The Rebirth of Wonder

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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.”

  “Makes sense,” Maggie said.

  “Um,” Art said, flicking off the lights in the big room. “Is there anything else you'd like me to show you?”

  “Well... what's in all the storerooms?”

  “Mostly costumes on this side,” he said, pointing. “And props on the other. And smaller set pieces; it's only the big ones we leave in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the chamber beneath the stage, and as he did he caught, from the corner of his eye, a vivid blue flash, shining for an instant through the tiny openings in the floor above.

  “What the hell...” he said, angrily. “What are they doing up there?” He turned and charged toward the stairs, forgetting Maggie.

  She followed, calling after him, “Art, it's okay! Don't worry!”

  He ignored her, rushing up the stairs at full speed and out through the open door into the backstage area.

  “All right,” he shouted, “who did that?”

  The Bringers of Wonder all turned, startled, to face him.

  “Did what?” Innisfree asked.

  “I don't know,” he said. “But I saw blue light, a bright flash of blue light – was one of you trying out the lighting instruments?”

  Some of them shook their heads; a couple muttered, “No.” The black woman – Tituba, Innisfree had called her – pointed at the shelves of equipment. “You mean those? Nobody touched those, boy.”

  Art could see that the lights looked undisturbed; the main power switch for the lightboard was still off, the pilot light dark.

  “Then what was it, a flashpot or something? Damn it, if you're going to be using pyrotechnics, let me know, so I can check 'em out and make sure we've got sand buckets ready!”

  “No one used any fireworks, Mr. Dunham,” the woman in green said.

  Maggie had come up behind him. “Art,” she said quietly, “I think it was just a camera flash.”

  Art turned to look at her, then turned back to find Innisfree holding up a camera.

  “Maggie's right, Arthur,” he said. “Just snapping a few 'before' shots for a little before-and-after.”

  Art hesitated.

  “How'd you see it in the first place?” the old woman in the kerchief demanded.

  “The cracks in the flooring,” Art explained, pointing. After a moment's consideration, he said, “It seemed awfully bright for a camera flash.”

  “A trick of the eye, perhaps,” Innisfree suggested.

  “I guess so,” Art agreed.

  “Young man,” the woman with the gypsyish looks said, “are you going to be rushing in here and interrupting us every time there's any little disturbance? Because if you are, that could be a serious problem.”

  “You know that our show involves magic, don't you?” the woman in green said. “We'll have things appearing and disappearing and flying about fairly often. And I wouldn't be surprised by a few flashes and bangs.”

  “Um,” Art said thoughtfully.

  “It would be inconvenient,” Innisfree said.

  “Sorry,” Art said. He chewed his lower lip as he looked the lot of them over, then said, “Okay, but listen, tell me before you set off any fireworks, okay? And whoever's going to do lights, talk to me first, and let me help you set up.”

  “Assuredly,” Innisfree said. “Certainly, by all means, and most assuredly!” He smiled ingratiatingly.

  Uneasy but outnumbered, Art backed down from any further argument. In fact, it seemed like a wise idea to leave completely for a little while. “All right, then,” he said. “I guess the basement can wait, anyway; I'll go take a little walk and leave you folks in peace for a bit.”

  “Our blessings upon you, then,” Innisfree said, bowing.

  Reluctantly, Art turned and walked out the stage door, uncomfortably aware of a dozen pairs of eyes watching him every step of the way.

  Outside, the sun was painfully bright; he blinked, and shaded his
eyes with his arm as he stood on the little porch, waiting for his pupils to adjust.

  Spread out before him was the theater's little parking lot, only about a dozen spaces – for successful performances, the patrons lined the streets for blocks and usurped the parking lot of the bank across the street. The asphalt was bare and gray, baking in the August sun; a thin sifting of sand had found its way onto one corner.

  The lot was empty.

  His eyes had adjusted, but Art blinked again anyway.

  There were no cars.

  He looked out at the street, and saw no cars parked along the curbs. He scratched his head, baffled.

  How the hell had the Bringers of Wonder got there? There were no hotels within what he'd have considered reasonable walking distance, and a motley bunch like that would have stood out on the Bampton streets on a Monday morning like seals in a schoolroom.

  Someone must have given them a lift, he realized. Maybe there was another member of the group he hadn't met yet who was off buying supplies somewhere.

  They'd have needed a bus, but they might very well have a bus, for all he knew.

  And it didn't matter anyway. It was none of his business. As long as they didn't burn the theater down, they could arrive by dogsled for all he cared. With a shrug, he descended the four wooden steps and went for a stroll.

  #

  He didn't bother to knock when he came back from his walk; he just slipped quietly in through the stage door, trying not to disturb anybody.

  The Bringers of Wonder were still sitting or standing about, talking quietly or looking over the theater. They had spread out somewhat – before, all but Innisfree had been onstage, but now the man with the turban was studying the lighting equipment – and not, Art was relieved to see, touching any of it – while Tituba and the woman in green looked over the ropes and ladders, the two Orientals studied the leftover sets, and two of the men, the big black one and the short one with the mustache, sat out in the middle of the house, chatting quietly. Innisfree was up in the balcony, poking through the dusty junk up there.

  The rest were sitting either on the edge of the stage or in the front row, talking.