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half-silly doing a recce inside a place obviously designed to be a spot for
what Doc had told him was the entertainment of half-wits and children, but he
knew from hard experience that nothing was ever as it seemed in the
Deathlands.
Still, his eye wasn't ready for a sight such as this.
From floor to ceiling were off-white cardboard boxes filled with magazines,
wall pegs adorned with packaged miniature toys and games, racks of compact
discs and black vinyl LPs, and an array of other colorful debris that Ryan
didn't even pretend to recognize. Even the surface of the drop ceiling was
adorned with more of the posters as seen on the front of the establishment. As
Ryan stepped through the glass door into the morass, a tinkly bell jingled
overhead to announce his arrival.
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"Wasn't kidding about the closet part in the name of this place, lover,"
Krysty said, walking in close behind him. "Going to be crowded in here."
"Feel anything?" Ryan asked, hoping Krysty's latent psi abilities might pick
out any dangers hidden behind the crowded piles of boxes.
"Just claustrophobic. Only danger here as far as I can tell is mebbe having
something fall on you."
Ryan glanced back and grinned. "You break it, you bought it, darlin'."
"Wow," Dean breathed, his eyes open wide. "Look at all this stuff!"
Ryan pressed forward, allowing the others to come inside the small pathway
that wound its way along the store's contents to the back counter.
"That smell," Doc whispered. "Wait, let me place it in the proper context!"
Jak wrinkled his nose. "Stinks. Smell sweat."
"Yeah, somebody needs to wash their ass," Dean agreed.
"No, I speak not of the stench of unwashed flesh, young Cawdor. I'm talking
about the heavenly aroma of old paper. Rotting pulp."
"Dust, you mean," Krysty said, running a finger along a box top and bringing
it up coated with fine dirt.
The smell was unfamiliar. In the Deathlands it was quite unusual to find much
in the way of printed material, new or old. The larger villes might have their
own little news sheets run off on antique printing presses Doc had spied a
version of this in Freedom and had happily grabbed one up in search of any
printed information, only to find it was a series of advertisements for the
endless array of mall stores but in the poorer sections, more often than not
paper was viewed as nothing more than useful kindling or toilet tissue.
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As for older, predark vintage books and magazines, most of the paper goods had
long since crumbled into dust due to the abnormal weather conditions around
the globe or vanished into nothingness in the long nuclear winter immediately
following skydark. There were rare exceptions, the odd baron and a hoard of
books.
A fair estimate of the general populace of Deathlands would probably put most
men and women in the category of the functionally illiterate. There was no
time for reading for the enjoyment of books, nor was there a viable system of
delivering written letters or messages. Written contracts with signatures were
a thing of the past, except for barons who delighted in thrusting papers down
for hired help to make their signature mark without even knowing what
agreements such contracts contained.
Kollector's Kloset contained the most pulp paper any of the group had ever
seen.
One wall was devoted to bagged examples of horror magazines. Ryan's eye
traveled over the lurid covers before one caught his complete and undivided
attention.
As he sighted the predark magazine, everyone heard a sound that was familiar
yet disturbing all the same.
Ryan was laughing, a deep-from-the-gut laugh followed by a few guffaws and
chuckles.
"You okay?" Jak asked carefully. The albino hadn't cared much for this shop
from the beginning, and now Ryan's mirth was starting to set him more on edge.
Ryan rarely laughed, unless it was in irony or bitterness.
This laughter was genuine, the kind that came without conscious thought or
warning, the kind of natural laughter few people were able to give of
themselves.
Ryan nodded toward the wall of monster magazines. "Check out the one on the
bottom left there," he said, still amused. "Does the ghoul on the front in the
fancy knee britches look familiar to anybody besides me?"
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Dean's young voice was the next to ring out in laughter, followed in turn by
Krysty's chuckling, then Jak's bark of surprise and amusement. Unable to
contain his curiosity, Doc bent over and peered intently at the indicated
magazine cover.
The colors were lurid green on mustard yellow. The center of the cover was
dominated by a tall, spindly man dressed in a long greenish coat with a lean
face, hawk nose and thinning white hair. The man was waving a hand in a
gesture of entry into the magazine's interior.
"
Creepy
," Doc read off the top of the cover. "
Creepy Magazine
."
"You forget the rest, Doc," Ryan added, reading the blurb next to the figure.
"Says here that Uncle Creepy Welcomes You Inside."
"Yes, yes, I see that. What I am missing is the implied humor."
"That Uncle Creepy& he looks just like you, Doc!" Dean piped up, in a gale of
giggling.
Doc frowned. "Nonsense! This fellow looks nothing like the proud countenance
of "
"Quiet!" Ryan whispered. "Somebody's in the back. I guess the guy who owns the
place finally decided to make an appearance."
Ryan's words were proven true when a fat, bearded man-child waddled out from a
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back room and took up a stance behind the long row of glass showcases.
He looked to be carrying about three-hundred-plus pounds on his
five-foot-four-
inch frame. His hair was long and greasy, and appeared to have been dyed a
phony jet black that never existed in nature. His beard was also the same
unnatural color of night. He wore a T-shirt two sizes too small. On the shirt
was a picture of a tall man with pointed ears spouting the command Live Long
And Prosper.
Some dark brown gravy stains also adorned the shop owner's attire above the
moon white expanse of flesh visible between his shirttail and waistband.
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Ryan kept expecting him to knock over one of the many precariously stacked
piles of books, toys and junk with either his wide ass or wider stomach, but
he was nimble and seemed to possess an uncanny sense of grace when it came to
navigating the store's many possessions.
"Greetings and salutations. My name is Chet. I am the proprietor of this, my
humble establishment," the bearded man said. "Welcome to the finest array of
predark comics and collectibles on the East Coast. If we don't have what
you're looking for, we can find it for you with our search service for a small
fee."
"More fees," Jak sniffed.
"Pardon me," Doc said, moving to the counter. "I cannot help but notice you
deal in paper goods." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]