Free Plague by Graham Masterton Page A

frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance,
and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips.
    His name was
Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood’s hottest new property.
    If you ever saw
The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you’d remember the face.
    Or at least a smoother and younger version of it – a version that
remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been
watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer
hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.
    The door from
the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in
his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim
shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his
short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.
    The young man
looked at the blank screen. ‘Have you finished sulking yet?’ he asked. ‘Or are
you going to watch the other one as well?’
    Herbert Gaines
didn’t answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention
was no longer fixed on the faded memories of. 1936, but on
the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.
    The young man
came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light
illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine
plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines dosed his eyes.
    ‘I don’t know
why you’re sulking,’ said Nicholas. ‘I never said anything unpleasant.’
    Gaines opened
his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did
so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.
    ‘You’re so sensitive,’
Nicholas went on. ‘This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship.
Least, that’s what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days
is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old
movies of yours.’
    Gaines’ mouth
turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from
answering.
    ‘I sometimes
think you want to fight,’ said Nicholas. ‘I sometimes think you take umbrage on
purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won’t work, Herbert. It won’t. I’m not
the vicious kind. But damn it all, I’m the kind that gets tired of fights.’
    Herbert Gaines
listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder
and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid
eye.
    ‘When you’re
tired of fighting me, Nick,’ he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, ‘then
you’re tired of loving me.’
    Nicholas
finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines
smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.
    Nicholas paced
from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines’ chair –
tense and exasperated.
    ‘You won’t
understand, will you? You’re too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and
uneasy nostalgia. Why don’t you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open
up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn’t even born
when you made those movies!’
    Herbert Gaines
looked up. ‘You were there though,’ he said, in his throaty voice.
    Nicholas was
about to say something else, but he stopped and looked quizzical.
    ‘What do you
mean?’
    ‘Precisely what I say. You were there. Haven’t you seen
yourself?’
    ‘Seen myself? I
don’t...’
    Herbert Gaines
put down the cigarette holder and laboriously got out of his chair.
    Nicholas
watched him uneasily as he walked across to the bookshelves, and took down a
large Film Pictorial Annual for 1938. The old man put the book on his desk, and
opened it out. Then he beckoned Nicholas over.
    ‘Look,’ he
said, pointing with his pale, elegant finger to a large