Exeunt Demon King (2 page)

An adventurous production of
Mother
Goose
in a small provincial theatre was not
my first choice as a venue for spending my time a few days after
Christmas (said Cabal). This particular theatre, however, had its
interesting aspects. Specifically, it had a death toll.

Actors are a flowery mob, given to exaggeration and hyperbole,
but when they talked about dying on the stage in the context of the
Alhambra, they were being very literal. In twenty years, four
actors had died on stage in a variety of ways, all dramatic, some
messy. The most recent case had occurred just before Christmas. The
pantomime’s plot – to dignify the excuse for a collection of bad
puns, bad songs and low comedy – revolved around a Dame, played by
a man, who sells her magic goose in return for beauty. She realises
her mistake and spends the rest of the interminable performance
attempting to recover it. It is
Faust
for toddlers. The antagonist is
the Demon King, a drunk in a red leotard and curling
mustachios.

On the
afternoon in question, a dull December afternoon with a sky the
colour of oxidised magnesium, the play had reached the point where
the Dame foolishly wishes for beauty out loud three times in the
gloomy Dark Wood. Her wish is heard and the Demon King appears in a
flash and puff of yellow smoke.

As an
aside, summoning demons is actually a time-consuming and pernickety
business. I feel this production seriously misled its audience. But
I digress.

On this
occasion, there was a flash and a puff, but no infernal
materialisation. Only a muffled cry and sound like somebody taking
an axe to a rotting tree stump. There was muttering in the wings.
On the stage the Dame ad libbed as well as a man in a dress faced
by an audience of primary schoolchildren who know damn well
something is amiss can. Then the manager made his way on stage,
apologised fulsomely and said that due to a serious technical
hitch, the show was being abandoned, full refunds would be made and
the management regretted any inconvenience.

There
had, indeed, been a serious technical hitch. In case you are
unfamiliar with the workings of this particular piece of stage
legerdemain, I shall explain. The flash and smoke are primarily
there to distract the eye while the Demon King makes his entrance
through a trapdoor, a particular type known as a star trap. The
model the Alhambra had was octagonal in shape. Each edge of the
octagon had its own triangle of trapdoor, the end vertices of each
sector of trapdoor meeting in the middle. The trick is that the
actor is bodily launched by the use of a rapidly rising platform up
through the trap. The leaves spring back like the petals of a
blooming flower on impact with the top of the actor’s head, the
actor shoots up through the stage and a little way into the air,
the trap’s leaves take the opportunity to fall back into place and
the actor lands lightly upon them to shrieks from the stalls and
cries of uncritical admiration from the circle. All this business
is covered by the smoke and dazzle from the flash.

You will
appreciate that the platform, a small item not much bigger than the
star trap’s aperture, must travel at a fair speed in order to
accomplish the effect. The actor’s safety is entirely dependent on
the leaves moving up easily as he hits them. On this occasion, you
will have guessed that they did not.

As far
as could be ascertained, they had not moved a whisker. Not when the
actor hit them, not when he cried out in the brief moment of
surprise he was allowed, not when his neck snapped nor even as his
skull was crushed.

It was a
mystery. The trap was checked daily as a matter of course and had
always operated perfectly. The police were unable to find any sign
of tampering or even of anybody who might have wanted to tamper
with it. The theatre was shut for a fortnight as the trap was tried
again and again and again and the police cast around looking for
suspects, motives and the like. They found nothing and as for the
star trap, well, there’s an axiom in science that an unrepeatable
result is no result at all. The circumstances of the tragic event
could not be repeated and nobody had the faintest idea what could
have happened.

Except
me. Now I needed to prove my suspicions. That something was afoot
was obvious to me. Chance may perform many peculiar acts and
extraordinary happenstances, but I doubted that four apparently
accidental deaths could be put down to mere bad luck. Not when each
had occurred precisely two thousand, three hundred days
apart.

The
Alhambra was, as I have said, a small provincial theatre of the
sort that was undoubtedly a music hall until a few years before.
Now it put on rep productions of Shakespeare, travelling murder
mysteries and, of course, pantomimes. It lived a hand to mouth
existence and a fortnight’s closure, even allowing for the days it
would have been shut for Christmas anyway, was more of a drain than
it could willingly manage. I expected to find the proprietor a
desperate man and I was not disappointed. Mr Curry sat sweaty and
unhappy at his desk as I introduced myself. In demeanour, he looked
like a man whose dreams were haunted by the bailiff’s knock.
Physically, he looked like a shaved panda.

“
You’re an actor?” he asked after I had introduced
myself.

Given
I’d been delivering little other but lies in a convincing manner
throughout my introduction, it seemed technically accurate to admit
that I was, adding “I’ve come about the vacant role.”

That
froze him. “You know,” he asked cautiously, “you know what happened
to the last man who took that part?”

I
blithely talked of a tragic accident, my understanding that the
trap had been thoroughly tested and finished with a statement to
the effect that the show must go on.

“
It’s a major role,” he said, as if it were Lear, “there’s a
lot to learn. Have you ever…”

“
Ho ho ho
,” I intoned.
“
I am the Demon King! I come from where
it’s hot and wickedness I bring!
At this
point, the audience should be booing and hissing. I am advised by
the script to ad lib some responses.” Curry looked at me, patently
baffled. “I borrowed a copy of the script. I have an excellent
memory. It did not take very long to learn.”

Curry
took a dog-eared script from his desk drawer and slowly chose a
page at random, never taking his eyes off me the whole time.
Finally he looked down and read, “’Go away, you silly
thing!”

“
When I go down, Mother Goose, you’ll be carried on my back.
If I go below without you, then I’m sure to get the
sack
! Then I exit, stage left.”

I am
attached to my dignity, I am well aware of it. Needs must,
however.

Mollified, Curry closed the script. “Indeed you do.
Exeunt Demon King.”

I may have winced. “
Exit
,” I corrected him. I know a job
interview is hardly the time to be correcting the Latin grammar of
one’s potential employer, but, really, sometimes diplomacy be
damned. “The stage direction should be
Exit Demon King
.”

He
looked at me with an uncomprehending frown upon his rounded brow.
“It’s Latin,” he said after some seconds of thought.

“
Yes,” I said. “
Exit
is singular.
Exeunt
is in the plural.”

“
It’s Latin,” he said again. His frown was not an aggressive
thing, but constructed from purest confusion. “
Exeunt
. It means
exit
. In Latin.”

“
There is only one Demon King exiting. Therefore, it should
be
exit
.” Even as
I said it, I knew I was wasting my time.

“
It’s Latin,” he said once more.

I
decided to cut my losses. “Is it?” I said with feigned
astonishment. “Latin, you say? Well, I never. You have educated me,
Mr Curry.”

The brow
unfurled. Order was restored in the wide open spaces of Curry’s
intellect. “Your delivery needs some work,” he said.

“
I can deliver perfectly well. Organise a dress rehearsal. I
shall demonstrate.”

And so
he did. The rehearsal was not an artistic triumph. I did not know
my marks to ‘hit them,’ and there had been some extemporisation on
top of the original script. Further, the rest of the cast seemed
loath to come near me. Perhaps they thought bad luck was now
attached to the role. Theatre folk are indeed a superstitious crew,
not to say vain, stupid and unhygienic.

Perhaps, however, their reticence was due to my performance.
Although this was in my early days and I was not even technically a
necromancer at that point, I had still had the very mild fortune to
meet a couple of demons. One had been weasely and apologetic but
the other had been impressive in its air of wanting very badly to
slowly shred every scrap of meat from my bones and eat my soul for
dessert. Its every syllable had dripped with a patient malevolence,
masking an incandescent capacity for brutality. I simply
impersonated it. As we took our bows before an auditorium empty but
for Mr Curry, he clapped slowly and uncertainly. “Mr Cabal,” he
said, “do you think you might tone that down a little? It’s very
good, very…
original
, but perhaps a little much for the kiddies?”

I was
privileged to receive a changing room of my own. Actually, I think
the rest of the cast insisted upon it. Almost all my entrances were
through the star trap and the room was conveniently down in the
cellar, by the props store and the trap platform. It smelt of damp
and mice down there, but I wasn’t intending to stay with the
production for long, just until I had concluded my investigations.
The whole acting conceit had occurred to me quite suddenly and,
once it had done so, I appreciated the elegance of it. Curry was on
the watch for reporters possibly defaming his theatre’s safety
record and he would have given thrill-seekers and nosy types even
shorter shrift. If he had got even the whiff of a possibility that
there was a nascent necromancer wandering around his aisles, well…
It would not have gone well for me.

The
first night’s performance was, I think, a triumph if a Demon King’s
triumphs are measured in screaming children being led out by the
hand. Otherwise, the response was good. “Tone it down a little
further,” said Curry, looking the happiest I’d yet seen him as he
peeked through the curtains, “but not much. A bit more ‘delicious
thrill,’ a bit less ‘bladder-emptying terror,’ Mr Cabal.” I was
happy to oblige, as long as I was left to my own devices in the
theatre cellar.

(Cabal
noticed Parkin looking at him speculatively over the top of his
snifter. Cabal narrowed his eyes. “You’re imagining me in red
tights, aren’t you?”

Parkin shook his head, letting the reverie fly. “No, Cabal.
Trying my damndest to avoid imagining it, if you must know.” After
a moment he added, “Did you
sing
?” Cabal ignored him and
continued.)

I was
confident that the Alhambra was haunted, but not by the usual
chain-rattling suspects. There was a very distinct pattern here, a
very ordered mind at work. Each death had been a neat 2300 days
apart. That’s an ugly period measured in years – approximately six
years and four months apart, a trifle over – but 2300 is a
significant time span in arcane terms. Twenty-three time one
hundred. No, there was magic here, of a perverse and corrupt kind
and it was lending power to a ghost that, I suspected, liked to
kill. But one cannot theorise without data.

The
theatre’s stage doorman gave the air of having been there as long
as the place had stood, possibly longer; it was easy to imagine
them building it around him. I discovered him in his tiny office
hard by the stage door, little more than a booth really, with a
window and counter that allowed him to watch the comings and
goings. I bid him a good morning and he regarded me like a dragon
from a Nordic saga, reptilian in aspect and surrounded by fumes
from his briar pipe.

“
Good performance last night, sir,” he said, his gaze
apparently focussed on a smudge on the glass between us. “You
scared the little tykes shitless, bless ‘em.”

“
I try my best, Mr Pensey, and thank you, I value your opinion.
You must have seen a good few productions here over the years. How
long have you been here, now?”

“
Man and boy,” replied Pensey, not really answering the
question. Changing tack, I noticed two shelves of books behind him
on the rear wall, each dated. They seemed to be theatre records and
I asked him about them. “Oh, yes,” he said, turning slowly to
regard them. “My records, faithfully kept.” He turned slowly back
to me. The action reminded me somehow of a dead man twisting on a
rope. “Never missed a performance through sickness, nor accident,
nor holiday.”

“
They must make fascinating reading,”

That
slow turn again. “They do. I spend long hours poring over them.” I
imagined he did. It was far harder imagining him ever leaving that
little office.

“
All that history.” I shook my head in admiration. “I wonder,
Mr Pensey, might I look at one, perhaps?”