999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [135]
“I’ll just fetch my shoes from my room.”
“You don’t want to bump into the old lot up there. They’ll be wet, won’t they?”
“Who?” Shone demanded, then regained enough sense of himself to answer his own question with a weak laugh. “My shoes, you mean. They’re the only ones I’ve brought with me.”
“I’ll find you something once you’re in your place,” she said, opening the door opposite the television lounge, and stooped lower to hurry him. As soon as he trailed after her she bustled the length of the dining room and patted a small isolated table until he accepted its solitary straight chair. This faced the room and was boxed in by three long tables, each place at which was set like his with a plastic fork and spoon. Beyond the table opposite him velvet curtains shifted impotently as the windows trembled with rain. Signed photographs covered much of the walls—portraits of comedians he couldn’t say he recognized, looking jolly or amusingly lugubrious. “We’ve had them all,” Daph said. “They kept us going. It’s having fun keeps the old lot alive.” Some of this might have been addressed not just to him, because she was on her way out of the room. He barely had time to observe that the plates on the Welsh dresser to his left were painted on the wood, presumably to obviate breakage, before the residents crowded in.
A disagreement over the order of entry ceased at the sight of him. Some of the diners were scarcely able to locate their places for gazing at him rather more intently than he cared to reciprocate. Several of them were so inflated that he was unable to determine their gender except by their clothes, and not even thus in the case of the most generously trousered of them, whose face appeared to be sinking into a nest of flesh. Contrast was provided by a man so emaciated his handless wristwatch kept sliding down to his knuckles. Unity and Amelia sat facing Shone, and then, to his dismay, the last of the eighteen seats was occupied by the woman he’d found in the bath, presently covered from neck to ankles in a black sweater and slacks. When she regarded him with an expression of never having seen him before and delight at doing so now he tried to feel some relief, but he was mostly experiencing how all the diners seemed to be awaiting some action from him. Their attention had started to paralyze him when Daph and Mr. Snell reappeared through a door Shone hadn’t noticed beside the Welsh dresser.
The manager set about serving the left-hand table with bowls of soup while Daph hurried over, brandishing an especially capacious pair of the white cloth slippers Shone saw all the residents were wearing. “We’ve only these,” she said, dropping them at his feet. “They’re dry, that’s the main thing. See how they feel.”
Shone could almost have inserted both feet into either of them. “I’ll feel a bit of a clown, to tell you the truth.”
“Never mind, you won’t be going anywhere.”
Shone poked his feet into the slippers and lifted them to discover whether the footwear had any chance of staying on. At once all the residents burst out laughing. Some of them stamped as a form of applause, and even Snell produced a fleeting grateful smile as he and Daph retreated to the kitchen. Shone let his feet drop, which was apparently worth another round of merriment. It faded as Daph and Snell came out with more soup, a bowl of which the manager brought Shone, lowering it over the guest’s shoulder before spreading his fingers on either side of him. “Here’s Tommy Thomson for you,” he announced, and leaned down to murmur in Shone’s ear. “That’ll be all right, won’t it? Sounds better.”
At that moment Shone’s name was among his lesser concerns. Instead he gestured at the plastic cutlery. “Do you think I could—”
Before he had time to ask for metal utensils with a knife among them, Snell moved away as though