Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,43

out the mantel and boarded over the grate with a panel of cheap plywood. In defiance of landlord and fire laws, Mercer had torn away the panel and unblocked the chimney. The fireplace was small with a grate designed for coal fires, but Mercer found it pleasant on winter nights. The hearth was of chipped ceramic tiles of a blue-and-white pattern—someone had told him they were Dresden. Mercer had scraped away the grime from the tiles, found an ornate brass grille in a flea market near Seymour. It remained to replace the mantel. Behind the plywood panel, where the original mantel had stood, was an ugly smear of bare brick and lathing. And Gradie had such a mantel.

“We ought to straighten up in here,” Linda told him. She was doing a sort of half-dance around the room, scoopingup debris and singing a line to the record every now and then.

“I was wondering if I could get you to pose for me this morning? ”

“Hell, it’s too nice a day to stand around your messy old studio.”

“Just for a while. While the sun’s right. If I don’t get my figure studies handed in by the end of the month, I’ll lose my incomplete.”

“Christ, you’ve only had all spring to finish them.”

“We can run down to Gradie’s afterward. You’ve been wanting to see the place.”

“And the famous mantel.”

“Perhaps if the two of us work on him?”

The studio—so Mercer dignified it—was an upstairs front room, thrust outward from the face of the house and onto the roof of the veranda, as a sort of cold weather porch. Three-quarter-length casement windows with diamond panes had at one time swung outward on three sides, giving access onto the tiled porch roof. An enterprising landlord had blocked over the windows on either side, converting it into a small bedroom. The front wall remained a latticed expanse through which the morning sun flooded the room. Mercer had adopted it for his studio, and now Linda’s houseplants bunched through his litter of canvases and drawing tables.

“Jesus, it’s a nice day!”

Mercer halted his charcoal, scowled at the sheet. “You moved your shoulder again,” he accused her.

“Lord, can’t you hurry it?”

“Genius can never be hurried.”

“Genius my ass.” Linda resumed her pose. She was lean, high-breasted and thin-hipped, with a suggestion of freckles under her light tan. A bit taller and she would have had a career as a fashion model. She had taken enough dance to pose quite well—did accept an occasional modelling assignment at the art school when cash was short.

“Going to be a good summer.” It was that sort of morning.

“Of course.” Mercer studied his drawing. Not particularly inspired, but then he never did like to work in charcoal. The sun picked bronze highlights through her helmet of curls, the feathery patches of her mons and axillae. Mercer’s charcoal poked dark blotches at his sketch’s crotch and armpits. He resisted the impulse to crumple it and start over.

Part of the problem was that she persisted in twitching to the beat of the music that echoed lazily from downstairs. She was playing that Fleetwood Mac album to death— had left the changer arm askew so that the record would repeat until someone changed it. It didn’t help him concentrate—although he’d memorized the record to the point he no longer needed listen to the words:

I been alone

All the years

So many ways to count the tears

I never change I never will

I’m so afraid the way I feel

Days when the rain and the sun are gone

Black as night

Agony’s torn at my heart too long

So afraid

Slip and I fall and I die

When he glanced at her again, something was wrong. Linda’s pose was no longer relaxed. Her body was rigid, her expression tense.

“What is it?”

She twisted her face toward the windows, brought one arm across her breasts. “Someone’s watching me.”

With an angry grunt, Mercer tossed aside the charcoal, shouldered through the open casement to glare down at the street.

The sidewalks were deserted. Only the usual trickle of Saturday morning traffic drifted past. Mercer continued to scowl balefully as he studied the parked cars, the vacant weed-lot across the street, the tangle of kudzu in his front yard. Nothing.

“There’s nothing out there.”

Linda had shrugged into a paint-flecked fatigue jacket. Her eyes were worried as she joined him at the window.

“There’s something. I felt all crawly all of a sudden.”

The roof of the veranda cut off view on the windows from the near sidewalk, and from the far sidewalk it was impossible to see into