Backstage lay beyond the door.
The backstage of any theatre: a narrow passage, scenery flats leaning against the wall, ropes and pulleys crossing in the darkness overhead, a row of dressing mirrors under cloth. Flames on the candelabra stood perfectly still, as if painted. Sharlo stepped across the threshold.
The door closed softly behind him, and after it closed it ceased to exist. When he turned, he saw a wall crowded with old costumes.
Costumes. When the candlelight showed him what they were, his scalp tightened.
The apothecary's robe. The seamstress's apron. The night watchman's cloak from the snowbound street.
Every garment was pressed, properly hung, and labelled with a little brass plate bearing the character's name. The clothes of every role performed in the fog over thirty years had been put away here.
Light showed at the end of the passage. Sharlo followed it and increasingly felt that the corridor was impossibly long. Backstage passages naturally led to the wings, yet this one continued after two hundred paces. The scenery flats on either side grew older; the fashions of the costumes receded in time.
He understood. He was walking inward, and he was walking backward. Back thirty years.
Halfway along, a small room opened off the passage. Its door stood wide. Sharlo looked inside and could not take another step.
The box office. A little selling booth of the sort set just inside a theatre entrance: one small window, a high stool, a shaded lamp. A chalkboard stood on the sill, its neat graceful writing giving that night's production, time, price—one copper tinder—and, on the final line, the number of tickets sold.
SOLD: 0.
The zero was round and heavily drawn, the chalk hesitating at the end to leave one small white dot. For thirty years, the box office had been preserved unchanged in this passage: lamp burning, stool straight, like a carefully tended wound.
A sheet of paper was fastened inside the window. Sharlo leaned closer. A hand-drawn seating plan, all two hundred places rendered in orderly little boxes. Every box contained a name.
He stopped. Two hundred boxes, every one named: the shoemaker's family from the west of the city, someone from the choir, someone from the newspaper, old acquaintances who existed only inside plays. A dense and bustling full house.
But every name was written in the same hand.
At some moment after an opening night without an audience, the playwright had imagined two hundred spectators for his two hundred empty seats, one box at a time. Imagined them taking their places. Imagined them whispering together. Imagined the act in which each would wipe their eyes.
Sharlo stood in the box-office doorway for a long time. He had seen the Dirge Society's wax theatre: forty-nine figures filled with other people's love, the most profane audience he had ever known. The two hundred invented names on this sheet were the purest. The same loneliness; two opposite answers.
He took Grey's copper tinder from his pocket and gently placed it in the payment slot.
"One ticket," he told the empty booth. "Please add a box to the plan."
The shaded lamp flickered softly.
He continued. The scenery on either side grew older. On the wall of the last section hung props: a paper moon, a wooden balance, a chain of locks no key could open. Beneath each, a little label listed the performances in which it had appeared.
The card beneath the paper moon read: Dreamless Street, Act Two, snow scene. Hang on east wall. Note: from the house, it must look real.
From the house, it must look real. Sharlo thought that might stand as the family maxim of everyone in the theatre.
He reached the wings and drew aside the curtain.
A man sat onstage.
At centre stage stood a writing desk piled with manuscript. A solitary lamp burned beside the pages. Beneath it sat a lean man around thirty, wearing an old suit washed pale, the cuffs frayed, crooked spectacles perched on his face. He was writing—or rather his pen hovered over the paper and made the movements of writing.
No ink followed the nib. Not one word. He wrote a line of "nothing," moved down, and wrote another line of "nothing."
At the sound of the curtain, the man looked up.
Only then did Sharlo see his face, and his throat clenched. The face was clear: lean, weary, stubborn and gentle around the eyes, each feature distinct. But taken together, it seemed to lie behind frosted glass.
Stare and its details fell out of memory. Blink once and one had to recognize him anew.
A face the world was forgetting. Thirty years forgotten, and not entirely gone.
"You came." Elias Finch put down the pen and rose. His manner had the restraint of an old-fashioned man of letters. Once upright, he first tugged at his worn cuff. "Forgive the disorder. I have had no visitor backstage in thirty years."
He paused, then added, almost shyly:
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"Outside the door, you spoke my name."
"Elias Finch," Sharlo said again.
At the landing of the name, the man's form sharpened slightly, like one clean stroke drawn through dust on glass. He closed his eyes, his throat moving.
"Thirty years." His voice was soft. "Do you know what it is, young man, to hear one's name spoken? A nail. For thirty years I have been a sheet of paper blown by the wind. Your voice pinned me back to the wall."
He opened his eyes and adjusted his crooked spectacles. "Tell me, then. Why does a man of the authorities enter my backstage at midnight carrying three old objects that hold the stage? I can smell them: old ticket money, an old letter, an old pen."
"Two matters," Sharlo said. "The first is official. Mr. Finch, every night your play borrows citizens from all over the city as players. They have not been harmed. They sleep better, in fact, and we have taken note. But if you borrow people, you owe them rules and terms. The second matter—"
He took Grey's copper tinder from inside his coat, set it on the desk, and pushed it across.
"Private. An old spectator asked me to purchase a ticket. He once saw a play in your theatre thirty years ago. After the curtain he forgot you, and kept forgetting for three decades. His message is that he owes you the price."
Elias Finch stared at the coin worn round.
He reached out. His fingertip hovered above it for a long time, as if afraid to touch. When at last it did, the shoulders of the man whom no one had remembered in thirty years collapsed.
He braced himself on the writing desk and slowly sat. The solitary lamp shone upon him, and Sharlo saw something sift from his face—not tears, but ash. Fine, shining ash like stage dust flaked from his outline and settled on the manuscript.
"Sold: one," he said hoarsely, and smiled. "We are open for business."
They sat at the edge of the stage to talk, like two theatre men after the day's work, their legs hanging above the orchestra pit, the solitary lamp between them.
Finch told the story of his thirty years without order. Order was a luxury to a man who had not spoken with anyone for three decades. But Sharlo was skilled at hearing disorderly stories; it was a fundamental art shared by detectives and improvisers.
Assembled, the account was this:
Thirty years ago, in the rainy season before the premiere, Elias Finch lost the ending while writing Act Seven. The first six acts held four years of his life. The seventh—the conclusion—would not come. He revised it seventeen times and tore up seventeen drafts.
The opening date approached. Posters went up. He locked himself in the attic and stared at blank paper until his eyes bled.
Then a night peddler knocked at the door.
"He sold me a candle," Finch said, as flatly as if telling another man's story. "Grey. He said, Sir, you cannot write it because you are only 'imagining.' Burn this candle and you need not imagine—you may dream it into being. Whatever a Dreamwright dreams need not be written. It becomes true of itself."
Sharlo closed his eyes. An ash candle. Thirty years ago, a peddler of the Dirge Society had walked these same streets.
"I burned it." Finch opened his hands. "That night I 'saw' Act Seven. I did not invent it. I saw it. A perfect ending. Every line felt as though it had always existed; I had only to copy. I was halfway through when dawn came. Opening day came. And then..."
He stopped for a long time.
"Sold: zero." He said the number himself, on behalf of the man he had been thirty years ago. "Two hundred seats. I waited in the wings from an hour before the curtain. Waited until curtain time, then one hour after, then two. I counted the two hundred empty chairs one by one. Do you know what finally broke me? It was not the chairs."
He turned and looked at Sharlo through crooked frames. "It was realizing I could not picture the face of one person who might come. My parents died early. No wife or children. Friends—I wrote for four years and wrote away every friend I had. I stood in the wings trying to think of someone to invite. The world was so large, and I could not find one name in it."
"Elias Finch had lost his audience before the theatre ever burned."
"I did not set the fire that night. It was no natural disaster either." He looked down at his faintly translucent hand.
"The candle's account came due. The title of Dreamwright collects its price very gently: never having existed. A thing no one sees is already little different from a thing that does not exist. I merely lived that truth into my flesh. The fire began in my attic, but it was not truly the theatre that burned. The world was erasing a clerical error."
They sat in silence above the orchestra pit. The flame of the solitary lamp did not move.
"Yet you are still here," Sharlo said at last. "Thirty years, and you still produce plays."
"Because Act Seven has never been performed." Stubbornness entered Finch's voice, the first glimpse of "the author" he had shown all night. "A playwright cannot leave while his play is unfinished. It is not that I refuse to go, young man. It is the rule. Any old hand in any company will tell you. For thirty years I have done one thing: tried to finish Dreamless Street. But—"
He snatched up the stack of manuscript and opened it to the end. Act Seven. Beneath the title, blankness. An entire act of blank paper.
"The ending the candle showed me burned with my existence on the night of the fire. I returned to the rainy season thirty years ago. I cannot write it. I need neither sleep nor food. The city's sleepwalkers are my cast. I have endless nights—and still I cannot write the final act."
Finch's voice lowered, his transparent fingers gripping the edge of the page. "I have rehearsed the first six for thirty years, round after round, polishing them. The hollow of Act Seven waits with its mouth open. Until—"
"Until you found an audience." Sharlo completed the thought, his heart descending little by little. "An audience who never sleeps. Mr. Finch, before I came I could not understand something. Now I do. You do not need Inspector Raven to see the play."
He turned toward the translucent man.
"There is only one way a play without an ending can avoid the final curtain: keep the audience. As long as she sits in the reserved seat, the play is always 'in progress,' and you never have to face the Act Seven you cannot write. You mean to use her six sleepless years to extend your thirty years without a bow."
Finch did not deny it. He adjusted his spectacles and evaded Sharlo's gaze, a writer's embarrassment at being exposed in his voice.
"...She is a very good audience. The only person in thirty years who sees the set. There is light in her eyes when she watches, the kind of light I waited thirty—"
"She will die." Sharlo cut him off, one word at a time. "Her fate-line is: The Wakebound sleeps without end. In your reserved seat, her sleep debt burns ten times as fast as it does outside. Keep her for a year and she will not survive the year. Mr. Finch, if your play can continue only by nailing one spectator to her seat—"
He rose and looked down at the pitiable, dangerous man inside the solitary light, speaking like the fall of a guillotine.
"Then it does not deserve to be called a play. It is a grave. You are not staging a performance. You are staging a burial with company."
The stage was silent as death.
Finch bowed his head. Stage dust sifted from his shoulders. After a long time, he whispered almost inaudibly:
"Then tell me what to do. I cannot write Act Seven. Thirty years, and I cannot write it."
Sharlo looked at him and suddenly smiled. He sat again at the edge of the pit, took out his black notebook and the old ebony pen, uncapped it, opened to a fresh page, and slapped both down on the stage between them.
"What luck," he said. "I am good at nothing else. But I know how to catch a play no one else can catch."
"Elias Finch, thirty-one years old, the unluckiest playwright under heaven—" Sharlo pressed the pen into the transparent hand. "Come on. I will write with you. Tonight. When it is finished, I will find the finest theatre in the world and give you your premiere."