Reign

Marvella to resume her old position.

'Half hour, Dennis,' came Curt's voice over the squawk box.

Dennis pushed a button. 'Thanks, Curt.'

'Well,' said Marvella, 'I'm gonna head out front. See who I can meet.'

Dennis kissed her cheek. 'I'm glad you came. Thank you.'

'I'm glad too, Dennis. Love you, as always.' She gave Evan a peck on her way out, and he felt a tremendous wave of love and sympathy for this woman who had always treated him so kindly, starting when he was a lonely little boy roaming his father's theatre, for back then every theatre Dennis Hamilton played was his theatre.

He turned and looked at his father, and it seemed that time had turned backward. Dennis looked tall and strong, young and handsome. The last time he looked like that, Evan had felt only a little love, and a great deal of fear. Now those emotions were reversed, for while he loved the man, he felt a bit of fear as well. Though he knew that it had not been his father who had actually threatened him with death, it had been his near double, and the two were hard to separate in his mind. Still, they were separate, and he took his father by the hand.

'Break a leg, Dad. I know you'll do great.'

Dennis's features quivered with emotion, and he drew Evan to him so that the boy could no longer see the man's face. 'Do you know,' Dennis whispered, 'how proud I am of you?'

He pushed Evan back then, and blinked tears away. 'What's this? Can't have my makeup ruined, can I?' He laughed. 'Save my emotions for the stage, yes?'

Evan smiled and nodded. 'Yeah, sure. You go get 'em, huh?'

'I'll do my best.'

He looked at Ann. 'You staying backstage?' She nodded. 'Well, take care of my old man.'

'I will.' She smiled so serenely, seemed so calm and confident, that Evan thought her own acting ability might outstrip his father's.

'Come on,' Terri said to Evan. 'I'll walk you out to the lobby.'

'I'll go out with you,' Ann said, 'and see how John's bearing up. Oh, here's your ticket, Evan.' She handed it to him. 'You're sitting with Cissy Morrison.'

'Oh no,' Evan said, partly dismayed and partly delighted. 'That woman treats me like I was her dear little nephew.'

'Her date for the evening got stuck in L.A. editing his new film,' Ann said. 'We thought you'd be a perfect replacement.'

'Only don't sit too close,' Terri warned him. 'That woman's not much on youth, but she's got money.'

They all laughed, Terri took Evan's arm, and they and Ann left the dressing room, moving past the guards at the stage door, outside, around the front of the building, and into the lobby, where Ann bade them goodbye and searched for Steinberg.

'You'll be okay?' Terri asked Evan.

'I'll be fine.' He heard the sound of the audience inside the auditorium, but it was all right. He was one of them now, and he would be with a friend. He would not be up there on the stage again. It was his father's turn tonight, and he prayed that Dennis would get through it, that the killer who had haunted the theatre would stay far away. 'But, Terri,' he said, 'keep an eye out for Dad, will you?'

Can you feel me?

It is, Dennis Hamilton thought, sitting alone in his dressing room, the loneliest and most frightening thing in the world.

When I'm on that stage, in front of the audience, there is no turning back. No one can help me if my strength begins to fail, if I forget my lines. Jam, while surrounded by people, completely alone. Only I can do what has to be done. Only I.

A writer can get up from his typewriter, walk around the room, come back, begin again, and no one ever knows how many pauses, how many thousands of disparate thoughts separate the words and chapters. A film actor can call for a break while he puts his thoughts back together, draws up the emotions from wherever he will, and then begin again, and have his errors, those tentative and failed attempts, eradicated in the editing rooms. An artist paints out his weaknesses, a sculptor destroys his with a swing of his mallet.

But I am naked and alone, and what I create is seen as I create it, and as the world sees my triumphs, it can just as easily witness my failures.

Dennis bit back the fear, looked in the mirror, and saw only himself, Dennis Hamilton, in the guise of the Emperor Frederick. And that, damn it, was who the audience was going to see tonight. Dennis Hamilton as the Emperor, no one else, and they would see him more clearly than he had ever been seen before.

And what of that impostor, that bastard who had stolen away the Emperor for a time? Dennis hoped that he was gone. He wanted to believe it with all his heart. But as long as his fear was there, as long as the thoughts of the mere possibility of failure existed, he could not help but feel that the creature was still alive, no matter how fragile and transitory that life might be. The only thing that would kill it, that would end its feeble existence once and for all, was for Dennis to play his role on his stage tonight as he had never played it before. Then and only then would he be truly restored to his throne.

He looked into the mirror again, almost in fear. But still he saw only his own face.

Can you feel me, Dennis? Can you hear me coming? My footsteps are light, but soon they will shake your world.

By eight-fifteen over two-thirds of the theatre's seats were filled. Most of the musicians were in the pit, having come up from the stairway beneath the stage, and were adding to the din. The brass players warmed up their horns and lips with triple tonguing exercises; the strings limbered their bowing arms, or attacked the many pizzicato passages in the score; the woodwinds wet their precisely shaven reeds, fit them into ligatures, played scales and arpeggios so rapidly the individual notes became part of a savage blaze of woodgrained sound; and the percussionists tuned tympani, examined their drums, and set in place blocks, gongs, temple bells, and triangles, all of which were used in Dex Colangelo's rich and varied orchestrations. To those used to such sounds before a musical performance, it sounded perfectly normal.

But to Abe Kipp, sitting below the stage in one of the little havens he had long ago made for himself, it sounded like all the demons of hell were bebopping over his head.

While the acoustics of the Venetian Theatre were nearly perfect for the audience, they were notoriously quirky in the rest of the house. An entire orchestra playing at top volume could not be heard in the second floor dressing rooms, but individual instruments could be picked out from the dressing rooms on the floor above. And where Abe Kipp sat seemed to be the locus of sound from the orchestra pit.

Abe was on call that evening in case of emergency cleanups, and John Steinberg had actually given him a beeper for the occasion. 'You can watch the show if you like, Abe,' Steinberg had said, 'or just hole up somewhere. If we need you, I'll give you a beep and you can come to the lobby.'

Abe didn't expect to be needed. Everything backstage would be taken care of by the crew people, so the only way Abe was going to have something to do was if the toilets overflowed or some rich theatre-goer threw up in the lobby. So he sat and relaxed in a small room next to the orchestra members' green room. It had a worn sofa that some prop department years before had decided to discard, and a rickety desk whose drawers held an assortment of girlie magazines and the sexier varieties of the spy paperbacks of the sixties. It was one of these, an opus called Fraulein Spy, that Abe now perused as he put his feet up and tried to ignore the cacophony over, around, and in his head.

After a few minutes, he heard the clash of instruments die down. Applause followed, and when it ended, the music began again, but this time it was no warm-up, no frenzied assortment of tuning. This time it was music that Abe had heard a quarter century before, sitting in the same room. He had not known Dennis Hamilton then. He had only seen him rehearsing, and never exchanged a word with the boy who seemed to have such a sense of quiet command for a person so young. He had watched the show one time, from the last row of the balcony, during one of the few matinee performances that had not sold out, and even at that great height he had felt the dramatic power of that young man who played the Emperor.