Maskerade

into the dark maw of the auditorium.
    “The audience haven’t gone, you know,” she said. “They’re still sitting out there.”
    Granny joined her, and peered into the gloom. “I can’t imagine why,” she said. “He did say the opera’s over…”
    They turned and looked at Agnes, who was standing in the center of the stage and glowering at nothing.
    “Feeling a bit angry?” said Nanny. “Only to be expected.”
    “Yes!”
    “Feeling that everything’s happened for other people and not for you?”
    “ Yes! ”
    “But,” said Granny Weatherwax, “look at it like this: what’s Christine got to look forward to? She’ll just become a singer. Stuck in a little world. Oh, maybe she’ll be good enough to get a little fame, but one day the voice’ll crack and that’s the end of her life. You have got a choice. You can either be on the stage, just a performer, just going through the lines…or you can be outside it, and know how the script works, where the scenery hangs, and where the trapdoors are. Isn’t that better?”
    “ No! ”
    The infuriating thing about Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax, Agnes thought later, was the way they sometimes acted in tandem, without exchanging a word. Of course, there were plenty of other things—the way they never thought that meddling was meddling if they did it; the way they automatically assumed that everyone else’s business was their own; the way they went through life in a straight line; the way, in fact, that they arrived in any situation and immediately started to change it. Compared to that, acting on unspoken agreement was a mere minor annoyance, but it was here and up close.
    They walked toward her, and each laid a hand on her shoulder.
    “Feeling angry ?” said Granny.
    “ Yes! ”
    “I should let it out then, if I was you,” said Nanny.
    Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.
    It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
    It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.
    The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
    As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wineglasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistle down with attitude.
    There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
    Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly…
    Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
    Nanny grinned.
    “Ah,” she said, “ Now the opera’s over.”

    Salzella opened his eyes.
    The stage was empty, and dark, and nevertheless brilliantly lit. That is, a huge shadowless light was streaming from some unseen source and yet, apart from Salzella himself, there was nothing for it to illuminate.
    Footsteps sounded in the distance. Their owner took some time to arrive, but when he stepped into the liquid air around Salzella he seemed to burst into flame.
    He wore red: a red suit with red lace, a red cloak, red shoes with ruby buckles, and a broad-brimmed red hat with a huge red feather. He even walked with a long red stick, bedecked with red ribbons. But for someone who had taken such meticulous trouble with his costume, he’d been remiss in the matter of his mask. It was a crude one of a skull, such as might be bought in any theatrical shop—Salzella could even see the string.
    “Where did everyone go?” Salzella demanded. Unpleasant recent memories were beginning to bubble up in his mind. He couldn’t quite recall them clearly at the moment, but the taste of them was bad.
    The figure said nothing.
    “Where’s the orchestra? What happened to the audience?”
    There was a barely perceptible shrug from the tall red figure.
    Salzella began to notice other details. What he had thought was the stage seemed slightly gritty underfoot. The ceiling above him was a long way away, perhaps as far away as