CHAPTER IX

Into the Mist

“Isn’t it spooky?” Pauline whispered, breaking the spell that was upon Judy. The theater was so dark she couldn’t see her friend, but she could hear her voice. She was about to answer when the sound of a wailing siren reached her ears.

“What’s _that_?” she questioned fearfully.

Pauline touched her arm. “Judy! You’re all goose-flesh,” she whispered. “It’s only an ambulance. Probably there was an accident outside. But don’t worry about it. We’re safe enough in here.”

“I hope we are.” Judy had thought, for just a fleeting moment, that something might have happened back in the film room. Maybe an explosion or a fire. But common sense told her Pauline was right. Her attention was drawn back to the set where the fairies were now singing:

“_The witch! The witch! Her curse came true. Pray tell us, what can fairies do?_”

“Nothing, my pretties!” chuckled the witch. She nodded her head so that the green hair fell in straggly wisps across her ugly face and repeated, “Nothing, my pretties. You can do nothing at all.”

“Not so! Not so!” cried all the fairies, rushing at her in a wild dance, their feet flying faster and faster as the music increased in tempo.

Judy and her friends sat in rapt attention as did the entire audience. The siren outside could still be heard wailing above the music, but nobody paid much attention to it. Irene, leading her train of fairies, drove the witch into the wings and returned to where the princess had fallen.

“_She only sleeps. She is not dead. We’ll take her to her royal bed_,”

the fairies sang softly. Making cradles of their arms, they lifted the sleeping princess and carried her to another set where she was placed in a canopied bed to sleep for a hundred years.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Judy whispered. “She looks—”

“Watch!” Pauline interrupted as the cameras turned quickly on another set showing the kitchen of the castle. Here the cook fell asleep just as she was raising her hand to box the ears of the kitchen boy. In still another room the king and queen fell asleep on their thrones. Finally the audience was given a glimpse of the castle itself. It was only a background painting pulled down to hide the various sets, but it looked real enough on the television screen. Irene, standing in front of it, waved her wand and began to chant:

“_Arise, oh misty vapors, rise To hide from all beneath the skies The place where Sleeping Beauty lies._”

“Look!” whispered Judy. “Now I know why everything is so misty. Steam is being blown from a big black kettle over there to the right.”

The mist was now very dense. A fan was blowing it across the set. When it cleared away the castle had changed. A thick growth of weeds and brush made it seem as if a hundred years had passed during the brief pause for the commercial.

All this time Irene had been standing to the left of the set. She introduced the prince, now seen in a puzzled pose before the forsaken castle.

“_What’s this?” he cried. “A lovely castle now appears. The mist has hidden it for years._”

Parting the thorny bushes, he made his way toward it. Suddenly, to Judy’s surprise, the whole background scene went up like a window shade, revealing the rooms inside the castle.

“There’s Sleeping Beauty again! Isn’t she lovely?” a voice behind Judy whispered.

“And so young looking!” another whispered. “Isn’t it wonderful that Francine Dow can still play the part of a fifteen-year-old girl?”

The face of the actress was turned a little away from the viewers. A veil covered it. She lay as still as death until the prince lifted the veil and kissed her. Then quickly, almost too quickly, it seemed to Judy, the play ended and Irene was before the cameras singing her closing song. She sang it all the way through. When it was finished, she blew a kiss to the children in the audience, adding, “And here’s one for you, Judykins.” Little Judy was always Judykins to her adoring young mother.

“Francine Dow wasn’t really the star. Irene was,” declared Judy as the red lights flashed off. Almost immediately the prop men began dismantling the set. Fairyland backgrounds disappeared. Cameras were pushed aside. The magic spell that had held the audience was over.

“Where’s Clarissa?” Pauline Faulkner asked suddenly.

Judy looked around for the girl they had met in the restaurant, but she was nowhere in sight. The seat next to Flo was vacant. Judy tried to think when she had last seen Clarissa or heard her speak. A shivery feeling came over her.

“Didn’t you see her leave?” Pauline was asking Florence Garner.

Flo shook her head. “I wasn’t looking at anything except the play,” she replied. “Wasn’t it beautiful when that fairy mist covered the castle and made it vanish?”

Judy waved her hand in front of Flo’s eyes. “The play’s over. Come back from fairyland,” she told her. “Clarissa has vanished. You were sitting right beside her. You must have seen her when she left her seat.”

“She didn’t leave it. Anyway, not that I noticed,” Flo protested. “Maybe she was a phantom after all. Maybe she disappeared into the mist.”

“If she did, she disappeared with the money we lent her,” Pauline declared.

“Good heavens!” This statement brought Flo out of her trancelike state. She stared at the empty seat and then at Pauline. “Well, what do you know?” she said at last. “I think all four of us, including Irene, have been played for suckers. We should have known better than to trust a stranger. We don’t even know where she lives.”

“I thought she was a phony. What do you think, Judy?” asked Pauline.

“I still can’t believe it,” Judy declared. “Clarissa was our friend.”

“Our phantom friend,” Pauline reminded her.

“It is sort of weird, isn’t it?” agreed Judy. “We called her a phantom and then she—well, she just vanished. I can’t think how or where. Was she there when we heard that siren, Flo?”

“What siren?”

Apparently Flo had been so engrossed in the show that she hadn’t heard it.

“It was an ambulance we heard outside the theater right after the witch put her curse on Sleeping Beauty. An ambulance!” Judy exclaimed, a new possibility dawning upon her. “Do you suppose Clarissa—”

“Of course not,” Pauline interrupted. “She was in here watching the show, not outside on the street.”

“We don’t know that,” Judy objected. “We don’t know how long her seat has been vacant. She could have slipped outside, for some reason, and been hurt in an accident. Come on, girls! We have to find out for sure.”

Grabbing their coats, they hurried outside to see what had happened. They were just too late. The ambulance with its wailing siren had already disappeared down the street. At the curb a taxicab with its rear fender smashed in was waiting to be towed away. The crowd that had gathered around the scene of the accident was beginning to thin. Judy spied a policeman and rushed over to him.

“We can’t find our friend. We think she may have left the theater and been hurt or something. Who was in that ambulance?” she inquired all in one breath.