Destroyer of Worlds Read Free Page A

can handle it,’ she said, firmly. ‘This is the first play I’ve had the chance to see since we left Earth and I’m not going to spoil it. Now relax, Carl, and forget duty for a while.’
    Something he could never do, but for a few hours at least he could push it deep into the back of his mind. And the atmosphere of the theatre helped. At the chime of a bell the lights began to lower and a blur of light and shadow drifted across the curtain. Music filled the air, soft, the throb and pulse of tambours and sackbuts, of flutes and horns. Music that augmented the illusion of being carried back in time to another world, another place.
    The curtains opened and they looked at Elsinore. It was magic, thought Maddox. The art of the illusionist, scenes created from light and shadow, props, plaster, paint and suggestion. Eric Manton, the expedition’s Chief Scientist, had helped and would even now be behind the scenes busy with his electronic wizardry, but the setting, the atmosphere, the choice of the men who now appeared in costume, all were a tribute to the skill and dedication of Sonia Bowman who had taken words and directions and had made them come alive and real.
    The genius of William Shakespeare presented by the most unusual travelling company of players ever to have trod a board.
    With a contented sigh Maddox relaxed and sank into the illusive and famous world of the Bard.
    There had, he knew, been better productions of the play but he doubted if any had been more eagerly received by an audience, which surely was the most receptive there could be. The actors too, a little rough perhaps, but gaining confidence as the minutes passed, their roughness adding to rather than detracting from their roles. Francisco, Bernardo, Horatio and Marcellus. The King was a giant, his Queen a mature accompaniment, Hamlet himself a tall figure of incipient madness, flashes of paranoia merged with the bitter necessity of acceptance, the frustration of thwarted desire.
    ‘Clever,’ whispered Claire at his side. ‘Sonia was shrewd to illuminate the incestuous desire of the son for the mother and to be able to bring it across so soon.’
    ‘Hamlet for Gertrude? The Oedipus Complex?’
    ‘Yes — it’s obvious when you have the clue and Sonia’s managed to leave it in no doubt. Remember Hamlet hates his uncle but as yet has no knowledge of his guilt as a murderer. The hate, as such, is illogical unless we accept the strong sexual motivation which drives it. Once that is accepted all the rest falls into place. The revelations of the ghost simply provide an excuse and justification for revenge.’ Her hand closed tightly on his arm. ‘Hush, now. Here it comes.’
    The curtains parted for Scene V and the prince’s communication with the ghost of his murdered father. Mist trailed across the platform, dimming the appearance of detail, the distant figures barely observed of waiting attendants. Hamlet was in the foreground, a cunningly aimed spotlight illuminating his features with a pale, nacreous glow, not too dim to take the attention from the disturbingly frightening appearance of the apparition he faced.
    Somewhere in Maddox’s brain a connection was made and, suddenly, he was a boy again, sitting in a classroom, mouthing words by rote; taking the part of the ghost.
    ‘I am thy father’s spirit;
    Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
    And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
    Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
    Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
    To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
    I could a tale unfold…’
    A spirit condemned to eternal suffering for the sake of sins unshriven, a relic of a time when men believed in the punishment which waited after death to sear and corrode all who had not kept the Faith.
    Maddox blinked, narrowing his eyes as he watched the ghost. Manton’s magic was superb. The thing seemed almost transparent, the gleam of a subdued torch showing through the rotting shroud.