Chet Williamson - Reign

"Fuckin' mess," Abe Kipp observed. Years before he had used the place to hide out and goof off, but gave up on it because there were too many stairs to climb. Besides, the place had an odor he didn't like. The old mattresses were part of it, but it was more than just that. It smelled like something metallic, yet sour and organic at the same time, as if a mouse had died behind the wall. Only the smell never went away as the mouse dried up. Abe had searched for its source, but had never found it. It just seemed to come from everywhere.

He shook his head as he thought about those actors living up here. "Better them than me," he muttered. Maybe, he thought, after everything was all cleaned up and repainted, the smell would go away. It was probably in the fuckin' walls and floor. A coat of paint'd cover it up all right, sure it would.

He found Harry Ruhl in the costume shop where he had sent him. The nigger had called Abe on the backstage phone and bitched about getting the waste cans emptied and the place mopped up, so Abe had sent Harry. Abe didn't like to work for the nigger. He didn't like niggers in general, and especially not that big fat Aunt Jemima on the fourth floor. She was sitting behind her sewing machine now, looking at Abe like he was something she found under a rock. "And what do you want?" she said.

Abe didn't answer right away. Damned if he was going to respond to that kind of talk. Who the hell did she think she was? He glanced around but didn't see Harry anywhere. Terri, the new girl, was in the corner fussing with some dress on a dummy. His gaze lingered on her body until she looked at him and he had to look away. Helluva nice set of knockers on her. She wouldn't have been at all out of place in one of his skin mags. "Where's Harry?" he finally said.

Marvella jerked her head toward the door under the costume loft. "In the bathroom."

"You didn't say nothin' on the phone about cleanin' no bathroom."

"Wasn't my idea. Harry just figured long as he was up here he might as well clean it."

Holy hell, cleaning a nigger's bathroom. Sure, it had to be done from time to time, but actually doing it because he wanted to? Christ, if there wasn't any proof before that the kid was a retard, it sure as shit was here now. "Harry!" Abe bellowed, moving to the bathroom door. "What the hell are you doin'?"

Harry looked up grinning from the toilet bowl. "Just cleaning up, Abe.”

“You finished?"

"Almost."

"Well, get finished. I got something else for you. A really big job. Important.”

“Important? What?"

"Porcelain removal."

Harry's face was a blank. "Huh?"

"I want you to bust up some sinks and toilets."

"Bust them up?"

"Take 'em apart from the wall, put 'em on the freight elevator, and then out back. They gotta be replaced."

"Hey," Marvella said, not deigning to turn from her sewing machine. "We're working here. You want to finish this talk somewhere else?"

Abe ignored her. "Get rid of the furniture too. Mattresses, desks, couple operating tables -"

" Operating tables? You mean up on the fifth floor? The… the hospital?”

“Yeah, the hospital, but it ain't been a hospital for fifty years, Harry."

"But it was, Abe. People died up there. I had a uncle died up there. I never been up there, Abe."

"There was never no reason before, was there?"

"You'll go with me, Abe? Won't you?"

"Hell, Harry, don't be such a…”Abe lowered his voice. “… a pussy boy now."

"I'm not, Abe, I'm not, it's just that I don't like that place, I mean, you think of all the people who died up there.

Marvella turned, frowned at Abe, and shook her head at Harry. When she spoke, her voice was gentle. "There's nothin' up there, Harry. I been up there before. I been all over this place day and night, and I never seen a thing to scare anybody." Her face clouded for a moment, and Abe wondered if she was telling the truth. "Abe," she said, "why don't you go up there with him. Those things're pretty heavy for one boy to tote around."

"Hey," he said. He never referred to Marvella Johnson by name, since he would not give her the honor of addressing her as Mrs., and he was too frightened of her to call her by her first name. "Do I tell you what to do with your helper?"

Marvella's face puckered like a prune. "Just plan your itinerary somewhere else then. We're tryin' to work here."

"All right, all right, come on, Harry." Head held high, Abe Kipp strode to the door, and Harry scurried behind him with his mop, bucket, and garbage bag.

"Don't you be scared now," Marvella said to Harry, "and thanks for cleaning up." He saw Terri smile at Harry and nod as if to encourage him. Shit, Abe thought, why are women so automatically nice to dummies? Maybe if that hot ticket thought he was a dummy, she'd be nice to him too. Goddam, what a figure, even if she did cut her hair like a guy. He considered it and decided he'd crawl through a mile of broken glass just to beat off on her ankle.

He stole one last glimpse of the girl's nipples poking against her blouse, and then went out into the hall. "Come on, dammit," he told Harry, and started walking toward the elevator that would take them to the fifth floor.

Marvella listened to the footsteps moving down the hall and shook her head. "That Abe is not a nice man."

"I've noticed that," Terri said.

"Only thing in the world loves him is that cat."

Terri gave a mock shudder. "Once I tried to pet it, but it ran away. Spat at me first, too."

"Nasty animal. Maybe that's why she and Abe get along." She shook her head again, then turned back to her work. "How you coming on those chorus designs?”

“I've got some rough sketches. You want to see?"

Marvella shrugged. "I guess so. They any good?"

"I think so." She placed a large pad in front of Marvella, just to the right of the sewing machine, and slowly turned the pages until she had finished showing six of them.

"That's all so far?" Terri nodded. "They're good," Marvella said, gave a flicker of a smile, then looked back at the sewing machine and stepped on the treadle.

Terri had to bite back a grin. It was getting better, she thought, better every day. Marvella's praise so far had been limited to semi-appreciative grunts. But today she had actually said Terri's work was good. True, she wasn't the most communicative person Terri had ever known, but the respect she felt for Marvella was, she thought, beginning to be returned, if ever so slightly. At least it was something, and it could, she considered, be a lot worse.

Abe Kipp could have been the costume designer.

Terri chuckled at the thought, earned a look of mild disapproval from Marvella, and got back to her work.

By four-thirty the shadows had gathered on the fifth floor, and Harry Ruhl was hoping that his digital watch would beat the darkness to five o'clock. From time to time he glanced down at it and whispered, "C'mon, c'mon, hurry it up…” but it did no good. He thought of moving it ahead by several minutes, but remembered that he did not have the instruction sheet with him.

He worked on, uncomfortably alert to every slight noise, every squeak of floorboards, settling of joists. He had disconnected each sink and toilet in the rooms of what had been the men's ward, had loaded them onto the elevator, and hauled them out behind the theatre to the dumpsters. It had taken him three trips, and now the only thing remaining was the equipment in the men's operating room. Harry had not yet gone in there.

He hated operating rooms, although he had never seen one. An operating room was where his daddy had died four years earlier. The doctor had come out and told him that when they cut his daddy open they had found that what they called the tissues were so desiccated that there was no way to reattach them on closing. Harry had not understood what all the words meant, but he had understood that his daddy had been alive when he went into the operating room, and was dead when he came out. Another thing he knew about operating rooms was that his uncle had died in the one on the fifth floor back in the late thirties. His uncle was only a teenager then, and his daddy had told him the story plenty of times. "They killed him in there, Harry," he had said. "He wasn't all that sick, but they killed him in there anyway."