400 Boys and 50 More (27 page)

“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.

“I’m here,” said Newt. “Ricardo, can you answer?”

The mound of foam on which he lay collapsed, spilling him out from under the hell-beast. Ricardo’s eyes blurred over for a moment, then his vision began to brighten.

“Newt!” he said.

“I’m here.”

“I can see Mars. I really see it. I—I’m going . . .”

“Wow, Ricardo! Great! How is it?”

“Just like I im—”

He shrieked, his eyes fixed on the Martian firmament that no one else could see. He wailed as the moontips burst the membrane of sky and the red heavens poured down around him. Up he rose through the dark flood, like a bubble in a bottle of burgundy, and it seemed he would never reach the surface, never breathe again. For the air of Mars was thin, thin and cold, cold as death.

* * *

“Mars Will Have Blood” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in
Scare Care
, edited by Graham Masterton.

UNEASY STREET

“Ah, good, here come the cops to arrest some more mutants,” said Raleigh’s boss, Pete. “Can’t have them just lounging around, living off the fat of the land, snacking on the core of our civilization.”

Raleigh finished counting verdigrised pennies into the grimy hand of a man who wore a heavy overcoat and woolen muffler despite the August heat, then he handed over the brown bag full of Copenhagen slicks. His eyes followed the man out into the heat-warped glare of the street. In the flickering intervals between speeding cars, he could see that the tiny park across the street was full of cops.

“Mutants?” Raleigh said, glancing into the fish-eye mirror at the men who browsed between racks of cello-wrapped magazines and sex toys. “You mean, like, genetic drift?”

“I'm talking sci-fi horror movies, kid. I mean bug-eyed monsters with green skin and the faces of dogs. Nothing remotely human.”

Raleigh looked back at the park. “They’re just bums, Pete. Street people.”

“I must disagree,” Pete said, taking a moment to readjust his John Lennon spectacles, which looked as misplaced as a lorgnette on his oft-broken nose. “Neither hapless hustler nor decrepit wino, Raleigh. These are the genuine item.
Homo mutatis.
I’ve been studying them for years, from this inconspicuous vantage. And what’s more, I'd wager the police will find their ragged pockets stuffed full of Easy.”

“Easy? That new drug, you mean?”

Pete stood up excitedly, peering past Raleigh and wagging his finger in the direction of the cash register. Raleigh turned to face yet another overdressed customer bearing yet another glossy, overpriced skinzine. As he searched for the dollar value among kroner, pounds, and lire, Pete went on about mutant pharmaceuticals.

“It’s everywhere these days, Raleigh. It’s as common as the mutants themselves. Don’t know where they get it, but they’re all pushers, selling it to each other. They call it ‘Easy,’ I gather, because it’s so easy to fix. A snort, a swallow—no needles need apply. And because once you take enough of it, life seems easy. Easy as pie. Maybe it caused the mutants; I don’t know. You can blame them on solar flares, or pesticides, or the national debt. From my experience, poverty can warp the mind; why shouldn’t it have subtler genetic effects?”

“Thank you, sir,” Raleigh told his customer. “You might want to keep on this side of the street for a few blocks.”

“Won’t matter,” Pete proclaimed. “The police have their hands full at the moment. Hey, Raleigh, take a look at this one. I’ll watch the register.”

Raleigh switched places with Pete in the cramped space behind the counter, and by stepping on the hidden cashbox, he managed to get a clear view of the melee.

“All I see is a bunch of cops,” he said.

“Brown coat, brown hair—it looks like a victim of cosmetic malpractice. And it hops like a frog.”

“Jesus, Pete,” he said. “That’s a person, not an ‘it.’”

“And I say you’re wrong, kid. That comes to $9.95.”

“You have no compassion, Pete.”

Raleigh watched the woman stumble against the metal steps of the paddy van. With both hands cuffed behind her back, and the cops pushing her ahead of them, she stumbled forward like a sack of potatoes. A plastic bag full of gray powder fell from the folds of her coat; one cop snatched it up with a shout. Raleigh had a glimpse of her face: wide, loose lips; basset-hound eyes showing more red than white; skin a cigarettish brown-green in color. As the cops shoved her into the van, he realized why the woman had “hopped,” as Pete put it. One leg of her slacks flapped loose.

“My God, that poor lady. She’s an amputee, and the way the cops are shoving her around —”

“Let me see,” Pete said, striving to regain his old place. Raleigh held on long enough to see her remaining leg disappear into the van, then the door slammed shut.

“Well, that’s that,” said Pete. “But they’ll be back tomorrow, and twice as many, too. Confine them in a cell and they multiply even faster.”

“You’re sick,” Raleigh said. His face burned; his throat had closed up and gone dry. “Those are just regular people, like maybe you and I could have been if we'd had a long run of bad luck. It’s living on the street makes them sick like that.”

“The street, eh? You sure it’s not the greenhouse effect?”

Raleigh sputtered and laughed despite himself. Pete slapped him on the shoulder, then leaned in close, whispering, “So what makes them look like this?”

He referred to the next customer, a stunted, pop-eyed-old man with a fringe of gray beard and a toothless mouth. Raleigh gritted his teeth and counted the proffered money, all in tarnished dimes, though he felt as if he were selling
Wet Beaver Beach Party
to Snuffy Smith.

“Sorry, gramps,” he said a minute later. “There’s not enough here. Why don’t you go get yourself something to eat?”

“You crazy?” the old man rasped. “That shit’s expensive!”

* * *

The next morning, before Pete’s shop opened, Raleigh stood in the park across the street with a lukewarm cup of coffee and a doughnut. Brick high-rises enclosed the little square of balding grass and litter; an alley ran along one edge. Thorny hedges concealed a few long, lumpy shapes like lint-colored turds the size of men; the sound of snoring drifted from them. Otherwise the park was empty.

As he drank his coffee, he saw Pete wandering up the far side of the street, beret pulled down low on his brow. Raleigh drained the Styrofoam cup and tossed it toward the trash can, but a gust of stale wind swept it aside.

The park was full of garbage. One cup more or less made no difference. Yet Raleigh could not avoid the voice of his conscience. Littering was bad, punishable by heavy fines. He wandered over to the hedge and carefully spread a few branches, looking for his cup.

There it lay, swaddled in bloody bandages, steaming.

He staggered back, slashing his wrists on thorns.

“Raleigh! Ho!”

Pete hailed him from the door of the shop. Raleigh hesitated, drawn to take another peek into the bushes despite the sickness caused by his first look. He finally broke and ran across the street ahead of a wave of traffic, the glimpse of dirty, blood-soaked swathes still hanging in his eyes.

“I'm glad you came early today,” Pete said as they went in. The shop was dark, and he kept it that way as he went back into his office for the cashbox. “I wanted a chance to talk to you privately.”

Raleigh was wondering about the heap of bandages. He tried to make himself concentrate on what Pete was saying, but it wasn’t easy. He was accustomed to tuning out most of his boss’s words.

“I'm afraid I have to let you go. Business has been lousy lately, as you may have been aware. I'm going to have to run the place single-handedly for a while if I want to break even.” He shook his head and laughed. “Even then, it’s not likely.”

“Wait a minute,” Raleigh said, following him at last. “Let me go? You mean, just like that—cut me off?”

“Like I said—”

“Come on, you can’t even give me a few hours a week? Pete, this job is my security! I'm counting on it.”

“I told you, I'm deep in the red. I wish I could give you some kind of severance pay, but this isn’t exactly a corporation. Of course, you’ll get the usual discount if you want to buy anything.”

“Yeah, right,” Raleigh said, slapping at a stack of magazines that stood as tall as Pete. They toppled and slithered over the floor of the office.

“There’s no call for that,” Pete said.

“You could’ve at least warned me, man.”

Raleigh raised his hands to go after another stack.

Pete stepped in front of him. “All right, here’s your warning. If you don’t get out of here, I'm calling the cops. I don’t need a vandal in my shop.”

Raleigh spun away from him and pushed out of the tiny office, rushed down the aisles of packaged flesh. Behind him, Pete muttered about Vandals, Goths, barbarians, mutants, the beginning of the end.

It felt good to slam the door and shove past the first trench-coated customer of the day.

An hour later he was still stalking the street, pissed off, in another world, and not a cent richer. In fact, he was already five dollars closer to eviction from his Tenderloin studio.

He curbed his anger and bought a pork
bao
from a dim sum place; the red meat was rancid, so he hurled it into traffic and went back demanding another. The cook came out from behind the counter with a carving knife, while two screaming Chinese women tried to hold him pinned against the wall—what was known in the area as Hong Kong persuasion. He tore free, but their shouts followed him down the street.

Get yourself together, man, he told himself, examining the holes the claws of the women had left in the shoulders of his T-shirt. Make yourself presentable, because you need a job in a hurry.