Tuesday night at the Epsom Playhouse. Theater communities are incestuous groups anywhere, but nowhere more than in small college towns. Epsom's wasn't an exclusive community—the casting committee always gave extra points to newcomers—but there was a solid core of people who carried on from show to show, so that these first-reading nights always combined the excitement of a new project with the comfort of a reunion.
Will came up the steps and in through the arched entry doors, and went downstairs to the basement, where folding chairs and tables had been arranged and Pat, the stage manager, had set up a coffee urn on the counter between the main room and the kitchen.
Diane Voss and Peter Nilsson were there already. Diane was a slender red-haired woman in her forties, sort of a Mary Astor type. Peter looked a little like the late Ed Flanders. Also present were Alan Johnson and Johnny Olson (Leonard Nimoy and Fred Gwynne), thirty-something, reliable bit players who had no great talent and knew it, but were dependable and enjoyed being part of the show.
At the end of the U-shaped formation of tables, behind a pile of scripts, sat Bess Borglum, the director. She looked like Glenn Close, but shorter. Will went over and sat down, taking the book she offered.
"Here you go, Hamlet," she said with a weary smile.
"I'm still adjusting to that," he said.
"Well, get used to it. We're depending on you, kid. There's a lot riding on this."
"Thanks for putting me at ease."
"Hey, this is the kitchen. Get used to the heat. You've got no idea how many asses I had to kiss to persuade the committee to schedule a classic. The way they figure it, you can never go wrong with another British sex farce. So if this isn't a big success, we probably won't see another one in this lifetime."
"You look tired."
"Yeah, well, you know—the same old thing."
"Minn?"
"I think I'm getting old, Will. I'm not keeping up like I used to."
"Hey, she loves you. It'll be okay."
"Your mouth to God's ear."
They heard footsteps coming down the stairway, and Randy Storm appeared. A David Copperfield (the illusionist) clone, he had the room's attention in a moment—that was one of his gifts. A girl hung on his arm. There was always a girl on his arm, and rarely the same one twice. Randy taught at the college, and was young enough to use the female students as a discreet dating pool.
Will was surprised by this one though. She didn't look like the general field of Randy's girls. Decidedly plain, she completely baffled Will's system of labeling people by actors they resembled. This girl didn't look like anybody he'd ever seen before. She was a blonde in good shape—she looked like a runner—but her face didn't impress. Her thinnish nose turned up at the end, and her mouth was wide and thin over a rather weak chin.
Then she smiled in response to something Randy said, and the stars came out for Will Sverdrup. That gauche mouth parted into a graceful curve, revealing perfect teeth. Her overbite was as elegant, in its way, as Gene Tierney's, but bigger—a Cinemascope smile.
Randy brought her over to the tables and introduced her as Rosemary Schmitt.
"This is our fabled director, Bess Borglum," he said, "and this is Will Sverdrup, who—unless I'm very much mistaken—will be our Hamlet."
Will started to say something, then stopped himself.
"That's okay," said Rosemary. "I've decided to allow each cast member one 'Rosemary for remembrance' joke. After that, I kill them."
They all laughed and Rosemary asked, "Is it true the theater has a ghost?"
"Oh, yes," said Bess. "I've seen him myself, working here late. He wears a clerical collar, so people think he's some pastor who hanged himself in the sacristy, back when this was a church. He'd been caught molesting a little girl, they say."
She picked up two scripts and handed one to each of them. They moved off, clearly wrapped up in each other.
"Rosemary has a part?" Will asked Bess.
"Yeah. Rosey will be Ophelia."
"She wasn't at the auditions."
"No, I made an executive decision. I originally cast Lori Nelson, but she came down with mono. Randy knew this girl, and said she was good, so I asked her to read for me."
Will suppressed his pleasure at this news. Lori was a nice girl, but a little overweight and prone to eye-batting. Working with Rosemary promised to be a lot more stimulating.
Next to arrive was Dr. Howard Smedhammer, Eric the big student's father. He was much smaller than his son, constructed along the lines of Claude Raines. Will seemed to recall that Eric had been adopted. He wanted to talk to Howie about his son, but he'd have to do it later, in private.
"I think this is pretty much everybody," said Bess, "except for Sean, and Sean will be along. Let's sit down and call the roll."
They pulled up folding chairs around the tables, with a clatter of steel and plastic on linoleum.
"Okay, speak up when your part is called. Hamlet—"
"Here," said Will.
"Gertrude."
"Here," said Diane.
"Claudius."
"Present," said a melodious voice from the staircase, and everyone turned to see Sean O'Reardon. There was no problem categorizing Sean. He lived a part, and lived it by choice. He looked like John Barrymore, talked like John Barrymore, and acted like John Barrymore. That Barrymore's style was long out of use in the theater bothered Sean not a whit. He had found a vehicle and he would drive it into the ground. As he reached the foot of the stairs, he paused a moment and half-turned to let everyone enjoy his profile.
"Good evening, Sean," said Bess. "Take a chair. Ophelia."
"Here," said Rosemary.
"Polonius."
"Here, said Peter.
"You'll also be the gravedigger. Laertes."
Randy said, "Here."
"Horatio."
"Here," said Howie.
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern."
Alan and Johnny said, "Here." And "Here."
"Alan and Johnny, you'll be also be playing Antonio and Bernardo, and you'll be Players, and one of you will be the gravedigger's assistant, and the other one will be Osric, and there'll also be several extras, who'll come in when we start blocking—Thursday night."
"So how are we going to play it?" asked Randy. "Elizabethan dress? Modern? Kenneth Branagh?"
"We're planning on a modified Elizabethan. Subdued colors, lots of golds and blacks, and a dark, stylized set with moveable stage elements. We're making a virtue of necessity—the budget won't stretch to more, but I think it's probably the best approach anyway."
"I hope the men will have codpieces at least," said Diane.
"Sorry to disappoint you, Diane."
"Not the first time I've been disappointed in that area."
When the laughter died down, Bess said, "Okay, let's open the scripts. We've made quite a lot of cuts, so if anybody hasn't got a pencil, there's some in the box here. First of all we're cutting Scene 1, Act 1. . . ."
Will hated every cut. There wasn't one that didn't amputate some bit of poetry he adored, but he understood the purpose and agreed with it. No audience in Epsom would sit still for the whole thing, and no amateur company could hope to pull it off.
After the meeting broke up, he got his coat and followed Howie out to the parking lot. "Got a minute?" he asked.
"Sure," said Howie.
"I caught Eric in the washroom today. He was attacking another student."
"Attacking?"
"He had him pushed up against the wall, with his hand around his neck."
"I find that pretty hard to believe, Will. Who was this other student?"
"A junior."
"An upperclassman?"
"A small upperclassman."
Howie leaned against his car trunk, arms crossed. "Did it occur to you that maybe Eric was defending himself against this older boy?"
"This older boy is a wimp. He's in the chess club."
Howie shook his head. "You've got the wrong idea about Eric, Will. Sure he's big, but he's gentle. He's sensitive."
Will started to say something, but Howie went on.
"I have a very open relationship with my son, Will. I know him. I'm not saying he's not capable of violence, if he's pushed. Who isn't? But I'll bet, if you look into it closely, you'll find out that that older boy said something to hurt him. He's going through a hard stage, and with all this crap about his mother—can you blame him for being touchy?"
"No, I understand that. And what you're saying is exactly how I see it. I just wish you'd talk to him about this. If he should hurt somebody, it would be as bad for him as for the one he hurt."
"I'll talk to him, Will. I talk to him all the time."
"Okay. I'm sorry if I jumped to conclusions."
"Hey, I appreciate your concern."
Howie got in his Mercedes and drove off.
Will walked to his Jeep, past a tattered poster on a light pole that announced a reward for information concerning the whereabouts of Angela Smedhammer, wife to Howard and mother to Eric.
Back at the farm, Will checked his answering machine (another call from Ginnie, which he erased) and his e-mail. He fixed a snack in the microwave and watched the news on TV. Abelard seemed upset, so he let him out. A minute later he had to let him in again.
Will corrected some student papers he'd taken home, then sat in front of the TV for brain candy while he went over his lines. An auditory learner, his way of memorizing a part was to read it aloud over and over.
He wasted some time surfing channels. He stopped for a moment on a TV movie entitled, My Life, My Choice. It seemed to concern a bright, attractive teenage girl who wanted to be sterilized so that she would never contribute to global overpopulation. Her uncooperative parents, played by one actor who looked a little like Larry Linville and another who looked like Dodie Goodman, were presented as moronic, Bible-thumping hypocrites.
"Creative," Will said. "Nobody's ever portrayed parents that way before. 'Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?' " He switched the set off and tuned in a light rock station on the stereo.
Abelard had his exits and his entrances again. Finally, Will stopped letting him out and just left him howling by the door.
The knocking had been going on for some time before he noticed it. It wasn't coming from the door. It came from upstairs.
He stepped into the upstairs stair well, flipping the light switch. At the top of the steps he stood and listened. Rap. Rap. Rap. Rap. It was too regular. If he hadn't known he was alone in the house, he'd have thought a human being was doing it.
The sound was coming from further up, in the attic. Did the attic have a light? He couldn't remember. As a boy Will had been terrified of the dark, and under oath he'd have had to admit that he'd still rather not go into a room with the lights off. He stepped toward the hatch in the ceiling, then turned and went back downstairs for a flashlight. He got one out of the refrigerator, where he kept it to preserve the batteries. He also got a step stool and carried the things upstairs. He set the stool underneath the hatch, unfolded it and climbed up the three steps, then lifted the square wooden cover that sat, unhinged and latchless, on top of the opening. He shone the light inside.
The attic in this small house was not intended for more than minor storage. It was a triangular space between the ceiling and the roof peak, too low to stand up in. Anyone who wanted to walk around there would have to step on the joists, over the pink insulation, in a crouch.
Everything looked quiet to Will. He had an uneasy sense of being in a place where he didn't belong, as if his lease didn't cover this part of the house (which was ridiculous). The only sign of disturbance was that one of the three or four cartons someone, not he, had shoved up there at one time or another seemed to have fallen over. Maybe squirrels had done it. Could squirrels have done it?
He shone his beam on the clutter and saw that the spilled carton contained books, some of which lay open on the fiberglass padding.
If it hadn't been books, he probably wouldn't have examined further, but Will was not normal about books. He kept his own as pristine as humanly possible, never breaking the spines or removing dust jackets. It simply was not in him to look at books lying open, spines up, and not put them right.
He hoisted himself up through the hatch (it was cold up there—he wished he'd put on a jacket) and crawled cautiously over to the carton on two knees and one hand (the other held his flashlight), keeping his weight on the joists. It hurt his knees, and his hands were going numb. From downstairs he could hear Abelard, still singing his song of protest.
He picked up the books one by one and closed them, setting them gently on their sides. They were old books, some of them apparently Norwegian, in that old Germanic printer's font that would have been impossible to read even if he'd understood the language. Then he turned the carton upright and looked over its contents.
In spite of the cold and the dark he had to check the titles. He'd come this far, he wasn't going to lie awake now wondering what books were up here. More of the same—books on history; books of poetry; about two thirds of them foreign language. He lifted each out in turn and handled it with care. Will had never gotten over the romance of bound literature—the wonder he had felt as a boy, coming from a house of many magazines but few books to the school library, and more volumes than he'd ever seen in his life. Later he would learn that this had been in fact a pretty meager library even for an elementary school, but at the time it had been an epiphany. A book, to Will Sverdrup, was a treasure, even with crumbling pages and water-stained covers. He wondered about the people who had spent money for them, perhaps money they could ill afford, generations ago.
At the very bottom was a book different from the rest. "This is seriously old," said Will. It was leather-bound, with a raised spine and triangular corners, and the cover was recessed and tooled. It was larger than the others, taking up the entire length and width of the carton bottom so that he was hard pressed to get his fingers around it. It wasn't terribly thick, so it couldn't be a Gutenberg Bible—Dream on, Sverdrup, he told himself—but it was heavy and the paper was thick.
He crooked his icy flashlight in the angle between his neck and his shoulder, under his ear, and set the heavy volume on his lap. Carefully he opened the cover. He uttered an oxymoronic imprecation to an excremental divinity, the flashlight making his white breath numinous.
The title page said:
The Tragickal Hystorie
of Hamleth, Prynse of Denemarke
by Thomass Kyd
Eric Smedhammer sat before his computer screen, joystick in hand, intent on Yggxvthwul's Gambit. Just 40 more kills and he'd have access to the fourth level. The screen depicted a blasted, post-Apocalyptic landscape of ruined buildings and twisted, ravaged trees, through which the hulking, tentacled form of Yggxvthwul trudged. Long experience with the game helped him to avoid deadfalls and obvious ambushes, and he had learned to identify radioactive dumps and send his monster there (extra power points).
A human figure appeared from behind a building. Yes! It was an old lady! You got extra points for old ladies. He guided Yggxvthwul to her, ran her down and devoured her. Her caricatured figure waved its arms and legs and made screaming noises as it disappeared into the monster's mouth. Cool.
A vehicle appeared. A school bus! This was his night! School buses were a hundred points, but they took finesse.
Eric made Yggxvthwul lie down in the middle of the road, moving slightly, as if injured. This part was tricky. The artificial intelligence chip would alert the bus driver if he failed to do a convincing "bait wiggle." Then the driver would speed up and run him right over, and he'd lose 500 points.
But he nailed it. The school bus rolled to a stop, and he made Yggxvthwul leap up suddenly, jumping onto the hood and tearing the roof off, picking the children out one by one and chomping them down in a spray of blood and a chorus of screams. This definitely did not suck.
A knock on his door broke his concentration. From somewhere a Slime Dragon appeared and covered Yggxvthwul with ooze, which it then set afire.
End of game.
"Yahgummin," Eric said, bitterly.
His father opened the door a few inches and sort of sidled in. He never just walked in. Eric thought it was funny, but he wasn't amused tonight.
"Kind of late," said his dad.
Eric made a snorting noise.
"I'm just turning in. Wanted to say goodnight. Everything okay with you?"
"Mm." It would be if you'd get your ass outta my space.
"How's things at school?"
"Mm."
"Mr. Sverdrup said he'd seen you in a fight."
"Mm."
"I told him I was sure it was nothing serious."
"Mm."
"I mean, sometimes you get upset. That's understandable. But you're sorry about it, right?"
"Mm."
"Yeah, that's what I thought. So everything's cool. It won't happen again."
"Mm."
"You bet. Okay, sport. Don't stay up too late, huh? 'Night. Love you."
"Mm."
His father sidled out.
What a lamer.
Time to kill the room light. The game was more fun in the dark, and no shining under the door would alert his father. Eric killed it without getting up by stretching his long tongue across the room and flicking the switch with it.
It wasn't exactly a tongue. It was more a tentacle, like one of Yggxvthwul's, with little suckers along its length. Eric had been frightened by it when it had first appeared, but now it was way cool.
Will barely remembered clambering out of the attic and downstairs to his den. He barely took his eyes from the book, afraid it would dissolve like the dream it must be.
Kyd's Hamlet! It was incredible! It was not to be believed! One of the great lost treasures in English literary scholarship, lying right over his head every night as he slept during the months he'd lived here.
Kyd's Hamlet was not much coveted for its own sake. Kyd had been a store-brand dramatist at best. But it may have been the missing link between Belleforest's transcription of Saxo Grammaticus and Shakespeare. So many questions about the play would be answered if we knew how much was Shakespeare's, how much (if anything) Kyd's. How in blazes had it ended up in a box in a farmhouse outside Epsom, Minnesota?
He set the book down on his desk and turned on the banker's lamp. Gently, reverently, he opened it and began to turn the pages.
Five minutes later he stopped reading straight through and began to turn pages at random, checking familiar sections. He paged faster and faster, forgetting for a moment his reverence for the yellow paper.
This was a nightmare.
It was almost word for word the play he knew.
Will had to step away from the desk and pace. It didn't make sense. Kyd was not this good a writer. Shakespeare was too great a writer, and too creative, to have simply plagiarized from a hack like Kyd.
But that was sure how it looked.