Harlan Ellison: Spider Kiss

Then the last of the hospital staff, leaving the royal chamber, genuflecting and bowing out backward, hoping Mr. Preston and the Colonel would not feel the management had acted in bad faith by calling in the police so quickly, after all, the girl had fallen from one of their suites, and their hands were tied, it was only the natural thing to do, because they had to maintain their repu—

" G’wan, get the hell out of here !" Shelly snapped.

(Was it his imagination, or did they all have huge, gnome-like pointed ears, to hear all the more, to tell all the more?)

And where in the name of Jesus Almighty was the Colonel? Or were they one and the goddam same?

A splitting headache cromped down on Shelly the moment he had slammed the door on the toadies. They would open their mouths, he was sure of it. It was bound to leak out; after all, midafternoon on Times Square, a header into the street, a little chick from Secaucus of all places, and her crowd standing there watching. This was going to hit every penny-ante fan-mag in the country unless the payola was spread thick as peanut butter. The headache grew more intense the harder he thought. He leaned against the closed door, ignoring Stag Preston in the center of the room, still onstage, and he tried to think it out.

The effort was simply too much.

Forget the thinking and let the reflexes take over. It was synapses time, and he was the Old Sheldon Morgenstern, as he had been all afternoon. Was it inevitable, then, that he was doomed to return to that hideous shell of hipness, that shallow shell he had thought cast off? Every time the alarm went off, would he once more revert?

It was too horrible to consider.

The poor man’s Jekyll-Hyde , he thought, wildly.

Break. The story was going to break. Click click click. It was going to get out all over the place unless he acted. He jumped, then, and found the phone again.

Once he had the number, and the dial tone had broken, he barely waited for a voice on the other end. “Joe? Me. Did you take care of it?

“Yeah … yeah … uh-huh, yeah … what about Atra Baer?

“Yeah, yeah … okay, good. Have any trouble with Kilgallen or Wilson?

“Yeah … yeah … right. What? Sullivan hadn’t heard? Good, that way we tipped him ourselves. Maybe he’ll figure we’re playing tight with him.

“Now look: get with Herman and Buddy on the Coast and have them get to the columnists—trade and otherwise. Particularly the second-string schlock magazines; the ones we deal with won’t screw us, but the others’d sell a story like this to our audience in a minute if they thought they could get away with it. I want them all sewed up. All of them. Have Herman and Buddy work on it all night if it takes that long and get back to you. I want a statement on how we stand by morning. Don’t forget, they’re three hours behind us out there. They’ve got—” he glanced at his watch, “—five good hours before six o’clock.

“Yeah … right … right … now you’ve got it!

“Look, Joe, I want this sewed up tight before you go home tonight, you got that? Yeah … yeah … that, too … yeah … okay, keep on top of it, and ring me if you come up against anything boygus .

“Yeah, it’s Yiddish. It means tough. And I’ll have your tuchus in a sling if you don’t cement this thing up.

“What? How the hell do I know why the moron picks days like this to get in trouble … ? I’m only paid to wipe his ass for him. No, that ain’t Yiddish. Now jump , willya!”

He hung up and walked back into the living room. Stag was standing by the French doors, now closed. He was silent, with a drink in his hand.

Shelly slumped down into a chair. Suddenly, it was very quiet in the suite and he felt utterly drained. It had not been an easy afternoon.

At that moment the door opened and Colonel Jack Freeport came in. Shelly started to speak, but never got the words past his throat.

“What has been going on here, today?” The Colonel was furious. “Everybody in the lobby was rushing up and saying how sorry they were it had happened. Did this miserable kid do something big again, or is it just another minor emergency?”

Shelly started to speak again. To tell the big, white-haired Messiah that his pride and joy had tossed a teen-aged fan out the window. The words would not come.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, anyhow,” Freeport said, without waiting for an answer, “I’ve sold the kid’s contract.”

Did you know there are bombs that make no noise at all?

A healthy, red apple, with one bite out of it, turns brown and stinking in the air, inside a few minutes. Stag Preston turned around to face the Colonel, and his healthy, red face went brown and stinking within a matter of seconds.

Someone had taken a big bite out of him.

But Shelly’s question preceded the singer’s. “You what ?

You sold his con tract? Are you kidding?”

They were inane responses to an extraordinary statement, but easily on a par with the inane answers to extraordinary pronouncements down through the ages. Now that it had been said, Shelly was not certain he had really heard it. Men do peculiar things in the peculiar world Shelly Morgenstern inhabited, but they did not throw millions away. Underarm or sidearm.

“Tell me what went on here today,” Freeport demanded, laying his pearl-gray fedora on the table. He studied the boy in front of him, and his glance narrowed down as he turned his eyes to Morgenstern.

“You, Shelly. Tell me.”

Shelly recapped it, hill-and-valleying it for speed and attention to such details as his calls to Costanza in re the columnists. The Colonel, however, seemed peculiarly disinterested; his attention was more clinical than personal.

When Shelly had concluded, Freeport moved across to the French doors, examined them carefully, stepped out onto the balcony and took a fast look down. He re-entered the living room and sat down in an upholstered straight chair, as though he had something brief to say and wanted no part of momentary comfort till he had said it.

“Boy,” he said, aiming a blocky hand at Stag, “you have an apartment of your own, I believe. I’ll expect you to be out of here as soon as possible. If you have any clothing or possessions I’ll have the management send them over to you.”

He steepled his longshoreman’s hands and puffed at his lips. “Shelly, you still own a block of Stag’s stock, don’t you? Hmmm. I thought of that this afternoon. Well, of course, it’s your decision, but there’s always a job open with me if you want to market your share of the contract. I couldn’t retain you on my staff with your interest in—” He did not finish the sentence, merely aimed two steepled fingers at his ex-talent.

Then Stag Preston, silent and bottled up during the explanation by Shelly and the comments by Freeport, exploded. He threw the drink across the room.

It shattered just under a Utrillo oil the Colonel had brought back from France, and the stain smeared down the wall in helpless, offensive trickles.

“What the fuck you think you’re doin’, Mr. Freeport suh ! Just what the hell you think you’re doin’? Whaddaya mean you sold my contract? You think I’m some kinda shit to sell or somethin’? I got a lot to say around here, and you ain’t sellin’ Stag Preston to no damnbody! Not till I say so, y’heah?” His eyes, dark a moment before, now actually glowed and flashed as he saw a bit of the situation out of his hands. All that drive, all that power and success and money, and he was still nothing more than an item on the slave-block for the more muscular traders.