Shadows 7 (15 page)

It would make an effective print. Robert softened the light from the window just a little and brought out the highlights on the man's hair, improving on reality. As he finished moving the print through the trays, he considered making a large one later to display at his upcoming show. It would undoubtedly sell very well.

He took it out to the bathroom to look at it in the light. Details he had missed in the darkroom caught his eye. The man had a cracked thumbnail, an ugly wart half hidden behind his ear. While that only served to make the print more effective, it made Robert feel uncomfortable.

Satisfied with the photograph, he peeled it off the mirror, and as he did, he saw himself reflected in the still-wet glass. It was a distorted image, warped by the rivulets of water as they ran down the mirror. His features twisted as he stared, unable to take his eyes away. It was as if he were watching a wax figure melt in an impossibly hot room. The flesh slid off and was replaced by bone, a gleaming white skull mocking him with vacant eye sockets and a frozen grin.

He grabbed a towel and rubbed the mirror violently. It helped, but not much.

His reflection stared back at him with unbelieving eyes through the musty cloud of cataracts. His hair was solid gray. A patch of skin discoloration spread across his cheek. His hand rose to touch the side of his face and as it did, he looked down and saw the cracked fingernails, the swollen knuckles. He screamed, and it was a violent, hollow sound torn from the depths of his soul. It echoed against the walls of the bathroom and went no farther.

He opened his robe and his body was thin and wasted. His hips jutted out sharply and the flesh hung from his bones in useless folds of dead tissue.

Still clutching the print, he staggered out to the living room. Somehow he managed to punch the proper numbers on the telephone.

"Hillside Nursing Home," said a female voice on the other end.

"This is Robert Whitten," he gasped. "I need . . . I need some information on a patient." His voice was raspy and he couldn't control the tremors in his hands.

"Oh yes, Mr. Whitten. I'm a big fan of yours. We saw you around this afternoon taking pictures. What can I do for you? You'll have to speak up. We seem to have a bad connection."

"An old man. I was taking pictures of him today."

"Most of our clients are elderly, Mr. Whitten. Could you give me a better idea who it is that you're looking for?"

"Front room. Something wrong with his skin." Robert coughed and saw with horror that he was spitting up blood.

"That would be poor Mr. Freeman. It was so sudden."

"Sudden? What do you mean?"

"Just like that. Alive one minute and dead the next. Of course, that happens here. Like I say, many of our clients are elderly and you have to expect—"

Robert hung up the phone and wiped the blood from his mouth. He was slobbering now, a mixture of saliva and blood. His eyes wouldn't focus and his arms and legs shook uncontrollably.

Through his clouded vision, he thought the room was filling up with faces. It could have been his imagination; he could no longer tell. They were all old. They had come to collect what he owed them.

He took the still-wet print in his shaking hands and sat down to wait for the inevitable.

It didn't take long.

The writer hunches over a battered table in a cramped attic room, sharpening his quills and staring off into space; the writer strolls through a rainstorm, deep in thought, a scowl upon his face; the writer slips into drug-induced fantasies in which he meets face to face the Muse. Sometimes.

Dennis Etchison works in Los Angeles without quills, and his latest collection is
Red Screams.

In the damp bedroom Victor Ripon sat hunched over his desk, making last-minute corrections on the ninth or tenth draft, he couldn't remember which, of a letter to the one person in the world who might be able to help. Outside, puppies with the voices of children struggled against their leashes for a chance to be let in from the cold. He ignored them and bore down. Their efforts at sympathy were wasted on him; he had nothing more to give. After thirty-three years he had finally stepped out of the melodrama.

He clicked the pen against his teeth. Since the letter was to a man he had never met, he had to be certain that his words would not seem naive or foolish.

"Dear Sir," he reread, squinting down at the latest version's cramped, meticulously cursive backhand. He lifted the three-hole notebook paper by the edges so as not to risk smearing the ballpoint ink. "Dear Sir . . ."

First let me say that I sincerely hope this letter reaches you. I do not have your home address so I have taken the liberty of writing in care of your publisher. If they forward it to you please let me know.

I am not in the habit of writing to authors. This is the first time. So please bear with me if my letter is not perfect in spelling, etc.

I have been reading your Works for approximately 6 yrs., in other words since shortly after I was married but more about that later. Mr. Christian, Rex if I may call you that and I feel I can, you are my favorite author and greatest fan. Some people say you are too morbid and depressing but I disagree. You do not write for children or women with weak hearts (I am guessing) but in your books people always get what they deserve. No other author I have read teaches this so well. I can see why you are one of the most popular authors in the world. I have all 6 of your books, I hope there are only 6, I wouldn't like to think I missed any! (If so could you send me a list of the titles and where I might obtain them? A S.A.S.E. is enclosed for your convenience. Thank you).

My favorite is THE SILVERING, I found that to be a very excellent plot, to tell the truth it scared the shit out of me if you know what I mean and I think you do, right? (Wink, wink.) MOON OVER THE NEST is right up there, too. My wife introduced me to your novels, my ex-wife I should say and I guess I should thank her for that much. She left me 2 1/2 yrs. ago, took the kids to San Diego first and then to Salt Lake City I found out later. I don't know why, she didn't say. I have tried to track her down but no luck. Twice with my late parents' help I found out where she was staying but too late. So that is the way she wants it, I guess. I miss the kids though, my little boy especially.

In your next book, THE EDGE, I noticed you made one small mistake, I hope you don't mind my pointing it out. In that one you have Moreham killing his old girlfriend by electrocution (before he does other things to her!) while she is setting up their word processor link. Excuse me but this is wrong. I know this because I was employed in the Computer Field after dropping out of Pre-Med to support my family. The current utilized by a Mark IIIA terminal is not enough to produce a lethal shock, even if the interface circuits were wired in sequence as you describe (which is impossible anyway, sorry, just thought you might like to know). Also the .066 nanosecond figure should be corrected . . .

And so on in a similar vein. Victor worked his way through three more densely packed pages of commentary and helpful advice regarding Rex Christian's other best-sellers, including
Jesus Had A Son, The Masked Moon,
and the collection of short stories,
Nightmare Territory,
before returning to more personal matters.

If you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods please feel free to drop by. We could have a few beers and sit up talking about the many things we have in common. Like our love of old movies. I can tell you feel the same way about such "classics" (?) as ROBOT INVADERS, MARS VS. EARTH and HOUSE OF BLOOD from the way you wrote about them in your series of articles for TV GUIDE. I subscribed so I wouldn't miss a single installment. There are others we could talk about, even watch if we're lucky. I get Channel 56 here in Gezira, you may have heard about it, they show old chestnuts of that persuasion all night long!!

If you have not guessed by now, I too try my hand at writing occasionally myself. I have been working for the past 1 1/2 yrs. on a story entitled PLEASE, PLEASE, SORRY, THANK YOU. It will be a very important story, I believe. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to read it. (You are probably too busy, anyway.) Besides, I read WRITER'S DIGEST so I know where to send it if and when I succeed in bringing it to a satisfactory stage of completion. But you are my inspiration. Without you I would not have the courage to go on with it at all.

He hesitated before the conclusion, as he had when first drafting it four nights ago. On the other side of the window pane the sky was already smoking over with a fine mist, turning rapidly from the color of arterial blood to a dead slate gray. The sea rushed and drubbed at the coastline a mile to the west, shaking and steadily eroding the bedrock upon which his town was built; the vibrations which reached the glass membrane next to him were like the rhythms of a buried human heart.

There is one more thing. I have a very important question to ask you, I hope you don't mind. It is a simple thing (to you) and I'm sure you could answer it. You might say I should ask someone else but the truth is I don't know anyone else who could help. What I know isn't enough. I thought it would be but it isn't. It seems to me that the things we learned up until now, the really important things, and I can tell we've had many of the same experiences (the Sixties, etc.), when it came time to live them, the system balked. And we're dying. But don't worry, I'm a fighter. I learned a long time ago: never give up.

I live in my parents' old house now, so we could have plenty of privacy. In my opinion we could help each other very much. My number is 474-2841. If I'm not here I'll be at the Blue & White (corner of Rosetta and Damietta), that is where I work, anybody can tell you where to find it. I hope to hear from you at your earliest convenience.

Meanwhile I'm waiting with bated breath for your book of essays, OTHER CEDENTS, they mentioned it on Wake Up, America and I can hardly wait! If you care to let me read the manuscript prior to publication I promise to return it by Express Mail in perfect condition. (Just asking, hint hint.) In any event please come by for a visit on your next trip to the West Coast. I hope you will take me up on it sometime (soon!), I really need the answer. We Horror Fans have to stick together. As you said in your Introduction to NIGHTMARE TERRITORY, "It may be a long time till morning, but there's no law against talking in the dark."

Faithfully Yours,

Victor Ripon

He sat back. He breathed in, out. It was the first breath he had been aware of taking for several minutes. The view from the window was no longer clear. A blanket of fog had descended to shroud all evidence of life outside his room. The puppies next door had quieted, resigned to their fate. Still a hopeful smile played at the corners of his mouth. He stacked and folded the pages to fit the already stamped envelope. There. Now there wasn't anything to do but wait.

He stretched expansively, hearing his joints pop like dry bones, and his fingernails touched the window. So early, and yet the glass was chillingly brittle, ready to shatter under the slightest provocation.

With any luck he wouldn't have long to wait at all.

The days shrank as the season contracted, drawing inward against the approaching winter. Trees bared stiffening limbs, scraped the sky and etched patterns of stars as sharp and cold as diamond dust above the horizon. Victor got out his old Army jacket. The main house became dank and tomblike, magnifying the creaking of dry-rotted timbers. He took to sleeping in the guest cabin, though the portable heater kept him tight and shivering night after night.

He pressed bravely ahead with his story, the outlines and preliminary versions of which by now filled two thick notebooks, reorganizing, redrafting, and obsessively repolishing lines and paragraphs with a jeweler's precision.

But it was not good enough.

He wanted the pages to sing with ideas that had once seemed so important to him, all and everything he knew, and yet they did not, and no amount of diligence was able to bring them to life. The story came to be a burden and weighed more heavily in his hands each time he lifted it out of the drawer. After a few weeks he was reluctant to open the desk at all.

He stayed in bed more but slept less, dragging himself up for work each day only at the last possible minute. Nothing except Rex Christian's books held any interest for him now, and he had read them all so many times he believed he knew them by heart, almost as well as his own stillborn effort. Channel 56 exhausted its library of late-night movies and sold out to a fundamentalist religious sect peddling fire and brimstone. The nights lengthened and the long winter closed around him.

Each day, he thought, I die a little. I must. I get out of bed, don't I?

Mornings, he walked the two miles along the creek into town, reexamining the last few years like beads to be memorized in his pocketed fists before they slipped away forever. He walked faster, but his life only seemed to recede that much more swiftly across the dunes and back to the sea. He could neither hold on to nor completely forget how things had once been. Whether or not they had ever truly been the way he remembered them was not the point. The spell of the past, real or imagined, had settled over him like the shadow of giant wings, and he could not escape.

He submerged himself in his work at the shop, a space he rented for small appliance repair behind the Blue & White Diner, but that was not enough, either. For a time he tried to tell himself that nothing else mattered. But it was an evasion. You can run, he thought, but you can't hide. Rex Christian had taught him that.

Some days he would have traded anything he owned and all that he had ever earned to wake up one more time with the special smell of her on his pillow—just that, no matter whether he ever actually set eyes on her again. Other days his old revenge fantasies got the better of him. But all that was real for him now was the numbness of more and more hours at the shop, struggling to penetrate the inner workings of what others paid him to fix, the broken remnants of households which had fallen apart suddenly, without warning or explanation.