Authors: Lisa Mantchev
“Will she be all right?” Peaseblossom’s voice was as tinny as a singer on an antique gramophone record.
“She’s not talking,” Mustardseed said in funereal tones. “That can’t be a good sign.”
Bertie managed to say, “S’all right,” with the vigor and conviction of a newborn bunny.
Twitching at the noise, Nate shifted her in his arms, the damp linen of his sleeves pressing water into her bodice. “I don’t know how ye vanquished her, but ye best remember th’ way o’ it.”
“Where did Sedna go?”
“Back into th’ water lines.” He shifted her weight so she was more firmly hugged to his chest. “Most o’ her, anyway. Th’ rest evaporated.”
Bertie tried to speak again, but found she couldn’t and, what’s more, wouldn’t bring herself to care about the absence of words.
“Let’s get ye inside.” He moved, swift and sure toward the glass revolving door. Neither of them expected it to give only an inch before slamming into some sort of obstruction. Bertie’s shoulder cracked against the door before they fell back with a spine-jarring thud. Nate cursed in a half-dozen languages, easily switching among them as he struggled to his feet again.
Bertie staggered up, dazed and dizzy. “I locked us out.” She mustered the ghost of a laugh, reaching out a hand and coaxing the iron bar to fall from its brackets, the locks to slide from their tumblers.
Nate pushed on the door again, to no avail. “Ye forgot t’ undo somethin’.”
Peering up at the stern façade, Bertie shook her head. “I don’t think so. The theater protects itself and its own. It’s sealed itself off somehow.” So presumptuous of her to think a magic as old and as powerful as the Théâtre Illuminata’s would need her meager assistance!
“We’re friend, not foe.” Waschbär turned Bertie toward the ticket booth and the woman who stood inside it. “Maybe she will have a suggestion as to how we can gain entrance.”
Startled, Bertie leaned forward to address the stranger before realizing it was a wooden figure, life-size and cunningly carved. The red paint upon her lips formed a perfect bow, and dark curls were piled atop her head. “How is a mannequin supposed to explain anything?”
The sneak-thief reached into his pocket, pulled out a silver coin, and dropped it into a slot. There was the sound of metal gears grinding to life, then the woman in the ticket booth looked up with a mother-of-pearl smile.
“No play tonight.”
Click. Whirr.
“No play tonight. The season is finished until the Touring Company returns.”
“Touring Company?” Bertie gaped at the figure. “But
we
are the Touring Company.”
Shhhhh, click. Shhhhh, click. Whirr.
“No play tonight.”
“Ye just said that,” Nate muttered. “Tell us somethin’ we don’t already know.”
The figure shook her head, massive earrings glinting with dull warning in the booth’s half-light. “Come back in a day.”
Click.
“A week.”
Click.
“A month. Perhaps they will have returned with the Brand-New Play by then. I’m certain it will be a wonderful piece!” Her programmed enthusiasm peeled the paint off her mouth. “All lights and flash bangs and people shouting speeches at each other.”
Click. Click. Whirr.
“You’ll love it.”
A wooden hand flicked a switch, and the electric lights of the marquee sizzled to life; white, ruby, and amber luminosity spread across the sidewalk before dribbling into the gutters. Bertie’s eyes filled with water and then overflowed. Though the colors blurred, she could still make out the words emblazoned overhead:
Coming Soon!
FOLLOWING HER STARS
A Brand-New Play
By Beatrice Shakespeare Smith
“Yer play?” Nate frowned. “Th’ one th’ Innamorati are performin’ right now?”
“No.” Bertie could taste panic and bile in the back of her throat, knowing somehow that she was responsible for this new twist of fate and yet unable to pinpoint what she’d done or how to fix it. “
Following Her Stars
is the name of the play I started so we could exit the theater. The one that’s been appearing in the journal.”
“But you haven’t finished it yet!” Moth said, whizzing forward to collide with a similarly inclined Mustardseed.
“He’s right,” Bertie told the wooden woman in the booth. “And I can’t truly finish it unless we get the journal back!”
False eyelashes fluttered, and the figure’s bloodred lips dribbled rhinestones as she said once more, “No play tonight.”
Out of patience for the automaton’s punchcard-programmed answers, Bertie pounded her hand on the glass. “Let us in!”
“You’ll love it,” the woman only repeated before her mechanisms ran down with a
whirrrrrrr.
Her eyes closed, her head lowered. Matching her dismissal, the marquee flickered off, and the rest of the theater’s exterior lights faded to a blackout.
The darkness was a perfect foil for a sparkle like moonlight upon the water, and Bertie glanced at the revolving door in time to see Ophelia. The hem of her mother’s dress was ragged, her hair tangled about with tattered ribbon ends, bits of shell, tiny silver charms.
“Beatrice.” Ophelia’s whisper was no more than one fish speaking to another underwater, the glass trapping the words in rainbow prisms and almost denying Bertie the chance to hear her at all.
“Mom.” The word rasped like the rough edge of Waschbär’s obsidian knife.
For the briefest of moments, the water-maiden’s features sharpened. She was Ophelia of the Outside, the woman who had torn her page from The Book and run away with the Mysterious Stranger, the woman who might have lived with the Scrimshander—and Bertie—in a cave high in the cliffs, had it not been for the vengeful Sea Goddess.
Had it not been for me, taking her place by accident, calling her back to the theater by saying her opening line.
Ophelia’s eyes were full of tears, her lips faintly blue when she mouthed her questions. “Did you find your father? Is he with you?”
“I found him, but he’s not here…” Some combination of desperation and compassion compelled Bertie to add, “Not just yet. Can you let us in?”
“Something happened soon after you left.” The hem of Ophelia’s gown began to unravel, fraying in a dozen spots along the waistband, pinholes appearing throughout the skirts so that she looked progressively more tattered and timeworn. “I heard your voice, as though amplified by every speaker in the building. ‘Following her stars,’ you said.”
The realization was like a punch to Bertie’s gut. “That’s when I read our entrance page into the journal.”
Ophelia nodded, though she couldn’t possibly comprehend. “In a trice there were two theaters; the one you left, and this empty shell. I am trapped between them, walking twin hallways, pulled without conscious thought or desire between the two.”
Bertie could guess why: Ophelia was a Player, bound to
The Complete Works of the Stage,
and yet the most important scenes in her life had played out in the world beyond the theater, the part of her story told in the journal. “You belong to both worlds.”
“I think it’s killing me.” Ophelia was no more than a ghostly apparition now. “It grows harder to remember you. Harder to remember myself. Something is towing me away with the drowning tide.”
When next she spoke, Bertie felt the diamond-tears fall again. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”
But Ophelia didn’t mark the confession. “Would that I had seen your father once more—”
Bertie could not bring herself to tell her mother that the Scrimshander had been here but could not find his way in, that he could not see anything save a deserted building.
There was nothing for me there.
She wanted to scream with the unfairness of it all.
The water-maiden flattened her hand against the glass. “Promise you’ll remember me, Beatrice—”
Bertie’s palm met Ophelia’s, one gesture the mirror reflection of the other, and though she refused to blink the tears from her eyes, the water-maiden still disappeared. When Bertie screamed, her “No!” echoed from the columns and the statues. She shouted again, hitting the glass door with both hands. “Mom!” No response. “Ophelia! Come back!”
“It’s killin’ her.”
Whirling about, Bertie irrationally wanted to hit Nate for speaking the truth. She started to call upon the wish-come-true, had indeed already strung together the words to set everything to rights. At the last second, Bertie remembered the Queen’s warning that it couldn’t be used to reunite her family.
“Not even my magic could help you with the way things are right now,”
Her Gracious Majesty had said.
“We have to save Ophelia before she disappears completely. There has to be another way inside. A window. A door.” Bertie lunged at Waschbär with such speed that the sneak-thief hadn’t the time to dodge or evade her.
“What are you doing?” he demanded as she wrestled the pair of dazed and sleepy ferrets from his jacket.
Peaseblossom hovered just behind her, keeping well out of reach of Pip Pip’s and Cheerios’s paws and teeth. “Whatever are you thinking?”
Bertie didn’t answer as she peered closer at the ferrets, realizing her mistake in casually dismissing Waschbär’s companions as potential slippers, as food thieves, as pests. She set them gently upon the ground at her feet. “Single-minded, aren’t you, with noses meant for tracking and eyes good for peering into dark and forbidding places?”
In musky agreement, the ferrets sat up on their back legs.
“They can scent anything,” Waschbär said.
“I have something specific in mind.” Bertie tried to imagine it into being: a forgotten tunnel, darker than the earth portal they’d used to travel to the theater, older than the bricks of the Théâtre Illuminata itself. “What if I asked you to find a crack in the theater’s magic … could you do such a thing? Could you find a way in?”
The ferrets peered at her, so still they might be mistaken for bookends perched upon one of Mr. Hastings’s shelves. Turning, they regarded each other, entering into a silent conversation that ended with twin squeaks and a sudden leaping down the stairs.
Nate’s hand came to rest upon the small of Bertie’s back. His touch startled her, recalling the time they’d cranked a vintage wall telephone in the Properties Department and accidentally electrocuted Mustardseed, who’d been licking inappropriate bits of the wiring. “They’re headed fer th’ Stage Door.”
Indeed, the ferrets led them down the narrow alley that ran alongside the theater, but they passed the Stage Door, scampering instead to a crumbled and forgotten corner. Shoving at loose brick and primordial mortar, they soon nosed into a tiny opening. Lying on her stomach upon the cobblestones, Bertie could barely make out the glint of light upon two sets of black-beaded eyes.
“Come back—” she started to call, just before the wall above her groaned an ill omen. Scrambling away, Bertie stifled a shriek as the bricks shifted to open a small but definite passageway. The darkness beyond the portal was a gaping, hungry mouth. Dank air swirled in tidal currents, and the moist breeze held notes of Sedna’s mocking laughter.
“I am
not
going down there,” Mustardseed announced.
Bertie very much wanted to flee, but to show cowardice now would admit defeat. “That’s the way in.”
Nate shifted, his cutlass drawn. “I’ll go first.” He slanted a quick look at Ariel. “Unless ye’d like th’ honor.”
Crouched next to the opening, the air elemental didn’t respond at first. “Something down there wishes to speak with you, Bertie.”
“Of course it wants to talk to her,” Moth said, his little teeth chattering. “It wants to get acquainted before it eats her!”
Refusing to imagine herself as someone’s supper, Bertie ducked her head and wriggled her way in. A ragged brick scraped down the length of her back, a tooth eager for a taste of her. When she stood, the weight of the air inside the tunnel was heavier upon her skin than the stage’s velvet curtains.
“Nate?” The word was muffled, nearly smothered by the utter darkness. “Ariel? Are you coming?” No answer. The path led downward—
to the very underworld
—and Bertie held her hands out before her. When she heard the telltale
drip! drip! drip!
of distant water, her limbs froze like birch branches in an ice storm. “Sedna?”
The tunnel exhaled, a monster waiting for the right moment to close unseen teeth upon her. Heat replaced cold, Bertie’s blood encouraging her to retreat. Galvanized by panic and adrenaline, she might have obeyed the instinct, save for Ophelia’s voice, calling to her through the darkness.
“Bertie.” The name brought with it the bleeding-water promise of her mother shredded to nothing.
Stiffening, Bertie summoned vines to wrap about her nerves, wood splints to straighten her spine, enough courage to spur her forward. Just when she thought the tunnel couldn’t grow any narrower, steeper, darker, her reaching hands met a curved stone wall and torches all around her flared to life. Momentarily blinded, Bertie ducked her head and covered her face, cowering back until her eyes adjusted to the flickering light. The passing seconds slowly revealed that she stood in an unknown chamber carved in the shape of a half-moon. Resting against the deepest part of the curve was the elaborate mosaic she’d last seen in the Turkish Bath: a slab of tile-inlaid marble portraying the Greek Chorus in all their robed dignity. Also taken from that scene was the elaborate clepsydra. Mr. Hastings surely suffered fits over the loss of the water clock, equipped as it was with silver bells, small brass gongs, and doors that would open and shut to reveal dials, pointers, and figurines. The water in the uppermost vessel flowed to those below with a
drip! drip! drip!
that intensified until it echoed throughout the room.