Dark Delicacies III: Haunted by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

After clicking through my local Yellow Pages, I emerged from the destitute darkness of my humble San Fernando Valley abode into the scorching, relentless sun that shrank my underdeveloped pupils into pinholes. Sol’s glare was so white-hot that it took several minutes before my brain could process my surroundings. When the world around me had irised back into visibility, I climbed into the Beemer to do some shopping.

One benefit of being out of work: traffic was light as I made my way over Coldwater Canyon from the Valley to the Basin. Pico Boulevard was filling with the kosher lunch crowd at its numerous delis that punctuated the car repair lots, the used-book stores, the faded fabric shops, and the medical supply houses. I parked and pumped the meter with all the change I could round up, and found that it wasn’t the medical supply houses that offered what I was looking for, but surgical supplies I sought. I suppose Home Depot would have served my needs as well as what I was looking for here, but as a movie guy (okay, fine, television guy), the visual mattered to me. Well, normally the surgical supply houses were limited to those only within the medical profession, but after a couple of hours and a half-dozen triple soy latte espressos trolling the boulevard, I stepped into the dark, dusty, cobwebbed little den that proffered all I had hoped for and more.

Though the surroundings within the tiny Silver Elite Surgical Supply store were grimy and ill-attended at best, the displays of gleaming, hungry scalpels, cutters, and other flesh-rending devices were immaculate. They stopped the heart; these challenged the gorgeous, horrific creations of the Mantle Twins in Dead Ringers. As I stood alone in the shadowy seemingly abandoned little shop, I felt the theatrical stillness rent by a ripple in the air and the shuffling of leather on the grimy floor.

“May I help you?” wheezed through the tiny shop, barely more voice than breath.

I looked up, then down to find the proprietor, a grizzled, hunched little man of indeterminate ancientness. His eyes, under the melting brow, were a pale ice blue beneath the milk of cataract, and peered out over the luggage of drooping lower lids. His liver-spotted scalp was studded with a few coarse white bristles pretending to be hairs, shellacked and pomaded across the cranium. He was bent over, a frail Quasimodo in the form of a permanent four-and-a-half-foot question mark. His surprising solicitous smile was toothless.

“I need some surgical instruments,” I told him.

“Hence your presence in a surgical supply shop.” But his sarcastic reply was delivered with such an ingratiating grin that I did not feel insulted. “Are you a member of the profession?”

“Well, I hope to be.”

“Ah. A student.”

“Exactly. A student.” I stood over the display case, taking in the instruments that gleamed in theatrical light. “These are beautiful.”

“Thank you. I’ve made them all since we opened, back in 1948.”

“Wait—you mean you actually craft these instruments yourself?”

He smiled again, and if there were blood coursing through his Paleolithic veins, he’d have blushed.

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