24

'You going to do some tricks for us, kid?' Bogart asked. He wore a slim black tuxedo, and a cigarette smoked in his fingers. 'Little more of the old razzle-dazzle before the curtain comes down?'

'Del told me about some summer when he was twelve - the whole thing was like a movie… ' Tom muttered these not very coherent remarks to Rose as he watched the actor impatiently toying with his cigarette. Tom looked sideways, but Rose had gone somewhere into the darkness behind him.

'Come on, we got some people who are interested in you,' the actor said, and snapped his fingers. 'Yeah, this way. Come on in and join the party.'

Tom went toward the entrance of the living room.

All the lights burned. A gathering of men in tuxedos, of women in dresses, filled the living room. The smell of gin invaded his nostrils again. 'Hey, sonny,' a bluff-faced man Tom recognized as William Bendix shouted, 'how you doing!'

'Oooo, Tom,' crooned a platinum-blond woman with very red lips and a playful face that made a delicious, sensual joke of its own beauty…

'Bird lover, are you?' Bogart said, and made to strike Del cushioned in Tom's shirt. 'Got a couple little dogs myself.'

'That monkey music - I can't take that monkey music,' William Bendix snarled, though all Tom heard was the chattering of dozens of voices and the whirring sound. Bendix wore a porkpie hat on the back of his head and was slamming a beer glass down on a bar.

'Aw, leave him alone - poor bastard has a plate in his head,' Bogart said, tugging Tom deeper into the party. 'I guess you never met Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale. They came here just to have the pleasure.'

A man with a face like a run-over dog and a woman whose head was a charred stump were standing up from the flowered couch, holding but their hands and struggling to speak through mouths that had been seared shut. Tom gagged and stepped backward. Their clothes were smoking; curls of flame sprouted from the man's collar.

'Can that monkey music!'

'Never mind them, kid,' and a hand spun Tom around. 'They're too fried to talk straight - you remember those other people I mentioned?'

Snail and Thorn were standing beside the table, Tweedledum and Tweedledee all dressed up to go dancing (now he could hear the music, a trumpet lead over strings like a hundred make-out albums, Jackie Gleason Plays for Lovers Only).

'Can't stand it!' William Bendix hollered, smashing his beer glass against the bar.

Snail and Thorn bled from holes in their foreheads, though that was not where he had shot them, and their faces were blameless and bland, washed of emotion…

'Take a drink - aren't you a man?' Bogart sloshed something that smoked and bubbled from a decanter into a glass. He winked, and half his face jumped in a tic. 'Just get this down into you, it'll chase away the snakes.'

Tom was looking for Rose, and Humphrey Bogart was putting the smoking glass into his hand, which was whole and unharmed. Rose had disappeared.

Then a red-haired woman in a low-cut black dress leered at him - she's … she's … a face from a hundred movies, an uptilted nose and perfect mouth - and her face suddenly had needle teeth and a long red-furred snout -

and all the well-dressed people at the party had animal faces, monkeys and apes and foxes and wolves, and they were leering at him, chattering now over 'Moonlight Becomes You.' Tiger eyes set in glowing tiger stripes blinked toward him.

A creature with a pig's head was clamping his hand around a bubbling glass and forcing it to his lips, and Bobby Hackett was using his cornet to tell a girl that she certainly knew the right things to wear and across the room a man named Creekmore was stumbling forward with half his face dangling like a flap over gleaming bone. Damp weeds dripped from his shoulder.

'Rose!' Tom called, but the party noises screwed up loud enough to deafen him and a boar chuckled in his ear and Bobby Hackett's spring-water tone had turned coarse and blasting… something bitter and burning touched his lips.

AWAY! he shouted with his mind. GONE! He closed his eyes and mouth, and something burningly spilled down his chin… and then silence, as if all power had died.

Rose touched his face. 'You're scaring me.'

'Did you see them?' They were alone in the darkened room. Moonlight pouring in through the glass doors showed silver furniture, immaculate and dead.

'See what?'

A trace of gin - juniper and alcohol - lingered in the air. Del's body thrummed against his skin.

'What scared you, Rose?'

She too was touched by the moonlight: her face hung as white as a sail before him. 'You were talking to yourself - you were acting funny.'

His heart gradually slowed.

A blast of fireworks turned the room and her face violently red: rose-red.