things of day begin to droop
and drowse; Whiles night's black agents to their preys do rouse."
Those graveyard lines didn't help my nerves any, of course. Nor did
thinking I heard Nefer-Elizabeth say from the audience, rather softly
for her this time, "Eyes, I have heard that speech, I know not where.
Think you 'tiz stolen?"

_Greta_, I told myself, _you need a miltown before the crow makes wing
through your kooky head._

I turned to go and fetch me one from my closet. And stopped dead.

Just behind me, pacing back and forth like an ash-colored tiger in the
gloomy wings, looking daggers at the audience every time she turned at
that end of her invisible cage, but ignoring me completely, was Miss
Nefer in the Elizabeth wig and rig.

Well, I suppose I should have said to myself, _Greta, you imagined
that last loud whisper from the audience. Miss Nefer's simply unkinked
herself, waved a hand to the real audience and come back stage. Maybe
Sid just had her out there for the first half of the play. Or maybe
she just couldn't stand watching Martin give such a bang-up
performance in her part of Lady Mack._

Yes, maybe I should have told myself something like that, but somehow
all I could think then--and I thought it with a steady mounting
shiver--was, _We got two Elizabeths. This one is our witch Nefer. I
know. I dressed her. And I know that devil-look from the virginals.
But if this is our Elizabeth, the company Elizabeth, the stage
Elizabeth ... who's the other?_

And because I didn't dare to let myself think of the answer to that
question, I dodged around the invisible cage that the ash-colored
skirt seemed to ripple against as the Tiger Queen turned and I ran
into the dressing room, my only thought to get behind my New York City
Screen.

V

Even little things are turning out to be great
things and becoming intensely interesting.
Have you ever thought about the properties
of numbers?
--The Maiden

Lying on my cot, my eyes crosswise to the printing, I looked from a
pink Algonquin menu to a pale green New Amsterdam program, with a tiny
doll of Father Knickerbocker dangling between them on a yellow thread.
Really they weren't covering up much of anything. A ghostly hole an
inch and a half across seemed to char itself in the program. As if my
eye were right up against it, I saw in vivid memory what I'd seen the
two times I'd dared a peek through the hole