In the Middle of the Night (6 page)

On the way to the Globe early that afternoon, he was hurried along by brisk howling winds that shook leaves from their branches, creating a snowfall of many colors.
Low clouds were heavy with rain that maybe would come later. Perfect weather for Halloween and a mysterious magic show.

When he arrived at the theater, Mr. Zarbor was talking to the six high-school kids he had hired to help out that afternoon. Although they were students at Wickburg Regional, John Paul did not recognize any of them. Four boys and two girls. His eyes were immediately drawn to a slender, blond girl whose hair flowed to her shoulders. Her eyes were a deep dark brown, in sharp contrast to her hair. A pang pierced his heart. He was always drawn to impossible loves, those always out of reach: movie stars, cheerleaders at football games, lovely girls walking down the street.

“Ah, you’re here,” Mr. Zarbor said, spotting John Paul. Then to the high schoolers, “This is your boss. He will be in charge for the afternoon. John Paul Colbert.”

Blushing furiously, John Paul faced his small audience. He tried to avoid looking at the beautiful blonde, afraid he would not be able to speak at all. The four boys were tall and gangly, probably basketball players. The other girl was small and dark-haired and seemed nervous, clearing her throat, tiny hands touching her cheeks, her nose, her hair.

Mr. Zarbor had rehearsed the instructions with him. They were simple assignments, thank goodness.

Taking a deep breath, he told the four boys that they were assigned to general duties: watching the children, helping them find seats (some were only five or six years old), keeping an eye out for older troublemakers. He realized
he was making a speech. He told himself to watch his contractions.

“Don’t scold the young children,” he said, conscious that he had avoided
do not.
“They will be excited but will settle down after a while.” He had missed
they’ll
, had used
they will
.

Turning to the girls, he was crushed to find the beautiful one stifling a yawn. The other girl stared at him intently, frowning. He concentrated on her. The girls would be in charge of the candy counter before the show started. Candy and popcorn were free but the children needed coupons to obtain them. Later, the girls would patrol the aisles with the boys, making sure the children were safe, looking for children who might have become sick. Who knows?

The boys asked a few simple questions. He answered them without wasting words, watching his contractions.

Ten minutes later, and forty-five minutes before curtain time, the children arrived in six big orange buses. They marched into the theater in orderly fashion, as if taking part in a parade. Boys with ties, hair neatly combed. Girls in dresses. Mostly young children, the oldest eleven or twelve. All of them trying to suppress their excitement but suddenly breaking ranks, whooping and yelling with sheer delight. “They go crazy at first but they settle down after a while,” Mr. Zarbor had told him.

The hired boys did their best to guide the children to their seats and to maintain some kind of order. But order was not the order of the day. The children ran all over the place, rushing for the front rows, climbing over seats, saving places for friends, pushing and shoving, all in great
good spirits. In the lobby, the two high-school girls worked frantically as the children stormed the candy counter as if it were a fort to be taken.

John Paul was here, there and everywhere. Answering questions, giving directions to the rest rooms. Called to the candy counter to settle an argument: Some children had not been issued coupons or had forgotten to bring them. Others had five or six. The rule had been two coupons per child, don’t spend them both at once. The girls looked at him desperately. “Only fifteen minutes to go,” he consoled them. The lights blinked, once, twice, three times. He was wrong. “Ten minutes to go,” he told the girls. Mr. Zarbor had allowed ten minutes for the children to settle down. Which they did quickly, finding their seats, speaking in whispers, although a few could not resist throwing popcorn around.

“Always a mistake, the popcorn,” Mr. Zarbor told John Paul as they stood down front near the stage. “A big cleanup job. But what’s a show without popcorn?”

Glancing at his watch, Mr. Zarbor said: “Five minutes more. Then the big bang …”

John Paul knew what Mr. Zarbor meant. Martini the Magnificent was especially proud of his dramatic opening. First a big boom, like an explosion, which never failed, he said, to bring on a stunning silence. Then total darkness. So dark the audience would not see the curtain silently part and open. Then a small dim light onstage, followed by another. Then another. Pinpoints of light like tiny stars winking in a darkened sky. Finally, Martini would appear as if suspended in the darkness. And the show would commence.

A mysterious and magic moment occurs a few minutes before a stage show begins, as if a silent signal has been sent. John Paul had seen this happen a number of times. It was happening now. The theater became quiet, a spooky kind of quiet. There was no clock in the theater and most of the children did not have watches, but they sensed that the show was about to start. They were instantly subdued, as if every child in the place had taken a deep breath and was holding it.

Awed by the stillness, John Paul was startled when Mr. Zarbor touched his arm. “What was that?” Mr. Zarbor asked. His voice a whisper in the quietness.

John Paul frowned. Did he mean the sudden absence of sound? No, something else. “Listen.” Now John Paul heard something. But what? A slow creaking sound. He thought, for some reason, of a ship tearing loose from its mooring, its deck creaking eerily, although he had never heard such a sound before—unless he’d heard it in a movie.

The sound again. Louder.

He and Mr. Zarbor exchanged puzzled looks.

The noise: this time like a huge nail being pulled from a board by a hammer. Crazy, but that is what it sounded like to him. A creaking, yanking noise. From the balcony.

John Paul looked, and so did Mr. Zarbor. John Paul thought some kids might have crept up there and were fooling around in the junk and debris.

“Better go see,” Mr. Zarbor said.

Dark up there, as usual. “I do not have my flashlight,” John Paul said.

“Here.” Mr. Zarbor handed him a book of matches.

Reluctantly, John Paul made his way up the center
aisle and through the lobby, then ascended the soiled carpeted steps to the balcony. The giant chandelier hanging from the ceiling gave no light: the bulbs had long ago burned out. He squinted into the semidarkness at the accumulation of junk. Old newspapers, cartons, piles of rags, old rolled-up posters. Saw no one. Was startled by that strange creaking sound almost beneath his feet. Much louder than before.

Then: the explosion from the stage as the show began, the sound booming through the air, banging against the walls, echoing from the high ceiling. The delighted cries and gasps of the children. Then darkness. And silence.

John Paul blinked: like being struck blind, this utter darkness.

A movement beneath his feet as if he were standing on a ship that was leaving the dock.

He struck a match, missed the first time, tried again. The flame created a small bright cave in the darkness. Suddenly the entire matchbook caught fire, because he had held the flaming match too close to the others. Pain singed his palm. He dropped the matchbook, watched it flare toward the floor and, to his horror, saw it ignite a ribbon of crepe paper draped over a cardboard box.

He tried to stamp out the flame but was thrown off-balance as the floor swayed beneath his feet.

“Fire!” someone yelled from the stage. Someone who saw the flames and knew this was not part of the show’s opening. The floor lurched again, definite this time. The impossible thought,
earthquake
, came to his mind.

“Fire!” The voice now a scream filled with terror.

The audience did not respond, while all the time the
flames were spreading to a pile of newspapers and another cardboard box. Smoke erupted, rolling between the seats.

“Fire!” This time, no doubt at all. The sheer terror in that voice began a stirring down below. John Paul, in panic, advanced a foot or two but the floor shifted violently under his feet, rumbling, crackling, sending him reeling, his arms flailing helplessly.

He tried desperately to regain his balance, smelled the stench of smoke and heard the screams of children. Standing almost on tiptoe, perched like a bird about to take flight, he felt the floor, with a terrible shudder, give way beneath his feet.

H
e did not wake up all at once but drifted in and out of consciousness. All he remembered later was a rising and falling, a reaching up toward lights that blinded his eyes and plunging down again into darkness. Then, voices, mumbling words he could not understand. Different voices, sharp and loud then soft and murmuring, his mother’s voice once, speaking in French. Then down again into a darkness that was sweet and safe.

Next came the pain. His head throbbed with the pain, pulsed with it, as if he were wearing a steel helmet that was too small for his head, too tight, threatening to crush his skull. His skull a mass of pain.

Sometimes the pain receded and went away, and he would drift lazily, carried on gentle waves. When he’d try to move with the waves, he’d find himself paralyzed,
trapped, his arms pinned down. He was aware of being connected to something.
Connected
, as if he were part of some terrible machinery. That’s when the panic began, screaming inside him. Until the darkness came. Or maybe the pain. Even the pain was better than the panic.

At some point he began to dream. Visions filled the darkness, shoutings filled his ears. He was being chased, pursued, tracked down. Shadows behind him, footsteps coming closer, closer. Children shouting and crying. Something terrible chasing him, pursuing him, coming closer while all the time the children cried …

 … Until he opened his eyes, blinking against the brightness of daylight slashing at his eyeballs. He quickly closed them again, seeking the comfort and safety of the dark.

Next time he woke up, he found his mother and father looking down at him as if from a great distance, their eyes wide with concern and worry. They seemed to be looking at him through a microscope as he lay pinned down on some Biology I glass slide.

He knew instantly that he was in a hospital bed and that the helmet on his head was not a helmet at all but bandages. His arm was connected to a nearby monitor that beeped and hummed. Another tube was connected to an upside-down bottle suspended in the air. His head did not hurt much at the moment. There was only a dull ache. But his eyes still stung from the brightness.

His mother’s eyes were wet with tears. She kept saying his name over and over. “
Jean-Paul … Jean-Paul
 …”
In the French way. She used to croon him to sleep murmuring his name. But such sorrow in her voice now. He had never heard such sorrow in her voice.

He wanted to reassure her.
I am fine, Mama, I am fine.
But he was not certain if he was fine or not, and the pressure on his skull became intense and began to brighten with pain.

“Take it easy, John Paul,” his father said, speaking in English tinged with the old Canadian accent. “Easy, easy …” He never spoke French anymore.

“Am I okay?” he asked, his voice surprisingly thin. He felt the panic beginning again, a shivering in his spine because they were looking at him seriously, as if they did not recognize him as their son. “Am I going to die?”

“
Non
 … 
non … non
 …,” his mother whispered, shaking her head vigorously and bending to kiss him wetly on the cheek.

“You were hurt,” his father said. “A concussion—serious, yes, but a fracture, no. Enough to put you out for a few days.”

“How long?” John Paul asked. “How many days?”

His father lifted his shoulders, grimaced, as if reluctant to answer. “Six days—but you are back with us now. That is all that counts.”

“That is all?”

But that was not all, because suddenly everything that had happened came back to him, and he heard again the crackle of flames, saw that snake of fire uncoiling at his feet and, God, the balcony coming apart under his feet and
then, the smoke and flames and the screaming children below—loud, then faint, fainter.

He drifted mercifully into the sweet safety of the dark again.

The next time he opened his eyes his parents were gone. He was flat on his back looking up at the ceiling, which had a swirling pattern, like waves frozen in an arctic ocean. He moved his head tentatively and was relieved to find that his bad headache had disappeared. Only the strange pressure remained. He heard the low murmur of the monitor close by and raised himself on one elbow to look at it.

A man sitting in a chair by the window rose to his feet and approached the bed. The man was about his father’s age but taller, with massive shoulders and a craggy face with deep lines etched into the flesh like Mr. Zarbor. His eyes focused on John Paul as if trying to read his mind, as if, in fact, he
could
read his mind.

“How are you, John Paul?” he asked, his voice as gentle as his eyes were sharp.

John Paul was suddenly afraid to speak.

“Do you feel well enough to answer some questions?”

Still kindly, still gentle, but John Paul tensed, making his arms and legs rigid, holding his body in check. He became aware of his heart beating, like a caged thing in his ribs. Before he could answer, the man said: “My name is Adam Polansky. I am the public safety commissioner for the city of Wickburg. I have been placed in charge of the investigation of the tragic events at the Globe Theater.” He
spoke formally, as if complying with some rule about properly announcing his name and purpose. Then gently again: “I’d appreciate anything you can tell me about what happened that day.”

John Paul was afraid to speak. As if he had something to hide, something to be ashamed of.

“I know this is difficult for you but it’s very important for our investigation …”