The Night Listener and Others (43 page)

Maybe it was just the scotch, he thought, as he looked away from the wall and sought the TV remote. He flicked it on, found the on-screen directory, and saw that Turner Classic Movies, his favorite, was available.

And there, miracle of miracles, coincidence of coincidences, was
Haunter of the Dark
, in gorgeous murky black and white. And there was Wesley Cranford in his early thirties, the moustache as dark as the tuft of chest hair that protruded from the V of “Robert Blake’s” opened shirtfront. Those days were gone all right. Hairless chests for men were
de rigueur
, and what they called
manscaping
was the norm. Thank god he’d missed
that
. He turned off the room lights, took another sip, and raised the volume so his ears could catch the dialogue.

“…seemed to be alien geometries, not of this world,” Blake was telling his friend Howard Carter, who had been written into the script as a bow to Howard Lovecraft, the story’s creator, to provide a human villain, and to avoid Blake’s having to convey most of the exposition in monologues. “Curved lines where straight lines should be, curving up into a hideous darkness, Howard! And down again into a primordial slime…”

The camera moved slowly in as Blake continued his story, and Cranford remembered having to project in words alone what the special effects of 1963 could not—and could not
afford
—to show. The film had been made on a miniscule budget, the producer/director Tom Newton refusing to even pay rights to the publisher who claimed to own the original story. “Public domain!” Newton had insisted. “I did my homework! Public domain!”

After the film was in the can, the publisher had threatened to take Newton to court, so Newton had made a token payment “just to shut ‘em up,” as he told Cranford at the time. When it came to promotion, Newton had made William Castle look like a piker, and they had pushed the hell out of the movie, but to no avail. It barely made back the original pitifully small investment in its first two years, but started showing up on television in the seventies, and as H. P. Lovecraft grew more and more popular,
Haunter
grew its own healthy fan base. With the advent of VHS tape and then DVD technology, the film had made a small fortune, not for Newton, who had died of a stroke in 1978, but instead for the studio to which he had sold it lock, stock, and barrel years before his death.

Wesley Cranford didn’t own the slightest piece of the film that had brought him what little fame he had, so he had to profit from it the best he could, in an associational manner, buying copies in bulk and getting a small discount, then selling them signed for more than retail price at the cons. It was a living.

He tried to forget the business angle and let himself become involved in what was taking place on the TV screen. Blake was talking to the frightened Italian girl now, asking her about the deserted church and the dead bodies that were found on its grounds over the years. Italian, my ass, Cranford thought. She was Jewish, her name was Sheila Feldstein (not Amanda Paris, as it read in the credits), and she had almost become the second Mrs. Cranford, had he not caught her behind a set fellating a key grip the last day of the shoot.

Cranford became lost for a moment in erotic memories of the woman, but popped back into the story when he saw himself opening the box with what had been called the Shining Trapezohedron in the story and original screenplay, but which Newton had changed. “A trapawhozis?” he had asked the screenwriter. “Nobody knows what the hell that is—call it the Sorcerer’s Stone, f ‘crissake…”

“It’s simple, Robert…” he heard Kelvin French, who had played Howard, say. “When the stars are right, at certain places on the earth, the gate can be opened by certain sounds, timbres of certain voices crying out the words that will call the Old Ones. I have tried, but in vain. It may be
you
they want…you they need.
You
may be the appointed one! Take the stone…”

Then came the scene of Howard teaching him the chant, one he hadn’t forgotten, even after all those years. It was a mish-mash of words from different Lovecraft stories, the same kind of mashup the screenplay had been, and he and Kelvin French had memorized it together during drinking bouts and repeated it jokingly for years afterward whenever they ran into each other. The whole thing went:

Ia-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Tekeli-li! Ngah’ng ai’y Zhro! Yog-Sothoth! Ia! Ia!

Cranston closed his eyes and repeated it back to himself perfectly. Damn, he still had it. Still sharp as a tack. If only his face and body were what they used to be…

He thought some more about Sybil, watching with only half an eye the boring scene with the police talking about the kidnapped girl. He perked up at the scene that followed, with a pubescent Glenda Garrison seemingly clothed only in strips of cloth on the altar, but try as he might, he could neither recognize her face nor detect a trace of erect nipple. He chuckled as he heard Kelvin chant the old words, and just as the darkness rose to engulf the horrified Howard Carter, betrayed by those he sought to free and worship, there was a knock on the door.

It startled Cranford, as he expected no visitors. He considered ignoring it and continuing to watch the film, since his big scene was coming up, the one where Robert Blake is tempted with eternal life if he takes Howard Carter’s place and uses the Sorcerer’s Stone to open the gate for the Old Ones.

But the knock came again, a single but inexorable rap, and the unlikely but appealing idea crossed Cranford’s mind that it might be Sybil, looking for company, a drink, or even, dare he imagine, more. He set down his scotch, pushed himself erect and walked slowly to the door, the large screen television providing enough light for him to easily make his way.

When Cranford put his eye to the peephole, he felt his heart give a slight hop, for there, on the other side of the door, he saw Sybil Meadows, smiling and giving the same little wave she had given him when she’d seen him earlier that day, as though she knew he was watching her. He threw back the security latch and opened the door.

It was not Sybil Meadows who faced him in the hall, but the person with the yellow mask, still in costume, hands at its side, spider fingers twitching ever so lightly. The dark eyes seemed to observe Cranford, and for a second he felt as though he had fallen into those offset pools of ebony, that his head had been strapped to a board, his skullcap removed, and that his every thought and dream and fear was visible to the creature that now stood before him.

Then he shook himself both outside and in, and took a deep breath. This was absurd, ridiculous, and downright
rude
. How had this man, if man he was, gotten his room number in the first place? Was he with the convention? Whoever he was, he had no right to come knocking on Cranford’s door at night.

“Now look,” Cranford said, and his voice sounded small to him, as though the cloth-draped figure sucked in the words as they were spoken. “That’s quite a splendid costume, as I said earlier today, but I’ve no time to play dress-up and go boo, all right? I don’t know how on earth you got my…”

Cranford’s words trailed away as the misshapen head of the creature (for such he had come to think of it)
shifted
beneath the mask, the protuberances and hollows ebbing and flowing as though a hand was randomly squeezing a rubber bag filled with rocks and gel. Cranford backed away into his room, and the creature followed. It did not occur to him to try and slam the door against it. He had the feeling that would do no good.

“The darkness has come. It is time…”

At first Cranford thought the echoing voice came from the creature that followed him, the door closing behind it in spite of the fact that he hadn’t seen either of the spidery hands push it shut. No, the voice was coming from the TV, where Robert Blake was standing on a studio precipice, looking at a huge black screen on which was being projected swirling planets and stars.

“You are the appointed one. Speak the words,” the voice commanded. “Bring back the Old Ones…”

The voice itself was that of Richard Shepherd, a voiceover specialist whose deep baritone had sold everything from used cars to feminine hygiene products in the fifties and sixties. Cranford recalled Tom Newton saying he had paid him fifty bucks to come in and record the three minutes of dialogue, as if that had been munificent beyond belief.

All those details flooded back into Cranford’s mind, as if in an attempt to keep him from coming to the obvious conclusion that this was no horror fan following him into his room, but something else, something not even human. “The stars are right…and this is one of the places on this world where, if the words are said by the appointed one, chaos will be unleashed. You are the one! Behold the stars in the darkness of night!”

The right arm of the thing in the mask slowly rose, and behind him Cranford heard the ratcheting sound of the curtains being drawn open. The creature made an imperious gesture just as Richard Shepherd’s echo saturated voice ordered, “
Behold
, I say!”

Cranford turned, unable to resist, and through the wide curved window saw not a parking lot where bright lights shone down on parked cars, but a cosmic vista of Kubrickian proportions, in which suns, stars, planets seemed bound together by a feathery chain of stardust, wan and sickly tendrils of green-gold light. Then he heard his own voice, decades younger…

“No! No, I
won’t
!”

And again, Shepherd saying, “You must! And look at what you gain!”

But instead of the shoddily filmed insert of Robert Blake wearing a cheap crown and sitting on a throne with plastic planet models orbiting him on strings, Cranford saw the wisps of star stuff transform into a bas-relief of his own face, only young again, young and handsome, his flesh firm and clear, with not a trace of the broken veins that decades of drink had caused.

Wesley Cranford young. Young, oh young…

“
Speak the words!”

Cranford heard them inside his head, and knew he could recite them easily. What would be the harm? This wasn’t real, was it? It had to be a dream, just a foolish dream, the result of exhaustion and too much to drink and seeing a boy in a silly costume. He began to speak…

“Ia-R’lyeh
…Cthulhu fhtagn…”

And when he finished, perhaps the logic of the dream would make him young…

“Ia, Ia
…Shub-Niggurath…”

And in his dream, maybe Sybil would come to him…

“Tekeli-li
…Ngah’ng ai’y Zhro…”

And maybe then, maybe…

“Yog-Sothoth
…Ia, Ia…”

The chant was finished. Cranford could feel his heart pounding in his chest, beating harder and faster than ever before. The cosmic landscape through his window blurred, softened, faded until he saw lights, cars, trees beyond the parking lot, and he wondered, was the dream over?

Then he felt the thin, wiry fingers of the creature in the mask close upon his shoulder, gently, lovingly, and the tempo of his heart quickened until muscle and bone could no longer contain it.

Sybil Meadows finished arranging her photos and looked around the room. It was dismal. There were fewer than half the number of tables set up this year than there had been for HellCon 4. She supposed she should have been surprised that there were that many.

What with the new wars in Iraq and Pakistan causing the reinstatement of the draft for everyone under thirty-five, the devastatingly fatal Muslim flu pandemic, the Dow falling below 2000, and the new government dedicating all its dwindling resources to impeachment and internal prosecutions, horror didn’t have much of an appeal anymore. Still, there were those diehards who had
some
discretionary income left, though Sybil had dropped her price for photos to fifteen dollars this year, and planned to go to ten, depending on the response.

She half smiled, half grimaced as she saw Glenda Garrison enter the ballroom, dragging her luggage cart filled with cases of photos, DVDs, and
Playboys
behind her. No gofers for HellCon 5. “Hey honey!” Glenda called as she came up to the table next to Sybil’s. “Partners again, huh?”

Sybil nodded. “A bit different atmosphere from last year, though.”

“You got that right. It’s like somebody opened up a can of whupass on the world. Jesus, honey, it’s
insane
out there. But how you doin’? God, I haven’t seen you since you blew outta here early last year. You were the one who, uh…?”

“Yes. I found him.”

“So like what happened? I mean…”

“It was Saturday morning. I was supposed to get him for breakfast. He didn’t answer, but his door was ajar, so I went in, and…there he was.”

“Heart attack, huh?”

“Yes. I don’t think he had any pain. He looked very much at peace.”

“Aw…” Glenda looked over at the ballroom door through which the few actors and writers were slowly trickling. “Ohmigod, not to change the subject, but there he
is
.”

“Who?” Sybil asked, seeing a young man with three people around him, carrying what she assumed to be cases of his items for sale. The man seemed to be in his mid-twenties, and was extremely handsome and stylishly dressed. A black moustache accented his perfectly straight, blindingly white teeth. Sybil recognized him then. “Blake Dexter,” she said.

“Uh-
huh
,” Glenda murmured. “God, is he hot. And
huge
. Kid comes out of nowhere—complete unknown—and gets a role in the biggest horror movie in years? Like a fairytale.” She gave a twisted little smile. “Wonder if the prince has a princess yet…”

As if he’d heard her, Blake Dexter stopped talking to his entourage and looked in their direction. He smiled and gave a short wave.

Glenda grinned broadly and waved back. “Didya see that?” she said to Sybil. “He
waved
at me!” But Sybil wasn’t sure which of them the young man had waved at. It didn’t really matter. They were both far too old for him.