William Sanders - Jennifer, Just Before Midnight

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 23.62KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

WILLIAM SANDERS

JENNIFER, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT

IT WAS JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT when Graham saw the woman at the bar. Or rather

that

was when he noticed her; she had, he realized, been standing there for some

time, and his eyes must have picked up her presence repeatedly, but only as

another figure in the human swirl around him. She was young and pretty, but

that

was true of most of the women in the room, and, as far as Graham had noticed,

those attending the convention in general. The con scene had definitely

undergone major evolution in that regard in the last decade or two. Either

that,

Graham reflected sourly, or the advancing middle years had affected his

perceptions. That sounded eminently plausible.

Be that as it might, the hotel bar had been lined all evening with

bright-faced,

trim-haunched young women -- you weren't supposed to call them "girls"

anymore,

though if some of the ones drinking here tonight were twenty-one he was H.P.

Lovecraft -- flashing perfect teeth and displaying, from beneath severely

abbreviated ensembles, a great deal of smooth, uniformly tanned skin. Graham

had

admired them in a vague distant way, as he might have admired the lines of a

fast sports car without feeling any real desire to drive it. They seemed

almost

an alien species; their reality barely touched his.

This one, however, was looking straight at him.

There was no doubt about it. She had turned clear around, to stand with her

back

to the bar, and her gaze was full on Graham. It was hard to read her

expression

from across the dim and smoky room, but he thought she was smiling.

And here she came now, pushing off from the bar with her elbows, moving

gracefully through the crowd, holding her drink carefully in front of her with

both hands. As she passed, men turned their heads to look --one large young

fellow in a Klingon costume spilled beer on his lap, watching the motion of

her

hips, and got a blistering look from the little redhead beside him -- and, the

con scene having evolved in more than one respect, so did quite a few women.

But Graham's primary reaction was to groan silently, and then to raise his

drink

and down a large and hasty swallow of bourbon. Not now, he thought and wanted

scream, Christ, not now of all times, I knew I shouldn't have come to this

stupid thing --

"I don't even want to go to the stupid thing," he had said, Wednesday morning.

"I hate conventions."

"You used to love them," Margaret reminded him. "You know you did, Keith. We

had

some good times at the cons."

"That was a different scene. Nowadays -- " He shook his head, a little

angrily,

a lot tiredly: He hadn't had much sleep the night before. Or any other night,

for longer than he could recall.

"It's not the way it used to be," he told Margaret. "Now, most of the cons you

go to, it's wall-to-wall Trekkies and role-players and costume freaks. And New

Agers, and grown men and women whose lives peaked the first time they saw The

Rocky Horror Picture Show -- "

"Oh, come on. The cons always did attract oddballs and misfits. That was half

the fun, wasn't it? And," she added, "I'll not mention how a certain elongated

young Nebula nominee was dressed the first time a certain promising young

illustrator laid eyes on him."

"Sure." Graham had to grin briefly at the memory. "But no matter how silly we

got, there was always the basic premise that this was about certain types of

written fiction, and the people who wrote it and read it. Nowadays, half the

guests at the average con don't read at all and don't see why they should."

He stopped, wondering why he was ranting like this. He sat down in the

uncomfortable chair beside Margaret's bed and took her hand in both of his,

feeling the bones through the frighteningly thin covering of flesh. "I'm

sorry,"

he said. "But really, I don't want to go."

"But it's something you need to do," she insisted. "You already promised the

committee -- "

"They'll understand. They know about you. I already explained that I might not

be able to make it."

"Bullshit," she said distinctly. "There's no reason whatever that you can't

go.

Either I'll be all right or I won't, and if I'm not there won't be anything

you

or anyone else can do about it."

She raised her head an inch or so from the pillow. "God damn it, Keith, I'm

not

going to let you waste any more of your life haunting my bedside. You know

what

they said -- it could happen any time, or I could still be lying here this

time

next year. You're fifty-four years old. You don't have that kind of time to

throw away."

Her head fell back; she breathed deeply for a moment, looking up at the

ceiling

with pain-widened eyes. Those eyes, Graham thought with a bottomless sorrow,

those wonderful violet eyes. Nothing else remained of the Margaret of years

past; her face was now no more than a pallid mask of lined and taut-drawn

skin,

and beneath the kerchief on her head was only bare scalp where that dense

red-brown mane would never grow again. The wasted shape beneath the stiff

white

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

William Sanders - Jennifer, Just Before Midnight.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

William Sanders - Jennifer, Just Before Midnight

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: