The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [183]
"THE TIME OF THE HOLY WORK IS HERE! THE MOMENT OF OUR DELIVERANCE!"
The white shirts staggered out of their seats and up the aisles, crawling over each other, rushing to perform some unknown action at a station they needed desperately to reach.
'Excuse me
"TO YOUR STATIONS, EVERY ONE OF YOU, AT ONCE. THE MOMENT IS AT HAND—"
"Ex-CUSE me!"
Bendigo Rymer standing downstage center, indignant as a peacock, wagging his sword up at the box.
Ghastly silence. Reverend Day staring at the man in shock.
"Really, sir. We're TRYING to give a per-FOR-mance here. A damn GOOD one, if I DO say so my-SELF. I am sure that what-EVER this is a-BOUT is all VERY im-POR-tant. But I don't sup-POSE it is TOO much to ASK... if it could WAIT until AFTER we're FIN-ished."
No one breathed. Bendigo puffed up, staying his ground.
Reverend Day laughed. A chuckle, genuinely amused, turning into a rolling, sustained guffaw that grew until its echoes rolled off the theater walls. The audience laughed with him; laughter building to a set of waves that roared and crashed down on the stage, shaking the scenery, knocking Bendigo's confidence out from under him. He took two faltering steps back, sweat dripping off his clammy made-up face. His sword drooped, he looked around desperately for support but instinctively the other actors onstage stepped away, avoiding his eye, smelling imminent theatrical disaster.
The laughter cut off suddenly. In the silence, Reverend Day leaned over the edge of the box and smiled at Bendigo Rymer.
"You're finished."
He gestured sharply with his right hand; the curtain plummeted to the stage, isolating Bendigo on the skirt of the proscenium. Fear putting the whip to his nerves, Rymer groped along the curtain to find an opening.
The Reverend bunched his hands into fists and twisted: The suspenders holding Bendigo's trousers broke away with a loud snap; his pants dropped and settled around his ankles. Reacting to the sound before realizing what had happened, Bendigo took a step downstage and crashed onto his chin.
Behind the curtain, actors and stagehands turned tail and ran, scattering out of the theater in a dozen directions. Eileen, alone, paralyzed with fright, watched from the left side of the wings.
Bendigo Rymer struggled to his knees, the uncomprehending look of an injured child in his eyes, a picture of dumb confoundment. Laughter rolled over him from the audience again; a harsh, disembodied, joyless pounding that never paused, never varied.
Reverend Day propped himself up on the edge of the box, waved his hands like an orchestra conductor, the buttons on Bendigo's blouse popped off and danced across the stage. The laces on his corset roped in and knit tightly together, stays groaning with effort, cinching his belly into an hourglass; she could hear the breath being squeezed out of Rymer's lungs. His wig rotated on his head, the absurd Prince Valiant haircut falling over his eyes. He crawled blindly on the floor, then appeared to gradually lose control of his movements, until he was jerked abruptly upright to his feet, lifted by a dozen invisible hands.
Eileen looked past Rymer, saw Reverend Day manipulating his fingers in the air as if he were controlling a marionette. Bendigo danced, arms hanging limply in the air, a pathetic shuffling encumbered by his fallen trousers....
And Eileen remembered where she had known A. Glorious Day.
His name was Alexander Sparks; she had seen him practice this same impossible nightmarish possession on another man ten years ago, a small, dear Cockney burglar named Barry. Inside the dining hall of a manor house on the Yorkshire coast. Along with six other lunatic, diseased aristocrats, Sparks had directed a plot against the Royal Family; she had fallen quite by accident into the outer tendrils of its web, but eventually found herself at its center, combatting the Seven along with Sparks's brother, an agent for Queen Victoria, and a young doctor who had gone on to become a famous author. Eileen left England for America hard on the heels of that experience