The Cornerstone Read online

  The house lights dimmed, which was Ruben’s cue that Act One was only minutes away. The opening notes of Bach’s ominous Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor recorded on some massive sixteenth-century pipe organ in Amsterdam came through the theater speakers, and Claire shivered. She loved this part of the preshow, especially the way the opening theme built slowly, relentlessly, first as single notes and then gradually layering counter melodies under the first one, and finally driving the whole thing through the pedals in the bass into a massive crescendo of polyphony. It was the perfect setup for the emotional underpinnings of the play.

  Claire put the box of programs on a chair by the door and slipped down the aisle to the side door that allowed access backstage. She found her place in the wings, opened the script, and took a deep breath. The lights went down and Act One got underway.

  Bayard emerged from the wings and stepped to the footlights to deliver the Prologue.

  Claire found herself holding her breath. He looked amazing. In full period costume, he looked every inch an actor from the Rose or the Swan. From his rakish cap with a long feather to his midnight blue quilted doublet and breeches, down to his silk hose and leather handmade shoes, he was exactly what she imagined a sixteenth-century player would have looked like. She wondered where he’d had the costume made and how much it must have cost.

  “...we now perform the tale of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad…”

  His British accent was impeccable, his timing and delivery nuanced. Claire shook her head. The man was good.

  “…On waxen wings he did extend his reach too far, and melting, heavens conspired his overthrow…”

  After he’d wow’d the audience with his perfect delivery and strode offstage, the bar was set. Act One proceeded in high gear. Faustus declared his intentions to seek unholy knowledge, and cemented his blood pact with Lucifer’s lieutenant Mephistopheles. Claire’s stomach clenched as they went through the stage business of the knife and writing the pledge in blood, but all went smoothly. Tom seemed in total control of the action, playing off Morris with fierce concentration.

  “Consummatum est,” said Tom. “Receive this scroll, a deed of gift, of body and soul.” He rolled up the parchment and handed it to his Mephisto. Morris took the scroll with a slight bow and a wicked leer at the audience. As the act drew to a close, they had the audience in the palms of their hands. Tom was so good at this, Claire wondered if he’d been sandbagging all this time and really did have acting credentials he’d neglected to mention.

  By the time intermission rolled around at the end of Act Three, Claire found she was mostly watching the play as a rapt spectator, being swept up in its intricacies and the inevitable downward slide of the brilliant but flawed main character toward his doom. Audience applause so far confirmed what she was seeing: Tom and Morris were riveting. The secondary actors were giving stellar performances as well, maybe in response to the energy flowing between the two principals. She slipped into the green room during intermission, unable to calmly sit on her stool and wait for the action to start up again.

  The green room was crowded, but Addie spotted her as soon as she stepped through the door. “Hey, it’s Claire. Don’t you look beautiful!” Claire thought Addie, costumed in the voluptuous one-shouldered silk gown of Alexander the Great’s paramour, her auburn hair done up with strands of pearls like a Greek goddess, was pretty much a knockout herself.

  “As if.” Claire smiled, self-conscious at suddenly being the center of attention.

  Alexander the Great, a drama major from the university, hulking next to the coffee machine in his short cape, fighting kilt, and little else, gave a low wolf whistle and winked.

  “Stop, you guys.” Her cheeks flushed. She felt embarrassed, but oddly pleased.

  “Well, it’s true. Who knew there was a princess under those medical scrubs?” Addie was grinning.

  Claire gave her a look. “I promise this is the last time you’ll see me in this outfit.” Looking around the room, she did a quick head count to see who else from Act Four was ready and accounted for. The German Emperor Charles sat on the long sofa with Frederick and Martino, two members of his court. He was laughing at something the Persian King Darius, sprawled in an overstuffed chair to his right, had just told him. Darius and Alexander, along with Addie, were part of the mime commanded by Faustus to enthrall the German sovereign. Morris, tall and inscrutable in his devil’s makeup, was texting on his cell phone beside the water cooler. Finally, she spotted Tom.

  He’d taken the folding chair in the corner, which set him somewhat apart from the others. He sat with his scholar’s robe pulled up off the floor, revealing his jeans and boots. The costume mistress had decided not to put him in a wig, and instead had made a period-accurate academician’s cap that covered his head and tied under the chin, although he’d left the strings undone, which seemed to fit Faustus’ rash personality. Far from rash, though, Tom seemed lost in thought, staring off across the room. Claire started to go speak to him, and then held back. He didn’t look all that approachable at the moment.

  The lights blinked twice.

  “That’s it—places, everybody,” said Addie, gathering up the hem of her dress and heading for the door. Claire held it open as the actors filed out and down the narrow corridor to the backstage area. Tom was last out. He gave her a tight smile.

  It was unsettling. “Everything okay?”

  “It’s all good,” he said, and gave her hand a quick squeeze. Before she had time to register how out of character that was for him, at least as far as she knew him, he’d disappeared into the darkened hallway.

  Still mulling this over, Claire took her station as Act Four got underway. She sensed Bayard’s presence behind her. She whispered to him, “It’s really good so far, isn’t it?”

  He smiled grandly. “Beyond expectations. I’m very pleased.”

  Well, as long as the impresario was happy, she refused to let Tom’s distant mood dampen her spirits. She was having a good time, the best in weeks. As long as Tom got his lines right, she didn’t care what was up with him. Except the sensation of that quick squeeze of his rough hand lingered in the back of her mind.

  The cast romped through Act Four, which was mainly comic relief with Faustus playing unholy tricks on courtiers and foiling their plot to take him out. The mood lightened for a bit, the audience laughed aloud at all the right places, and then everyone settled in for the climactic Act Five, where Faustus’ Wittenberg colleagues beg him to repent his ways and ask for divine mercy. He repudiates them, remorseful and yet resigned to his fate. Claire realized she was holding her breath again as Faustus, in the solitude of his study, hears the clock tower bell begin to toll the hours, forcing him to acknowledge the fact that his time is running out and shortly Lucifer’s lieutenant will come to claim him.

  The Good Angel glided out of the wings and stood behind his chair, reaching toward him, palms up in supplication. The bell tolled again.

  “Ah, Faustus, if thou hadst given ear to me, e’en now Heaven’s bliss might still be yours…”

  From the opposite wings, brushing past Claire and Bayard, Addie now garbed in red as the Evil Angel went to Tom and crouched at his knees. More bell sound effects.

  “But instead you gave ear to me, and now must taste what Hell will give thee.”

  Defeated, the Good Angel withdrew. Addie stood up and spread her arms wide, as Ruben slipped a red filter over the spotlight.

  “Now, Faustus, stare with thine eyes in horror at what lies before thee…” The bell tolled for the eleventh time. “And so I leave thee, till ‘tis time…” She made her exit, and Tom got up from his chair to approach the footlights and speak his lament for his lost salvation, which was actually a two-and-a-half-page soliloquy that to Claire seemed the most daunting of anybody’s lines in the play. She watched the script closely as he began, although she was sure he wouldn’t forget anything. He hadn’t so far and tonight he was definitely on a roll.

  “…O lente,
lente, currite noctis equi, slowly, slowly run, ye horses of night…” The twelfth bell clanged. Thunder boomed through the speakers and lightning danced over the stage.

  “…If only this cursed soul could be changed into drops of rain and fall into the ocean, and ne’er be found…”

  Tom stared into the audience as if peering into the very pit of Hell. Morris entered upstage, at first a darker shadow against the backdrop and then stalking slowly forward, his retinue of devils and minions, including the Evil Angel, hanging back behind him, which was a little odd, Claire thought, because they’d practiced this entrance with everyone clustered tightly around him.

  Tom turned to them and his body language telegraphed both fear and confrontation.

  “Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.” He faced the audience again. “Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer!” But Morris’s red-caped frame came out of the shadows and into the spotlight to stand beside him. Tom turned once more and looked him in the eyes.

  There was a beat of silence, and then another. Claire’s stomach flipped. Their timing was off, something wasn’t right.

  Tom’s voice took on a harsher tone. “Art thou indeed Mephistopheles?”

  Morris waited a beat and then answered. “One name among many.”

  Claire frowned—that wasn’t in the script. What the hell were they doing? And there was something wrong with Morris’ voice. Was the sound guy playing with the effects? She’d heard that peculiar inflection before somewhere—it iced her blood and filled her mind with black despair. And then she knew with certainty where, and when. With a catch in her breath, she cut her eyes to Bayard. Even in the dim light his face was bloodless, his expression a mask of stark terror.

  She leaned in and whispered to him, her voice unsteady. “T-they’re not following the script. What’s happening?”

  He looked at her for a blank second or two, as if empty air had spoken to him, then fixed his gaze back on the two figures center stage.

  An acrid, sulfurous tang invaded the theater and rode the air circulating the room. A red haze lit the stage as the proscenium curtains began to smoke.

  “Well, Tom,” said the voice that wasn’t Morris. “We meet again.”

  “Nay, demon, my name is Orin Ó Braonáin and I am come to free my mother.”

  Wicked laughter filled the theater, bouncing off the walls and reverberating across the rows of the packed house.

  Fire blossomed along the open rafters over the stage, and the smoke alarm erupted for a few shrill bleats before the flames ate the wiring and silenced it. People began to panic and scream as the auditorium filled with smoke.

  Claire’s mind was spinning. Orin? Who the hell? The script in her lap fell to the floor as she slid off the stool. She stared speechless at the stage, engulfed in fire, then turned to Bayard, but there was no one. She looked back onstage just in time to see Tom push against his adversary and break into a run, heading straight toward her, his scholar’s robe billowing behind him.

  “Tom! What…?” But he ran past her like a hound after the fox, oblivious to his surroundings. In total confusion, she looked back where Morris has been standing, only now he was a crumpled form swathed in a voluminous cape lying near the footlights. Fire roared over the stage and across the ceiling of the theater. The audience was transformed into a shrieking mob, panicked beyond all reason, shoving and knocking others down to get out into the lobby.

  Claire’s emergency training kicked in and she ran to Morris. She shook him and felt for a pulse. His arm was cold, but gradually he began to wake up.

  “Claire?” he looked her uncomprehendingly, then took in the inferno that was the stage.

  “Get up! We have to get out of here!” She was pulling on his sleeve, dragging him toward the wings.

  Morris staggered to his feet. “B-Bayard…”

  Claire grabbed him by the arm and tugged. “Forget him! We have to get out!”

  Morris seemed to wake suddenly, as if a light had been turned back on in a dark room. “Holy fuck, the building’s going to burn to the ground—it’s all century-old heart pine.” Morris grabbed her hand and they felt their way through the dark backstage to the dressing room hallway. “C’mon, we can get to the lobby this way.” They were both coughing and broke into a run as the narrow corridor filled with cast members and crew who’d been backstage.

  Claire felt panic rising in her chest as smoke blinded her eyes and filled her lungs. She clung to Morris in the press of bodies pushing toward the red EXIT sign ahead. There was a momentary bottleneck as he wrestled with the door and then they all spilled, choking, into the smoke-filled lobby.

  The lobby was utter chaos. Five-hundred theatergoers had shed their sophisticated civility as easily as their raincoats, shoving and screaming and stepping on or over those who fell under the blind panic of the herd. The single front door was barely wide enough for two or three at a time to escape.

  Morris, his Mephisto cape torn off and his makeup streaked, dragged Claire through the crowd toward the door, but then a sudden surge from the side pulled them apart.

  “Claire!” She heard him over the din, but another voice called to her more clearly, inside her head. It came from the basement. She fought her way across the lobby, falling, losing the dress shoes she’d only worn once, scrabbling to her feet again, and then running down the basement stairs into the dark.

  Chapter 19

  Friday, Opening Night

  Bayard leapt down the basement stairs in the dark, heedless of his footing. He’d recognized that arctic, echo-chamber voice coming out of Morris’s mouth and needed to get his hands on the cornerstone as fast as possible. Confronting the banshee, or the witch, with all his will could not wait. He knew betrayal when he tasted it, and this might even qualify as a full-fledged mutiny. As much as he’d railed against the way he'd been tricked into taking possession of the stone, and just as often complained to himself about the things he was forced to do to maintain his suspended life, these were nothing compared to the presence that had just revealed itself on the Janus Theatre stage. The probability that the real Mephisto had come to collect him, body and soul, trumped everything.

  He knelt in front of the alcove at the bottom of the stairs but was tackled by a body coming full-tilt down the steps after him. His breath nearly knocked out, he grappled with the fury that was Orin Ó Braonáin.

  “You’ll not have her!” the boy shouted and landed the hard heel of his motorcycle boot in Bayard’s face. Lights exploded in his head.

  “Whoreson!” Bayard shook his head and scrambled on his knees for the stone. Orin pulled him back, but Bayard was quicker. The athame, concealed in the secret pocket of his sleeve slid easily into his palm. He sliced blindly without thinking and connected with Orin’s forearm, severing the big veins and tendons just above the wrist. Orin let go for precious seconds as blood spurted over them both.

  The light came on at the base of the staircase and a woman’s scream tore through the basement. Bayard jerked his eyes away from his attacker for a second and saw Claire pressed against the wall, her eyes wide with shock and disbelief. He cursed under his breath, forcing his attention back to what needed to be done. He grabbed Orin’s bloody arm, bathing both their hands in the steady red stream.

  “I name thee my sacrifice,” Bayard shouted as the first red drops hit the stone. “Ecce signum! As master of the buachloch I command—” A spiral of mist rose from the cornerstone, coalescing into the shrouded form of the Irish witch. Quick as thought her spectral arms speared Bayard’s body through the abdomen to grab hold of her son Orin struggling behind him. The floor was slick as the wound across his arm bled out. Pinioned, Bayard spasmed in horror as he felt the banshee squeeze through the witch’s arms and outstretched fingertips. It sprang free with an ear-splitting shriek. A loud crack like controlled thunder shook the Janus Theatre to its foundations. The cement pillars began to crumble, wiring fried and shorted out, and the Black Coach began to materialize through the wal
ls, impossibly huge within the confines of the basement. The witch gripped her son with all her strength as Bayard struggled to see behind him.

  The Black Coach, drawn by beasts that resembled dragons more than horses in spite of their wild tangled manes and tails, partially materialized into the basement space. Its driver, the headless dullahan, rode high in the coach-master’s seat, cracking a whip fashioned from the bones of a human spine. It held its severed head aloft by the hair, its bright black eyes like those of a raven scanning the assemblage. The head gave off a faint luminescence like a will o’ the wisp. Bayard felt the subsonic rumbling of the coach’s arrival in his bones, punctuated by the thumping crash of walls and ceiling timbers falling in the fire above. A smoky stench invaded the air and combined with a deeper scent of the grave that surrounded the carriage. Under his feet he sensed the grinding of the earth’s very bones against each other, spawning earthquakes Hell knew where.

  Death’s carriage loomed over his head. Hewed of ebony that seemed to have been aged underwater, covered as it was in wormholes and barnacles, the coach bore door hinges and undercarriage axles of red bronze, and the giant wheels, taller than a man, were shod in black iron that struck sparks wherever it touched the floor. The black silk curtains over its door windows billowed like tattered sails in the vortex of energy that was pulling it into the earth plane. The carriage resembled nothing so much as the magnificent wreckage of a great ship. Its dragon-steeds clawed at the air, shrieks rending their foam-flecked mouths. Bayard took in the sight, knowing it could well be the last thing he would see in this life.

  Then, in an eyeblink, everything went still, freeze-framed into utter silence.

  Bayard saw the tall figure step out of the gloom, his elegant black tuxedo now claret red. Golden hair framed his head like an infernal halo, the individual strands lifted as if by static electricity. Sparks from his summer-blue eyes revealed the hellfire banked within. “How convenient, all the players in one scene together.” His voice stilled the tumult of the fire raging upstairs and the terrifying wail of Death’s Herald as she celebrated her release.