Will was up with the police until 2:00 in the morning. He worried the deputies would ask whether he thought the intruder had been looking for anything in particular, but they didn't approach law enforcement imaginatively. "Yeah, we see a lot of these break-ins," the one in charge said. He had a Smokey the Bear hat and a county-issue gut. "Lots of times they don't even steal anything valuable. You missing anything valuable?"
Will couldn't think of anything that was missing offhand. Thank God he'd taken the book with him.
"When I was a kid we left our house unlocked all the time," said the deputy. "Somebody got robbed maybe once every two or three years around here. Don't tell me society ain't on the skids."
He wrote up a report and left with his people. Will said the hell with it and went to bed without even trying to clean up, except for piling the toppled books neatly so they wouldn't lay open and crooked.
In the morning he went to work half asleep. The weatherman on the radio said to expect scattered snow flurries. "They'll be getting heavy snow in parts of Iowa, but it won't come this far north."
His first afternoon class got preempted by a school assembly.
Principal Hellstrom opened the proceedings with an announcement.
"I'm sure you'll all be happy to know that the School Board has authorized a new program to improve security in our school," the principal said. He was wearing a purple sweatshirt today that asked the question, do i look like somebody who gives a rat's ass?
"Beginning next week, we will have a Student Security Team," he went on. "The faculty and student council have met and agreed on the following list of outstanding students who will be your Security Team members. These students are:
"Jason Sunde
"Kimberly Lurvey
"Jason Chesley
"Kimberly Clow
"Jason Pedersen
"Kimberly Kaste
"Jason Cook
"Kimberly Anderson
"And Eric Smedhammer."
Wonderful, thought Will. They've given Eric a badge.
The assembly speaker was a woman from the Sociology Department of one of the state universities. She spoke on the subject, "Thinking Outside the Box."
Original, thought Will.
The gist of her talk was that the structures and traditions of our society confine us in prisonlike conceptual boxes. She exhorted the students to think of at least one traditional value they could set aside, in order to liberate their souls.
Then Principal Hellstrom dismissed them, suggesting they all go to their next classes and write a short essay about some tradition they would like to set aside.
And, behold, it was done.
Will collected his students' essays at the end of the hour. He looked through the essays once they had filed out.
Some traditions the students felt might be jettisoned:
Marriage
Religion
Racial equality
Gender equality
Parental authority
Police authority
The incest taboo
Sobriety
Art
Literature
Law
The Golden Rule
Will sighed and dumped them all in his trash basket before leaving.
The students had cleared out quickly. The hall was empty as Will locked the room. From somewhere two men appeared and moved in, one on either side of him. They grabbed his arms with strong hands.
Will looked from side to side in panic. The men appeared young, but too old for high school. College age. They wore sweatshirts and sweat pants. He tried to see their faces, but a hand pressed his head forward against the door panel and held it there, flattening his nose.
"Where's the book?" they asked.
Terrified, Will said nothing.
They twisted his arm behind him. The pain radiated both ways from his shoulder.
"The book! Where is it?"
Will was no hero. He wasn't about to give his life for a book, even the Ur-Hamlet. He opened his mouth to speak.
Suddenly the hands let him go and he fell. Voices shouted; there were sounds of blows and bodies falling.
He turned to see Eric Smedhammer fighting the two attackers.
He saw a suckered tentacle dart from Eric's mouth and smack one of them. The college boy screamed and ran away, followed quickly by his friend.
Eric didn't chase them. He stood and looked down at Will, a superior smirk on his face.
"Goothingiwuzhere," he mumbled.
"Eric. What was that—your tongue? Some kind of tentacle—"
"T-shirt," said Eric, pointing at the silk screen of Yggxvthwul on the garment.
Of course that must have been it. In the confusion of the moment, he'd seen the picture and somehow superimposed it on what actually happened.
"Well, thank you, Eric. Thank you very much."
Eric shrugged and walked away. He didn't show any interest in why outsiders had attacked a teacher in school.
Will went out to his Jeep and found the lift gate jimmied open. Thank goodness he'd left the Kyd book with Bess. He drove home and straightened things in his house, then worked on his lines. He didn't eat supper.
When he drove back into town for rehearsal, snow had begun falling in light, fat flakes that became an array of fireflies that streaked toward him in his headlights like stars in hyperspace in a Star Wars movie.
"We're getting a little more snow than we expected tonight, but nothing to slow you down in the morning," said the man on the radio.
Will was early as usual. There were lights on in the theater, so somebody was there. He started to climb the concrete steps.
Footsteps pounded up from behind. Will turned in panic, still edgy after the attack that afternoon. The man who climbed up beside him, panting, was fat and short. Will didn't recognize Del Perry at first.
Perry said, "Will, hold up."
Will faced him. "Nice to see you," he said. "Run out of thugs?"
"Look, I'm sorry about that," said Del, taking a deep drag on a cigarette and flicking it away. He wore a wool overcoat with the collar up, no hat. His yellow hair was blowing away from where he'd combed it across the top of his head. "They were a couple jocks who were flunking my class. I said I'd pass 'em if they did me a favor."
"You're not even embarrassed, are you?"
"I'm embarrassed as hell, Will. But I've been so embarrassed for so long, I just don't give a rip anymore. I'm desensitized. Let's go inside. I'm freezing my butt off out here."
"There's somebody in there. If you threaten me, there'll be a witness."
"No more pushy stuff, I promise. I just want to talk. I suppose there's no smoking in there?"
"Fire marshal's rules."
"Like everyplace else. And me out of nicotine gum. Come on."
They climbed the steps and went in. Through the auditorium door they could see Bess on stage, kneeling over the trap door. They went down the basement steps. Will flipped on a light and they sat in folding chairs by a long table. Del sighed and shrugged his overcoat off.
"I may not get tenure," he said. "My wife left me; she took me for everything I've got and there's alimony and child support on top of it. I'm living in a one-bedroom apartment and I drive an '88 Escort, and I'm barely making it. If I lose my job there's no way I can pay my obligations. I'm a dead meat deadbeat."
"That's you, Del. Always quoting Shelley."
"Give me a break. I had to learn to talk like a thug to survive in the department. I told you, it's a different world. It's not an ivory tower anymore. Ivory's environmentally insensitive."
"Instead you take your gun and go slaughter Shakespeare."
Del's hand wandered toward his shirt pocket, where the cigarettes were. He touched it lovingly, then dropped the hand. "Don't get high and mighty with me, Will. If you're trying to withhold evidence that Shakespeare plagiarized Kyd, what does that make you?"
"I'm not withholding anything. I'll turn it over to somebody. But I won't give it to you."
"I need it. I thought we were friends."
"So did I. Until you sent people to trash my house and beat me up."
Del slumped in his chair. "I'm in a bad place, Will. I'm appealing to you."
"No. You disqualified yourself."
"Yeah, yeah." Del pushed himself heavily up out of his chair. "You remember I talked about money, don't you?"
"It's all you've talked about."
Del got up. "Yeah right, rub it in, you goddam prig. Young and good-looking and on the upswing. I was there once too, you know. You don't swing up forever. Someday you'll be in a bind too, and looking for somebody to do one little thing just to give you a hand up, and I hope they have more consideration. . . ."
He moved up the stairs talking as he went.
Will wished he could do something for the man. Del had been a good friend once, and the breaking of their trust was like losing a minor organ—a spleen, maybe.
He climbed the stairs, leaning heavily on the banister.
He found the other principal actors gathered with Bess at the front of the auditorium. She and Randy and Diane sat on the stage apron. Rosemary, Howie and Peter sat in the first and second rows. Eric sat a little further back, to one side. They were doing an imaginative exercise, talking about how life must have been in Shakespeare's time. As Will went down the aisle Sean came in, covered in snow and complaining about driving conditions.
"It was a very different world back then," Bess said as Will and Sean sat with the others. "Religion was as important as career. Careers were generally decided for you by your family. Marriages were decided that way, too."
"God, that must have been a time," said Diane. "Can you imagine getting married that way?"
"Think of the wife abuse there must have been," said Rosemary.
"Not necessarily," said Peter. "I personally believe wife abuse was probably rarer then than it is now."
Diane sat bolt upright. "How can you say a thing like that?" she asked.
"Because I've thought about it in light of my actual experience, instead of romantic movies. If there's one thing I've learned about in life, it's dysfunctional families.
"What's the first thing you learn from dysfunctional families? That they reproduce themselves. Abused daughters go out and find abusive men to marry, men just like dear old dad. It happens almost every time. They swear they'll never marry anyone the least bit like their fathers, and then they infallibly pick out his clone. It's like salmon swimming upstream.
"But if you've got a system where dad picks his daughter's husband, what happens?"
"What happens is, he picks out a fat bastard just like himself for her," said Diane, unwrapping a breath mint.
"No, that's exactly what he doesn't do. That's a picture you get from sentimental novels. What happens in real life when one bully meets another? Do they slap each other on the back and become bosom buddies? No. Bullies flatter strong people and push weak ones around, but they don't like their own kind.
"This is what I see happening: Daughter says, 'I think Johnny over there is really cute.' What she really means is, 'I can sense that Johnny is the kind of s.o.b. who'll use me for a punching bag and make my life a living hell,' only she doesn't know that's what she means. Daddy says, 'No, I don't like him.' Daughter says, 'But why, Daddy?' Daddy says, 'I don't know—he's got shifty eyes.' What he means is, 'I can smell it that he's just as big a bastard as I am, and I wouldn't trust him with my garbage, let alone my daughter.'
"So he picks out a nice, dull, dependable husband for the girl, and she spends her whole life dreaming about the wonderful bad boy who got away, not realizing that her father, all without knowing it or even wanting to, has stepped in to short-circuit the natural cycle of abuse."
Bess said, "Very creative, Peter. I don't buy it for a second, but at least you've been thinking about it. That's the kind of thinking I'd like all of you to do, even if you only come up with this kind of crap. We're going to get our costumes about a week before dress rehearsal, so you can wear them awhile and be comfortable in them. I want you to think about the period too, like this, so you're comfortable in it."
Howie craned his head around. "It's getting late. Where is everybody?"
From the shadows in the back of the theater a slumped figure appeared, trudging down the center aisle. It was Del Perry. He had snow in his hair.
"The storm's getting really bad," he said, in an apologetic voice. "I couldn't get out of the parking lot. I'm afraid we're all stuck here for the time being."
Will introduced Del without mentioning the reason for his visit.
"Well," said Bess, "we might as well get to work on our blocking. If we get snowed in, we'll make a working party of it."
"If this is a party," said Sean, "where's the bar?"
"Put out that cigarette!" said Bess. She snapped her head to the side to face Del, who'd collapsed in one of the seats and lit up.
"Have a heart, lady," he said. "Do I really gotta go out in that storm to get a little relief?"
"The fire marshal says you do. You're a guest here, Mr. Perry. Please observe the rules of the house."
"Yeah, yeah." He headed out, pulling his overcoat on again.
Bess went to center stage. "Okay, kids, Act III, Scene iii. We've had the play within the play, Claudius has stomped out; Hamlet is certain of his guilt now. We've cut the first section; Claudius, you pick it up with line 36; we'll have a little chapel thing set up back here—way upstage, where you'll feel at home. A small curtain'll cover it—it'll open to show you kneeling at the altar. By the way, everybody, try to stay off the trapdoor. I was checking it and I think the braces are loose."
Claudius made his prayer, stopping to make penciled notes in his script as Bess gave them, and Hamlet hovered over him with his own script rolled up for a sword, then let him live so as to kill him later in "some act that hath no relish of salvation in't."
The theoretical main curtain closed and opened again to reveal Peter and Diane in the queen's bedchamber.
"Polonius, you'll hide behind a curtain upstage left," said Bess. "Gertrude, you stand here. Hamlet, you enter stage right."
They worked through the murder of Polonius, and Peter settled himself comfortably on his side with his head propped on one hand to watch them trace out the rest. They made use of all the space, Diane constantly retreating from Will's intensity, Will forever stalking her and blocking her escapes. Even doing it this way, forever rerunning sections and making small changes, the innate tension of the scene made Will's shoulders ache.
"Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it love, for at your age
The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment, and what judgment
Would step from this to this? . . ."
Bess told Will to grab Diane's wrist as he spoke the line, "Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty—" and Diane used her free hand to slap him across the face.
Will stopped, stunned, and put his hand on his cheek. It had been no stage slap. It stung.
"That's good," said Bess. "We'll use it."
Diane's eyes went wide. "I don't know why I did that," she whispered.
Will smiled ruefully. "Just pull your punch next time, okay?"
"Hold it like that for a moment," said Bess. "Gertrude, you're afraid of Hamlet. You're afraid that slap will push him over the edge and he'll murder you too. So you go from anger to pleading. Let's hear your next line."
Eric slouched on in the ghost's place, and they finished the scene. Bess excused Will from dragging Peter offstage for the time being.
Sean, Diane and Will went through the next scenes without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, since Alan and Johnny weren't present.
"Okay, we skip Act IV, Scene iv—" said Bess.
"Skip it?" asked Will. "I thought we were doing Scene iv!"
"Did I say that? Sorry. I decided to cut it."
"You're cutting the 'My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!' speech?"
"We can manage without it."
"It develops Hamlet's character and sets up Fortinbras' arrival in the last scene!"
"I'm sorry. You'll have to live without it."
Will said something under his breath about Reader's Digest and Bess said, "You want to direct this play, Will?"
"I don't like it. Am I allowed to say I don't like it?"
"Why don't you just bottle it up inside you for now?"
"Fine."
"Fine. Shall we move on? Scene v, folks. Gertrude and Ophelia on stage, Horatio and Claudius, you wait in the wings."
Will went out into the audience and sat fuming as Diane, Rosemary and Howie blocked their scene. When it came time for Sean to enter he was nowhere to be found.
"Are all you people in league against me tonight?" Bess demanded.
"I'll find him," said Randy. "Heaven knows I have little enough to do in this play."
Bess put a hand over her eyes as he went for Sean. She stood motionless center stage until Randy returned with the truant. Sean seemed even unsteadier than usual. Turning to see them come in, Will noticed Del in a seat toward the back. Incredibly he had another cigarette lit, and was hiding the glow behind cupped hands.
Sean stumbled as he climbed the steps to the stage. Bess, Diane, Rosemary and Howie rushed down to him while Randy rushed up from below.
" 'Mall right," said Sean. "I once had a walk-on in The Skin of Our Teeth and saw Richard Burton do Mr. Androbus brilliantly on twice the alcohol I've had." He pulled himself up the steps in a couple of tries. Bess and Rosemary helped him. Will, watching from his seat, noticed that Sean managed to rest his hand on Rosemary's bottom fully three times before he made it to the top.
"Watch your hand there, buddy," said Randy.
"What do you care?" Rosemary asked. "My ass isn't your property."
"You're right," said Randy, stepping back. "The line forms on the right, gentlemen; take your turns at Rosey's ass."
Rosemary took three angry steps toward him, but Bess caught her by the arm and turned her around.
"Back to work," said Bess. "Can you people try to play nicely?"
Sean groped her one more time and Rosemary slapped him. He fell down again.
"Stop it! Just stop it!" Bess shouted.
Eric, who was still on stage, said quietly, "Fire'n thentryway."
They all ran down the aisle to see, but the fire was spreading quickly in the old woodwork, and the smoke and flames drove them back.
"The side door, through the sacristy," said Bess.
The group ran back toward the stage. They clattered up the steps and headed for backstage right.
They stopped, piling up into one another, at the sight of a tall man in a black suit and clerical collar, who stood barring their way with hot, angry eyes.
They ran back toward center stage. One by one, each of them found themselves poised on the edge of the trapdoor, which had somehow opened itself, and one by one they fell through.