Page 8 of Potion Sickness

Mayor Blackwood was cast as Duncan, and he’s playing the King of Scotland as though… well, as though it’s a mayoral campaign. He enters waving. He has, I’m told, asked twice whether Duncan could shake hands with the front row on his way in. He was twice refused.

Tonight he strides downstage , spreads his arms at the painted castle, and delivers one of his famous lines… or at least delivers the start of it. “This castle hath a pleasant⁠—”

Before he can finish his sentence, the cauldron starts producing fog and doesn’t stop.

It’s been sitting cold on stage right since the witches’ scene ended half an hour ago, holding six inches of water, a rubber frog, and whatever Dorcas added “for the smell.” The fog machine, which is supposed to be emanating a low creep of haze around the kettle’s base, is now instead pouring out columns of smoke and, for some reason, making a horrible sound that somewhat resembles the honk of a startled goose.

Moonbeam says, off-stage and off-script but in character, “Sisters, is this us?” and then the leading edge of the fog bank rolls off the stage apron and into the front row, where Skye disappears entirely with a small shriek.

“Cody!” Vivian is on her feet. “Cody, kill it!”

“It’s not— The button’s not—” says Cody’s voice from somewhere inside the cloud. There’s a pop from the direction of the light board, and the stage lights die and then the work lights die. The hall drops into darkness save for the red EXIT signs and the rectangle of Skye’s phone glowing from inside the fog like a jellyfish.

“WHO,” says Englebert, from the blackness, “SAID THE NAME?”

“Six fifty-two,” Emma reports from the audience by penlight. “I won’t name names. But I heard it.”

Englebert has made his way to the stage. The emergency lights have shuddered on by now, dim and orange, and they catch him at the edge, above the fog, tail lashing, addressing the entire hall.

“How many times,” he says, into the half-dark. He exaggerates every syllable. I hear it end on the downbeat.

“How many times must I entreat this room? The play is called the SCOTTISH PLAY indoors.”

Pru, who has come up beside me, whispers, “Oh no. Is he about to lecture us in⁠—”

“I think he is,” I nod.

“Is this a fog I see before me now?” he continues. “Nay, it is but a plague invited in by careless mortal lips and loosened tongues.” He paces back and forth as he speaks. “One rule. ONE rule I set before this troupe: thou shalt not speak the name beneath this roof — and lo, the fourth wall FALLS. The kettle SPEAKS. Out, out, damned cast! Get thee outside, turn thrice and spit and swear and knock and PRAY.”

He stops, but doesn’t break eye contact with the room. He’s breathing hard.

“That last part wasn’t pentameter,” Emma says quietly, checking her fingers.

“IT WAS TROCHAIC FOR EMPHASIS.”

Mayor Blackwood — the sitting mayor of Duskboro, King Duncan of Scotland — looks around the dark hall at his constituents, sighs, and walks up the aisle toward the lobby doors.

“For the record,” he says, passing my seat. “I’m only doing this for morale.”

“Six fifty-two p.m.,” I say. “You said the name. Noted.”

Through the lobby windows, in the last blue of the evening, the town’s chief executive turns three times in the parking lot, spits into the hedge, says a word I will be paraphrasing for a regional family magazine, and knocks on the Community Center door to be let back in.

Somewhere behind me in the fog, Dana strikes a match and lights an emergency lantern she’s apparently been keeping under the ticket table.

“I suppose we’ll call this intermission,” she says.

CHAPTER 3

The Hearth & Stone has hosted exactly one other going-away party since it opened, and I know this because Bert Fisk, the town historian, announces it before anyone has the chance to order any drinks.

“The last one was for Pastor Whitton, in 1989,” he says, “when he took the posting in Burlington. We had a sheet cake with his face on it, which was a mistake, because nobody wanted to be the one to cut into his face, and so the cake sat there untouched until Marjorie Blackwood — that’s the Mayor’s aunt, not his mother, his mother is Miriam, people confuse them, you see, understandably, as they’re twins — but Marjorie took the knife and said, ‘He’s leaving, he can spare a cheek.’ Wonderful woman. Terrible at bridge.”

“To Marjorie,” Rupert Buchanan says, raising his glass, and half the table joins him in drinking to a woman most of us have never met.

Four months of research and one finished dissertation chapter later, Rupert is going home. He’s documented Duskboro’s founding families within an inch of their lives, and now he’s driving back to Pennsylvania to write it all down properly.

The whole town, of course, has come to see him off. Half of us came straight from rehearsal. Jackie Chambers has a sword belt on over jeans. Ms. Pelham’s wig is shoved haphazardly in her purse.