Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  The machine cut him off. He considered the voice, waiting for the guy to call again. Young. Awesome gave that away. Twenties, maybe thirties. White, middle-class. Used to working the telephone. But no expert at it. Not a broker.

  Sales, maybe.

  The phone rang again. The machine did its thing.

  Then, Sorry about that, Mr. Daniels. Anyway, we’d pick up expenses and dinner and if you have any books you want to sign and sell here, you could bring them along. There’d be about thirty of us and we’re all great readers. So if you’re interested and I hope you are, the date we have in mind is Saturday the fourteenth, though we could do it on the twenty-first if that’s more convenient for you. Again, my name’s Will Harris and you can reach me at 201-992-6709. That’s 201-992-6709. Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks. Bye.

  He sat there staring at the computer, at the list of messages.

  The people who read him. What did he owe these people? Anything? He felt he did. He’d reached out to the world with his books and the world—at least some small part of the world—was reaching back.

  He didn’t need it. It was not what he’d signed on for. But there it was.

  At first it had been fun. Conventions, readings. Lines of kids twenty years younger than him, waiting for his signature. For a word with him. Their hero. The scary horror writer. A lot of them wanted to be writers themselves. A lot of them women twenty years younger than him, some of whom were even willing to share his bed.

  He collected the awards. Shook a lot of hands. Got used to the feel of hand sanitizer, sticky and then smooth, and learned how to apply it on the off moments so as not to offend. Perfected the quick jagged pen strokes of his pseudonym.

  But he’d been doing this for more than thirty years now.

  Did he owe them still?

  He felt he did.

  And there he sat, doing nothing.

  He supposed it was self-interest, too, on his part. Not the fame. Or in his case, minor notoriety. Not even the willing women. By answering the messages, by showing up at the conferences and signings and conventions, he was cementing his connection to his readers. He was pitching them his legacy in hopes that they’d catch it on the fly and run with it after he was gone.

  It was all about the books. His sole offspring.

  And he wouldn’t be here very much longer now to throw that pitch.

  He might have years. But probably not all that many, considering.

  He had emphysema. He had myelofibrosis. Neither of them acute just now. Both chronic. Slow reveals. Slowly draining him of energy. His lungs and his bone marrow in a competition to see who’d kill him first.

  He still smoked a pack a day.

  He thought the smart money was on the bones.

  Though there was still the possibility of that other thing, doing something careless, drunk or sober, which could take him out yet.

  You live well into your sixties. Half the time your back’s out. Your skin’s dry no matter how much you moisturize. You shrink. Your muscle tone goes all to hell.

  As packages go, you are severely damaged in shipping.

  He closed out his message page and left the website in favor of saved email. Scrolled down. Way down. This one was nearly eighteen months old now.

  I wish with all my heart that we could do this, you and I. But we don’t want the same things. I wish we did. You don’t want kids, and I do. You want New York and I’ve had it with New York. I’m thirty-four. I’ve got to move on. I hate doing this via email, but I don’t have the courage to talk to you right now. I’m sorry.

  And then, Love, Kate.

  Ridiculous, he thought, going back to this again. I should delete it. Wipe it out. Erase all trace of her.

  But he’d kept all her emails. There were nights he’d be drinking too much again and the television wouldn’t divert, the Netflix disc was the wrong fucking one for this particular fucking night, he’d chosen badly, and music was out of the question because music was essentially a happy thing even when trying its best to be a sad thing, music was optimism, the optimism of composing and then orchestration and performance, and as she’d had it with New York City, he’d had it with optimism.

  The joy of creation. The will to create. This past year he hadn’t had much of either. His output had slowed to a trickle. Mornings he’d awaken to work songs in his head reminding him. SIXTEEN TONS. NINE TO FIVE. Hey, Mr. Talley Man, tally me banana.

  Those bad nights he’d go back to the emails. Read through them one by one. There were dozens of them.

  Pathetic, he thought. In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

  For a small dinner party at a friend’s house last month—a painter/designer who’d done good strong covers for his last three books—he’d gone to the liquor store shopping for single-malts. Bought a Glenmorangie for himself at forty bucks a fifth and a Glengoyne for the party at thirty-two. He’d never tried the Glengoyne before, but the price was right.

  At the party he thought the Glengoyne clearly the better scotch and a few days later returned to the liquor store and bought two bottles. He took one in hand and with the other tucked under his arm walked down the winding narrow staircase to the checkout counter, aware that for some reason the upstairs seller was right behind him. The seller guided him to an open register. He paid the woman behind the register and went home and only then looked at his Visa receipt and learned he’d paid $119.99 for each bottle. With tax, $261.98. This was eighteen-year-old Highland single-malt scotch whiskey, while what he’d previously bought was a mere ten-year. He now understood the teller’s solicitude.

  It took him all of thirty seconds’ consideration to say to himself, Fuck it, I’m drinking them.

  They were very tasty. But for some reason he still preferred the ten.

  Maybe it was the party, he thought. He knew most all of the people there and they were convivial people and he’d had a good time. Maybe the scotch had tasted better because of that.

  He didn’t get out much these days.

  He looked at his calendar. He was free on the fourteenth.

  He phoned Will Harris.

  He’d been right. Sales.

  —

  Harris offered to drive the forty minutes into the city to pick him up and drive him back, but that would mean he was Harris’s captive for the duration, and for all he knew he might not even like the guy. He told Harris he enjoyed the occasional opportunity to drive and asked if they’d spring for a rental and Harris said yes, they would.

  Then he forgot all about the Essex County Science Fiction Group until the morning of the eleventh, when he received an email from someone named Eleanor Bradley reminding him and sending him cheery directions to the venue, and he checked his wall calendar and, sure enough, his visit was three days away. He called Hertz and arranged for a rental.

  The morning of the fourteenth he packed a dozen trade paperbacks into his travel bag and took a cab uptown and filled out the forms at the rental counter, and by ten-thirty he was in the Lincoln Tunnel headed west. He hadn’t been kidding Harris, he really did like to drive. And at this in-between hour traffic was fairly light. Jersey always got a bad rap. Once you left the Turnpike, 280 was a breeze.

  He got off at the South Livingston Avenue exit and spotted the Lutheran church in no time. He was almost an hour early so he drove on by and found a little deli that served a nice fried-egg sandwich and decent coffee and sipped and ate them in the car.

  The car afforded privacy. Every once in a while he got recognized from his photo on a book jacket or his cameo in one of the movies. It happened rarely, but it happened. He didn’t want that now.

  When he was finished he drove back through the sunny street and parked in the lot beside the church.

  Will Harris was waiting for him at the side door. He wondered how long the guy had been standing out there in the cold. He had a big smile and a solid handshake. Hair cropped close
to his head. Back straight as a pool cue. He was too small and slight to be ex-Marines, so maybe Navy.

  He returned Harris’s smile and told him to stop calling him Mr. Daniels. He was Jonathan, period.

  Harris took his bag and led him down a flight of stairs. He heard the rattle of excited voices below.

  “They use this room for Sunday school meetings,” he said.

  He knew about Sunday school meetings. As a kid he’d had to attend.

  “I’ll try not to pollute the air,” he said.

  He was happy that they didn’t have to go through the actual church. The last time he’d been in one it had been for Bill Starr’s funeral, and he’d done so reluctantly. Starr wrote what those in the business called quiet horror, the equivalent of cozies in the world of mysteries. Strange, yes. Eerie, sure. But bloodless. A much gentler body of work than Daniels’s own. Still it was a shock to find that Bill was Catholic. He guessed he’d thought that pretty much everybody who wrote this stuff was like him. Godless heathens. The service made him angry. It was all Jesus this and Jesus that. It pissed him off that they were using a good man’s death to promote their fucking Lord.

  Harris opened the door and there they were, standing between the rows of one-armed school desks, talking, drinking coffee out of paper cups, and munching doughnuts.

  “Guys? Mr. Jonathan Daniels, aka Ben Cassady.”

  Smiles. A round of applause. A plump, doughy little blonde of around fifty stepped forward and offered her hand. He noticed a slight limp.

  “Mr. Daniels? I’m Eleanor. Eleanor Bradley. We emailed.”

  “Yes. Call me Jonathan.”

  “Jonathan. We’re delighted to have you.”

  “Eleanor’s our fearless leader,” Harris said.

  “Organizer, Will,” she corrected.

  There were further introductions. The crowd was mostly middle-aged or older, which disappointed him a bit. It was the young ones you were after. The ones with years of reading and book-buying ahead. He counted them. There were exactly thirty. Out of the thirty he would place only three of them as under the age of thirty. Two look-alike women who might have been sisters and a bearded burly young man.

  He had to wonder how many guest speakers they’d had before him. Because he had the feeling they were looking at him as though he were some sort of exotic animal. Which perhaps in their world, he was.

  He was offered coffee, which he declined, and bottled water, which he accepted. He opened his bag and set his books out on the table in front of him. Six novels, two copies each.

  Harris introduced him, and they sat attentively at their desks as he launched into his talk. In her email, Eleanor Bradley had asked him to address the state of horror fiction today so, tired though that subject was, that was what he did, but began at the beginning, giving them a short primer, starting with some background on Poe and Lovecraft and Blackwood, ranging up from there to the forties and fifties with Bradbury, Bloch and Sturgeon and then to the bases of all modern horror, the blockbusters of the seventies, King and Straub and Blatty, V. C. Andrews and all the rest, finally getting to his own stuff and that of his younger contemporaries.

  He kept it light. Even got a laugh or two now and then. They seemed particularly to like Bradbury’s statement about Fahrenheit 451: I don’t try to describe the future, I try to prevent it. They were science-fiction people, after all.

  So it figured.

  He finished by talking about the cross-pollination going on between horror and suspense, mystery, sci-fi, and even teen romance, and finally paraphrased King’s famous line on Clive Barker: I have seen the future of horror, and it’s all over the place. A little glib, but what the hell.

  Then he opened it up for questions.

  He got the usual. Where do you get your ideas? How long does it take you to write a novel? Why do you write the kinds of things you do?

  That last one, from Eleanor Bradley, seated with Will Harris up front, seemed to have a slight edge to it.

  He gathered Ms. Bradley didn’t entirely approve. He smiled.

  “I try to fight the good fight while I entertain you. So that I tend to start with what pisses me off,” he said. “Child abuse, animal abuse, thrill killers, the legal system.”

  “Religion?” That from the young burly guy with the beard.

  “That, too. I took a swipe at it with Invasive Exotic. And again with The Abortion. True believers of any kind are pretty damn frightening to me.”

  “But aren’t we all?” Harris said. “True believers, I mean. Aren’t we all in one way or another? You believe in books, don’t you?”

  “Yes and no. You can recognize the power and value of books and still distrust the hell out of them. Look at Mein Kampf. Look at Dianetics. There’s one called Ragnar’s Big Book of Homemade Weapons and Improvised Explosives. Very educational.”

  “But you believe in your own work, right?” said beard guy.

  “Sure. I write cautionary tales, mostly. I hope in some way they’re useful. Though a lot of it’s just for fun.”

  “Fun?”

  It was one of the younger women he thought of as sisters. And she was scowling.

  “You call the rape and torture of a young girl fun?”

  She was referring to The Neighborhood.

  “Of course not. That book was based on a series of true incidents, terrible crimes. There was nothing fun about it.”

  A balding man in back stood up and waved a manila folder at him.

  “But you’re on record as saying that it was!” he said.

  He opened the folder and read.

  “From an interview in Cemetery Dance #81. ‘Some of these books are harder to write than others. Some, like Concealment, took a lot of research. I did background work on that for a year before even starting. Others come to you almost like dictation. Like they’re full-blown in your head. Whitey was like that, and The Neighborhood. Serious subjects, sure, but writing them wasn’t like work at all. More like magic. It’s wonderful!’”

  He closed the folder.

  “Sounds like fun to me, sir.”

  Sir?

  He was aware of a general muttering. The two young women had turned in their seats and were nodding at the guy.

  “I was talking about the actual writing, the process. Not the subject. That’s clear in the interview, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? You were enjoying yourself imagining this…this degradation. You were having yourself a fine old time. At the expense of a young girl’s pain and innocence!”

  He was waving the folder again. The image of Joe McCarthy popped into his mind. He almost had to laugh. I have here before me a list of names…

  This guy was seriously pissed.

  “As I said on the phone, Mr. Daniels,” Harris said, “we’ve read your work. Between us thirty, I’d say we know pretty much all of it. We’ve catalogued what you do to people. Before killing them. Eleanor?”

  Ms. Bradley had a folder of her own. He hadn’t noticed.

  “Beating, whipping, burning, branding, cutting, rape, genital mutilation, castration, facial mutilation, starvation, biting—a lot of biting—incest, impalement with sharp objects…”

  “I get it,” he said. “There’s a good bit of mayhem in my books, sure. So? You could say the same of any writer in the field.”

  “That doesn’t make it right, though, does it? And we’re not talking about any writer in the field. We’re talking about you.”

  He was thinking, Who the hell are these people? So he asked them.

  “Who are you people? I don’t get it. I don’t understand what you expect me to say. You want me to defend myself? I’m not going to do that. Except to say that somewhere, somebody’s actually done what I’m only writing about.”

  “Yes, they have,” she said. “Our point exactly. You’re aware of the Linda DeLuca murder?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Then you’re aware that they copycatted The Neighborhood almost to a T.”

  �
��That’s not the book’s fault or mine. A book’s a book. You want to murder somebody, you’ll find a way to do it. They could have used another book as a blueprint or no book at all. They chose mine. And mine was based on a real case, the Jackson murder. I assume you know that.”

  “Yes. So let’s see. Exactly what have you done here? You’ve taken a real murder that not all that many people remember these days—it goes back to 1981, after all—and written a popular novel about it, which in turn inspires another murder. You’ve perpetuated the first murder, Mr. Daniels! Don’t you see? But I’m sorry, I haven’t answered your question, have I?”

  “What? What question?”

  “You wanted to know who we are.”

  He waited. She placed the file on her desk.

  “I’m afraid we’re guilty of a little deception here. We’re not really a science-fiction group, Mr. Daniels. Most of us couldn’t care less about science fiction. And we’re not really based in New Jersey. Most of us come from either upstate New York or Indiana. Because Elizabeth Jackson was murdered in Indianapolis and Linda DeLuca was killed in Peekskill. These were our neighborhoods! These were where these terrible things happened! We’ve corresponded for months now. The Internet and you brought us together.”

  He’d gotten lazy in his old age, he thought. He should have vetted this bunch. Time to get the hell out of here. And it must have shown on his face because burly beard guy got up and blocked the door, arms crossed in front of him. A tired, classic move. But effective.