Lara is struggling to contain her tears. All her life alone with all the secrets people hide in their graves and now she’s found herself here, a place where every single night everyone else can see the dead too. For she has no doubt everyone else knows what’s happening. The dancers on stage and the musicians in the pit have shut their eyes, flinching at the sight of what the dead are dragging behind them as they rise further towards the gilded stucco of the auditorium ceiling. But Lara is used to the sight of the bloodied gashes of stab wounds and failed surgeries, the haemorrhages of childbirth and the organ rot of cancers, and so she keeps watching to see the details of their faces; every one a person with a soul and a story, she tries to catch a glimpse of each of them to be one last witness to their life.
She cannot tell where all these souls were during the show – and she suspects the answer to that is not a simple one – but it’s clear they’re being called here by both the bells and the fair folk’s howling and squalling and maybe also by – there, Lara sees it at last, swooping among the bodies and their parts, the Crow soaring with wings outstretched, herding the dead like sheep into a swarming vortex.
She swallows. Derek’s leer in the wings earlier:A clever girl like you probably knows all about the Crow, don’t you?She has a dreadful sense that something horrible is going tohappen, but not to her, not to Zach, not to anyone on stage or in the pit. The dead are getting agitated now because the Crow is pushing the mass of them towards the stage and they do not seem to be able to resist, and now Lara knows she is the only one who knows that this is terrifying for the phantoms – those who had thought that the only good thing about being dead is that they are beyond pain and fear at last – but there is one last portal to enter and they cannot escape it. There, at the back of the stage, sitting in that star-shaped pip-space in the middle of the pink flesh of the Apple, is the Pearl, gleaming placidly. Waiting.
And then the bells stop and the fair folk fall abruptly still and the air is vibrating with the sudden silence, leaving behind a jangling in Lara’s ears. The Crow’s wingspan widens as it dives towards the stage, driving the dead before it. Lara bites her lip to keep herself from calling out, because the silence is the worst bit of all as the whirl of souls pour across the pit and over the dancer’s heads, right into the Pearl. The Crow sweeps upwards at the last moment and turns back into the auditorium, disappearing into the gilt as the last of the dead are gulped up on stage.
On her headset, Lara hears Charlie call ‘tabs’ for the last time tonight, and the crimson curtains start to descend between the audience and the dancers. The orchestra are starting to leave the pit, with AJ at the very back, as always. As soon as the hem of the curtain touches the vinyl of the floor, Zach turns the dial to bring the house lights up and starts fiddling with the cables by his feet.
Lara has the distinct feeling that Zach is trying to give her space to think about what has happened, while also trying to convey that this parade of the dead is normal, happens every night, and is nothing to get in a stew about.
Derek gives a loud and theatrical sigh and cracks his knuckles. He shifts out of the follow spot seat, kneels among the mass of snaked cables and looks up at Lara with a knowing glint in his eye.
‘You see, girl, and I know Zachary won’t have told you this because that’s not the way his mind works, but the world goes in circles and cycles, and there isn’t anything here that hasn’t happened before and won’t happen again. Every night me and Zachary sit here and we watch the dead go into the Pearl, and every night we pack away this gear and every night we climb up through the tunnel to get back to Charlie and the others, dismantling the show we set up not thirteen hours ago. And I don’t ask where the days are going or how they fall away from us because some things aren’t given to us to know, you hear me?’ Derek pauses to pick up a cable to wind it around his elbow and Lara glances at Zach, who is concentrating on his switches and dials and pretending not to listen. ‘Around and around and around. That’s the problem with humans. You forget the earth is a circle.’
And because all the little creatures crowded into the lighting box around Derek are staring at her with wide, dumb eyes, Lara takes the cable Zach hands her and starts to wind it up, squeezing the heavy thickness of the plastic in her palms.
***
Half past nine and Belinda stands just inside the stage door with her clipboard pressed to her chest, leaning against the wall, listening. Members of the orchestra wait behind her in a quiet, patient queue, instruments packed up in their cushioned cases, evening dresses and tuxedos safely stowed away in the dressing rooms. As always, Wilf the cellist and Steve the bassoon are at the front. They like to get to the dining car first to crack open new bottles of whisky before Gino serves dinner.
The dancers start to join the queue at the other end of the corridor, sweaty hair covered with hats, tide marks of make-up at their chins and foreheads. Soon, there will be queues in the Grub for the showers and the drains will run with the watery residue of sweat and hairspray and blister fluid. Gino never lays out all the food until the first dancers arrive, soap-scented and starving. He has a soft spot for their hollow legs and little patience for the cavernous appetites of Wilf and Steve and that gang of carousers.
The bell rings with a single, solemn peal, its deep bass humming through the mist, and Belinda twists the iron key in the lock and stands back as Wilf and Steve shuffle past her.
‘It’s completely black out here, Belinda!’ Wilf booms as he stops at the top step of the Grit and rests his cello on his large paunch. ‘Could you sling us a torch or two? This isn’t health and safety.’
Belinda rolls her eyes but before she can answer the corridor is awash with bright yellow light and it spills out onto the steps to illuminate the avenue between the mausoleums.
‘It’s called modern technology, Wilf,’ says Max the second violin, trotting down the steps with his phone held up in front of him, screen shining out across the graves like a beacon. ‘You should try it some time.’
The bell is supposed to be an all-clear, to tell them that the last of the Fae have slunk back to wherever they came from and everyone can walk freely again. But it doesn’t always work that way. That’s why it’s safest to leave the Grit in a herd; stragglers get picked off. That’s one of the first things Belinda tells them, on the day of their first pledge.It’s a little grey area, that part of the day, and if you’re sensible you’ll not try and make it black or white. Stick with the others, at least three is best, and if any of the fair folk catch you at the stage door and ask you to take a drink with them after the show, then you smile and you shake your head politely, and you’ll find it a good idea to bow or curtsey a little so you’re not looking at them in their violet eyes, and you say you’d love to but you really mustn’t, such a long day and another show tomorrow, and you back away slowly but surely and you don’t stop until you’re inside the iron carapace of the Grub and you count anything you call lucky that they didn’t take you by force.
Cecile and AJ are last, as always. They check the green rooms and the dressing room, and when they are empty they meet at the noticeboard, then proceed to Belinda at the stage door. She watches them coming, raven and blackbird,AJ’s tall and lanky frame next to scrawny Cecile, and she wonders if they feel the weight of this show as she does, if they wake in the night with something black and fearful squatting on their chest.
‘Ça va?’ Cecile asks Belinda as they pass.
‘All fine, thank you.’ Belinda says. She never knows whether to try to answer in French or not. She fancies she might have a few sentences in her, just from listening to Cecile over the years, but she wouldn’t want to embarrass herself. ‘Just to say, I’ll be posting the notice of next day off later and it looks like it’ll be a station just outside Oxford if you want to make your arrangements.’
‘Très bien,’ says Cecile and she pulls her phone out of her black leather handbag.
AJ gallantly offers Cecile his arm. ‘Goodnight, Belinda.’ he says, and they walk down the steps of the Grit and out into the night.
Belinda watches the procession of lights up the avenue towards the Grub. She sees one light peel off from the others and zigzag through the maze of graves. The changeling, taking his chances again. She sighs. The Crow says to wait, Gino saysplease can we have milk we can drink, Derek sayshe’s more human than me but that’s not saying much, the bells ring kings and queens and suitors in a dream. Likely he’ll find himself back in the Grub by midnight, ready to try again tomorrow but wouldn’t the simplest thing for him to get his wish and go to Faerie so they can all move on and forget about him?
She looks back to the train. The first musicians are there now: she can see their phone torches reflecting on its sleek surface, rectangles of light blinking on as they reach their cabins, sink onto their beds, release the tensions of another day. Good. Inside the Grub they’re safe. If they stay there.
She turns the iron key to lock the stage door and goes back into the heart of the Grit to start the next job she has to complete before midnight. A quick stop by her office to pick up her sack and her litter picker, and then out into the stage right wing where Shirley is flicking the clasps on a flight case, through the pass door and into the auditorium.
She starts with the stalls as always. The house lights are up so all the little trinkets glitter as she methodically works her way along each row picking them all up and dropping them in her sack. It looks a little bizarre, this bag, with the canvas rotted and threadbare with unexplainable stains near the drawstring, but the Crow keeps it looking like an artefact from a tomb to deter light fingers.
Tonight she finds little sprays of diamonds like raindrops; turquoise earrings; silver coins that would cover her palm; an emerald as big as an egg. Some of it will be trick gold, of course, but there’ll be enough here to pay the salaries of the cast and crew and settle all the bills Gino racks up.
Percy Montgomery used to wear thick leather gloves for this task, crawling along the rows like a penitent monk, but she has no desire for the stage crew to witness her on her knees each night and her sciatica wouldn’t have it anyway.The litter picker was £5.99 from Asda and the Fae-cursed trinkets are handily confused by the plastic.
She pincers a rope of dull gold coins and the thing explodes in successive puffs of green smoke. The sounds of hammering and drilling on stage stop abruptly.
‘It’s all right,’ she calls down to Mackie. ‘I’m fine. As you were.’
