Puzzle for Players Read online

  We stood there, in awkward silence, as she moved down the path of the working light toward us. She held out her hand to me for a cigarette. As I gave it to her, I saw that her slim, hard fingers were shaking.

  “Children,” she said very quietly, “be warned by Mother. Never, never go upstairs in the Dagonet Theater at night.”

  She laughed an unstable laugh that tilted off key. Apart from a mania for brewing tea at odd moments and a confirmed habit of falling in love with the wrong person, Theo was the sanest woman in the theater. I’d never seen her this way before.

  “Peter,” she said in that same alarmingly flat voice, “the Dagonet doesn’t happen to be haunted, by any chance?”

  I exchanged glances with Iris. “No ghost was specified on the lease,” I said.

  For a moment Theo just stood there, twisting the cigarette. Then she flicked ash onto the floor and stabbed at it with her toe. “Listen to a little story,” she said. “I went upstairs to take a look at the dressing-rooms. I got to the first one on the top of the steps. The door was open but the light wasn’t on. I went to the door and found a switch.”

  She looked straight at me, speaking very slowly.

  “I snapped on the switch, Peter. It was the switch for the mirror—just the little lights around the dressing-table mirror. The rest of the room was dark. From where I stood by the door, I could tell no one was there. And yet, reflected in the mirror—” she paused—“reflected in the mirror, quite plainly, I saw a face.”

  Coming on top of what Wessler had hinted about the mirror in his dressing-room, that was pretty nasty. “But, Theo, darling…” began Iris.

  “I know what you’re going to say and it’s not true.” The English actress’s lips made a wry smile. “It wasn’t my own face. The mirror’s on a side wall. I was standing by the door. It couldn’t possibly have been my own reflection. It was somebody else’s face looking out at me from the minor. And there was no one in the room.”

  Wessler took a quick step forward. I said weakly: “But, Theo, you must be crazy. What kind of a face was it?”

  “It wasn’t at all a nice face.” Theo was still staring me straight in the eyes. “It seemed to be a woman’s. I had the impression of a light tan fur around her throat. Her cheeks were white as death, her mouth…”

  “Miss Ffoulkes!” Lionel Comstock pushed roughly past Wessler. His breath was coming in quick, erratic jerks, his skin a sort of bluish gray. He’d looked that way once before at rehearsal when he’d had some kind of heart attack. “Miss Ffoulkes, you saw a woman’s face reflected in a mirror?” The old actor repeated Theo’s words haltingly like a little boy learning his lines.

  “Exactly.” Theo’s cigarette hung poised in mid-air. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “A woman’s face!” The veins in Comstock’s temples stood out thick and pulsing. “A girl’s face, white, with staring eyes, with her lips twisted in a last struggle for breath. A girl with a rope tight around her neck— hanged.”

  The cigarette dropped from Theo’s fingers. “My God, she did look as if she were being hanged. But how do you know? You weren’t there. Have—have you seen it too?”

  Lionel Comstock gave a little gasp. One hand groped futilely forward for support. As his knees sagged, Gerald Gwynne and Henry Prince jumped toward him, gripping his arms, holding him up.

  “I knew it.” The old actor’s voice broke into a tiny whisper. “She never went away. She’s still here. Lillian is still here at the Dagonet….”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THAT WAS a dandy way to start rehearsal. For the first few moments I couldn’t think much about anything except Comstock himself. He was crumpled in Gerald Gwynne’s arms like a limp black sack and his breathing sounded harsh and jarring as if someone was sawing through wood. With Gerald and Henry Prince I managed to get the old man to a chair, and sent Eddie Troth for some water.

  We must have made a pretty crazy tableau as we stood around that grimy stage, waiting for Eddie to bring the water. Theo Ffoulkes held her head high and kept her lips in a set pale line, silently defying any of us to disbelieve the incredible thing she’d told us. Wessler, his huge fists limp at his sides, was looking at her with a sort of blank fascination. It was almost as if he, like Comstock, had had some previous inkling of what Theo was going to see in that upstairs dressing-room. The rest of us, Iris, myself, Gerald and Henry Prince were grouped around like a lot of badly rehearsed extras.

  At last Eddie came with a paper cup of water. Comstock got it to his lips somehow and slowly, as he sipped it, his breathing came back to normal. There were hard, shiny drops of sweat on his forehead.

  Theo Ffoulkes was the first to break that queasy silence. She said bluntly: “This is absolutely balmy, Lionel. You’ve got to tell us what you mean. You described that face I saw upstairs and you’ve never left the stage since you’ve been here. How did you know? And who is Lillian?”

  The old actor let the paper cup slip from his fingers. He forced a sickly smile. “I must apologize. It is just that what you told us—it reminded me of something which happened very long ago—My—my feelings carried me away.

  You must please none of you pay any attention to what I said.”

  I was thinking, of course, of the odd way he’d behaved outside the theater. It was pretty obvious he knew quite a lot more than he intended to tell.

  I said uneasily: “If you know anything that can help explain what Theo thinks she saw, Lionel, you better tell us.”

  “But I don’t. Indeed I don’t.” Comstock’s voice had a desperate quality, as if it were less important to convince me than it was to convince himself. “I—I am as astounded as the rest of you. If Miss Ffoulkes really saw a face in the mirror upstairs, it must have been her own reflection or—or some trick of light.”

  That was the only reasonable explanation. But, in spite of reason, I still felt a darn twittering in the pit of my stomach. I was sure Theo hadn’t scared herself with a trick of light. She just wasn’t that sort of person.

  It was Iris who crashed through with the next unsettling remark. She was staring curiously at Wessler. “You complain of the mirror in your dressing-room, Herr Wessler. You didn’t see anything—funny in it too, did you?”

  Conrad Wessler’s hand moved slowly over his blond beard, and the light blue eyes, turning to Iris, seemed to be gazing straight through her at something beyond. “It is never good too long to look in mirrors,” he said haltingly. “In mirrors I have seen things far more horrible than what Miss Ffoulkes describes because the things I have seen were real and I knew they could not by turning away from the glass be banished—or by trying to forget.”

  I guessed what was behind that queer little speech. I could tell the Austrian was thinking back to the days of horror and disfigurement after his airplane accident. Conrad Wessler must have had every reason to shun mirrors.

  But Theo didn’t seem to catch the allusion. She said crisply: “If Herr Wessler’s suggesting I had a hallucination or something, it’s not true.” Her eyes, worried but stubborn, met mine. “You know I’m not one of those females who go psychic all over the place, Peter. And you can take my word that I’m not tight. But I did see something damn queer in that dressing-room and I’m not going to be particularly fond of the Dagonet until I’ve found out what it was.”

  “That shouldn’t be difficult.” Gerald Gwynne, looking very young and very handsome and very tough in a high-necked polo sweater, was watching us with a sardonic smile. “Since we seem to have a spook on our hands,” he drawled, “the thing to do is to lay it I’ll run upstairs and cope with Lillian.”

  That was the first sensible thing anyone had said. I offered to go too. But Gerald said quickly: “Don’t bother. I can scream for help if I feel ghostly fingers around my throat.”

  I got the idea that he didn’t want me to go with him. But I insisted. After all, I was the boss. I was the sucker who’d leased the Dagonet and its crazy mirrors.

  I asked Theo which
dressing-room it was.

  “The first when you come to the top of the stairs.” The English actress added wryly: “You can’t miss it. I was so petrified I left the light burning.”

  Gerald and I went to the door. The others trailed after us, grouping themselves around the threshold of the stage watching with wan anxiety as if they were saying good-bye to us at the foot of the scaffold. We started along the bleak passage toward the even bleaker stone staircase which led up to the dressing-rooms on the higher floor.

  I admit I felt a bit jittery. My juvenile, however, seemed to be taking the whole impossible situation very calmly. But then, nothing ever fazed Gerald unless it affected Mirabelle Rue for whom he acted as a kind of passionate body-guard. Whenever Mirabelle was in trouble, which was often enough, Gerald sloughed his six-months-old Broadway veneer and reverted to the tough little Mid-Western he-man he was. But this was only a ghostly face in a mirror. Things like that didn’t bother Gerald.

  That typically Dagonet odor of damp and disuse invaded our nostrils as we climbed the sheer stone stairs. The corridor light on the upper level was burning ahead of us, dim and wispy with cobwebs.

  “The first room,” said Gerald.

  We saw it at once, straight in front of us at the head of the steps. The door was half open, but the room was in darkness.

  “Theo said she’d left the lights on,” I said.

  “Well, they’re not on now,” remarked Gerald laconically and moved to the door.

  The darkness inside was thick and musty. I don’t know what I expected we’d find in that room. Rather unsteadily

  I fumbled for a switch and snapped it down. Instantly the little bulbs around the mirror on the side wall sprang into light. Some of them were dead, leaving blank spots in the gleaming chain, making the minor look like a gaping mouth with several teeth lost. The glass itself was brightly lit Nothing unusual was reflected there, of course.

  Nor was there anyone in the room.

  Gerald found another switch which illuminated the ceiling light and revealed the regular dressing-room props. A table in front of the wall mirror, a few wooden chairs, a long curtained clothes closet. Gerald crossed to the closet, pushed his head between the faded green curtains and brought it out again, brushing dust nonchalantly from his shoulders.

  “No Lillian,” he said.

  “Then what the hell scared Theo?”

  Gerald glanced at the mirror. It was only too obvious that Theo couldn’t have seen her own reflection from the door. “Probably a rat—or a desire to make herself romantic for Wessler’s benefit. I have a hunch she’s hatching one of her thwarted passions for him.” Gerald seemed suddenly bored by the whole expedition. “Still we might as well make a thorough search while we’re about it. I’ll take on this floor. You can embark upon the unknown upstairs.”

  Before I had time to do any more looking around the room, he had hustled me out into the passage toward the stairs which led upward again to the third and last tier of dressing-rooms.

  It struck me as odd, Gerald suddenly assuming authority that way. I was also worried about the light being out when Theo had said so definitely that she’d left it on.

  But I didn’t give either of those points a great deal of thought at the time. There were other things to get intense about as I started alone up the dark stairs to the third set of dressing-rooms.

  The corridor light ahead of me was not burning. After I’d taken the bend in the stone steps, I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. It was like walking up into nothingness.

  The higher one went in the Dagonet, the more unpleasant it became.

  I raised a leg and brought it down firmly on a step that wasn’t there. I stumbled, throwing a hand against

  the cold wall for support Presumably, I had reached the landing.

  I stood still an instant, trying to get my bearing, figuring where the electric light switch was most likely to be.

  It was at that particularly inconvenient moment that I heard the noise—a soft, rhythmic padding moving toward me out of the pitch darkness ahead.

  Probably, if I had been anywhere else in the world except the top floor of the Dagonet Theater, that furtive sound would have done no more than arouse my curiosity. But here, coming on top of what Theo had sprung, it was rather hellish. It connected up with nothing tangible. It was just a sound and a presence in the darkness —a sound which was getting closer, a presence which seemed uncannily to have sensed the fact that I was there. I didn’t like it

  I threw out a hand, more or less at random, searching the invisible wall at my side for a light switch. My fingers met up with something small and alive that scurried away, a cockroach probably. I dragged my hand back. Then, as I made another stab for the light switch, the thing that had been making the noise reached me. I felt an unidentifiable body, soft and pliant, pressing against my trouser leg.

  I shook my leg wildly, trying to brush away that warm almost caressing pressure. It went. But, in an instant, it was back again, clinging, persistent.

  I found the switch then. As the thin corridor jumped into light, I looked at the thing at my feet. It looked back at me with a bored, aristocratic stare. I felt distinctly foolish. The sinister presence in the darkness had been nothing more supernatural than a cat.

  But it wasn’t an ordinary cat. The coffee fur was set off by the dapper chocolate of its ears and paws. Its eyes were calm, swooning blue. Tied around its neck was a pink ribbon.

  A Siamese cat of obvious pedigree with a pink bow around its neck was hardly the thing one expects to run up against in the dreary heights of a long-uninhabited theatre.

  I had picked it up and it was brushing haughty whiskers against my chin before I realized just how unusual a cat it was. Hanging from the pink ribbon, flat against the fur of its throat, was a label. There were little silver trumpets designed around the edges—a sort of Christmas gift label. On it, in large, round handwriting, was the unpromising legend:

  HERE’S A MASCOT FOR YOU. MAY IT BRING

  YOU BAD LUCK.

  At first I thought that someone who’d heard we were opening at the jinxed Dagonet had played a fool practical joke. Then, as I stared once again at that unfamiliar handwriting, I wasn’t so sure. In the show business, people take good luck and bad luck seriously. If that cat, with that label around its neck, had wandered on stage during rehearsal, it could have started a mild panic. I knew that Anyone else in the Theater would have known it too.

  I guessed then that I was up against genuine malice. Maybe what Theo had seen was part of the same business.

  I stood there with the cat in my arms, feeling uneasy. Then I remembered Gerald waiting for me on the floor below. I yanked the label off the ribbon, stuffed it in my pocket and started down the stone staircase.

  My juvenile was waiting on the landing below.

  “All quiet on this front,” he said. Then he saw the cat. “My God, where did you get that from?”

  “We’ve been wrestling upstairs,” I said. Then I added, although I didn’t believe it: “Probably belongs to the doorman.”

  “Whoever it belongs to, it clears up our spook.” Gerald’s astonishment had given way to an almost exaggerated relief. “That cat is obviously Lillian.”

  He seemed positive the cat was what Theo had seen reflected in the glass. I wasn’t so sure.

  We took the animal down to the stage where the others were grouped around in wilted silence. Once again Gerald assumed all authority. He explained emphatically how the cat must have been somewhere in the dressing-room and how Theo must have caught its reflection in the mirror. To my surprise, everyone swallowed the story. There was an immediate slackening of tension and some of them even started wisecracking about it.

  I was glad as hell. I had my company back to normal. But, even if I hadn’t known about that crazy label, I couldn’t have sold myself on the theory that Theo Ffoulkes, the most level-headed English importation we’d had for years, had scared herself with a cat.

&nbs
p; While Gerald carted the animal away to the doorman, Theo strolled over to me where I was standing apart from the others.

  She said: “You know perfectly well, don’t you, Peter, that it wasn’t any Siamese cat I saw in the mirror?”

  I nodded gloomily.

  “I’m not insisting, Peter, because I don’t see any point in getting the others worked up. But I wanted you to know. What I saw in that glass was the face of a woman I’ve never seen before. It’s loopy, but that’s what I saw.”

  I asked: “Are you sure you left the lights on in that dressing-room?”

  “I’m positive,” she said, adding curiously: “Why?”

  “Because they were turned off when we got there.”

  I realized suddenly just what that implied. Theo did too.

  I said: “But for Pete’s sake keep it under your hat.”

  “Of course I will.” When Theo gave you her word, she meant it. She looked at me, a rueful smile on her mouth. “Not a very promising start, is it, darling? But don’t you worry. We’ve got a swell show and a swell producer.” A slight flush crept into her cheeks. “And Wessler, of course, is a dream. We’re giving all we’ve got to make this a success for you and we’re going to set the Thames on fire—spooks or no spooks.”

  It was sort of swell of her to say that—just then when I needed it badly.

  Gerald had come back now with the news that the cat didn’t belong to the doorman. The toothless Mac, however, had fallen in love with it and wanted to keep it as the theater mascot. It didn’t look like a particularly auspicious mascot, but I gave my okay. After all, someone had to take care of the animal, and I was relieved that no one thought to ask how the hell it had gotten into the theater.

  I was just set to start the rehearsal without Mirabelle Rue when the swing-door burst open and I heard the familiar throaty voice behind me caroling: