Dreamsongs. Volume I

by George R. R. Martin

  There was no answer. Kenny went from room to room. The apartment was filthy, a shambles. There was no sign of Boney Moroney anywhere. When Kenny came panting back to the living room, the monkey shifted abruptly, and threw him off balance. He stumbled and fell hard. Pain went shooting up through his knees, and he cut open one outstretched hand on the edge of the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Kenny began to weep.

  He heard the door close, and the thing that lived here moved slowly toward him. Kenny blinked back tears and stared at the approach of those two mammoth legs, pale in the moonlight, sagging all around with fat. He looked up and it was like gazing up the side of a mountain. Far, far above him grinned those horrible mocking teeth. “Where is he?” Kenny Dorchester whispered. “What have you done with poor Boney?”

  The grin did not change. The thing reached down a meaty hand, fingers as thick as a length of kielbasa, and snagged the waistband of the baggy striped shorts. It pulled them down clumsily, and they settled to the ground like a parachute, bunching around its feet.

  “Oh, no,” said Kenny Dorchester.

  The thing had no genitals. Hanging down between its legs, almost touching the carpet now that it had been freed from the confines of the soiled shorts, was a wrinkled droopy bag of skin, long and gaunt, growing from the creature’s crotch. But as Kenny stared at it in horror, it thrashed feebly, and stirred, and the loose folds of flesh separated briefly into tiny arms and legs.

  Then it opened its eyes.

  Kenny Dorchester screamed and suddenly he was back on his feet, lurching away from the grinning obscenity in the center of the room. Between its legs, the thing that had been Boney Moroney raised its pitiful stick-thin arms in supplication. “Oh, nooooo,” Kenny moaned, blubbering, and he danced about wildly, the vast weight of his monkey heavy on his back. Round and round he danced in the dimness, in the moonlight, searching for an escape from this madness.

  Beyond the plate glass wall the lights of the city beckoned.

  Kenny paused and panted and stared at them. Somehow the monkey must have known what he was thinking, for suddenly it began to beat on him wildly, to twist his ears, to rain savage blows all around his head. But Kenny Dorchester paid no mind. With a smile that was almost beatific, he gathered the last of his strength and rushed pell-mell toward the moonlight.

  The glass shattered into a million glittering shards, and Kenny smiled all the way down.

  IT WAS THE SMELL THAT TOLD HIM HE WAS STILL ALIVE, THE SMELL OF disinfectant, and the feel of starched sheets beneath him. A hospital, he thought amidst a haze of pain. He was in a hospital. Kenny wanted to cry. Why hadn’t he died? Oh, why, oh, why? He opened his eyes and tried to say something.

  Suddenly a nurse was there, standing over him, feeling his brow and looking down with concern. Kenny wanted to beg her to kill him, but the words would not come. She went away and when she came back she had others with her.

  A chubby young man said, “You’ll be all right, Mr. Dorchester, but you have a long way to go. You’re in a hospital. You’re a very lucky man. You fell eight stories. You ought to be dead.”

  I want to be dead, Kenny thought, and he shaped the words very, very carefully with his mouth, but no one seemed to hear them. Maybe the monkey has taken over, he thought. Maybe I can’t even talk anymore.

  “He wants to say something,” the nurse said.

  “I can see that,” said the chubby young doctor. “Mr. Dorchester, please don’t strain yourself. Really. If you are trying to ask about your friend, I’m afraid he wasn’t as lucky as you. He was killed by the fall. You would have died as well, but fortunately you landed on top of him.”

  Kenny’s fear and confusion must have been obvious, for the nurse put a gentle hand on his arm. “The other man,” she said patiently. “The fat one. You can thank God he was so fat, too. He broke your fall like a giant pillow.”

  And finally Kenny Dorchester understood what they were saying, and began to weep, but now he was weeping for joy, and trembling.

  Three days later, he managed his first word. “Pizza,” he said, and it came weak and hoarse from between his lips, and then louder still, and before long he was pushing the nurse’s call button and shouting and pushing and shouting. “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza,” he chanted, and he would not be calm until they ordered one for him. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

  THE PEAR-SHAPED MAN

  THE PEAR-SHAPED MAN LIVES BENEATH THE STAIRS. HIS SHOULDERS are narrow and stooped, but his buttocks are impressively large. Or perhaps it is only the clothing he wears; no one has ever admitted to seeing him nude, and no one has ever admitted to wanting to. His trousers are brown polyester double knits, with wide cuffs and a shiny seat; they are always baggy, and they have big, deep, droopy pockets so stuffed with oddments and bric-a-brac that they bulge against his sides. He wears his pants very high, hiked up above the swell of his stomach, and cinches them in place around his chest with a narrow brown leather belt. He wears them so high that his drooping socks show clearly, and often an inch or two of pasty white skin as well.

  His shirts are always short-sleeved, most often white or pale blue, and his breast pocket is always full of Bic pens, the cheap throwaway kind that write with blue ink. He has lost the caps or tossed them out, because his shirts are all stained and splotched around the breast pockets. His head is a second pear set atop the first; he has a double chin and wide, full, fleshy cheeks, and the top of his head seems to come almost to a point. His nose is broad and flat, with large, greasy pores; his eyes are small and pale, set close together. His hair is thin, dark, limp, flaky with dandruff; it never looks washed, and there are those who say that he cuts it himself with a bowl and a dull knife. He has a smell, too, the Pear-shaped Man; it is a sweet smell, a sour smell, a rich smell, compounded of old butter and rancid meat and vegetables rotting in the garbage bin. His voice, when he speaks, is high and thin and squeaky; it would be a funny little voice, coming from such a large, ugly man, but there is something unnerving about it, and something even more chilling about his tight, small smile. He never shows any teeth when he smiles, but his lips are broad and wet.

  Of course you know him. Everyone knows a Pear-shaped Man.

  JESSIE MET HERS ON HER FIRST DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, WHILE SHE and Angela were moving into the vacant apartment on the first floor. Angela and her boyfriend, Donald the student shrink, had lugged the couch inside and accidentally knocked away the brick that had been holding open the door to the building. Meanwhile Jessie had gotten the recliner out of the U-Haul all by herself and thumped it up the steps, only to find the door locked when she backed into it, the recliner in her arms. She was hot and sore and irritable and ready to scream with frustration.

  And then the Pear-shaped Man emerged from his basement apartment under the steps, climbed onto the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop, and looked up at her with those small, pale, watery eyes of his. He made no move to help her with her chair. He did not say hello or offer to let her into the building. He only blinked and smiled a tight, wet smile that showed none of his teeth, and said in a voice as squeaky and grating as nails on a blackboard, “Ahhhh. There she is.” Then he turned and walked away. When he walked he swayed slightly from side to side.

  Jessie let go of the recliner; it bumped down two steps and turned over. She suddenly felt cold, despite the sweltering July heat. She watched the Pear-shaped Man depart. That was her first sight of him. She went inside and told Donald and Angela about him, but they were not much impressed. “Into every girl’s life a Pear-shaped Man must fall,” Angela said, with the cynicism of the veteran city girl. “I bet I met him on a blind date once.”

  Donald, who didn’t live with them but spent so many nights with Angela that sometimes it seemed as though he did, had a more immediate concern. “Where do you want this recliner?” he wanted to know.

  Later they had a few beers, and Rick and Molly and the Heathersons came over to help them warm the apartment, and Rick offered to pose for her (wink wink
, nudge nudge) when Molly wasn’t there to hear, and Donald drank too much and went to sleep on the sofa, and the Heathersons had a fight that ended with Geoff storming out and Lureen crying; it was a night like any other night, in other words, and Jessie forgot all about the Pear-shaped Man. But not for long.

  The next morning Angela roused Donald, and the two of them went off, Angie to the big downtown firm where she was a legal secretary, Don to study shrinking. Jessie was a freelance commercial illustrator. She did her work at home, which as far as Angela and Donald and her mother and the rest of Western civilization were concerned meant that she didn’t work at all. “Would you mind doing the shopping?” Angie asked her just before she left. They had pretty well devastated their refrigerator in the two weeks before the move, so as not to have a lot of food to lug across town. “Seeing as how you’ll be home all day? I mean, we really need some food.”

  So Jessie was pushing a full cart of groceries down a crowded aisle in Santino’s Market, on the corner, when she saw the Pear-shaped Man the second time. He was at the register, counting out change into Santino’s hand. Jessie felt like making a U-turn and busying herself until he’d gone. But that would be silly. She’d gotten everything she needed, and she was a grown woman, after all, and he was standing at the only open register. Resolute, she got in line behind him.

  Santino dumped the Pear-shaped Man’s coins into the old register and bagged up his purchase: a big plastic bottle of Coke and a one-pound bag of Cheez Doodles. As he took the bag, the Pear-shaped Man saw her and smiled that little wet smile of his. “Cheez Doodles are the best,” he said. “Would you like some?”

  “No, thank you,” Jessie said politely. The Pear-shaped Man put the brown paper sack inside a shapeless leather bag of the sort that schoolboys use to carry their books, gathered it up, and waddled out of the store. Santino, a big grizzled man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, began to ring up Jessie’s groceries. “He’s something, ain’t he?” he asked her.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  Santino shrugged. “Hell, I dunno. Everybody just calls him the Pear-shaped Man. He’s been around here forever. Comes in every morning, buys a bottle of Coke and a big bag of Cheez Doodles. Once we run out of Cheez Doodles, so I tell him he oughta try them Cheetos or maybe even potato chips, y’know, for a change? He wasn’t having none of it, though.”

  Jessie was bemused. “He must buy something besides Coke and Cheez Doodles.”

  “Wanna bet, lady?”

  “Then he must shop somewhere else.”

  “Besides me, the nearest supermarket is nine blocks away. Charlie down at the candy store tells me the Pear-shaped Man comes in every afternoon at four-thirty and has himself a chocolate ice-cream soda, but far as we can tell, that’s all he eats.” He rang for a total. “That’s seventy-nine eighty-two, lady. You new around here?”

  “I live just above the Pear-shaped Man,” Jessie confessed.

  “Congratulations,” Santino said.

  Later that morning, after she lined the shelves and put away the groceries, set up her studio in the spare bedroom, made a few desultory dabs on the cover she was supposed to be painting for Pirouette Publishing, ate lunch and washed the dishes, hooked up the stereo and listened to some Carly Simon, and rearranged half of the living room furniture, Jessie finally admitted a certain restlessness and decided this would be a good time to go around the building and introduce herself to her new neighbors. Not many people bothered with that in the city, she knew, but she was still a small-town kid at heart, and it made her feel safer to know the people around her. She decided to start with the Pear-shaped Man down in the basement and got as far as descending the stairs to his door. Then a funny feeling came over her. There was no name on the doorbell, she noticed. Suddenly she regretted her impulse. She retreated back upstairs to meet the rest of the building.

  The other tenants all knew him; most of them had spoken to him, at least once or twice, trying to be friendly. Old Sadie Winbright, who had lived across the hall in the other first-floor apartment for twelve years, said he was very quiet. Billy Peabody, who shared the big second-floor apartment with his crippled mother, thought the Pear-shaped Man was creepy, especially that little smile of his. Pete Pumetti worked the late shift, and told her how those basement lights were always on, no matter what hour of the night Pete came swaggering home, even though it was hard to tell on account of the way the Pear-shaped Man had boarded up his windows. Jess and Ginny Harris didn’t like their twins playing around the stairs that led down to his apartment and had forbidden them to talk to him. Jeffries the barber, whose small two-chair shop was down the block from Santino’s, knew him and had no great desire for his patronage. All of them, every one, called him the Pear-shaped Man. That was who he was. “But who is he?” Jessie asked. None of them knew. “What does he do for a living?” she asked.

  “I think he’s on welfare,” Old Sadie Winbright said. “The poor dear, he must be feebleminded.”

  “Damned if I know,” said Pete Pumetti. “He sure as hell don’t work. I bet he’s a queer.”

  “Sometimes I think he might be a drug pusher,” said Jeffries the barber, whose familiarity with drugs was limited to witch hazel.

  “I betcha he writes them pornographic books down there,” Billy Peabody surmised.

  “He doesn’t do anything for a living,” said Ginny Harris. “Jess and I have talked about it. He’s a shopping-bag man, he has to be.”

  That night, over dinner, Jessie told Angela about the Pear-shaped Man and the other tenants and their comments. “He’s probably an attorney,” Angie said. “Why do you care so much, anyway?”

  Jessie couldn’t answer that. “I don’t know. He gives me goose bumps. I don’t like the idea of some maniac living right underneath us.”

  Angela shrugged. “That’s the way it goes in the big, glamorous city. Did the guy from the phone company come?”

  “Maybe next week,” said Jessie. “That’s the way it goes in the big, glamorous city.”

  JESSIE SOON LEARNED THAT THERE WAS NO AVOIDING THE PEAR-SHAPED Man. When she visited the laundromat around the block, there he was, washing a big load of striped boxer shorts and ink-stained short-sleeved shirts, snacking on Coke and Cheez Doodles from the vending machines. She tried to ignore him, but whenever she turned around, there he was, smiling wetly, his eyes fixed on her, or perhaps on the underthings she was loading into the dryer.

  When she went down to the corner candy store one afternoon to buy a paper, there he was, slurping his ice-cream soda, his buttocks overflowing the stool on which he was perched. “It’s homemade,” he squeaked at her. She frowned, paid for her newspaper, and left.

  One evening when Angela was seeing Donald, Jessie picked up an old paperback and went out on the stoop to read and maybe socialize and enjoy the cool breeze that was blowing up the street. She got lost in the story, until she caught a whiff of something unpleasant, and when she looked up from the page, there he was, standing not three feet away, staring at her. “What do you want?” she snapped, closing the book.

  “Would you like to come down and see my house?” the Pear-shaped Man asked in that high, whiny voice.

  “No,” she said, retreating to her own apartment. But when she looked out a half hour later, he was still standing in the same exact spot, clutching his brown bag and staring at her windows while dusk fell around him. He made her feel very uneasy. She wished that Angela would come home, but she knew that wouldn’t happen for hours. In fact, Angie might very well decide to spend the night at Don’s place.

  Jessie shut the windows despite the heat, checked the locks on her door, and then went back to her studio to work. Painting would take her mind off the Pear-shaped Man. Besides, the cover was due at Pirouette by the end of the week.

  She spent the rest of the evening finishing off the background and doing some of the fine detail on the heroine’s gown. The hero didn’t look quite right to her when she was done, so she worked on him, too. He was
the usual dark-haired, virile, strong-jawed type, but Jessie decided to individualize him a bit, an effort that kept her pleasantly occupied until she heard Angie’s key in the lock.

  She put away her paints and washed up and decided to have some tea before calling it a night. Angela was standing in the living room, with her hands behind her back, looking more than a little tipsy, giggling. “What’s so funny?” Jessie asked.

  Angela giggled again. “You’ve been holding out on me,” she said. “You got yourself a new beau and you didn’t tell.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He was standing on the stoop when I got home,” Angie said, grinning. She came across the room. “He said to give you these.” Her hand emerged from behind her back. It was full of fat, orange worms, little flaking twists of corn and cheese that curled between her fingers and left powdery stains on the palm of her hand. “For you,” Angie repeated, laughing. “For you.”

  THAT NIGHT JESSIE HAD A LONG, TERRIBLE DREAM, BUT WHEN THE daylight came she could remember only a small part of it. She was standing at the door to the Pear-shaped Man’s apartment under the stairs; she was standing there in darkness, waiting, waiting for something to happen, something awful, the worst thing she could imagine. Slowly, slowly, the door began to open. Light fell upon her face, and Jessie woke, trembling.

  HE MIGHT BE DANGEROUS, JESSIE DECIDED THE NEXT MORNING OVER Rice Krispies and tea. Maybe he had a criminal record. Maybe he was some kind of mental patient. She ought to check up on him. But she needed to know his name first. She couldn’t just call up the police and say, “Do you have anything on the Pear-shaped Man?”