Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online

be scared off. But they never were. Any of them.
    Her breath went in like a train through a tunnel, fast and sharp and leaving emptiness behind it. " Stag ? Me?"
    He nodded. No encouragement, no deterrent.
    She said something to a girl beside her, a fat girl with pimples (why did the best-looking ones always come with their comparison-friends, so they looked that much better?), and gave her the Stag Preston We Love You sign. Then she turned, with Roman candles in her eyes, and followed Shelly Morgenstern into the theatre.
    Four years , he thought. Four years, and how did it all start? Was it that request from the Kentucky State Fair for Colonel Jack Freeport to judge the talent contest?
    Had it started then, when they'd met Stag in Louisville? Or did it go further back, much further back to the days when Shelly had been trying to break away from the orthodox enslavement of his home, when he had discovered he could no longer believe in the terrible God of his father, and worshipped more easily at the heavenly throne of Success (and Money is his profit)? Did it go back to Jack Freeport, who needed more, more, more of everything … to rebuild a name that had been shattered as far back as the burning of Atlanta? Had it begun with hungers, or with simple supply-and-demand?
    He knew how it had started.
    And as he walked the little redhead into the lion's mouth, he thought about it … about the four years.
    Well tell it, then. Tell it, but make it quick.
    We've still got three shows to do.
     
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Two
    Great White Father and the ferret. That was how they looked from the corner of the eye, in that side-of-sight glance hurriedly thrown by people at airports. First came the big man in the white linen suit. He paused at the head of the aluminum stairs, mopping his desert brow with a monogrammed handkerchief.
    Even as his hand came away from his face, the armpits of his white-on-white shirt darkened through with perspiration. Almost maliciously, he turned his face up to the sun, and the Louisville heat greeted him inhospitably.
    "Cursed state," he muttered, "always said it should have been plowed under by God." He spoke with a thick Georgia accent, a touch of nobility, a touch of arrogance.
    He was big in small ways. His face was almost leonine, with a snowy nimbus of hair capping his massive head splendidly. His hands were blocky, yet had a suppleness suggestive of fine Swiss watchmaking or brain surgery. He stood momentarily, staring from bleached-out eyes — the image of Great White Father — framed against the open port of the big Eastern Convair 440; he surveyed the crowd jammed against the fence.
    With a satisfied tone he called back over his shoulder, "Wharton sent no one, Shelly. I don't see any badges from the fair."
    Then he deplaned from the twin-engine Silver Falcon.
    Behind him, squinting, the wiry Palm Beach-suited ferret shied from the gagging humidity. It was not so much the olive coloring of his lean, hard face as the diamond-intensity of his black eyes that gave the impression of stealth … deviousness … attentiveness. He cursed softly, a Manhattan twang, and gripped the strap of the thin, cabretta-grain attaché case more tightly. It did not swing idly from his left hand. Shelly Morgenstern hurried after the older man.
    Almost before they had passed the hurricane fence with its strict admonition of
    GASOLINE FUMES
NO SMOKING
DANGER!
    the younger man had forked a cigarette from his lapel pocket and had wedged it between his lips, firm in a corner of his thin-lipped mouth.
    Even inside the terminal building of Standiford Field the heat was monstrous. The big man stopped abruptly and leaned against the wall. He mopped at the perspiration on his jowls. "Shelly," he said snappishly, "give me one of those cursed tablets."
    The ferret jammed the attaché case between his feet and fumbled a small plastic vial from a jacket pocket. Unsnapping the lid he tumbled a pale blue tablet onto his