An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe Page A

till you went to sleep, so they could raid your peanut butter.
    By the middle of the first act, she had been in the wings for ten minutes at least, peering out at the audience (the lack thereof, really) through the spy hole and more than prepared to make her entrance as Veronica’s dearest friend, Mildred. The usual lines spoken in response to the usual cues from the usual people.
    Except that when she stepped out onstage something was very different. . . .
    A lot of things, really. The theater was the same and the play was the same, but . . .
    For one thing, Alexis Cabana was looking daggers at her. The eyes above that mocking smile wanted to kill, and that was utterly and completely new.
    For another, Bruce Sandoz’s eyes were devouring her alive. He was (his eyes declared) a famished lion. She was a strawberry ice cream cone. When he licked his lips, Cassie wrote and underlined a mental sticky to lock her dressing-room door.
    For a third, the play had become far more serious and real, a real life—
hers
—watched not at all strangely by several hundred people sitting in the dark. A real life (still hers) in which she herself was the center of every silent watcher’s attention.
    Brad Kingsley was determined that he and Jane Simmons would tour the moons of Jupiter in his new hopper on their honeymoon; while she, knowing all they risked, was equally determined to stop them. Sorrow, fear, and determination poured from her lips unbidden, a triple stream that filled the theater with wailing ghosts and the echoing threats of drums.
    She stole a glance at the audience while Brad was arguing and stamping around. A second-row seat that had been empty a minute before was occupied now—occupied by a big soft-faced man who wore glasses.
    A man she knew at once.
    When she had exited, she used the peephole again. Reis was no longer in the audience. Had she imagined him?
    S EURAT strangled her—Act Two, Scene Two—and she lay gasping and trembling on the darkened stage until he helped her rise and supported her as he led her into the wings. In real life, Donny Duke was small and swishy and reeked of Nuit de Marseilles; but Cassie clung to him until he had to leave to take his bow.
    There was a scattering of polite applause.
    Hers came after his.
“And now,”
India Dempster’s voice echoed from the walls,
“Mildred Norcott, Kingsport’s own Cassie Casey!”
The applause rose as surf rises when a storm races toward the coast. In less than half a minute it was thunder. A man stood up, and another, and another. Women were rising as well, smiling and clapping. Someone was slamming something hard against the back of a seat. Somewhere a woman with a fine, strong contralto called, “Brava! Oh, brava!”
    Cassie bowed and bowed again, and fled to the wings, only to be grappled by Mickey, the stage manager, and thrust out onstage once more.
    At last it was over. Bruce Sandoz came out, the roar subsided, and the audience resumed its seats. By the time Alexis took her bow, the theater seemed almost silent.
    The tiny, dirty dressing room that Cassie had always detested had become a place of refuge. She shut and bolted the door and sat down before the smeared mirror, ignoring both burned-out bulbs.
    The woman who stared back at her was herself—was her true self, and not the foreign and slightly shoddy knockoff who had looked at her from a thousand other mirrors. “I am
me
,” she said, and only afterward realized shehad spoken aloud. Before the mirror, she removed her stage makeup and combed and brushed her hair. That done, she stripped and practically bathed in her favorite cologne, a baptism of the new self by the new self: a ritual cleansing in Lily Delight performed while someone tapped very softly at her door.
    When it was complete she called, “Just a minute! I have to put on a robe.”
    With the robe in place and securely tied, she opened the door.
    “Miss Casey.” A small, gray woman smiled hesitantly, bobbing her head.