Free Shade of Pale by Greg; Kihn Page A

suitably photogenic, he hungered.
    They walked past the street people and garbage cans toward the Star Hotel, a run-down establishment that rented rooms by the hour or by the lifetime, whichever came first.
    As they passed an alley, Red happened to glance down into the shadows, past a row of overflowing garbage cans, and saw an extraordinary woman.
    Her flaming red hair caught his eye. When he focused on her, her beautiful, wan face seemed to glow like winter moonlight.
    She stared at him, her big eyes wet and accusing. His heart fluttered, and he shivered slightly.
    Who is this bitch? Why is she staring at me? Does she know who I am?
    He felt a peculiar moment, as if a tendril of energy had darted out from her and stung him. She pulled his attention away from Dolly and held it, locked onto the other woman’s ghostly face.
    He almost stopped walking, almost took a step toward her.
    Then he noticed pink tears unevenly bisecting her pale visage. She’s crying, and her makeup’s running . But the moment he thought that, his mind rejected it. There’s more to it than that. Why are her tears pink? What kind of makeup does that?
    He got the uncomfortable feeling that she could look inside him, that his dark desires were, to her, laid bare. A flicker of fear fired through him, resonating harmonically between the recesses of his troubled soul.
    What the fuck?
    This ain’t right .
    Why is she standing in that alley?
    And why is she staring at me?
    She was doing something with her hands. Red squinted into the shadows to see. The rest of the world seemed suddenly to melt away, the city and its noise, and Red was suspended in a dream.
    He walked now in slow motion, time stretched like just before an accident. The rest of the universe slowed, too. Then he realized what she was doing with her hands.
    She’s combing her hair .
    The mystery woman’s eyes followed him as he crossed the mouth of the alley.
    Red didn’t like the way she made him feel.
    He got the notion that she could read his mind, and it made him extremely uneasy. His heartbeat accelerated, in weird juxtaposition to the leaden slowness of the moment.
    The intensity of her stare seemed to create a tunnel vision that pulled his eyes.
    Red looked back at Dolly; she hadn’t noticed a thing. She walked along, oblivious, a few paces in front of him, chewing a fresh stick of gum and acting like the queen of the block.
    As soon as he’d passed the alley, out of sight of those haunted, accusing eyes, he felt better.
    Whoever she is, she’s got nothing on me .
    He tried to concentrate on Dolly, but the ghostly face of the woman in the alley stayed with him, her likeness burned onto the retina of his mind’s eye like a flashbulb afterimage. He thought how unnatural she looked, how disturbing … how white her skin and how red her hair. Pallid as a corpse, yet beautiful. Supernaturally so.
    The gothic rock song by Procol Harum, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” floated through his head, its Hammond B-3 organ throbbing grandly. It was Red’s all-time favorite classic rock tune, and now, triggered by the woman in the alley, it flooded his consciousness.
    Gary Brooker’s tortured vocals bit into Keith Reid’s surrealistic lyrics.
    â€œHer face at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale,” Red mumbled.
    Red shivered though the night was not cold.
    Then it passed.
    He shifted his gaze back to Dolly’s tight little butt as she wiggled up the street. He blotted out the memory of the beautiful ashen-faced specter and concentrated on other thoughts.
    They entered Dolly’s hotel and went directly to her room, a squalid little cubicle on the third floor.
    His hands began to shake a little as soon as he got past the deserted lobby. By the time they reached the second floor, he was sweating and breathing rapidly. He could smell her perfume, and it intoxicated him like a cheap, pungent narcotic. His hands fumbled