“Let’s drink this toast in Venusian slug-ichor!” said Macbeth.
The officers raised their goblets.
Someone strode down the front row, a huge man with silvery hair and a dark red furious face. It was Mr. Magnusson, come to summon Mrs. Sherman from her seat. All around them, parents watched, while politely pretending to see nothing.
Ricardo heard his cue. He took a deep breath and strode onstage, aware of the two adults leaving together. Mr. Dean looked after them in horror, his conductor’s wand drooping. The music swooned.
Neal spotted Ricardo in his costume, and his eyes widened with melodrama. “By the cosmos!” he cried.
“What is it, my Lord?” said Lady Macbeth, her eyes passing through Ricardo as he shambled forward. He heard the expectant breathing of the audience at his side, now invisible in the red glare of footlights. The whole set, everything around him, appeared to be drenched in blood. His insane hieroglyphs crawled over the walls, red-on-red, luminous.
“But-but-but,” said Neal. “You-you-you…”
Ricardo walked offstage, turned on his heel, and waited to re-enter. His visor was steamed with the sweat of stage fright. He tried to find his breath
“My lord?” said Cory Fordyce. “What is it? Have you seen some nightmare with your eyes wide open?”
“Didn’t you see him?” Neal asked.
“See who?”
“Nothing, it must be nothing. I am tired, my dear. However, I’ll let nothing stop our celebrations. I propose a toast to—”
Backstage, Ricardo heard a growing commotion. Mr. Magnusson, pulling Mrs. Sherman after him, came through a stage door.
“No, Jack,” Mrs. Sherman whispered. “You can’t just stop the show. If you were going to come late, you shouldn’t have come at all. You’re drunk, Jack.”
“Ichor,” said Mr. Magnusson, almost spitting. “Ichor! That’s practically blood! It was the first word I heard. I’ll pull down the curtain myself if I have to.”
Morris Fluornoy bumped into Ricardo. He was running from the adults.
“What’s going on?” Ricardo asked.
“We’re in trouble!” Morris said, and blinked in puzzlement. He stooped to look under the visor. “Hey… Ricardo?”
“My cue,” Ricardo said.
He slipped back onto the stage and stood at Neal’s side. His pointed ears and Banquo’s emblems were enough to tell the audience who he was, but now it was time to show Neal alone. He stepped before his former friend and slipped the visor up an inch or so, until Neal could see his grin while the audience saw only the back of his head. Another inch of raised visor exposed the tip of his bloodied nose. Finally Ricardo stared full into Neal’s face. He rolled up his eyes until the whites were showing, and with his hand smeared Vampire Blood all over his face.
Neal turned ghastly green.
“Hello, my friend,” Ricardo whispered.
Cory looked over and yelled, “You!”
The visor dropped. Ricardo turned and ran till he was tangled in the wings. Where was the backstage door? He saw Lady Macbeth scowling after him and Neal still gaping. He ripped off the ears and wiped the red goo on his sleeve.
“Newt?” he whispered. “Trade off.”
“All right,” said a deep voice that echoed through the backstage. Mr. Magnusson came storming around the backdrop, intent on the light cage.
“Jack,” said Mrs. Sherman, just behind him, still trying to whisper. “Jack, they’ll murder you.”
“If not them, their parents,” he said.
Actors rushed from the stage and the next scene began in chaos.
Neal and Cory charged Ricardo.
Mr. Magnusson opened the door to the light cage.
Ricardo turned toward the backstage door but Neal veered to cut him off. The next thing he saw was the ladder.
He was climbing.
Cory cried, “I’ll get him!”
The ladder shuddered as if it were trying to throw him. Looking down past his feet, he saw Lady Macbeth climbing up. Below her, Mr. Magnusson swore at the array of light switches, asked “Which is which?” of the terrified operator, then snarled and stalked out of the cage.
Ricardo reached the top and looked out over the stage. The catwalk was the narrowest of tracks across the deepest of pits. At the bottom, three witches chanted around their cauldron while their red and black queen Hecate—played by Sheri DuBose—rose with her arms outspread to take in all the stage. She met his eyes and screamed.
The band faltered, stopped. Mr. Dean climbed onto the stage and met Mr. Magnusson and Mrs. Sherman at the witches’ cauldron; there they stood looking out at the audience. The proper witches backed away. Sheri still stood looking up at Ricardo. He realized he had better move. A door opened onto the roof at the other side of the catwalk.
Mr. Magnusson began, “We apologize—”
Cory’s feet banged on the ladder. Ricardo scuttled over the abyss. Below, Hecate screamed again, pointing now.
“Don’t do it!” she cried.
Murmurs from the audience, yells from the darkened regions of the stage. The Committee looked up at him.
Halfway out, he heard Cory speak after him:
“Ricardo, don’t be stupid. You can’t get out that way. Come on back and face the music.”
Her voice was soft.
He took a tentative step.
“Please,” she said. The word was like nothing he had ever heard.
He turned to face her, and crouched with both hands holding the plank. She stood at the end of the catwalk, her red robes flowing into space. She was barefoot tonight, raven-haired, seeming much older and crueler than ever, despite her gentle word.
“Don’t come out,” he said.
She took a step.
Glancing down, he saw all of them, Neal and Newt and the faculty, all of them looking up at him with rubies for eyes.
“What is it you want, Ricardo?” she asked. He looked up. “Attention?”
Her face seemed to crack into pieces, everything he recognized in it crumbling away. She was smiling, reaching out to him, yet she was sad. He knew that look: pity. It drove him back.
She took a step. The catwalk shuddered like a diving board.
“Don’t,” he said, and turned to run.
One foot missed the plank.
He fell, bleating.
Cory screamed. Newt was already running through the darkness below, pushing the hell-beast like a cradle to catch him. Ricardo’s clawing hands triggered the net full of foam boulders and he plunged amid a shower of soft Martian rocks.
As he fell, he dreamed with regret of all the scenes that would not be seen tonight because the show was spoiled. There would be no Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, sniffing the ozone left on her fingers by the firing of ray-guns. There would be no attack by Birnham Waste, where soldiers disguised as sand dunes advanced on Macbeth. Macbeth’s disconcerted cry of “Ichor!” would not be heard, for he would never casually thrust a spear-point in that same sand. Ricardo saw all the things that should have been and would have been, if not for his fall.
Falling took longer than it should have.
Above him he saw no catwalk receding, no backdrops rushing past, no dwindling floodlights. There was instead a sky of crimson so dark, so deep that it was almost black; wherein, high up, like the smiling white eyes of a slick red beast, were two tiny horned moons. It was his dream, Mars as he had come to see it, and now it had him.
With much ripping of foam and splintering of wood and creaking of chicken wire, he landed. The belly of the hell-beast split wide, dropping him on the floor. A few boulders tumbled through after him.
A little figure scurried to him, a small boy swathed in red, with wide shiny eyes beneath a strange cowl.