Reign (9 page)

“That's right. That's what's left over from the accident. And what she don't lick up, we gotta
clean
up."

"Who? You mean me?" The hefty shoulder trembled under Abe's spidery hand.

"Well, sure, Harry. I mean, you just can't leave a big blood stain right there in the middle of the floor, can you? Hell, the folks in the balcony and the mezzanine would see it sure, and Mr. Hamilton couldn't have
that
in his theatre, now could he?"

"Nope, I . . . I guess not."

"You wouldn't want to get Mr. Hamilton mad, would you?"

"Nope. I wouldn't . . .”

"All right then, let's get backstage and get to work."

Abe had learned that the easiest way to get Harry to do what he wanted was to keep asking him questions, questions whose logic, right or wrong, demanded from Harry the kind of answer that Abe wanted. And if Harry said it himself, well then, he most likely would do what he himself had said.

Abe led the way down the aisle and onto the stage, where he went over to the gray cat and picked her up. Harry stayed near the wings, looking with a mixture of fear and awe at the dark stain on the blond wood.

"
Whatsa
matter, girl?" Abe said. "Isn't old Abe
feedin
' you enough? Gotta eat up other people's
leavin's
?" He rubbed his bulbous nose against her moist black one. She purred.

"Geez, Abe," Harry said. "Geez . . ."

"Okay, you little cannibal," Abe said, setting the cat back on the floor and pushing her in the direction of the wings, "go catch yourself a mouse or eat your Purina or something. We gotta clean this crap up. Let's get a bucket, Harry."

"Aw, geez, Abe. I mean, couldn't I do something else?"

"What, you're afraid of a little blood? Come on, Harry, be a man. It's a good thing you was never in the service. I fought in Europe when I was a helluva lot younger than you, kid. I seen my share of blood. Guts too." Abe put a fatherly arm around Harry and led him offstage into the scene shop that also housed the janitors' closet. "My buddy — name of
Ikey
, Jew boy from New York City, but he was okay — he took a bullet right in the head at Anzio — you know where Anzio is?"

"Uh-uh."

"Italy. You know where
Italy
is?"

"Uh . . . Europe? Where you fought?"

"That's right. Europe. Anyway,
Ikey's
head just went ka-
pow
, like you put a cherry bomb in a melon. Blood? There was blood all over, but that wasn't the worst — there was brains, too, like white-gray oatmeal, stuck all over my uniform, splashed all over my face —"

"Aw, come on, Abe," Harry said, shaking his head and pulling a large bucket and a wet-mop out of the closet, "I don't like to hear talk about —"

"And a
eyeball
," Abe proudly announced. "This eyeball just popped right out of his head, and it's
layin
' there on the
goddam
sand, and you know what, Harry?"

Harry looked up tentatively from his mop and bucket. "What?"

"It
winked
at me."

"No!" The tone was properly awestruck.

"Hell if it didn't — just
layin
' there, and it
winked
." Abe could see from the way
Harry's
expression was changing from amazement to puzzlement that he was not too far from asking how an eyeball could
wink
without having an eye
lid
attached, so he changed the subject. "So you ain't too fond of
cleanin
' up blood, are you?"

"Well . . . no. No, Abe."

"Scared of ghosts?"

Harry snorted disgustedly. "Aw, come on now, you said you wouldn't talk about ghosts anymore."

"Well, hell, they can't hurt you, Harry. Now you know we've had them, and you know they've never hurt you, don't you?"

"Well . . .”

"Come on, you've worked here what, eight years? Have you ever been hurt in here?"

"No, no . . ."

"Well, then, what are you scared of them for? Get that bucket filled, huh?"

Harry took the bucket over to the large sink, put it in, and turned on the hot water. "I just don't
like
'em, that's all. They're creepy."

"Honest to God, Harry, sometimes I think you're a pussy boy, you're so damn afraid of everything."

"I'm
not
a pussy boy, Abe." Harry stared down glumly at the water filling the dingy gray bucket.

"You sure act like it. And I never see you with girls."

"I like girls fine," Harry said, then added softly, "but not too many of them like me.
Hey!
" he said, as though he had just thought of something. "What about you, Abe? You're not married. Don't
you
like girls?"

Harry had brought up that point many times before when Abe had accused him of being a pussy boy, but had, as usual, forgotten that he had and forgotten Abe's response as well. Abe grinned and answered. "I like girls fine, Harry. In fact I screw 'em every chance I get. I like 'em so much I
pay
for 'em, and then I can get 'em to do just whatever I want."

Harry's
eyes widened. "Whatever you want? What kinda things, Abe?”

“
Nothin
' you'd understand. And I thought we were
talkin
' about ghosts."

"
You
were
talkin
' about ghosts," Harry said, twisting the spigot handle and hauling the full bucket from the sink.

"Ghosts come
outta
bloodstains,
y'know
. Did you know that?" Without waiting for an answer, Abe went on. "
Y'ever
see that stain up in the costume loft?"

"What stain?" Harry asked, pausing with the mop over his shoulder.

"Hell, you know. That dark spot at the top of the stairs to the loft. Back when they were
doin
' little theatre here one season, this older woman who was
doin
' costumes had a heart attack or a stroke or somethin' and fell down, hit her head, and died up there in the loft, and some blood came
outta
her mouth and stained the boards up there. It wouldn't come out no matter how hard we scrubbed. Now you gotta understand that she was a real nasty woman, what you'd call an old bitch. But the one good thing about her was that she loved her son, who was one of the actors in the theatre.

"The first time somebody was up in that costume room alone after this woman died, she heard somethin' up in the loft and thought it was a friend of hers, so she calls and there's no answer. Now she thinks maybe her friend's up there and
playin
' a joke on her, so she sneaks up the steps to the loft,
thinkin
' of
goin
' boo herself. But it ain't her friend up there." Abe paused, knowing that Harry was bound to ask what happened next. He wasn't disappointed.

"Who . . . who was it?" Harry said in the manner of a patient anxious to hear even a doctor's negative prognosis.

A sharp smile creased Abe's face. "It was the
dead
woman. She was
standin
' right where she fell, and right where her son's costumes were hanging. Had on the same dress as on the day she died. A
red
dress, Harry, dark red — like
blood
— and she just looked at that other woman, just stood there and
looked
at her, and the woman said later it was like all the blood in her turned to ice water. But it didn't all freeze, 'cause she
wet
herself — I know, I cleaned it up afterwards." Abe chuckled.

"What . . ." Harry cleared his throat. "Did she say what she looked like?"

"Sure did. This old bitch had gray hair before, but now it was
white
, and her face was white too, and the woman said it was like she didn't have any eyes, just black holes in her white face, but there was red lights back in them holes, and that's what she was lookin' at the woman with,
them
lights."

"Did it . . . do anything?"

"I'll say it did — it started
comin
' toward her, closer and closer, and it reached out its hands for her, like it wanted to take her back to the land of the dead where it came from." Abe paused and shook his head.

"So what
happened
?" Harry nearly wailed.

"The woman closed her eyes. She couldn't stand to look at it any more. And she waited to feel this thing's cold claws — 'cause that's what they were, she said, claws — reach out and grab her or choke her or something. But nothing touched her, and when she got enough guts back to open her eyes again, the thing was gone."

"My gosh . . . my gosh," Harry said solemnly. "Anybody ever see it since?"

Abe had told Harry the story at least once a month since they had begun to work together years before, and Harry always forgot it by the next time Abe told it. "They sure did.
Lotsa
people seen it, and always up in the costume loft. That's why hardly nobody goes up there alone."

Harry's
eyes widened in sudden realization. "I been up there alone!"

"And
nothin
' ever got you, did it?
Nothin
' ever hurt you." The younger man shook his head slowly. "And
nothin's
gonna hurt you if you clean up that blood, is it?”

“I really don't want to, Abe."

"All right then, tell you what — you do the johns, and I'll take care of the blood. Fair?"

Harry nodded quickly. "You bet it is. I'll do the restrooms, you take care of the blood."

Abe nodded too, nodded and smiled as he watched Harry scurry up the aisle toward the janitor's closet in the mezzanine. It was what Abe had planned all along. He hated doing the restrooms. He didn't mind the rest of custodial work, but the idea of his cleaning up where somebody had pissed and shit drove him half nuts. He'd had enough of that back in the war when he was assigned to latrine duty.
Honeydippin
', that's what they had called it, taking buckets and hauling the waste up out of the pit holes. And the stink! Jesus, it had been awful. He had actually fallen in one of the pits when he was put on duty while still drunk on some cheap Italian wine, though he never told Harry that war story. He had never told
anybody
that one.

The Venetian Theatre latrines, as he still thought of them, had never been that bad. At least people aimed. But sometimes some asshole would miss the urinal, and there would be a
goddam
puddle he'd have to mop up. And always those fucking yellow stains — somebody else's piss — not to mention the bitches who dropped their used plugs in the waste cans rather than flushing them. If you didn't empty the can that very night, you got a real
whiffy
surprise in the morning. No, Abe would much rather have risked his life climbing around dusting the
goddam
ceiling than clean up the johns.

He poured some cleanser into the bucket, then carried the mixture and mop onto the stage, wet the mop, and began to scrub. He felt a little strange about cleaning up a dead man's blood all alone at midnight, but it didn't bother him too much. He'd gotten used to the theatre, and used to death. When he first started working at the Venetian back in the fifties, he had thought that there wasn't anything as eerie as being alone there after dark, especially after the stories that old Billy Potts had poured into his head. The deaths, the ghosts, the weird happenings — Mad Mary, who was supposed to haunt the mezzanine and balcony; the Big Swede, a ghost of a stagehand who had been crushed by a sandbag in the twenties, and showed up in the flies at inopportune moments; the Blue Darling, a little girl's spirit that was supposed to be a harbinger of death.

The tales had scared the hell out of Abe for the first few days he worked there, but as time went by he discovered that Billy Potts was as big a
bullshitter
about everything else as he was about ghosts, and Abe quickly learned that the stories were just Billy's way of having fun, the same way he had fun telling the old stories to Harry
Ruhl
. The only difference was that Harry never was able to figure out that Abe was as big a
bullshitter
as old Billy Potts had been.

Hell, some of the stories were true, in a manner of speaking. The ghost in the costume room had supposedly been seen. The woman who had reported the story said she saw the woman, who turned and looked at her, and then disappeared. That was all. The hollow eye sockets and the claws were nothing but Abe's embellishments, and the "blood stain" was only a darkening of the wood where he had spilled a bit of solvent back in 1967.

But still, someone had reported seeing the woman, just as others had actually believed they had seen Mad Mary, the Big Swede, and the Blue Darling. Abe
Kipp
, however, having worked at the Venetian Theatre for the past forty years, and having explored every dark nook and cranny at every time of day or night, had never seen a thing even suggestive of the supernatural. No, the Venetian was his second home, more of a home than the three room apartment where he slept and kept the accumulation of a wifeless and childless life. He had a number of cubbyholes with mattresses and cots on long-term loan from the storage area beneath the stage, as well as an assortment of skin
mags
dating back to the early sixties. Many was the time he would take a little nap or have a little read during working hours, with not a fear of being discovered. There were many places Harry didn't like to go, and those were the places Abe had his havens.