by Linda Barnes
Eddie’s wide blue eyes focused on a spot in the group’s center. “Arthur Darien’s drinking again,” he said quietly. “The pressure must be getting to him.”
The circle was silent. Then everyone spoke at once.
“How do you know?”
“Bullshit!”
“Have you seen him?”
“That’s not truth, that’s opinion.”
“Next!”
“Don’t you even want to talk about it?” Eddie asked. “One week before opening? A new Dr. Seward. All those strange little happenings.…”
“Shut up!” They were all startled by the venom in Emma’s tone. “It’s my turn and I’ve got a truth for all of you. This is the first show I’ve ever had a lead in that I felt was going someplace! I want it to work! And I am not the company ghost. I think it’s a good truth and I’d like you all to repeat it. We’ll just go right around the circle and see if everybody else can say the same.”
“Wait a minute,” wailed Greg. “Emma, this is just a game. I didn’t mean it to get so serious.…”
“I’m willing to play,” Georgina said calmly.
“Anybody want out?” Emma asked.
Complete silence.
“Places!” came a strong female voice from onstage. “Let’s go! Places: Act One, scene three!”
Chapter Four
For a frozen second, no one moved. Then chaos. Spraggue found himself suddenly alone, cross-legged on the gold plush carpet. Act One, scene three! He leafed feverishly through the blue-bound script, found the scene, relaxed. Dr. John Seward made no appearance until the second act. He was of England, not Transylvania. Act One was Transylvania; he should have remembered that.
He sat in the first row and closed his eyes. With actors, half the game was guessing when they lied, half why. Seldom whether. A life spent reciting other people’s words made lying too damn easy.
Act One, scene three. Dramatis Personae: the brides of Dracula. That would be Georgina and the dark-haired Deirdre. Jonathan Harker: tall, blond Greg Hudson, a man with an effeminate air—until he looked at Emma Healey. Dracula himself: John Langford. Spraggue settled back in his seat. Years since he’d seen Langford act. The man was magic. A matinee-idol profile did him no harm, but he had more than that, some animal magnetism that made the audience care about him, hero or villain. Which would his Dracula be?
Onstage, Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor, slept, his elegant body stretched out on a chaise in the vampire’s library. Yes, that scene; Spraggue remembered the plot. Harker had been cautioned by the Count never to sleep in any room other than his own bedchamber. But worn out by the exertions of attempted escape from the castle, the lawyer had disobeyed. It was night now. Enter the brides of Dracula.
The women approached the sleeping man.
“He was warned,” said the brunette. She laughed and the laugh was hauntingly evil.
“And we were warned,” added Georgina, hesitantly. Her face was cunning. She wanted the man. But something frightened her.
Her dark companion licked her sharp white teeth. “We have obeyed. The master will have nothing to complain of.”
“Then you shall kiss him first,” said Georgina. “Yours is the right to begin.”
On the chaise, Harker opened his eyes and stared at the approaching brides, enthralled.
The women came closer. Deirdre broke the silence. “He’s young and strong. There’s blood enough for two.”
As she spoke, she leaned over Harker and kissed him full on the lips. Georgina gave a low growl. The transformation from women to beasts was well done—clear, but subtle enough to stay within the bounds of possibility. Shocking, but not laugh-producing. Deirdre growled in answer, raised her long neck, bared her teeth for the kill.
Dracula was in the room without entering. A trick of lighting or a trapdoor? Or was it just that Spraggue’s attention was so completely absorbed by the scene at stage right that the stage-left movement hadn’t caught his eye?
Langford wore black. Not a costume. The dark turtleneck and slacks wouldn’t attract a second look on the street. It was the man inside. He wore the nondescript garments with flair. On him, they were costume. He’d probably worn nothing but black for weeks in preparation for the role, Spraggue thought. Langford had a reputation for being scrupulous about detail. But had his eyebrows always been so black and shaggy? His skin so pale? His cheekbones so prominent? How much makeup and how much sheer acting ability?
No matter. He was Dracula. At the sound of his voice the women froze. He grabbed Deirdre by the neck. His slight motion threw her across the room.
“How dare you touch him? How dare you look at him when I had forbidden it?”
Georgina cowered as the vampire raged. The dark woman confronted him.
She laughed, a cold hollow sound. “What would you have us do? Starve? Ignore the beauty of human men? We’re not like you. You never loved.”
“You never love,” echoed the blonde.
The Vampire King softened. He crossed the room, took the women in his arms. “I, too, can love. You know it from the past.” He knelt, blond Georgina on his knee, Deirdre in the crook of his right arm. He whispered, “I promise you, when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. But for now, go. I have work to do tonight.”
“And are we to have nothing, then?” pouted Deirdre.
Georgina gave a little squeal and pointed. On the floor, near the place where Dracula had first appeared, was a sack. The two women pounced on it eagerly, transforming themselves again into animals, bacchantes. Deirdre, eyes gleaming, reached in the bag to pull the morsel out.
A human child, Spraggue remembered.
Deirdre screamed, a shriek that was female, not animal. The sack hit the stage floor with a thud. The dark woman held up her hands. Blood trickled down to her elbows.
“What the—” Darien’s yell was almost lost in the commotion. Spraggue found himself onstage. He grabbed the bag that had fallen from Deirdre’s unresisting fingers.
“It’s not the doll,” she whispered. “It’s something awful. Look at my hands.” She stared at them, transfixed.
“Georgie,” Spraggue said firmly. “Go help her wash up.”
Georgina gawked. The stage manager propelled Deirdre offstage.
Spraggue eyed the sack warily. Darien was beside him now. The others circled, waiting: Greg, Langford, Eddie, Emma, Georgina. Spraggue wished he could see their faces more clearly.
At first he thought the thing in the bag was a skull. His hand recoiled as he touched it. Too flimsy for bone. He lifted it out. The light caught it and Greg Hudson gasped.
The head was a likeness of Hudson’s. Grotesquely thin, a caricature, but unmistakably him. The neck had been rudely hacked from a nonexistent body. The straw-blond wig, partially askew, was dappled with blood from the gaping wound. The face itself was beautifully sculpted. A Halloween mask attached to a wig form, Spraggue hazarded. The whole thing covered with celastic strips, molded to Greg’s image. Whoever the joker was, he—or she—had an artist’s touch.
A retching sound came from Hudson’s direction. He ran offstage. Emma followed. Everyone started to speak at once.
Spraggue paid no attention to the tumult. He’d seen something else inside the sack. A flash of white, stiff cardboard with rough penciled numbers. Familiar printing that made him think of Mickey Mouse paper and decapitated bats.
In the confusion, he transferred the card to his pocket. It didn’t say much: 1538. That was it.
With luck, Spraggue thought, he’d have the whole thing figured out by the time the show played its one thousand, five, hundred and thirty-eighth performance.
Chapter Five
The next evening, Spraggue ate sushi alone at the Japanese restaurant down the block from the theater. The meal was good. Not great, the way his Thursday night dinners customarily were. Thursday night meant dinner at the Brookline estate—created by Dora, the cook who’d spoiled Spraggue for Boston’s best resta
urants.
But not tonight. He’d called Aunt Mary filled with excuses and finally agreed to come over later for a nightcap. No time was too late for Aunt Mary.
He savored the delicately flavored raw fish slowly, then abandoned his chopsticks, finished his green tea, and ordered a refill on the small flask of saki.
Rehearsal had gone like clockwork. No bloody heads, no decapitated bats. Just nine straight hours of lines, cues, and blocking, with costume fittings and publicity stills sandwiched in between.
Eight-thirty. Fifteen more minutes and it would be dark enough to begin. Rehearsal had broken up at six. The crew left at seven. Some of the cast had stopped for a drink at the bar next door. Spraggue had watched them from his carefully chosen dining nook. Everyone was gone now.
He fingered the picklocks in his left hip pocket and smiled. How close he’d come to giving them to a police-sergeant friend after he’d decided that private detection was not for him. He’d convinced himself that he must have thrown them away, right until the moment he’d found them in the bottom desk drawer.
Spraggue paid the check, bowed to the impossibly tiny waitress, and left. Two minutes’ walking brought him back to the theater.
The side door was the best bet, opening off an unfrequented alley. The chief danger would be muggers, not an overzealous police force.
His technique was a little rusty after years of legal keys. Patience. Slow, careful work would avoid those tiny marks around the keyhole, surefire indicators of a “B & E.” A minute passed like ten, then the door creaked and Spraggue was inside.
The side door brought him into a long passageway near the costume shop. Storage rooms on his left gave off a musty odor. He stood still, waiting until his eyes adjusted to the blackness. Then quietly, on rubber soles, he made his way down the corridor toward the stage.
The hallway ran straight for twenty yards, then branched. To the right, a short passage led to the paint room and a stairway down to the dressing rooms. The stage was straight ahead, hidden behind double doors. Spraggue turned left. Darien’s office was upstairs.
He heard a muffled voice and stopped dead. Someone was onstage. A person with a key, a right to be there? The stage manager? Or the joker.
Six steps brought him back to the double doors. He turned the knob slowly, opened the right-hand door a crack.
The work lights were on, the curtain down. Deirdre, the tall brunette bride of Dracula, was alone, rehearsing a scene. She turned, sank into a hard wooden chair as if it were a comfortable Victorian love seat, and continued her dialogue:
“Oh, John, you do understand, don’t you? I’m sorry to have worried you.”
She paused, heard a flattering response, and replied: “I’m glad, my darling. So glad. Don’t fret about me anymore. I’ll be fine. It’s only these dreams, John. Such bad dreams.…”
It was an attractive performance, unassuming. Childlike and womanly at the same time. Confiding, but hesitant. An interesting interpretation. But not of a vampire queen.
Spraggue cleared his throat.
“Who’s there?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Michael Spraggue. I didn’t realize anyone else was here.”
Damn, he said inwardly. I should have.
Her pale intense face relaxed. “I didn’t either. How’d you get in?”
Spraggue smiled. “How did you?”
“I just stayed. I love empty theaters at night. Especially this theater. It has such wonderful vibrations. Did you know that a man killed himself here?”
“I’d heard.”
“Hanged himself.” Her voice played with the sound. “Right here, center stage. Such a romantic way to die.…”
“I doubt he thought so.”
She giggled with her mouth but her eyes were far away. “Will you play a scene with me?”
“I don’t have any scenes with the brides of Dracula.”
“The scene I was just doing,” she said. “That’s one of yours.”
“Mine and Lucy’s, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I love that scene. Right after the first attacks on Lucy. She knows she should tell you about them, but there’s something so fascinating, so erotic, about the vampire that all she does is complain about her ‘bad dreams.’”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the scene yet,” he said. How to get rid of the woman! Would she rattle on with the dreamy voice and the distant eyes all night?
“Do you believe in dreams?” Deirdre asked. “In portents?”
“Sometimes,” Spraggue said carefully.
Her eyes widened, stared into nothingness. “I do. I’m only Emma’s understudy, Mr. Spraggue, but I believe that I’ll play Lucy. That’s why I have to stay late. To rehearse. I have to be very good, very professional, when the accident happens.”
“What accident?” Spraggue was almost afraid to prompt her. The woman blurted out her thoughts in a stream of consciousness. Her eyes rarely met his. She seemed to speak to an invisible presence. Not an audience, but some specific person. Maybe the vibrations of the dead Mr. Phelps.…
“Accident,” she murmured. “Not the right word. So hard to find just the right word. Incident. One of our actors already left because of an incident.…”
“Frank Hodges,” said Spraggue. Either Darien had been less discreet than he’d claimed or—
“And I hardly think Greg was amused by that incident today. I was terrified.”
She seemed more entranced than terrified now, thought Spraggue. “Have there been any other ‘incidents,’ Deirdre?” he said.
She smiled. “Nothing to fuss about. I mean, it wasn’t voodoo or anything. No hair, no nail clippings—”
“You’ve lost me.”
“The doll in my hotel room. I think Gina got one, too.”
At least someone called the blonde “Gina.”
“It was in my bed,” she continued. “Almost three weeks ago. Maybe the second or third day of rehearsal. Sit down and I’ll tell you about it. I haven’t told the others.”
“Why not?”
“It wasn’t funny enough to be a joke or scary enough to be a threat. It was just odd.… And there was never the right moment, you know. You need a mood for a tale like this one.…”
“An empty theater at night?”
“Exactly.” She settled back in the chair, ready to begin. How much truth will I get, wondered Spraggue. How much embroidery?
“I’d gone out to eat after rehearsal, so I didn’t get home until nine. It wouldn’t have scared me at all if I’d come home before dark.”
“Yes?” Spraggue said. Deirdre seemed to have forgotten all about him. Was she really an actress or had Darien recruited her for the part out of a local coven?
“The light was out. I turned the switch but nothing happened. Do you know the Emory Hotel?”
“No.”
“It’s cheap. I was sorry to leave. At the Emory, broken light switches are de rigueur. I tried the lamp in the corner. That was dead, too. At least the two lower bulbs were dead. The third bulb was different. Someone had rigged it all up, with a baffle and a theatrical gel—midnight blue. It was shining on the doll in my bed.”
She paused. “There was a resemblance. The doll had long dark hair, a pale complexion. But she also had a two-inch gap between her head and her body.”
Decapitation. Nice little fixation for our prankster to have, thought Spraggue. The bat, Greg’s mask, now beheaded dolls. “You changed hotels.” he said.
“Yes.”
“Was there anything else about the doll that frightened you?”
“The head was stuffed with garlic. There were two small marks on the neck, white with red centers, just like in the script. A trickle of blood from the mouth. Fake, like today.… Oh, and the doll was in a rather immodest position, dress hiked, legs spread, and anatomical details added with great care.… There was a little piece of paper stuck to the doll’s breast with a toothpick type of thing. A stake right through the heart.”
; “Anything on the paper?”
“Just numbers, I think. Three or four different numbers. Not even threes and sevens and mystical numbers. Just regular numbers.”
“A phone number, maybe? Did you save it?”
“No.” She was definite about that. “Not enough numbers.” She looked up. The story was finished. “What time is it?”
“Nine-fifteen. Are you late?”
“I suppose. I never wear a watch. Time is so intrusive, you know. But I like to be in bed before midnight and I do an hour of yoga before I sleep. My cat howls if I don’t feed him on time. I’d better go. And I don’t think you should stay here all alone.”
“If you can—” Spraggue began.
“But I’m not at all afraid of ghosts, Michael Spraggue. Are you?”
“No.” Spraggue kept his gaze level. “Ghosts don’t bother me much.”
“Not even the ghosts of suicides?”
“You mean old Phelps?”
“You know about him.” Deirdre nodded approvingly. “Suicides are funny. They can just become vampires. No need to get bitten.”
“Spontaneous vampire generation,” said Spraggue gravely.
She laughed. “It’s not that you’re unafraid of ghosts. You just don’t believe in them; that’s a very different thing. If I were you, I wouldn’t stay here alone tonight.”
“I don’t intend to stay long,” Spraggue said. “Once over tomorrow’s blocking and I’m gone. I’ll probably catch up with you before you get on the trolley.”
To his relief she picked up a jacket off a chair. “Good-bye then,” she said. Her high-heeled shoes made no sound on the steps or the carpeting. She disappeared into the lobby. Spraggue heard the door swing shut. Silence.
He moved quickly. The switch that turned off the work lights was near the double doors. Thank God for that. At least he wouldn’t have to wander across a pitch-black stage hoping Deirdre didn’t rehearse with the trapdoors open. He climbed up the stairs to Darien’s office.
The lock was old and rusty. Spraggue worked carefully with the picklocks for ten minutes before it yielded.