On my third night playing a demon ticket-taker in the Valenciennes booth, Mary brought me an early edition of The Inquirer along with my usual jam sandwich and coffee. It was set out neatly along the edge of the tray, folded open to the entertainment page. 'All Hallows' -- Trick Play a Treat for Those Not Faint of Heart, it said right there in cold print. I suppose they expected to hear me whooping it up all the way into the back. But I hardly had time to notice; the phone was ringing off the hook, and people had already started turning up at our door. It was time for me to go into my act.

Every evening at six-thirty Mrs. Templeton zipped me into a suit made of muslin and leather and fur, topping it off with a papier-maché mask that fit right down over my head. It was a good theatrical gimmick, if an old one; as the men and women came in from the street I lurched up at them out of a sudden rush of blood-red light, raking the bars with my wooden claws. It provoked more laughter than fright, as we intended; they came to my booth knowing they were in the right place, and left it ready to have a good time. Once inside the hall, they met up with yet another nightmare figure: Mary, dressed in a shroud bound all in rusted chains, waiting in the shadow behind a table set out with bloodcolored programs and a row of paper cups. "Here, drink this," she said to all who filed past; and before their eyes the cups were filled with wine flowing thick and purple from the tips of her fingers.

I never saw the reaction to that, never even heard it there in the booth, under the diving-suit head of the demon. For half an hour the folks came in a steady stream, so many that I had to keep my red light on all the time. I snatched at their money, ripped two or three tickets from the paper "tongue" that drooped between my mask-lips, and hurried them on. By seven forty-five I was turning them away. Curtain time was eight; it was eight fifteen before I was able to close up.

So even then I didn't have a chance to look at the article, just time enough to slip out of the demon outfit, dump the cold coffee into me and grab a half of the sandwich to eat on the way. But the heading I'd seen was too encouraging to ignore; on my way out I scooped the paper up, and with jam running down from the corner of my mouth I scanned the length of the column until I found my own name. The play, by Winston Howe, is an effective bit of Halloween trickery, it said, drawing on

Backstage was the usual blur of painted faces, the attentive silence with everyone poised all at once, ready to move, Templeton working alone for the moment inside the box of light. His voice came over the backs of the scenery, rattled in the wings

and it came to me suddenly that he was not changing anything, not ad-libbing. It was my voice that powered him, my words being spoken so beautifully. "Listen," I wanted to say. "Hey, listen to that."

I held the newspaper so tight that it crackled in my hands. Off in the dark, waiting to help them, I spoke the words along beside him, not making a sound, only his voice rising from my mouth into the rafters above and then on, into the house.

We were an odd group coming out of the alleyway, the Templetons in their street clothes and phony age lines drawn on their faces; the corpsecolored woman towering over them, and Mary and Moscow and Sylvie following along, their eyes sunk deeply into black-painted sockets; and Lon and I, an oversized day laborer and a youth shivering in a frayed summer jacket. We walked in the descending cold, alone in the street with our shadows lengthening from lamp to lamp. Jones came between the Templetons, linked her arms in theirs. Her breath rose into the city night. "What was his name?" she said.

"Edward Moran."

"Hah! Well bless his heart."

"Maybe we should send him flowers," Sylvie said.

"Calla Lillies!"

"No," Jones said. "The time to do that is when they give you a bad review."

We went to a little restaurant just a block from the theater, up on the second floor of a building that I passed every day. There were no signs to mark the place, only a three-by-five card saying CLOSED TUESDAYS tacked into the wall at the top of the stairs. The owner said that we sounded like the entire Russian army, but he didn't seem to mind. Somehow he'd managed to squeeze seven tables and a bar into a room no bigger than our stage; it was late enough so that most of the chairs were empty. He gave us two tables next to the row of windows overlooking the street, and we sat around them in a figure eight and passed the newspaper from hand to hand.

"'Those with a taste for the unusual,'" Jones read out loud, "'will not want to miss All Hallow's Eve, a melodramatic bit of work by newcomer Winston Howe.'"

" 'ray!" Mary said, and Lon whistled and Templeton said "Here here" and everyone clapped and thumped the table. Jones motioned for silence. "'By turns amusing, ghastly and absurd'"

"Absurd?" Templeton said. "Not our Mr. Howe."

"'the play draws on some very ancient horrors and succeeds in making them effective for a modern audience. It has been given lavish treatment most in keeping with the season, including some Grand Guignol stage effects not for the squeamish.'"

The owner brought us wine and said that it sounded like we had had a good night. He took orders from all eight of us without writing anything down; somehow in the middle of all that, Templeton got hold of the newspaper.

"Second paragraph," he said. "'Connecting story concerns an awful old man who' Hmm." He read on, or pretended to, in silence, making a show of steadily building anger until I thought steam would pour out of his ears. "Why, that's horrible! Outrageous! I'm going to see to it that this show is banned!"

"Oh, stop it," Mrs. Templeton said. "You are awful." She snatched the paper out of his hands and peered at it over the top of her glasses until she found where he left off. "'an awful old man who weaves tales around all who have the misfortune to come in contact with him. First, a night nurse finds herself embroiled in serio-comic reworking of the Saint Winnifred legend, in which a decapitated woman wreaks terrible vengeance on her killer; next, his own granddaughter enacts the leading role in a nightmare vision of a child terrorized in the workroom of her father's funeral home.' It does sound gruesome, you know."

"That's all right," Jones said.

My face hurt from all the grinning, but I couldn't seem to stop. Only half a glass of wine and already I was lightheaded; I blamed it on my empty stomach, the sandwich four hours gone. I felt tired and warm and happy. Mary had the article now; her voice rose from the next table, and she made it sound like music.

"'Second act features tales of a priest who can see into hell and a society woman who becomes a rabid hound by night. In these stories Chaos is suppressed or masked by Order, only to come bursting to the surface, stronger than ever, and with an even greater power to terrify. Much of what could have been offensive is deftly handled here, though it should be stressed that All Hallows is not your church Sunday-school meeting'"

"Ah, you see?" Templeton said. "Close the sinners down!"

Then the newspaper found its way into my hands. It had been folded into a fly swatter shape. I had to open it again to read down into the lower half of the column. "Shh, shh," Moscow said. "He's going to speak."

"'The production'"

"Louder," Moscow said.

"'The production allows greatest possible leeway for bravura performance, and its cast does not fail to take advantage.'" More table-thumping. "'Claude Templeton as the tale-spinner gives a grand performance but is nearly surpassed by the deft Margaret Darwin, cast here as the socialite hound woman'"

"Socialite Hound Woman?" Sylvie said, and everyone had a good laugh over that.

"'Ruth Templeton, Mary Eckert and the beguiling Sylvie Lindstromm all contribute first-rate work.'"

A chorus of wolf whistles rose from around the two tables before I could even finish the sentence. Sylvie actually turned red. "All right," Lon said. He cleared his throat. "Don't get us thrown out. Acting like kids. Here, look at this: 'Peter Moscow's turn as the priest plagued by demon visions proves once again that he's as big a ham as they come.'"

"Give me that," Sylvie said. "It says, 'one of the most strenuously physical bits of acting in this or any season.'" She glared at Lon. "My public," Moscow said. Sylvie ignored him and went on reading to the bottom of the page. "'Mounted in settings that awaken thoughts of the melodramas of the '9Os, All Hallows Eve makes for a festive and chilling seasonal treat for those with strong hearts and a taste for the macabre.'"

The owner and his wife carried in two big trays of food and began setting it out around the tables. Jones sat back in her chair. Black hair spiraled over her brow and shoulders. In the soft restaurant light the heavy paint around her eyes made her look like something out of The Arabian Nights. She lifted her wine glass. "Sursum corda," she said. "I'm proud of you all."

After dinner we walked back up to Valenciennes and stood in the cold under the marquee. It was past time for us to be saying our goodnights, but we paused there for ten or fifteen minutes before the chills set in deep enough to make it happen. Then Jones took out her key and turned to twist it in the lock. "I'm going in for a few minutes," she said. "No rest for the deft."

I was tempted to tag along. But I would have been the only one, and anyway they hadn't gone to the trouble of finding me a "writer's garret" as they called it just so I could follow around after her like a puppy dog with its tongue hanging out. I knew better than to make myself a fair target. And so the goodnights were finally said; we went off our separate ways, and when I looked back the sidewalk was empty, the theater standing dark and strange against the street with Jones alone somewhere inside, cleaning away the remains of my "hound woman" from her face.

The "writer's garret" was one and a half rooms looking out over a private garden bordered on all four sides by brick houses. I had a bed, a writing desk and a couple of shelves for books; Mary said that she'd help decorate the place, but I had only just moved in and she hadn't yet had the time to do anything more than hang a star-patterned curtain across the front of my closet. Even that was more than what I needed. But Mary said there was a trick to living alone, and part of it was to make home a place that you liked coming back to.

If that was the case, I had a long way to go. When I came in that night I was too restless to sleep, too unsettled to work. There were a couple of books I should have been reading, but I didn't feel up to that, either. was used to having the rest of the company just down the hall. Instead of undressing I sat in the little half-room and read the clipping again and again, wishing that I hadn't drunk so much wine, feeling exultant and sad at the same time without quite knowing why. At last I got up, threw my jacket back on and went down to the pay telephone on the landing. I fed it as many dimes and nickels as I had. And I dialed my parents' number.

Waiting for the call to go through, I marveled at how fast it could travel all those hundreds of miles down the black wires. It found their house and shot into the receiver beside their bed. My father answered after two rings. He said, "Do you know what time it is?"

"Sorry but I had to tell you. We got a review in the Inquirer today, and wait till you hear it"

"Son, it's one in the morning. Couldn't you just send it? This is costing you money."

"A few cents. Listen, I think this is going to work out. Jones says that I'm getting better with every act. Hey, you should see her as the Angel of Death. I really think it's going to work out."

"That's a good thing," he said. "Did you hear about your Mr. DeLodges?"

I thought: How could I? "No," I said. "No, I didn't."

"He passed on last week. Went into the hospital with a pain in his chest, and died that night."

The hall was so cold that I was afraid I'd left the door open coming in. There was no place for me to sit down. The wall was bare, and covered with handprints. I felt as if he'd swept away the entire evening; there had never been a play of mine, we hadn't had any cause to celebrate. Jones and I had never laughed together. "If you could only see her the way I do," I whispered into the mouthpiece. "He did. He knew."

Far, far away in St. Paul my father sat up with his back against the head of the bed. "Whatever assurances he may have given you are no good now," he said. "You've burned your bridges."

I wanted to say: good. Instead I apologized again and told him to get some sleep. I went back to the room with my hands clenched in my pockets. It wasn't until I went to lock the door behind me that I saw what I had done to the review.