Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle

by George R. R. Martin

  “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?”

  After Angela had gone to work, Jessie pulled a chair over by the front window and sat down to wait and watch. The mail usually arrived about eleven. She saw the postman ascend the stairs, heard him putting the mail in the big hall mailbox. But the Pear-shaped Man got his mail separately, she knew. He had his own box, right under his doorbell, and if she remembered right it wasn’t the kind that locked, either. As soon as the postman had departed, she was on her feet, moving quickly down the stairs. There was no sign of the Pear-shaped Man. The door to his apartment was down under the stoop, and farther back she could see overflowing garbage cans, smell their rich, sickly sweet odor. The upper half of the door was a window, boarded up. It was dark under the stoop. Jessie barked her knuckles on the brick as she fumbled for his mailbox. Her hand brushed the loose metal lid. She got it open, pulled out two thin envelopes. She had to squint and move toward the sunlight to read the
name. They were both addressed to Occupant.

  She was stuffing them back into the box when the door opened. The Pear-shaped Man was framed by bright light from within his apartment. He smiled at her, so close she could count the pores on his nose, see the sheen of the saliva on his lower lip. He said nothing.

  “I,” she said, startled, “I, I … I got some of your mail by mistake. Must be a new man on the route. I, I was just bringing it back.”

  The Pear-shaped Man reached up and into his mailbox. For a second his hand brushed Jessie’s. His skin was soft and damp and seemed much colder than it ought to be, and the touch gave her goose bumps all up and down her arm. He took the two letters from her and looked at them briefly and then stuffed them into his pants pocket. “It’s just garbage,” squeaked the Pear-shaped Man. “They shouldn’t be allowed to send you garbage. They ought to be stopped. Would you like to see my things? I have things inside to look at.”

  “I,” said Jessie, “uh, no. No, I can’t. Excuse me.” She turned quickly, moved out from under the stairs, back into the sunlight, and hurried back inside the building. All the way, she could feel his eyes on her.

  She spent the rest of that day working, and the next as well, never glancing outside, for fear that he would be standing there. By Thursday the painting was finished. She decided to take it in to Pirouette herself and have dinner downtown, maybe do a little shopping. A day away from the apartment and the Pear-shaped Man would do her good, soothe her nerves. She was being overimaginative. He hadn’t actually done anything, after all. It was just that he was so damned creepy.

  Adrian, the art director at Pirouette, was glad to see her, as always. “That’s my Jessie,” he said after he’d given her a hug. “I wish all my artists were like you. Never miss a deadline, never turn in anything but the best work, a real pro. Come on back to my office, we’ll look at this one and talk about some new assignments and gossip a bit.” He told his secretary to hold his calls and escorted her back through the maze of tiny little cubicles where the editors lived. Adrian himself had a huge corner office with two big windows, a sign of his status in Pirouette Publishing. He gestured Jessie to a chair, poured her a cup of herb tea, then took her portfolio and removed the cover painting and held it up at arm’s length.

  The silence went on far too long.

  Adrian dragged out a chair, propped up the painting, and retreated several feet to consider it from a distance. He stroked his beard and cocked his head this way and that. Watching him, Jessie felt a thin prickle of alarm. Normally, Adrian was given to exuberant outbursts of approval. She didn’t like this quiet. “What’s wrong?” she said, setting down her teacup. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Oh,” Adrian said. He put out a hand, palm open and level, waggled it this way and that. “It’s well executed, no doubt. Your technique is very professional. Fine detail.”

  “I researched all the clothing,” she said in exasperation. “It’s all authentic for the period; you know it is.”

  “Yes, no doubt. And the heroine is gorgeous, as always. I wouldn’t mind ripping her bodice myself. You do amazing things with mammaries, Jessie.”

  She stood up. “Then what is it?” she said. “I’ve been doing covers for you for three years now, Adrian. There’s never been any problem.”

  “Well,” he said. He shook his head, smiled. “Nothing, really. Maybe you’ve been doing too many of these. I know how it can go. They’re so much alike, it gets boring, painting all those hot embraces one after another; so pretty soon you feel an urge to experiment, to try something a little bit different.” He shook a finger at her. “It won’t do, though. Our readers just want the same old shit with the same old covers. I understand, but it won’t do.”

  “There’s nothing experimental about this painting.” Jessie said, exasperated. “It’s the same thing I’ve done for you a hundred times before. What won’t do?”

  Adrian looked honestly surprised. “Why, the man, of course,” he said. “I thought you’d done it deliberately.” He gestured. “I mean, look at him. He’s almost unattractive.”

  “What?” Jessie moved over to the painting. “He’s the same virile jerk I’ve painted over and over again.”

  Adrian frowned. “Really now,” he said. “Look.” He started pointing things out. “There, around his collar, is that or is that not just the faintest hint of a double chin? And look at that lower lip! Beautifully executed, yes, but it looks, well, gross. Like it was wet or something. Pirouette heroes rape, they plunder, they seduce, they threaten, but they do not drool, darling. And perhaps it’s just a trick of perspective, but I could swear”—he paused, leaned close, shook his head—“no, it’s not perspective, the top of his head is definitely narrower than the bottom. A pinhead! We can’t have pinheads on Pirouette books, Jessie. Too much fullness in the cheeks, too. He looks as though he might be storing nuts for the winter.” Adrian shook his head. “It won’t do, love. Look, no big problem. The rest of the painting is fine. Just take it home and fix him up. How about it?”

  Jessie was staring at her painting in horror, as if she were seeing it for the first time. Everything Adrian had said, everything he had pointed out, was true. It was all very subtle, to be sure; at first glance the man looked almost like your normal Pirouette hero, but there was something just the tiniest bit off about him, and when you looked closer, it was blatant and unmistakable. Somehow the Pear-shaped Man had crept into her painting. “I,” she began, “I, yes, you’re right, I’ll do it over. I don’t know what happened. There’s this man who lives in my building, a creepy-looking guy, everybody calls him the Pear-shaped Man. He’s been getting on my nerves. I swear, it wasn’t intentional. I guess I’ve been thinking about him so much it just crept into my work subconsciously.”

  “I understand,” Adrian said. “Well, no problem, just set it right. We do have deadline problems, though.”

  “I’ll fix it this weekend, have it back to you by Monday,” Jessie promised.

  “Wonderful,” said Adrian. “Let’s talk about those other assignments, then.” He poured her more Red Zinger, and they sat down to talk. By the time Jessie left his office, she was feeling much better.

  Afterward she enjoyed a drink in her favorite bar, met a few friends, and had a nice dinner at an excellent new Japanese restaurant. It was dark by the time she got home. There was no sign of the Pear-shaped Man. She kept her portfolio under her arm as she fished for her keys and unlocked the door to the building.

  When she stepped inside, Jessie heard a faint noise and felt something crunch underfoot. A nest of orange worms clustered against the faded blue of the hallway carpet, crushed and broken by her foot.

  She dreamed of him again. It was the same shapeless, terrible dream. She was down in the dark beneath the stoop, near the trash bins crawling with all kinds of things, waiting at his door. She was frightened, too frightened to knock or open the door yet helpless to leave. Finally the door crept open of its own accord. There he stood, smiling, smiling. “Would you like to stay?” he said, and the last words echoed, to stay to stay to stay to stay, and he reached out for her, and his fingers were as soft and pulpy as earthworms when he touched her on the cheek.

  The next morning Jessie arrived at the offices of Citywide Realty just as they opened their doors. The receptionist told her that Edward Selby was out showing some condos; she couldn’t say when he’d be in. “That’s all right,” Jessie said. “I’ll wait.” She settled down to leaf through some magazines, studying pictures of houses she couldn’t afford.

  Selby arrived just before eleven. He looked momentarily surprised to see her, before his professional smile switched on automatically. “Jessie,” he said, “how nice. Something I can do for you?”

  “Let’s talk,” she said, tossing down the magazines.

  They went to Selby’s desk. He was still only an associate with the rental firm, so he shared the office with another agent, but she was out, and they had the room to themselves. Selby settled himself i
nto his chair and leaned back. He was a pleasant-looking man, with curly brown hair and white teeth, his eyes careful behind silver aviator frames. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  Jessie leaned forward. “The Pear-shaped Man,” she said.

  Selby arched one eyebrow. “I see. A harmless eccentric.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  He shrugged. “He hasn’t murdered anybody yet, at least that I know of.”

  “How much do you know about him? For starters, what’s his name?”

  “Good question,” Selby said, smiling. “Here at Citywide Realty we just think of him as the Pear-shaped Man. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a name out of him.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” Jessie demanded. “Are you telling me his checks have THE PEAR-SHAPED MAN printed on them?”

  Selby cleared his throat. “Well, no. Actually, he doesn’t use checks. I come by on the first of every month to collect, and knock on his door, and he pays me in cash. One-dollar bills, in fact. I stand there, and he counts out the money into my hand, dollar by dollar. I’ll confess, Jessie, that I’ve never been inside the apartment, and I don’t especially care to. Kind of a funny smell, you know? But he’s a good tenant, as far as we’re concerned. Always has his rent paid on time. Never bitches about rent hikes. And he certainly doesn’t bounce checks on us.” He showed a lot of teeth, a broad smile to let her know he was joking.

  Jessie was not amused. “He must have given a name when he first rented the apartment.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Selby said. “I’ve only handled that building for six years. He’s been down in the basement a lot longer than that.”

  “Why don’t you check his lease?”

  Selby frowned. “Well, I could dig it up, I suppose. But really, is his name any of your business? What’s the problem here, anyway? Exactly what has the Pear-shaped Man done?”

  Jessie sat back and crossed her arms. “He looks at me.”