But the attention he had given her was only perfunctory in comparison to that which he gave the person in the yellow mask. There was more to the costume than just a mask, of course. The masquer wore a long robe of pale yellow, nearly the same color as the mask, embroidered simply but richly with stitching of various shades of brown and tan. A red sash contrasted starkly with the gentler colors.
The hands, Cranford thought, had been skillfully made up. At first he assumed they were rubber gloves, like the large monster hands he had seen children wear at Halloween, but the naturalness of the fingers’ movements told him there was more to it than that. They seemed hideously thin, like spiders’ legs rather than fingers, and Cranford wondered if they were purely prosthetic, their motion operated by hands hidden inside the costume.
The feet were equally well constructed, broad appendages covered with a coarse, thick hair that looked as if it had come off a burly animal rather than being made from some rayon fake fur. The claws that thrust themselves from the mass of hair were the shade of old ivory, and had an iridescent realism that even extended to blood vessels visible just beneath their surface. Only, Cranford observed, the blood was sickly green in color. Nice touch.
But what set off the whole ensemble was the mask. It glowed with a faint luminescence, and the eyeholes were pure black, the result, Cranford assumed, of using sheer black material, possibly cut from women’s hosiery. The true novelty was the shape of the imagined head beneath the mask. The many folds were draped in such a way as to give the suggestion of the head of a nonhuman entity beneath, with features that bulged where human features would have receded, and showed hollows where a normal face would have boasted a nose, a jaw, a forehead. It was, Cranford thought, quite hideous through suggestibility alone.
The hooded person walked slowly through the aisles, seemingly unjostled by the teeming fans, none of whom, Cranford was surprised to see, seemed to pay much if any attention to him. Perhaps, Cranford thought, the costume was too subtle for those whose tastes ran generally toward the gory. The person continued to walk until he or she stood directly in front of Cranford’s table, then turned toward him.
The misshapen head tilted down until whatever eyes were behind the black pits of darkness in the mask were looking at the seated Cranford. Cranford started to give an appreciative chuckle, but it caught in his throat. The friendly smile he had planned likewise departed before arrival. The eyes, or the absence of them, discomfited Cranford, especially when he realized the eyeholes were not on the same horizontal level. The one on the left was an inch below the other, and neither was in the place where one would expect the eyes to be.
Another clever conceit, he thought, intended to bring a further alien touch to the whole. He forced the original smile back onto his face and said, as jovially as he could, “Well, that’s quite a costume!”
The person said nothing. Only the long spidery fingers twitched.
“Are you planning to enter the contest?” No reply. “You should, you know.”
Still there was no response from the masked figure. Cranford made himself look away, out over the throng.
“A lot of excellent costumes here this year, really. Were you here last year?” Cranford didn’t look back at the person. Instead he looked down at his tabletop and adjusted the position of some of the stacks of pictures and DVDs, neatly aligning them and aligning again, as though he were trying to find the perfect marketing feng shui. He kept his head tipped down so that he couldn’t even see the figure of the standing person.
He was planning to say, Well, I’m sure you’ll want to see some of the makeup tables in the other room, when he looked back up again, but when he did the masked figure was gone. Cranford’s gaze darted about the room, but the yellow-robed countenance was nowhere to be seen. Cranford was relieved, yet puzzled. How could the man have gotten away so quickly and silently?
Practice, he wryly told himself. Yellow alien stealth ninjas must practice a great deal. Cranford shook off the feeling of unease and made himself grin, but took another large sip from the flask just the same and felt better as a result.
Six o’clock finally arrived, and Cranford tallied his take. It was nearly fourteen hundred dollars, which meant that he’d sold an average of a photo or a DVD every five minutes. Not bad. Saturday morning, with its new influx of fans, might be even better.
He pocketed his stash and thought about dinner. Sybil, God bless her, invited him to dine with her and Glenda Garrison. He could have done without Glenda, but he wanted the company, so they walked outside and crossed the plaza to the Italian restaurant in the suburban hotel complex where the convention was held.
The walk was cold, and he was glad he’d worn his coat. Overhead the sky was bright with stars, jutting out like pinpricks on black velvet. Inside, the food was acceptable (though the menu offered only a few Italian items) and the conversation could have been worse. Sybil was always lovely to be with, though Glenda’s coarseness dismayed Cranford. Still, the shots of scotch he’d had that afternoon, another double in his room before dinner, and two glasses of Chianti with his meal loosened him up until he could chuckle at Glenda’s crude jokes.
He did discover one thing that he had never known before, and that was that Glenda had actually been in Haunter of the Dark, in the small role of the girl on the altar, the sacrifice that the villain was making to bring back the Old Ones. Cranford had never met her because her scenes were shot separately and then edited in.
“I was underage,” Glenda recalled as she sipped her fourth glass of wine, “so my mom hadda be there and there weren’t any guys allowed except the director and the crew. I had as little on as they could get away with, but it was colder’n hell—we shot it outside—and my nips were stickin’ up like crazy, and it was before the ratings system, so the director, who was it?”
“Tom Newton,” Cranford said.
“Yeah, him…he put this gauzy stuff over the lens. You couldn’t even tell who it was in the finished shot, so I don’t put it in my whatsit, my fi mography…” She slurred the word.
“Weren’t you in the credits?” Sybil asked.
“Yeah, as Felicia Freeman. ‘S before I decided on Glenda Garrison. One letter away, y’know? Eff-Eff, Gee-Gee? So anyway, nobody knows, and I’ll jes’ keep it that way.”
They were finishing their coffee when Gary Busey, who had been to a number of cons Cranford had attended, noisily entered with several cronies and went directly to the bar, only a short distance from their table. “Well, ladies,” Cranford said, throwing down enough cash to cover his meal and the entire tip, “I suggest we depart before the situation grows…abusey ive.”
“I dunno,” Glenda said, “I think he’s still pretty hot.”
“Glenda dear,” Sybil sighed, “you think Paul Lynde is hot. And he’s dead and gay.”
Nevertheless, Glenda remained behind to chat up Busey, while Sybil and Cranford left the restaurant. Back at the hotel, Cranford suggested that Sybil might want to join him for a nightcap in the hotel bar, but she smiled sweetly, he thought, and pleaded tiredness.
“It’s a longer day tomorrow,” she said, “and I’m not in my…twenties anymore.”
He smiled. “I suppose you’re right. Nor I. Well, goodnight. Maybe breakfast tomorrow?”
“Lovely. Around nine? I’ll knock on your door when I’m ready.”
Her tone was friendly, nothing more, but Cranford’s step was a bit lighter as he walked down the hall toward his mini-suite. Once inside, he threw off his coat, jacket, and tie, put the cash he’d made that day into the room safe, and poured himself a libation of single malt. Then, drink in hand, he sat down in the easy chair, put his feet on the hassock, and looked around the spacious room.
The hotel was one of the Wyndham chain, a new, modern building that appeared as a giant curved slab when viewed from the outside. Now, for the first time, Cranford was surprised to see that the interior of his room was curved as well. The wall with windows had a definite arc to it, and
for some reason it seemed a bit disorienting.
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. Cranfo
rd 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…
The Night Listener and Others Page 33
