Ridley must've been pretty confident that everything was going to work out since he was sitting in the front row, just watching the play rehearsal, when we walked in. Act I, Scene iv of Hamlet, the very beginning of it, with Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus on the platform. But the platform in question was just an awful twelve-foot-tall canvas painted with big gray bricks to look like the side of an old castle but really it looked more like misshapen LEGOs. I didn't even need to see behind it to know that it was probably built like a tree-house landing.
Apart from an awful background painting of the castle throne room pushed slightly off to the side, the stage was bare. Made of the same black wood as the walkway and sound booth, it was a good-sized stage breadthwise. Lots of room for a sword fight. The actors were crowded together in the center of the stage, lit up in a wavering blue spotlight. The kid playing Marcellus looked like he was wearing plastic armor. Just fake.
The actors started the scene again. Right about the time the pain in my head reached official headache status.
"The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold," the kid playing Hamlet said. He was a Runner. I knew him. Heller, his name was, and he was actually an Uncle in his family.
"It is a nipping and an eager air," Fred said.
"What hour now?" Heller was overacting already, craning his neck and everything. He was sniffing the air too. No idea why.
"I think it lacks of twelve." Fred was real understated, just like a companion to a prince would be, I guess. He was stealing the scene.
"No, it is struck." Heller raised his voice too much, played with his gloves too.
"Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the season wherein the spirit held his wont to walk." Fred's last word hung in the air.
Then the actors stopped, waited. Fred did a great little improv where he put his hand to his ear and got a silly look on his face. He knew the scene was blown.
"Trumpets! Fucking Trumpets and Fucking Ordnance!" Ridley screamed at the booth behind him. "Sound effects! Actors need cues! So does the audience!" Funny thing though, at that point, he was the only one in the audience. Apart from us.
Looked like Ridley had taken over directing duties. Or at least thought he had. He didn't throw the script down or anything, just sat there, waiting. He probably knew we were there. But it was Mock that spotted us first. He'd been leaning against the fire exit by the right wing of seats, dragging on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out the slit in the door but he didn't waste any time tossing it away.
He came at us, right up the aisle. I've got news for you though, if you're not fast enough to dodge an attack coming from someone above you, then don't go after someone higher than you on any staircase, ever. Gravity just isn't on your side when fighting upward on a slope. The consequences are pretty much disastrous and Mock learned them all firsthand. Never even had a chance. He caught jimmy's full leaping kick in the throat and tumbled down the stairs backwards making cracking noises that echoed around the theater. I swear I saw Ridley put his hand on his head when Mock flopped onto the concrete beside him.
A few stragglers followed, all three repeated Mock's mistake. Bodyguards working as shop monkeys, set designers, carpenters, whatever. Ridley had put them all to work. And they might as well have all been named Jack, because each one fell down the hill, broke his crown, and wouldn't be getting up in the morning. I slung one into the seats to my left. This Jill wasn't going tumbling after.
People jumped out of the lighting booth and ran for the exits as I followed Jimmy down the stairs. Marcellus ran for it too, scraping his plastic armor together the whole way.
"Your lucky day, huh?"
Ridley got up and walked through the orchestra pit and took the side stairs up to the stage. He was in no hurry. He was wearing a blue, white, red, horizontally striped polo shirt that changed to square lines of purplish red and all-over blue as he passed under the stage lighting.
"You forced my hand. I wasn't quite ready to go ahead with everything today but I had to, didn't I? You and your preemptive strikes. So how is Melinda? Is she well?" Ridley walked to the back of the stage, behind the throne room painting. "All the same, I had a feeling it would end this way. It's what I get for being disorganized. Perhaps a little bit greedy."
Jimmy and I didn't need to say anything. We crossed the pit and got up to the stage, taking up fighting positions side by side.
"Freddy, please go to the dressing room right now." It was Ridley's firm voice and Fred scooted off stage right, leaving a mushrooming of swept velvet curtain behind him.
Then the other actors emerged, forming a barrier between Ridley and us. It was pretty clear that we had to go through them to get to him. So be it. They must've been doing a costume fitting or something, because they were all dressed up. I don't know, maybe it was a full dress rehearsal. They did only have a week until the opening. King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Heller Hamlet, Laertes with his sword, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were all going to get it about four acts too early, all for real on a big, empty, black stage.
Quick and messy: I saw legs in alternating colors of tights fly up into the air of my peripheral vision before I even threw a punch. There went Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I kicked Gertrude in the belly and then swept her legs out from under her. Her hooped dress billowed as she fell. I stomped her in the mouth and felt her jaw give underneath my heel. Strangely satisfying. Her crown rolled off as she jerked, gurgling for air. It got crushed underfoot by Laertes backing up from one of Jimmy's furious combinations. Also trying to avoid Jimmy, Claudius got my nasty boot in his ear and then a chop to the throat for his trouble. He raised his face to me from where he fell so I smashed him in the eye with my elbow. He brought his head up again so I kneed him in the ribs and kicked him in the solar plexus, then the neck. After that, he didn't move. The nails sunk in all the way to the rubber of my sole both times, taking bits of flesh out with them like little shish kebabs. Laertes's dull metal sword snapped in two and the other half was sticking out of his leg when he fell to the floor with a hollow thud. The stage wasn't solid.
Heller Hamlet was no better a fighter than an actor. Jimmy beat him with the flat of his own blade before knocking him out with the hilt in the back of the neck. Next to Heller Hamlet was the face of a sixteen-year-old made up to look like he was sixty with a dark gray painted-on mustache and greasepaint wrinkles staring up at me without drama, not closing his eyes because he couldn't anymore. Stupid Polonius. I had no idea where he came from. Jimmy must've really got him good. I wished I'd seen it.
And then it was just me and Ridley, with Jimmy standing directly between, warning me off trying to be the hero and protect me. Everything was lit up in the blue light. That hue that was supposed to tell the audience it was nighttime, that something dramatic was about to happen, and the only recognizable sounds in the whole theater were the wheezes of half a dozen injured people cursing and struggling to breathe.