Maskerade

jumpers, going through a routine.
    The inside of the Opera House—at least, the backstage inside—put Agnes strongly in mind of the clock her brother had taken apart to find the tick. It was hardly a building. It was more like a machine. Sets and curtains and ropes hung in the darkness like dreadful things in a forgotten cellar. The stage was only a small part of the place, a little rectangle of light in a huge, complicated darkness full of significant machinery…
    A piece of dust floated down from the blackness high above. She brushed it off.
    “I thought I heard someone up there,” she said.
    “It’s probably the Ghost!!” said Christine. “We’ve got one, you know! Oh, I said we !! Isn’t this exciting?!”
    “A man with his face covered by a white mask,” said Agnes.
    “Oh?! You’ve heard about him, then?!”
    “What? Who?”
    “The Ghost!!”
    Blast, thought Agnes. It was always ready to catch her out. Just when she thought she’d put all that behind her. She’d know things without quite knowing why. It upset people. It certainly upset her.
    “Oh, I…suppose someone must have told me…” she mumbled.
    “He moves around the Opera House invisibly, they say!! One moment he’ll be in the Gods, next moment he’ll be backstage somewhere!! No one knows how he does it!!”
    “Really?”
    “They say he watches every performance!! That’s why they never sell tickets for Box Eight, didn’t you know?!”
    “Box Eight?” said Agnes. “What’s a Box?”
    “Boxes! You know? That’s where you get the best people?! Look, I shall show you!”
    Christine marched to the front of the stage and waved a hand grandly at the empty auditorium.
    “The Boxes!” she said. “Over there! And right up there, the Gods!”
    Her voice bounced back from the distant wall.
    “Aren’t the best people in the Gods? It sounds—”
    “Oh, no! The best people will be in Boxes! Or possibly in the Stalls!”
    Agnes pointed.
    “Who’s down there? They must get a good view—”
    “Don’t be silly!! That’s the Pit!! That’s for the musicians!!”
    “Well, that makes sense, anyway. Er. Which one’s Box Eight?”
    “I don’t know! But they say if ever they sell seats in Box Eight there’ll be a dreadful tragedy!! Isn’t that romantic?!”
    For some reason Agnes’s practical eye was drawn to the huge chandelier that hung over the auditorium like a fantastic sea monster. Its thick rope disappeared into the darkness near the ceiling.
    The glass chimes tinkled.
    Another flare of that certain power which Agnes did her best to suppress at every turn flashed a treacherous image across her mind.
    “That looks like an accident waiting to happen if ever I saw one,” she mumbled.
    “I’m sure it’s perfectly safe!!” trilled Christine. “I’m sure they wouldn’t allow—”
    A chord rolled out, shaking the stage. The chandelier tinkled, and more dust came down.
    “What was that?” said Agnes.
    “It was the organ!! It’s so big it’s behind the stage!! Come on, let’s go and see!!”
    Other members of the staff were hurrying toward the organ. There was an overturned bucket nearby, and a spreading pool of green paint.
    A carpenter reached past Agnes and picked up an envelope that was lying on the organ seat.
    “It’s for the boss,” he said.
    “When it’s my mail, the postman usually just knocks,” said a ballerina, and giggled.
    Agnes looked up. Ropes swung lazily in the musty darkness. For a moment she thought she saw a flash of white, and then it was gone.
    There was a shape, just visible, tangled in the ropes.
    Something wet and sticky dripped down and splashed on the keyboard.
    People were already screaming when Agnes reached past, dipped her finger in the growing puddle, and sniffed.
    “It’s blood!” said the carpenter.
    “It’s blood, isn’t it?” said a musician.
    “Blood!!” screamed Christine. “Blood!!”
    It was Agnes’s terrible fate to keep her head in a crisis. She sniffed her finger again.
    “It’s turpentine,” said Agnes. “Er. Sorry. Is that wrong?”
    Up in the tangle of ropes, the figure moaned.
    “Shouldn’t we get him down?” she added.

    Cando Cutoff was a humble woodcutter. He wasn’t humble because he was a woodcutter. He would still have been quite humble if he’d owned five logging mills. He was just naturally humble.
    And he was unpretentiously stacking some logs at the point where the Lancre road met the main mountain road when he saw a farm cart