The Rebirth of Wonder Read Online Free Page A

left-hand
balcony stair, wearing a light gray suit and smiling down at
him.
    “ How'd you get in
here?” Art demanded.
    “ Why, the door was
open!”
    “ It was?” Art turned
and stared. “No, it wasn't; I just now unlocked
it.”
    “ Not that one, my
boy, the stage door.”
    Art frowned. He had locked all the doors last
night when he left, hadn't he? He had certainly thought so.
    He remembered checking the front doors before
he walked home, and taking a look down at the big basement door
where the chain and padlock had been securely in place. He had come
out through the stage door – was it possible he hadn't locked it
behind him?
    He thought he had locked
it...
    “ We found it open
when we arrived, so we came inside to look around,” Innisfree
added, helpfully.
    “ We?”
    “ Certainly, we; didn't I tell you? Did you think I was
alone? I'm sure I mentioned the others; after all, what would one
man do with a theater?”
    “ I knew you had a
group,” Art admitted. “The Harbingers of Wonder, or something like
that? But I didn't know you were... I mean, I thought you'd be
coming alone this morning, to sort of plan things out before the
others got here.”
    “ By no means, Arthur!” Innisfree smiled broadly. “Ours
is a cooperative effort, and we must all share in the
planning, if our little production is to have the success we hope
for!”
    Art nodded.
    “ Oh, and it's the Bringers of Wonder, not harbingers,”
Innisfree added.
    The door to the house opened just then, and a
face appeared between the two valves of the big double door. It was
no one Art had ever seen before, a rather tall, thin woman,
obviously Oriental – in fact, without knowing exactly why he
thought so, Art classified her specifically as Chinese. She was
wearing a long, utterly simple white dress – the sort of simplicity
that dress designers charged a fortune for. She wore her hair long
– lush, straight black hair that spilled past her waist, so fine
that it seemed to float about her in a cloud.
    She was staggeringly beautiful.
    “ Ah, Ms. Fox!”
Innisfree called. “Come on out here and meet young Arthur Dunham,
our landlord's scion and representative!”
    The name Fox was hardly Chinese – but then,
it wasn't Asian at all. “Hello,” Art said.
    Ms. Fox emerged two tentative little steps
into the lobby and then bowed, without making a sound.
    Art blinked. He couldn't remember anyone
bowing to him before, ever, and was unsure how to respond.
    Then Ms. Fox whirled and vanished back into
the theater's depths; the sudden motion sent her hair up into a
glorious black cloud, and perfume spilled from it into the
surrounding air. Art took a step after her, then looked up at
Innisfree.
    Innisfree smiled. “Go on in, lad, and meet
the others!”
    Art was getting tired of being called “lad”
or “my boy” – after all, he was twenty-six years old, he wasn't a
kid.
    This wasn't the time to argue about it,
though. He went on into the theater.
    The others were up on the stage, milling
about and speaking quietly among themselves; most of them were
smiling. As Art watched, Ms. Fox leaped up to rejoin them, jumping
the thirty vertical inches as if it were nothing.
    There were about a dozen, and at first he saw
them as an undifferentiated mass. Gradually, though, individuals
emerged.
    To one side, crouched against the proscenium,
fingering the ancient velvet of the curtain's edge, was a bent old
woman, her white hair straggling out around a red kerchief; she
wore a drab brown skirt and sweater and a frayed white apron.
    Near her stood a woman Art judged to be in
her thirties, tall and straight, in a dark green gown, red hair
swept back from her face and bound in a single thick braid.
    An immense black man in a brightly colored
shirt and faded jeans stood beside the woman in green.
    A short, swarthy woman with curly black hair
could have passed for a gypsy fortune-teller; she wore a white
blouse and leather slacks, though, rather than the