Reign (24 page)

“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."

The conclusion was a simple one for Harry
Ruhl
to draw — they killed people in operating rooms. And since people were killed in there, what happened was what usually happens in places where people are murdered. Ghosts come back.

That thought was more vividly in his mind than ever as he walked down the short hall toward the operating room. He had to take the sinks and the table out of there, or Abe would get mad at him. He didn't mind someone being mad at him — lots of people had over the years — but what really bothered him was Abe's teasing, and calling him a pussy boy. So he had to show Abe he wasn't afraid. He had to show him he was
brave
. He had to take that operating table down there, right in front of Abe.

The only problem was that he didn't feel brave. He really felt like a pussy boy right now, and it was dumb, he knew, but he really didn't want to open those big doors to the operating room. Worst thing was that there were no windows in those doors, so he couldn't peek through first to make sure there wasn't anything there. He'd have felt a lot better if he could have done that.

But he couldn't, doggone it. So there was no point in just standing here, was there? Nope. What he just had to do was open those big wooden doors and walk right in, and there wouldn't be a thing there to be scared of, and he could just yank out that operating table and take it down and then go the hell home and watch something funny on the television to help him stop thinking all these dumb, weird things.

Harry put his hand on the cold metal handle of the door and was about to pull it open when he heard something inside the room and froze. It was a dry, rasping sound, like something scraping on metal.

A mouse?
he wondered, and prayed it was so. Maybe a mouse's claws scratching the floor. But wait, it wasn't the floor, was it? No, it had sounded hollow, like something on the operating table.

Oh Jeez
, he thought, and then,
oh Jesus
, damning himself as he heard the words in his head. He shouldn't think that, shouldn't think swearing. But in another moment the self-condemnation was gone as the sound came again. Could it be a mouse?

Doggone it, if it was he would be ready for it, wasn't going to let a mouse scare him, wasn't going to go down and tell Abe that there was something up there and then Abe would come back and say, "Look, it's just a mouse, you dummy, you pussy boy . . .”

Harry reached in his pocket and drew out a Swiss Army knife that his daddy had given him the Christmas before he had died. It wasn't a real official one — Abe had told him that — but it had all sorts of things on it, including two knife blades, the larger of which he now opened and held in front of him, inner wrist cocked up, like a child shines a flashlight, as though it were a talisman that could magically protect him from whatever waited within.

"Not gonna scare me, mouse," he said, and thought how lonely his voice sounded up here in the waning shadows from the far windows that faced the west. "No sir. I'm gonna open this door now, so you better scoot!" He shook the handle with his left hand and listened.

There was no sound now. Maybe it had run away.

"I'm
comin
' in . . . right . . . now!" He yanked the door open and looked in.

The doctor was waiting for him.

~ * ~

(
THE EMPEROR, tall, broad-shouldered, strong looking, stands behind the metal operating table. He wears a white gown spattered with red-brown stains, and rubber gloves glimmering with something dark and wet. His hands are empty, but his eyes are full of fire, and a saber lies on the table before him.)

Hello, Harry. I've been waiting for you. Waiting for . . . the pussy boy. (
HARRY tries to speak, but his throat chokes
.) Give me your scalpel, Harry. I was going to use this . . . (
He indicates the saber
.) . . . but yours is much nicer. Give me the scalpel.

(
HARRY walks toward THE EMPEROR with slow, ponderous steps, as if against his will. He reaches across the table and hands him the Swiss army knife. THE EMPEROR takes it in his right hand, picks up the saber with the left, and leans it against the wall. He holds up the knife and turns it in his hand, as if admiring the blade.
)

This will do nicely. (
He reaches up and pulls down his mask, revealing his face
.)

Mr
. . . Hamilton . . .

(
Smiling
) No. Not Mr. Hamilton.
Emperor
. Emperor Karl Frederick Augustus, about to grant a boon to one of his most loyal subjects. Now. Won't you lie down? And then we shall begin.

God
damn
Harry anyway. Five-thirty already and the big dummy's still upstairs, and after how afraid he was and all.

Abe
Kipp
shook his head in disgust, as he paced toward the elevator. He always counted on Harry to let him know when it was quitting time, but for once the kid didn't come through. Abe had been backstage reading a twenty-year-old issue of
Cavalier
, when that smart-ass Curt Wynn came walking by and asked him what he was still doing there. When Abe looked at his watch and saw that he should have left a half hour before, he was torn between walking out the door and giving Harry a piece of his mind. He decided on the latter, as there were so few times that Harry really did anything worth yelling about. But this, dammit, was one of those times. Christ, stay late once and they'll be expecting freebies from then on. They got paid
weekly
, not by the fucking hour.

He jabbed the elevator button with his finger, and hopped on when the door skittered open. The lights were on
on
the fifth floor, so he felt sure that Harry was still there. He had never known Harry to leave the lights on when he was finished with a job. One thing you could say about Harry — he was dependable. Up until now, at least.

"Harry!" Abe called, but there was no answer. "
Harry!
Where the hell are you!"

It took him three minutes to find Harry
Ruhl
, and he smelled him before he saw him. The odor, sharp and sweet and salty all at once, was coming from behind the closed door of one of the operating theatres. Abe thought he recognized the smell, but when he recalled where he had first come across it, he dismissed it as impossible. The Venetian Theatre was no battlefield.

He changed his mind when he opened the door. Harry
Ruhl
was lying on the operating table, his abdomen split open, his intestines seemingly floating in a pool of blood that had overflowed its boundaries and lay puddled on the tile floor. In one of the puddles lay his genitals. Where they had once been was now nothing but a deep gash, apparently slashed there by the pocketknife that remained in the wound. On what was left of the skin of
Harry's
chest were words drawn in blood, "IM A PUSSY BOY."