"Dan Simmons - Shave And A Haircut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

the pole outside, the red spiralling down, and by the name painted on the broad
window, the letters grown scabrous as the gold paint ages and flakes away. While
the most ex-pensive hair salons now bear the names of their owners, and the
shopping mall franchises offer sickening cutenessesтАФHairport, Hair Today: Gone
Tomorrow, Hair We Are, Headlines, Shear Masters, The Head Hunter,
In-Hair-itance, and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseumтАФthe name of this shop is
eminently forgettable. It is meant to be so. This shop offers neither styling nor unisex
cuts. If your hair is dirty when you enter, it will be cut dirty; there are no shampoos
given here. While the franchises demand $15 to $30 for a basic haircut, the cost here
has not changed for a decade or more. It occurs to the potential new customer
immediately upon entering that no one could live on an income based upon such low
rates. No one does. The potential customer usually beats a hasty re-treat, put off by
the too-low prices, by the darkness of the place, by the air of dusty decrepitude
exuded from both the establishment itself and from its few waiting custom-ers,
invariably silent and staring, and by a strange sense of tension bordering upon threat
which hangs in the stale air.
Before entering, I pause a final moment to stare in the window of the barbershop.
For a second I can see only a reflection of the street and the silhouette of a man
more shadow than substanceтАФme. To see inside, one has to step closer to the glass
and perhaps cup hands to one's temples to reduce the glare. The blinds are drawn
but I find a crack in the slats. Even then there is not much to see. A dusty window
ledge holds three desiccated cacti and an assort-ment of dead flies. Two barber
chairs are just visible through the gloom; they are of a sort no longer made: black
leather, white enamel, a high headrest. Along one wall, half a dozen
uncomfortable-looking chairs sit empty and two low tables show a litter of
magazines with covers torn or missing entirely. There are mirrors on two of the three
interior walls, but rather than add light to the long, narrow room, the infinitely
receding reflections seem to make the space appear as if the barbershop itself were a
dark reflection in an age-dimmed glass.
A man is standing there in the gloom, his form hardly more substantial than my
silhouette on the window. He stands next to the first barber chair as if he were
waiting for me.
He is waiting for me.
I leave the sunlight of the street and enter the shop.


"Vampires," said Kevin. "They're both vampires."
"Who're vampires?" I asked between bites on my ap-ple. Kevin and I were twenty
feet up in a tree in his back yard. We'd built a rough platform there which passed as
a treehouse. Kevin was ten, I was nine.
"Mr. Innis and Mr. Denofrio," said Kevin. "They're both vampires."
I lowered the Superman comic I'd been reading. "They're not vampires," I said.
"They're barbers."
"Yeah," said Kevin, "but they're vampires too. I just figured it out."
I sighed and sat back against the bole of the tree. It was late autumn and the
branches were almost empty of leaves. Another week or two and we wouldn't be
using the treehouse again until next spring. Usually when Kevin an-nounced that he'd
just figured something out, it meant trouble. Kevin O'toole was almost my age, but
sometimes it seemed that he was five years older and five years youn-ger than me at
the same time. He read a lot. And he had a weird imagination. "Tell me," I said.