in the curtain: a bevy of
ladies in masks and Nell Gwyn dresses and men in King Charles
knee-breeches and long curled hair, and the second time a bunch of
people and creatures just wild: all sorts and colors of clothes,
humans with hoofs for feet and antennae springing from their
foreheads, furry and feathery things that had more arms than two and
in one case that many heads--as if they were dressed up in our
_Tempest_, _Peer Gynt_ and _Insect People_ costumes and some more
besides.

Naturally I'd had mind-wavery fits both times. Afterwards Sid had
wagged a finger at me and explained that on those two nights we'd been
giving performances for people who'd arranged a costume theater-party
and been going to attend a masquerade ball, and 'zounds, when would I
learn to guard my half-patched pate?

_I don't know, I guess never_, I answered now, quick looking at a
Giants pennant, a Korvette ad, a map of Central Park, my Willy Mays
baseball and a Radio City tour ticket. That was eight items I'd looked
at this trip without feeling any inward improvement. They weren't
reassuring me at all.

The blue fly came slowly buzzing down over my screen and I asked it,
"What are you looking for? A spider?" when what should I hear coming
back through the dressing room straight toward my sleeping closet but
Miss Nefer's footsteps. No one else walks that way.

_She's going to do something to you, Greta_, I thought. _She's the
maniac in the company. She's the one who terrorized you with the
boning knife in the shrubbery, or sicked the giant tarantula on you at
the dark end of the subway platform, or whatever it was, and the
others are covering up for. She's going to smile the devil-smile and
weave those white twig-fingers at you, all eight of them. And Birnam
Wood'll come to Dunsinane and you'll be burnt at the stake by men in
armor or drawn and quartered by eight-legged monkeys that talk or torn
apart by wild centaurs or whirled through the roof to the moon without
being dressed for it or sent burrowing into the past to stifle in Iowa
1948 or Egypt 4,008 B.C. The screen won't keep her out._

* * * * *

Then a head of hair pushed over the screen. But it was
black-bound-with-silver, Brahma bless us, and a moment later Martin
was giving me one of his rare smiles.

I said, "Marty, do something for me. Don't ever use Miss Nefer's
footsteps again. Her voice, okay, if you have to. But not the
footsteps. Don't