CURTAINS FOR NAT CRUMLEY

 

He heard the creak of ancient floorboards, the scurrying of rats, and the squeak of hand-forged hinges as a massive oak door was slammed shut. From somewhere below came the crackle of flames and the clanking of metal on rock. Footfalls echoed from a monstrous stone staircase and reverberated through the gloomy halls.

Which was odd, on the face of it, since he was living in a small one-bedroom apartment.

 

*      *      *

 

All journeys, it is said, start with a single step. This one had started when Nathan “Nat” Crumley stepped unsteadily out of his bathtub, wearing nothing but a frown.

It was October in the city, and just beginning to grow dark. Crumley, raised on the principle of a clean mind in a clean body and still a believer in the latter, had been taking a long, luxuriant shower.

It was an unusual time for a shower, a time when most of his neighbors in the building had either just returned from work, had settled down to dinner, or had already parked themselves in front of the TV; but Nat Crumley knew from nearly thirty years’ experience that it was the best time to bathe. The building was an old one, just six stories high, and the water heater in the basement was in frequent need of repair; if you waited until bedtime, or chose to shower in the morning when tenants in the other apartments were preparing for work, you might well find yourself without hot water.

But he had a more important reason for showering now. He was planning to drop over to the Social Center this evening—its full name, the West Side Seniors’ Resource Center, sounded too depressingly geriatric—and he wanted to look his best, especially because a curvaceous blond widow named Estelle Gitlitz might be there, playing canasta with her friends.

He had seen Estelle just last night, for a pair of mocha decafs at one of the many small coffee bars that had sprung up in the neighborhood. It had taken him months to work up the courage to ask her out. Their date had not gone well—Estelle had not seemed entertained by his reminiscences of thirty years in the collection department of a local printing plant, where he’d methodically arranged payment schedules for small impoverished publishers who would otherwise have faced legal action—and after half an hour she had excused herself and left; she hadn’t even asked him to walk her home. But maybe she would call. He hoped she would.

Or maybe she’d be at the Social Center tonight. It was the only place he had for meeting women lately, now that he’d stopped working; it was damned near the only place he could afford. There’d been women at the office that he’d flirted with, some he had dated, and two he’d even slept with, briefly. But all that was behind him; he hadn’t set foot in the office for nearly a year. Ever since he’d accepted early retirement, electing to live frugally on his pension and his buyout money (for he was still too young for Social Security, thank God), he had looked to the Center for female companionship.

Running a hand over his chin, as he stood there in the tub with the water coursing down his sparse hair, bony shoulders, and legs that might normally be called spindly (except that spindles were more graceful and sturdy), Crumley realized that he needed a shave. He was meticulous about being clean-shaven and well-groomed—so meticulous that he tended to spend more time preparing for a date than on the date itself.

In fact, he was meticulous in all things, maybe too much so; he’d been told more than once that he was not an easy man to live with. He was quick to find fault with other people’s work, behavior, and appearance, though equally quick to apologize. He was prone to tiny, unexpected bursts of rage—unexpected even to him—though never directed at anything other than typewriters, toasters, and other inanimate objects. His wife had divorced him decades ago, after just three years of marriage; his grown-up daughter had moved across the country and telephoned only on holidays.

He reached for the razor, a throwaway plastic thing, in its customary place on a corner of the flat rim of the tub. It wasn’t there. For one confused moment he was startled, then frightened, then actually furious at the loss—he was, above all else, a creature of habit—but suddenly he remembered: he had put it away yesterday in the medicine cabinet. He had hoped, at the time, that Estelle might possibly come over, after their coffee date, for some late-night TV and maybe something more. Just in case, he’d spent an hour cleaning the apartment. It had not been an unpleasant task; he liked cleaning up, and he believed that he liked playing host, rare though it was that he had guests. It had turned out, this time, that he’d cleaned up for no one but himself.

The tub in which he stood took up one wall, end to end, of the tiny windowless bathroom. The medicine cabinet, concealed behind a large hinged mirror, was attached to the same wall as the shower head, with the bathroom sink projecting just below it. Because of the sink’s bulk and its closeness to the bathtub, one was all but prevented from stepping in or out of the tub at that end. Invariably, therefore, Crumley would open the shower curtain from the opposite end, farthest from the spray of water. The curtain itself was of faded cream-colored plastic with vertical yellow stripes, like the bars of an old-fashioned jail cell; he left it spread wide and unwrinkled even when he wasn’t showering, in an effort to keep mildew at bay. He was conscientious about things like that.

This October evening, with a touch of cold in the air, Crumley broke with habit; he needed the razor, and wasn’t about to step dripping from the tub to retrieve it. Directing the flow of water so that it wouldn’t spray on the floor, he pulled back the curtain from the shower-head side, the side that normally remained closed. All too aware that half of all household accidents happen in bathrooms, he grasped the end of the round metal curtain rod with one hand where it was attached by screws to the wall, then placed a foot cautiously onto the edge of the tub. With his other foot still inside the tub, up to its ankle in warm water, he stretched precariously toward the medicine cabinet with his free hand and slowly swung its mirrored door toward him. Reaching beneath it, he groped blindly along the cabinet’s bottom shelf, fingers searching for the razor among bottles of tranquilizers and vitamin pills.

It occurred to him, as he gazed idly into the mirror, that this was an unusual position to find himself in. Indeed, he had probably not assumed this particular position, foot planted firmly on this particular spot, facing the mirror at this particular angle, in all the thirty years he’d lived in the apartment.

He paused for a moment, puzzled. Something didn’t look quite right. There was something odd about the reflection in the mirror.

As he always did except in the chilliest weather, he had left the bathroom door half open; otherwise the airless little room became too steamy, and the dampness was bad for the paint. Even now, the mirror was slightly fogged, but he could still see himself in it. Behind him he could see the open doorway and, beyond it, the hall, most of it dark now because of the advancing night and, in contrast to the brightly lit bathroom, all the darker; he was not the sort of man to waste electricity by leaving lights burning in other rooms.

Directly outside the doorway, however, a portion of the hall was illuminated by the light spilling from the bathroom. And in this parallelogram of light, the hall looked… different.

While his fingers resumed their search for the razor, he studied the view in the mirror. Seen from this unfamiliar angle, the hall looked somehow wider. In truth it was barely wide enough for even a skinny man like Nat Crumley to walk through without brushing against the sides, especially since he’d fitted a small shallow bookcase against one of the walls. Now, outside the doorway, the hall appeared spacious, almost cavernous; and where once the bookshelves had displayed a ragged collection of cartoon books, crossword puzzle books, and other cheap paperbacks, now the shelves had taken on a more substantial look—at least the narrow section that was visible—and seemed to support more substantial-looking books of uniform size and uniform dark binding; or so they appeared, however indistinctly, in the mirror.

And it was the mirror, no doubt, that was the source of this illusion. His brain clung to that certainty, even as his eyes noticed something else. Above the bookshelves, in the circumscribed area of light, he could make out the bottom corner of a painting that had been hanging in the hall for the past thirty years. It was a painting he knew well, one that he’d completed as a boy of twelve, a paint-by-numbers picture of ducks sitting placidly in a pond. It was the first such painting he’d ever gotten right; he knew every furry cattail, every cloud. He remembered how, in his awkward fingers, his paintbrush had strayed outside the lines on several earlier attempts—a picture of sailboats, one of the Alps, another of Old Mexico—and how he’d torn up those paintings in a rage.

Yet tonight, unless his eyes were deceiving him, the painting looked larger than he’d remembered. And though most of the scene lay in shadow, it appeared to him as if the little duck pond had been replaced by something darker, and that the crabbed, meticulous style of his youth had given way to one looser, cruder, and more disordered.

Had the painting, the books, really changed? No, it simply did not compute. “There ain’t no such animal,” he heard himself say, unconsciously quoting what the New Jersey farmer had said upon seeing a camel for the first time.

Yielding, nonetheless, to a certain curiosity, he was about to look over his shoulder to examine the doorway directly—a maneuver that, in his present position, would have meant twisting his head and upper body to an uncomfortable degree while keeping his feet planted where they were—but at that moment his fingers encountered the plastic handle of the razor. Reflexively he shut the medicine-cabinet door and withdrew back into the shower, closing the curtain again.

As he lathered his face and stood shaving—ordinary bath soap, he believed, was as good as shaving cream and far more economical—he tried to make sense of what he’d seen. He’d been the victim of an optical illusion, a trick of the shadows, a freak of perspective; of this he was sure. Blame it on the unfamiliar angle of the mirror, or on the steam from the shower that, even now, was rising in clouds around him.

The other possibility, of course, was that, just beyond the shower curtain, something very weird had just happened. It was a possibility so far removed from his normal experience that he hardly knew how to get a grip on it.

Finished shaving, Crumley placed the razor back in its usual spot on the rim of the tub. He reached once again for the soap, but a tiny worm of uncertainty now gnawed at him: What if, out there, the world had somehow changed? What if he was, in effect, an unwilling traveler, lost and far from home?

It was a childish fear, and not a terribly real one, but he couldn’t resist, just for a moment, sliding back the shower curtain from the usual end, the end farthest from the faucets. Gripping the towel rack and leaning outward, hair dripping onto the bathroom rug, he peered through the steam at the medicine-cabinet mirror—and, to his relief, was able to make out the familiar hallway, a cozy place of crossword puzzle books and paddling ducks.

He closed the curtain and stepped back beneath the shower, his mind once more at ease, but already playing with a new idea. What if that more spacious hallway, with its darker books and cruder art, was just as real as the one he knew lay outside the door; but what if it could only be glimpsed from the other end of the tub?

It would be a little thing, he realized, the smallest of inconsistencies—and yet momentous. You stuck your head out of one end of the shower and you were one place; you peered out of the other end and you were somewhere else. Somewhere very similar, maybe, but different enough to set the universe on its ear.

And that’s just what it would do; that’s all it would take to shred the laws of logic. A Cheerio rising slowly out of your cereal bowl was as monstrous an affront to the known universe as a flying saucer twice as big as Texas.

Idly he wondered, if such a thing were true, who’d be the most appropriate one to call. A friend? A physicist? The Enquirer? The police?

Impulsively he drew back the curtain from the end by the shower head—letting in, as he did so, a wave of cold air—and stood looking out at the world. The mirror, by now, was too fogged to reveal anything, and the hall outside, from where he stood, was lost in shadow. Carefully he turned the shower head to avoid wetting the floor; then, holding on to the sink to keep his balance, his back to the doorway, he stepped out of the tub and onto the bathroom rug.

Even before he had the chance to turn around, he heard the ringing of the telephone. It came from his bedroom a few feet down the hall. For a second it occurred to him that perhaps the sound was a touch deeper than the sound his phone normally made; but then, he was so prone to losing his temper, smashing telephones and having to buy new ones—all of them flimsy plastic affairs—that he was hard-pressed to remember exactly what the latest phone sounded like.

At the second ring, all thought fled. After the third, he knew, his current phone machine would answer (unless he’d smashed that one as well; he couldn’t remember), at which point, many a caller—who knows, maybe even Estelle Gitlitz—might well hang up. Crumley had trained himself to get to the phone before that third ring.

Galvanized into action, he snatched a towel from the rack, and, with the shower still running, he hurried down the darkened hall toward the bedroom. That the doorway to it seemed a few steps farther away than usual was not something he had time to notice; nor did he so much as glance at the picture on the wall.

The bedroom was dark, but his hand found the phone as it commenced its third ring. He picked it up before the sound had died.

“Hello?”

From the other end came the rumble of traffic. Someone was calling from a pay phone on the street, or maybe from the subway.

“Hi,” shouted a woman’s voice, above the din. “This is Marcy Wykoff. We’re running a little late.”

“Who’d you say it was?” asked Crumley. He knew no Marcy Wykoff.

“I can barely hear you,” she shouted. “Brad and I took a wrong turn up one of your winding country roads—”

“Are you sure you’ve got the right number?”

“—but it’s okay, we’re back on the highway now.”

As if to prove the veracity of what she said, her words were drowned out by the thunder of what sounded like the Cannonball Express. By the time it had passed, to be replaced by a series of blasts on the sort of horn he associated with little English sports cars, the woman was saying:

“—following your map, so we should be there in half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes. Oops, Brad’s honking, gotta go. Bye.”

He stood there dripping in the darkness, the towel in one hand, the dead phone in the other. It felt, he now noticed, oddly heavy. And the floor felt cold beneath his feet; wasn’t there supposed to be a rug here? In the sudden silence, he found himself gazing at the window across the room. The sun had set, and the first few stars were beginning to appear.

It was several seconds before he registered exactly what he was looking at. He was looking at the sky. The night sky. Complete with stars.

But the sky was not visible from this window—at least it hadn’t been until this moment. Except for a narrow strip at the top, it was blocked by the buildings just across the street.

Now, however the only things blocking the sky were—he swallowed hard—trees.

Where the hell was he? Breathless with panic, he dropped the phone and looked wildly around the darkened room. His fingers found a wall switch, and the room was flooded with light, revealing ancient-looking paneling, a high ceiling, a foot-worn plank floor, shelves of books, a rumpled bed.

This was not his room.

The realization hit him with the force of a nightmare, one of those nightmares in which we find ourselves wandering naked through a classroom or a cocktail party. He felt suddenly very vulnerable. Hurriedly he wrapped the towel around his pale midriff.

The first thing that occurred to him, though it made no sense at all, was that somehow, crazily, he had wandered by accident into someone else’s apartment, someone who wasn’t home right now; that he had taken a shower in someone else’s bathroom; and that he must get back to his own apartment at all costs.

What do you do when you step out of the shower and find yourself in someone else’s home? You step back in the shower. It was crazy, all right—as senseless as a horse or a child running back into a burning building—but at the moment, its fairy-tale logic appealed to him. I’ll dash back into the shower, he told himself. (The shower was still going; he could hear it down the hall.) Once I’m back under the hot water, I’ll be safe. All this will be gone; all will be well again…

He had replaced the phone (beside an answering machine that definitely wasn’t his) and was about to sneak back into the hall to the bathroom when, above the sound of the water, he heard the slamming of a door—a heavier, more solid door than had ever existed in a New York apartment. The thud of footfalls and the scrape of metal echoed through the corridor.

The sound was unmistakable; panic seized his heart like a fist. Someone huge and clumsy was dragging something up a stone staircase.

Yes, staircase. There was no sense kidding himself: this was no apartment. He wasn’t even in the city. He was in an unknown house, he didn’t know where; and at this very moment, its occupant was coming up the stairs.

He stood in the doorway, trembling with indecision. He could step into the hall right now and greet whoever was approaching; he could acknowledge he was trespassing, admit that he was lost, and throw himself upon the other’s mercy. Maybe that was what he ought to do. At least, that way, there was a chance that maybe they could talk this whole thing over…

But maybe he didn’t have to give himself up; maybe he could get away with it. Maybe he could hide right here in this room, wait for the right moment, and somehow escape—flee the house or slip back into the shower—without ever being discovered.

It was a gamble either way, presenting risks beyond calculation. He could step out into the hall and take the consequences, or he could hide right here and pray that maybe, just maybe, he’d get off scot-free.

The only problem with hiding was that, if he was caught—discovered here in someone else’s bedroom dressed only in a towel, and sopping wet—the consequences would be much, much worse.

The footsteps came closer. They sounded huge.

He hid.

As he squeezed himself behind the open bedroom door, he realized, with dismay, that he should have remembered to turn off the light. Anyone entering the darkened hall would notice it immediately.

But it was already too late to turn it off; that, too, would be noticed. And anyway, the switch itself was on the opposite wall. There was no way he could reach it and remain concealed.

Down the hall, the footsteps paused. Several seconds passed. Then the silence was broken by what sounded like the opening of a door. The steps resumed, but softer now, and then seemed to recede, as if the newcomer—the occupant of the house, most likely—had disappeared into another room. From somewhere came the muffled clank of metal.

Crumley waited, listening. Whoever was out there remained nearby but busy with other things—at least for the moment. He felt chilled to the bone, standing here half naked with a puddle of cold water growing at his feet; he was shivering, as much from cold as from fear. But maybe if he hid here long enough and kept silent, the person out there would go away.

He stared at his new surroundings, which struck him, in his present predicament, as dangerously, almost obscenely, well lit. From where he stood, he could see an edge of rumpled bed and a section of expensive-looking bookcase—less than half the room, but enough to know that its occupant was a very different sort of person than he was. He felt a flash of anger at the bed, and perhaps a touch of envy; he’d never left his bed unmade, even as a boy, and had always been sure to put hospital corners on the blankets.

He scanned the contents of the bookcase. Instead of the familiar shelf of well-thumbed self-help books, biographies, and medieval histories that occupied one wall in his own room, the volumes here, most of them in dust jackets, looked newer; and judging from what he was able to read on their spines, they appeared to concern themselves with a single subject: crime and criminals.

Or rather, one criminal. He noted a few of the titles: The Count Jugula Murders. The Jugula File. The Mind of Count Jugula by Colin Wilson. Down for the Count by Ann Rule. Jugula Exposed by someone named Von Goeler.

Weird.

And even weirder: All in a row in the center of one shelf, resplendent in their glossy dust jackets, stood nine hardcover editions of something apparently written by the man himself, Confessions of a Serial Killer by Count Jugula.

Why in the world would anyone want so many copies of the same book?

The bottom shelf, he now noticed, held a mass of lurid red paperbacks bearing the very same more than a dozen in all—more than enough for even the most avid title, piled horizontally. There must have been collector. Why, Crumley wondered, would someone buy so many?

His eye was caught by light reflected from something mounted on the wall just beyond his head. He turned and saw that it was an inscribed photograph, carefully framed, of a plump Oriental woman; he recognized her, after a moment, as a newscaster he’d seen interviewing celebrities on network TV. Standing on tiptoe to cut down the glare, he read the inscription: To Count Jugula—Thanks for a fascinating afternoon!

It dawned on him what those multiple copies of Confessions of a Serial Killer were.

Author’s copies.

A clank of metal echoed up the hall, followed by the sound of footsteps. Crumley’s eyes widened; the steps were growing louder. He heard the floorboards creak as the occupant of the house—someone large and heavy—drew closer to where he was hiding.

The worst thing, he reasoned, with someone of that size, would be to jump out at him… No, the worst thing would be to do nothing. He should step into the hall right now; he should identify himself. It would go worse for him if he was discovered in here.

But he was paralyzed; his legs would not move. He stood frozen to the spot, watching with horror as a small stream of water from the puddle at his feet advanced slowly beneath the bedroom door.

Just beyond it, at the open doorway, the footsteps paused. Crumley, straining to listen, thought he heard the sound of breathing. It was barely audible—perhaps intentionally so. Not the thin, piercing sound of one who breathes through the nose, but the deeper sound of breathing through the mouth. Two long breaths. Three.

Then, with a hollow scrape of metal, the steps moved slowly on, advancing farther up the hall toward the bathroom.

Until this moment, above all thoughts of escape, Crumley had clung to a half-mad hope of dashing back into the safety of the shower. Now, however, with the author of Confessions of a Serial Killer headed in the very same direction, all such notions fled. The trick, he saw now, would be to get out of the damned house without getting caught.

And this would be the perfect chance.

Slipping around the door, Crumley peered warily into the hall. Outlined in the light streaming from the open bathroom doorway stood a wide, square-shouldered figure, partially enveloped by clouds of steam rising into the darkness. One hand held what looked like a barrel or a garbage can. Facing the light, with his broad back turned to Crumley, the man appeared to be staring into the little room, toward the shower.

Just as Crumley made his move, he noticed something else, something he wished he hadn’t. On the wall opposite the bathroom hung the painting he’d glimpsed in the mirror. He could see it in its entirety now, illuminated by the bathroom light; and just as he’d feared, it depicted nothing resembling a duck pond. From what he could make out, the subject was more a sort of anatomical study—a human hand, large, burly, and imperfectly rendered, holding by the hair a woman’s severed head.

But by this time he had crept into the hall and was tiptoeing swiftly in the other direction, toward the distant stairs, praying he was too light to make the floorboards creak—and if they did, that the shower would mask their sound.

Before he’d gone more than a few steps, the telephone rang again in the bedroom.

It was as loud and jarring as an alarm bell. He stopped dead; the game was up. He was old and skinny and wearing nothing but a towel; there was no way he’d escape the hulking creature behind him. He turned to face his antagonist, trying to say in one heartfelt expression, I’m harmless, please don’t kill me!

Down the hall, the man by the bathroom hadn’t moved. He continued to stare into the steamy little room.

The phone rang a second time—and still the man didn’t move.

Neither did Crumley, the doomed smile now frozen on his face.

Seconds later, from the bedroom, came an audible click, then a whirring, and then a voice, sinister and insinuating:

“Grrrreeeetings to you. Thees ees Count Jugula’s… D and D!” The speaker let out a screech of maniacal laughter that sounded as phony as the accent. “I’m tied up right now—or maybe tying up someone else! Eef you should leave your name and number, I’ll be sure to get back to you. Eef you don’t, I’ll be sure to get you!”

Throughout the message, Crumley had stood rooted to the spot, and the man in the hall hadn’t moved.

Now he did—away from Crumley. Farther down the hall. As if he hadn’t heard.

Like the deaf.

Crumley watched as the other shuffled slowly into the darkness. Yet he didn’t seize the chance to turn and run. He stood dazed as if poleaxed, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Even as the machine in the bedroom emitted an electronic beep, followed by another voice—a woman’s voice, requesting a brochure and leaving an address in Cleveland—Crumley didn’t move. The woman’s message was baffling, yet he was far more baffled by what had preceded it. It had left him stunned.

He’d gone through a lot of phone machines in his time, from cheesy and primitive to state-of-the-art; he knew how poorly they reproduced voices. But he recognized the voice he’d heard on this one, distorted though it was by the tape and the phony accent. It was his own.

In the shadows at the far end of the hall, he saw the hulking figure open another doorway, reach inside, flick on a light, and disappear into a room. It was clear that Crumley hadn’t been noticed and that the phone had gone unheard.

Pushing all questions from his mind and willing himself to move, Crumley whirled and hurried toward the stairway, where the smooth wooden floorboards abruptly gave way to the roughness of stone. Chilly as the wood had been beneath his bare feet, the stone felt even colder as he padded down the stairs. Behind him he could hear the echo of hollow metal as the man he’d just escaped from—a mere servant, it now seemed—emptied garbage cans.

By the time he’d reached the bottom step, he was still in a daze, but his spirits, paradoxically, had begun to lift. He found himself beneath a high vaulted ceiling in what was obviously the front room of the house. Directly ahead, down a short, shadowed passage, lay the entrance.

He gazed at his surroundings with a growing sense of wonder and relief, like a tourist who, having just survived an air crash, regards the airport’s souvenir shop and luggage carousel with the same astonishment he might normally have reserved for the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids. His odyssey through the chambers of the house, from shower down to foyer, so nightmarish until just a few seconds ago, had now begun to take on the quality of a dream—and perhaps even a good one. He was starting to feel comfortable here.

Best of all, there was a spot here to warm his feet, before an imposing stone fireplace almost too grand for the room, where flames fizzed and crackled on freshly stacked logs that looked as if they’d last the rest of the evening. An antique candelabra flickered atmospherically overhead, while the two electric lamps that provided most of the room’s light stood discreetly in the corners. Crumley was especially impressed by the tall grandfather clock, the sort he’d always wanted to own but had never had the space or money for, and by a grim-looking door near the foot of the stairs, adorned with iron bars and an improbably giant padlock, designed to look like the entrance to a dungeon but which was in fact, he decided, the doorway to a wine cellar, one that might well be worth a visit.

 

 

Now that he’d begun to get his bearings, he could see what this place actually was: an old stone house converted to an inn—in fact, it appeared, judging from the room and its furnishings, a sort of theme inn. There was even, by the door, a simple check-in counter, complete with oversize guest book and credit-card machine.

Determined to explore the house further—the house? he’d half begun to think of it as his house, for he sensed that the mystery was perhaps going to be solved in his favor—he wandered through another doorway into what appeared to be the main room. It was as deserted as the first, dimly lit, and dominated by an even larger fireplace, though at the moment it was bare. The only illumination came from a recessed light in the ceiling. Most of the floor was covered by a thin green carpet and, near the fireplace, by a slightly ratty bearskin rug; as he circled the room, the rug felt good against his feet. Along one wall a bay window revealed the dark shapes of trees and what may have been a lawn. Beyond the trees, the night looked almost impenetrable.

In the shadows against the farther wall, behind a row of high wooden chairs, stood a small but well-stocked bar. He crossed to it and, still in his damp towel, hoisted himself into one of the seats. The air here smelled pleasantly of liquor. On the bar top, just within the perimeter of light, lay a stack of printed cocktail napkins bearing a cartoon of a grinning ghoul in a cape with a high peaked collar. He noticed, with mingled relief and disappointment, that the ghoul’s face was so crude as to be unrecognizable; after the shock of hearing his voice on the tape, he’d half expected that the face would be a caricature of his own. The creature was welcoming guests into a forbidding-looking mansion, cartoon-gothic in style, surrounded by a flock of cartoon bats. A sign in front read COUNT JUGULA’S DEAD & DREADFAST.

Appalled by the pun, he winced and looked away—and noticed, on the wall above the bar, a set of framed pictures; or rather, he could see now, framed articles. They were in shadow, however; he couldn’t make out what they said. Snapping on a small clown-shaped novelty lamp, he got down from the chair and walked behind the bar to examine them.

The largest of them, an entire page from one of the supermarket tabloids, caught his eye first—not because of its size, but because it bore a muddy black-and-white photo of Crumley himself, or of a man who looked just like him, dressed in an expensive tie and jacket and standing, it appeared, before some sort of public building. He was grinning broadly; Crumley, though horrified at the context, was pleased to see how good he looked. The headline proclaimed PAROLED KILLER ALL SMILES NOW—BUT THE FANGS STILL SHOW.

Above it, and already slightly yellowed, hung a small newspaper editorial (“Blood Money”) expressing outrage that “thanks to the liberal court’s so-called ‘Count Jugula’ decision,” a mass murderer could now become rich while serving time in prison for his crimes. It accused the Count of “cashing in on his notoriety.”

And he’d apparently cashed in well, judging from the Money magazine article next to it: AN AUTHOR INVESTS PRUDENTLY—FROM HIS PRISON CELL. Nearby hung a photo, captioned Jugula Spills All, that looked as if it came from a local pennysaver. It depicted the Count, or Crumley, flourishing a pen before an open volume at a book signing, presumably after his release.

The Count’s picture appeared again, along with several others Crumley didn’t recognize, on the cover of a true-crime monthly called CrimeBeat. The story, “Men Who Kill Women—and the Women Who Love Them,” contained a display quote in large red type that sprang out from the page: THERE’S NEVER BEEN A MURDERER, NO MATTER HOW DEPRAVED, THAT DIDN’T HAVE HIS COTERIE OF FANS.

Beneath it hung an illustrated feature from a travel magazine (COUNT ON THIS INNKEEPER—FOR A VACATION OFF THE BEATEN TRACK), describing how, “mellowed and rehabilitated,” the former convict now devoted himself to his so-called “D-and-D.” He was, the article declared, “the most affable of hosts, his violence all behind him: ‘I’ve gotten it out of my system,’ he explains. ‘I want to get on with my life.’ ” A photo showed him smiling genially as he greeted two female guests, while their bags were carried upstairs by the shambling creature Crumley had avoided earlier. “I like to call him Igor,” the Count confided in the caption, “but his real name is Bruce!”

A final photo, a flattering full-face publicity shot, appeared to have been clipped from the TV section of a newspaper. The caption said it all: Nathan “Count Jugula” Crumley tells the NBC audience that life outside prison has been good to him.

He reached for the nearest bottle, opened it, and drank.

He drank a goodbye to Nat Crumley—goodbye to Nat, hello to the Count—and a toast to his peculiar good fortune. For more than half a century he’d led a life of restraint and strict routine, holding his demons in check, and all the while another man, the man he might have been, had been out in the world accomplishing great things. Instead of reading books on self-realization, Jugula had acted.

Now, thanks to the tiniest of breaks in that routine, with a single unwitting step out of character, he was that man.

Or almost. He certainly didn’t feel very liberated. He was still an angry soul, a finicky misfit who smashed his possessions and forced himself to paint within the lines. Not like the genial Count Jugula.

But then, the Count was different; he had, so he claimed, gotten it all out of his system. Crumley had not. Not yet.

He was going to have to think about that.

Meanwhile, he had new responsibilities: the house to maintain, a reputation to uphold, a world full of enemies to occupy and obsess him. And right now there was cleaning up to do; in the second-floor bathroom the water was still running, and he was still damp. He would have to wipe up all the spots where he’d been dripping. Guests were on their way, that’s what the woman had said. The Wykoffs, they were called. He would have to get things ready for them. Tightening the towel around his waist, he hurried upstairs to turn off the shower.