Concrete Underground, Moxie Mezcal [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

smooth and perfect as I remembered. The bastard must feed nightly on the souls of uncorrupted youths or something.

I waved the program at him. "Well played, sir. I assume you are responsible for all this."

"I wouldn't say that," Max said. "I may have suggested the play at one of the board meetings, but I can't take credit for any creative input."

"What about this list of characters. Are you telling me you didn't come up with these?" I asked skeptically.

"What do you mean? You wrote them. These are the descriptions from your manuscript." He looked genuinely confused. Of course he would, I thought.

The house lights flashed off and on, and Max quickly excused himself as the audience took their seats. Nick and Jenny returned; she sat on my left while he sat to the left of her. The seat on my right, the aisle seat, remained empty.

I heard the sound of an old film projector coming to life amplified over the P.A. system, which was turned up so loudly it began to feed back and picked up a low crackle of static interference. A blue-washed video played on a translucent screen in front of the stage. The reel showed archival footage of carnival sideshow performers.

Suddenly the stage lights came up, illuminating the bare set behind the screen. Then the actors appeared, each wearing a gunmetal mask of the Commedia dell'Arte counterpart named in the program, and began to dress the set. The incessant noise continued to blare from the speakers as they moved the props and furniture into place, dancing playfully with each other as if the speakers were playing music instead of this unholy cacophony. As the sound finally died down, the set was completed and the actors took their places.

The plot of the play was pretty straightforward. It was set at the summer home of a wealthy family whose members were coming together for a week-long vacation. The dress and style of speech placed the time in the early twentieth century, though it was never explicitly stated. The main character was a reporter assigned to write a feature for the society page of the local metropolitan daily.

The first act played out like a comedy of errors as Natalie, the maid, gleefully helped the reporter uncover the family's dirty secrets.

Max was embezzling money from his employer, James, right under his nose. James was too old and senile to notice, and spent what little wits he had left devising opportunities to rape Natalie, who was later revealed to be his illegitimate daughter. Anthony, a deranged sadist with an explosive temper, beat his wife, whom he met while she was working in a brothel.

Despite the dark subject matter, though, the play strangely attempted to be light and humorous, full of slapstick physical comedy and double-entendres.

As the act drew to a close, Max's embezzlement scheme was discovered, except he arranged for it to appear that his fiancée, Lily, was responsible. She was later found murdered. Meanwhile, Natalie took the reporter down into the catacombs beneath the house, which she said held a terrible secret.

Once underground, they discovered a complex system of tunnels and bunkers built from concrete. Natalie explained that it was constructed as a place to hide in the event of an atomic bomb attack; oddly, neither character questioned this anachronism. The act ended as they discover a locked chamber. Natalie stole the key from James during one of their trysts, and as the two of them opened the door, they found a Harlequin locked inside.

The house lights came up for intermission and I was glad to be able to go outside. I needed to get some air and get away from the crowd, so I headed around to the back of the theater and took a seat on a stoop leading to a stage entrance. I sat there hugging my knees and shaking, trying to fight the urge to be sick again.

After a couple of minutes, I heard the door behind me open. The actress playing Violet appeared, still wearing her costume with half-mask and purple wig. She produced a silver cigarette case from her small hand bag.

"You look like you need one of these," she said as she opened the case and offered it to me. I took one of the hand-rolled cloves, and she took one for herself. We smoked silently, enjoying the cool night air and the sweet taste of the smoke.

When I returned to my seat, Jenny and Nick were both visibly concerned at my appearance. I'm sure I looked terrible; my face felt cold and clammy, my head was swimming, and it was all I could do to keep from doubling over into dry heaves right there.

"Do you need to go?" Nick asked.

"I'm fine," I replied as I waved him off dismissively and sank back into my seat.

When the curtain raised for the second act, the set was dressed with more modern accoutrements, like a television, a computer, and contemporary furniture. The actors' wardrobes were now more fitting with the turn of the millennium, and all the actors had changed masks. Natalie wore the mask of Judy, Max had taken Pantalone's, Violet was Columbine, Anthony was Pierrot. The character of the reporter was inexplicably absent for the first few scenes until he re-emerged dressed as the Harlequin, dressed in a motley suit and wearing a grotesque gunmetal mask.

The man sitting to my right leaned in to whisper in my ear, "The Harlequin character can be viewed as a kind of working-class hero; he is a servant who always gets the better of his masters through trickery, simultaneously exposing and exploiting their buffoonery. In this respect, he is often viewed as a sort of avatar of trickster god Hermes. To look upon the face of God is to invite madness into your heart."

"Shh!" Jenny admonished sharply to my right. I turned to her to apologize, but the emanating light from the stage washed us both in a blue glow, giving her hair a vivid purple tint.

I felt the nausea swell within my gut and finally overwhelm me. I jumped up from my seat abruptly and tripped over the feet of the man sitting to my right, causing me to stumble clumsily into the aisle. I turned to apologize, but then remembered that the seat had been empty. So instead I just staggered down the aisle to the exit.

Once I made it to the lobby, a concerned usher pointed me in the direction of the men's room.

Thankfully it was empty, and I quickly collapsed into one of the stalls and dry-heaved loudly into the bowl. I wretched so hard I could feel the capillaries burst in my face, making my skin warm and red. When the sickness subsided, I struggled awkwardly to my feet. Then I thought heard laughter coming from the stall next to me.

I hobbled out and over to the next stall, then opened the door slowly. No one was in there; I must have imagined the sound. I was just about to turn away when I noticed the vent in the wall. Something blue and metallic caught my eye from behind the cover. I stepped up onto the toilet so I could reach the grating and found that it was missing its bottom two screws. I was able to pull it out just far enough to snake my fingers into the opening and slide out the thin blue object.

When I realized what it was, I couldn't help but laugh.

I waited out the rest of the play in the lobby. The concerned usher offered to let me back in to sit in the back row, but I declined, telling him I wanted to be close to the bathroom just in case. I was lying though; I felt fine.

I knew the play was over when I heard the muffled sound of applause coming through the closed doors. Soon after, the doors opened and the lobby was flooded with people filing out. The sound system blasted Cursive's "Art Is Hard" as the sideshow performers reappeared and the freakish carnival atmosphere returned.

A crowd of people gathered around to congratulate me. Someone asked if I was going to make it to the after-party. I told them I probably would not.

"Nonsense," I heard Max say behind me and spun around to find him grinning proudly. "Of course, he's going."

Max thew an arm around my shoulder. "Too bad you missed the ending," he said good-naturedly as he led me away from the crowd to the side of the room. "But then I suppose you already knew how it turned out."

"Not really," I shook my head. "But it really doesn't matter. I realized a long time ago not to worry about whodunnit; the more answers you find, the more questions they'll keep raising. I'm more a man of action now, trying not to over-think things."

"I'm not sure I follow," Max said, his smile taking on a menacing quality.

I leaned in close to him and whispered into his ear, "You tricked me into that room. You fabricated those files and leaked them to the blackmailers. You knew I would go in."

He just kept on smiling. I couldn't be sure he heard me over the din of the crowd.

I drew the blue knife out from my waistband and plunged it into Max's stomach repeatedly, feeling his warm blood gushing out onto my hand. Then I pulled it out and thrusted it back in again and again, penetrating his firm, sculpted flesh, tearing apart that exquisite body. After five or six stabs, his legs gave out and he fell back onto the floor. And when he looked up at me, that smug bastard actually had a triumphant grin on his face.

"I always knew you were the right man for the job," he said, spraying blood everywhere as he opened his mouth. Or maybe I just imagined I heard it.

I dropped down on top of him and hacked away at his throat a few times just to make sure the bastard was dead.

When the rage passed and the haze lifted from my mind, I stood up and turned to face the assembled crowd, who were all staring back at me, frozen in place like human statues. Suddenly a single person started to applaud. My eyes darted over their faces, following the sound to its source. Jenny stepped forward from between two men and continued clapping, smiling gleefully.

A couple knowing chuckles rippled through the crowd, and several more people joined in with the applause. A man elbowed his friend playfully in the ribs, and a palpable relief spread over their expressions. They started clapping, too, then a few more, and a few more, until the lobby was filled with boisterous applause.

"Such a realistic effect!" I heard a voice say.

"Just like the end of the play!" said another.

"'If we are not willing to destroy the beauty we have created, we become slaves to it,'" someone else quoted sagely from somewhere, trying to sound intellectual.

I was reeling, slowly pushing my way through the crowd in a daze. Hands patted me on the back. Strangers smiled at me and flashed me thumbs-up.

I finally found the front door and was happy to once again be outside