Welcome to the Show: 17 Horror Stories – One Legendary Venue

by Brian Keene

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “I did not say.”

  “Doesn’t matter how I know,” Guthrie said, shaking his head. “What’s important is for you to know that the place is cursed, just as Matt said it would be, and that you will suffer if you continue to play there.”

  “Well,” I said, willing to play along, “it’s not The Great American Music Hall.”

  “This is not a jest,” he said. “The new music hall was opened by Stewart Bryte’s brother, Eldon after he inherited the land. Its name is The Shantyman. Do you think Matt didn’t have a hand in that somehow?”

  “Mr. Eldon Bryte,” I said, “a man with a wealth of timber holdings, gave it the name. Another name for lumberjack is shantyman. And just how would a curse have traveled across the Pacific to reach San Francisco?”

  Guthrie huffed. “You know the rules, do you, what governs such things?”

  I’d become angry. What, I wondered was he after? “I brought you here to buy you luncheon,” I said, “out of the goodness of my heart.”

  “You still pity me?” Guthrie asked.

  “If your story is at all true,” I said, “and I have begun to have my doubts—”

  Guthrie interrupted. “If you had not invited me, I’d have made the invitation so that I could sit with you, Beverly, and tell the tale. I tell it to all the new performers at the Shantyman. Surely you don’t think that begging is best done in an alley.”

  I held my silence as I thought about that.

  “In the last two years,” Guthrie said, “The Shantyman has seen its best singer, Dorothy Hendricks commit suicide, its orchestra leader, Charles Lucern die in an opium den, and its top comedian, Lawrence Eddie killed in a hunting accident. And how many more?”

  “What sort of rube do you take me for?” I asked. “They say mobsmen were after Mr. Eddie because of his gambling debts. And surely you know that the pressures of finding fame are many, that those who seek notoriety on the stage are often, though brilliant, fragile and must perhaps be a bit mad to begin with.”

  Slim approached. “Another hard case?” he asked.

  Guthrie nodded. “I’ve done what I could,” he said, shrugging.

  “Come with me, young man,” Slim said.

  “You’re not gonna—” Guthrie began.

  Slim cut him off. “Yes, I am. She said she doesn’t mind.”

  Guthrie hopped into his barrow and followed. Slim led me to the swinging doors I’d assumed led into the kitchen. He opened them, and I saw the kitchen staff going about their work. Against the far wall, a woman stood at a sink washing dishes.

  “Darling,” Guthrie called out.

  She turned around. The burns had withered half her face. The other half had kept its perfection of beauty. “My wife, Kalina,” Guthrie said.

  I found myself speechless. I don’t know why. Her presence did not lend veracity to his tale. Yet I knew that the Bryte family were well-to-do. What was she doing at Slim’s washing dishes?

  She seemed to anticipate my thoughts. “I will have nothing to do with my family,” she said.

  And what was Slim’s part in it—just a friend?

  All three looked at me without a hint of cunning. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking they were involved in a conspiracy of some kind. To what end, I hadn’t a guess.

  I knew that no magazine would want that story. Who would believe it?

  I remained angry as I turned to leave the tavern, having the foolish notion that Guthrie had somehow robbed me in that alley. Robbed me of what, though—innocence, a sense that I knew what the world was made of? Couldn’t I just return to my soft life?

  “Let him go,” I heard Slim say behind me. “Like you said, you’ve done what you could. He’ll chew on it.”

  That, I did.

  I quit the Shantyman within the week.

  Many years have passed since I heard Guthrie’s tale. In that time, those working the music hall have seen a lot of tragedy. I don’t go near The Shantyman. I’ve often wondered if Guthrie still begs in the alley that runs along beside it, and what will happen once he’s gone.

  NIGHT AND DAY AND IN BETWEEN

  Jonathan Janz

  July, 1926

  . . . and when Raft stepped out of the darkness and peered across the dew-glistened street, he felt a tug on the right side of his mouth, the involuntary half-grin that accompanied a breakthrough. Beyond the street, he spied the porch, the maroon canvas overhang, the cursive name, the nightspot to which his search had led him. The Penelope at the end of his Odyssey.

  The other side of Raft’s mouth twitched too.

  THE SHANTYMAN, the moon-white script read.

  Of course, her name wasn’t Penelope—it was Clara—and Raft hadn’t been searching for twenty years, but rather a day shy of three months.

  Still. Three months was longer than it had ever taken him. He wasn’t known as the top bloodhound on the West Coast because it took him a quarter-year to track down his marks. He’d earned his reputation because he was fast.

  And he was merciless.

  Raft took one last drag on his Murad—the cigarettes had started him coughing last year, but lately the cough was less persistent—chucked it at the brick alley wall, and started across the road. Christ, it was muggy. His buddies back in Hollywood claimed winter was the humid season in San Francisco, but clearly they were full of shit. Breathing the July air was like plastering a brine-soaked washcloth over his mouth and sucking.

  He couldn’t wait to get home.

  A sleek black Mercedes bore down on him, its driver beeping the horn like a goddamned kid. Raft saluted him with a middle finger and kept walking. He was almost to the curb when the smartass laid on the horn again, and this time Raft did stop, stopped and swiveled his square jaw and angular cheekbones and harpooned the horn-happy bastard with his eyes.

  The honking abruptly ceased. Raft continued to stare the idiot down, the man’s curly blond hair coiffed like some chorus girl’s, the guy’s lips disappearing inside his troutlike mouth as he realized what a mistake he’d made.

  Raft let him squirm, leveled his sharkish grin at the guy for a full fifteen seconds before he continued toward the curb, and when he stepped up, the cheerful sodium glow cast by the Shantyman’s entryway illuminating Raft like he was the main attraction at tonight’s show, he made sure to square up to the driver, to let him behold the breadth of Raft’s shoulders, the width of his corded neck.

  The driver looked absolutely ill now, and when he finally remembered to roll forward and rejoin the sporadic flow of traffic, he offered Raft what was no doubt intended to be a conciliatory smile.

  Raft let his own grin slide off his face, let the predator’s scowl settle in its place.

  The driver’s eyes widened, and the Mercedes leaped forward as if goosed by a lusty boozehound’s fingers.

  Raft climbed the porch steps and glowered down at the doorman. Little guy, but tough-looking. Pugnacious, like a bantamweight boxer moonlighting between fights.

  “You got money?” the doorman asked.

  Raft took in the burgundy suit, the matching tie with a weave so thick the ivory collar couldn’t quite contain it. Christ. Might as well make the guy wear clown makeup.

  “Somethin’ funny?” the doorman asked.

  “Only that suit,” Raft answered. “Can’t you afford a ticket booth?”

  The doorman’s eyes glittered. “It’s inside. But I’m asking you if you got money.”

  “More than you make in a year,” Raft said and tapped the pocket of his bomber jacket, the one he’d gotten after arriving home from the Great War. He was sweltering in it, but it concealed the bulge in his left side, and that made the discomfort worthwhile. If this little bulldog found out he was packing, he might make a fuss, and Raft didn’t need that. He wanted to see Clara before she saw him.

  More importantly, he wanted to catch Lonnie “Spider Fingers” Livingston unawares.

  Raft was shouldering past the doorman when the little bu
lldog put his hands on Raft’s arm.

  Half-in, half-out of the doorway, Raft stared straight ahead. “You got one second to let go of me.”

  “Don’t threaten—” was all the doorman got out before Raft swung the guy around and crashed him into the heavy steel door. The guy’s head thudded against steel, rebounded, and before Raft could judge whether the guy was conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, Raft leaned forward, grasped him by the collar and a leg, and somersaulted him over the railing. The doorman’s muscled body landed with a deep whump on the sidewalk below. Without pausing, Raft stepped inside.

  And heard her voice.

  Clara.

  She was singing a song he didn’t know, something disposable, the melody unworthy of her. Overlaying her voice, grandstanding as always, he heard Lonnie Livingston working the piano.

  The nightclub was sweltering; he could tell that right away, even before the heavy door wheezed shut behind him. Raft scanned the crowd as he descended the stairs—A hundred and fifty patrons? A hundred seventy-five?—but he made an effort not to glance to his right, toward the stage. He wanted his first glimpse of Clara, Clara in the flesh and not as he’d seen her in the photographs and on her audition reel, to be from straight ahead, and the only way to accomplish that view was to make for the rear of the nightclub, where the mahogany bar was centered.

  Raft never knew where the manager came from, but by the time Raft was leaning an elbow onto the bar, the manager was there, rudely close, blocky shoulders and broken nose filling his vision like a derelict barge.

  “Here on business?” the manager asked. Unlike the doorman, the manager was dressed to the nines, his purple cravat a garish compliment to the black tuxedo and two-toned shoes.

  No point in denying it. “I need to see Clara,” Raft said.

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  The bartender, an older man with pouches under his eyes and a few strands of alabaster hair Brilliantined onto a liver-spotted pate, was approaching.

  Raft said, “I thought folks came to hear Spider Fingers.”

  “For a while they did,” the manager allowed. “But now Clara’s the real draw.” The manager’s look darkened. “Lonnie doesn’t croon like he once did.”

  “Get you something?” the bartender asked.

  Raft glowered at the gaunt bartender. “You can get your face away from me.”

  The bartender recoiled, but the manager brayed laughter. He patted Raft’s triceps through the bomber jacket leather. “Please, my good man, there’s no reason to be combative.” A glance at the bartender. “Please pour a glass of our finest bourbon.”

  Raft pocketed his big hands, straightened, and stared at the manager. They were roughly the same size and build, Raft a decade younger. “That what you’re drinking?”

  “I don’t drink while I’m working,” the manager said. “May I have your name?”

  Raft told him.

  It earned him a smile from the manager. Or maybe it was a sneer. “Quite a handle,” the manager said. “Is that your real name?”

  Raft didn’t answer. The name was an alias. He’d met a young actor named George Raft last year and had liked the name so much he’d used it on jobs ever since.

  The manager smiled. “You’re already in the spirit.”

  “I don’t read you,” Raft answered, accepting the bourbon from the bartender.

  “Here at the Shantyman,” the manager said, “we can be whatever we want to be. You prefer to don a name like Raft, that’s your prerogative.” He tapped himself on the purple handkerchief that jutted from his pocket. “I go by Summers. It’s not my real name, of course, but since it is my favorite season . . . ”

  “The hell’s so nice about it?” Raft demanded. “Down by the wharves, the air’s like breathing lukewarm fish soup.”

  The manager’s demeanor shifted, a stiffness coming into his shoulders, an alertness around the eyes. “You’ve visited the wharves?”

  When Raft didn’t answer, only took a swig of the bourbon, which had zero taste whatsoever, Summers went on, his voice prodding like some fussy doctor’s speculum. “What were you doing down there?”

  But rather than answering, Raft experienced a sensation he hadn’t experienced before. It was more than déjà vu, more than familiarity. As the first few chords echoed from Lonnie Livingston’s Steinway, swooping across the sweaty nightclub and whispering over Raft’s flesh, he was overtaken by the notion that this was where life had led him. The ugliness, the deprivation, the struggle. The scuttling around in lightless places because the glow of humanity was too bright, too cruel. And as before, rather than Lonnie’s jaunty tenor, it was Clara who carried the melody, the song like, yet unlike any he’d heard before:

  “I had thought of telling you

  They’re the reason why I’m blue.

  Not allowing you to be

  Living in a part of me.”

  Raft’s mouth pooled with saliva, but he couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. Though Clara was peering at the ceiling, her profound blue eyes studying a night sky visible only to her, Raft couldn’t escape the notion she was singing to him.

  No. About him.

  Clara’s pale skin coruscated with twirling stars, her silver dress’s sequins throwing the spotlight’s glow in a million directions. On the Steinway, onto Lonnie Livingston. Onto the swaying, benighted crowd.

  Most of all, onto Raft.

  He hoped Summers was watching the performance too instead of watching Raft. Because at that moment Raft knew he cut a comical figure. Mouth agape, a tide pool of spit glinting at the corners of his mouth, eyes as naked and starey as those of the most smitten teenage boy ever to sneak onto a studio back lot in the hopes of catching a glimpse of his favorite actress, his own personal goddess.

  Worshipfully, Raft listened to Clara’s soulful and gloriously tragic chorus:

  “Sun and moonlight start to fade

  Dead along the promenade.

  Night and day and in between

  You’re the one who haunts my dreams.”

  And Clara did look at him then, and Raft knew. Evidently, Summers felt the crackling of the invisible tether that spanned the room, because he interposed his bulk between Raft and Clara, her sweet, curving cheekbones replaced by Summers’s hacksaw features. Raft scowled at him, but rather than looking alarmed, Summers said, “Before you make a mistake, you’ll need to know what happened, why you’re too late.”

  Raft’s eyes narrowed.

  “That’s right,” Summers went on. “You’re too late by a couple months.” A hesitation, the murky eyes strafing the vaulted ceiling, the stamped bronze and coffered walnut. “Time is funny here. You get lost. Forgetful. The energy is so strong you feel enveloped. Encased.”

  Raft fought the hot tide of impatience. “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “She’s gone, Mr. Raft,” Summers said, still with that musing cast to his features. “This place is a magnet. Terrible things have happened in the Shantyman. Terrible things.” Summers’s eyes traced the antique ceiling; his face clouded, and he actually shivered. If it was a put-on, Raft decided, it was a convincing one. “The . . . energies that have been generated by the gruesomeness, those energies . . . they call to those who lust for shadows.”

  “‘Blood will have blood,’” Raft muttered.

  Summers’s eyes fell on him, blinked, as if seeing him for the first time. “Why, yes, Mr. Raft. That’s exactly what I mean. I never would have pegged you for a Shakespeare man.”

  Raft stepped closer, his nose mere inches from Summers’s. “You have thirty seconds to tell me about Clara.”

  Summers actually smiled an apology. “It will take longer than that, Mr. Raft.”

  “Two minutes,” Raft said. “By the time the song is done, I better know everything.”

  Summers pursed his lips. “I’ll try, Mr. Raft. But I warn you—”

  “No warnings,” Raft snapped. “Talk.”

  Summers’s grin was singularly unp
leasant. “As you wish.”

  ***

  Summers said, “We first met Clara in late February.”

  “That long ago?” Raft asked quickly.

  “She followed Lonnie here the night his final Hollywood show concluded.”

  Raft made a fist, almost did the same with the hand grasping the bourbon. He relaxed his grip a moment before the glass shattered.

  “I was told she stayed in Hollywood longer than that,” Raft said. “With a friend.”

  “Who told you that?” Summers asked. The unpleasant smile resurfaced. “The friend?”

  “Traitorous little shit,” Raft said and knocked back a slug of bourbon.

  “You mustn’t blame the young woman,” Summers said. “Like so many aspiring starlets, Clara’s friend is living hand-to-mouth. The studio heads, the directors, they take what they want but make no promises. Besides,” Summers added, “we paid Clara’s friend handsomely.”

  Raft’s fingers twitched. “To exploit Clara,” he said.

  For the first time, Summers’s insouciant façade disappeared, in its place something skulking and nasty. “You’re such a saint,” he spat. “Hired by her parents to haul her back to her wretched life. She’s just a paycheck to you, so stop behaving as though you’re the morality police.”

  The fine hairs on the back of Raft’s neck stood on end. He yearned to peel that smirk off Summers’s ugly features, to do it slowly, luxuriantly, to revel in the man’s shrieks and to leer into his tomato bisque of a face and watch him gurgle his last breaths.

  But he couldn’t do that. He’d come too far.

  Gradually, he began to calm.

  If Summers noticed these changes, he made no sign. “We never advertise,” Summers said. “Had Clara not followed Lonnie up the coast that night, she’d have never known he was playing the Shantyman next.”

  “Who runs a business that way?” Raft asked.

  Summers flourished a hand. “Look around you, Mr. Raft. Do these folks look like your run-of-the-mill socialites? Teeming from night spot to night spot, always on the lookout for the newest, chicest trend?”

  And Raft realized Summers was right. So transfixed by the sight of Clara had he been, and so mesmerized by her dulcet voice, that he hadn’t noticed how self-possessed these patrons were, how unlike the pretty faces he was accustomed to. Oh, there was attractiveness here. And money. But it wasn’t the brassy sort of clientele that frequented Hollywood’s hot spots, or, he was sure, the swankest nightclubs in San Fran. No, here were self-made men and streetwise women, too schooled in the wiles of mankind to affect those wiles any longer.