Edwin Blackgaard had never wanted the part of Mortimer Brewster.

In fact, he had never wanted the drama class of Harklestone High School to put on a performance of "Arsenic and Old Lace" at all! How could some 20th century playwright compare to the Bard? And they were meant to be studying drama, the theatre. What better choice could be made for such thespian study than Shakespeare himself?

But alas, Edwin seemed to be alone in that preference. Mr. Elm announced the chosen play as "Arsenic and Old Lace" nearly a whole school year ago, to the apparent delight of all other students (excepting Edwin). This only added to his initial disinclination.

However, he had been cast. Their theatre group was small, and they needed him. Why, the production could not possibly continue without him (Mortimer being the lead role)! So Edwin had shouldered his reservations, swallowed the far-lesser words of the script, and said simply, "I will undertake it." A noble act, he considered it. After all, the show must go on! And if it is dependent on you, even more so.

That is why now he was onstage, talking to a little snake of a teenaged boy named Henton (now going by the name of Doctor Einstein), with whom he never would have conversed otherwise, waiting to be bound and gagged. And here he sat, as scripted, explaining the very method of it.

"But didn't he see him get the curtain cord?" asked Henton, grinning (that was another thing that annoyed Edwin about this production; Henton, though affecting a nervous disposition onstage very capably, had not stopped smiling the entire scene. It was terribly unrealistic and off-putting.)

"See him get it? No, the silly chump sits down with his back toward the murderer." With that, Edwin turned his body round in the chair and pointed behind him—in fact, directly at the imminent murderer, the character of Jonathon.

There, at least, was a casting choice that came as no surprise. The homicidal brother of Mortimer was played by none other than his own twin, Regis. And Edwin had always known him to be the dark sort. In fact, most of their schoolmates seemed to harbor at least a little fear of Regis. However that had been achieved, it had built their name up to a certain respect. And high esteem was always welcome to actors such as Edwin.

Though he suspected Regis was generally up to something or other, he could rarely be bothered by his brother. Particularly when there was a performance at hand. He hardly wanted to take the time out of his own practise to pick apart the other's slightly lesser performance.

And it wasn't that his acting was bad, per se, simply… understated. A little too understated for proper thespian activities, in Edwin's established opinion. But as a matter of fact, he could not deny that Regis played the character rather well. Quite well, actually.

But now, Regis, in the garb of Jonathon Brewster, crept silently behind him to the curtain cord, which he would take down for use as a rope. And Edwin, actor that he was, was not to turn or look at him.

"All he has to do is look around," Edwin said, pointing vaguely, "but does he? No." And he sat straight in his seat again. "Don't you see, Brother Heidelberg? In a play, or even in a movie for that matter, a fellow never sees or hears anything."

Henton nodded, still grinning. "Right, but what does he do?"

"What does he do?" continued Edwin, trying very hard not to rush his delivery (and so get the ridiculous speech over with, long before "Jonathon" could get there). "Well, the big chump just sits there! This fellow, who's supposed to be bright, he sits there—now get a load of this—"

He adjusted his position so that his legs were together, his back upright, and his arms firmly on the armrests.

"Look at the attitude! Large as life, he sits there, waiting to be tied up and gagged." He laughed aloud, suppressed a grimace at his lines, then added "The big dope!"

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, it was filled with a handkerchief as the curtain cord constricted round his chest like a snake. He tried to appear shocked as Henton continued grinningly with his line, still stuffing the cloth into his mouth. "You were right about that fellow. He wasn't very bright."

The lights went out to end the scene. Edwin knew what came next: they would have thirty seconds to allow Henton to finish up the false ropes and Regis to get their props in place. Then the lights would come back on. The last, long scene would begin. And they would finally get the ridiculous play over with.

The rope around his wrists pulled sharp, and he winced. No need to overdo it, he thought, although he couldn't quite say it with the cloth in his mouth. Imbecile.

Thirty seconds went by, and still they were in shadow.

A second gag was strapped around his mouth. A clink and soft thump, as if something heavy had been dropped on a table, could be heard in the darkness.

Another thirty seconds.

The rope was wrapped around his neck, but it was uncomfortably tight. There was a second sharp pull at his wrists, and he let out a muffled cry.

Another thirty seconds.

Sweat began to drip down his temples, and still the ropes were being pawed at by someone unseen. He tried to say something, tell him to stop. But he could not say anything. He was incapable of it. And still he could not see. Dread started building in his chest.

"Yes, Mortimer…"

The voice was low like thunder, yet perfectly clear in every syllable. The voice of his brother. The moment it sounded, the scuffling about the ropes was stilled.

The lights began to slowly fade back on, this time in dimmer footlights: the scene was meant to be ominously candlelit. Edwin glanced around the stage. There stood Regis, with his shadowed back to him. "I've been away for twenty years," he said.

Nearby, seated half-crouching at the table, was the leering Henton. Now, however, the reason for his slimy smirk was evident: he and Regis had conspired to play a trick on Edwin. Now Edwin saw it all. And the relief quickly gave way, making him very cross.

He scowled and moved in their direction, attempting to make clear that he wasn't amused by their little prank. There was certainly nothing they could do now that the scene had started, but it was worth expressing disapproval over. However, as he moved, he suddenly found that the breath was blocked from his lungs. His airways were being crushed. From the outside. Edwin froze. He gasped desperately for air, but he could only manage it through his nose.

The noose wasn't supposed to be real.

"But never, my dear brother, were you out of my mind."

Edwin turned wide eyes up to his brother—Jonathon—Regis—who had just turned to face him. And in those dark eyes and grotesquely calm face, he saw a look that made him quail. Edwin had seen looks like this upon him before, but never so potent, so fanatical.

"In Melbourne, one night, I dreamt of you."

Dread sped into panic, and his breath grew shaky. It could not be. Whether through some horrible nightmare or spell or simply madness, both dark brothers—the real and the role—had become one. The face before him was filled with sheer hatred. The black eyes were wild with it, boring into him with a cruel delight.

Edwin saw it all, truly this time. He had arranged it so. He had told the hand at the lights to wait longer. He had gotten Henton to tie the ropes in real knots. He'd had him bound onstage, in the sight of the entire school, and no one had any idea something was wrong. He had done it all so he could… so he could…

Could what?

He barely had time to consider the question before Regis began to move, drawing his attention. He pulled a black bag up onto the table and opened it. At first, all Edwin saw was the prop bag and plastic prop instruments. But Regis picked one up and squeezed its pincers together. It glinted metallically in the footlights. Then Edwin realized; it, too, was real. All of them, real instruments… of torture. He squirmed at the sight, but quickly stilled when the noose threatened to take his breath once more.

"The more you struggle, Mortimer, the more you strangle yourself." Regis waved a bottle of some unknown liquid under his own nose. "Later on, you may consider that a blessing." He took out a knife-like instrument and fingered its blade lightly. Each small action built up more and more panic in Edwin.

Regis turned and picked up a pair of gloves on the table. "Now, Doctor." Henton jumped up nervously. Regis slowly, deliberately, slipped the gloves over his own long fingers. "We go to work."

Edwin was truly trembling now, all over, and he felt as if he couldn't get enough breath. Regis was about to… no. No. He couldn't. He couldn't think to do such things to him, onstage, here before the eyes of all!

"Jonny, for me, please, the quick way, please," Henton quoted rapidly.

"Doctor, this must be an artistic achievement. After all," and his brother's voice dripped with dark irony, "we are performing before a very distinguished critic." Edwin squirmed again, painfully reminded of his own disdainful tendencies.

"Jonny, please—"

"Doctor."

The word gained a somehow still darker edge, and hung in the air a moment, threateningly, before Henton moved again.

"All right," he said, taking off his jacket, "let's get it over with. Oh, but Jonny, I cannot see this without a drink!"

As the two of them continued speaking, Edwin glanced frantically around him, desperate for some escape. He could not move. He could see no one backstage—not even the boy at the curtain rope was visible. He flung a last wavering gaze at the audience. But the whole crowd was unintentionally heartless, unaware of what was becoming reality before their very eyes. How could they—how could no one see his horror?

His attention was flicked away as the two figures stepped to either side of him, almost behind him. A shiver scurried over his skin. This was it. There was no escape. They were about to begin. What they would do, he tried not to imagine. He tried.

"Doctor." The sudden word startled Edwin; oh, how much longer must this torment be prolonged? "One moment, please. Where are your manners?" he purred, in a voice almost lazily ominous. Then he began to walk forward.

Edwin's heart pounded frantically, skipping every other beat. He tried, gagged as he was, to beg Regis to stop, to not hurt him. But then Regis stopped his forward motion and took a step closer to him. They were face to face now. And Regis turned his black eyes down upon him… and smiled. A small, cruel smile, as if to reply, Go on, then, brother. Beg. And Edwin fell silent, still shaking, eyes beginning to brim with liquid, hopeless pleas.

"Yes, Mortimer," Regis spoke, in a voice more real than Edwin had ever heard. "I realize now that it was you who brought me back to Brooklyn. We drink to you."

Just a moment more, he held Edwin's wavering gaze, and then Regis turned back to his lackey, a glass in his hand—the drink Henton had mentioned.

"Doctor… to my dear, dead brother."

Two glasses slowly met and clinked before Edwin's nose as sweat poured down the sides of it. Then, they raised the glasses to drink.

Edwin's heart exploded in his chest as a gigantic, wild trumpet blast shook the world. It nearly knocked the breath out of him with its sound. To his surprise, he heard Regis' voice, angry, cursing the name of "Teddy", and Henton nervously opposing the death of it. Edwin was bewildered as he recovered the shrapnel of the internal explosion.

Then he remembered. It was all a play. It was all a scene. A single part of a scene, one that was now over. He grasped at his suddenly fragile remembrance of the script, and he began to realize that there was no other place so perfectly made for Jonathon, or Regis, to do anything to hurt him. It was over… right?

He felt the rope tying down his neck suddenly slacken, and he leaned back, relieved at least to have breath unbroken. He did not care what else they were saying. He did care when Regis stepped up to him and grasped his collar roughly, though he was only moving him to get at the ropes. Any touch from him was too much.

But then came another noise—the small ring of a doorbell. Henton quickly grabbed the black bag, snapped it shut, and hid it beneath the table. The brief sound of footsteps could be heard, though the two figures standing in front of him blocked his view.

"Hey, the colonel will have to quit blowing that horn!" came a brash voice.

Edwin's eyes widened; someone else in the class had come in. That loud lad from the school rugby team—Cortie or some such—it was his voice. He certainly could not be in on this horrid scheme, he barely had enough brains to memorize his lines (Edwin had no idea why he'd joined this class in the first place). And he was large enough to handle anyone who started any trouble. Perhaps this was a chance, a chance at last, to finally get out of this horrific mess!

The higher lights turned on, and Edwin glimpsed the bulky frame ascending the set's stairs, arrayed in a police uniform. He tried to cry out to him, get his attention, but all that came out was a garbled yelp. It did the job, though. Cortie noticed him and turned. "Hey, you stood me up! I've been waiting for you at Kelly's for over an hour!"

Edwin glanced down and blinked quickly in confusion. What in the world was he talking about? But then the other seemed to notice the ropes.

"What happened to him?"

"Nothing," Henton jumped in, still affecting a nervous voice. "Uh, he was explaining a play he saw the other night, and that's what happened to a man in the play." And he quickly walked away. To Edwin's relief, Regis followed.

"Oh, I see," Cortie shrugged.

He said more words, but Edwin didn't care what they were. He kept making his own mangled noise, trying to make him understand, begging him to actually notice his predicament. But the other seemed too thick to get it.

Another tactic occurred to him then. Edwin directed his gaze down to the cloth strapped round his mouth, essentially gesturing with his entire face. Understanding seemed to dawn on Cortie. And wonder of wonders, he began to reach for the gag to untie it. Edwin grew wild-eyed in anticipation. He could tell him what had happened, he could blow the lid off of Regis's whole scheme, he could get free of these wretched ropes at last, he—

"No…"

To his shock, Cortie stood back beaming, the gag left in its place.

"You've got to hear the PLOT!"

Edwin stared at him in bewilderment. He tried to say "What?!" but it only came out as noise. Then, to his utter dismay, he remembered. This too was a scene. He, as Mortimer, had earlier sent the policeman and wannabe-playwright on to some restaurant where they might meet to talk about his script. Cortie was playing his role. He had no idea anything was really, truly wrong. No one did. No one would. The play would not stop for him.

Nor did it. Characters came and went and spoke and almost tried to kill each other. And no one came to untie him. They barely noticed him, and he barely noticed them. His thoughts were too filled with the looks and tones, the horrible memory of what he had been through. Indeed, the only thing he ever noticed in the entire wait was the flash of a knife in Regis's hand. He made alarum, but that too was scripted. His brother quickly fell by a blow to the head, feigning unconsciousness, and Cortie went on, unaware of the false attempt on his life.

It was unbearable. Here he sat, bound and gagged with fingers growing numb, body aching from the ropes, still intermittently shaking after the terror of his life. And no one cared. No one could see it was real. No one but him. He was alone. In the midst of a cast of characters, an auditorium full of people, Edwin was alone.

Before his heart could break from this crowded isolation, however, a new realization began to grow on him. Edwin suddenly found that the ropes were galling him. The feeling of tight cord against numb skin was agonizingly unpainful. It became the sole thing he was aware of. And it only worsened. At last, he could not stand it any longer. He had to get out. He had to move. He had to, he had to, somehow, before he went mad!

Suddenly, there was a scuffle of motion, drawing his attention. There was a fight going on, a very big fight. He vaguely remembered it—Jonathon and the policemen, he seemed to think. But it didn't matter. And yet, suddenly, it did, greatly, for an abrupt, wild notion of escape entered his head.

He stood up, chair still attached to him, ropes stretched cuttingly tight (though his wrists were so numb he barely felt it), and rushed headlong into the fight. Almost immediately, he crashed into Cortie. The chair cracked and broke, splintering into several fragments before he hit the upstage floor. The cords went slack around him. He was no longer bound. Cortie threw a glare at him before he rushed back into the fight.

Edwin did not see it. He was simply lying on the floor, head barely held up off it. He heard no fighting. His eyes took in nothing but the floor and the ropes and the shards of wood and his own sleeves, though he didn't truly see even those things.

He only saw the Brother.

Blackgaard or Brewster, it didn't matter. Those dark eyes lodged in front of his own, that dreadful smile, and o, that this too, too solid flesh would melt! He had every right to crawl off the stage, go home then and there, or else lie there forever and die. And yet… and yet…

And yet, he couldn't.

Something in him twinged at the thought. He simply couldn't lie there. He couldn't just leave. Something held him back, some word or notion nagged at him. Time seemed to slow as he searched for it. Then, he found it at last. And his eyes flew open, and he staggered to his feet, with hardly a thought in his mind besides this alone:

The show must go on.

And so it did. Edwin continued in his part, at first dazedly, hardly bothered by the others, by anything at all. But as he went further into it, as the story progressed, he began to fill up with the energy and adrenaline of the performance. He thought nothing of properness of delivery. He barely thought at all. The story was everything. For the remainder of the play, there was no such person as Edwin Blackgaard: he was Mortimer Brewster, and he was nearly mad himself.

At last, the play ended with him rushing down the center aisle with the girl—her name, as far as he was concerned, was Elaine—and the audience beginning to applaud. He was meant to rush out the doors at the back of the auditorium with her, then they would both walk back around to the backstage area. But he did not stop. He ran with her all the way without stopping.

When he arrived backstage, people had already started taking their bows. He set her down and began pacing furiously, unable to stop moving. Her face was flushed as she whispered to her fellow actresses, glancing at him several times, but he didn't notice. He didn't hear what anyone said to him. He was not yet Edwin Blackgaard again, and he deliriously muttered some of his lines from the last scene as he paced.

"Edwin!"

The whispered name caught his attention, though how many times it had been said before it did so, he never found out. He glanced up. One of the older stagehands was gesturing to him. "Hurry up! Take your bows!"

Edwin stood perfectly still a moment. Then he jolted suddenly forward, headed for the stage. The spell was broken, though he still acted as if he were in a trance. But he was, at least, no longer Mortimer Brewster. He stumbled on the last step and almost lurched forward onto the stage.

As soon as he came into the lights, he was met with roaring, thundering applause. He stared out at them in blank bewilderment, lost in the sound and the light. Then, hardly knowing what he was doing, he bowed, which heightened the applause. He stumbled backward, then found both his hands stolen. His arms were raised in the air by others, and were dipped toward the ground. Then once more. All to a grand ovation.

By the time the curtain was fully closed for the last time, he had already wandered off the stage in a daze. He found himself Edwin again, and found himself baffled. Why in the world were they cheering him? He knew he had been onstage, and he knew the show had gone on. But he had barely acted at all for a third of the play! He barely even remembered what he had done in that time!

Someone bumped into him as he walked aimlessly backstage. He began to murmur an apology, but he caught the face, and recoiled in alarm.

"Ah, excuse my carelessness," said Regis, very casually. "I didn't see you walking there." He nodded to Edwin. "I must congratulate you. You made off with quite the impressive performance… brother." And he flashed him a very small smile, the twin itself of the one he had made onstage.

Edwin bolted. Heart pounding, he tore down the dark hallways, leaving the backstage area far behind. The dark scene had been renewed in his mind, and it reared itself up more terrible than ever before, haunting him, chasing him like a ghost. He turned a sharp corner and barreled down a set of stairs, slamming into the wall at the halfway turn.

At last, he came to the bottom of the steps, and from there, to a door. He pushed it open and left it there. He was now in the big storage room under the stage, and it was pitch black. Legs wobbling, he made his invisible way to a spot behind a large crate. It was a spot he had gone to often to rehearse alone.

He did not quite make it there before he collapsed on the floor, sobbing brokenly.