Authors: Michelle Knudsen
“Why didn’t
you
hate the idea of making a deal with him? Have you forgotten what he is?”
“No! Of course not! I did hate it! But I could see that it would work. And it
did
work. You have to see that. At least now there are only two —”
“Three.”
“Ah. Right. Okay, three. Still, better than thirty!”
Ryan sighs and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes for a minute.
“And — look, you couldn’t help me with that part,” I go on. “It was something only I could do, because of that super-roach thing.”
“You still should have told me.”
I’m not so sure about that, but I nod anyway. “I know. I’m sorry. I really am.”
His hands find their way back down to his sides. He turns to face me directly. “No more secrets, Cyn. This nightmare is bad enough without feeling like I can’t even count on you to tell me what’s going on.”
“Okay.” Once again, I know that I am lying; there’s no way I’m going to tell him about the two-more-times-to-the-demon-world addendum to the agreement with the demoness. Or that I made all the demons promise not to hurt him. But those are
old
secrets. I tell myself that I am only promising not to keep any
new
secrets. This doesn’t sound very convincing, even inside my own head. But I can’t worry about that now.
“Okay,” he says.
We stand there for a moment, and then by mutual unspoken agreement we start walking toward the auditorium again. As we’re heading down the aisle toward the stage, I say, “Hey, can you stay after rehearsal? I need your help testing out the chair.”
He looks relieved, although whether it’s because of the subject change or because he’s just glad to hear I’m finally about done with the damn chair, I’m not sure. “New prototype?”
“No prototype. This is it. This must be it, because we are out of time. I have to show it to Mr. Henry before the week is out, and I’d rather make that tomorrow than Friday. And I want us to practice it a few times before I let him see it. I’ve got Claude staying, too.” Claude is one of the chorus guys who gets his throat slit by Sweeney in the second act.
“Sure, of course.” He gives me a tiny hint of a smile, which lightens my heart enormously. I wasn’t sure if he was ever going to smile at me again. “Is it going to be awesome?”
“Yup,” I say.
“Glad to hear it.” His smile flashes to full power for just a second. “Can’t wait to try it out.”
Later, I tell Mr. Henry that we’ll lock up after we’re done and shoo him away. I don’t want him to see it until it’s perfect. And it will be. My minions have done excellent work.
And, if I do say so myself, my design was pretty excellent, too.
I ask Ryan and Claude to sit in the audience so we can show them how it’s going to look. My team and I have already moved the chair to the upper level of the pie shop / barber-shop set piece, and removed the sad folding chair that had been standing in for the real thing until now. Jessica, my trusty tech-crew volunteer, has already practiced going down the trapdoor dozens of times, but this is our first time with an audience. I signal to Tom and Liz in the lighting booth and the houselights go down. The stage is currently lit as it will be for the start of “Johanna (Quartet),” which is when several throat-slittings and body-dumpings happen in the show.
“The chair looks great!” Ryan calls out, and Claude nods beside him.
I wave this away. The chair in its dormant state is not the thing that is awesome.
I check that everyone we need is in position. “Okay,” I say, projecting my voice toward Ryan and Claude. “For the purposes of this demonstration, I will be Sweeney”— I hold up the gleaming silver razor (blunt-edged, of course) that I have borrowed from the prop table —“and Jessica will be you, Claude.”
Jessica gets into the chair.
“So — the song is going along, lots of lovely singing, la-la-la.” I move around, shifting the basin, pretending to lather up Jessica’s face, doing a general approximation of what Ryan will be doing during the song. “Then, when it’s time for the killing —” I mime slitting Jessica’s throat (she makes an extravagant
oh my God what happened I’m being killed
face) and then pull a hanging chain we’ve installed from a beam above the stage. On cue, Tom and Liz dim the ambient stage lights slightly just as the trapdoor swings down and open in the section of the platform in front of the chair. Pulsing red light glares up from the gaping hole. I release the lock on the chair with a foot pedal, and the whole contraption swings forward, dumping Jessica front-first down the trapdoor and into the pulsing fiery light. I know from watching an earlier test run that my own face is also bathed in the evil red glow, giving me an appropriately demonic visage, and I hold up the razor so the red fire can be reflected in its surface as well. It’s a beautiful effect with the dim lights everywhere else: Sweeney (or me, in this case), standing above the hole in the floor, holding up the razor and reflecting the heat and fire spilling up from below. (In the show the razor will be dripping with fake blood, too, which will only make it better.)
“Nice!” Ryan shouts. He and Claude stand up and start clapping. Claude gives a long whistle as well.
I grin at them. Jessica pokes her head out from around the doorway on the lower level and waves merrily.
They jump up to the stage to check out the mechanics. There’s a giant mattress piled with extra cushioning beneath the trapdoor, of course, and the lights are set back far enough that there’s no danger of Claude or anyone else smacking into one on the way down. The trapdoor itself is large, so that the opening can be large, so that there won’t be another incident of someone’s head making unintentional contact with the edge of it after getting half caught in a slightly faulty hinged seat — a design flaw of the previous chair that was more closely modeled on the 1982 Broadway production and was not quite ready to be tested at the time that certain people, who have since been demoted to cleaning crew, decided to try it out.
Anyway. None of that matters now, because that chair was nothing. This chair is the best chair ever.
“It’s the best chair ever!” Claude says enthusiastically. “Reset it, I want to try!”
Ryan catches my eye from where he’s standing in the pie shop / cellar area section of the stage. He’s smiling. “That’s one fantastic chair,” he says.
“Well, it’s not just the chair, obviously,” I say, tucking my hair behind my ears and bending down to reset the chair for Claude. “It’s the whole setup.” I glance at him again shyly, unable to help myself. “Did you like the lights?”
“The lights were amazing. It’s like the fires of hell are blazing up from the oven below. It looks — really great. Nice job, Cyn.”
He holds my gaze again, still smiling, until I can’t take it and I have to look away. Luckily the red lights will hide any blushing that might be happening in my general facial region. Ryan climbs up to the barbershop level and I start showing him and Claude how it all works, and I come to a startling realization: I’m happy. Despite everything else going on outside this auditorium, right now, in this moment, I’m happy. The chair is awesome, the cast and crew are excited, Mr. Henry is going to love it, my partner in demon fighting seems to have forgiven me for my sins, and all of my old delicious tingly Ryan-related feelings are singing out from various places in my body as my cells awaken to his very near proximity. Also the stage lights are making everything feel kind of warm and nice and toasty. I give in to it. I can feel sad and scared again tomorrow. Tonight, I just let myself feel happy until it’s time to go home.
The demoness — who calls herself Ms. Královna — turns out to be our new Italian teacher. She’s actually pretty good. Worlds better than Mr. Hubbard, although, admittedly, Mr. Hubbard set the bar pretty low. She tells the class she is from Slovakia but that she speaks several languages, including Italian, English, Danish, and Mandarin. She wears low-cut shirts and tight dresses, and all the boys in the class and a few of the girls suddenly seem intensely interested in learning Italian as well as they can. Even I get a little shivery when she says
bravissima
in that sultry voice of hers. Even though I know full well what she is.
But, hey — out of all the demons I have met, she is my favorite by, like, infinity.
Other than a single startled yet not really super-surprised glance on Friday morning when we walk into class and see her, Ryan and I don’t discuss the demoness’s presence. We also still haven’t talked about the whole going-to-the-demon-world thing. There’s nothing to say, really. He was there; he knows I made a deal, although, thank God, not all the details. But he knows I have to go. I know I have to go. So talking about it seems pretty pointless. I’m certainly not going to bring it up, and I’m grateful that he hasn’t either. We only have a little time left before the time (the next time) when we might die. I don’t want to spend it fighting or being more sad and scared than I have to be.
We showed the chair to Mr. Henry and the rest of the cast Thursday at the beginning of rehearsal. It was even better than when we showed Ryan and Claude, because this time Ryan and Claude were in full character and we had the fake blood and everything and it was
perfect.
Mr. Henry got up and hugged me and told me he was proud of me, and I had to work really hard not to start leaking around the eyes. The rest of the evening we ran all the scenes and numbers that involved the chair, and I just sat there in the audience and watched and loved it and was happy. Again. This time I could feel some other things lurking around underneath the happy, but I ignored them. Or tried to.
One week,
my stupid brain reminded me. One week from tomorrow would be opening night. And then — I had no idea what then.
Shut up,
I told my brain.
I have a week. Leave me alone.
My brain backed off, but I was not fooled. All the bad terrified and sorrowful thoughts and feelings were still there. Waiting.
I spend the weekend missing Annie even more than usual. I guess because it’s the last weekend before I either save her or die trying. I almost call her so many times. But instead I lie on the floor of my room with my headphones, like I used to do in junior high whenever I was sad, and listen to all my favorite musicals over and over and over. I know there is probably something else I should be doing. Running intervals, maybe, or learning karate, or brushing up on my knife fighting, or maybe just praying a lot. I mean, there are
demons
infesting our school and people are still getting pieces of their souls sucked out every day and Principal Morse is dead and Signor De Luca is dead and Mrs. Foster and Miss Daniels are dead and probably more people are going to die before the end, although hopefully not too many if we can succeed in doing all the things we are hoping to do when the time comes. And I know that. Of course I do.
But that is part of the magic of musical theater, dammit. That it can be awesome when everything else is awful, that it can make you feel better when life kicks you in the face and then stomps on your head while you’re lying there on the ground whimpering and then makes out with your boyfriend while making you watch, when there seems to be no hope and you have trouble seeing the possibility of happiness or a future or anything else. Musical theater can save you, even if only for two or three hours at a time. Sondheim especially can save you, although, of course, he’s not the only one, and personally I think
Sweeney Todd
can save you almost more than anything else, except maybe
Les Misérables
(Schönberg / Boublil) or, possibly,
The Secret Garden
(Norman / Simon). Oh, or
Chess
(Tim Rice and those guys from ABBA). Or
Into the Woods
(see? Sondheim again). But I don’t know — right now I am thinking that
Sweeney
has them all beat.
And so, yeah, demons, and death and scary terrible terrifying things waiting around every corner, sure, and, for some of us, impossible journeys to some hellish underworld on the agenda very, very soon. Whatever. The awfulness isn’t going anywhere. It will be there waiting for us all next week. And so for now, I am listening to my favorite songs and dreaming impossible dreams and ignoring the reality of the swiftly approaching future as much as I possibly can.
Tech week for the show begins on Monday, which means full run-throughs every night with reworkings of whatever needs it afterward and frequent stops to work out lighting issues or sound cues or any other tech-related thing that might need to be smoothed out. (Except the chair. The chair works perfectly every single time. It is the best chair ever.) Rehearsals go late and then later, and all of us are exhausted and it’s getting kind of hard to tell who’s walking around like a zombie because they’ve had part of their life force sucked out and who’s just sleep deprived because of the show. It’s just as well, because it means it takes all my brainpower just to make it through the day, and so I don’t have a whole lot left for being terrified at the slow but steady horror-show countdown going on in the back of my head.
I’d been using
Sweeney
as a frequent excuse to avoid Diane and Leticia, because I’m so bad at keeping things from them and they are so good at seeing when something is up. But this week I have lunch with them every day. Because, I guess, I know that these lunches together might be the last. At least for me. I’m trying to have faith that no matter what, the demoness will fulfill her part of the bargain to stop Mr. Gabriel and Principal Kingston from killing everyone before they head home. So Diane and Leticia will go on having lunch together for the rest of the year, and next year, and for as long as they want to thereafter. Maybe forever. Even if I don’t save Annie and make it back alive.
But I want to get
my
last lunches in, just in case they really are my last. Tech week insanity is a well-known phenomenon among the friends of the theater crowd, and so they will not question any odd behavior on my part now. So I can relax a little about that, at least. We studiously do not talk about Annie. She has pretty much disappeared from regular life at this point, but somehow everyone seems to be overlooking this fact, or else some demony hocus-pocus has made L&D not quite able to notice the fact that our friend is all but gone.