Short story · 4 min read · Set in Haldane Place ·
The Curtain That Rises Early
The house curtain at Haldane Place rises four seconds ahead of the called cue at every performance, and the stage manager signs the difference on the timing sheet each night without a word.
New owners took the Haldane Place theatre in the autumn and, as owners do, they wanted the operations made visible: everything the house had, written down, signed, filed. They put in a timing pen, a stopwatch chain screwed to the prompt side, and they asked the resident stage manager, a level man named Henshall, to keep the house's timing sheets the way the licensing scales require — call in, follow on, curtain, house out, to the second.
Henshall kept them. The sheets are kept still, and the box of them grows a page a night, and every page carries his signature at the foot and his initials on each alteration, which is more than the licensing asks.
The sheets are correct, and the four seconds stand on every one.
It works like this. At each performance the deputy calls the house curtain on the crossed line and the cue light burns green; the pen logs the light; four seconds later the curtain moves. That is what Henshall writes, and pulling is a rota thing he would never write falsely, because he signs what happens. But the pen is not the only instrument in the house. The new owners also had the fire curtain's descent gear overhauled, the house's counterweight system re-chained, and the linen of the grand drape photographed for wear — and the photographer's darkroom log, kept for the insurance company rather than for the stage, times its exposures by the very clock the curtain motor runs on. On the first page of that log the owner's surveyor wrote a private note in the margin, and the note is misfiled now under the fire safety folder, where it was read once.
The note says the drape's shutter opens, on every exposure of every sheet, against a motor run dated to the second — four seconds of open shutter before the motor that raises it has drawn. The exposure gear is electric; electric shutters are exact or they do not fire; the insurance test ran the shutter forty times with the motor chained off and it never once opened alone. With the motor live and the cue light burning, it opens alone, and always by four.
Henshall, plainly, knows. The timing sheet's curtain column on every page is filled in a different hand-accident from his other columns: the figure entered, then a small stroke, then the four seconds entered behind it as a correction, and the whole thing initialled as his alterations are. He has never once — not at the owners' meeting, not at the licensing scale review, not in the staff book — written why the curtain's own timing needed a correction on every night of the run. The staff book shows the deputy asked him once, in November, in eleven words, and Henshall's answer runs to nine, and the nine are: The four are spent. Ask the four what they buy.
The committee of the Fancy, who think of these things, have since had the pen tested against the stopwatches of three halls and it agrees with them all, so the pen is not at fault, and the cue light has been rewired twice for the same result. Something is being counted open in that four seconds that nothing in the house's paperwork buys, and the house's paperwork is otherwise exact.
The last figure in the box, the one the owners have not found yet, is a water-stained sheet from the Haldane's longest dark season in the war, when no call was logged at all and no company was engaged. The curtain column on that sheet carries the pen's handwriting in it — the pen was not installed for thirty more years — and the figure is eleven seconds, and under the eleven, in the margin, in a hand nobody at the theatre can put a name to, is written: Paid for. Counted fair.
If the four seconds are spent nightly and signed for willingly, and the eleven were once paid for outright, then the house is keeping an account the timing sheets never show — and someone on the sheet chain knows the name on it, and it is not Henshall's. Whose account does a house draw its curtain against, four seconds per night, and what was it that made the last figure worth eleven?