shadow on the pool table in just the same way. And before that, an equally strong, nearly magnetic pull had drawn his gaze to a face lost in shadow behind a curtain of blonde hair.
The face of a ghost.
No. Only the face of Shelly Desmond.
Marvis closed the closet.
The faceless ghost was gone. Hidden away.
Shelly was in the living room.
Suddenly, Marvis wanted to be with her.
Barefoot now, wearing only a black silk robe, Marvis returned to the living room, and Shelly.
The girl had stacked the scattered videos, save one, on a shelf above Marvis’s stereo. The other cassette was playing in the VCR. Shelly lay on a throw rug in front of the 32” Sony television, a video remote held in her hand, studying her mirror image. The two Shellys moaned in unison. Marvis had to smile. To think that, even in shadow, he hadn’t recognized Shelly’s busy fingers.
Shelly hadn’t noticed his presence. He set the coke-lined mirror on the edge of the pool table and watched her. There was almost something innocent about her unconscious nudity.
But there was nothing innocent about the girl on the screen.
And he’d never feel the same way about her, anyway. He knew that. He’d never desire her in that crazy, unquenchable way. That was the hell of it. Shelly’s eyes were wrong. They were green, not gray. And her hair was wrong. It was straight and uniformly pale, not curled and frosted, as the girl’s hair had been on that night in 1976. That girl, whose face had been excised from the 1976 Lance amp; Shield, she’d had a wonderful smile, too, one of those Mona Lisa smiles that were as good as a whispered secret you could never forget even if you wanted to.
The girl with the excised face had been the main attraction in the first erotica Shutterbug photographed (Shutterbug never called it porno – that was declasse, one of the first words you learned to avoid when you got involved in the industry). A little 16mm job he had done at eighteen. It had been a complete surprise, that film. Nothing he had ever planned to do, but those fifty feet of 16mm had started him on the road to fortune, if not fame.
And now that girl was dead. April Destino was gone from this vale of tears. Shutterbug had read about it in the paper. OD’d, or a suicide, or something.
But tonight he’d seen her ghost.
A shiver of excitement sizzled the length of Shutterbug’s spine. He smiled, amazed that he was actually old enough for nostalgia. He hadn’t watched that loop of film in quite a while. He used video these days, but he still had the 16mm equipment around. The old Bell amp; Howell projector was in a closet upstairs. The screen was in the basement. And the film itself, where the hell was it?
Shutterbug grinned. Amazing. He had a hard-on, and Shelly hadn’t even touched him.
Amazing. He’d take care of Shelly, just the way he wanted to. Do her right there on the pool table. Then he’d get rid of her, make a little popcorn, and have a retrospective of the early works of Marvis Hanks, Junior. That’s exactly what he would do.
He ran a finger along a stack of CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Some good old seventies whitebread music, the kind they used to play on KFRC. Forgotten names like K.C. amp; the Sunshine Band, England Dan and John Ford Coley, and Janis Ian.
The CD rack whirred open at the touch of a button. He studied the selections listed on the silver face of the disc. “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.” That’s what he’d play, just for the irony.
Something thumped against the bay window.
The CD box slipped from Marvis’s fingers, cracked against the floor.
Outside, someone laughed.
Marvis glanced at the closed drapes. Stared at Shelly
Her eyes were as big as saucers. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “No one knows that I’m here… Not my parents. Not my boyfriend. I… I did just like you said, Marvis. I didn’t tell- “
All he had to do was twist his head. Shelly grabbed her little backpack, unzipped the bottom compartment, pulled out a top and a pair of shorts, all the time moving across the room and into the kitchen.
Shelly was moving fast, but Marvis was moving way too slow.
Again, something thumped against the window. Again, someone laughed.
Marvis turned off the television. He summoned his courage and opened the drapes.
The slamming sound startled him, and he glanced toward the kitchen. The door to the side patio didn’t catch, swung open again.
Shelly was gone.
Had someone come in the side door and snatched her? Or had she been so frightened that she ran off? Did she know something?
Had she told someone? Had she sold him out?
Time would tell. It was very quiet. Marvis stood before the window, waiting for some answers. The front lawn was a sloping slab of blackness in the still night. His Jaguar sat in the driveway, a sleek silhouette. He framed the shot through the wood-bordered pane of the Anderson window without consciously knowing he was doing it. Second nature, and natural as could be-a picture, a rectangle of glass, and a wooden frame. The light behind him was just strong enough so that his reflection was visible on the glass in the foreground, the ghost vision of the living room sharper than the world outside.
And then it was there-in the background on the other side of the nearly opaque window, on the lawn of slate-a man’s silhouette.
Someone was out there. Someone who laughed.
Marvis couldn’t see eyes, but he knew the stranger was watching him.
Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were.
No still photo, this. No frozen frame. This figure moved, but Marvis couldn’t. He stood rooted in front of the expensive window, watching the dark man advance through his reflection.
Suddenly, Marvis’s reflection became a black hole as deep and empty as the missing face of April Louise Destino in that old photo.
A ghost’s face flew at Marvis from out of the blackness, coming fast. Coming so very fast.
But this face was not a black shadow. It was dead white.
White as a negative image of the black hole that had replaced April Destino’s face in the old photograph.
White as a negative image of an eight ball.
1:31 A.M.
The ghost thumped against the window and fell away.
Marvis staggered backward, gasping.
Now there were other figures on the lawn. Four dark silhouettes. Ghosts sailed above their unseen faces, trailing ectoplasm through spidery branches.
The night opened and another ghost flew toward the window.
Thumped against the pane.
Marvis blinked.
Impossible.
Impossible! It thumped against the pane!
The ghost was nothing but a roll of toilet paper!
Outside, laughter broke the silence. The sharp sound, still familiar after all these years, touched Marvis in a
