SCENE 12
Halloween approached like a tiger in the night, with a soft rumble of warning. All through the second half of October, the skies were bruised and stormy, and Gwendolyn greeted us every morning by saying, “What dreadfully Scottish weather we’re having!”
As the ill-omened day crept closer, it was impossible to suppress a buzz of mounting excitement among the students. The morning of the thirty-first, whispers chased us around the refectory as we poured our coffee. What, everyone wanted to know, would happen on the windswept beach that evening? We were too restless to focus on our lessons, and Camilo dismissed us early, with the instruction that we “go and prepare our enchantments.” Back in the Castle, we avoided one another, slunk into corners, and muttered our lines to ourselves, like the inmates of a lunatic asylum. When witching hour arrived, we set off through the woods, one by one.
The night was eerily warm, and I struggled to follow the crooked forest path in darkness plush as velvet. Unseen roots reached up to snatch at my ankles, and once I lost my footing and fell to the ground, the damp smell of the coming storm swelling in my nose. I brushed myself off and proceeded more carefully, my heartbeat quick and shallow, like the pulse of a nervous rabbit.
When I reached the trailhead, I was afraid for a moment that I was late. My costume (pants, boots, shirt, and coat in culturally ambiguous military style) did not include a watch. I hovered at the edge of the trees, looking back up the hill toward the Hall. Dim lights burned in three or four windows, and I imagined the few students too cautious to brave the beach peeping timidly out. A twig snapped in the shadows and I turned.
“Someone there?”
“Oliver?” James’s voice.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Where are you?”
He emerged from between two black pines, his face a pale oval in the gloom. He was dressed much the same as I was, but silver epaulettes glinted on his shoulders. “I had hoped you might be my Banquo,” he said.
“I suppose congratulations are in order, Thane of Everything.”
With my suspicions confirmed, I felt a little pinch of pride. But at the same time something prescient stirred, an indistinct disquiet. No wonder Richard wasn’t happy on the day of scene assignments.
Midnight: the low boom of the chapel clock rippled through the still night air and James gripped my arm hard. “The bell invites me,” he said, words light and breathless with excitement. “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven, or to hell!” He let go and vanished into the shadows of the underbrush. I followed, but not too close, afraid of tripping again and dragging both of us to the ground.
The belt of trees between the Hall and the north shore was dense but narrow, and soon a dusky orange light began to filter between the branches. James—I could see him clearly by then, or the outline of him at least—stopped, and I tiptoed up behind him. Hundreds of people were crowded on the beach, some sitting in long cramped rows on the benches, others in tight little clumps on the ground, their silhouettes black against the fulgent glow of the bonfire. A murmur of thunder smothered the lap of the waves against the shore and the crackling flames. Excited whispers rose from the spectators as the sky overhead, oil-painted in furled foreboding violet, flushed white with lightning. Then the beach was quiet again, until a high, shrill voice said, “Look!”
A solid black shape was approaching on the water, a long rounded dome, like a hump of the Loch Ness Monster.
“What is that?” I breathed.
“It’s the witches,” James said slowly, the firelight reflected like red sparks in both his eyes.
As the bestial shape crept closer, it came slowly into focus, enough that I could tell it was an overturned canoe. Judging by the height of the hull on the water, there would be just enough room for a pocket of air underneath. The boat drifted into the shallows, and for a moment the surface of the lake was smooth as glass. Then there was a ripple, a shudder, and three figures emerged. A collective gasp rushed out from the audience. The girls looked less like witches at first than phantoms, their hair hanging sleek and wet over their faces, filmy white dresses melting from their limbs, swirling in spirals behind them. As they rose from the water their fingertips dripped and the fabric clung so closely to their bodies that I could tell who was who, though their faces remained downcast. On the left, Filippa, her long legs and slim hips unmistakable. On the right, Wren, smaller and slighter than the other two. In the middle, Meredith, her curves bold and dangerous under the thin white shift. Blood pounded in my ears. James and I, for the time being, forgot each other.
Meredith lifted her chin just high enough that her hair slid back from her face. “When shall we three meet again?” she asked, her voice low and lush in the balmy air. “In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
“When the hurlyburly’s done,” Wren answered, slyly. “When the battle’s lost and won.”
Filippa’s voice, throaty and bold: “That will be ere the set of sun.”
A drum echoed from somewhere deep in the trees and the audience shivered with delight. Filippa looked toward the sound, straight up the path to where James and I stood hidden in the shadows. “A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come.”
Meredith raised her hands from her sides and the other two came forward to grasp them.
ALL: “The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the sea and land,
Thus do go, about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice again to make up nine.”
They came together in a triangle and pushed their open palms up toward the sky.