Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  The bell above the door rings, and Oscar turns around, surprised.

  The middle-aged man in the doorway looks like a product of the same bygone era in which Oscar’s fondest memories are mired. He’s a walking anachronism, from his gray fedora to his gray suit and polished shoes. He nods a greeting. Everything about him seems faded, as if the old days really were in black-and-white and the man has yet to learn color.

  Oscar instantly approves. “Hello, sir!” he says. “Shave and a cut?” His smile is uncertain because he doesn’t yet know if that’s why the man is here. Could be he’s on his way to a fancy-dress ball or something and has just stopped in to ask for directions. Oscar hopes that isn’t the case. It would be nice this close to the end of the business day to get at least one customer to justify opening in the first place.

  The man has pale, waxy skin and cold eyes that seem to trap and quench the glow from The Palaver’s fluorescents, almost as if when he removed the hat the shadow stayed in place. His smile when it comes is even colder, and now Oscar finds himself with a new fear.

  This is the way your luck runs, Oscar. You should have known. He’s here to rob the pittance from your register.

  He clears his throat and checks his watch again. Wonders what he’s going to do if he’s right about the visitor’s intent. The man is twice his size, though most of it is fat. Will Oscar put up a fight? Of course not. There isn’t enough in the till to bother risking his health. He will, he suspects, step aside and let the man do his thing.

  Coward, he thinks. You’re old and gutless, and if you don’t have the sand to stand up for anything, you deserve to have it taken away from you.

  “Relax, my friend,” the man says and raises a hand with long tapered fingers. “I’m in sales, not theft, though I suppose some would argue there’s little difference.” He tosses the hat onto one of the coat-rack hooks, rubs his fingertips along the line of his clean-shaven jaw, and purses his thick, rubbery lips. “And I will have you take a bit off the top, if you don’t mind. The road has been a long one.”

  Oscar feels the tension drain from his shoulders. “Certainly.” He indicates the hydraulic chair. “Take a seat. Make yourself comfortable. But I should tell you that I don’t need anything, sales-wise.”

  The man’s gut swells against his cotton shirt as he reclines into the chair. He inspects himself in the mirror and seems, like Oscar, to be a little disappointed by his reflection. “Everybody needs something,” he says tonelessly.

  Oscar plucks a fine-toothed comb from his breast pocket. “That may be so, but even if I did need something, I doubt I could afford it. Business isn’t what it used to be.”

  The salesman wets a fingertip and runs it across his tangled right eyebrow in an attempt to calm the wildness of the copper-colored hair there. It has little effect.

  “I see that you’re hardly packing them in here,” he says, in that same almost disinterested tone. “But perhaps I can change that for you.”

  Freed of the hat, the man’s hair is thin, red, and unruly. It rises on both sides of his scalp like paralyzed waves of fire. Comb primed and curious despite himself, Oscar considers the frenzy. “How would you do that? What is it you’re selling?”

  He meets the man’s eyes in the mirror, watches the salesman’s unpleasant smile grow, exposing a mouthful of thick yellow teeth. “Purpose,” he replies. “Hope.”

  Oscar allows himself a smile as he tries to temper the man’s hair into a more attackable swath. It furiously resists. “I’ve invested in plenty of that over the years,” he says. “Little of it paid off.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t the right kind of hope.” The salesman joins his meaty hands over his gut, and it occurs to Oscar that he didn’t come with a briefcase or any other kind of container in which his wares might be contained, which leads him to wonder if the product being sold is of a less tangible, more spiritual kind. It would not be unfeasible, given the proximity of The Good Book bookstore.

  He decides to spare the man his spiel. “I’m not a man of faith.”

  The salesman nods. “Of course you are. Perhaps not in any traditional sense, but everybody believes in something.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure about that. I’ve lived long enough to have learned the folly in believing too much in anything.” He steps around the chair and procures a spray bottle, begins to moisten the man’s hair when it’s clear that it will not obey the comb. He notes that the hair feels like filaments of wire, as if it is not just copper in color.

  “You’re a cynic, then?” the salesman asks.

  “A realist, I’d say.”

  “Those who would debate the difference between thievery and sales might also argue the distinction between those two classes of people. A thin line, is it not?”

  Oscar considers the statement and the scabrous pink line of the man’s scalp.

  “In any case,” the salesman says, brushing his thick fingers over his gut with the tenderness of a pregnant mother, “we could argue semantics and definitions all day, and I’m aware that I’ve caught you on the verge of closure, so I’ll get on with it, shall I? And I promise by the time you’ve won the war on my wicked hedgerow of hair, I’ll be done. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” Oscar agrees.

  “Good. Then if I may be so bold, I’d like to tell you a story. It’s an old one, and a true one, and it will illustrate my purpose here better than any sales pitch. Are you amenable to such a thing?”

  Oscar is. Listening to the stories of his customers used to be one of the biggest pleasures of being a barber. Indeed, the subsequent discussions influenced the name of the store. Like the chiming of the bell, however, such sounds are rare these days.

  “Go right ahead,” he says, and grabs the scissors.

  The sun sinks lower, sending deep shadows stretching toward the storefront. Oscar pays them no mind as the salesman begins to tell his tale.

  —

  There is a town out west called Milestone. I can tell without asking that you’ve never heard of it because few people have. There’s no reason for you to know of it. And if you look it up on a map, you won’t find it. Not on any of the new ones anyway. To the world at large, it was relevant for only a short time, and then, only because it had something to offer to keep it from being forgotten. Back in the big business days of strip-mining, someone found copper there, and for a few years the town prospered. But then the copper ran out and so did anybody with any sense, and it was never the same after that. Even during the boom, stories abounded about things they had found down in the mines, about strange symbols found engraved in the rock, about insidious whispers, ghosts and weird lights, and so on. Most sane, sensible people laughed them off, but those stories persisted, bolstered by the queer things that started to happen in the town after it was declared dead.

  In the boom years, Milestone had boasted a population of more than fifteen hundred souls. Four years to the day that the Holstern Mining Company declared it dead, there were a little under a hundred.

  That day was a hot one. It was August and people tended to keep indoors, their windows shut, the fans running. One who didn’t was Ellard Scott, a retired teacher and full-time drunk, who lived alone in a shack out by the mines.

  He was sunning himself on a slab of sandstone left over from the pulverizing of Red Mountain, his shirt tied around his waist, when the barber came sauntering out of the mine. Ellard said the man looked pristine, not a speck of dirt on him, as if he’d walked not out of a filthy mine at all, but out of a dry cleaner’s. He was dressed in a radiant white tunic and white slacks, his oiled black hair gleaming in the sun. When Ellard greeted him, the young man smiled and wished him a good day. He also told Ellard that his hair was badly in need of treatment, and that he would soon be offering the best rates in town. Ellard figured this was probably true, because Milestone didn’t have a barber at the time. Their own had packed up and left for Arizona in the great exodus of 1936.

  Then the barber nodded once more and hea
ded toward town.

  When Ellard recounted the story later for the patrons at Carl’s Tavern, few people took him seriously. This was to be expected. Not only was Ellard the town drunk, his sanity had long been in question. He had, after all, been fired from his teaching post at the high school in the neighboring town of Saddleback for exposing himself to two male and three female coworkers in the teaching lounge. When asked why he had done this, he seemed confused that the action had needed explaining at all. “I was showing them my music,” he’d said, “on the sliding scale. And the only reason they made a fuss is because they didn’t want anyone to know they were tone deaf.” Nobody knew whether or not he had obeyed the judge’s order of psychiatric counseling in the wake of his dismissal and subsequent arrest for indecent exposure, but few doubted the need for it.

  “Face like wax paper. Eyes like coal,” he told the barflies, ignoring their laughter. “Man came up on out of there like it was his home and he was just heading out for a stroll.”

  He was dismissed and talk moved on to more pressing and relevant matters, like the war and the British bombing of Berlin. Ellard found a corner and sat there looking troubled. What he hadn’t told the men had been how the barber had radiated cold, as if he’d just emerged from a freezer. He hadn’t told them that the man didn’t look as if he’d ever seen a day of sunlight in his life, his eyes a little too dark and a little too big, as if he lived in the mine. But it didn’t matter. This and more information would become common knowledge soon enough.

  —

  Ronald Hawkes was the man charged with welcoming newcomers to town. That some of them might prefer he didn’t was of no consequence. It was his job and it gave him pleasure to do it, and so that’s what he did.

  Thus, the morning after the barber emerged from the mine, with the coverlet of mist not yet thrown back from the slumbering cobblestone streets, Ronald, the mayor of Milestone, was the first to greet the town’s latest prospective voter, and he did so with the ebullience for which he was known.

  “Could we have asked for a more glorious morning?” he enthused, ruddy cheeks spread wide around a grin of large polished teeth. His eyes were small but wily behind his rimless spectacles. His thinning hair was neatly trimmed and oiled, and he did not wear a hat, for he considered such things pretentious, too much like the political cartoons in the newspapers he chuckled over every morning, and he was not eager to distance himself from his voters by appearing to have too much money even if that was the case, particularly when most of them had very little.

  “It is indeed beautiful,” said the young man, with a nod of acknowledgment.

  Hawkes had found the stranger standing before the window of Rex Flanagan’s old barbershop on Parson Street. Rex had abandoned his business in favor of a better life elsewhere but hadn’t bothered to strip and clean it for the next merchant, assuming there would ever be one, and so it stood still fully outfitted beneath a patina of dust like a tonsorial Marie Celeste. He hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.

  The young man was dressed in a crisp white tunic and white pants. He was sallow and skinny. His effeminate eyebrows were thin and arched, his eyes dissuading the light, the lashes so dark as to appear almost painted that way. His small bow-shaped lips, too, seemed artificially darkened, a little too red and full, and the mayor felt the slightest twinge of distaste. He was careful to keep this from his face, however, as it wouldn’t do to get them off on the wrong foot. Besides, he had just met the man. There was no way of telling if his apparent vaudevillian inclinations might be for some theatrical purpose only.

  “My name is Ronald Hawkes,” he said and stuck out his meaty hand. “I’m the mayor of this fine town. And you are?”

  Clearly not quite as concerned with causing undue offense, the young man’s unlined face wrinkled in unbridled disgust, his eyes on the hand outstretched between them. He made no move to accept it. Instead, he looked apologetically at the mayor.

  “You must forgive me,” he said, his voice like rain on a tin roof. “But I don’t shake hands.”

  Hawkes found this odd but lowered his arm. “I see. Is it a foreign custom, perhaps?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I see,” Hawkes said again, somewhat flustered by this taciturn stranger. “And your name?”

  “The Barber,” said the young man.

  Hawkes forced a laugh, his sizable belly jiggling. “Well, that’s good to know, too, but I asked your name.”

  “And you were given it.”

  “Your name is The Barber?”

  “Yes. I have no need for any other.”

  “Well, now, that’s rather peculiar, don’t you think?”

  “If I did, I would perhaps endeavor to change it. But I don’t.”

  Hawkes appraised the man anew, hoping to find something congenial with which to offset the unpalatable impression he felt was being forced on him. “And what is it that brought you to Milestone?”

  The man went back to looking in the window, through which could be seen a row of hydraulic chairs. “I should think that would be obvious.”

  “You came to cut hair.”

  “Yes.”

  “And who says we need a barber?”

  “I know you do, or I wouldn’t have come.”

  Hawkes restrained a sigh. “Well, I suppose you know it’s not just a case of showing up out of the blue and setting yourself up right here on Main Street.”

  The young man’s black eyes found him again. “Why isn’t it?”

  “Well, there are rules, a process that needs to take place first. Surely you know that.”

  “Can’t you take care of it?”

  Hawkes frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” said The Barber, “in the absence of a resident third-party agent, it’s your job to facilitate such matters, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And Milestone does not currently have a barber.”

  “Not as such, no, but—”

  “Then wouldn’t it be in your best interests to provide your people with one?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I should think that’s what you’ll do. I will rent this building at the going rate, and I shall provide the service Milestone needs. And should the hour come in which my services are no longer required, I will gladly take my leave.”

  Hawkes could feel the blood rushing to his head. “Now, wait just a second young man, I—”

  “Do you cut your own hair, Mr. Hawkes?”

  “What? No, my wife does.”

  “She’s not very good at it.”

  Hawkes felt as if he’d been slapped. “Now, hang on. She—”

  “As the mayor of this fair town, as the leader of your people, your fashion should set the trend. People should imitate your look. Therefore, you need to look your very best. I can help with that, and as you’re the mayor, you need never pay for a haircut or a shave again. I will open for business at eight o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. I expect to see you and the rest of the townsfolk then. Kindly ensure that they are on time.”

  Then he walked away, leaving Hawkes, for the first time in his life, at a loss for words.

  —

  The ire had not left Hawkes by the time he got home. If anything, as all the things he should have said occurred to him now that it was too late to say them, he found his anger inflamed, his day ruined. He was unaccustomed to being so summarily dismissed, to being talked down to, and by a barber, of all things!

  “It was as if he thought he was the mayor,” he complained, flapping his hands in the air and scattering the dust motes that had been drifting lazily through the shaft of sunlight in which he sat. Opposite him at the kitchen table, his wife, Gladys, stirred her tea with her trademark patience, her eyes fixed on him, lest he accuse her of not paying him enough attention.

  “I’m sure you simply misinterpreted things,” she said, and gently set down her spoon.

  “Oh, no, dear, there was no room for
misinterpretation. He was like cock of the walk. Acted like he already owned the place. Said he was going to set up business right there in Rex Flanagan’s and that I should facilitate him.”

  “And are you going to?”

  He folded his arms over his considerable chest. “I’m inclined to do nothing of the sort.”

  “But we do need a barber, do we not?”

  “We’ve managed quite well thus far without one, and we could do without a man of his ilk in Milestone.”

  Gladys sipped her tea and regarded him levelly over the cup. “His ilk? I get the feeling you’re not referring to his choice of trade.”

  Hawkes scowled. “I suspect there may be worse things about that man, things of which I’m sure few people in this town would approve. Can I afford to risk displeasing them now that Ed Boxley has made clear his designs on my office? That bastard would use this as a pole vault to clear the loyalists. ‘Under Hawkes, Milestone will become a haven for homosexuals,’ he’ll say, and how will I be able to counter the claim when the evidence will be right there snipping hair on Main Street?”

  Gladys allowed herself a small smile. “Don’t you think you might be overreacting a little, dear?”

  He recoiled dramatically, as if she had belched in his face. “How on earth am I overreacting? You weren’t there today, Gladys. You didn’t see how he looked or hear his words. Whatever his disposition, there is not a doubt in my mind that we’d be better off without him here.”

  “But you don’t even know for sure that he is what you think he is. And if you’re right, what’s the harm, really?”

  He goggled at her. She raised a hand to stem the tide of his disbelief.

  “What I’m saying is: As long as he’s not conducting his affairs in public, how will it affect anything? I daresay he’ll want to keep such things behind closed doors in order to safeguard his business. Public opinion will matter to him as much as it matters to you. Otherwise, he’ll fail and be forced to move on.”