light revealing that I was in a set of rooms and corridors underneath the theater. I barely had a moment to look around before Jack came down the hole and landed beside me.
“We have to get out of here, Harlow! We need to get everyone out,” he yelled.
“No, there's a bomb. If we can find it, I can stop it,” I said.
I had no idea, of course, whether I could but I was too frantic, too crazed to think about it. I’d run to find it and then… do anything I could to stop it exploding.
We rushed away from the ladder, Jack tripping over a black garbage bag. It tore open and scattered empty spirit gum bottles everywhere. He got to his feet and we continued to run, looking around for a bomb. It was then, there in the distance that I saw a small blinking red light. We bolted towards it, passing a table filled with wigs on stands, a complete dressing table underground. I had the barest moment to realize this had been where Viola had been becoming Henry G every day. She had been the one using all the spirit gum to keep her costume together.
Oh Goddess, we had her over for dinner! She’d fooled us completely.
We skidded to a stop near the bomb. It didn't look like anything I'd seen on television. There was a small, blinking red light and then some dull gray blocks with black wires running to another black box.
“Is there anything magical you can do to stop it? Can you freeze it or pull it to pieces without it exploding?” Jack asked.
Now that I was standing in front of the bomb I had no idea what I could do. If Aunt Cass had taught me the spell to teleport things perhaps I could have moved it from here to somewhere out over the sea where it could explode harmlessly, but I didn't know how to do that.
“We need to get it away from here or we need to run,” Jack urged.
“There's a stormwater drain near here. We could get rid of it there,” I said, remembering the map I’d studied countless times. It was somewhere near the rear of the theater.
Without thinking I ripped the bomb off the wall, seeing Jack flinch as I did. It didn't detonate so we didn't die, so I guess it was okay.
We ran through the gloom, the light bobbing along beside us. Soon we came to a room with WATER/UTILITY printed on the door. Inside it was dark and dank, an open manhole in the center of the floor.
I quickly climbed down, clutching the bomb to my chest. As soon as my feet hit the wet concrete I was off, my miniature sun lighting the way. Jack was mere footsteps behind me and then caught up, running alongside as we pelted through the darkness. We ran maybe a street underground and then I saw an edge, one of the stormwater drains descending into the dark. I threw the bomb and it disappeared, the red blinking light fading as it went.
“Come on!” Jack yelled and grabbed my hand. He'd meant to pull me back in the other direction away from the black darkness below, but then there was an enormous roar, a crack that sounded as though the earth itself had split in two, and then it seemed that darkness rushed up to consume us both.
Chapter 21
“All I'm saying is, as a modern woman playing Katherine, is that I don't think it matters whether Shakespeare was super intelligent for his time and Katherine's speech at the end is all about her obeying her husband but secretly in private she has the power, or whether he was really a man of his time, and perhaps it was just a little bit sexist. Doesn’t matter. The art tells a story and it compels us to think for ourselves, to contrast the way it was then and the way it is now. Besides do you see me obeying a man? I don't think so,” Kira said and gave me a grin.
I pulled on my pants, feeling my body still aching from two days in the hospital.
“I think Katherine was being smart. Like you know when you say I can't open the jar of pickles and then you get him to do it and then he feels really good?” I said.
“Oh yeah or when you say can you get that book off that high shelf and it's not really that high and then he does and then your fingers touch and then complications ensue and then he becomes your boyfriend,” Kira said in a rush. There were some footsteps outside my hospital door and then Fox appeared, returning with the coffee Kira had asked him to fetch.
“There he is. Okay, Harlow, stay strong H-bomb, whoops bomb, sorry,” Kira said. Fox waved goodbye to me and then Kira grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the room.
It was two days since the bomb had detonated, two days since I had awoken with my ears ringing in the back of an ambulance, looked across and seen Jack covered in blood staring back at me. Both of us had appeared far worse than
it was. Superficial wounds from the explosion and bits of concrete that had hit us. We'd both been kept in for observation. Jack was down the corridor from me and today we'd be going home. There had been a constant stream of visitors since I'd awoken. The moms and cousins and Aunt Cass at first obviously, fussing around me and then Jack down in his room, and then Sheriff Hardy. Incredibly they'd managed to get Viola - real name Mary - and also Hans to the hospital and save their lives despite the fact both of them had been poisoned with an exotic frog toxin.
Viola had almost died but Hans had survived perhaps because he had just recently been poisoned with the same toxin and had built up some resistance. I told Sheriff Hardy the full story, everything Viola had said, that she was merely doing to Hans what he had done to her, and then how Hans had said there must've been a bomb underneath the building. Sheriff Hardy had taken all that information away and then returned a day later telling me that, in fact, thirty years ago there had been an explosion at a theater where Hans and Viola had been working. Viola had been directing a play, Much Ado About Nothing, and something had exploded under the theater. People had died and ultimately she'd received the blame. They'd had a gas tank that was to belch out a burst of flame at a pivotal moment, in a wild interpretation of the play. The official report said that it exploded because safety protocols had not been adhered to.
With Hans leaping straight to there being a bomb underneath the theater it appeared he had made a confession of sorts and that investigation would be reopened.
Viola had awoken raving mad at Hans but also genuinely confused about what she had done. Sheriff Hardy had told me that she couldn't understand why she'd set the bomb that she'd known would have killed all the people inside the theater. He said that she initially only intended to poison Hans, to kill him, and that was all. The motivation for it was the autobiography and the cruel things he had written about her, how she’d been nothing to him. She’d always suspected that he’d sabotaged the gas bottle and caused the explosion, but after having her career ruined she had vanished, content to leave that pain in the past until Hans's autobiography had come out and smashed her into the ground once more. It was then that she had donned the guise of Henry G, making herself up as an expert costumer and joining Hans to work for him to look for her moment to exact her revenge.