Reign

that's stored here…” He glanced at Ally.

'The psychic energy,' she explained. 'From that catharsis thing?”

“I see,' said Bebe Gonsalves. 'Go on.'

'And it… and it does bad things with it, with the power. It wants… I don't know what the hell it wants – to be me, maybe, to replace me.'

'It's real,' Ann added. 'I've seen it – it and Dennis at the same time.”

“I don't doubt what you say,' the psychic told her.

'I went away,' Dennis went on, 'hoping that being away from me it might grow weak, maybe die. I thought that you might be able to tell, to… feel something, see if you think there's anything here.'

Bebe Gonsalves pursed her full lips. 'Theatres are difficult. There are so many things, so much activity, that it's hard to pinpoint any one phenomenon. But I'll try. Now. Where is the creature the strongest? Where have you seen it?'

'The stage, I suppose,' Dennis said. 'On the stage.'

He led the three women into the inner lobby, fumbled about at the wall switch, and turned on the house lights. The interior of the Venetian Theatre was just as they had left it. They walked down the aisle onto the stage, and Dennis noticed that Ally looked overhead nervously, as if expecting the curtain to come crashing down on them the way it had on poor Tommy Werton.

'It's here,' Dennis said. 'I think it's here that it's strongest.'

Bebe Gonsalves's face seemed to shimmer in the dim light, as though possessed of an infinity of unpleasant emotions. 'It is very bad here. Not from the presence you seek, but from the act, from the man who died, the one last fall. His pain and shock, the horror of those who watched – I feel it all. It makes things muddy.' She put a long-nailed hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. 'It will take a moment to dispel these thoughts. They must go before I can seek the entity you dread. Please, be quiet for a time.'

The four of them stood, all of them believing, and trembling. After three long minutes, Bebe Gonsalves gave a quick intake of breath, and whispered, 'There is something.' Her eyelids fluttered. 'Something that wishes… or wished… to start a… a dynasty, or rather… an empire. A dark, dreadful empire. But it is very weak, very weak. Near death. It suffers. It is being drained away. It lives in fear…'

She shook her head. 'It is gone,' she said, turning to Dennis. 'It may still be here, but I can sense it no longer. I would advise you to have no fear, Mr. Hamilton.'

'Then you think… it's harmless?'

'If what I felt is the entity of which you spoke, I think it is indeed harmless.' She shrugged. 'Pitifully so. It will not live long, and while it does, it is impotent. Ignore it,' she said, and smiled for the first time. 'And it'll go away.'

Ally and Bebe Gonsalves declined Dennis's offer of lunch, and drove away in their rented car, but not before Ally had kissed Dennis on the cheek and whispered to him, 'Hang in there, buster. You got over me, you can get over this,' which made him smile, but not laugh.

When they were gone, Dennis stood with Ann on the sidewalk under the marquee. 'Do you believe her?' Ann asked, putting her arms around him. 'Do you think she has those… powers?'

He held her. 'After what's happened to me, I don't disbelieve in anyone's powers anymore. As for what she said, I think she might have felt something. Something that had dreams, something that's weak, that's dying. Something that won't be here for long.'

'But isn't that good?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'It depends on who it was that she was sensing. The Emperor?' He looked down at her. 'Or me?'

He felt her muscles stiffen. 'Don't say things like that.'

'I've got to face the facts. I don't have much left in me.'

'It'll change now. You're back on a stage again. Your stage.'

'Mine?' He turned and looked back through the glass doors into the shadows of the lobby. 'Is it?'

'Yes. It's your building, your theatre, your stage. It's your character.'

'No, Ann. They'll be mine when I take them back again, back from him. Not before.'

'Then do it, Dennis. Reach down inside you and do it.'

He did not answer. He had nothing to say. He felt horribly old, unbearably weary, as though the battle had already been fought and he had lost. 'Let's go back to the hotel,' he finally said. 'I'm tired. I'd like to rest.'

At one o'clock that afternoon, the techies went in. Curt Wynn supervised as two assistant stage managers taped the stage, the props people prepared the tables stage right and left, and the crew set furniture for the first scene to be rehearsed the next morning. The set itself, the original road show design by the late Kinsey Holworth, was still being reconstructed in New York scene shops under Mack Redcay's demanding eye, and would be transported to Kirkland on Wednesday. The designer had been disappointed at the delay of Craddock , but the money that John Steinberg offered did much to assuage his regret at having to supervise the rebuilding of another man's design. Still, there was no time for a new one.

Thorne Wilson's lighting design was also to be repeated, and Wilson, a big, hearty man with a penchant for using as many lighting instruments as his budget would allow (and often more), was delighted to recreate his former triumph, even if only for one performance. He scurried about the theatre, using the lighting board in the rear of the theatre as his home base, always on his walkie talkie to his minions above, those on the tall platform ladders called cherrypickers, and those in the ceiling, who were hanging and focusing the instruments.

Though Thorne Wilson was happy to be back with A Private Empire, Marvella Johnson did not share his enthusiasm. She had remained in New York, working in the costume shops and rental houses to recreate as closely as possible the show's costumes, many of them now sold, scattered, or rebuilt. Terri Deems had done most of the legwork, and Marvella rewarded her with the title of Costume Coordinator, and she would appear as such in the playbill directly under Marvella's name. That Sunday afternoon Terri worked in the fourth floor costume shop with three female seamstresses and one male, a flighty gay who got on her nerves, but who was a master of organization and could stitch a seam as quickly as the best of them.

Some of those who had never before been in the Venetian Theatre were wary at first of the place's reputation, and for the first hour or so were constantly glancing overhead or over their shoulders. But hardly any of them had never worked in a theatre that did not have some dark history of a violent death or a ghost or two, and when no one was strangled by a roll of adhesive tape, smashed by a falling counterweight, or skewered by a stage brace in the first hour of work, they began to relax, and brought to their jobs the attention and professionalism that had gotten them hired in the first place.

But neither Curt Wynn nor Terri Deems were quite so cavalier as their blissfully ignorant charges and co- workers. Although Curt had seen only the eerie and possibly hallucinatory revenant in the cellar, he firmly believed that a killer was stalking Dennis and Dennis's theatre, and had told everyone that if they saw any person in the theatre building they could not identify, to come to him immediately and tell him about it.

Now, as he walked about the stage, in the wings, in the dressing rooms, he could not banish the feeling that he was being watched. It was not, however, the sensation of being observed secretly, but rather of being watched quite openly and appraisingly. Every time he turned around, he expected to see the nemesis standing there unconcerned. But he saw nothing, not even from the corner of his eye.

Terri, on the other hand, had a more realistic knowledge of what stalked the Venetian Theatre. She had, after all, been with the imposter, spoken with him, touched him and more. If he had not actually raped her, the bastard had at least pushed her past the point of consensual sex. Still, when she thought of what he might have done, and what he had done to the others, she shuddered with the horror that such a man had had her. She felt unclean, and horribly used, and wished that she might see him again, captured and bound. She would spit on him then.

But now, surrounded by other women and one ineffectual male, she wanted nothing less than for the monster to come through the costume shop door. Still, she did not think he would come among so many, and she did not intend to be alone in the theatre, or be alone anywhere, for that matter.

She and Evan had adjoining rooms in the Kirkland Hotel. They had slept in each other's arms last night, and would, by mutual consent, continue to do so. Though she had grown to like him before, it was when they were together in New York that she thought she had begun to love him. He was the only boy she had ever known who made no demands on her, and although he had not gone to college, an omission that he was now planning to correct, he was one of the brightest people she had ever met. But more than that, they had fun together, and the