They said nothing as they watched the dozen or so guests shift around for better views; they tensed when they heard the sirens stop outside, heard footsteps on the carpeted stairs, heard voices raised in authority.
“I don’t think I want to talk to the cops,” he said at last, and with a nod for her to join him, slipped back into his room.
She took the chair at once; he sat cross-legged on the bed.
“I heard you nearly caught it the other day,” she said, staring around the room as if it were light-years different from her own down the hall. “Are you all right?”
He explained what had happened, didn’t bother to exaggerate the injuries he’d received. She wasn’t that impressed, though she didn’t seem to mind that he couldn’t stop looking at the T-shirt she wore—a thin one, and of a solid black that accentuated the tan of her bare arms and the curve of her chest. With a few variations, it was what she had worn since the first day he had met her; he assumed she had several of them and knew what they did.
Then he told her about waking up and finding the door open.
“Oh, my God,” she said, sitting suddenly forward. “Brian, do you realize you could have been a victim? My God!” She scanned the room again, this time checking the shadows for a lurking killer. “My God!” And she was grinning.
A flare of light when the wind parted the curtains, and she looked to the side table and saw the picture of Crystal.
“Melody’s mother,” he said to her unasked question.
“You’re kidding. That old bat?”
“So she says.”
Bess reached for the frame, changed her mind with a frown, and suggested that he make sure he kept his door locked. When he told her he did, she reminded him it had been open.
“Or opened,” she amended with a sly, menacing smile.
“Right,” he said. “Now look, I don’t know about you, but living dangerously makes me hungry.”
“I already ate.”
“Eat again.”
She looked at him, considered, and nodded, then took his arm, stroked it once, and led him into the hall, where they were stopped by a constable who asked them if they’d mind looking in at the downstairs lounge, just a few questions, no problems, the inspector would take only a moment of their time.
Melody Tyce met them on the landing and looked at him strangely.
The inspector took exactly ten minutes, thanked them, and took their names.
“I’ll be damned,” Bess said as they walked out to the street.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “Sooner or later one of his women was bound to catch on.”
“You knew him well?” she asked dubiously.
“No. But White was the kind of guy ... I don’t know. The kind of guy who just travels around, seeing what he can get from where he is before going somewhere else. I don’t know. Old before his time, you know what I mean?”
“Sure,” she said, skipping a step. “Decadent.”
He thought about it, and shook his head. “No. Just lost, I think.”
“Ah,” she said. “Very profound.”
Maybe, he thought, and wondered if she knew how much the description seemed to fit him. If she did, she said nothing, and once their meal was over, they walked home in silence, not holding hands, not brushing arms, and when she skipped up the steps to her room he stood in the foyer shaking his head.
Was it something I said? he thought with a grin.
And thought about it again the next morning when Melody acted as if he had just contracted the plague. Her manner was stiff, her eyes blank when she looked at him, and as he headed out for a day trip to the Tower, he looked back and saw her standing in the doorway, arms folded under her breasts.
From Traitor’s Gate, then, to the armor museum, he walked through the tour and thought of nothing but Bess. She was getting to him. She was taunting him. The idea she was toying with him got him so mad that he returned to the hotel before he was ready and sat on the steps, waiting for her, ready to demand an explanation of her disinterest.
The sun set.
He went up to his room only once, to change clothes, and turned Crystal’s face away when her eyes seemed to follow.
Back outside he sat again, hands on knees, seeing a patrol car pass and remembering Mr. White and Ben. I am, he thought then, pretty damn lucky after all.
A light switched on in a room overhead, and he looked up and back, and saw a shadow behind curtains. Melody’s mother, and he rolled his shoulders in a shudder.
Bess showed up just after nine, smiled broadly when she realized he’d been waiting just for her, and nodded when all the dialogues he’d imagined came out as an invitation to a late dinner up the street.
They ate at the nearest Garfunkel’s, neither of them wanting to walk very far, neither in the mood for anything fancy. She took a place on the wall-length booth, he the aisle chair. The only adventurous thing they attempted was switching plates when he was unable to face the bland meat he’d been served. And neither of them spoke of more than the cool weather, the bright skies, the tourists who seemed to be crowding into everything and not giving the true Anglophiles a chance to indulge, until Bess looked peculiarly at the veal she’d been nibbling.
“Something wrong?”
“The cheese,” she said, her face abruptly pale, the freckles suddenly too dark.
He reached over with a fork and took a bit on a tine, tasted it with his tongue, and shrugged. “Seems all right to me.”
She gagged and covered her mouth with her napkin, looking apologetic and near frightened at the same time. When she reached for and failed to grab her glass of water, he half rose and began to search for a waitress, looked back in time to see her slump to one side in the false leather booth. With a cry for help, he kicked back his chair and attempted to stretch her out along the seat. She moaned. He muttered encouragement and chafed her wrists, reached around and grabbed a napkin to dip into water when he saw the perspiration breaking over her brow.
A doctor pushed him aside.
Two minutes later she was dead.
Five minutes after the place was closed down, and within the hour he was standing in front of the hotel, looking up at the lighted window where Melody’s mother lived. Questioned and released from the scene, the urge to wander had been suppressed in favor of a sudden macabre curiosity. He supposed, if he were inclined to believe in such things, that the portrait was some sort of good-luck charm; and right now it was difficult not to believe. The taxi, White’s murder, the rat poison-tainted food; add them up and they tallied deaths that should have been his. Add them another way, however, and they tallied a run of good fortune that had nothing to do with anyone’s likeness. Melody had said it herself, in fact—that she had gotten rid of it because her mother didn’t like it. She called it a bad penny, which, to Brian’s mind, had nothing at all to do with good luck.
The questions shifted as a shadow approached them.
He stepped back toward the curb, not bothering to look away.
The curtains parted just enough for him to see a slant of face, a slash of vivid blue, before they closed again and the shadow backed away.
He almost went in. He almost ran up the steps and slammed open the door. But a sudden image of Bess’ stricken face loomed over the stoop, and he turned away and began walking—past buildings that even in the dark seemed a century out of place, past short-skirted girls who giggled softly in the shadows, past theatergoers in fine clothes, and belligerent shills who told him he’d better not wait, mate, if he didn’t want to miss the city’s greatest show.
He saw none of the neon, none of the headlamps, none of the faces that turned toward him and away.
Good luck, he thought sourly; what the hell kind of good luck was it for Bess, and Mr. White, and old Ben at the shop?
Coincidence.
Poisoned meat.
He was angry at himself for not feeling more sorrow at young Bess’s dying, but he had hardly known her except as some
one he couldn’t have; he felt nothing at all for Thurmond White, in spite of the man’s brashness and his ill-mannered ways; and Ben just happened to be standing where he was, at his post in the shop as the taxi crashed through.
Coincidence.
Good luck.
Bad pennies; and he whirled, nearly knocking over an old woman, and broke into a run that soon covered him with sweat, had his shift clinging to his chest, filled his shoes with slimy damp. The dark streets were quiet save for the slap of his soles; the last of the leaves hissed as he passed. Twice he had to dodge cars as he crossed in a street’s center; once he had to outrun a dog he’d surprised rooting in garbage.
He ran back to the hotel and stood on the pavement, and when Melody came to the door he only glared and nodded.
She had a sweater cloaked over her wide shoulders, and she fussed with the top button as she came down the steps.
“It’s her,” he said tightly, pointing at the window.
“I admit, it’s unusual.”
He could barely see her face, but he could sense her hesitant smile. “Unusual? Christ, Mel, it’s impossible!”
She took his hand and tugged. When he resisted, she tugged again. “Won’t hurt, Brian. It won’t hurt to look.”
He shook off her grip, but followed her just the same, into the lobby, up the stairs, through the fire door and around to the front. She knocked and tilted her head, gave him a smile and walked in, and he rode with her on her shadow.
A single bed, a single chair, a dresser on the far wall.
A crystal chandelier that blinded him until he squinted.
Melody stood beside him.
The other woman stood with her back to the curtains.
She wore a red velvet nightdress trimmed in faint gold, a complement to the ebony that spilled over her shoulders. Her face told him she was sixty, perhaps even thirty; her hands told him she was thirty, perhaps even twenty; and she was as far from fat as he was from content.
She was the woman in his picture, framed by the silvered drapes.
“She tries very hard, my granddaughter does,” said the woman named Crystal, in a soft, whipping voice. “Her mother was no better.”
He heard Melody sobbing; he didn’t look around.
“I suspect she took a fancy to you, a little before I did.” The smile was brief and cold. “For different reasons, of course. She fancies she loves you.”
He did look then, and looked away from the tears; then reached behind him for the doorknob. “You’re crazy,” he said.
“You’re alive,” she told him.
He snorted, courage returned when he wasn’t looking in her eyes. “Look, lady—”
“You’re here,” she said quietly, “because you’ve no place else to go, isn’t that so? No home. No family. You live in the past, and England is perfect for ambitions like that. And so do I, Brian. So do I.” The rustle of velvet. “My past, not yours.”
He yanked the door open and stepped into the hall; and once out of the wash of white light, he took a deep breath, and shuddered, and headed for the stairs. It was time, he thought, to move on. Another city, perhaps the Continent. Maybe even go back to the States. It didn’t matter as long as he didn’t stay here.
Melody hurried up behind him.
“Tote the tab,” he said as he climbed toward his room. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
“You don’t get it yet, do you?” she said.
“Get it?” he look down. “C’mon, Mel, you know me.”
She wiped her nose with a sleeve. “Do you know who had that picture before you?”
“You did. You told me.”
“No. Not me. Mr. White.”
He blinked, and grinned. “Mel, this isn’t the time. I—”
“I killed him.”
He fumbled for the banister and lowered himself to the step. “You didn’t.”
“She was tired of him. With a few exceptions, he was growing to like older women.”
“So?”
“Older women, Brian, don’t have much time left.”
He stood angrily. “Jesus, Mel, what the hell are you pulling here, huh?” His eyes closed, and opened. “Oh, I get it. Your grandmother has the power to take what life is left from a person, right? She then gives that portrait to someone, and it brings them good luck—like not dying when they should.” He spread his hands. “No problem, Mel. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll leave it behind. O.K.? Are you happy?”
He started up again (my past) and reached the landing, then turned around (not yours) because he saw the cab, and the blood, and young Bess on a stretcher.
“Let me get this straight,” he said to Melody, who was still waiting. “You arranged, somehow, for me to get the picture because Mr. White didn’t pick the girls, he picked older women?”
“You were the type,” she said. “She always knows the type.”
“And ...” He put a finger to his chin. “And no matter where I go, because of me people are going to die just to keep her where she is.”
Melody lifted a helpless hand.
“You,” he said, “are insane. So is that imposter in there, or was the old woman the fake?”
He pulled open the fire door—
“Brian, how did you feel when poor Bess was dead?”
—and stepped into the hall, snatched his key from his pocket, and slammed into his room.
He didn’t turn on the lights.
He didn’t look at Crystal’s picture.
He stood at the window and stared down at the street through the gauze of the curtains.
What a stupid thing to say, he thought, spinning the key in one hand; I felt lousy, I felt rotten, I felt ...
And he knew then what Crystal wanted.
Not the dead, not the dying, but the fact that good old Brian, like Thurmond White, would never really care.
A polite knock on the door.
“What!” he said as a tour coach drifted by.
“The bill,” Melody said. “Do you still want it?”
A pair of young women in jeans and down jackets huddled on the opposite pavement, knapsacks at their feet, and they were studying a map.
“Brian?”
“No,” he said loudly, and parted the curtain.
One of them looked up and saw him, poked her companion, and they smiled.
He heard Melody shift the picture so it faced his bed.
“Brian, she’s waiting.”
Girls, he thought; they’re not much older than girls.
He watched them without expression, watched their flirting and their intent, and when he nodded at the last, the light in the room above switched off, and he waited.
Listening to the girls hurry over to the door.
Listening as Melody left to let them in.
Waiting, and sighing, because he didn’t feel a thing.
RETIREMENT by Ron Leming
Ron Leming is another writer struggling out of the pack of small press writers. His stories have appeared in Potboiler, Sycophant, Twisted, The Horror Show, Eldritch Tales, and other leading small press magazines, and he has had recent sales to professional markets such as Mayfair and Outlaw Biker (from which the following story is reprinted). Leming is also a small press editor with the Damnations anthology series and the forthcoming Slice of the Razor. Just at this moment he is concentrating on his budding career as an artist.
Ron Leming says that he was supposedly born on September 11, 1950, but doesn’t know where, as he is an orphan. For now he lives in Berkeley, California. As for his background: “Just out of high school I went into the music business and played in several well-known bands during the sixties. I’ve been an actor in very cheap, very bad B movies, a chef, a biker, a gas station manager, a professional full contact martial arts fighter and instructor, owned my own restaurant, built custom vans, dug ditches, flown planes, worked for a year as a mortician’s assistant ... I love cats, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Presently I’m playing in a rock and
roll band called CHAINSAW REDEEMER. Part punk, part metal, and all hardcore rock and roll.” Isn’t it amazing just how many horror writers like cats?
“I want to be laid out nice and neat on my stomach,” Jack said, “with my pants down around my ankles so everybody can kiss my ass goodbye.”
“Jack,” Chell said reproachfully.
“Well,” Jack said, “it’s true.” He took another drink of Rebel Yell and looked lustfully at Chelly, behind the bar. “What about you?” he asked. “How do you want to be buried?”
Chell was my best waitress—my only waitress. It was an exceptionally slow night at Diamond Dog’s—a very slow bar, at best—and how we’d gotten round to talking about death and burial, I’ll never know. It had just seemed to come up in the conversation. I wouldn’t be the one to object, though. DD’s was all I had—since my wife had died—so my customers and neighbors and regulars were my friends, and I depended on their good will to fill my time and stimulate my mind. Not a good life, maybe—but life enough.
“I don’t rightly know,” Chell said. “I never thought about it much. I guess I’ll just do whatever everybody else is doing when the time comes—’cept maybe with a little less money.” She laughed and slapped Jack lightly on the shoulder. “Us poor folks cain’t afford to die, you know, Jack? We just get so damn depressed that we cain’t move no more. Then they wrap us up and dump us in a hole. Easy enough, eh?”
Jack snorted as if the answer hadn’t had imagination enough for him and he turned to me. There was only the three of us in the bar. It was near midnight and the weather outside was gettin’ real unfit. A slow night at a slow bar, like I said.
“What about you, Don? How do you want the deed done?”
“Me?” I answered, pretending to think while I dried an unused beer glass. “My daddy always told me I was too downright mean and nasty to die. I’m just gonna cut loose with a big ole fart someday and that’ll be it. I’ll collapse like a sack of Jell-O and seep away into the ground.”
Chell bent over laughing, and I smiled, but that answer wasn’t enough for Jack.
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