Reign

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.

No, he thought as the blood came easily off the floorboards, the Venetian was a pretty good place to work. All except for the latrines .

While Abe Kipp detested cleaning toilets, Harry Ruhl loved it. It gave him a feeling of accomplishment, of seeing a job through to its end. With fabrics and draperies and carpets you couldn't really see where you had cleaned. But you could with tile. You could with porcelain. You could with mirrors and marble and metal. You could wipe them and rub them until they sparkled and shone so brightly you could see your face in them, not blurred and indistinct, but sharp and clear. You grinned and the face in that smooth surface grinned back at you as if to say good job, something that Abe hardly ever said, even though Harry knew he did do a good job, because if he didn't he wouldn't be working there at the Venetian Theatre.

Harry liked the Venetian Theatre just as much as Abe did, but in a different way. The theatre scared Harry sometimes, especially after the stories Abe told. And now this guy getting his head cut off by the fire curtain…

Harry tried to drive the thought out of his mind and think about the good times he had at the theatre when he was a kid, when the theatre was showing movies, and his dad took him on a Saturday night. The theatre, even before it had been refurbished, had always been a magic place to Harry, with its marble walls and rails, the mosaics and bas-reliefs all over the lobby ceilings, and especially the sky ceiling inside the theatre itself. Sometimes when the movie was boring he would lean back and look up at the stars and the clouds rolling by, and pretend that he