Chet Williamson: Reign

He heard them outside his dressing room door now. It was late. The show itself ran, as always, three hours with the intermission, and tonight's curtain calls had lasted another half hour. They could have lasted longer, he thought. They could have lasted until morning.

But no, it was good that Curt had brought the curtain down and the house lights up when he did. Always leave them wanting more – the theatre's golden rule.

Dennis smiled at the memory of the applause continuing long after the curtain had come down for the final time and the auditorium was fully lit. Five years ago, three, even six months ago he might have interpreted Curt's ending the curtain call as insolence, and given him a tongue-lashing for it. But tonight he felt not even mild aggravation. Leaving the Emperor behind was indeed, he thought, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

There was a knock on his door, and he heard Robin's voice calling, "Dennis? Dennis, the party?"

"I'll be there," he called back. He had not yet removed his costume or his makeup, and the Emperor still stared at him from the mirror. The medals flashed, the gold braid gleamed like chorus girls' hair. The lines in his face were invisible beneath the makeup and the powder. It was, if not a young man's face, then the face of a man whom the years had touched but lightly. He knew that he could not stay there forever, that people and the rest of his life were waiting for him. The thought made him smile, and he spoke to his image in the glass, encompassed by soft, naked bulbs, "Well, your majesty, it's time to leave you. Leave you for good." He shook his head. "I can't stay here forever."

It was as if the image told him that he could. The carmined lips did not open, but he heard the voice inside his head.

You can, it said.

"What…" he whispered so quietly that an ear next to his mouth would not have heard.

You can, it said again, then became silent.

Dennis Hamilton shivered, and the conceit that he had considered, the intention to leave on his costume and makeup, to remain the Emperor for one final night, suddenly oppressed him. He pulled the uniform jacket open so quickly that the snaps seemed to pop simultaneously, and yanked the garment from his body as though it were lined with barbs. Then he reached for the jar of cold cream as a drowning man reaches for a spar, and slathered it over his face, rubbing it in and wiping it away with handfuls of tissue, desperate to escape the Emperor.

And when he looked in the mirror again, the Emperor was gone. In his place, dressed crisply in a dinner jacket, was Dennis Hamilton. The beard, reddish-brown and trimmed to perfection, was the only thing that remained, for the eyes, the brow, the mouth were all gentle, with not a trace of imperiousness in their slants, their turns, their attitudes.

Dennis sighed in relief, walked to the door, grasped the knob, and looked back at the mirror, expecting for a moment to see an image still framed within. But the glass only reflected the silken curtains, the red brocade wallpaper of his dressing room. He looked again, as if some mistake had been made, then turned and opened the door upon the crowd, upon the world. Hands reached out for him, kind words assailed him, and the door closed upon the mirror.

It sat there, blank. And, in a while, an image returned.

All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

– C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Scene 1

Six months after Dennis Hamilton's farewell performance of A Private Empire, on a October night whose chill pushed thin ribbons of cold between the cracks in the casements of the old farmhouse windows, Ann Deems, newly widowed, sat in the large family room and watched Entertainment Tonight on the projection TV. She had been working on the details of the estate all day, and a thick sheaf of papers still lay, awaiting her attention, on the teak coffee table.

She ignored them now, her feet tucked comfortably under her, her gaze fixed loosely on the images that blurringly danced across the giant screen. She made a mental note that one of the first things she would do would be to get rid of the damned thing and buy another regular TV. She hated the way colors bled into each other, the lack of sharp detail that phosphor dots provided. She had complained to Eddie about it time and again, but all he had said was, "You'll get used to it, Annie. I mean, look at the size of it. It's like being in a goddamned theatre, isn't it?"

Yes, she had told him. Yes, I suppose so, thinking all the while that it was like a theatre in which the projectionist was drunk and the lens was smeared with Vaseline. Still, Eddie had loved it. It was his toy, just like all the other toys he had bought and played with and gotten bored with through their twenty-odd years of married life.

She didn't begrudge him the things. After all, he had worked hard for them, had always worked hard since the day he had gotten out of law school and gone into practice with his father's firm. And even if he hadn't worked hard, they still would have had the money. Henry Deems always saw to that. The only son of the senior partner in one of the oldest law firms in Philadelphia would want for nothing, and neither, Ann thought with an odd mixture of satisfaction and distaste, would his widow or his daughter.

She shrugged off the thoughts and tried to turn her attention back to the TV. This kind of empty-headed pseudo-journalism was exactly what she needed now. Mind candy, popcorn for the brain. It seemed as though she had been thinking about Eddie every minute since his death three weeks before. She was afraid she would always think about it.

It left a tremendous void in her life, as though someone had come and pulled up their house in one piece, so that only a pit remained where the basement used to be. If they had been older, it might have been easier to take, even though the ties would have been still deeper with years. But you just don't expect someone to die of a heart attack at forty-four. Cancer maybe, or a car crash, but not a heart attack, not for someone who never smoked, got a lot of exercise, ate right, was a walking public service spot. Not Eddie. And not the way it happened. She wondered if, after everything was over, the estate settled, Eddie's things stored away or distributed among the many charities that Ann did volunteer work for, she could forget that night. She wondered, if she met another man and fell in love with him, if she could ever make love again.

A commercial came on the huge screen, and Ann looked away, closed her eyes, and remembered once more. There was nothing to see, for it had been in darkness. No, there was only the sound and the feeling of him, of Eddie over her, filling her, the two of them pressed together, moving as one toward a climax, and her coming first, the warmth moving up from groin to stomach to breasts, and feeling the spasmodic heat inside her, knowing that Eddie was with her, part of her. And then the horror began.

It was as if someone had struck him with a sledgehammer. He died on top of her, inside her, in an instant. A sharp intake of breath, and the weight of him pressing her down, smothering her, not the weight of passion spent, but the terrible, awesome weight of life fled. Dead weight. Dead.

She blinked back tears and looked at Eddie's goddamned, mammoth screen again. It was the stuff of stupid, dirty jokes, dying like that, and she felt furious at him for doing it, knowing full well that it had not been his fault, that he did not choose where and when to have his fatal attack. Still, his death had savaged her above and beyond the already harrowing experience of losing a husband, a friend, a man to whom you had given all your love for nearly a quarter of a century. Despite her friends, her family, despite Terri, she felt terribly alone.