The first hour of writing the play was spent arguing.
"No." Finch pushed away the third draft and tapped the boards with a transparent finger. "This ending of yours is comic. Dreamless Street is an elegy in seven acts. An upward turn in the final act violates the form—"
"Form is for people who can write an ending," Sharlo said without ceremony. "You've starved for thirty years guarding yours. And I didn't write an 'upward turn.' I wrote 'alive.' Read it yourself: the old apothecary returns every dream he collected, one by one, then closes his shop. What is uplifting about that? His life's trade is ruined. He stands in an empty shop with nothing left."
"Nothing left," Finch murmured. "And then? Your draft stops there."
"It stops because I'm waiting for you to accept it." Sharlo thrust the pen back into his hand. "The rule of collaboration: one line each; fail to take the offer and you lose. I've written the old man into an empty shop. Elias Finch—accept."
Finch took the pen but did not set it down. He stared at the paper, then spoke suddenly, his voice low as if to himself.
"Do you know, I have seen the seventh act. The perfect version. The candle showed it to me the night I burned it."
Sharlo did not hurry him.
"I remember its beginning even now." Finch looked through the draft and thirty years into the past. "In the perfect version, the old shopkeeper never closes. He realises that dreams can never all be collected and the human heart can never be filled, so he opens branch after branch and takes his trade in dreams across the continent. In the end, he stands at the summit of a high tower, gazes down over ten thousand lighted homes, and delivers the final line of the play: 'Now every dream beneath heaven is mine to guard.'"
He stopped and straightened his crooked spectacles.
"Curtain. Magnificent, exact, immense in vision. Every seed comes to fruition; every rhyme falls precisely where it should. Halfway through copying it, my hand was trembling. I thought, What have I done to deserve the ability to write such an ending?"
Finch slowly turned to Sharlo. "Thirty years. I have recited that half-act thousands of times in my head, and each time it has left me colder. Young man, do you know what is wrong with it?"
"Tell me."
"It returns nothing," Finch said, one word at a time. "In the perfect version, not one of the dreams taken away is ever returned. The old shopkeeper wins; the tower rises; the line rings like a triumph. But the two hundred poor people who told him their dreams never appear again. They were only steps. The ending the candle showed me was a hymn of victory—and hymns of victory never settle their debts."
He lowered his head. At last, the nib touched paper.
"I spent four years writing Dreamless Street about poor people telling one another the last things they possessed. The candle nearly deceived me. Everything in its ending was right, except that it turned the play into its own opposite."
His transparent fingers tightened. "So I did not fail for thirty years because my gift had run dry. Something inside me kept bracing against that half-act. It refused to copy, but did not know the road elsewhere. Not until you wrote just now: the old man returns the dreams one by one."
He raised his eyes. Something Sharlo had never seen before burned in their weary stubbornness.
"Return them. Two words. Thirty years." Elias Finch said, "Accepted."
Finch held the old ebony pen poised above the paper for a very long time.
The backstage candle did not stir. Far away, in some unseen place, came the faint breathing of actors waiting in the fog for their cue. Every sleepwalker in the city had gathered tonight at the edge of the play, waiting for the final act to begin rehearsal.
The nib descended. This time, ink appeared on the page.
"The old shopkeeper stands in his empty shop," Finch murmured as he wrote, his voice growing steadier, "and discovers that he has forgotten one thing. After a lifetime collecting dreams, he remembers every one of them perfectly, yet cannot remember the last year in which he dreamed himself. He closes the shop door, climbs upstairs, and lies down. For the first time in sixty years, he does not keep vigil over someone else's dream. He sleeps."
"Good acceptance." Sharlo snatched the pen. "Then the heroine knocks at the door—to repay the price of her medicine. No one answers. She looks through the window—"
"And sees the old man asleep." Finch seized the pen back, his eyes alight behind his spectacles. "Sleeping like a child. She does not knock again. She leaves the money on the sill and weighs it down with something—"
"Her dream," they said together.
"She tells again the dream she once traded for medicine, tells it to the windowsill." Finch wrote at a furious pace, the ink whispering across the page. "She tells of summer, of teaching her child to swim, of warm water. Each dream told is one dream fewer—but tell it to the right person, and each dream told becomes one dream more. Everyone in the street files past the window, each leaving one dream, like the fulfilment of a vow. The snow stops. Act Seven. Curtain—"
The nib stopped.
Finch stared at the page, breathing fast. Only one line remained. By the laws of the elegiac form, the final act required a "valediction" before the curtain fell: the last words of the play, the final nail in its coffin. For thirty years, that final nail had been the death of him.
"Can't write it?" Sharlo asked.
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"Can't write it." Finch's voice trembled. "Thirty years. Every time I reach this line—"
"Because it isn't yours to write." Sharlo turned the notebook toward himself and took the pen. "That line belongs to the audience. The performance ends, they step out of the theatre into the cold, turn up their collars, and mutter one sentence under their breath—that is the true valediction. An author cannot write it. He can only overhear it. As luck would have it, one member of your audience is seated here tonight."
He stood, went to the edge of the wing, and called into the darkness before the stage.
"The lady in the reserved seat! Act Seven is missing a line. When the heroine leaves her dream on the windowsill, what does she say?"
Deep in the dark, from the direction of the reserved seat, there was silence for several seconds.
Then Viola Raven's voice carried to the stage. Not loud, but perfectly clear, bearing the rasp of six sleepless years and the washed-clean purity of someone who had only just wept.
"She says—'Shopkeeper, this time I'll keep watch. You sleep.'"
Onstage, Elias Finch stood rigid for a very long time, pen in hand. Then he bent his head and wrote the sentence into the manuscript, one stroke at a time. When the final word was done, he laid the pen down gently, as though setting aside a burden borne for thirty years.
Dreamless Street. Complete text. End.
For the first time in thirty years, the flame of the solitary candle gave a slight tremble.
Before the tremor had faded, applause began.
It was not the full-bodied applause of Sharlo's theatre. This applause was soft and slow, coming from the darkness directly before the stage, one clap at a time. Its rhythm was elegant, courteous, and devoid of feeling—as much a marking of the hour as applause.
Beneath the solitary lamp, Finch's face went transparently white.
"A fine play," said a voice in the dark. Dry, courteous, perfectly enunciated, each word projected like an announcement at the lip of the stage. "Thirty years spent honing one act, and this is the resolution you deliver. Mr. Finch, allow me, as a fellow professional, to offer my respects."
The blood in Sharlo's veins froze by slow degrees.
He knew that voice. Every midnight, during the minute his pocket watch stopped, he had heard it for three months—the announcing voice in the grey-white theatre. But now it was not in his dreams. It stood deep within the audience of Dreamless Street, somewhere in the darkness rows behind Viola's reserved seat, like a late-arriving spectator utterly sure of his welcome.
The Stage Announcer.
"This stage of yours," Sharlo said through a tightened throat, stepping to the apron, "who sold you a ticket?"
"Ah, the gentleman without a script." The voice inclined toward him, its tone almost intimate with familiarity. "No ticket is necessary. Professionals traditionally watch from the standing room—in the wings."
It paused. "Besides, I did not come to watch tonight. I came to deliver an offer of employment."
Something fluttered out of the darkness and onto the stage. A playbill, gilt and elegant, made to the Dirge Society's pattern. Its heading, however, was blank. The place where the title should have been waited empty, like a contract awaiting a signature.
"Mr. Elias Finch." The Stage Announcer turned toward the transparent man at centre stage, every word distinct.
"The Eighth Voice of the Dirge Society has stood vacant for three hundred years. The Dreamwright's seat has waited three hundred years for a gentleman worthy to occupy it. We have all observed your predicament: once the work is finished, so are you. 'The Dreamwright never was.' When the curtain falls upon Act Seven, you will vanish entirely. That account was signed the moment you burned the candle."
"But an account can be transferred."
The voice grew gentle, as gentle as Mrs. Margot urging someone to pawn an attachment.
"Join us. Take the seat of the Eighth Voice. What we offer is not mere survival, but perpetuity. A theatre without end. A schedule without end. An audience that will never finish watching your work. Every play you write will have cities across the continent for its stages and millions of people for its actors. Mr. Finch, to burn away a genius like you would be the dull world's greatest waste in three hundred years. Sign your name. Write whatever title you please. From this day onward, write as many seventh acts as you desire."
Onstage, Finch looked down at the blank playbill beside his feet.
His transparent fingers trembled slightly.
Sharlo neither moved nor spoke. Ten sentences crowded his throat—that is a trap, those are puppet strings, you will become Bassoon, become Sweet Voice, become wax—but he did not say one. For suddenly he understood the weight of this moment: this was Finch's seventh act.
The choice once faced by the old shopkeeper in the play now stood unchanged before the author himself. If someone answered for him, it would become yet another scripted play.
Viola said nothing from the reserved seat. The entire unseen theatre, together with all the city's sleepwalkers waiting in the fog, held its breath.
Elias Finch bent down and picked up the playbill.
He brought it close to the solitary candle and examined it by the light, slowly and minutely, like an old bookkeeper auditing a contract. Then he raised his head toward the deep darkness and straightened his crooked spectacles.
"A schedule without end," he said slowly. "Millions of actors. An inexhaustible audience. Sir, when I hid in the wings thirty years ago counting empty seats, I would not have dared dream of the terms you offer."
"So I should like to ask one question. Only one."
He raised the stack of completed pages in his hand—the full text of Dreamless Street.
"You listened to Act Seven from beginning to end just now, out there in the darkness." Finch's voice was soft, but each word nailed itself into the theatre's silence. "I ask only this—did you weep?"
For the first time, the darkness fell silent.
The voice that was always composed, always courteous, paused for two unmistakable seconds before those three words.
"...It is a fine play," it said at last.
"Thank you." Finch nodded, as though he had received every answer he required. "You heard an entire act and remembered only that it was 'fine.' The young lady below heard half and supplied my heroine's final line. Sir, that is why I will not join your Society—"
He opened his hand. The blank playbill slipped through his transparent fingers. Before it touched the boards, it caught fire without a sound and burned to a thread of ash in the air.
"You have an eternal audience," Elias Finch said. "But not one of them is willing to speak for my characters."
Deep in the darkness, there was a long silence.
"A pity." The Stage Announcer's voice returned, composed as ever, though its intimacy had withdrawn, revealing the smooth cold surface beneath. "Three hundred years, and now the wait begins again. Very well, Mr. Finch. I wish you a pleasant final curtain. As for you—"
The voice shifted direction and settled, neither lightly nor heavily, upon Sharlo.
"Gentleman without a script. You borrowed my stage; the favour enters the ledger. We shall meet again—next production, One Night of Dusk."
It paused, like the Stage Announcer closing its programme. "Tell me: when that night comes, who will save the show?"
The voice dissolved. Darkness became ordinary darkness again.
Sharlo stood at the apron, his shirt soaked with cold sweat down the back. Finch came beside him and followed his gaze into the now-empty audience.
"Old acquaintance?" he asked softly.
"I don't know," Sharlo said hoarsely. "It uses the voice that announces in my theatre. Either it is my landlord, or—" He did not finish.
Finch studied him for a moment, then rolled up the manuscript and tapped Sharlo lightly on the chest with it, adopting the tone of an elder who had survived the road ahead.
"Young man, remember how I answered tonight. When it brings you an offer one day—ask whether your play ever made it weep."
He returned to the solitary candle, squared the manuscript, and rubbed his transparent hands together.
"Enough conversation." The brightest light in thirty years kindled in his eyes. "Come. We have business to conduct. The premiere you promised me—when, where, and what price for a ticket?"