The Night Listener and Others (44 page)

But as she looked at him more closely, she wondered. His skin and body were young, but even from a distance his eyes were old, as though he harbored a guilty sadness with which he was unable to cope.

“I’m going up to my room, freshen up a little,” Glenda said, still eyeing Blake Dexter across the large room. “Never know when you might meet somebody, right? Hey, what room you in?”

“324,” Sybil said. “You?”

“349,” Glenda replied. Sybil flinched, just a little. “What?” Glenda asked.

“Nothing.” There was no point in telling her that 349 had been Wesley Cranford’s suite the previous year.

While Glenda was gone, Blake Dexter looked over toward Sybil several times, but never came closer. At last Glenda returned, her lipstick redder, eye liner blacker, makeup base thicker. Even so, she looked shaken, almost pallid. “You okay?” Sybil asked her.

“Fine. Just ran into one of those costume creeps. Made my skin crawl.”

“Another zombie?”

“Nah, just a newbie in a yellow hood—never saw him before. Couldn’t see his eyes, but he was acting like he wanted to…oh I dunno, just creeped me out a little…” Glenda stopped talking, opened her cases, and started lining up her goodies on her table.

Sybil could hear the crowd of fans chattering outside the ballroom door now. Though smaller in number than the year before, they sounded excited and enthusiastic. One of the volunteers opened the door partway to let the mob get a look inside before allowing them to enter.

Sybil glanced at her watch. One minute till opening. She sat behind her table, took several deep breaths, and waited for the door to open wider and the chaos to be unleashed.

Silken Words

All Michael Dean wanted, when he went into the little bar on Eighth and Pine, was a drink. He didn’t want to talk, especially not to Vincent Price.

As unusual as that conversation would turn out to be, it was almost as unusual for Michael Dean to want a drink in the middle of the day. But when he saw the cozy-looking tavern on the corner, he knew that he desired nothing more than to be inside its comforting darkness, and to feel whiskey slip roughly down his throat. Something was bothering him, but he didn’t know what. Why was he downtown? He couldn’t remember. It was as if he had been sleeping and had just awakened on the street, fully clothed and walking.

It was an unpleasant, disquieting feeling, and he wondered what had caused it, and stood in front of the bar for several moments, his fingers on the rustic handle of the worn, wooden door. But it was useless. He could not remember, so he pushed open the door and went into the tavern.

The air was thick with cigarette smoke, though only a few people were inside. The bar was at Michael’s right. Behind it was a stocky, aging bartender dressed in a white cotton shirt and an apron made from some rough-textured, cream-colored cloth. He looked up as Michael entered, but did not smile or acknowledge him in any way, and Michael feared that he might have come into one of those territorial neighborhood bars that are at the best indifferent and at the worst hostile to strangers.

But there were plenty of stools, and Michael sat down at one near the far end of the bar, away from the door. At the other end sat an older man wearing a red flannel shirt and denim pants. Behind Michael was a booth with three apparent businessmen in it. They talked quietly, sipped their drinks, and seemed careful not to set the elbows of their dark, wool-blend suits in the drink rings on the tabletop.

The bartender sauntered over, and Michael asked him for a Jack Daniels on the rocks, which the man served up with surprising grace and economy of motion for one so rotund. Michael had just lifted the drink to his lips and was about to take in its chill warmth, when light from the opening front door streamed into the tavern, and a shadow fell across the floor to stop just behind where Michael sat.

A man entered. Michael could see that he was tall, gaunt, and thin to the point of cadaverousness. With the light behind him, however, he could not see the man’s face until the door drifted shut and Michael’s eyes became used to the darkness again. By that time, the man had walked up to the bar, sat down on the stool next to Michael, and said “Hello,” in a voice that Michael thought he recognized. When he saw the man’s face, he was certain of it.

Vincent Price was sitting right next to him, dressed elegantly in a gray silk suit, smiling with his thin lips and those amused and ironic eyes.

Michael Dean knew that Vincent Price was dead, and that the late, great actor could not be sitting there with him, particularly since this man looked like the younger Vincent Price of the sixties, when Michael had seen him in all those Edgar Allan Poe movies, shivering with his other friends at the Saturday matinees. Still, this did not keep Michael from staring, nor his jaw from dropping open.

“Excuse me, is something wrong?” the man with Vincent Price’s face asked with Vincent Price’s voice. The soft tones and gently hissed sibilants were like silk given utterance, and Michael stared at the man’s face as though hypnotized by some sinister yet mesmerizing snake.

He struggled several times before he was able to speak. “I, uh…do you know who you look like?” He felt embarrassed by the stupidity of the question as soon as it left him. Of course this man knew who he looked like. How could he not?

But to Michael’s extreme surprise, the man shook his head with not a trace of guile. “No, who?”

Jesus, the inflections, the tone,
everything
about the voice said that this was…”Vincent Price. Are you kidding me?”

“Vincent Price,” mused the man in his silken tones. “I don’t believe I know the gentleman. Does he…” The man looked around casually. “…frequent this establishment?”

“He’s an actor.”

“An actor. I see,” the man said disinterestedly.

“Or he was. He died a couple years ago.” Michael couldn’t believe that he was having to explain this. “You really don’t know who Vincent Price is?”

“Someone who looks very much like me, I gather.”

“You’ve never been told that before?”

“I can’t say that I have, no.”

It was incredible to Michael that every word this man said, even the most casual, sounded sinister to him. It was the Price connection, of course. Michael had found the movie Vincent Price to be the single most frightening character of his youth. He always seemed to play these highly sensitive men on the verge of insanity, so that just a look or a wrong remark would send them over the edge. He felt that way now, that this man’s immaculate self-control was just a cloak for lunacy.

The feeling was hard to shake, but he told himself that this was not actually Vincent Price, nor any of the characters from his films made flesh, but just a man with the misfortune to look and sound like a movie star. So he smiled and shook his head. “Well, believe me, you get yourself a Vincent Price video and I guarantee you’ll be surprised at what you see.”

The man nodded agreeably. “Maybe I’ll do just that.”

Michael gestured at the empty spot on the bar in front of the man. “Aren’t you drinking?”

“Oh no,” the man said. “I can’t.”

An alcoholic? Michael wondered. It seemed possible that such a strong resemblance to a movie star could indeed drive someone to drink. But why would an alcoholic come in and sit at a bar? Testing himself ? Michael was too much a gentleman, however, to inquire. “The bartender doesn’t mind you just sitting here?” he said at last. He had noticed that the bartender had not taken the slightest notice of his new acquaintance.

“Not a bit,” the man said. “He looks untroubled, doesn’t he?” Then turning back to Michael he added, “Unlike some people I see.”

“I…I beg your pardon?”

“Oh come now, my friend. I can tell that you’re troubled in some way.”

“You can?”

“Oh yes, your hands are trembling slightly, and there are oh-so-small beads of sweat on your upper lip. I hope it’s not because my resemblance to this Price person had discomfited you.”

Michael shook his head almost angrily, as if trying to cover up with bravado what this stranger saw. “No, no, no way. At first maybe, but not now. Really.”

“But
something’s
bothering you, isn’t it?” The man cocked his head and looked expectant, a gesture that Michael had seen Vincent Price make in a dozen movies. “I mean, one doesn’t just come into a bar and drink alone in the middle of the day for no reason whatsoever unless one is a dipsomaniac, or one has received a telling blow of some sort. And since your overall healthy appearance for one your age rules out the former, I can only deduce the cause to be the latter.”

Michael shook his head in mock admiration. “Christ, you even talk like Vincent Price’s scripts.”

“But am I correct in my assumption?”

Michael almost had it then, but it slipped away from him. He still could not remember what had, as the man suggested, driven him in here. “No,” he said vaguely. “I just…came in.”

“Many men,” the stranger went on, “are swept into the arms of demon rum because the arms of their own wives are no longer welcoming enough. Could that be your case, Mr….?”

“Dean,” Michael said. “Mr. Dean.”

“My wife and I…get along.”

“Merely ‘get along?’ That doesn’t sound like a particularly happy home life.”

The stranger sure as hell had that one right, and Michael gave a little snort. “Not particularly.” Why lie? he thought. He’d never seen this man before and would never see him again. Why not share some of his misery?

“I bet she spends too much money, doesn’t she?” the man said, making Michael wonder if he even had to share. Old Vincent already seemed to know everything.

“That she does.”

“But so many women,” old Vince went on, “seem to want careers today. Surely your wife could make her own money, couldn’t she?”

“Her trying to
make
it is what’s costing
me
,” Michael said. Vince cocked his head again questioningly, and Michael went on. “She thinks of herself as a designer, see? Married twenty-seven years and never a problem, then she takes some course at a community college, and all of a sudden she’s not fulfilled anymore because now she sees what she always should have been—a clothing designer, for crissake. I say honey, you never designed a piece of clothing in your life before this course, but that doesn’t matter to her, because she’s gotten an A in the course. One lousy course, right? And now she’s Oscar de la Renta. Only the stuff she does looks more like Oscar Daily Rental, if you know what I mean.” He stopped, overwhelmed by the intensity of his own outburst.

“You don’t think she’s much of a designer.”

“I don’t think she’s any
part
of a designer.”

“So where does this insistence on her talents take her?”

Michael sighed long and slow. “A shop.”

“A shop?”

“Mmm. At the sign of the three D’s.” Michael thought he saw Vince’s eyes widen at that. Wasn’t Vincent Price in a couple of 3-D movies? “And beneath it is what it stands for—Debra Dean Designs.”

“You helped her open this shop?” Michael nodded. “Then might I assume that you must love your wife a great deal to so humor her?”

“Yeah…yeah, sure.” What Michael didn’t tell old Vince was that at first he had given an unqualified no to Debra’s request. She had sulked for a couple of weeks, which didn’t change his mind any. But finally one evening she dropped a packet of photographs in his lap, photographs of him going in and out of a Day’s Inn with a woman who was not Debra. His belly had turned to ice, and he had asked her if she wanted a divorce, knowing full well that if she did she could make a pauper out of him.

But she had said she didn’t care about a divorce, since they were so messy, and she didn’t care who he slept with either, as long as he didn’t try to sleep with her ever again. Michael thought that would be no small loss. Then he asked what
do
you want, and she had said that she wanted her shop, and whatever amount of money it would take to keep it going.

The situation was blackmail, pure and simple, between husband and wife. He hadn’t known then that he was about to start pouring his money down a bottomless pit, but that was exactly what had happened. He paid her store rent and initial setup cost, which included thousands of dollars for equipment and more fabric than he ever thought existed in the world. He bought sewing machines, cutting tables, dress forms, implements, and paid the salaries of three seamstresses, none of whom were attractive enough that he would have wanted them to show their gratitude carnally.

The first month Debra had designed and her “girls” had made enough clothes to dress the mannequins in the windows. She was delighted with the way they looked, but Michael thought the dresses were shapeless and frumpy. In the months to come, the shop became a hole in the city where his money went, and nothing more. She sold a few dresses that she had designed and her doughy robots had constructed, but Debra Dean Designs was a flop from the word go and, Michael saw all too clearly, would continue to be, no matter how many tens of thousands he would sink into its fabric maw.

Old Vincent was dead wrong. Michael didn’t love his wife. But he didn’t hate her either, did he? It was the funniest thing—he couldn’t recall exactly
how
he felt about Debra. He knew that he
should
hate the bitch, but there was something that kept him from doing it, something that he couldn’t quite…

“Remember?”

The word, spoken so silkily, jerked Michael out of his reverie.

“Remember what it was like when you and your wife were first in love? Ah, the exciting days and languorous nights! If we could only keep those feelings forever,” said old Vince. “But things change, don’t they? I somehow sense that you don’t feel the way you used to toward your wife. Am I correct?”

“Bingo,” Michael said.

“This…business venture of hers seems to be the crux of the matter, yes?”

“Double bingo. That damn store.” He shook his head and closed his eyes, not so much in rueful contemplation as in the need to escape the intense probing glare of the man next to him. It was almost as though this Vincent Price look-alike could see right into his mind.