The Night Listener and Others (42 page)

What Glenda had said was true, though. There was something sad and slightly seedy about Wesley Cranford, a few hairs out of place, an area on his jawline which had escaped the ministrations of his razor, a grease spot on the carefully knotted necktie, the shoes scuffed beyond polishing. He appeared a poor man who dreamed himself rich, or at least carried himself so as to project the illusion of richness to others. He certainly seemed gentlemanly, though Sybil suspected that he drank more than he should.

As if sensing she was looking at him, he looked up from his table, smiled, and gave a small wave. She waved back, then turned her attention to straightening her stacks of photos for the coming mob.

Wesley Cranford looked down at the various images of his younger self staring back at him and thought that if Sybil Meadows had only known him thirty years ago, even twenty, she would surely have found him worthy of more than a quick wave. That man with the dark hair and full moustache who stared up so coolly from the studio portrait was the same person who now sat down with a sigh, easing himself into the plastic chair on which he would spend the next six hours, except for bathroom breaks and the frequent standing up for fans who wanted to have their pictures taken with “Robert Blake.”

Cranford patted the left side of his spindly chest to assure himself that his small flask was still there, filled with the bracing single-malt scotch which was his sole luxury. A nip or two when no one was looking would help to sustain him through the weekend ahead. He made himself remember that this was the
celebrity room
and he was a
celebrity
, no matter how depressed and foolish he felt.

It was whorish, he felt, to peddle images of himself and his signature when he should have been making his money by doing what he had done ever since he was seventeen, acting. None of these fans, who asked him the same questions over and over about
Haunter of the Dark
, ever asked about his Hotspur and Romeo with the RSC or his Henry V and Coriolanus for the Stratford Festival, about the times he had shared a stage with Olivier and Richardson and Gielgud. But it was no wonder. Whatever took place on the stage was fleeting, transient, while film…

Film went on forever, didn’t it? Cranford pursed his lips as he looked at the piles of
Haunter
DVDs he was offering for sale: bare-bones single disc, two-disc special edition with the commentary track he had recorded six years earlier, and now the Blu-ray, priced at fifteen dollars more. A nearly fifty-year-old film and people still bought them at his inflated prices, just to have him sign the paper inserts tucked into the plastic sleeves, and so that he could smile with their hand on his shoulder as the red lights of the little digital cameras blinked and blinked again and captured fan and star.

His reverie was interrupted by the opening of the main doors into the hotel ballroom and the swift entrance of the fans, most of them in black t-shirts with the blood-drenched logos of current horror movies emblazoned on the fronts. For a moment, flight seemed the most attractive option, but Cranford steeled himself. These people were nothing like him. They had completely different tastes and concerns, yet they were the ones upon whom his survival depended. Were they not to buy his wares, there would be no money for rent or food or single malt.

And now it was time to smile and look approachable and friendly. He felt no dislike for the fans. Truth to tell, he was appreciative of those who remembered his work in
Haunter
or any of his other, even more obscure films. What was discouraging were those cretins, most often dressed in the height of punk gothic “fashion,” and sometimes in horrific makeup and even costumes, who would ask, “So, who
are
you?”

It seemed an unnecessary question, since the standing placard on his table stated in large print Cranford’s name, and beneath it: “‘Robert Blake’ in
HAUNTER OF THE DARK
, and star of many other films!” Still, Cranford was always polite and told them the otherwise readily available information, had they had the patience to read it.

The first hour of the con, however, was gratifying for Cranford. He actually had a line of sorts, not as long as Glenda Garrison’s, which he knew would be fairly constant throughout the weekend, and nowhere near that of George Romero, on the other side of the large room. Still there were two or three people always waiting that first hour, and Cranford smiled and evinced graciousness and gratitude and posed with his arm around their shoulders and collected the twenties as he signed the DVDs and photos.

At last there was a lull when no one was waiting for or talking to him, and he leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, took a quick look around, then had a surreptitious swig of the scotch, savoring the taste of it in his mouth before allowing it to trickle down his throat, smoothly shining its way into his stomach, where it nestled like a warm living creature. And it was as he was sitting there, feeling the scotch inside him, feeling relatively happy with the day to the point where he could forget that there would be hours ahead of sitting there unnoticed and unloved, that he noticed the person in the costume with the silken mask.

A costume in and of itself was nothing in this exhibitionistic crowd. There would be a costume contest Saturday evening, and many of those who would enter were already stalking the halls and ballrooms of the hotel. Some were the more traditional creatures of horror, such as Death with a skull face, cowl, and scythe, or zombies with gruesome makeup effects of chewed flesh and severed stumps of limbs. Others were more fantastical in nature. A tall and slender young Asian woman was costumed as some vampire/demon hybrid whose main purpose in her undead life seemed to be to show as much tanned flesh as possible. A pair of five-foot-long, brilliantly realized leathern wings extended from her exquisitely curved back, and she had held Cranford’s attention for some time when she had walked past his table and chatted with several admirers.

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…a
busey
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.