The Rebirth of Wonder

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “I might,” Art said. “You might be surprised what one can find here in Bampton. Who was it?”

  Innisfree smiled. “A fellow named Merton Ambrose,” he said. “Or at least, that's the name he used; I suspect it's a stage name.”

  Art nodded. “I'll take a look,” he said.

  “For what?” someone asked. Art started, and realized that the woman with the curly black hair was in the stage-right wings. He hadn't seen her come in. She was wearing a low-cut sundress and white sandals, and was walking toward them.

  “For The Return of Magic,” Art replied. “Mr. Innisfree said you could use another copy or two of the script.”

  “Oh, did he?” She gave Innisfree a look Art couldn't even begin to interpret, and stopped two paces away.

  “Yes, Ms... I'm sorry, I didn't get your name?”

  The black-haired woman turned her inscrutable gaze on Art, then smiled wryly.

  “My stage name,” she said, “is Kaye. Kier Kaye, K-I-E-R K-A-Y-E. I can't say I really care for it any more, but I seem to be stuck with it.”

  “It's pretty,” Art said, truthfully.

  “Ha!” another voice interjected. “The lad thinks he knows beauty!”

  Art looked, and discovered the mustached man off to stage left, in embroidered white shirt and loose black pants.

  “Arthur Dunham,” Kier Kaye said, “allow me to introduce Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a man whose blessings sound like curses.”

  Dr. Torralva bowed deeply. “Your servant, sir,” he said.

  “Hello,” Art replied.

  Now, these two seemed like actors – the flamboyant bow, the snide remark, that was the sort of behavior he expected from theater people.

  He discovered that while he had been speaking to this pair, the rest of the Bringers of Wonder had somehow arrived – though again, he hadn't seen or heard the stage door open. “Hello,” he said again, this time directing it to the entire group.

  Old Ms. Yeager glowered at him; Maggie smiled. One of the men gestured, and pulled a flame from thin air; it seemed to burn without fuel between his thumb and forefinger, a bright orange flame four or five inches high. Then he parted his fingers, and it was gone.

  Art hesitated, unsure whether he should applaud, or whether the sudden sleight-of-hand demonstration had any purpose at all. And of course, playing with fire wasn't necessarily safe, in the dry old wooden building, and maybe, in his role as fire marshal, he should say something about it. “Uh...” he said. “Ms. Kaye, who is that?”

  She smiled again.

  “Apollonius!” she called. “Would you come here a moment?”

  The man who had conjured the flame strode over to them. He was tall and rather thin, old enough that his hair was white, but he was still straight and strong, with few wrinkles; he wore a white robe that looked vaguely Arabic, and Art was unsure whether this was a costume or his normal street wear.

  “Kier,” he said.

  “Your little stunt caught our young friend's eye,” she told him. “Art, this is Apollonius... Apollonius Tanner.”

  “Call me Al,” the tall man said, holding out a hand.

  “Art,” Art said, shaking.

  Before he could say anything more, issue a warning about open flames, Yeager interrupted, calling, “Can we get on with this?”

  “Yes,” Innisfree immediately said, rubbing his hands together and marching to center stage. “I think we should get started.”

  “Then get that damned kid out of here!” Yeager demanded, pointing at Art.

  The open flame wasn't worth arguing about.

  “I'm going,” Art said. He climbed up on the stage, tucked his magazines under his arm, and marched toward the basement stairs. Behind him, he heard a few murmurs uneasily raised in his defense; he ignored them.

  After all, he had plenty of sorting still to go.

  As he descended the steps he reviewed the names he had learned so far, and concluded that he could now attach a name to eight of the twelve Bringers; he still wasn't sure of either of the two blacks, or the fat Oriental guy, or the one in the turban, but he knew the others. And the black woman's name was Tituba, he thought.

  In the storeroom he found the boxes and props as he had left them – but the gleam of metal caught his eye the instant he turned on the light.

  He knelt and looked over the heap of unsorted objects, and saw what it was he had spotted. He pulled a foot-long dagger from the pile.

  It was a fine piece of work, a glittering steel blade and a hilt of carved bone, colored dyes worked into the patterns on the grip. It looked archaic, ancient, really, but the metal shone like new.

  He had never seen it before.

  He was quite sure of that; he would have remembered a thing like that. It looked valuable, and out of place in the jumble of dusty, worthless props. How had he missed it, yesterday?

  He held it up, studying the play of light on the razor-sharp blade.

  Nobody would use that thing onstage, he thought. Far too dangerous, with an edge like that; sooner or later someone would get cut, would wind up with bloody fingers or a slashed costume at the very least. So what was it doing here?

  He looked down at the pile, puzzled.

  Knives – where had he been putting prop knives?

  Hadn't there been a wooden one, with peeling paint, in this pile? Had he put that somewhere?

  It certainly wasn't here now.

  He stared at the pile for a moment, then sighed, seated himself cross-legged on the floor, and placed the dagger carefully to one side.

  That was an exotic, expensive-looking knife. Perhaps one of the Bringers of Wonder had lost it, and it had somehow wound up down here? Dropped through a trapdoor, perhaps?

  No, the traps all came out in the big room, not the prop storeroom.

  Maybe it had been caught in his clothes and then had fallen out down here? Or maybe that Apollonius guy was playing a little trick of some kind?

  That reminded him that he had never issued a warning about conjuring up fire, the way Al, or Apollonius, or whatever his name was, had.

  Well, it could wait. He would figure it out later where the knife came from. For now, he had sorting to do.

  He ignored the dagger and began pulling items one by one from the pile.

  Chapter Nine

  That evening Maggie's call to lock up didn't come until seven. Art had lost track of time, and hadn't noticed his empty stomach. He hurried home, but was too late to join his father at the table; he had to scrounge up his own dinner.

  He had intended to ask the Bringers if they could identify the mysterious bone-handled knife, but he had missed his chance; all but Maggie were long gone, and by the time he remembered his intention she, too, had left.

  The next day's call was for four in the afternoon, Maggie told him; that meant he had plenty of time to go through the theater books in the Bampton library again, this time looking for any reference to Merton Ambrose.

  He found not a trace; the name did not appear anywhere. Not in the card catalog, not in the theater books, not in any of the reference books he checked.

  Frustrated, he wandered out onto the sidewalk, where he found Marilyn sitting on the ornamental stone wall by the Leader Federal Savings Bank. She waved at him.

  He hesitated, then strolled down the block and hoisted himself up beside her.

  For a moment the two of them sat side by side in friendly silence, enjoying the shade of the maples and studying the scattered spots of afternoon sunlight that had found a path through the leaves and now wandered about the sidewalk beneath their dangling feet.

  It couldn't last forever, though. “Ever hear of Merton Ambrose?” he asked, still watching the play of light. A solitary ant was scouting the concrete, he noticed.

  She considered the question carefully while she, too, watched the ant, and then looked up and replied, “No; should I have?”

  Art shrugged.

  “Is he an actor?” she asked. “TV, or movies?”

&n
bsp; “No,” Art told her, turning his attention from the ground to his companion's face. “He's a playwright. Or a magician, maybe. He wrote the play that those people are staging.”

  “Oh!” Marilyn was suddenly intensely interested; she forgot all about the ant and the sunlight and the maples. “Merton Ambrose, was it?”

  Art nodded.

  “And it's called The Return of Magic, you said?”

  “Yup.”

  Marilyn glanced past Art at the library, and said, “I take it you were just looking it up; what's it about?”

  “I didn't find it,” he answered. “Didn't find a trace of it anywhere. It's gotta be really obscure.”

  Marilyn thought that over, then shrugged. “Well, at least it'll be different, then; I don't think I could stand seeing yet another production of Oklahoma!”

  “I don't know,” Art said, trying to spot the ant again. “There's something funny about the whole thing.”

  She blinked at him, then asked, “Why?”

  “Oh, I don't know, a lot of little things.” Art hesitated, and then explained, “They won't let me watch them rehearse – but they can't really be rehearsing yet, and why shouldn't I watch blocking? I haven't seen a script, or any costume sketches, or anything; they haven't touched the lights, or started building sets. And I haven't heard anyone say a single line from the show!”

  “They won't let you watch?” Marilyn stared at him. “Then what have you been doing all day?”

  He grimaced. “Cleaning the prop room – I've been meaning to do that for years, to go through all that junk down there and throw out most of it. Or maybe sell it, hold a big rummage sale.”

  “Good idea,” she said, thoughtfully.

  Art didn't bother to answer.

  They sat silently for a moment, Art staring down at the cracks in the sidewalk, Marilyn watching him do it. The ant had gone.

  Marilyn was the next to speak. “They haven't started on the sets or anything?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “So what are they doing, while you're cleaning the prop room?”

  Art shrugged. “I don't know. I honestly can't figure it out.”

  “Do you think they're really getting ready for a show? I mean, maybe it's one of these minimalist things, with a bare stage. Or they've got a set ready-built somewhere that's getting shipped in.”

  “Really, Marilyn, I just don't know,” Art told her. “I don't have any idea at all.”

  “If they aren't doing a show,” she persisted, “what are they doing?”

  “Marilyn, I don't know,” he insisted.

  “Are they dealing drugs, maybe?”

  Art shook his head. “Nobody else ever comes to the theater,” he said. “Where are their customers?”

  “If you're in the basement all day, how do you know nobody comes?”

  Annoyed, Art found himself unable to answer that. A week ago he'd have said he could hear people come in, but after a couple of days with the Bringers, who almost seemed to appear out of thin air and then vanish just as mysteriously, he was no longer going to make any such claim.

  Marilyn didn't press the point. Instead, she suggested, “Or maybe it's prostitution; didn't you say they were mostly women?”

  “Not mostly,” Art protested. “About half of them, same as any bunch of actors. It's just the ones who talk to me are the women.”

  Marilyn nodded.

  Art added, “And that's normal enough, too, I guess.”

  “So maybe the men are pimps...”

  Art sighed. “You're being silly,” he said. “One of the women looks about ninety and talks like Don Rickles, and one of the others looks like, I dunno, Pearl Bailey or somebody. The others all look good enough, I guess, but what's that, four hookers to support a dozen people?”

  “So maybe the men peddle their asses, too.”

  “In Bampton? Oh, come on!”

  “Sure, in Bampton!”

  “A bunch of strangers, coming to Bampton for that?”

  It was Marilyn's turn to have no good answer; after a pause, she said, “Okay, so they're dealing drugs...”

  Art turned away in disgust and slid down off the wall.

  “Hey, wait, Art, I'm sorry!” Marilyn called.

  Art stopped, and waited, standing by her knees. He didn't look at her; instead he studied the stones that had been fitted together to make the wall on which she sat – or perhaps had just been stuck on the surface, it was hard to be sure. In any case, the wall was hardly traditional New England dry stone; it was obviously held together with mortar or cement.

  When she was certain that he wasn't about to depart, Marilyn asked, “Okay, so do you really think they're putting on this play?”

  Art shrugged. “What else could they be doing?”

  “Umm... kiddie porn, maybe? Or some kind of cult thing?”

  At that Art looked up. There was that mysterious knife to explain – with its bone grip and strange carvings, might it be some sort of ritual dagger?

  He didn't want to get Marilyn off on another tangent, though.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “If you figure it out, tell me,” Marilyn said. “Or just give me a call sometime anyway.”

  “All right,” he said.

  For a moment the two of them remained as they were, looking at each other without making direct eye contact; then Art turned away.

  “Guess I'll go sort some more old props,” he said.

  “Have fun,” she said.

  She sat on the wall, watching him go.

  The dimness of the theater seemed somehow different today, Art thought; it wasn't as familiar and comforting. Maybe that was because, this late in the day, the theater was hotter than outdoors – it held the heat. He ambled up the aisle to the lobby and got the air conditioning running.

  The Bringers weren't due for almost an hour. He wasn't entirely sure why he had come early; sorting props wasn't exactly his idea of a grand and glorious good time. Sitting in the shade talking to Marilyn was a good way to pass the time, but somehow he hadn't wanted to stay there.

  There was something a little uncomfortable in his friendship with Marilyn just now; he figured it was because she was going to be leaving in a month. What was the point in getting closer to her when she would be leaving, and he would be staying?

  Better to just keep his mind on his work, such as it was.

  He took his time coming down the aisle again, and used that time to study the proscenium, the curtain, the stage.

  It all looked just as it had three and a half days ago, when the Bringers had first arrived; they hadn't so much as moved the curtain, so far as he could tell. There were no sets, no props.

  However, he realized, he did see marks on the stage – those would presumably be for blocking, for showing the cast who belonged where in various scenes. He climbed up on the stage and looked.

  Every other production he'd ever worked on had used colored tape for blocking marks, but the Bringers had used chalk, white and red chalk. They had drawn a white circle center stage, about fifteen feet in diameter, with little red symbols here and there around the circumference.

  It was a very neatly drawn circle, obviously not done freehand; the symbols, on the other hand, looked like little more than scribbles to Art. He could make no sense of any of them.

  As he walked around the circle, he remembered Marilyn's suggestion that the alleged play was a cover for some sort of cult activity. The idea had a certain plausibility that made him uneasy; this chalk figure could be some sort of mystic figure for an occult ritual.

  But it was probably just blocking marks.

  Maybe the play had some sort of ritual in it. It was about magic, after all.

  But what if it was some kind of occult ceremony these people were planning, rather than a play? What then?

  Well, what then? What business was it of his?

  Not much. People had a right to their own beliefs. That was in the Constitution.

  But it would
mean they had lied to him, and to his father, and that was wrong, that was a violation of the rental contract. And why would they lie? It wasn't any big deal if they wanted to hold a ritual, was it?

  And why in the theater? There were some local pagans in Bampton, people who called themselves Wiccans, who held meetings, and they always held them outdoors, not in theaters.

  So the Bringers weren't Wiccans, obviously. Maybe they were Satanists, and the fact that the foundation had originally been a church had appealed to them.

  But Maggie had apparently not known that the theater was built atop a ruined church until he had told her.

  He looked down at the chalk lines on the scuffed wood of the stage and frowned. He was being silly. They were just a bunch of actors and prestidigitators. These were blocking marks. And the knife in the basement wasn't anything special; someone had dropped it somewhere, that was all, and it had wound up in the prop room by accident.

  But why couldn't he find any mention of Merton Ambrose or The Return of Magic? It was all rather odd.

  He would, he decided, bring the knife up here and wait for the Bringers, and ask a few questions. Simple enough.

  When he started down the stairs the theater was empty and silent. By the time he had fetched the dagger and started back up, even though it was still ten minutes before four, he could hear voices; the Bringers had begun to arrive.

  He was spotted the instant he reached the top of the stairs. “Ah, Arthur!” Innisfree called. “I'd wondered where you were!”

  “I was getting this from the basement,” Art explained, carefully holding the knife out by the blade, hilt extended. “I think one of you must have left it here the other day.”

  Innisfree and Morgan, the two closest of the four Bringers in sight, came to look.

  “A fine weapon,” Morgan said, “but not mine.”

  “Nor mine,” Innisfree said. He looked up and gestured to the man in the turban – who also wore a loose white shirt and black denim jeans.

  Art took the opportunity to transfer the knife to his left hand and hold out his right.

  “Art Dunham,” he said.

  After a moment's startled hesitation, the turbaned man took the offered hand and replied, “Mehmet Karagöz.”