The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Read Free Page A

grey-wood walls, brass rail top
and bottom around the bar, electric lanterns anchored on thick
shelves just wide enough to hold them kept twilight inside no
matter where the sun was. The only window faced Centre Street, and
its lower half was veiled by a burgundy curtain hung from brass
rings on a brass rod; the outside wall, along Steuben, had been
painted by the owner to resemble three arched, frosted windows so
realistically done that more than one evening pedestrian had paused
to peer through the painted panes and abruptly walked away as if
nothing had happened.
    No food was served here, just pretzels and
salted peanuts.
    Casey loved it.
    The Mariner Lounge and the Chancellor Inn made
him uncomfortable; the Cock’s Crow, while more his style, was
sometimes just too far away, and too often too crowded. The Brass
Ring, then, was a godsend. It had opened three months ago on the
same site as its namesake, which had shut its doors in 1897 after
less than five years’ operation. This one, he thought as he waited
for Yard, was bound to last much longer. The atmosphere was amiable
without forcing anyone to be friendly when they weren’t in the
mood, the liquor and beer inexpensive, and Nigel Oxley, the owner
and sometimes dart player, didn’t insist on his customers drinking
just as long as they bought something during their stay.
    Yard relaxed with a sharp sigh. “I give up.”
    “You give up.”
    “That’s what I said. I give up. What’s the
trick?”
    Casey massaged the side of his neck, the backs
of his hands.
    “Yard, pay attention, boy — the bottles are
weighted, you see — only a Goliath could knock them over with the
spongy softballs they give you, so . . . you . . .” He waited
expectantly.
    Chase nodded. Waiting.
    “Jesus,” Casey said. “Damnit, man, it’s all
rigged against you so you don’t even try!”
    “Ah.”
    “Right” He grabbed a handful of peanuts from a
chipped wood bowl, dropped one into his mouth. “Yard, how the hell
do you make a living with that store, huh? Seems to me you’d get
robbed blind in three days.”
    “Two,” said Yard. “But I’m independently
wealthy.”
    Grinning, Casey shook his head, looked down at
his glass, at the polished wood. His face was there in dark
reflection, but he couldn’t see it clearly. Lean and leathered like
the rest of him, eyes in a constant partial squint, lips in a
perpetual lopsided smile, topped by a mass of combed-back hair that
had begun to turn white while he was still in high school, finished
its turning before he’d graduated from college. A number of dyes
and colorings had been tried before he gave up — they only made him
look foolish, unnatural, made him look like a stranger had claimed
squatter’s rights in his bathroom mirror.
    Mayard Chase, on the other hand, was high and
wide, with a carpenter’s hands and a bricklayer’s muscles, and
virtually no hair at all above a face round and fleshy. The owner
of the hardware store had tried, only once, a toupee. Two summers
ago, to keep his pate from burning and peeling. Neither his
children nor his wife had had the nerve to tell him what he looked
like; not so his friends. The rug was gone in a week.
    A cry of victory from a dart game, applause and
a call for a round of drinks on the losers for those at the back
tables.
    The door opened to admit three men and a woman;
they hesitated for a moment, listened to the noise, and left.
    Your loss, he thought, sipped, looked around
again, and nodded to the two women seated at the first table by the
door. Both wore their hair short and brushed back over their ears,
both wore T-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes without socks. The
older was near his age, a teacher at the high school; the other was
a decade less, though her sharp-angled face erased the difference
until she smiled. Ordinarily he wouldn’t speak to them other than a
polite greeting, a polite farewell; tonight, however, Yard’s
feigned obtuseness had put him in good