Free Reign by Chet Williamson Page A

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