Chet Williamson - Reign

"I… I thought I did. But I couldn't have." She shook her head in disbelief. "This place seems full of nightmares."

"I know," he said, still looking at the stage, "but it won't always. It's going to be a theatre again, with living performers and living audiences. It's going to be a wonderful place, Ann, the way it used to be. In spite of…” He broke off, and Ann thought his eyes too seemed to see something below that wasn't, that couldn't be, there. "In spite of everything," he finished.

"You'll do it, Dennis," she said. "You can make it live again. Make it sing."

He nodded, then looked back at her. "If you'll help me."

"I will," she said. "Any way I can."

He smiled at last. "Let's go somewhere else now. Together."

"Yes," she said, relieved to take his hand again, to find that it was still warm and soft.

They walked together to Dennis's suite, meeting no one on the way, seeing nothing strange or frightening. As the door closed behind them, Ann thought its solid sound of wood meeting wood was one of the most comforting she had ever heard. Nothing, she felt, could harm them now.

"I do love you," Dennis said, embracing her.

"And I love you."

"Would you like something to drink?"

"No," she said. "No, let's just go to bed."

He nodded, and led the way.

At the same time their mother and father were tenderly undressing each other, Evan Hamilton and Terri Deems were finishing their second bout of intercourse. Evan rolled off the girl, pushed his hair back from his sweating forehead, and rubbed his hands down his chest until he touched his groin. Then he sat up and began to peel off the condom.

"Worn out yet?" Terri asked, and Evan chuckled wearily.

"No," he lied. "Not yet. You'll have to give me a little time, though.”

“Fine. We can watch some TV, then fuck some more."

"Why do you say that?"

"Say what?" she said, stretching long and languidly beside him so that her leg rubbed against his.

"Fuck. Fuck some more."

"So what are we doing? I thought we were fucking."

Evan shook his head and looked away from her toward the candle that gave the room its only light.

"What's the matter?" Terri said. "You want me to pretend I'm a virgin?"

He gave a little laugh so as not to make her angry. Although the girl was turning him off in one way, she sure as hell turned him on in another. He didn't think he had ever been with a lover – or was that, he thought, a fucker? – who had done the things that Terri had done. Her legs moved and stretched like a contortionist's, and she had done things with the muscles of her vagina that sent ripples of pleasure through him, even with the sensory handicap of the condom.

"It's not that," he said, caressing the smoothness of her stomach, and feeling a tingling in his groin again. "I mean, I don't care if people say fuck. It's just that when you say it in reference to, well …”

"I see. It's a question of semantics. What do you want me to say – making love?" She said it with such a bored flatness that he could have hit her. "Evan, I'm not making love, okay? You've been fucking me, and I've been fucking you. Why try to turn it into Casablanca?"

He didn't say anything, and his hand slowly slipped from her stomach. He felt humiliated and embarrassed and as if he might be sick.

"Hey," she said, and he felt her hand on his arm. "Did I hurt your feelings?”

“No."

"I had fun," she said, and rested her head on his thigh, where she blew soft streams of air over his penis, chilling it. "I really did. And I want to have fun with you some more." She shifted her head so that she could take him in her mouth, and, impossibly, he felt himself beginning to grow hard again. "Mmm," she muttered, "great taste – latex and come."

He laughed in spite of himself, and let her take his hand and press it between her legs.

"So," she said. "You wanta make love? Or you wanta fuck me?"

His mouth felt dry. "I want to fuck you."

"Just what I wanted to hear."

"No, Dennis, wait!"

She pressed her legs together, trembled. Her hands bit into his shoulders, not in passion, but in fear.

"Ann?" He whispered. There was an urgency in his voice as demanding as the piece of flesh that pressed against her mons. "What is it? What's wrong? Don't be frightened…”

She tried to drive the image from her mind of the last time she had made love with Eddie, but she could not, and the vision terrified her, smothered her desire to finally consummate the love that she had felt for Dennis for decades. "I'm sorry," she stammered, tears coming to her eyes. "Wait. Please wait."

She felt him grow flaccid against her, and loved him all the more for his involuntary concern. "What is it, Ann," he said again, the breathless need gone from his tone. "Please tell me. If you can't make love to me, if you won't, it doesn't matter." She felt his hand touch her cheek. "It hasn't mattered all these years. I've loved you just the same."

She told him then. She told him about Eddie, about their making love, about Eddie's death. She even told him what she had never told anyone else. "When he died… when he collapsed on me… he, he came. He came inside of me."

"Oh God, Ann…"

"I knew he was dead, and still…" She was shaking uncontrollably now. "It seemed to go on forever, and it felt as though it was burning me, and I started to scream and scream and scream until

… until Terri came in."

"God… she saw it then."

"Yes. She saw everything. But she helped me. I think I might still be there if she hadn't helped me. She took over when I lost control, and ever since then she's been, I don't know, less of a daughter and more like a person I just live with.”

“It must have been hard on her too."

"Oh, it was. She went around in a daze for weeks afterward. Then her skin toughened up and never got soft again."

They lay there naked, their arms around each other, for a long time, until tenderness, warmth, and security took the place of apprehension and bitter memory. Finally Ann turned to Dennis, kissed his cheek, and began to make love to him again. No more words were spoken. This time when he touched her, she did not object, and finally the love story that had begun a quarter of a century before was told, the song sung.

From the corner of the room, in the dark, the Emperor watched, and listened, and smiled, waiting his turn.

Dennis dreamed of him again, of the Emperor and of Ann. The Emperor had her by the throat as before, but in his other hand was something long and thick and wet, and as Dennis watched in horror, unable to move, the thing became thinner, harder, and the Emperor's hand seemed to become a shell. But then Dennis saw that it was not a shell, but a guard from which extended a gleaming saber.

With one hand the Emperor held Ann higher in the air, her face white from lack of blood, and with the other he plunged the sharp blade into her, just below the heart.

Dennis screamed in silence as blood pumped out of her, as though she had been a balloon filled with it, and he, the Emperor, dying Ann, his dream were all awash in blood, and the whole world was wet and red, and the only sound was the Emperor laughing, laughing.

He did not wake from the dream, only entered a deeper darkness of sleep until the morning came, and he found her beside him, well and alive and asleep. He had little memory of the dream. Now it was just a blurred jumble of terrifying images. He lay there, wondering about the thing, the person, the doppelganger he had seen. Was it evil? If not, why then the visions, the dreams of violence and terror? Perhaps, he thought, the dreams merely mirrored his fear, his lack of understanding of what it was he had created. Perhaps they were not premonitory, but simply indicative of his mental state. He was a pragmatist concerning such things, which was, contradictorily enough, precisely why he believed in the reality of the Emperor. Dreams were one thing, his waking senses another.