He swung the door wide and looked out at morning light sparkling on the dew in the fields beyond the parking lot.
“We weren't...” he began, but he could not finish the thought.
“You aren't up on your fairy tales, are you?” Maggie asked. “Time in Faerie isn't the same as time on Earth. That's what the stories all say, and I guess they were right.”
Art looked at his watch, and found it was blinking “12:00” up at him. He stared at it.
Maggie noticed the gesture. Her mouth twisted wryly. “Digital watches, it would seem, don't work in Faerie,” she said. “Nobody knew that before.”
Art looked at her. “They didn't have digital watches last time anyone went there, huh?”
Maggie nodded. “I hope we only lost the night, and this is still Sunday morning,” she said, looking out toward Thoreau Street.
Art blinked, and stared out at the pale sky.
“It's a good thing you didn't eat anything,” Maggie remarked as she started down the porch steps.
“Why?” Art asked.
She glanced up at him. “Don't you know?” she said, startled. “If you eat anything in Faerie, you can't return. The door would have vanished, and you'd have spent the rest of your life there.”
“The rest...”
“Good night, Art. Call tonight is for seven again – at least, if it's still Sunday.”
He stood watching as she stepped gracefully over a broken chunk of rock and vanished around the back corner of the theater.
A car cruised by, and in old man Christie's field Spanner whinnied.
Magic, Art thought. Real magic. Witches. Fairies.
Real magic.
Real magic, either about to die forever, or about to be reborn.
He felt a chill of terror at the thought – and a stirring of something else, of excitement, of desire. He quickly suppressed it.
The whole situation was too much to absorb right away, he decided. He would, as he had told Maggie, need time to think about it.
He stared at his blinking watch as he descended the steps and started home.
Chapter Sixteen
He slept until 4:00 p.m.
When he finally came downstairs the radio was on, and a newscaster was describing the new comet that was gracing the southern skies, talking about how astronomers were puzzled by the suddenness of its appearance.
“Hi there, sleepyhead!” his father called.
Art waved.
“Those folks keep you up late?” the elder Dunham asked.
Art nodded as he passed through on his way to the kitchen.
“What time did you get in?”
“Seven,” Art said, as he got a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator.
His father made a wordless noise of sympathy.
Art wasn't sure just what meal he was eating, but whatever it was, breakfast or lunch or dinner or just a snack, he decided a microwave pizza would do just fine. He found one in the freezer.
He watched the timer on the microwave oven count down, square blue numbers changing as if by magic.
Microwave ovens were pretty magical, weren't they? Art considered that.
His life was full of miracles, really – everyday, commonplace miracles he accepted without a second thought. Frozen pizza, microwave ovens, digital clocks, he didn't know how any of them worked, they all might as well be magic. Why couldn't he learn to live with a little more, if the Bringers brought their ritual off?
But those things weren't real magic.
That fairy meadow was real magic.
At least, if all that had happened, if he hadn't just dreamed the whole thing. He glanced through the living room door. The Sunday paper, immediately recognizable by the presence of four-color comics, was strewn about.
“It's Sunday, right?” he called. “I mean, I didn't sleep a whole day or anything?”
“It's Sunday,” his father replied.
That was reassuring; it fit with his memories. He hadn't lost whole days in Faerie – and he hadn't dreamt all of Saturday, either.
At least, he didn't think so. If he had dreamt it, wouldn't it still be Saturday now?
But the whole thing was beginning to have the feel of a dream; that field, the long, slow sunset, the conversation with Maggie Gowdie, it was all starting to seem unreal, like a story he had once heard, or a daydream.
Was it real?
He slugged down milk, straight from the jug. The microwave beeped, and he found a potholder with which to take out the pizza.
The Return of Magic, they called it, and they meant just that – if it was all true. If Maggie hadn't lied, if the conversation had happened, if the meadow was real, if the door was there, if he hadn't imagined the whole thing.
He tried to straighten his thoughts as he ate, but they wouldn't come straight. He couldn't make himself certain of anything at all about anything that had happened since the end of July. The final performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the cast party, cleaning the theater – that all seemed real enough, there was no reason to doubt it, but then Mr. Innisfree had turned up...
A wizard, more than a thousand years old?
A dozen magicians, the last magicians in the world, come to Bampton to put on a play that would cast a spell – there was a pun in that, the cast of the play casting a spell.
“I think I'll go over to the theater,” he said, brushing crumbs from his lap.
His father looked up. “Okay,” he said. “When's call for tonight?”
“Not until six,” Art said, shading the truth, “but I wanted to look at something.”
“Suit yourself,” his father said, returning to his book.
Art took the keys from the hook and left the house.
The air had a heavy, damp feel to it as he clattered down to the sidewalk; he thought it might rain a little later, though you never knew.
The sky was darkening by the time he opened the stage door; rain was now clearly far more likely than not. He flicked on the light and stepped inside.
The chalk circles, white with red symbols, were on the stage, just as he remembered them; the Bringers of Wonder were real, not just a dream, then.
He found his way down the basement stairs, down the central passage, and around the corner at the end. And there, past the water meter and the secondary fuse box, was the door, black and ancient.
He stood in the passageway for a long moment, just staring at it.
Finally, he stepped forward and took the knob gingerly in his hand. He turned it and pulled, half expecting, half hoping, that it would be locked.
It opened easily and silently, and he found himself looking out at the meadow.
It was night in Faerie; the dim glow of the corridor light spilled past him onto dew-moistened grass. Stars shone above the meadows; he leaned forward for a quick look, then hastily pulled back.
Stars, millions of stars, more stars than he had seen since a childhood vacation in the mountains, the Milky Way a white path across the heavens – but all wrong, all in impossible places, the constellations twisted and distorted.
Slowly, carefully, he closed the black door.
It was real.
But was Maggie's story, her explanation of what was happening, was that all true?
What if the Bringers were all the black magicians of the world? What if this was some plot?
What if it wasn't really magic at all, what if they were extraterrestrials, and that door was some sort of teleportation device, and they were going to invade and conquer the world? After all, hadn't someone said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
He reached out and ran his fingertips over the door, feeling the crazed and beaded finish. It felt like the remains of antique varnish, but maybe it was all really some sort of alien microcircuitry.
But the world beyond wasn't alien – it was a meadow, with grass and flowers and insects, with Earth's air and gravity...
Well, Earth's gravity, anyway; the ai
r might be a trifle richer, might have a different mix of inert gasses for all he could tell.
But what would alien invaders be doing putting on a play? Why would they conjure up birds and flames and winds and flowers? Why would their portal come out in a meadow, and not a city or staging area?
The alien-invader hypothesis had a certain appeal – Art had never even believed in UFOs or psychic phenomena or any of the New Age stuff, let alone full-blown traditional magic, witches and wizards and spells, so any sort of scientific explanation would be welcome, but still, he couldn't really make himself believe it.
It looked like magic. It felt like magic. Even if it was really some sort of super-science, he might as well treat it as magic.
Slowly, thinking deeply, he turned away from the door and ambled back down the central passageway.
When he reached the prop room he glanced at the door, but didn't open it.
The box of lost things – that was magical, wasn't it? They were all things that had felt magical to him once, all things that had been inexplicably lost, and now magic had brought them back to him.
White magic, surely. Even when he had had no idea what was going on, even when he had been furious that someone was playing tricks on him with his own lost treasures, he had felt a reawakening of childlike wonder when he had handled those trinkets, all that outgrown junk.
The bone-handled knife – that must be magic, too. He frowned. A knife didn't seem like a good omen.
He opened the sliding door and turned on the light for the big room, then stood there looking in, looking at all the fragments of old sets, at the wooden floor and stone walls.
Why here?
The other magical places he had heard of all had distinctive features to them – the standing stones at Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, whatever. Was this new mystic power source just going to have a ramshackle little theater?
A theater with a mysterious pit under the basement? Maybe that was responsible for all this.
But really, it was just a theater.
It had been a church once, but it was a theater now.
He looked around at the stone walls with new insight. He had always known the building had its history, its idiosyncrasies, but he had always just accepted them. Now, for the first time, it occurred to him that the theater could be seen as a mysterious place, a magical place, quite aside from the plays performed there, and aside from the special, personal magic it had always held for him. Stone walls over a century old, an inexplicable and unexplored hole beneath it, a history that blended the sacred and the profane...
A few days ago, he knew he would have dismissed all that as nonsense, but now he wasn't sure.
If he refused to join the Bringers in their ritual, if he let magic die out completely, would the theater still have that special magical quality, when he was here alone? Was that actually magic? Was it inherent in the theater, a trace of its magical potential? Or was it just in him, just a matter of psychology, something that had nothing to do with real magic and wouldn't be changed?
A few days ago, he would have chosen the last without a moment's hesitation.
Now, though – even if it was just psychological, even if no true magic was involved, what would he think if he let the Bringers fail, and eleven of them actually did die? Could this place still be magical for him?
Somehow, he didn't think so.
He frowned. Did they have to die, then, if he didn't help?
The answer to that depended on several other questions. Had Maggie lied? If she had said what she believed to be true, was it in fact true, or had she been misled?
And was his choice really a simple either/or, between eleven deaths and unleashing wild new magic on the world?
Whatever the truth, he wanted to think it over and decide for himself, without getting anyone else involved yet; even if he couldn't settle the big questions, he could settle that. He really didn't need to add any more complications, as it was all quite complicated enough.
And that, he decided, meant that he wouldn't be calling Arnie Wechsler, or any other locksmith, in the morning; he wasn't ready to find out what was behind that other door. If his father asked, he'd say that the door had turned out to be just a closet.
Maybe, when he was a bit more confident that he understood what was going on, he could get a locksmith out here and see what was in there, but there wasn't any hurry. He really needed to think through what he had already learned. Whatever was behind the other door – Faerie or something else – was far more likely to provide more problems than to show him any solutions.
So it could wait. Everything down here could wait while he thought it all through.
He closed the sliding door and went upstairs.
He was sitting on the edge of the stage, still thinking, when the Bringers arrived.
That night he saw the play through, beginning to end, as the Bringers rehearsed. He saw them working their spells, warming up, practicing for the big night, when the moon and stars would be right, when they would have an audience, when they would have to perform the entire thing nonstop, without break or flaw.
Afterward he talked to Maggie, and to Myrddin, whom he had known as Merle Innisfree.
Everything Maggie had told him in the fields of Faerie was confirmed; if he did not participate, the ritual would fail. Magic would pass from the world forever, and all the magicians but Maggie would die.
“There's no chance you could do it again in November?” he asked.
Myrddin and Maggie looked at one another. Then Myrddin shook his head.
“I shouldn't think so,” he said. “I doubt there would be enough left of Sedona to serve our needs. And it wouldn't matter, in a way – you'd just be putting it off. Lad, you'd still know about it. We'd still need your help – but instead of here, it might be in Antarctica, or Kathmandu, or the Amazon jungles.”
“Oh,” Art said.
“We need you, Art,” Maggie said. “Maybe I shouldn't have told you, but I didn't know what else to do.”
“But turning magic loose – you say yourself you don't know what it'll do.”
“It's been done before, you know,” Myrddin pointed out. “The species seems to have survived.”
“Are you sure? When was the last one of these... these things created? How do I know it wasn't magic that killed off the dinosaurs?”
Maggie looked startled; Myrddin said judiciously, “It might have been, at that, I suppose. And I've heard stories about Atlantis, of course. But Arthur, my lad, the Stonehenge power spot was only opened about eight thousand years ago, and Sedona probably a little after – though we don't know who started Sedona, or how, or why.”
“Eight thousand years.”
“About that.”
“This hasn't been done in eight thousand years?”
Neither of them answered that.
“That's prehistoric. I mean, literally.”
Myrddin nodded.
“You said you needed my participation,” Art said.
“That's right,” Myrddin replied.
“Participation, how?” Art asked. “The play's got seven roles, and the rest of you are mostly just a chorus – would I be in the chorus?”
“I suppose so, yes,” Maggie said, with a glance at Myrddin. “I was sort of a late addition, and that's where I am.”
“But I can't sing,” Art protested. “I can't do magic. I don't act, you know, I never have – I don't think I'd remember my lines.”
Maggie glanced worriedly at Myrddin, who smiled.
“Stage fright, lad? No need for that. You need to participate, true, but nobody said you had to perform.”
Art needed a second to think about that; then he turned and looked at the neatly shelved lighting instruments.
“I expect it'll make the show look a little more professional, don't you?” Myrddin asked, putting an arm around Art's shoulders.
Chapter Seventeen
The temptation to tell Marilyn when they met in Dumfrey's Anti
ques the next day was almost irresistible. The knowledge that she wouldn't believe him helped considerably in fighting temptation, but then came the realization that he could prove it to her by taking her down to the door into Faerie.
And that would also prove that he wasn't going insane, wasn't imagining the whole thing. He didn't really think he was deluded, but independent confirmation certainly wouldn't hurt his self- confidence.
That thought gnawed away at his resolve, and he almost cracked at lunch, when Marilyn asked if he'd figured out what the people who had rented the theater were up to.
But if he told her, she would have to join the show. She might not mind – or she might.
And what if he decided against participating, and she didn't?
She might blame him for eleven murders. She might blame him for wiping away the little magic that was left in the world – if that made any difference. Nobody knew if it made any difference, if anyone but the magicians would notice when it was gone.
And she might tell others, and each new person would mean a whole new debate.
“Oh,” he said at last, “they're just doing a play, same as they said all along.”
“Really?” Marilyn cocked her head. “But you said they weren't doing any preparation.”
“Well, they weren't, but they are now. Got a slow start, that's all. I'll be hanging the lights tonight – or at least starting to.”
Marilyn nodded. “So did you ever find out anything about this, what was it, 'mystic classic of the stage'?”
He nodded. “Yup. Turns out it was written by some secret society back around the turn of the century, or something, so it's always stayed sort of underground, never gotten wide distribution.”
“Oh, foo, that's no fun, then! That takes almost all the mystery out of it!” She slapped at him gently.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling.
“I mean, what good are a bunch of mysterious strangers if they aren't smuggling dope or something?”
“Not much,” he agreed.
“So are they planning to advertise this show of theirs? I haven't seen any posters or anything.”
Art shrugged. “I don't know,” he said. “Hey, have you seen Susan around lately?”
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