him out of the room where the grenade had detonated.
“Anyway You Want Me,” Connie said.
The perp was silent for a moment. Then his voice echoed through the room, infuriatingly directionless,
“I’m Yours,” Connie said.
Harry couldn’t get over the speed with which she thought of the appropriate titles.
“I’ve Got a Thing About You Baby,” Connie said.
She’s a genius, Harry thought admiringly. And seriously obsessed with Presley.
Counting on the perp being pretty much distracted by Connie’s weird seduction, Harry risked showing himself. Because he was directly under the peak of the roof, he rose slowly to his full height, and surveyed the garret on all sides.
Some piles of boxes were shoulder-high, but many others were only a few inches higher than Harry’s waist. A lot of human forms stared back from the shadows, tucked in among the boxes and even sitting on them. But all of them must have been mannequins because none moved or shot at him.
“There’s Always Me.”
“Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Connie said.
Standing, Harry had a slightly better sense of the direction from which the voices arose. Both Connie and the perp were ahead of him, but at first he couldn’t discern if they were close to each other. He could not see over the boxes into any of the other avenues of the maze.
“Love Me,” Connie urged.
They were at the west end of the attic, the south side, and they
“Stuck on You,” Connie insisted.
Harry sensed an escalation in the intensity of the dialogue, subtly conveyed in the gunman’s tone, in the speed of responses, and in his repetition of the same title.
“I Need Your Love Tonight.”
Harry stopped putting caution first. He hurried toward the voices, into an area more densely populated by mannequins, groups clustered in niches between boxes. Pale shoulders, graceful arms, hands pointing or raised as if in greeting. Painted eyes sightless in the gloom, painted lips eternally parted in half-formed smiles, in greetings never vocalized, in passionless erotic sighs.
More spiders lived there, too, evidenced by webs that tangled in his hair and stuck to his clothes. As he moved, he wiped the gossamer off his face. Wispy rags of it dissolved on his tongue and lips, and his mouth flooded with saliva as nausea gripped him. He choked down his gorge and expelled a wad of spittle and spider stuff.
“It’s Now or Never,” Connie promised from somewhere nearby.
The familiar answering three words had become less of a plea than a warning:
Harry had the feeling the guy wasn’t being lulled at all but was ticking toward a new explosion.
He proceeded another few feet and stopped, turning his head from side to side, listening intently, afraid he would miss something because the booming of his own heart was so loud in his ears.
“I’m Yours, Puppet on a String, Let Yourself Go,” Connie urged, voice falling to a stage whisper to foster a false sense of intimacy with her prey.
Although Harry respected Connie’s skills and instincts, he was afraid that her eagerness to sucker the perp was distracting her from the realization that the perp might not be responding out of his confusion and longing but out of a similar desire to sucker
“Playing for Keeps, One Broken Heart for Sale,” Connie said.
She sounded as if she was right on top of Harry, in the next aisle, surely no farther than two aisles away, and parallel with him.
“Ain’t That Loving You Baby, Crying in the Chapel.” Connie’s whisper had grown more fierce than seductive, as if she was also aware that something had gone wrong with the dialogue.
Harry tensed, waiting for the perp’s response, squinting into the gloom ahead, then turning to look back the way he had come when he imagined the smiling, moon-faced killer stealing up behind him.
The attic seemed to be not merely silent but the source of all silence, as the sun was the source of light. The unseen spiders moved with perfect stealth through all the dark corners of that high room, and millions of dust motes drifted as soundlessly as planets and asteroids in the airless void of space, and on both sides of Harry, gatherings of mannequins stared without seeing, listened without hearing, posed without knowing.
Forced between clenched teeth, hard as a threat, Connie’s whisper had ceased to be an invitation, had become a challenge; and song titles no longer constituted her entire rap: “Anyway You Want Me, you toad, come on, come to mama. Let Yourself Go, dirtbag.”
No reply.
The attic was silent but also eerily still, filled with less motion than a dead man’s mind.
Harry had the strange feeling that he was becoming one of the mannequins that stood around him, his flesh transformed into plaster, his bones into steel rods, sinews and tendons changing into bundles of wire. He let only his eyes move, and his gaze slid across the inanimate citizens of the garret.
Painted eyes. Pale breasts with permanently erect nipples, round thighs, tight buttocks, curving away into darkness. Hairless torsos. Men and women. Bald heads or matted wigs caked with dust.
Painted lips. Puckered as if to plant a kiss, or in a playful pout, or parted slightly as if in erotic surprise at the electricity of a lover’s touch, others formed into shy smiles, some coy, some with a broader curve, the dull gleam of teeth, here a more thoughtful smile, and there a full and perpetual laugh. No. Wrong. The dull gleam of teeth. Mannequin teeth don’t gleam. No saliva on mannequin teeth.
Which one, there, there, in the back of the niche, behind four true mannequins, one clever mime, peering out between bald and bewigged heads, almost lost in shadows but moist eyes glistening in the dimness, no more than six feet away, face to face, the smile opening wider as Harry watched, wider but as humorless as a wound, the weak chin, the moon face, and one more song title so soft as to be barely audible,
The perp opened fire with his Browning 9mm maybe a fraction of a second before Harry did, and the attic was filled with the crashes and echoes of shots. He saw the flash of the pistol’s muzzle, which seemed to be directly in front of his chest, oh God please, and he emptied his revolver faster than seemed possible, all in a blink if he’d dared to blink, the weapon bucking so hard that it seemed likely to fly out of his grip.
Something hit him hard in the gut, and he knew he had been shot, though he had no pain yet, just a sharp pressure and a flare of heat. And before the pain could follow, he was knocked backward, mannequins toppling into him, driving him against the wall of the aisle. The stacked boxes rocked, and some were dislodged into the next branch of the maze. Harry was carried to the floor in a clatter of plaster limbs and hard pale bodies, trapped under them, gasping for breath, trying to shout for help, able to make no sound louder than a wheeze. He smelled the distinct metallic odor of blood.
Someone snapped on the attic lights, a long string of small bulbs hanging just under the peak of the roof, but that improved visibility only for a second or two, just long enough for Harry to see that the perp was part of the weight that held him on the floor. The moon face peered down from the top of the heap, between the naked interlocking limbs and past the hairless skulls of the mannequins, his eyes now as sightless as theirs. His smile was gone. His lips were’ painted, but with blood.
Although Harry knew that the lights were not actually going out, it seemed as though they were on a dimmer being cycled off. He tried to call out for help but still could only wheeze. His gaze shifted from the moon
