Reign (18 page)

The woman put a finger to her lips, as though she didn't want Whitney to tell her grandma that she was there, and winked at Whitney with her bright green eyes. Whitney winked back, and the woman smiled even more then, gestured over to the narrow stairway that led up to the loft, and began to tiptoe in that direction. She was a great
tiptoer
. Everybody made noise when they walked around the costume shop because the floor was so creaky, but Whitney couldn't hear the woman's footsteps at all, not even when she started up the stairway and beckoned to Whitney to follow her.

Whitney, in her own opinion, was a great
tiptoer
, since she was so light the floorboards refused to give beneath her. She held her breath as she followed the woman, around the pile of clothes, across the floor, and up the steps. Whitney couldn't see her now. She must have gotten to the top and turned to the left and was waiting for Whitney. What was she going to do? Some surprise for Grandma, that was it. Maybe they could scare her.

"Hello?" Whitney whispered, and clapped her hand over her mouth dramatically, the way she had seen the little girl on
Cosby
do it when she said something she shouldn't have.

"Whitney?" came her grandma's voice from below. "Where are you, honey?"

She had to answer. "Up here, Grandma. Just exploring."

"Well, you be careful and stay away from the edge. That banister's not much to speak of, so you stay back."

"I will, Grandma," she said. She was at the top of the stairs now, but still couldn't see the redheaded woman she had followed. On the left was the open area of the loft and a small work table, while to the girl's right were three racks of clothing parallel to the wall, so that only the front one was visible to Whitney. Where was the woman? Was she hiding behind one of those rows of clothes? Did she want Whitney to come and hide with her too? And then they could get Grandma to come up and look for them and jump out at her and scare her? That had to be it, and Whitney suppressed a giggle as she tiptoed across the boards of the loft, peering between the costumes that hung like dozens of scarecrows on the fat, steel pipes.

"Hello?" Whitney whispered again, softly enough this time so that she didn't have to put her hand over her mouth. But there was no answer. Okay then, Whitney would just have to find her.

Slowly she made her way down the rack of costumes, pausing after every half dozen or so to separate and look behind them for the lady. At worst, she expected Grandma's helper to lean forward, make a face, and whisper
Boo
. But when she pulled the costumes apart at the exact middle of the rack to reveal who was standing behind them, no one said
Boo
. No one said a thing. And what Whitney had expected to be the worst would have been merely playful in comparison to the reality.

It was not a young, redheaded woman with kind green eyes and glasses who now stood a yard away from Whitney. Instead it was a creature out of a worse nightmare than any little girl could imagine. Everything was bad, but the eyes were the worst of all, or rather the absence of eyes. Where they should have been were two black pits, their utter darkness in vicious contrast to the icy whiteness of the skin and the long hair that, shroud-like, framed the face. Yet deep within the sockets Whitney saw red specks burning brightly, like coals when you blow on them.

The mouth opened slowly, as if cranked, and the exhalation that rippled over Whitney was more foul than anything she had ever confronted in her eight years of life. She felt a sudden warm dampness, knew that she had wet her pajamas, and for an instant shame swept over her before the fear bludgeoned its way back.

Now something moved at the bottom of her field of vision, and she saw that the hands, sharp talons from which gray flesh was flaking, were coming up toward her across the surface of the thing's blood-red dress, and the monstrous head was growing closer as well, the nightmare face nearing her own.

Whitney's hands fell to her side, and the costumes closed together, blocking the woman from her sight, breaking the spell the lich had laid upon her, giving her just enough time to back away a few steps before the gray, rotting claws darted from between the costumes, pushed them violently to either side, and the woman came toward her again, quickly now, her legs unseen beneath the long red dress she wore, the red coals of the eyes blazing as though buffeted by a tornado.

"
Grandma!
" Whitney screamed, still backing away, unable to turn her gaze from the thing bearing down on her. Then her head hit the railing of the loft, and she was through, falling backward, toward the floor of the costume shop far below, falling, the ceiling receding, and all she could do was hope that the woman didn't come over the edge, didn't fly down after her where she was falling, falling, hearing the air rush past her, hearing Grandma's cry, and falling . . .

~ * ~

It was Whitney's scream that alerted
Marvella
, then the sharp crack of her head hitting the rail that brought her to her feet and turned her around just in time to see the girl fall. Too far away. There was nothing she could do, only stand frozen and watch the girl falling, falling in an eternity of time during which
Marvella
could not move a muscle, in that split second knowing the futility of it, praying for angels to bear the child up, ease her to the floor.

But the prayers were unanswered. The girl did not slow in her descent, but fell down, down, directly onto the heap of clothing that
Marvella
had been throwing over the edge of the loft for hours, and disappeared into them.

"Oh Jesus,"
Marvella
breathed, a prayer, not a curse, and ran to the heap of costumes, where weak, thrashing movements told her that her granddaughter was alive. "Lie still!"
Marvella
barked, fearing that if harm had been done the girl's movements would only worsen it. "You lie
still
, Whitney!"

But the girl did not obey. Soon she was out of the soft pile, and if the strength of the embrace with which she held her grandmother was any indication of her general health,
Marvella
had nothing to worry about. Still, she grasped the girl's shoulders to disengage her as gently as possible and hold her at arm's length. "Are you all right?" she said firmly.

The girl, tears in her eyes and trembling, nodded. "Oh Grandma," she said, lowering her head and pointing upward, as though she feared what she might see. "That lady up there, she turned into something . . . into a
witch
. . ."

"What?"
Marvella
frowned. "What are you talking about. What lady?"

"The
lady
! The lady you said was helping you, the lady with the red hair and the glasses, she was
here
."

"Who? Terri?"

"I guess, I guess, and I followed her up the stairs, only when I got up there it wasn't her, it was somebody
else
, like a witch, or like a . . . a
dead
person . . .” The girl broke into a fit of crying then, and it was a moment before
Marvella
could get anything else out of her. "She
scared
me, Grandma, and that's why I fell over!"

"You let me look," said
Marvella
grimly, knowing that no one could have gotten into the costume room without her seeing them.

"Don't leave me, Grandma!" The girl grabbed at her sleeve.

"Well, you
wanta
come with me then?"

"No! No, I don't
wanta
go up there!"

"Well then, you just have to wait here, don't you? I won't be a minute," and she started toward the stairway.

"I gotta see you, I gotta see you, Grandma!"

"Well, you're not gonna see me when I'm up there."

The girl's face puckered in thought, and she wiped her cheeks with balled fists. "Sing then," she said. "You sing, I know you're there."

"All right, all right, I'll sing." And she climbed the stairs, singing one of the ballads from
A Private Empire
that she sang Whitney to sleep with when she was younger:

"'I catch a glimpse of you as in elusive dreams,

A girl who could be true, but isn't who she seems . . .”

Marvella
hummed the rest, loudly enough so that Whitney could hear her as she went through a cursory search of the loft. She expected to find nothing. She knew Whitney, and knew how the girl tended to dramatize events, blaming her own rash acts on invisible playmates, or people who were there "just a minute ago," but who conveniently disappeared when time came for blame. The woman turning into a witch was just one more,
Marvella
reasoned, in a long line of Whitney's fictitious scapegoats. Her fear and crying could easily have been caused by her terrifying fall. God knew it had shaken up
Marvella
as well.

There was no one in the costume loft. The only thing she found out of place from when she had left it just a short time before was one of Dennis Hamilton's costumes from
A Private Empire
. It was the Emperor Frederick's formal dress uniform. The costume was turned on its wooden hanger so that it lay adjacent to the other costumes, neatly lined up in their row.

"Now what's that doing here?"
Marvella
whispered to herself, forgetting to continue humming. It should have been downstairs in the locker that held all of Dennis's costumes. She picked it up just as Whitney shouted up to her.

"I'm here, I'm here,"
Marvella
replied. "Don't worry." She began to hum again as she crossed the loft and came down the stairs, the uniform held carefully so that it would not wrinkle.

"Did you find her?" Whitney asked. "Where is she? Was she there?"

"There's
nobody
there, Whitney,"
Marvella
said gruffly. She opened the locker, carefully hung the costume inside, closed the door, then turned back to her granddaughter. "And there wasn't to begin with. You made that all up, didn't you?"

The child's face went gray. "No, Grandma, no!"

"You got careless and you fell
outta
that loft and thank the Lord those costumes were beneath you, and you made up that story to get the blame off yourself. But now you got a
whupping
coming, girl. You come here."

Whitney went to
Marvella
, but not at all reluctantly. She went, her arms outstretched, tears streaming down her face, sobbing as if she were going to die.
Marvella
hugged the girl, but her trembling would not stop. She decided then not to punish her, that the terror of the fall had been punishment enough. When Whitney sat in her lap, and she felt where the girl had wet herself, she was sure of it.
No
,
Marvella
thought, patting her granddaughter's head as she carried her back to their suite,
this little one has had quite enough for one night
.

The show was titled
Craddock
, and Robin Hamilton knew it was a good one. It had all the elements she thought a strong musical should — harmonically sophisticated yet memorable tunes, lyrics that managed to disguise their cleverness beneath a cloak of spontaneity, and a powerful, original story, complete with a charming and involving love interest.

The readers in New York had done a good job, narrowing the field down to just five finalists. Robin, Quentin Margolis, and Dex
Colangelo
read all five shows, listened several times to the scores of each, and interviewed the librettists, lyricists, and composers. The final choice of
Craddock
was unanimous. She had copies sent to Kirkland, then stayed two more days in the city to rest, see some shows, and visit friends, activities that ultimately drained her far more than her work had.

Now, as her plane landed at the Philadelphia Airport early Friday afternoon, she felt quite weary, anxious only to see Dennis again, to have him put his arms around her in the car so that she could go to sleep as Sid drove them both home. But when she went to the baggage area, she found only Sid, who shook his head sadly, as if he knew what she had expected, and was sorry. "He said he didn't feel up to the drive," Sid told her.

"He sounded all right on the phone the other night," she said, trying to keep the hurt and disappointment out of her voice.

"I don't know, Robin. I mean, the doctors can't find a thing wrong, but . . .”

“I still think it could be Epstein-Barr."

Sid shook his head. "Doc
Chandar
says it's not the yuppie flu, and he's not the only one." He reached out and grabbed one of Robin's Banana Republic bags from the carousel. "I think once we get started with the show, he'll come around. Something to keep him occupied."

"That's what I thought about the theatre. But he's been holing up in our suite so much . . . there's the other one." Sid grabbed the bag at which Robin was pointing, and they started toward the parking lot.

The drive to Kirkland took forty minutes, and Sid had to wake Robin after he parked the car. She stretched and rubbed her eyes, lightly smearing her liner, but did not fix it, thinking that she would have access to a rest room before she saw Dennis again. Indeed, she would be surprised if he was not sitting in the chill air of their balcony, steeped in lethargy.