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

Well, right away they all went on stage with a flourish, Sid and Martin crowned and hand in hand. The play got going strong again. But there were still those edge-of-control undercurrents and I began to be more uneasy than caught up, and I had to stare consciously at the actors to keep off a wavery-fit.

Other things began to bother me too, such as all the doubling.

Macbeth’s a great play for doubling. For instance, anyone except Macbeth or Banquo can double one of the Three Witches⁠—or one of the Three Murderers for that matter. Normally we double at least one or two of the Witches and Murderers, but this performance there’d been more multiple-parting than I’d ever seen. Doc had whipped off his Duncan beard and thrown on a brown smock and hood to play the Porter with his normal bottle-roughened accents. Well, a drunk impersonating a drunk, pretty appropriate. But Bruce was doing the next-door-to-impossible double of Banquo and Macduff, using a ringing tenor voice for the latter and wearing in the murder scene a helmet with dropped visor to hide his Banquo beard. He’d be able to tear it off, of course, after the Murderers got Banquo and he’d made his brief appearance as a bloodied-up ghost in the Banquet Scene. I asked myself, My God, has Siddy got all the other actors out in front playing courtiers to Elizabeth-Nefer? Wasting them that way? The whoreson rogue’s gone nuts!

But really it was plain frightening, all that frantic doubling and tripling with its suggestion that the play (and the company too, Freya forfend) was becoming a rickety patchwork illusion with everybody racing around faster and faster to hide the holes. And the scenery-wavery stuff and the warped Park-sounds were scary too. I was actually shivering by the time Sid got to: “Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” Those graveyard lines didn’t help my nerves any, of course. Nor did thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly for her this time, “Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where. Think you ’tiz stolen?”

Greta, I told myself, you need a miltown before the crow makes wing through your kooky head.

I turned to go and fetch me one from my closet. And stopped dead.

Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.

Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, Greta, you imagined that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer’s simply unkinked herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe Sid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybe she just couldn’t stand watching Martin give such a bang-up performance in her part of Lady Mack.

Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehow all I could think then⁠—and I thought it with a steady mounting shiver⁠—was, We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. I know. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals. But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stage Elizabeth⁠ ⁠… who’s the other?

And because I didn’t dare to let myself think of the answer to that question, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-colored skirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I ran into the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York City Screen.

Even little things are turning out to be great things and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about the properties of numbers?

Lying on my cot, my eyes crosswise to the printing, I looked from a pink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tiny doll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread. Really they weren’t covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole an inch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if my eye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I’d seen the two times I’d dared a peek through the hole in the curtain: a bevy of ladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes, humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and in one case that many heads⁠—as if they were dressed up in our Tempest, Peer Gynt and Insect People costumes and some more besides.

Naturally I’d had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid had wagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we’d been giving performances for people who’d arranged a costume theater-party and been going to attend a masquerade ball, and ’zounds, when would I learn to guard my half-patched pate?

I don’t know, I guess never, I answered now, quick looking at a Giants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willie Mays baseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I’d looked at this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren’t reassuring me at all.

The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it, “What are you looking for? A spider?” when what should I hear coming back through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet but Miss Nefer’s footsteps. No one else walks that way.

She’s going to do something to you, Greta, I thought. She’s