Daniel O'Thunder. Ian Weir

      SPECTACLE, DEAR BOY. Never mind the mirror held to nature. If they want nature they’ll look at a tree. Bangs and whizzes—startling effects—characters who shriek and stab and get on with it. That’s what they want, and so naturally that’s what we give them. And why? Because we are not muffs.”

      Edmund Cubitt peered down at the boards beneath his feet, and raised his voice. “Are we ready down there?” Silence below. Sounds of carpentry from the wings. He gave an impatient stamp. “Can you hear me? One knock for yes.”

      Two muffled raps were given in reply on the underside of the stage, like goblin-knocks in a mineshaft. Cubitt rolled his eyes. “No, of course we’re not ready. We go up in two hours, and it hasn’t worked yet, so why would we be ready now?”

      “About my play—”

      “Could we be ready soon?” Cubitt’s voice rose into his tragedian’s register. This was the register he used for climactic moments of doomed heroism, and the hailing of cabs down the full length of crowded thoroughfares. “Could we aspire to readiness at some point in the identifiable future, or shall I just chuck it all over and go back to Punch and Judy in the provinces? I merely ask.”

      Silence below.

      Edmund Cubitt ground his teeth.

      He was First Tragedian and Manager of the Kemp Theatre: a man of five-and-forty, brisk and brusque, with strands of boot-blacked hair painstakingly arranged upon a startlingly large head. He was already half costumed for his performance as the vampire lord in this evening’s melodrama, which meant he was kitted out in kilt and tam-o’shanter. No, don’t ask.

      “My play?”

      “Right. Short answer?”

      “Well, yes, if—”

      “No.”

      I admit, this came as a blow. This time, I’d been so sure.

      “You’ve read it?”

      “Most of it. Enough of it. Can’t use it, dear boy.”

      “Could I—could I ask why?”

      I heard the damnable note of bleating in my voice, and for an instant had an image of myself as a cartoon drawing of the wretched fawning Poet: knock-kneed in supplication, clutching my scribblings in both hands, prevented from tugging my forelock only by the absence of a third hand to tug with. Christ, what is it about literary endeavour that strips a man of all dignity?

      “A Scottish vampire,” Cubitt was muttering to himself. “Jimmy MacRevenant. Ah, well—why not, eh? Why not.”

      He had fallen to contemplating his costume, having apparently forgotten completely about my play, which was one of the problems with him. His attention span was a hummingbird, darting incessantly from one topic to the next, and invariably returning to the one topic above all that riveted his attention: Edmund Cubitt.

      “Romania—Hibernia—it’s all much the same to the gallery. Yes, they’ll like it well enough. They’ll like it a damn sight better than Shakespeare.”

      The decision to mount a Scottish vampire play was not in fact an artistic one, incisive or otherwise. It came in consequence of an earlier decision to remove a production of Macbeth from the repertory, after audiences dwindled to the point at which there were scarcely enough lungs to give it a proper booing-off. This left the Kemp with both a yawning hole in its schedule and a wardrobe full of Highland costumes, which coincidence brought Cubitt darting to the honeysuckle-bush of inspiration: he would remount The Vampire, a melodrama written by Mr Planché some decades past and inexplicably set in Scotland. Cubitt had seen a pirated version as a boy, and later played it himself to some minor acclaim in the provinces. The story made relatively little sense, but it had fangs and imperilled virgins, both enduringly popular in the three-penny seats. Cubitt had added some innovations of his own, including Scottish ballads and dances, some caber-tossing, and a heroic charge by the Black Watch Regiment, complete with pipers. These had now begun rehearsing in the wings, setting up a plaintive Highland wheezing. In short it was a complete dog’s breakfast, bereft of any artistic merit whatsoever, and likely to be a great success. Cubitt was an indifferent tragedian, but a shrewd manager, occasional lapses into Shakespeare notwithstanding.

      “I forget, dear boy—there’s the problem. I sit down with my text of the Scottish Tragedy, and I exclaim to myself, ‘This is good—this is in fact sublime—it is a mirror held to the Human Condition. But I forget about the audience. Anyone who can spell Condition—or Human—or The—is at the opera. The ones we’ve got are mutinous before we’re fifteen minutes in. ‘I liked them witches—they was all right—and it was prime that bit where they stabbed the feller. But why do they have to talk about it, rest of the bloody night?’ It’s the same with Hamlet. Give them the Ghost, and the Gravedigger and the five minutes of slaughter at the end, and they’d go off happy as clams. It’s the other four hours that bores ’em rigid.”

      Cubitt’s limitations as Chief Tragedian had something to do with this failure as well. The last time he had essayed Hamlet, vocal elements had begun urging him on to self-slaughter by the middle of Act II. But there was a straw here, and I reached for it, albeit morosely.

      “Are you saying that my play is beyond the grasp of the Kemp Theatre audience as presently constituted?”

      “No, I’m saying your play’s no damned good. Same as your other ones. Sorry to say it, dear boy, but spade a spade. I’d put the quill away, if I were you, and look about for something I had a talent for. Ah, finally?”

      An apparition had uncannily manifested down below, poking its head out through a little door in the stage apron and waving one bony hand to Cubitt. It looked for all the world like something the faeries had left behind, on one of their nighttime depredations into some ill-starred nursery. Remarkably this was not a performer in the evening’s extravaganza, but the boy who operated the trap. He was not above twelve or thirteen, with lank white hair and great unblinking eyes in a pale and sharp-chinned goblin’s face. We called him Tommy—short for Tommyknocker.

      “We’re ready? My stars, can it be true?” Cubitt demanded, in the register he reserved for moments of tragic irony.

      Tommyknocker disappeared beneath the stage without a word. He never did say a word—never a syllable, for apparently he was mute. He had been discovered at the stage door one morning, huddled and shivering, one of those waifs that the metropolis vomits up upon the cobbles. But one of the actresses took him in, and one of the carpenters found him a corner to sleep in, and eventually someone else discovered that he was no fool, and in fact ingenious with pulleys and mechanisms—amazingly so, in a child so clearly defective.

      “Then let us screw our courage to the sticking point.” Stepping forward, Cubitt assumed the attitude of Lord Ruthven, Highland fiend, and declaimed: “Demon as I am to walk the earth to slaughter and something-or-other! Something else about a black heart sustained by human blood—oh, deuce take it, they’re not coming for the bloody dialogue.” With that, Cubitt precipitated himself headlong and disappeared, with a suddenness that would elicit great gasps and cries from the three-penny seats, for in tonight’s performance it would be accompanied by a hiss of smoke and a belch of hellfire. I gave a little jump myself, despite knowing how the illusion was produced. It was a simple stage trap, consisting of two India-rubber flaps underlain by a wooden slide fitting close beneath. This was slid back at the appropriate instant, letting the actor plunge through to be caught by a blanket affixed below.

      As Cubitt disappeared I had a glimpse of Tommyknocker, staring up at me through the opening with those great uncanny eyes. For a disconcerting instant he might have been an imp squatting upon the infernal coals, contemplating the inevitability of my eventual arrival. Then the flaps snapped back into place and I stood alone, clutching my poor rejected manuscript while the muffled voice of Cubitt wafted up through the boards.

      “Give it up, dear boy. I’m sorry, but give