The Rebirth of Wonder (18 page)

Art didn't answer; he didn't even try.

“
Well, I'll tell
you, I don't know what it'll be like, really, any more than the
rest of 'em. I don't suppose it'll be as different as all that –
but who knows? You can't use magic to see a world where magic isn't
possible. I suppose you people will go on just as you have these
last few centuries. You probably won't even miss it.” She grinned,
revealing hideous teeth, yellow and sharp. “Or maybe you'll all
drop dead, or turn to apes – maybe your minds are all magical. Who
knows?”

Art hesitated, trying to think what to ask
next, while the old woman was in a reasonably talkative mood, but
just then her cue came, and she turned away, returning to the
stage.

Art stood for a long moment, holding the
Fresnel, then headed out to hang it.

Chapter Eighteen

Four days later, on Friday, Art had the
lights hung, aimed, gelled, and shuttered, and he had still not
decided whether to go through with the ritual.

He had argued with Marilyn without really
knowing why, and had left her on the verge of tears with no clear
understanding of what she was upset about.

He had, however, retrieved the idea that had
come to him.

The Bringers were supposedly doomed to die
because the world would no longer have any magic in it – so why not
find them another world?

If they all went through
that door in the basement, stepped through into Faerie, and just
stayed there when the door disappeared, wouldn't they be safe
enough? Faerie wasn't going to vanish when the magic from Arizona
died; Faerie
must
still have magic. How else could it be Faerie?

And the normal, everyday world would still be
intact, without any wild magic turned loose. Bampton would still be
a quiet little suburb. Art's life could continue undisturbed, and
there wouldn't be any worries about New England becoming the next
Atlantis.

He wished he had come up with this when he
had still been working on focusing lights, using various members of
the group as lighting dummies – that would have made conversation
convenient and natural. Right at the moment, the Bringers were
onstage discussing something among themselves – he couldn't hear
what, and although he was now allowed to watch rehearsals, and was
accepted as a necessary part of the performance, he was still not a
full member of the group.

Not that he particularly wanted to be. He was
a techie, not a magician.

Well, sometime soon he and the director would
need to sit down together and go over the lighting cues, and he
could bring up his idea then.

“
Arthur!” Myrddin
called, almost as if he had heard Art's thought. Art looked up from
the lighting board, startled. “Arthur, lad, come here a moment,
would you?”

Puzzled, Art came.

“
We've been talking it over, the lot of us,” Myrddin
explained. “We've been looking at the lights you've got up there,
and we were thinking that it might be nice if we had
some
sets
, as well – I mean, if we're really going to do this up as a
play, and not just use that as an excuse, we might as well get it
right, eh?”

“
But it
is
a play...”

“
Well, I wrote it that way, but that was so we wouldn't
have any trouble over it. I wrote it up as a church service, too –
if we'd come out with a place where there was a church available
instead of a theater, we'd be doing
that
version.”

“
Really?”

“
Really. I wrote it
half a dozen ways. Now, what do you think about some
sets?”

“
Well, but, I mean,
the sets are all supposed to be in place before the lights go up –
I'll have to refocus everything.”

“
Will
you?”

“
Yes!”

Myrddin looked up at the lights, then back at
Art. “Well, that'll give you something to do for the next two
weeks, then, won't it?”

Art's mouth opened, then snapped shut.

So much for building proper strips. Maybe he
could do that this winter, if there wasn't enough snow to keep him
busy.

“
Anyway,” Myrddin went on, “we wanted to ask your
advice. We don't need new sets – Maggie tells us you have old ones
in the cellars, same as you have those over there.” He pointed at
the leftovers from
A
Midsummer Night's Dream
, which still
hadn't been moved to the basement.

“
Well, yeah,” Art
admitted.

“
Splendid! We'll
just take a look at them, then, and choose the ones we
want...”

“
Mr. Innisfree,” Art
interrupted desperately, “you don't need to do
that.”

“
Ah, but we want to, lad! Add a bit of your stage magic
to our own, we will – and all the better for making
new
magic, I'm
sure!”

“
You don't need new
magic, though.”

Myrddin stopped his speech abruptly and
stared at Art; so did several of the others.

“
What you say there,
child?” Tituba Smith demanded.

“
Art, that's the whole
point
,” Maggie
called.

“
New magic for old,
new magic for old!” Granny Yaga chanted, parrotlike, before
bursting out in a raucous cackle.

“
But you don't,” Art
insisted. “If the world loses its magic, you can all still go live
in Faerie.”

Myrddin blinked solemnly at Art.

“
How are we supposed
to get to Faerie?” Morgan asked, her hands on her
hips.

“
Through the door in
the basement,” Art replied, startled by the
question.

Morgan glared, first at
Art, then around at the others. “Is this true?” she demanded.
“Nobody told
me
about any door in the basement!”

“
We didn't?” Maggie
said, as startled as Art had been.

“
Morgan,” Myrddin
said, a hand raised in a calming gesture, “I'm sorry, I admit it,
that was my doing. I didn't trust you – you know why. I feared if
you knew of the door that you'd leave us, and I don't know if we
could succeed without you at this point.”

Morgan glowered at him, and Myrddin faced up
to it.

“
I'll not flee to
the Other Realm,” Rabbitt announced. “This world is my own, and
I'll live or die in it.”

Several voices murmured, and worried eyes
turned toward Morgan.

“
Oh, I'll stay,”
Morgan said, “until the spell is cast. Then I'll go back where I
belong, where I should have been these past two
centuries.”

“
I'd prefer Earth,
if I have a choice,” Kaye remarked. “But if anything goes wrong,
I'd prefer Faerie to death.”

“
What's it like in
Faerie, now?” Karagöz asked. “Who did you see?”

“
No one,” Maggie
said. “Just an empty meadow.”

An uneasy silence followed
this, broken a moment later when Tituba asked, “You didn't
see
no one
? Not
even off in the distance?”

“
I thought I saw
towers,” Art said. “Beyond the trees. And there were birds. And
butterflies.”

“
In all my years,
I've never heard of anyone entering Faerie without encountering its
inhabitants,” said Tanner.

“
Maybe it is dead,” Wang suggested.
“Maybe
their
magic ran out even before ours.”

That possibility had not occurred to Art.

“
But the door...” he
began.

“
The door is in
our
world,” Rabbitt pointed out.
“Conjured by the spells we've begun here.”

Art stared at the magicians. His great idea
had not resolved his dilemma; instead it had created even more
questions.

“
We'll have to
explore,” Morgan said. When several voices started to protest, she
raised a stilling hand and added, “Once the ritual is done, that
is.”

“
And if the spell
fails, perhaps we can slip through before the door fades, as the
young man suggested,” Wang pointed out. “That would surely be
preferable to certain death.”

That evoked a general chorus of agreement –
but Art noticed that Myrddin and a couple of the others didn't join
in. He stared at them all hopelessly.

Maybe he had found them a way out – but maybe
he hadn't.

And that meant he still didn't know what to
do, whether to help them unleash chaos, or to refuse and see what
happened.

At least he'd reduced it from eleven murders
to a mere gamble with eleven lives. He sighed. He'd tried – and
they'd chosen to take the risks.

At that point Myrddin decided the time had
come to drag the conversation back to its original track. He said,
“Now, about those sets...”

Chapter Nineteen

The stage was a
phantasmagorical clutter of mismatched elements, but that didn't
seem to trouble any of the Bringers of Wonder at all. A castle wall
loomed in the upstage right corner, a flowering hedge upstage left,
with an art deco triumphal arch, originally intended for a
nightclub set, between them. The chalk circles had been redrawn on
a sloping platform originally built for a production of
The Roar of the Greasepaint
that had been one of the first shows Art had worked on. Roman
columns adorned either side of the stage, alternating with
Victorian streetlamps, the entire array supporting a glittering
mesh, draped in graceful swags in two long arcs, one on either
side.

The whole effect was supremely weird – not
mystical so much as just plain strange. It resembled an
architectural warehouse more than a wizard's laboratory.

For two weeks, Art had
been desperately reworking his lighting to suit this new, cluttered
stage, and all the while, as he worked, he was trying to decide,
trying to think – and trying
not
to think.

He had not gone near the mysterious black
door in the basement again, but some of the others had – Karagöz,
Tanner, and Kaye had ventured in, in a cautious little group.
Morgan had not accompanied them; everyone agreed that she knew
Faerie better than anyone on Earth, but she had declined the
invitation to join the exploratory party. She preferred not to risk
the temptation she knew she would feel to stay in the Twilight
Lands.

Upon their return the explorers reported that
magic still worked in Faerie – but differently. They couldn't
explain that. And they hadn't yet met any of the inhabitants. Due
to the time differential between Earth and Faerie they had not
dared venture far, lest they miss the performance – everyone knew
that an hour or two in Faerie might easily turn into days or weeks
back on Earth.

That left more mysteries, made every guess
about the future more difficult.

And other manifestations of the supernatural
had arisen to keep Art's attention divided. Something was
definitely alive in the pit beneath the basement, for one thing;
Art could hear it snuffling and slithering about. Sometimes it
thumped against the wooden floor.

It didn't seem particularly annoyed or
dangerous, though, and the thumps sounded more like random
explorations than an attempt to break out. Art had told the others
about it; no one had any idea what it was, and after much debate
they had resolved to leave it alone.

Also, there were small glowing things that
drifted about in the basement sometimes. Nobody had gotten a good
look at one. They came in three colors, red, green, and gold, and
they were beautiful. Art often glimpsed them from a distance, or
from the corner of his eye, or vanishing around a doorway, and
every time he stopped and stared, and every time they were gone
before he could see more than a vague impression of colored light,
of something small and delicate and graceful moving through the
air, glowing brightly.

Art thought they might be
fairies – after all, if the land beyond the door was Faerie, why
not? Not the lordly fey folk of
A
Midsummer Night's Dream
, of course, but
little winged creatures, the sort in Victorian children's books, or
Disney's
Fantasia
. Why not?

The Bringers just
shrugged; they didn't know what the lights were, either. This
didn't trouble them; they
expected
new magic to be different from anything they'd
known.

Art couldn't get a good look at the things,
couldn't tell if they were fairies, or some sort of mutant firefly,
or something else entirely. He felt as if he ought to be frightened
by such things, but he wasn't.

Fear came from threats, after all, from
danger – or from the unknown. But the little glowing things posed
no threat that he could see, and the Bringers assured him that
whatever they were, they weren't dangerous.