Chet Williamson: Reign

"Her date for the evening got stuck in L.A. editing his new film," Ann said. "We thought you'd be a perfect replacement."

"Only don't sit too close," Terri warned him. "That woman's not much on youth, but she's got money."

They all laughed, Terri took Evan's arm, and they and Ann left the dressing room, moving past the guards at the stage door, outside, around the front of the building, and into the lobby, where Ann bade them goodbye and searched for Steinberg.

"You'll be okay?" Terri asked Evan.

"I'll be fine." He heard the sound of the audience inside the auditorium, but it was all right. He was one of them now, and he would be with a friend. He would not be up there on the stage again. It was his father's turn tonight, and he prayed that Dennis would get through it, that the killer who had haunted the theatre would stay far away. "But, Terri," he said, "keep an eye out for Dad, will you?"

Can you feel me?

It is, Dennis Hamilton thought, sitting alone in his dressing room, the loneliest and most frightening thing in the world.

When I'm on that stage, in front of the audience, there is no turning back. No one can help me if my strength begins to fail, if I forget my lines. Jam, while surrounded by people, completely alone. Only I can do what has to be done. Only I.

A writer can get up from his typewriter, walk around the room, come back, begin again, and no one ever knows how many pauses, how many thousands of disparate thoughts separate the words and chapters. A film actor can call for a break while he puts his thoughts back together, draws up the emotions from wherever he will, and then begin again, and have his errors, those tentative and failed attempts, eradicated in the editing rooms. An artist paints out his weaknesses, a sculptor destroys his with a swing of his mallet.

But I am naked and alone, and what I create is seen as I create it, and as the world sees my triumphs, it can just as easily witness my failures.

Dennis bit back the fear, looked in the mirror, and saw only himself, Dennis Hamilton, in the guise of the Emperor Frederick. And that, damn it, was who the audience was going to see tonight. Dennis Hamilton as the Emperor, no one else, and they would see him more clearly than he had ever been seen before.

And what of that impostor, that bastard who had stolen away the Emperor for a time? Dennis hoped that he was gone. He wanted to believe it with all his heart. But as long as his fear was there, as long as the thoughts of the mere possibility of failure existed, he could not help but feel that the creature was still alive, no matter how fragile and transitory that life might be. The only thing that would kill it, that would end its feeble existence once and for all, was for Dennis to play his role on his stage tonight as he had never played it before. Then and only then would he be truly restored to his throne.

He looked into the mirror again, almost in fear. But still he saw only his own face.

Can you feel me, Dennis? Can you hear me coming? My footsteps are light, but soon they will shake your world.

By eight-fifteen over two-thirds of the theatre's seats were filled. Most of the musicians were in the pit, having come up from the stairway beneath the stage, and were adding to the din. The brass players warmed up their horns and lips with triple tonguing exercises; the strings limbered their bowing arms, or attacked the many pizzicato passages in the score; the woodwinds wet their precisely shaven reeds, fit them into ligatures, played scales and arpeggios so rapidly the individual notes became part of a savage blaze of woodgrained sound; and the percussionists tuned tympani, examined their drums, and set in place blocks, gongs, temple bells, and triangles, all of which were used in Dex Colangelo's rich and varied orchestrations. To those used to such sounds before a musical performance, it sounded perfectly normal.

But to Abe Kipp, sitting below the stage in one of the little havens he had long ago made for himself, it sounded like all the demons of hell were bebopping over his head.

While the acoustics of the Venetian Theatre were nearly perfect for the audience, they were notoriously quirky in the rest of the house. An entire orchestra playing at top volume could not be heard in the second floor dressing rooms, but individual instruments could be picked out from the dressing rooms on the floor above. And where Abe Kipp sat seemed to be the locus of sound from the orchestra pit.

Abe was on call that evening in case of emergency cleanups, and John Steinberg had actually given him a beeper for the occasion. "You can watch the show if you like, Abe," Steinberg had said, "or just hole up somewhere. If we need you, I'll give you a beep and you can come to the lobby."

Abe didn't expect to be needed. Everything backstage would be taken care of by the crew people, so the only way Abe was going to have something to do was if the toilets overflowed or some rich theatre-goer threw up in the lobby. So he sat and relaxed in a small room next to the orchestra members' green room. It had a worn sofa that some prop department years before had decided to discard, and a rickety desk whose drawers held an assortment of girlie magazines and the sexier varieties of the spy paperbacks of the sixties. It was one of these, an opus called Fraulein Spy, that Abe now perused as he put his feet up and tried to ignore the cacophony over, around, and in his head.

After a few minutes, he heard the clash of instruments die down. Applause followed, and when it ended, the music began again, but this time it was no warm-up, no frenzied assortment of tuning. This time it was music that Abe had heard a quarter century before, sitting in the same room. He had not known Dennis Hamilton then. He had only seen him rehearsing, and never exchanged a word with the boy who seemed to have such a sense of quiet command for a person so young. He had watched the show one time, from the last row of the balcony, during one of the few matinee performances that had not sold out, and even at that great height he had felt the dramatic power of that young man who played the Emperor.

Now, as he heard the music, the years seemed to vanish, and he closed his eyes and remembered what it had been like before all the deaths had come, before he himself had been responsible for one of them, in the days when, though cruel, he was still innocent of blood on his hands.

At last the music ended, the audience applauded, and the music began again. He heard singing now, but where he sat it was greatly overwhelmed by the orchestra. For a while he struggled to make out the words, but could not, and turned back to his book.

The musical numbers passed in quick succession, and Abe thought the applause was as loud and strong as any he had ever heard from this particular hiding place. He recognized some of the songs that had become standards, particularly "Someone Like You," which had been a Barbra Streisand single in 1968, and hummed along with it. He sat there for a long time, trying to read, stopping, listening to the music, trying to read again, dozing off from time to time.

When music woke him up again, he looked at his watch, saw that it was nearly ten o'clock, and thought that the first act must almost be over. He licked his dry lips with a furred tongue, and decided to go get a drink of water. There was a fountain in the green room the musicians used, but there were always some of them in there, and Abe was uncomfortable around them. Part of it was the contrast he felt between their full dress and his own dark green work clothes, and the rest was the cool attitude with which most of them viewed him, as though he were an interloper in the halls of the Muses. No, better to go through the cellar and into the lower level lobby. No one would be there while the show was going on except for maybe some security people, and they knew who he was.