Chet Williamson: Reign

You feel me now, Dennis. You feel me coming, and growing strong, taking your strength. One final performance, Dennis. Just what I needed. Just what we both needed.

I will see you soon. Very soon. I'm practicing now. Honing my skills. Like you, I've been in retirement for far too long.

Can you imagine that I even have to audition in order to appear with you?

Even now I am in the midst of my final audition.

For your director.

Some of the cherub heads broke when they struck the lounge floor, but reformed immediately. Several of them landed on the sofa next to Quentin, and either flopped end over end toward him, or rolled on edge. He jumped up, looking around in panic for a way to escape, but the fat little faces came at him from every direction, and the black faun was closing in fast, less than six feet away from him now.

He cried wordlessly, turning about, looking for a breach in the nightmarish line. He could have jumped over them, but his legs were trembling so much that he knew he dared not try it, lest he trip and fall among them. Then he saw a break in the direction of the men's lounge, and in a moment he was through it, racing across the tile floor, and now he was in the small chamber, and there were two doors – the open one into the lavatory itself, which would give no means of escape, and a closed one. He grasped the knob and turned it, but it was locked. Screaming with rage and fear, he kicked it with his dancer's legs, felt the frame give, looked behind and saw the faun and the cherubs in the doorway behind him, kicked again, harder. The door flew open, and Quentin saw, several yards away down four wooden steps and a long, dirt-floored tunnel, the hanging, eviscerated corpse of Abe Kipp.

The sight made him stagger back, and his heel caught one of the rolling faces. He tripped, fell, felt them bumping against him, then felt the pain of the black faun's teeth as it buried them in his ankle. Screaming, he batted away the faces and crab-walked into the lavatory. He wrenched the doorstop up and tried to push the door closed against the creatures, but its pneumatics made it close slowly, and several of the things rolled through. The faun got an arm and a cloven foot into the crack, and although Quentin pressed as hard as he could, battering the door with his shoulder, the marble would not shatter. The gap grew wider, allowing more of the white faces to enter, and Quentin, as he moved further away from the door, saw to his greater horror that now the cupid mouths were opening wider than he would have thought possible, showing teeth within. The little round chins dropped, and the jaws snapped as they clattered toward him. One was larger than the others, and he knew that it must be one of the four corner winds.

Now the faun was inside, phallus rampant, teeth gnashing, scuttling toward him, its shoulders swinging with each step, and Quentin retreated further, crawled into the end booth, shot the bolt even as he realized the futility of it. He climbed onto the seat, grasped the top of the partition for balance, watched as the cherub heads, their mouths chattering like wind-up teeth, rolled under and into his booth and rattled like saucers as they toppled over and came to rest, glaring up at him with white plaster eyes. They kept rolling in, dozens of them, clattering next to each other until they overlapped, hiding the tile floor, their baby mouths with predators' teeth still working.

Then everything was quiet. Quentin hung on, balanced on the toilet, panting, bleeding from his ankle where the faun's teeth had raked him.

The faun…

" Eat me! " grated a voice next to his ear, and pain ran red through his hand. The faun had climbed up the other side of the partition and was shredding his fingers like a hulling machine strips corn.

Quentin screamed and let go. His left foot plunged down into the bowl, and his head struck the wall.

It was a great mercy that he was unconscious when he fell among the white faces.

"'There will be no marriage, Prime Minister. Not ever.'"

The lines were as listlessly given as those of a weary conductor calling station stops.

"'But, Majesty,'" a jittery Alan Singleton replied, "`Your responsibility – to your throne – to your people!'"

Ann Deems watched from the wings, her heart filled with fear and love, and she thought, If only I could give him what I feel now. If only I could give him what he needs…

The show went on. And the audience remained in their seats. Not one left for a cigarette, or a breath of fresh air, or a visit to the rest room. They sat there as repelled and fascinated as a crowd at an execution.

Dennis's singing "All My Life to Grieve" was almost drowned out by the orchestra, in spite of Dex Colangelo's noble efforts to pull the orchestral volume down as low as possible. The next two scenes were without the Emperor, and the other performers gave their all – some felt too much – to counterbalance Dennis's lack of fire. In the following scene where Rolf tells Inga that the Emperor is behaving like perfect royalty, there were audible if uncomfortable chuckles from the audience, appreciative not only of the absurdity of the line in context, but of Bill Miley's zeal in its delivery, as if saying a thing strongly enough would make it so.

Then came Scene 6, in which the plan evolves to have Kronstein disguise himself as Frederick to announce the marriage to Maria, which will unite Waldmont and Borovnia, and turn Kronstein, who has taken Maria as a mistress, into a power behind the throne. Wallace Drummond nervously chewed the scenery so thoroughly that most in the audience despaired of any return to balance for the remainder of the show.

And while Wallace Drummond was singlehandedly attempting to provide thespian pyrotechnics enough for two, Ann was in Dennis's dressing room, standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders as he looked wearily into the mirror. "You have to bring it out, Dennis. It's there – you just have to reach down deep enough."

"I'm trying," he said, his voice hollow as an empty stage where the echoes of past performances have long since died away. "I reach, but there's nothing there. I can't feel, and I can't pretend to feel – it's too late for that. It has to be real. And it won't come."

She steeled herself. The last thing she wanted to do was to humiliate him, but she had no choice. "Can you think of how you look to the audience then? Does that make you feel? Feel… ashamed, even. If you do, maybe that's a place to start."

"Of course I feel ashamed. But it's not enough. It's just not enough. So much of it is knowing that he's here – and not being able to do anything about it – not being able to confront him – that makes it worse."

"Dennis," came Curt's soft and steady voice over the squawk box, "fifteen minutes."

Dennis pressed the red button on the top to acknowledge the call. "The last scene," he said. Ann leaned down, put her cheek against his, looked at the reflection of his empty eyes. "Find it, Dennis. Make it live.

"And make him die."

Several minutes later, Wallace Drummond looked at his own face in the mirror, and wondered if he had gone too far in that last song. He had always prided himself on being a very natural actor, but in "Take What Is Mine," he thought he might have gone just a tad overboard. Dan Marks's eyes had widened a bit as Drummond sang the song to him, but maybe it was just something new that Dan was doing as Kruger, trying a little bit harder to make up for what was happening to Dennis.

Holy hell, Drummond thought for the hundredth time that evening, what was wrong with him? Drummond had acted with stiffs before, but the caliber of Dennis's performance wouldn't have been acceptable in a bad high school production of Bye Bye Birdie. He had heard of actors getting burned out from playing a role too long, but this was more than burnout, it was mind-rot.