Boo came back to the lobby. She was in a foul mood, judging by the ugly line of her mouth. When her eyes lit on the hapless smoking boy, she was reborn.

"You put that cigarette out, this minute!"

Boo turned on Mallory who slowly picked up one program and folded it in half with great concentration.

"Here," Boo held a roll of red tickets entirely too close to Mallory's face. "You can number the comp tickets, too."

The red roll and Boo's hand hung in the air, ignored by Mallory who showed no enthusiasm for numbering tickets. Boo opened her mouth to say something as Mallory looked up at her with narrowed eyes. Boo shut her mouth quickly, as though she had been told to do it, and sat down on the far end of the bench and began to number the tickets herself. Always better to do it yourself if there's even the remote possibility of having your authority challenged. Or possibly she had just remembered that she was only twenty and had no authority.

Mallory checked the pocket watch again. He'd been out of her sight for ten minutes, hardly time enough to kill an old lady and make it back for the dress rehearsal, but she didn't like it.

The boy took the tickets from Boo's hand. "I'll do it."

The boy was relighting his very battered cigarette as Boo was passing through the lobby door to the theater. Mallory stood up quickly, and crossed the room towards the double doors on the other side of the lobby, missing the expression on the boy's face as he looked up suddenly in the belief that she had disappeared.

She ran up the wide staircase, long legs spanning three steps at a time. She had only been this way once before. As she recalled, it was tricky without a flashlight. The stairs wound up and around for two flights, and then a small passage led her down five steps of total blackness and into the second-tier balcony. She settled into the covering dark while Boo was commanding the lights from center stage down below. Two young women were seated in the front row, ten feet from the stage, consulting over a clipboard. They were dressed like Boo in the Barnard uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. A very un-Barnard redhead was standing stage left in a dress that hemmed mid-calf above stiletto heels. A young man with slicked-back hair and a Forties-period suit sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his out-of-period running shoes. Boo, legs akimbo, hands on hips, screamed for the light cues, and with each call a different part of the stage was illuminated until number twenty-two blew the fuse and the theater went black.

Samantha Siddon consulted her wristwatch. In one hand she grasped the silver lion's head of her cane. She was aware of the person behind her before she heard the footfalls. All this day, she had had the sense of something momentous looming, an invisible behemoth. Now it was approaching, the moment was almost here. It was death.

The pain of her arthritis made her slow to turn around, and she was even slower to focus through the thick lenses of her glasses. Confusion added to the obscuring clouds in her faded brown eyes.

"So it's you," she said. "How odd, how very odd." She stared at the knife. It occurred to her to scream, but it was a listless thought, and she had no real heart for it. Her cane was rising feebly to block the first strike, and she had a bit of time to realize this was only the reflex of life itself, which was stubborn even when its vessel was not so set on its continuing.

Boo strode onto the stage with a toss of her frizzy mane which would not toss nicely but only lumped to one side.

"Where's the lighting tech?" She called into the dark of the theater, shading her eyes with one hand and lifting her face to the second-tier balcony above Mallory's head. "It's getting late!"

And where was Gaynor, Mallory wondered. Another two minutes had passed. She'd give him two more to come out from backstage, and then she would go hunting.

Boo strutted back and forth, ordering more light cues, one through twenty this time. The lights went on and off, up and down. She screamed, "Jonathan! Where the hell are you?"

Yes, where, Mallory wondered, going on nineteen minutes, where are you, you son of a -?

Gaynor ran onto the stage. He was wearing a wide-brim hat. His tie was loose, and he had garters on the sleeves of his shirt. And something else was radically changed. There were no jerky thrusts to his elbows, and his feet agreed to carry him in the same direction without the usual starts and stops. He made a low bow and kissed Boo's hand, neatly pulling off that gesture without looking the fool. He suddenly had style, thought Mallory. This must be what they called acting.

With the easy grace of dance steps, Gaynor quickly climbed the platform's rickety stairs, which were begging for an accident, so poor was their knocked-together construction. He sat down in a straight-back chair before a desk. At the center of the desk was an old-time microphone with radio call letters crowning the top. The platform had a built-in sag toward stage right.

Boo screamed for the next cue and the house lights went down. "Where the hell is the Shadow?"

The lobby doors flew open, banging against the walls to either side. The actors on stage turned to stare as a young man strode into the theater and stood for a moment in the semi-darkness. He had wild curls of dark hair, darker eyes and full lips. Just as Mallory was deciding that this was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, he keeled over dead-drunk, making a perfect three-point landing on the back of his head, his ass and one elbow. And this, she reasoned, must be the Shadow. The look of horror on Boo's face confirmed it.

Gaynor descended the platform stairs, stepped lightly to the edge of the stage and jumped down to floor level to call the unconscious boy by name, to prod his body, checking for signs of life, and finally to lug the dead weight of him through the side door by grasping the boy under the limp arms which dragged along the floor.

Mallory was wondering what had possessed Boo to cast that striking boy, sexual even when passed out cold, as the Shadow. He was definitely a poor choice for the part of a character who had the power to cloud minds and render himself invisible. Certainly no woman had a libido so dulled that even blindfolded and three days dead she could fail to notice him in any crowd.

Gaynor returned to the stage and climbed back to his mark behind the desk. The platform was so tentative, so screwy-looking, Mallory waited for it to crumble and tumble Gaynor, desk and chair to the stage. It never did, but she continued to wait, believing that it would.

It was another hour of radio plays, an old Jack Benny routine and a sketch from Stella Dallas, an hour of Boo terrorizing a good-natured cast and crew before Mallory heard the line she had been waiting for.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

The Shadow knows.

Mallory's mouth moved, silently accompanying the lines of the script. When she closed her eyes, she was back in the cellar of the old house in Brooklyn, sitting with Markowitz on a rainy Saturday afternoon, sipping cocoa in the smaller audience of two dedicated make-believers.

There was a long pause in the dialogue where a pause shouldn't be. The Shadow had missed his first cue.

She opened her eyes. The star had made his entrance. With his first lines, Mallory realized that he was stone-cold sober. No hasty cup of coffee had done that for him. So the deadfall drunk routine had been an act to torture Boo. Now the boy moved to center stage and launched into a stunning soliloquy.

Of course, the lines belonged to another character who had escaped from an entirely different play, A Streetcar Named Desire, and had nothing at all to do with the Shadow script. But the heroine gamely responded to the riveting, animalistic screams, and she came running in from the wings and bounded across the stage to leap into his arms. The boy carried her off the stage to wild applause from cast, crew and Mallory.