Page 19 of Potion Sickness

“Damien?” she says instead.

He looks toward her and says, in a small, unprojected voice, “mebbe,” and folds sideways onto the stage.

The room holds still for one second, everyone waiting for him to stand back up. Jackie crosses to him first and turns him over. Corn syrup blood smears his cheek.

“He’s out,” she says. “Somebody — he’s out.”

Pru gets off her chair and on her knees beside him, her crown sliding loose. Vivian is up on the stage stairs faster than I’ve ever seen someone move in such high heels. A shriek comes from the front row before anyone else has caught up, and Skye is scrambling up the apron.

“He’s breathing,” Pru says, two fingers at his throat. “His pulse is fine. Damien. Damien.” She takes his jaw and turns his face to her, and pinches his ear, hard. Nothing. His face is slack and unbothered.

“Call 911,” Mayor Blackwood says.

“Call Annabel,” Pru says. “This is obviously outside the realm of conventional medicine.”

Besides, the county ambulance is twenty-five minutes away on a good night. Annabel is six.

Annabel answers quickly. I explain the situation and she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions. “Don’t move him. Don’t give him anything. I’m coming.”

Moonbeam attempts to organize a healing circle and gets four takers. Ms. Pelham announces that this is the curse, that it was always going to be the curse, that her cousin saw a production in Bangor in 1981 where a Macduff went through the stage. Two of the lords go out the lobby doors without being sent and complete the ritual, preemptively. Cody brings up every light in the building.

Tiffany finds me with my notepad out. “I told you,” she says. “Things happen to people in this play.”

Emma stands on her chair with her clipboard and pitches her voice to carry, which she presumably learned from Englebert.

“Nobody said it.” She holds the log up. “I’ve been here since six. Nobody said the name. Not once, all night.” She looks around the gym at the adults, waiting for this to matter to someone.

Englebert hasn’t left the wings. He’s sitting at the edge of the stage with his tail wrapped over his feet, saying nothing.

* * *

Annabel comes through the lobby doors in a raincoat over pajamas and garden clogs, carrying a canvas bag. She kneels at Damien’s side and works without talking.

She takes his pulse at the wrist and the throat. She thumbs back an eyelid and watches, then leans down close over his mouth and smells his breath.

“He’s stable,” she says. Skye makes a sound like a hiccup and sits down hard on the stage stairs. “His breathing is deep and even. Heart’s slow but strong. He’s not in danger tonight, but I don’t know why he won’t wake up. It isn’t presenting like a stroke. It doesn’t seem like he’s just fainted. People who faint come back when you pinch them.”

“Can you fix him?” Skye asks. Her mascara is everywhere. “You can fix him, right? You do… remedies, right? He just needs, like, a remedy.”

“I need to understand what’s wrong before I can help him,” Annabel says.

The Mayor does something actually useful, which is call Damien’s mother. It’s decided that he’ll be moved home to the Carter estate on Quarry Road, and Annabel will go with him tonight and stay. They carry him out on the lid of the props crate, cape trailing, Skye holding his hand the whole way.

The lobby doors swing shut behind the stretcher party, and Englebert walks out of the wings to center stage, into the light Cody hasn’t killed. He addresses the remaining company from approximately the spot where Damien went down.

“He is alive,” Englebert says. “And Annabel says he is in no danger. I wish it to be noted that I never doubted it.” He allows the relief a respectful two seconds. “And so, having established that our Macbeth will live, I must now raise, with all tenderness, the related matter, which is that we go live in TWO WEEKS.”

“Englebert,” Vivian says.

“The house is SOLD, Vivian. Every night. There is a WAITING LIST.” He’s pacing the apron now, tail going like a metronome. “Four centuries this play has eaten its leading cast, and four centuries the theatre has answered with one sentence, the oldest vow we have: the show must go on. It went on in plague years. It went on in the Blitz. In 1974 I personally watched a Peter Pan⁠—”

“You told us about the Peter Pan,” Hannah says.

“Then you know what is POSSIBLE.” He stops, sits, and collects himself. “I am simply observing that every soul in this room has heard Macbeth’s lines nightly for weeks. That the role is, at its core, a man being loudly told what to do by forces beyond his understanding, an experience with which this entire company is intimately familiar. And that I” —he lifts his chin— “know every word of this play, in order, and have known them since before any of you were born.”

“You’re a cat,” Jackie says.

“Olivier was shorter than people remember.”