As they came closer, the silhouettes came clear in the diffused glow from above me. Their shapes were familiar. Darkness hid their faces, but I saw them open their arms.
The singing had no words, now, but only a peaceful melody. I rose to meet them. Overhead, the strange light was gradually going out.
Yes, they could hear me; yes, they could see me. As though when slanted eyes like white women, slanted eyes die—only they don’t, really. Death Angels came singing me a song, and I was home.
CRYSTAL by Charles L. Grant
According to the introduction to “Crystal” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where Charles L. Grant’s first story appeared in 1968, this is Grant’s 100th short story sale. Not bad for a former New Jersey high school English teacher—and, considering the high quality of those 100 stories, a record any writer must envy. Not good enough for Grant, who is also a novelist and anthologist of note. To date he has written or edited over forty books, in addition to another twenty or so under various pseudonyms. Recent novels include The Pet and For Fear of the Dark; recent anthologies include After Midnight, Greystone Bay #3, and Shadows 10.
Born in Newark, New Jersey on September 12, 1942, Charles L. Grant shares with Ramsey Campbell a fascination with contemporary urban horrors (What is it about being born in depressing industrial cities?), although Grant’s chosen milieu leans toward the middle-class, suburban bedroom-community of the American Northeast. But forget about that, since “Crystal” is set in the Bloomsbury area of London, as anyone who has ever strolled past Russell Square toward the British Museum will quickly recognize. Grant, like some other American authors, enjoys stopping in this part of London. So far he’s always made it back to New Jersey.
The shop wasn’t a very smart one as shops in the district went, but Brian had weeks ago learned that it catered mostly to tourists and the occasional country family in town for a holiday, and so needed only a bit of flash, a few items with the royal family on them, and a dozen different street maps from which to choose the best way of getting lost.
Now, Brian, he thought then in a silent scold, that’s not the way to think, is it? This is London, boy, and you’re practically a native. You’re not going to get lost, you’re not going to be shortchanged, you’re not going to be taken for a foreigner at all. Until, that is, you open your fat Yank mouth.
His reflection in the shop window smiled wryly at him, and he nodded to it just as a young man and his girl wandered by, saw him, and gave him a puzzled look, the boy lifting an eyebrow and the girl shoving a laugh into her palm. Startled, he watched them until, if he wanted to watch them further, he’d have to look directly at their backs; so he stuffed his hands into his pockets and returned to his contemplation of the display.
Seeing nothing.
Hearing nothing of the homewardbound traffic grumbling past him on High Holborn.
Until a face in the window caught his attention. A young woman, striking in a dark-haired, pallid sort of way, and he smiled again, hopes rising, until he realized with a derisive snort it was a picture he was looking at. And not a very good one, at that. Oval, in fading color, framed in cheap silver.
He leaned closer.
No. Not cheap at all. In fact, the frame only appeared to be simple, but there around the edges were etchings of long-stemmed roses, so delicately done the sunlight blotted them out until he moved his shadow over their stems. He cocked his head and leaned closer still; he felt his left hand bunching around the roll of money he kept in his trousers; and when a horn blared behind him, he jumped and moved instantly and casually into the store.
The shopkeeper was a rotund man and thickly mustached. He remained behind the rear counter when Brian asked about the picture, saying that if he were interested, he was more than welcome to take it out of the window and bring it into the light. Brian shrugged. He didn’t want to appear too stupid, nor too interested. Nevertheless, he made his way slowly back along the narrow aisle, angling sideways between a group of women chattering in Texas-Southern accents about how darling everything was and wouldn’t Cousin Annie just love a picture of that adorable Prince Andrew. Carefully, he reached around a newspaper display and picked up the frame.
It was heavy, much heavier than it had a right to be.
He turned it around and looked at the portrait.
Narrow face; narrow chin; wide, dark eyes that matched the dark hair curling under her jaw. The hint of a lace-trimmed velvet bodice. Bare shoulders. Nothing more.
Attractive, he decided, but with an odd distance in her gaze.
He hefted it. Tilted it to the light when he felt the shopkeeper watching. Frowned as if in concentration and debate, shrugged as if in reluctant decision, and carried it back, waiting patiently as the women fussed with the unfamiliar coinage, finally giving up and handing the man some bills, their faces sharp in daring him not to give them their due.
Brian grinned, and the man grinned back over a blue-tinted head. One of the ladies turned around and glared, obviously taking him for a local and extending the dare to him.
But he only nodded politely and handed over the picture as soon as the women moved on, chattering again, exclaiming, and wondering aloud why the English, with all their experience, didn’t have money like the Americans, it would make things so much easier all around, don’t you think?
“You must get tired of it, Mr. Isling,” Brian said sympathetically as he pulled out his roll and coins and gave him the correct amount.
“Not so much anymore, Mr. Victor,” was the smiling answer. “At least I don’t have to put my feet up in a hotel, do I, when the day is over.”
“Oh, they’re not that bad.” But his expression put the lie to it, and the man laughed, put the purchase in a paper bag, and thanked him for the sale.
Halfway up the aisle, Brian turned. “Do you know who she is?” he asked.
“Who?”
He held up the bag.
“No. Not really, that is. There’s a name on the back. Crystal. I reckon that’s either her or the artist.”
“Do you get many of them?”
Isling hesitated, then shook his head. “Only one of that lot, far as I know. We get them now and then, the odd piece. Sometimes they last until I junk them; sometimes they go as soon as I put them out.”
“And this one?”
“Put it out this morning.”
“It must have known I was coming.”
The shopkeeper’s laughter followed him to the street, where he turned left, elbows in to protect his ribs from his dubious prize, trying to decide if he should go back to his room now, or find someplace to eat and examine his folly there. Wherever it was, it would have to be someplace quiet, someplace that would allow him peace, to figure out why the hell he’d spent so much on a whim.
He slid the frame just far enough out of the bag to take a puzzled look, heard someone scream a warning, and looked up in time to see a black, square-framed taxi jump the curb and head straight for him. He shouted and leapt to one side, lost his balance and fell over the curbing into the street. The taxi plowed on, scattering pedestrians and postcard displays until it slammed through the window of the shop he’d just left. There was a man’s yell, a faint whump, a whiff of gas, and suddenly the pavement was alive with smoke and fire.
Brian immediately crossed his arms protectively over his head, half expecting that any moment some fiery shard of metal would soon crash down on him, that glass lances would shred him. And he stayed on his side until he heard someone asking him if he was all right. Cautiously, he lowered his arms. Sirens were already blaring, and through the thick smoke he could see figures rushing about the shop with fire extinguishers hissing.
“Do you need help?”
He didn’t object when hands cupped under his arms and pulled gently, until he gathered his feet beneath him and stood. He swayed a bit, and coughed. Someone brushed grime from his denim jacket, a piece of something from his hair, then led him away from the scene, talking all the whil
e about the danger of living in the city these days, and if it wasn’t the damned IRA or the damned Arabs, it was the damned taxis going wrong and he’d be damned if he didn’t think the damned Apocalypse was coming.
Brian’s eyes stopped their watering, but his right leg still hurt where he’d cracked it on the street, and his right shoulder felt as if it had been yanked from its socket. He groaned and gripped his arm, tensing with the anticipation of feeling the flow of blood.
“You need a doctor?”
After a moment he shook his head, closed his eyes tightly, and willed the pain to go away, come back later when he wasn’t shaking so much. When he opened them again, his benefactor was gone and the police were already cordoning off the area. He walked off, still a bit wobbly but able to convince those who saw him that he wasn’t drunk or crazy.
And it wasn’t until he’d cut through Russell Square several minutes later and was heading toward his place near the university that he realized the bag was still clamped under his sore arm. A sign, he decided, and leaned against the nearest lamppost, took the picture out, and smiled at the woman.
“Crystal,” he said, “why do I get the feeling you’ve just saved my life?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, boy. It was a mistake.”
Brian nearly dropped the package at the voice, then whirled and scowled. “Melody,” he said, “you could have taken ten years off me, sneaking up like that.”
Melody Tyce only laughed, parts and sections of her rippling in accompaniment as she tried to get a closer look at what he was holding in his hand. “You talking to pictures now, Brian?”
Quickly, he tucked Crystal back into her bag and tucked it back under his arm. “None of your business.”
She laughed again and pushed coquettishly at the mass of blond hair that ill-framed her pudgy face. She was much too large for so much atop her head, and, he thought, for the snug clothes she wore. It made her seem as if she were trying too hard, which he knew wasn’t the case where he was concerned. She was a good-natured woman who had taken him under her wing, sending him to the restaurants where meals were good and just as good with their prices, to the shops where his clothes wouldn’t look as if they’d fallen off the rack, and to the clubs where he might, were he more aggressive, even meet a young lady.
“Oh, come on,” she persisted. “What do you have? Not one of those things, is it?”
“No,” he said with a grin. “Something I picked up in a shop, that’s all.”
“Ah. A souvenir.”
“Yes. Sort of.”
She nodded. “Better. You’re forgiven, then, for talking to yourself.”
“I wasn’t talking—” He made to ease her away, to give him some room, and the package slipped to the pavement. Instantly she pounced on it, and since the picture had slipped out of its covering, she was able to take a good look as she handed it back.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
“What?” He moved to her side and peered at the woman’s face over her shoulder. “You know her?”
“I should.” Her thumb ran along the frame, tracing the roses, while she sighed. “Where’d you get it, Brian?”
He told her.
She sighed again.
“Hey, what?” he said as she pushed it back into his hands and walked off. “C’mon, Mel, what gives?”
Midway down the block she stopped, shaking her head and looking up at the clean white facade of what had once been a Georgian townhouse, was now only one of several bed-and-breakfast hotels that lined the narrow street.
“Mel, what do you mean, you should know her?” Then he followed her gaze into the top-floor window, over the narrow entrance. “No,” he said. “No, you’re kidding.”
“Clear as day, it’s her.”
They took the steps together, and he held the door, frowning but not wanting to push her with more questions. What she was claiming was clearly absurd—that the picture was of her mother, who lived in a large room two floors above the entrance and seldom showed herself to any of the guests. It couldn’t be. She was, by his estimation after the one time he had seen her, well over eighty and almost as large as Melody herself.
At the back of the square foyer now used as a lobby was a large desk. Melody hurried behind it and dropped into a wing-back chair, slapped her hands on the blotter, stared at him without expression. “I gave that to Ben two weeks ago,” she said. “Told him to take it to a friend that has a shop in Salisbury. He promised me he would.”
“But why, if it’s true?”
“Oh, it’s true, Brian. And the why of it? Because she don’t like seeing herself like that anymore. It makes her—”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh. I see.” And he supposed that seeing his own photograph, taken now, thirty years in the future would probably drop him into an unstoppable depression. “Oh, hell.”
“It’s all right,” she assured him. “I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. Bad pennies, if you know what I mean.”
He said nothing more, just gave her a sympathetic look and started up the winding staircase toward his own room on the middle floor. And once inside, he flopped into his armchair and puffed his cheeks, blew out a breath, and set the picture on the table beside him.
“So,” he said as he unlaced his shoes and kicked them under the bed. “So that’s what you looked like, you old bat. Not bad. Mind telling me what happened?”
He laughed shortly, hoisted himself back up, and stripped to his underwear. There was a basin in one corner, and a mirror over it in which he saw the spreadings of a pair of marvelous bruises—one on his shoulder, another reaching up over his hip. Suddenly he began to tremble, and a chill of perspiration slipped over his chest and back. He coughed, he choked, and he barely made it to the toilet at the end of the hall before he lost his breakfast, and the bit of lunch he’d taken during his walk.
Ten minutes later he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
Delayed reaction, he thought, and almost immediately fell asleep.
Dreamless.
Long.
Waking shortly after sunset when a screech of brakes made him sit up, his breath short and his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists.
“Jesus,” he said, reached up and switched on the tiny light affixed to the wall. The floor-to-ceiling windows were open, the curtains drifting with the breeze; the armchair a dark blotch in front of a fireplace bricked over, its shadow on the wall slightly wavering, as if under water.
He rubbed his eyes until they burned, then forced his fingers to relax, groaning when the aches, dull and throbbing, erupted along the side. He wondered if he ought not to see a doctor, and by the time he had decided it wasn’t worth it, he was sleeping again.
Dreaming, this time, of phantom taxis and phantom drivers and old Ben Isling crushed to death behind his counter.
He spent most of the following day in the hotel, watching television, eating sandwiches, fussed over by Melody, who told him more than once that if he wanted to get rid of the picture, she could take it out to her friend in Salisbury herself. The other guests wandered in and out of the cozy front room, clucking, shaking their heads, giving him all the sympathy he required, until Melody finally laughed and told him he ought to charge admission.
But Bess didn’t come. Bess Orbache, a young American like himself, using the city as a way to bury her past. Or so he thought each time she refused him a history, or even a hint. He hoped she was all right; he knew, however, she was more than all right, she was competent and confident and didn’t need him for a squire.
On the third day, he walked to get the stiffness from his leg, had dinner and too much to drink at a pub he haunted, and finally, when there was no place to go, went to his bed.
And dreamed of taxis and explosions and something crawling black and wet through his window.
He woke with a start, blinking sleep away without sitting up. A few deep breaths to calm him, and he turned his head to the left, and saw the door to his room
several inches ajar.
God, he thought, and felt himself grow cold, not once moving his gaze from the bit of hallway he could see. There was no one out there, not anymore, but he held his breath anyway, against the odd chance.
This is silly, you know, he told himself when he felt his shoulders trembling; you’re just the victim of a beautiful woman who wanted to see your body before asking you to her suite at the Savoy for a night of—
Someone screamed.
“Jesus,” he said, and leapt to his feet, wincing at the ache in his bruised leg as he stumbled back into his clothes. By the time he was dressed, the hallway was filling with those guests still at home, most of them crowding to the center stairwell. As best he could tell from the babble and the whispers, someone on the floor below had been discovered in his room; murder, it was said, a throat cut and enough blood to paint most of one wall.
A young woman, shorter than he, her long brown hair touched prematurely with strands of gray, swayed a bit as the descriptions grew more graphic, and he put a hand on her back to prevent her from falling.
“I’m all right!” she snapped, then looked over her shoulder. “Oh, sorry, Brian. I thought it was Mr. White.”
He smiled, tapped her once with a finger, and they backed away to a free corner. “Mr. White? Thanks a lot, Bess. It’s just what I needed.”
Her answering smile was more forced than easy, the faint spray of her freckles nearly vanishing in the attempt, and he leaned back against the wall, a hand in a hip pocket. Thurmond White was a lone traveler—fresh from Virginia, though he had no identifiable accent—with one eye out for bargains and the other out for lonely women. Bess, it seemed, was one of his prime candidates for either category, and twice Brian had to rescue her in the lobby by pretending they had a date. White hadn’t been gracious, and hadn’t given up the fight.
Bess, for her part, allowed him to take her to dinner both times, once more to the theater, once again to a film. Their good-nights were so chaste he wanted to scream.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 15 Page 9