The Road to Vent Haven: Ghosts in the Gullet

• I Was Made to Love You
• My Brave Boy

Joachim Lask

"This is Vent Haven? This was why you convinced me to flee a crime scene with stolen property under my arm?"

"You can't see it," the dummy said, "but trust me: I'd be rolling my eyes if I could. Of course this isn't Vent Haven, not the one you are taking me to once we clear up the little complication of Randy's murder. This convention is sponsored by them. Free admission to the museum for anyone who attends the con. Otherwise, you weren't getting into Vent Haven short of breaking and entering, no matter how damn charming you seem to think you are. Also, I am not 'stolen property,' schmuck, and you'd be a damn fool to hang out around a murder scene bragging that you were some innocent little princess."

"You lied to me." This didn't sound like an accusation, no matter how much I meant it as one. It was a statement of fact, muted by my exhaustion.

The sunlight shined off the lacquer of Woodrow's hard face. I wanted to close his eyes as though the glare of morning would hurt them. Among dummies, I counted few of them as friends. I would not have driven through the night for many of them, even prompted by our associate's bloody death.

"So, I lied to get out of a murder scene. This is your big surprise? You should be thanking me for having a clear head while you were running around, contaminating the room with your hair and sweat."

I needed to move soon, or I was going to pass out in my car. I could almost get away with that outside a vent convention, but it wasn't worth chancing. Some well-meaning ventriloquist might decide the cops needed to do a wellness check. Maybe they'd let me go, but my name would be on the record somewhere: "Charles Lavender, asleep in a car, told to either check-in or move along." Someone would make the connection, coupled with the oddity that is the ventriloquism scene.

I closed my eyes to focus my thoughts but felt the trap of sleep snap almost before I could stop it. "Did you actually see Randy murdered?"

"If the Adequate Rando had treated me with a fraction of the TLC he wasted on groupies, I would have been out there to see everything," Woodrow said, more defensive than offended. He knew that this conversation would come when I discovered he did not know the killer's identity, and so he had prepared for my anger. "But I heard enough. The person who killed him? They were telling him that he had better not show up or they would kill him here. I guess they couldn't wait, but the way they talked, they were still going to show. Even his murder wasn't going to stop them." He gave a mirthless laugh. "You know, most people? They would get out of town and lay low after slitting a guy's throat. Not vents, though. They'd go exactly where it'd be the stupidest."

I didn't point out that we were precisely where a murderous ventriloquist was headed, meaning I was as stupid and suspicious. Still, this information was the jolt of adrenaline I needed. I hadn't expected that I would have to confront the murderer, only find out enough information to drop a dime. "What did the killer sound like?"

He grumbled, self-consciously. "Eh, you all sound the same to us."

"Male? Female? Old? Young? You've got to know something, Woodrow."

"As I said, I couldn't pick most of you out of a crowd. You and Randy, that's the extent of what I know," the dummy said, "and I'm not sure about you. You get me in there, stroll around. One of us has to know something more. It's strictly vents. there are going to be at least as many of us as there are of you."

This was a plan as dangerous as it seemed inevitable.

I had not even heard of ConVENTion before. I'd lingered around vents for years, mostly to chat with their dummies. None had given a whisper of this. It felt as though I were going to take a crowbar to a church door on Christmas Eve or stood outside a grove where demon worshipers were about to sacrifice a virgin.

I told Woodrow as much.

"There you go, letting that brain of yours ruin my idea," he said. "You got me on your arm? They aren't going to look at you twice."

"Vents aren't going to like party crashers."

He chuckled. "Charlie, my boy, you are invited. Or Randy was, before his untimely death. Look in the bag."

I pushed aside one of Randy's costumes and Woodrow's discarded glasses, finding dot-matrix printouts. I tried to read them, but I was too bleary.

Seeing my squinting at the pages, Woodrow said, "Cliff's Notes, Chuckles. That's Randy's reservations. He paid for admission. He's got a hotel room waiting. It's all set up with a bow on top."

"I'm not Randy. I look nothing like him."

"Are we going to sit here bullshitting, or are we going to get in there?"

"I'm not Randy," I repeated. "Randy has reservations. I don't."

"Describe Randy to me," said Woodrow. "No, wait. Describe the Adequate Rando."

I understood at once and hated it.

Woodrow didn't belabor the point. "Right, the mask. The Adequate Rando never went on stage without it. Said it was his gimmick, but the man just wasn't much of a ventriloquist. You've heard his show enough. I'm sure you've got the patter down dead. No one is going to know much better, except the killer and maybe their dummy."

"Randy is dead," I said, though my conviction was eroding beneath his reasoning and my need to stop having this conversation. I did not have the headspace to remain cogent. "The police have been and gone."

"Randall Cutts is dead," he said. "Maybe they've had time to scrounge up a real tearjerker of an obit, but this is not some national day of mourning. If his parents have had a hand in it, the name 'Adequate Rando' is not going to appear. They weren't real proud of some of his life choices."

Woodrow waited for me to argue more. I kept my hands on the steering wheel, deciding if I ought to pull back onto the road and sleep a few hours somewhere less conspicuous. The police would want to talk to me. I liked to tell myself the cops had to clear me, but that wasn't worth it.

I looked over at Woodrow, his jaw slightly parted. I pushed it closed with my knuckle.

"Put the mask on. Shove your hand up my ass. Wave this printout in their faces. Act like your shit don't stink," said Woodrow, sounding more soothing than goading. "You can do this. No one is going to look twice. You are Charles Goddamn Lavender, buddy. The one and only, and don't you dare forget it." When I remained still, he added, pleading, "You've come too far just to give up now. We can do this. Partners, right?"

I breathed in slowly, then relaxed my arms to my sides. In better circumstances, I could have found an argument. If there were better circumstances, though, I wouldn't be on the edge of Kentucky, arguing with a ventriloquial figure about fingering a murderer.

My head fell back in resignation. "Are they nice hotel rooms?"

"No, buddy. They are just hotel rooms, but that's a palace compared to sleeping in your car," he said. "You put the costume on. You keep it on as long as you are in public. It's not rocket surgery."

Woodrow was right. The front desk clerk saw me, masked with a dummy on my arms, and plastered on a forced smile, hating me every second. It was early, he told me, wanting to turn me away for a little while longer. When I said that I had had a long drive and would sleep in the lobby until my room was ready, he miraculously discovered my room had already been cleaned. I couldn't blame him. If I were a normal persona and walked into a room where a masked figure had passed out with a dummy on their lap, I would be in another zip code.

Randy hadn't sprung for the presidential suite, not that I expected a place like this had one, but I didn't need one. I managed to place Woodrow carefully in a hard chair, tell him to wake me when he heard the con start, fighting myself to stay awake long enough to make this request.

I sat on the bed, yanked off the mask, and was dead asleep before I got off my left shoe.

"Princess," Woodrow crooned, "your carriage awaits."

My eyes felt gritty. Had I slept at all? The clock radio on the nightstand said I had slept until it was nearly morning again.

"Why didn't you wake me?" I understood the pointlessness of this question before Woodrow answered. He had tried, and this was the first time I had responded.

"I thought I was going to wait until you started stinking, bud."

I had meant to call the club to let them know I would not be in, but they assumed I was irresponsible anyway. They would be pissed, and the management might chew me out, but wouldn't consider it out of character. I could always plead that I was too distraught over Randy's death. People seemed to think we were friends because I put up with his crap for a paycheck.

Now, if anyone would tell snitch to the police that I bailed on work last night, that was another matter.

I all but crawled to the bathroom to relieve myself. A body that had had nothing but diner food in the last twenty-four hours makes its displeasure known pretty clearly.

The moment I'd voided myself, my stomach lurched, demanding every meal I had skipped.

My mouth tasted awful, which seemed more pressing at the moment than eating. I skimmed the amenities listed on a laminated card, calling down to the front desk for a toothbrush and toothpaste.

The costume itself, an all-black (though cheap) tuxedo and a black mesh mask that engulfed my head, had nothing to do with Woodrow's grunge style and less still to do with Randy's generic act of wood puns. The suit had been freshly dry cleaned and pressed, for which I was grateful to the deceased. If I had to perpetuate this ruse as his body odor seeped into my skin, I might have turned myself in.

The suit fitted me better than Randy, who was more an aspirational shopper when it came to clothes. From working backstage and as a gofer, I was lean and muscled enough that it was not so apparent that he had the shoulders padded. I lacked Randy's paunch, so the suit did not bulge in the wrong places.

With Woodrow on my arm--an act he made clear he hated, though less so when I unconsciously began to fiddle with his mechanisms so that his mouth moved to his otherwise silent complaints and his eyes could roll--I exited the room.

There are no quiet hours at a convention, even when the convention proper is closed up for the night. Sunrise wasn't for another hour. The convention had four before it would resume, but vents spoke in hushed voices around snack machines and in stairwells. The dummies were less quiet out of necessity, but they also were less apt to talk. Even Woodrow seemed laconic, though I absently fiddled with his mechanism so that it seemed he looked around.

This had always been my unconscious habit with dummies. When I got my hands on them or in them, I knew what they would have done if they could. They were not always fond of this presumption, used to keeping their gestures to themselves. Other dummies could see their actions fine. It was only people that were left in the dark.

I found breakfast at a deli down the street. It was far enough from the con that I didn't feel the danger of taking off my mask to eat a toasted bagel and sip some tea. It wasn't all I wanted, but it was all I was willing to give myself for now. I needed to be hungry. I couldn't have anything heavy in my guts, as though that would stifle my ability to hear what I needed to.

The day would be humid, there was no question. As the sun rose, it brought with it a haze that stuck to my costume. When I replaced the mask, it was as though another skin had sucked to my face.

I lingered in the lobby. The clerk I had dealt with yesterday was back in place. His face was on the sunny side of trained indifference, but his eyes narrowed when looking at my mask, as though something more significant had passed between us. I opened and shut Woodrow's jaw at him as though threatening to bite him, then took a chair to wait.

"You think he's the killer?" said Woodrow, teasing me.

"He might wish he were a killer before this weekend was over."

In the air conditioning of the hotel, the mask felt permeable again, allowing me to feel as though Randy's face had not been superimposed over mine.

There were easily four times as many vents milling about around me now, chirping and grunting at one another like the mating display of some simian tribe. A little girl approached me, urging the head of a pink seal at Woodrow.

"I want to bite her," he said. "Snap my jaws at her."

"You are a real piece of work," snarled the seal. "She's a baby."

"Have some respect, bud," said Woodrow.

The seal chortled. "We're puppets, bud," the seal said, mocking Woodrow's tone. "If we had any respect, we'd roll into the nearest fire."

The girl skipped away, having decided that I would not be up to playing with her.

"Bet she isn't the killer either," said Woodrow. "Too short."

A quarter of an hour later, a man--a Friar Tuck crown of white hair, a plaid shirt tucked into spotless jeans--sat across from me in the lobby. Though he could not see my eyes, his were searching my face. My chin was low, talking with Woodrow or just thinking, and I considered if this gave the illusion that I was asleep.

"Something I can help you with?" I asked.

"You're the Adequate Rando." This was not a question, so I did not see a reason to answer it.

"Do you need something?"

He studied me longer. I turned my attention to his dummy. Expensive, no doubt. A custom job that oozed personality. Not a traditional model like Woodrow, more a caricature of a celebrity in a tailored costume of shining fabric, though a celebrity I could not place. I'd already seen a few Bush and Clinton dummies being made to debate each other in the lobby, spectated by a skeletal Michael Jackson; puppet-makers are not known for their subtlety.

The man continued his survey of my mask. Did he know Randy enough to see through the ruse? Was that the meaning of this?

"Your vent have some sort of glandular condition?" Woodrow demanded of the dummy. "Some reason he is giving Rando the stick-eye."

Nothing. The dummy was there, he was not empty, but he would not or could not speak.

"Hey, pal," Woodrow prompted, "you are being rude. Not as rude as your vent, but it ain't any more polite to ignore me than it is for him to stare."

The man said he would be seeing me later, jogging away before I could get in another word. Vents are odd ducks, no question.

The ballroom doors opened early, the vendors still setting out their wares. Vendors resent you if you are there before they open. Wave some money in their faces, and they act otherwise, but they want to get ready for the long day. It is a sort of mercenary cheerfulness I couldn't help but respect. Looking at the vent, the fact that the vendors could regard all this as normal enough for commerce turned their smiles sarcastic.

I had never been in the presence of so many vents and puppets in one place. The former disturbed me in profusion, the latter only by how the vents had adorned them.

The vents were, by and large, doing nothing wrong. I wanted them to be. Wholesomeness might as well have been a poison apple, a Halloween Snickers bar with an AIDS needle in its nougat center. I couldn't trust so many people bereft of the kindly blanket of irony. It was psychologically easier to believe this was insidious. Yank off the head of the right dummy, and you'd see an aborted fetus.

But that wasn't the truth. I was here to shake the metaphorical bushes to scare out Randy's murderer. Everything else was so kosher that this might as well have been Passover with my folks.

A film crew walked the hall for some unknown purpose. A sign out front made explicit that, while film cameras were tentatively acceptable, videoing was verboten. If I were blind--and the mask limited my vision as a good pair of Ray-Bans--I would have known the crew's location. One or another set of goofy voices became louder, all jockeying for the spotlight. There weren't a lot of vents, at least after the first hundred hours of practice, who didn't harbor fantasies about being discovered on American's Funniest Home Videos or Star Search. I'd like few things less than standing on a stage, the audience waiting to laugh or extract their pound of flesh.

Woodrow directed me this way and that, listening to gossip. I kept his mouth moving as a cover against the other vents until Woodrow chewed me out for making it obvious.

"What the hell?"

"One, you are pulling too hard," he grumbled. "I am a precision figure. You damage me, and we are going to have an issue. You think I want to go to Vent Haven with a broken eye? Two, you are making me speak the words that only you hear. The other dummies are going to notice."

The benefit of being masked in this hall was that no vent noticed that I seemed to be talking to myself. They were all doing the same anyway and wouldn't look askance.

"What does it matter?" I asked.

"You spend fifty years talking to no one aside from other dummies at a place like this. You figure out that a human hears you, someone who can tell their vent to go to hell or stop touching her in the bathing suit area. What do you expect happens?" he said. "We don't need that kind of heat."

It was a spectacle, no question. I didn't blame this convention for wanting to restrict access to serious adherents of ventriloquism. Civilians would only get the wrong idea. I, straddling the border between the ordinary world and that of the vents, wasn't sure I had the right idea. I tried to imagine being here if I didn't have the excuse of Randy's murder. I had never felt as at home anywhere as these vents did here.

You could tell who was making a living off their act. Either because amateurs trying to catch their ears thronged them or because of their arrogance. I wore the costume of someone who had been, to a small extent, successful. The Catskill scene was about fifty years out of vogue--no New York City headliners there--but it had been where vaudeville had gestated. I'd been in Randy's apartment once. He was never going to be rich, but he got paid enough that he could afford a separate bedroom and living room, something I could not boast for myself. It is hard to take a woman home when you can see your toilet and refrigerator from your bed.

A few recognized the Adequate Rando. Woodrow was right; I had the patter down. I improvised a few new jokes, for which Woodrow called me an idiot, but no one went away upset for the time they had spent listening to me.

"You think you are Mr. Showbiz now? You think you're the big shot vent?" asked Woodrow.

"Hell no, but that's was Randy would have done."

Woodrow snorted. "He wouldn't have given those people the time of day without a paycheck attached. The only way you got anywhere, to his way of thinking, was by stepping on the guy just below you. He would have been an asshole to them."

"I'm not going to be an asshole around kids," I said.

"Well, you should."

I tried to convince myself he was right. When, ten minutes later, a tween with a cheap, plastic knockoff of Woodrow's model asked for some pointers, I told her I was too busy. The look she gave me, I felt like hot garbage for the next half hour.

Woodrow related small hints, but nothing too solid. I stopped outside the vending room to confer where it was quieter, but all he could say would have fit in a fortune cookie and had been about as cryptic. He knew something, I could tell, but there wasn't anything I could do that would persuade him.

A woman, red hair blazing, dropping her puppet, stormed up to me.

"What's going--" was all I could get out before she slapped me across the face. The mask gave no protection from this. If anything, it added a subtle rug burn to the impact.

"You have some goddamn nerve, Randy."

I cleared my throat, a signal to Woodrow to give me any information he might have. He called out to her fallen puppet, foam and dressed like Dracula.

"Randy pumped and dumped her last year," he said. "Never called. Women at cons drop their standards considerably."

How Randy didn't get stabbed in the throat sooner was a miracle. She was not a beautiful woman, but she was more presentable than Randy on his best day.

I placed Woodrow on the floor so that I could hold up my hands in contrition. "Hey, what I did to you? That was a real bastard move. No question. I thought about calling you for weeks--"

"Her name's Alicia," added Woodrow before the woman could notice the pause.

"--Alicia, but I couldn't get over that you were too good for me. Maybe I don't deserve to be happy."

"You don't," she said firmly, but her fury had ebbed a little. "And I don't forgive you."

"I can't ask you to," I said. I doubted my voice sounded right when it was not approximating Randy's ventriloquism, but the tone didn't matter. He hadn't spoken to her for a year, so how could she be expected to remember? "I haven't even begun to ask for your forgiveness. I have no real excuse for what I did."

"'You' promised you would call to help her get into the business. Randy said he was going to be her connection," said Woodrow. "He suckered her to get her panties on the floor."

Just like our last argument. Guys like him, it's like they can sniff out vulnerability. Randy didn't have any conscience that would stand in his way of getting his hand up something more yielding than a dummy.

Without showing my face--not that she seemed offended by the mask so far--there was only so far that I could go. I relaxed my posture, slackening my shoulders. I gave a step forward with as much humility as I could. "Listen, what I did... I still owe you. I made a promise to you, and I'm going to keep it." I thought of giving her the number of the club, but they would be only too interested in this woman who would claim to have just been speaking to a very alive Randy. "Give me your number again. I'll pass it on to a few people in the business. Let me make good on this."

Woodrow coughed from the ground. "You are being a real son of a bitch; I hope you know that."

She softened further. I understood that she was less offended at the one-night stand (who would want more with Randy, if that?) than that he lied to her about helping her. She stared hard at me for a second, then pulled a card out of her bag and slipped it in my breast pocket.

"If I don't hear from someone in a week, I'm making a GeoCities page telling everyone you have a tiny dick." She stepped back, and there was a fleeting glimpse of a smile when she left.

I retrieved Woodrow from the floor. "A real son of a bitch," he repeated, "leading that poor, stupid girl on."

"Who's leading her on? I know a club that has a sudden need of a vent."

"Seems like she has a good reason to want to at least lightly maim Randy," he said.

"Yeah, no question," I said, "but she didn't do it. She wasn't surprised to see me, just livid."

"So, you're thinking we might be looking for another woman scorned?" he asked, interested in the possibility. "That's how it'd go on Law & Order."

"It's another angle to this," I admitted, "though the fact that he got any play..."

"I know, I know. It's like I told you, standards drop. You feel like for once you are with your people, you drink a bit, you forget about that tolerant spouse waiting for you at home, and you get freaky."

Woodrow called out to me, but it was only to draw my attention to a booth of racially insensitive dummies.

"Places I've been, displaying a dummy like that'd get you either run out of town or made the Grand Wizard," Woodrow said. "Not here, though. Par for the course."

Woodrow didn't have any worry that his commentary would offend the thick-lipped figures. Until they've spent some time with a vent trying to talk through them, it was like they were empty. It was the action of imagining them speaking that allowed them to. It wasn't a level of philosophizing I thought Woodrow would appreciate.

The dummies in the vending hall, the ones that were waiting for a vent, were silent. There was nothing in them yet, so they were still dolls, empty shells. If I put my hand in one, that wouldn't do the trick. You had to be some sort of vent to bring them to life. You had to want them to be alive, I suppose.

It boiled down to no concern about causing offense. There was nothing in the dummies to offend, though I expected they would be livid that they existed as propaganda caricatures of black, Asian, and Jewish people. It was hard to even state with authority that the vents who bought them would understand that the requisite "How to Throw Your Voice" pamphlet could include an embossed copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A man who dedicated himself to playing with dolls (woe betide the person who said that out loud) was likely to have a few blind spots.

The whole thing reeked of wholesomeness, which got under my skin. Detachment and irony were my flesh and bones. The world had disappointed me, my future seemed slim, but everything here was happy horseshit. I didn't even want to swear for fear that it would be overheard by a tyke wielding a pink unicorn on her arm.

Even in their occasional dirtiness, they were obscenely family-friendly, so utterly PG-13 at worst. Male vents were having their dummies ogle the foam tits of another puppet, also wielded by a man. There were hushed ribald jokes that wouldn't have reddened the cheek of anyone born since Eisenhower. Even this racism seemed oddly well-intentioned.

I took us outside a hall where some professional vent gave a talk about advanced tricks to a gaggle of people whom I doubted had managed better than basics, not that I was one to talk.

Woodrow said, "Randy was a tool, no question, but want him dead for sticking his dick where it didn't belong? I don't buy it, or he'd have been a slurry, not one clean cut. I can't imagine most people cared enough about that walking sack of inferiority and cheap beer to want to kill him."

Woodrow wasn't the only one subjected to crime procedurals. You needed means, opportunity, and motive for a crime.

The means was easy: his throat was slit from artery to artery. I didn't have long with the body, but the cut was deeper on the left. Whoever did this was right-handed. I didn't remember seeing the weapon at the time, but I had damn good reason not to be thinking clearly. A knife or box cutter would do fine, neither of which were in short supply backstage. All that told me was that they favored their right hand like ninety percent of humanity.

Opportunity was slim. Slipping backstage between our argument and my finding the body before his set gave the killer maybe ten minutes to complete the act and get out of there. No one had noticed them come in or out, so it wasn't someone distinct, someone who would have aroused the suspicion of the crew, even covered in arterial spray. That quick and precise, it didn't seem like a crime of passion. An initial stab, that was something passionate, but slitting the throat? Personal, but not passionate. Maybe practiced. I didn't like the idea of a vent serial killer when there had to be three hundred vents between the ages of five and ninety surrounding me. They--whoever they were--had promised to kill Randy if he came here. Who was to say that they still didn't have murder on their mind? The state can only hang you once. (Though Randy's murder took place in New York, a state that hadn't had executed anyone since '63, we were not in so generous a jurisdiction right now.)

The motive was beyond me. Being the kind of guy who hurts women, sleeps with them and then tears them down, makes you enemies. The husband of a conquest coming to exact revenge? That's an idea, but it didn't fit with what else I had. If you do something like that, it's a gunshot to the face. You don't talk about going to a ventriloquist convention in the meantime.

I felt someone pushing behind me, turning to see a woman a foot shorter than me in a platinum blonde, pin curl wig. She wore a fluffy, gingham milkmaid dress with what I took for a stuffed bra.

"That's not Rando," said a green spider in her arms. "You're too tall. You don't slouch. So, who the hell are you?" The spider's voice was husky and sultry, the kind you've want to hear from your next lay. It was not, in short, the voice the tiny woman would have given it.

I couldn't answer the dummy directly, mask or no mask.

Woodrow was good enough to fill her in, though his portrayal of the events leading up to this moment was hardly flattering. "So, I'm going to help this sucker clear his name, and he's going to bring me to Vent Haven."

At this name, the chatter of the puppets--their actual conversation and not the goofy voices their ventriloquists gave them--stopped.

"Why do you want to do something like that?" asked a plush money carried under the arm of a high-strung girl.

"I'm tired. Rando wasn't my first. I'd prefer that he was my last."

I hadn't heard him like this before, sad and defeated. To this point, I had almost taken this quest toward retirement as an excuse. The puppets around us made this sound far more like suicide.

We trolled the rooms for a few more hours, hearing nothing too promising. I sat in on a panel on marketing to give myself time to think, but I couldn't remember after I stood again what the people on the stage had been saying. The dummies around me continued a low chatter, bored of this more than I could ever be.

Woodrow, tireless as he was, insisted we keep searching, but I told him I needed to use the bathroom in my room.

"Shy bladder?" he said. "You know the other boys aren't going to make fun of what you are packing." I locked the bolt behind us, yanking off the mask. God, it felt good to have fresh air on my face. I felt that I wore Randy's face more the longer people thought I was the Adequate Rando. No one would sense would want to be him long.

"Am I your Dr. Kevorkian?" I demanded. "Am I helping to kill you?"

I had tossed Woodrow with little reverence on the bed, face down. "Sit me up, Charlie," he said, his tone stern. "You want to have a man's conversation; I'm not doing it staring at this bedspread."

I placed him in the chair, one hand on his lap, the other draped over the arm.

"Now, what kind of a question is that?" he asked. "'Am I helping to kill you?' What's that supposed to mean?"

"The other dummies, when you mentioned Vent Haven, acted like you wanted to chase a handful of downers with a bottle of vodka while standing on a bridge holding a gun."

He scoffed. "They're superstitious, that's all. Vent Haven isn't going to be shoving ol' Woodrow through the chipper. I'll have a shelf of my own, someone to take care of me, and no one to shove their hands inside me. You are a tender lover, by the way, Chuckles. You have much experience fisting men?"

I studied his expression out of habit, but it was unchangeable. I wouldn't let his joke get a rise out of me. "You promise me that this isn't going to be the end of you."

His silence was painful as I waited for his answer. "What if it was? Why would that matter to you? You promised you'd bring me. We've come all this way. I'm helping you. You're not going to back out now, are you?"

"It's retirement, right?" I asked. "We're partners. You keep saying it, so start believing that I care what happens to you. Tell me it is retirement."

"A better one than the shuffleboard set could ever imagine. Don't let some gossipy sack of felt and sawdust make you skittish."

I was not convinced, but I was also not in a secure position to argue. Once we had the culprit's information to the police and were on the way to Kentucky, I would revisit my concerns. I was sure Woodrow would expect and fight me over them.

I picked up dinner at a nearby greasy spoon, which was so humble that it made me miss the 2 AM pancakes at that Pennsylvania diner. Watching a woman who looked like my high school principal mime spoon-feeding peas to her dummy, herself dressed as a cheerleader, cooing the dummy's supposed retort made me miss the waitress, Winona.

The cheerleader dummy cursed an eloquent, blue streak about the woman's likely mental health issues. A few other dummies cheered on the cheerleader.

I would have liked to have stuck around, but I couldn't eat without removing the mask. Pulling it up over my mouth made me feel like a child pretending to be Batman.

One thing about vents is that they have blind spots. The few that dressed the same as their dummies, that was one thing. A crime against good sense at worst. It took on more unsettling dimensions when you could tell they had spent a lot of money commissioning a dummy who looked like them like that would let them inhabit it. I encountered one of those a few years back, the matched pair. The dummy hadn't ever spoken to another of its kind, so she parroted her vent. She was like a feral child, unable to form logical sentences. I had tried to coax a personality from her in the few minutes we spoke, but she felt like a lost cause. Some random guy who could hear her did not matter a whit to her.

Woodrow was about as far from that as possible. As expensive as he no doubt was--you didn't ask a dummy their original price--he wasn't a custom job. He wouldn't talk about his past. I didn't see how I could ask him to, but he had made clear that Randy one just the last of many people who had owned him. All that action gave him a true personality. He knew who he was, which was more than I could say for a lot of people. Hell, most days, it was more than I could say for myself.

I sat on the bed, my boxed-up BLT and fries spread on the quilt, careful not to be infected by it. I thought I ought to take off the suit to avoid likewise staining it, but I wouldn't need it in another day. I hadn't considered what I would do with it then. Fire, maybe. I'd want every vestige of Randy out of my life.

I looked at Woodrow, propped up on the desk, his blind eyes on me. I'd gotten attached, I supposed, which wasn't the revelation of the century. I wasn't going to keep him, but I knew I'd be sorry not to see him anymore. I wouldn't lie to myself and say I would visit him in the museum if it were all above board. I don't think he'd want me to, or, at least, I knew he wouldn't tell me if he did.

I was half-done with the sandwich, wiping mayonnaise from the corner of my lips with a napkin, when Woodrow said, "This was once a sacred art."

I stared, sure that I had misheard him. He was not the most mystical of thinkers.

"Sacred, Chuck. That's what I say. You talk this game about what the ancient Greeks did, ghosts in the gullet, and all that. Hucksterism, sure. I can appreciate a good scam. But the people who came to see it--to see us--it was holy, wasn't it?"

I sat back, my stomach rumbling at having been inadequately fulfilled. "I mean, from what I've read, there was a time."

"And now," he said with a sigh, "it's comedy. Mostly, it's comedy by someone who couldn't stand behind a mic without some sort of prop." He gave a short laugh. "Hell, I'm not sure that the man who gets up with a doll on his arm is much better than Carrot Top or Gallagher."

"You aren't a doll."

"Damn right. I don't see any Barbies trying to chat you up," he said, "but that's it. I'm for people to laugh at. That's all I exist for. You get up on stage, you get me reading 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' people are going to be waiting for the punchline."

"Is this some kind of existential crisis?"

"I am due a crisis," he snapped. "I exist as a gag."

I had heard dummies discontent with their lot in life, but never like this. "You want to be taken seriously?"

"No, Chuck. I want to be done with the act. I just... I want to be done."

This conversation made my food taste only of salt and fat, no other flavor. One of the more challenging parts of a friendship with a dummy--though far from the only one--is that you only have their voice to judge them on, and they know this. Short of carving tools of paint, Woodrow was only ever going to wear the expression with which he had been made. Humans communicate so much in a flick of the eyes or a quiver of the lips so subtle that you couldn't consciously register it.

I couldn't revisit this topic with him. In the philosophical or general, sure. In the specific, about Woodrow? I didn't have it in me. The day had so far been a bust, and there were precious few hours tonight to change that.

As though guessing my thoughts, he said, wryly, "You know, I do have an idea for our little investigation. It's a bit more intensive than wandering around, feeling pity and contempt, though. You up for it?"

"When did you get this idea?" He had given no mention or even a hint before this. Was he only trying to get me off this morbid topic he had introduced despite himself?

"It's less an idea than an invitation, you see."

I did not see, but he assured me that I must not have heard him discussing it with the other dummies throughout the day. It was easy to say that I didn't believe him--and I didn't--but that didn't necessarily translate into not trusting him. And, frankly, I'd be given nothing else to go on. I told him I was up for it.

I finished my meal--he said I might need the energy--and donned the costume in full again.

"Don't get persnickety about all the buttons," he said, sounding as though this were a joke.

He directed me to a room a floor up. It felt as though there was a bubble of silence around it, as though the other vents knew something I did not.

"What the hell is in that room?"

Woodrow chuckled. "You've been around this type. You want to play innocent? That the kind of person who spends their lives throwing their voice into a lamb or lizard isn't into some kinky shit when the lights go out?"

"So, it's a--"

"It's a party. A private affair. Invite only."

I would not play the dope with him, stating that I did not have an invite.

"Mr. the Adequate has a standing invitation to this sordid soiree."