Ellen's been raving about this stage since they got to Montreal. When Geoffrey unlocks the door, he can see why: with the curtain closed, he can already almost see Richard of Gloucester perched on the front of the stage, conspiring treacherously with the audience.
On the other hand, Ellen hadn't said anything about the teenaged girl sitting cross-legged in the aisle.
"Will you kindly tell me exactly what the hell you're doing here?" he asks.
"Transdimensional vortex manipulation allows for the visitation of alternate temporal flows," she informs him flatly. "Simon didn't think it would work."
"Oliver? Have you taken up transvestitism in your old age?"
"Oliver's dead," she says. "You ground him up and fed him to the swans."
"Yeah." Geoffrey wonders idly how she knows about that, and then decides that it's really not all that surprising that his hallucinations have access to his memory.
"I'm not a hallucination," she says. "I'm here to be your Margaret."
"Okay. One, I haven't even told anyone I'm planning to do Richard III. I haven't told you anything about Oliver, although I guess maybe you could have gotten that from the magazine article. I certainly haven't said anything that would lead you to believe that I think you're a hallucination. Your claim to reality would be a lot more convincing if you didn't know every single thing that I'm thinking about. Two, I don't know you. I don't know who you are, I don't know if you can act. I don't even know your name. Three, even leaving all that aside, Margaret is old enough to have a son. A married son. Do you honestly think you can convince an audience of that?"
"It doesn't matter if they believe," she whispers, pulling her legs up to her chest. "All that matters is that you make it real."