Enter Three Witches (13 page)

“Stop that this minute!” Miranda said, and Bren stopped.

“Oh, I know. You want to hear about brunch with Dad. Well, okay. That was really boring too—more boring than the park, but the place was nice. They had all this cheerful Mexican stuff hanging all over the place, and I got to have margaritas. Nobody seemed to mind, and they were amazingly good.”

“What was she like, Bren?” Miranda said in a taut, ominous voice.

“Really skinny,” he said, relenting. “And sort of odd-looking. I mean she had this dark skin and red hair and very peculiar jewelry. Her name is Alia, and she comes from Venice, or so she says. I really didn’t like her, if that’s any consolation. She was creepy and gushy at the same time.”

“Tell me about this peculiar jewelry,” Miranda said. “It must have been very peculiar indeed for you to notice it.”

“Well, there was a lot of it,” Bren said, “and it didn’t seem to go together. She had a big necklace of lumpy yellow beads and copper snakes on her arms and this humongous silver ring that looked like it had a secret compartment in it.” He stopped, noticing that his mother was smiling, a slow, contented, feline smile. “You like this part about the jewelry?”

“I like it very much,” Miranda said. “It’s hard to believe, but it explains everything.” Suddenly she laughed out loud. “Your poor father, Bren. Haven’t you realized? He’s taken up with another witch, and I bet he doesn’t even know it yet. She has a nerve wearing witch jewels to brunch. What an amateur. And red hair with olive skin? It’s almost certainly dyed. Some people think you have to have red hair to be a witch, but of course it has to be natural, and even then it’s no big deal. Oh, how I wish I could get my hands on even one little hair!”

Bren stood up and dug in the depths of his jeans, then held aloft the clump of tangled red hair. Miranda gave a cry of triumph and snatched it out of his hand. “You’re wonderful, Bren. My God, what did you do? Scalp the poor woman?”

“It was in her hairbrush,” Bren said. “It was sticking out of this big purse she had hanging over the back of her chair. Really, Mom. It was like taking candy from a baby.”

“I’ve underestimated you,” his mother said admiringly. She got up and prowled around the kitchen. “This changes everything,” she muttered. “I can switch to attack, and that’s much more satisfying than moping away the night in a dreary old circle of protection. Let’s see. I think I’ve got everything I need—black candles, wax, henbane…”

“What about dinner, Mom?” Bren said.

“Dinner? Who’s hungry?”

“I’m hungry, and I think I deserve it,” Bren said. “You don’t do these things till midnight, anyway. Better eat something yourself and build up your strength.”

“Spiritual strength is what I need,” Miranda said. “I should fast, but never mind. Let’s see what’s in the fridge.”

When Bren climbed the stairs that night, full of an assortment of leftovers and tired from an exceptionally trying day, he could hear his mother chanting in her tower room. He paused and peered through the tiny window in the door. Robed in black, tall and magnificent, her bright hair an incongruous halo in the flickering light of the black candles, she stood over the smoking thurible molding a small waxen doll—a doll with an untidy mass of dyed red hair. “Poor Alia!” Bren said, and went down the hall to his room.

A technical marvel, that’s what it’ll be, thought Edward Behrens. A technical marvel and an artistic catastrophe. Slumped in a seat near the back of the house, he was watching the technical crew transform a bare stage into a blasted heath in medieval Scotland. Although the basic lighting and sets were finished, much remained to be done in the way of special effects. He had just come from a disheartening rehearsal of his principal actors, who, it seemed, were simply too young to convey or even to understand the primitive evil that informed the black history of Macbeth. But the witches were already good. Why? he wondered, watching the innocent capers of Erika, who, momentarily out of a job, was turning cartwheels in front of the cauldron. Erika and, to a slightly lesser degree, her two co-witches hadn’t far to go before they were truly terrifying.

These speculations were interrupted by the voice of Eli, who had opened the sliding window in the front of the light booth and was craning to see something in a far corner of the balcony. “We can’t do much more until you’ve focused that light,” he shouted. “What’s the problem?”

“Problem?” said a strangled voice out of the shadows. “Why would there be a problem? Focused? I haven’t even got the bastard hung yet. Is this play worth my life?”

“You’d better believe it,” Eli said, and withdrew his head.

Erika stopped turning cartwheels and gazed in the direction of Bren’s voice. She could just barely make out a dim figure suspended in space at the edge of the balcony, a gigantic, torpedo-shaped stage light swinging from its hand.

Technology, which had made such great strides with the electronic switchboard, had seemingly stopped when it came to getting the lights where they needed to be. Hanging and focusing remained in the early years of the industrial revolution.

Bren had one foot on the balcony rail and one hand on the steel pole that stretched upward from it and already held a cluster of lights and a tangled mass of cables and plugs. There was one space just above his head, and into that space, with a supreme effort, he managed to heave the forty-pound stage light. He got both feet on the balcony rail and propped the light on his shoulder while he attacked the C-clamp with his Crescent wrench. The clamp was frozen. Bren swore.

“What’s the matter?” Erika called from the stage. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Never better. What the…There, you unspeakable object. Take that.” A ferocious blow freed the clamp, and Bren was able to attach the big light to the pole and point it roughly in the direction of the stage. He wrapped one arm around the support and searched the dark tangle of cables for an open plug. However, when light and plug were connected, nothing happened. “Eli!” he shouted. “Have I got power up here? I thought you were in a hurry.”

Eli applied himself to his switchboard, and all over the house the spotlights began to pop on and off, flaring and fading in the gloom until finally Bren’s light blazed under his hands. It would be too hot to handle in seconds, and he fished in his back pocket for gloves. “Lean over the cauldron from stage right,” he called to Erika. “Kill everything else, Eli; I can’t tell what I’m doing.” In spite of its hazards and frustrations, Bren loved focusing. Three bolts, only one of them frozen, determined the position of the light. Four shutters, all sticky, narrowed it down to a hot spot on Erika’s head. This was to be a special-effects spot that would turn the three witches red as they leaned over the cauldron. Once satisfied with the focus, Bren slid a red gel over the front of the light and was delighted with the effect it had on Erika’s hair.

“That’s good,” Eli called. “You can come down now.”

“You’re a prince, Eli,” Bren said, as he slid gratefully off the balcony rail and went down the stairs into the theater. It was good to feel solid ground under his feet.

“Was that dangerous?” Behrens asked. It had occurred to him that he had something more than an artistic responsibility for his young technicians.

“Only for you,” Bren said cheerfully. “It’s a good thing you didn’t look up. You’d have had a heart attack. Erika, you should see what that light does to your hair.”

“I can imagine,” she said, joining him at the edge of the stage, “but I’m thinking of dying it green for the show.”

“That’s a disgusting idea. Have you thought that the show is only three nights, but your hair will be green for months?”

“I can dye it something else, if green palls.”

“You’ll be bald if you keep that up.”

Erika ran one hand through the soft pink brush that adorned her head and looked thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “We could all three shave our heads and make up our faces like skulls. The only hair would be those awful, scraggly little beards. It would be a new interpretation.”

“It would be gross,” Bren said.

“It’s supposed to be, and anyway, who asked you?”

The voice of Mr. Behrens rescued Bren from what seemed to be a doomed conversation. He came up front and shouted at the light booth, “Eli, let me see what you’ve got for this scene. Bren and Jeremy can be the other witches. Give me the lights and then let’s try one of the projections. I stay awake nights wondering if this stuff is going to work. Jeremy!”

Bren clambered onto the stage, and Jeremy appeared yawning from the wings, where he had been napping on a pile of dusty curtains. His blond hair was becomingly tousled, and as he stretched, the muscles rippled under his skin-tight T-shirt.

“Crouch,” Eli shouted. “You guys are a foot taller than the witches.”

Erika held out her hand to Jeremy. “Make yourself small and ugly, if possible,” she said, “and gather round the cauldron.”

Bren supposed, miserably, that he should do the same. Behrens joined them and stood off to one side. “I’ll be Macbeth,” he said. “Go, Eli.”

The stage darkened, and eerie blue and green lights came up around the cauldron, followed by Bren’s red special.

“You’ll have to give me more,” Behrens said. “Even at the cost of a little atmosphere.” The light brightened slightly on his face. “Now the bloody child, if you’ve got him. He’s my favorite, I have to admit.” On the scrim behind the witches appeared the wavering apparition of a small, naked child streaked with blood.

“Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth. Be bloody, bold and resolute,” Erika intoned in a suitably disembodied voice.

“Oh, lovely,” said Behrens. “Thank you all
very
much. We’re ahead in this department, which is just as well when you ponder the technical horrors of the play. It’s not something you want to throw together at the last minute. I don’t suppose you have something equally stunning for the first witch scene?”

“Wait till you see,” Erika said. “Come on, Jeremy. Let’s get that wicked tree.”

“Cauldron off, tree on. Help me drag this thing, Bren.” Jeremy heaved at one side of the cauldron, which seemed to be almost as heavy as it looked. “I’ll have to put wheels on it or there’s no way it’s going to vanish into thin air.”

“Please don’t mention vanishing,” the director said. “It’s an issue I am simply not prepared to face.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll think of something,” Erika said.

The tree was new to Bren as well. Jeremy and Erika, he reflected bitterly, must have built it while he was hanging lights and disentangling cables in the remote corners of the balcony. It was a twisted skeleton, bare and desolate, its branches reaching out like claws.

“Now that is an evil tree,” said Behrens. “That is an absolute nightmare of a tree. I love it. But the lights are different, I hope, or is that hoping too much?”

Eli’s head appeared at the light booth window. “Would you wonderful people be changing scenes?” he asked. “I’ve still got work to do on the other one.”

“Just a sketch, Eli—the barest suggestion of what you had in mind for this marvelous tree, and then I promise to go home and leave you all alone to your wizardry,” said Behrens.

“It’s not programmed yet,” Eli said. “You’ll have to wait while I bring them up manually.”

The lights began to change around the four people on the stage. The red light went out, and the atmosphere grew cold and bleak. The backdrop now suggested a lowering, late afternoon sky. There would be rain, one felt, or something worse.

Behrens abandoned his pose as Macbeth and went out into the house. After a moment Bren joined him. It was hard to see the effect of the lighting from the stage, and the witch scenes were his own project. Eli had let him plot them and was going to let him run the cues once they were programmed into the board. He studied the stage, noting where the level of light was too high or too low and where in one place, instead of blending imperceptibly into one another, you could see the overlapping circles of two spotlights. It was still very good.

“Are you responsible for this miracle?” asked the director, and Bren nodded happily. “Well, only a few more humps to get over,” Behrens went on. “Any ideas about these awful vanishings? We have to face it sometime in the next few days. We can do the old dry-ice trick, of course, but how to suddenly get a big enough puff of smoke to cover the witches’ exit beats me. I don’t think the budget runs to a real smoke machine in the wings. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t. We’re way over as it is.” (He refrained from mentioning that he had already dipped into his own pocket several times and, short of robbing a bank, could think of no other source of funds.)

“It’s supposed to be stormy,” Bren said. “We can do lightning flashes with the floods. Maybe if we lower the lights gradually and bang on the old thunder sheet more and more toward the end, we could get away with a tiny blackout.”

“You’d have to have a few really quick ones during the scene,” the director said, “to keep it from being too obvious, but it might work. The girls will have to be exceeding nimble.”

“They are that,” said Bren, who was now watching Erika’s swift preparations for departure. “Excuse me, Bear.” He jumped over a row of theater seats and dashed up the aisle to head Erika off at the exit.

“Can we try it tomorrow?” called Behrens, and Bren gave him an ambiguous wave of the hand.

He caught Erika at the foot of the stairs, and she turned, frowning slightly. “Hey, Erika, I’m sorry I hassled you about your hair,” Bren said. “It wasn’t any of my business.”

She shrugged. “No problem. You know I’ll do what I want anyway. Did you come dashing after me just to tell me that?”

“No, actually…” Bren stopped. He wondered how he had ever found her the easiest person in the world to talk to. “Actually, I had an idea of something you might like to do—with me, that is. It’s awfully interesting, but maybe you’d rather not. I mean, well, suit yourself.”

To his amazement, Erika laughed. “How can I suit myself if I don’t even know what you want me to do?”

“Good point,” Bren said. “I’d better tell you what it is.”

“Right,” Erika said.