Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

swinging⁠—telling me he’d still be doubling Second Witch. And he was hissing, “Places, please, everybody. On stage!”

With a sweep of silver and ash-colored plush, Miss Nefer came past him, for once leading the last-minute hurry to the stage. She had on the dark red wig now. For me that crowned her characterization. It made me remember her saying, “My brain burns.” I ducked aside as if she were majesty incarnate.

And then she didn’t break her own precedent. She stopped at the new thing beside the door and poised her long white skinny fingers over the yellowed keys, and suddenly I remembered what it was called: a virginals.

She stared down at it fiercely, evilly, like a witch planning an enchantment. Her face got the secret fiendish look that, I told myself, the real Elizabeth would have had ordering the deaths of Ballard and Babington, or plotting with Drake (for all they say she didn’t) one of his raids, that long long forefinger tracing crooked courses through a crabbedly drawn map of the Indies and she smiling at the dots of cities that would burn.

Then all her eight fingers came flickering down and the strings inside the virginals began to twang and hum with a high-pitched rendering of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

Then as Sid and Bruce and Martin rushed past me, along with a black swooping that was Maud already robed and hooded for Third Witch, I beat it for my sleeping closet like Peer Gynt himself dashing across the mountainside away from the cave of the Troll King, who only wanted to make tiny slits in his eyeballs so that forever afterwards he’d see reality just a little differently. And as I ran, the master-anachronism of that menacing mad march music was shrilling in my ears.

III

Sound a dumbe show. Enter the three fatall sisters, with a rocke, a threed, and a pair of sheeres.

Old Play

My sleeping closet is just a cot at the back end of the girls’ third of the dressing room, with a three-panel screen to make it private.

When I sleep I hang my outside clothes on the screen, which is pasted and thumbtacked all over with the New York City stuff that gives me security: theater programs and restaurant menus, clippings from the Times and the Mirror, a torn-out picture of the United Nations building with a hundred tiny gay paper flags pasted around it, and hanging in an old hairnet a home-run baseball autographed by Willie Mays. Things like that.

Right now I was jumping my eyes over that stuff, asking it to keep me located and make me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from the play wouldn’t be able to come nosing back around the trunks and tables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen to them, even if they’re sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones by their crooked trip. But they’re always tense-making. And tonight (I mean this afternoon)⁠—no!

It’s funny I should find security in mementos of a city I daren’t go out into⁠—no, not even for a stroll through Central Park, though I know it from the Pond to Harlem Meer⁠—the Met Museum, the Menagerie, the Ramble, the Great Lawn, Cleopatra’s Needle and all the rest. But that’s the way it is. Maybe I’m like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to go outside because the whale’s a terrible monster that’s awful scary to look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a second time, yet reassured to know you’re living in the stomach of that particular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth planet of Aldebaran.

It’s really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing room. The boys bring me meals: coffee in cardboard cylinders and doughnuts in little brown grease-spotted paper sacks and malts and hamburgers and apples and little pizzas, and Maud brings me raw vegetables⁠—carrots and parsnips and little onions and such, and watches to make sure I exercise my molars grinding them and get my vitamins. I take spit-baths in the little john. Architects don’t seem to think actors ever take baths, even when they’ve browned themselves all over playing Pindarus the Parthian in Julius Caesar. And all my shuteye is caught on this little cot in the twilight of my N.Y.C. screen.

You’d think I’d be terrified being alone in the dressing room during the wee and morning hours, let alone trying to sleep then, but that isn’t the way it works out. For one thing, there’s apt to be someone sleeping in too. Maudie especially. And it’s my favorite time too for costume-mending and reading the Variorum and other books, and for just plain way-out dreaming. You see, the dressing room is the one place I really do feel safe. Whatever is out there in New York that terrorizes me, I’m pretty confident that it can never get in here.

Besides that, there’s a great big bolt on the inside of the dressing room door that I throw whenever I’m all alone after the show. Next day they buzz for me to open it.

It worried me a bit at first and I had asked Sid, “But what if I’m so deep asleep I don’t hear and you have to get in fast?” and he had replied, “Sweetling, a word in your ear: our own Beauregard Lassiter is the prettiest picklock unjailed since Jimmy Valentine and Jimmy Dale. I’ll not ask where he learned his trade, but ’tis sober truth, upon my honor.”

And Beau had confirmed this with a courtly bow, murmuring, “At your service, Miss Greta.”

“How do you jigger a big iron bolt through a three-inch door that fits like Maudie’s tights?” I wanted to know.

“He carries lodestones of great power and diverse subtle tools,” Sid had explained for him.

I don’t know how they