Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  And teeth, wrote my friend.

  Many, many teeth.

  Introduction to

  “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites”

  My family moved frequently when I was a child. One of the problems of moving—at any age—is the tedious chore of finding a new doctor, dentist, favorite grocery store … and barber.

  When I was about eight we moved to the small Illinois town of Brimfield, population less than a thousand, and although the town barely had one of everything—one store, one doctor, one school—it had two barbers. I remember my mother taking my younger brother Wayne and me downtown and entering the first barbershop we saw.

  The wrong one.

  I remember the desiccated cactus and the dead flies on the window ledge. I remember the musty, chewing-tobacco-and-old-sweat smell of the dark interior and the mirrors that seemed to absorb the light. I remember the old men in bib overalls who scurried away like cockroaches as we entered; I remember how startled the elderly barber was at out intrusion.

  I had my hair cut that day, Wayne didn’t. It was a terrible haircut. I wore my Cub Scout hat, indoors and out, for three weeks. Mom soon learned that the real barbershop was a block down the street. No one went to the shop we had blundered into. Even the old farmers who hung out there were bald or had never been seen in a barber chair.

  The only interesting part to this anecdote is the epilogue: that same barbershop—or one just like it—has been in every town I’ve lived in since.

  In Chicago, it was tucked away on an unnamed sidestreet just off Kildare Avenue.

  In Indianapolis, it was a short block from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

  In Philadelphia, it was on Germantown Avenue just across the street from a three-hundred-year-old haunted house named Grumblethorpe.

  In Calcutta—where most people get their haircuts and shaves from sidewalk barbers who squat on the curb while the customer squats in the gutter—the old shop was just off Chowringhee Road, tucked under a hundred-trunked banyan tree which is said to be as old as the earth.

  Out here where I live in Colorado, it is on Main Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues.

  Of course it’s not the same shop, it’s just … well, the same.

  Look around. You’ll find it in your community. You don’t get your hair cut there, and no one you know has ever had a haircut there … and the prices are from a previous decade if not century … but ask around. The locals will shake their heads as if trying to remember a dream, and then they’ll say—“Oh, yeah, that place has always been here. That barber’s always been here. Don’t know nobody who goes to ’im anymore, though. Wonder how he gets by.”

  Go on. Work up the courage to go in. Ignore the mummified cactus and dead flies in the window. Don’t be distracted by the old men who scurry out the back door when you come in the front.

  Go ahead. Get your hair cut there.

  I dare you.

  Shave and a Haircut,

  Two Bites

  Outside, the blood spirals down.

  I pause at the entrance to the barbershop. There is nothing unique about it. Almost certainly there is one similar to it in your community; its function is proclaimed by the pole outside, the red spiralling down, and by the name painted on the broad window, the letters grown scabrous as the gold paint ages and flakes away. While the most expensive hair salons now bear the names of their owners, and the shopping mall franchises offer sickening cutenesses—Hairport, Hair Today: Gone Tomorrow, Hair We Are, Headlines, Shear Masters, The Head Hunter, In-Hair-itance, and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseum—the name of this shop is eminently forgettable. It is meant to be so. This shop offers neither styling nor unisex cuts. If your hair is dirty when you enter, it will be cut dirty; there are no shampoos given here. While the franchises demand $15 to $30 for a basic haircut, the cost here has not changed for a decade or more. It occurs to the potential new customer immediately upon entering that no one could live on an income based upon such low rates. No one does. The potential customer usually beats a hasty retreat, put off by the too-low prices, by the darkness of the place, by the air of dusty decrepitude exuded from both the establishment itself and from its few waiting customers, invariably silent and staring, and by a strange sense of tension bordering upon threat which hangs in the stale air.

  Before entering, I pause a final moment to stare in the window of the barbershop. For a second I can see only a reflection of the street and the silhouette of a man more shadow than substance—me. To see inside, one has to step closer to the glass and perhaps cup hands to one’s temples to reduce the glare. The blinds are drawn but I find a crack in the slats. Even then there is not much to see. A dusty window ledge holds three desiccated cacti and an assortment of dead flies. Two barber chairs are just visible through the gloom; they are of a sort no longer made: black leather, white enamel, a high headrest. Along one wall, half a dozen uncomfortable-looking chairs sit empty and two low tables show a litter of magazines with covers torn or missing entirely. There are mirrors on two of the three interior walls, but rather than add light to the long, narrow room, the infinitely receding reflections seem to make the space appear as if the barbershop itself were a dark reflection in an age-dimmed glass.

  A man is standing there in the gloom, his form hardly more substantial than my silhouette on the window. He stands next to the first barber chair as if he were waiting for me.

  He is waiting for me.

  I leave the sunlight of the street and enter the shop.

  “Vampires,” said Kevin. “They’re both vampires.”

  “Who’re vampires?” I asked between bites on my apple. Kevin and I were twenty feet up in a tree in his back yard. We’d built a rough platform there which passed as a treehouse. Kevin was ten, I was nine.

  “Mr. Innis and Mr. Denofrio,” said Kevin. “They’re both vampires.”

  I lowered the Superman comic I’d been reading. “They’re not vampires,” I said. “They’re barbers.”

  “Yeah,” said Kevin, “but they’re vampires too. I just figured it out.”

  I sighed and sat back against the bole of the tree. It was late autumn and the branches were almost empty of leaves. Another week or two and we wouldn’t be using the treehouse again until next spring. Usually when Kevin announced that he’d just figured something out, it meant trouble. Kevin O’toole was almost my age, but sometimes it seemed that he was five years older and five years younger than me at the same time. He read a lot. And he had a weird imagination. “Tell me,” I said.

  “You know what the red means, Tommy?”

  “What red?”

  “On the barber pole. The red stripes that curl down.”

  I shrugged. “It means it’s a barbershop.”

  It was Kevin’s turn to sigh. “Yeah, sure, Tommy, but why red? And why have it curling down like that for a barber?”

  I didn’t say anything. When Kevin was in one of his moods, it was better to wait him out.

  “Because it’s blood,” he said dramatically, almost whispering. “Blood spiralling down. Blood dripping and spilling. That’s been the sign for barbers for almost six hundred years.”

  He’d caught my interest. I set the Superman comic aside on the platform. “OK,” I said, “I believe you. Why is it their sign?”

  “Because it was their guild sign,” said Kevin. “Back in the Middle Ages, all the guys who did important work belonged to guilds, sort of like the union our dads belong to down at the brewery, and …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But why blood?” Guys as smart as Kevin had a hard time sticking to the point.

  “I was getting to that,” said Kevin. “According to this stuff I read, way back in the Middle Ages barbers used to be surgeons. About all they could do to help sick people was to bleed them, and …”

  “Bleed them?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t have any real medicines or anything, so if somebody got sick with a disease or broke a leg or something, all the surgeon … the barber
… could do was bleed them. Sometimes they’d use the same razor they shaved people with. Sometimes they’d bring bottles of leeches and let them suck some blood out of the sick person.”

  “Gross.”

  “Yeah, but it sort of worked. Sometimes. I guess when you lose blood, your blood pressure goes down and that can lower a fever and stuff. But most of the time, the people they bled just died sooner. They probably needed a transfusion more than a bunch of leeches stuck on them.”

  I sat and thought about this for a moment. Kevin knew some really weird stuff. I used to think he was lying about a lot of it, but after I saw him correct the teachers in fourth and fifth grade a few times … and get away with it … I realized he wasn’t making things up. Kevin was weird, but he wasn’t a liar.

  A breeze rustled the few remaining leaves. It was a sad and brittle sound to a kid who loved summer. “All right,” I said. “But what’s all of this got to do with vampires? You think ’cause barbers used to stick leeches on people a couple of hundred years ago that Mr. Innis and Mr. Denofrio are vampires? Jeez, Kev, that’s nuts.”

  “The Middle Ages were more than five hundred years ago, Niles,” said Kevin, calling me by my last name in the voice that always made me want to punch him. “But the guild sign was just what got me thinking about it all. I mean, what other business has kept its guild sign?”

  I shrugged and tied a broken shoelace. “Blood on their sign doesn’t make them vampires.”

  When Kevin was excited, his green eyes seemed to get even greener than usual. They were really green now. He leaned forward. “Just think about it, Tommy,” he said. “When did vampires start to disappear?”

  “Disappear? You mean you think they were real? Cripes, Kev, my mom says you’re the only gifted kid she’s ever met, but sometimes I think you’re just plain looney tunes.”

  Kevin ignored me. He had a long, thin face—made even thinner looking by the crewcut he wore—and his skin was so pale that the freckles stood out like spots of gold. He had the same full lips that people said made his two sisters look pretty, but now those lips were quivering. “I read a lot about vampires,” he said. “A lot. Most of the serious stuff agrees that the vampire legends were fading in Europe by the Seventeenth Century. People still believed in them, but they weren’t so afraid of them anymore. A few hundred years earlier, suspected vampires were being tracked down and killed all the time. It’s like they’d gone underground or something.”

  “Or people got smarter,” I said.

  “No, think,” said Kevin and grabbed my arm. “Maybe the vampires were being wiped out. People knew they were there and how to fight them.”

  “Like a stake through the heart?”

  “Maybe. Anyway, they’ve got to hide, pretend they’re gone, and still get blood. What’d be the easiest way to do it?”

  I thought of a wise-acre comment, but one look at Kevin made me realize that he was dead serious about all this. And we were best friends. I shook my head.

  “Join the barbers guild!” Kevin’s voice was triumphant. “Instead of having to break into people’s houses at night and then risk others finding the body all drained of blood, they invite you in. They don’t even struggle while you open their veins with a knife or put the leeches on. Then they … or the family of the dead guy … pay you. No wonder they’re the only group to keep their guild sign. They’re vampires, Tommy!”

  I licked my lips, tasted blood, and realized that I’d been chewing on my lower lip while Kevin talked. “All of them?” I said. “Every barber?”

  Kevin frowned and released my arm. “I’m not sure. Maybe not all.”

  “But you think Innis and Denofrio are?”

  Kevin’s eyes got greener again and he grinned. “There’s one way to find out.”

  I closed my eyes a second before asking the fatal question. “How, Kev?”

  “By watching them,” said Kevin. “Following them. Checking them out. Seeing if they’re vampires.”

  “And if they are?”

  Kevin shrugged. He was still grinning. “We’ll think of something.”

  I enter the familiar shop, my eyes adjusting quickly to the dim light. The air smells of talcum and rose oil and tonic. The floor is clean and instruments are laid out on white linen atop the counter. Light glints dully from the surface of scissors and shears and the pearl handles of more than one straight razor.

  I approach the man who stands silently by his chair. He wears a white shirt and tie under a white smock. “Good morning,” I say.

  “Good morning, Mr. Niles.” He pulls a striped cloth from its shelf, snaps it open with a practiced hand, and stands waiting like a toreador.

  I take my place in the chair. He sweeps the cloth around me and snaps it shut behind my neck in a single, fluid motion. “A trim this morning, perhaps?”

  “I think not. Just a shave, please.”

  He nods and turns away to heat the towels and prepare the razor. Waiting, I look into the mirrored depths and see multitudes.

  Kevin and I had made our pact while sitting in our tree on Sunday. By Thursday we’d done quite a bit of snooping. Kev had followed Innis and I’d watched Denofrio.

  We met in Kevin’s room after school. You could hardly see his bed for all the heaps of books and comics and half-built Heath Kits and vacuum tubes and plastic models and scattered clothes. Kevin’s mother was still alive then, but she had been ill for years and rarely paid attention to little things like her son’s bedroom. Or her son.

  Kevin shoved aside some junk and we sat on his bed, comparing notes. Mine were scrawled on scraps of paper and the back of my paper route collection form.

  “OK,” said Kevin, “what’d you find out?”

  “They’re not vampires,” I said. “At least my guy isn’t.”

  Kevin frowned. “It’s too early to tell, Tommy.”

  “Nuts. You gave me this list of ways to tell a vampire, and Denofrio flunks all of them.”

  “Explain.”

  “OK. Look at Number One on your stupid list. ‘Vampires are rarely seen in daylight.’ Heck, Denofrio and Innis are both in the shop all day. We both checked, right?”

  Kevin sat on his knees and rubbed his chin. “Yeah, but the barbershop is dark, Tommy. I told you that it’s only in the movies that the vampires burst into flame or something if the daylight hits them. According to the old books, they just don’t like it. They can get around in the daylight if they have to.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but these guys work all day just like our dads. They close up at five and walk home before it gets dark.”

  Kevin pawed through his own notes and interrupted. “They both live alone, Tommy. That suggests something.”

  “Yeah. It suggests that neither one of them makes enough money to get married or have a family. My dad says that their barbershop hasn’t raised its prices in years.”

  “Exactly!” cried Kevin. “Then how come almost no one goes there?”

  “They give lousy haircuts,” I said. I looked back at my list, trying to decipher the smeared lines of pencilled scrawl. “OK, Number Five on your list. ‘Vampires will not cross running water.’ ” Denofrio lives across the river, Kev. I watched him cross it all three days I was following him.”

  Kevin was sitting up on his knees. Now he slumped slightly. “I told you that I wasn’t sure of that one. Stoker put it in Dracula, but I didn’t find it too many other places.”

  I went on quickly. “Number Three—‘Vampires hate garlic.’ I watched Mr. Denofrio eat dinner at Luigi’s Tuesday night, Kev. I could smell the garlic from twenty feet away when he came out.”

  “Three wasn’t an essential one.”

  “All right,” I said, moving in for the kill, “tell me this one wasn’t essential. Number Eight—‘All vampires hate and fear crosses and will avoid them at all cost.’ ” I paused dramatically. Kevin knew what was coming and slumped lower. “Kev, Mr. Denofrio goes to St. Mary’s. Your church, Kev. Every morning before he goes down to open
up the shop.”

  “Yeah. Innis goes to First Prez on Sundays. My dad told me about Denofrio being in the parish. I never see him because he only goes to early Mass.”

  I tossed the notes on the bed. “How could a vampire go to your church? He not only doesn’t run away from a cross, he sits there and stares at about a hundred of them each day of the week for about an hour a day.”

  “Dad says he’s never seem him take Communion,” said Kevin, a hopeful note in his voice.

  I made a face. “Great. Next you’ll be telling me that anyone who’s not a priest has to be a vampire. Brilliant, Kev.”

  He sat up and crumpled his own notes into a ball. I’d already seen them at school. I knew that Innis didn’t follow Kevin’s Vampire Rules either. Kevin said, “The cross thing doesn’t prove … or disprove … anything, Tommy. I’ve been thinking about it. These things joined the barber’s guild to get some protective coloration. It makes sense that they’d try to blend into the religious community too. Maybe they can train themselves to build up a tolerance to crosses, the way we take shots to build up a tolerance to things like smallpox and polio.”

  I didn’t sneer, but I was tempted. “Do they build up a tolerance to mirrors, too?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I know something about vampires too, Kev, and even though it wasn’t in your stupid list of rules, it’s a fact that vampires don’t like mirrors. They don’t throw a reflection.”

  “That’s not right,” said Kevin in that rushy, teacherish voice he used. “In the movies they don’t throw a reflection. The old books say that they avoided mirrors because they saw their true reflection there … what they looked like being old or undead or whatever.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. “But whatever spooks them, there isn’t any place worse for mirrors than a barbershop. Unless they hang out in one of those carnival funhouse mirror places. Do they have guild signs, too, Kev?”

  Kevin threw himself backward on the bed as if I’d shot him. A second later he was pawing through his notes and back up on his knees. “There was one weird thing,” he said.