Theatre of the Worm

Death, like so many things, is relative. It is relative to life. When people physically die, their heart stops, they no longer draw breath into their lungs and all functions within the brain fade away. What remains of the person is an empty shell. Dead flesh, cold skin and bones.
Still, many people would say the deceased is alive. This life takes place in their minds and in their souls. After the physical death, the afterlife is lived within the survivors. In this manner, all that lives exists forever. This is a very important balance.

Mortimer Hautköning died, but could not begin his afterlife.
Mortimer had once been an actor. He played the great Shakespearian tragedies. Women had fallen in love with Romeo when Mortimer asked: “Is the day so young?” when he had first appeared on a big stage. In his later days, he had continued to baffle his audience.
Until the theatre in which Mortimer played had fallen into a financial crisis. There had only been enough money left for one show. The most popular play would have been performed with the best actors the theatre had to offer. The play had been The Tragedy of Macbeth. Mortimer had been given the role that seemed to be written for him: the noble Banquo, who would haunt the feeble tyrant’s mind.
It had been an enormous success. Everybody, yes everybody had been there. Of course, the friends and families of the actors had been sitting in the best seats, right before all the press and the critics. All that knew the name of the theatre had bought a ticket. The theatre had been saved.

Mortimer cursed alone in his forgotten house. He cursed irony and cursed curses.
There had been one scene left for him. The scene where Banquo’s ghost would appear. They had made an intricate construction with smoke and mirrors. Mortimer would stand behind the stage and Banquo’s ghost would be projected on the stage. It had been at that point where Mortimer whispered Macbeth’s name. Banquo’s ghost had mimicked it, as Mortimer expected. It had been at that exact moment that the machine creating the smoke exploded.
The actors on the stage had been dead in an instant, their torn bodies burning and their flesh boiling. The audience had been too shocked to realise what had happened and had never known how old the building really was. There had been no money to repair anything. They had not even fully understood when the lighting fell down and they burned as in inferno. The screams Mortimer still heard in his sleep were of confused fear. There screams had been accompanied by the unbearable sounds of the stage breaking down on the people backstage, burying them alive or dead under the rubble.

Everyone presumed that every man and woman died there. Mortimer could only wish that were true. He was the only survivor. His friends, his family, his critics, everyone he knew was dead. Everybody who had known him was dead.
Mortimer Hautköning died physically, but there was nobody to remember him. No mind or soul to live in. So it lived in his own mind and his own soul. The life animated his dying body.
It only occurred to him slowly.
At first his heartbeat stopped, fading away from his grasp. Mortimer slowly realised that he did not need to breathe. In contrary, his muscles stiffened and he was unable to move his chest. Unable to move at all. He sat in his chair, caught inside his dying body. His eyes closed and there was nothing but darkness, silence and thoughts. It was not real death, it was no real sleep. It was a living hell.
And he was released from it, in a very disturbing manner.

Mortimer felt something touching his cold skin. A hand, trembling but tender, touched his eyelids. He opened them and a woman let out a scream. Mortimer tried to scream as well, but all he could do was push a dry groan into the air in front of him. With dead eyes Mortimer saw a glorious being. A young woman with brown hair that fell beside her face on her shoulder like fine silk. Her smooth face was tightened by fear, but her eyes were slowly filled with understanding and perhaps sympathy. They were dark green, sometimes almost golden.

”I’m sorry,” she said with an accent he almost recognised. “It’s always a bit frightening to wake someone.”
”Know you,” Mortimer managed to whisper. Because he did. Perhaps when he had been younger or when he had been somewhere. Perhaps when he had been dreaming.
”In a way, yes, you know me. Everybody knows me; I live in everybody’s heart and soul.”
”How?”
”People hear things. A girl found frozen to death on the street. A mad woman begging for change. A mother leaving her child on the doorsteps of a wealthy house. People do not know me, but they hear and remember. I am alive in that way, nothing but a soul in the hearts of others. My name is Anima.”
”Why?” He could still only whisper one word, with effort.
”I want others to live. Other who don’t live in the minds and souls. They slumber, like you. I woke you to find a way so you can be remembered. So you can die and live on in the souls of the world.”

Mortimer nodded and Anima smiled, something that flowed over her whole face.
”We have a plan, but it is not enough to make it work.” She sighed. “People see us as monsters. Things they fear. They do not remember, only fear.”
”Many?”
”Too many.” She said while she turned around to the door. “Come, I’ll show you our place.”
He could walk and they walked through the night of the city, all night long. When they stopped, Mortimer dropped to his knees.

He sobbed in dry gasps before their destination. His eternal, endless, cruel, inevitable destination.
”Here?!”
”Yes,” Anima replied, slightly confused. “People thought it was cursed and even though it was rebuilt, it is never used.”
Mortimer whispered his confession: “It ís cursed.”
He told the whole story. She listened with a complex veil of understanding and sadness on her face.       
Her hand touched his bony shoulder compassionately when he finished.
”I understand, Mortimer. Now you must understand everything will be alright. You of all people, here of all places. If we can tell the stories, if we can make the people remember and know, you and all these others will live on in their knowledge and remembrance. They will learn and free you all.”

He nodded and they entered the theatre. It was as if the old building was reborn itself. Decorated with statues and ornaments depicting classical plays, illuminated by yellow candlelight. These memories incarnated in stone made Mortimer happy, optimistic. He almost felt like he could step onto the stage again, be Hamlet, be Rodericko, be Romeo, shining in the light of stories that cannot be forgotten.
”Yes,” he whispered with a smile on his grey wrinkled face, “They will learn.”
Anima gave him a while to stare at the renewed, but unused theatre.
”Come,” she said then, “It is time to meet the others.”
The tormenting moans and laments darkened Mortimer’s mind. He saw them in the same golden light, embodied souls burning in limbo. Their limbs skin over bone, ribcages with broken hearts inside and their faces cobweb skulls of desperation. They cried out to him to help him.
Mortimer stared up, shocked, away. He saw there, in the twisting candlelight, the oldest image of theatre.

”Masks.”
”What is it?” Anima asked.
”We will make masks, like the old Greek. They will not see the death in our bodies, but see the lessons of our soul.”
”Then we will rest.” They knew. “We will make the masks.”
Thus the theatre was reopened. No living soul ever knew how, but the plays they saw were tragic, enchanting and contained great wisdom.
Every actor was seen only once, wearing a clay mask. Every actor told a story. The spectators could do nothing but take these stories in their hearts. Behind the stage, behind the masks, the dead smiled as they felt life fall from them, into the souls who would live a better life, learning from their mistakes.

Mortimer was the last to leave the stage, the last to tell his story.
He ended it with old words, words he had spoken a long time ago and had a new meaning now: “And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers, restrain me in the cursed thoughts that nature gives way in repose.”
His life filled the spectators with tragic realisation and he lives in their souls forever, as they walk this world and tell what has been taught.