In the Court of the Yellow King (25 page)

ulia’s reflection raised its arms. It rippled in the yellowed, uneven glass of the mirror. It turned slightly at the waist and gestured at something unseen to its right. It took a half-step, awkward and hobbled, a bird with an injured wing, and then Julia’s foot twisted under her. She flailed into the heavy wooden frame of the standing mirror and knocked it over, landing flat-out across the glass. She looked down at her reflection; for an absurd instant she worried that it might be hurt. A dull bead of blood dripped from the point of her chin and splashed the mirror.

Someone shoved the heavy back curtain aside and the other actors of the company crowded into the space. Nicole, the tallest woman in the group, did not so much shove them aside as move them by the aura of her angry presence. She looked down at Julia. “What happened?”

Julia awkwardly rolled over and sat up. “I was doing warm-ups in front of the mirror —”

“You’re not supposed to be practicing your
dance
,” Nicole said, practically hissing the last word. “You should be practicing your
lines
and practicing them
sitting down
until your ankle heals. We are putting on this play with a skeleton crew and nobody has time to be your understudy. Is that clear?”

Nicole spun and stalked away without waiting for an answer. The other actors milled around, avoiding her eyes. Only Kai stepped forward, regal, beautiful Kai, helping Julia to her feet.

“Sorry about that,” Kai said. She smiled an apology. “Jarré hasn’t sent any new pages of script in days and Nicole’s very upset.”

You don’
t have to apologize
for her just because
you’re sleeping wit
h her,
Julia thought, but did not say. She mimicked a smile back, and nodded, and said nothing at all. She resisted the urge to go back and check on the mirror before she left the theater.

Julia spent the next two days sitting down. She didn’t bother to practice her lines, because there were only two. She passed the time re-reading Abelard Jarré’s other plays, the ones she had hunted down in the basements of used book stores and read to tatters when she was a drama student:
Memorial Sand
, Anticlast, Hour of t
he Oxen
, even
Indolence
, his first and least-regarded play that was nonetheless her favorite. In the thirty-five years since releasing
Ma
nifenêtre
, Jarré had written nothing. He gave no interviews and appeared in public rarely; many speculated that he was dead. Through some chain of friendships or remote relation that seemed hazy to Julia, Nicole had gained his rare favor, and Jarré picked her tiny, all-woman theater company to stage his new play
Carcosa
. Julia would have believed it a hoax or publicity stunt if she hadn’t seen the first pages of the partial script herself, read scenes described through Jarré’s searing vision, impossible to imitate. She still had trouble truly believing that she had a role, even a small one, in his play. It was a gift that even Nicole’s hostility and arrogance could not tarnish.

Julia had read to the point that she feared any more would make her bored and tired even of Jarré’s writing. She went to the theater and slipped in to the back, picking a seat far back in the shadows where she could watch the rehearsals unnoticed. Even the choice of theater was odd, if not surprising for Jarré: a jewel box of a building from the turn of the century that seated perhaps a hundred patrons. It fell into disrepair after World War Two, but in a spurt of local philanthropy, had been renovated to a state that echoed its old glory. Julia privately hoped those renovations had included meeting modern fire codes. Whoever had dictated the renovations failed to match their nostalgia for a historic theater with modern practice; the seats rose in steep tiers, but the stage was raked, tilted forward toward the audience, a trick from the early days of theater to make actors upstage visible to the groundlings. Julia had twisted her ankle because of the unfamiliar angles of that tilted stage.

Onstage, Kai and Catherine were practicing Scene Four, the lovers’ spat that turned from sensual flirtation into a violent, erotic brawl. Nicole rose from the front row of the audience. The actors scrambled apart. They spoke, their voices too low for Julia to make out the words, but their tone of voice clear: Nicole furious, Kai and Catherine abashed. Julia wondered whether they had botched something in the script – a forgotten line, or an intonation departing from Nicole’s rigid interpretation of Jarré’s artistic vision – or whether Nicole was jealous, suspicious that the passion between her lover and Catherine heralded something other than the demands of the play.

Nicole sat back down, vanishing behind the tall back of her chair, and the women onstage began the scene from the beginning. Julia lost interest in watching the drama, either within the play or outside of it. She slipped out of the back row and along the shadowed aisle that led to the stairs going up. She decided to explore the old box seats first, and then, when the others took a break from the rehearsal, to look around backstage. Something about the old theater intrigued her: the oddity of its architecture, its strange partial renovation, the odds and ends of props and costumes left behind by other troupes years ago.

There was little backstage proper that she hadn’t already seen. The tall mirror had been shoved into a far corner, next to rolls of canvas crusted with ancient paintdrops. Thick layers of dust rose and made her sneeze. She wandered through the near-maze of pallets and backdrops and cheap furniture sets, her interest in exploring the theater waning. In turning to find her way back out she stepped on a knob of metal sticking up from the floor. She crouched down and gave it an experimental tug. It came up, attached to a thick cord that might once have been white, before it abruptly stopped. Julia pulled harder. A section of the floor swung up and over, like a utility door in an attic. Beneath it a set of haphazard wooden stairs led down. The air rising from the hole smelled stale.

Julia tapped the flashlight icon on her phone and shone the beam down the stairs ahead of her. Splinters dragged at the fabric of her shoes. She picked her way down a wooden staircase that was little more than a wide ladder. Even with her careful balance, the absence of handrails felt dangerous, as if putting a foot wrong in the slightest would send her flailing over the side. The weak, dusty sunlight barely filtered down to the room below, and she shined the flashlight ahead. It was hard to guess exactly where the room was relative the rest of the theater; perhaps under the stage, but wouldn’t that all have been cleaned up during the restoration? Cold leached through her thin shoes. The floor felt hard, uneven, like packed dirt.

She turned the flashlight up toward the low ceiling. White ceramic knobs looped with wire dotted the crossbeams. Julia frowned. It was hard to imagine that restoration work would have left old wiring in place, especially in a theater, where concerns about fire bordered on the paranoid.
Th
ey restored the whol
e place, top to botto
m,
Nicole had told them; either Nicole was wrong, or there was some other reason that an electrical system a century old was still in place.

Julia held up her phone so that the beam of light shone along the wire, which turned sideways and ran left along the seam of wall and ceiling, into the darker recesses of the room. She followed it a ways until it struck a wall, curved down, and paralleled a doorframe, disappearing through a hole drilled into the wood of the frame. The hole was fringed with some kind of sticky cloth, protecting the wood from the electric wire. It was too close for her to peer through to the other side. She moved the light to the door and illuminated dark, heavy-grained wood. Light sparkled on an old-fashioned glass doorknob, its facets caked with gray dust. Julia turned the knob, expecting the mechanism to be rusted shut, the door warped into its frame. To her surprise, it moved. She tucked the phone into her back pocket and used both hands to twist the knob harder. There was resistance, and then something metallic snapped, letting the knob spin all the way over. She tugged at the door. It opened with surprising ease, the old hinges grating but doing nothing to hinder her.

Without thinking she reached inside the door for a light switch, felt something under her fingers, and flipped it up. There was a humming, crackling sound overhead and the room flooded with dusty yellow light. Julia stared up at a light bulb, the size of her fists put together, mounted in the ceiling inside a faded green-bronze dome of metal. Not only had the old wiring been left in it place, it still worked. Possibly the electricians just hadn’t gone this far into the building.

The light in the ceiling was hardly brighter than her phone’s light, but at least it left her hands free. The secret room was disappointing; more of a storage closet than a proper room. The damp-dog smell of old books, poorly cared for, was everywhere. Sheaves of paper overflowed rickety wooden shelves. Julia flipped through a few, saw nothing of interest, put them back haphazardly. Other than the usual copies of Shakespeare, they were plays she’d never heard of, none dated any sooner than fifty years ago.

The room was poorly ventilated and uncomfortably hot. Julia pushed a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes and left a streak of dirt and sweat on her face. She wiped her filthy hands on her jeans and reached for the switch to turn the light off as she went out. Her gaze rested on a cardboard box that she hadn’t noticed before, high up on a shelf, pushed so far back that it was barely visible. She stood on tiptoes to reach it. Her fingers just brushed the corners of the box; she stretched up, using her fingertips to inch it towards her little by little, and before she could get her hands fully around it the box tipped forward, showering her with musty paper.

Julia stood, stunned, the now-empty box in her hands. It was perhaps three inches deep. Its dimensions were slightly unfamiliar, not quite right to fit a standard piece of paper. She kneeled down to start gathering up the papers that had tipped out, and saw that they were also odd-sized, maybe a European size, or paper so old that it had come out before standard dimensions. They were yellowed and crackled under her touch.

She turned the papers written-side up. At first glance she thought they were sheet music, covered in long, lined boxes that looked like musical staves; on a closer look, the markings on the staves weren’t musical notes, but stick figures. If it was dance notation, it was a form she’d never seen before. The figures moved up and down on the grid behind them, and the staves had seven lines, not five. Their limbs and posture contorted in positions that didn’t flow from one movement to the next.
Twisted in pain
, she thought, then dismissed it as fancy. No system of dance writing illustrated how uncomfortable any position would be for the dancer.

There was tiny, faded writing everywhere around the papers, too; some neatly printed above and below the figures, some in the margins. Entire paragraphs of dense scribbling were crammed between staves. Most of it was illegible, possibly not even in English. Julia sighed and piled the papers back into the box. There were no page numbers or titles, no way to find any sensible or orderly arrangement of their proper sequence.

Julia picked up the last stray sheet and dropped it back on top of the others. Printed squarely in the center of the page, surrounded by a margin of white, was the word CARCOSA.

She squinted at the page. She couldn’t tell whether the word had been printed in the only block of available space, or whether it had been put there first and the other writing around it. The scribbles did seem more compressed at its margins, almost as if they were crowding away from the word.

Julia carefully fitted the grey cardboard lid back over the warped edges of the box. She decided that she would look it over later, after she’d had some rest and wasn’t squatting on the floor of a dingy and probably dangerous old storeroom, working herself up into a melodramatic lather over an obsolete stack of papers that had nothing at all to do with her current work. For all she knew, it was some long-dead choreographer’s idiosyncratic notation for
Swan Lake
.