Just as they began to surge forward, the door to Alonzo’s opened to reveal a beautiful young blonde woman. She was dressed fashionably, but not flashy. Style, grace, passion—she possessed all these things, and you knew it instantly. She was the kind whose entrance into a room compelled everyone to take notice, and it was happening now. Jerry Leigh’s barroom passion play was a pale memory.
She stood there scanning the faces of her audience, obviously looking for someone, apparently distressed. When her gaze reached Jerry Leigh, it fractured like a delicate vase in the hand of a dolt.
“Daddy!” she half-whispered, half-cried out the word.
The collective empathy of the patrons filled the room with its immediacy. The inherent tragedy of this beautiful girl/woman being in any way related to the slug at the bar touched everyone.
She moved to the bar, glanced at Longhair Tommy and enacted a small smile. “It’s okay, I can handle him. Thank you.”
Elegant. Direct. Whatever, it worked.
Both men relaxed as Tommy retreated to his own stool and Jerry struggled up from the depths of his self-pity.
“Karen…Jesus, what’re you doin’ here?”
“I waited for you, Daddy. I looked for you. When you didn’t come, I got worried.”
“Huh?” Her words slipped past his ethanol sentries, making sense when he wished they wouldn’t. “What’s goin’ on, baby?”
“Daddy, how could you…?” She was shaking her head slowly, biting her lower lip. This man had embarrassed her, but far worse, he had failed her.
“How could—?”
The front door swung open again to reveal a young man in a tailored suit. He looked like he could have sculled for Princeton or Brown and he should have a name like Kyle or Coates.
“Chip!” Karen said to him. “I found him!”
Okay, so it was Chip—Jerry had been close…
The young man moved quickly to their position at the bar. His expression belied his relief, sadness, and disgust. “I told you this is where he’d be,” he said.
“What’s goin’ on, Baby?” slurred Jerry.
“He doesn’t even know why we’re here!” said Chip, anger contorting his features. “He forgot! I told you he forgot!”
Who the hell was this indignant snot? Jerry tried to stand up, face his accuser. “Forget what, buddy?”
Chip started to speak, but Karen beat him to the punchline. “Daddy, I graduated from law school tonight.”
“Tonight? That was tonight?!”
A dim alarm sounded in some back room of his mind. Law school. Lawyers. Of course, that’s why they’d been on his mind. Somewhere, amidst the clutter of his life and his thoughts, lay the discarded note to attend his daughter’s commencement at the University of Baltimore Law School. Downtown. Right down the street from his desk at the Sun, right down the street from his favorite oasis where Karen had found him…
“Jesus, baby, I’m sorry! I can’t believe I forgot…It’s like I was so busy at the paper, I guess everything caught up with me. But I’ll make it up to ya, I promise, you’ll see.”
“Let’s go, Karen,” said Chip, who had sandy hair. Naturally.
Jerry reached back toward the bar. He needed a knock of bourbon. Bad.
“Oh, Daddy, I can’t believe this…”
“C’mon, Karen, he’s too drunk to even know what’s going on.”
“No! No, I’m not,” Jerry said in a loud voice. “So how’d it go, huh, baby? You a lawyer now?”
“Daddy, I’ve got to go. Chip and I are driving up to Deep Creek Lake with some friends. They’ve got a great cabin up there. We’re going to celebrate.” She paused and looked at him with an expression of terrible sadness. “We’ve got to go.”
“Now? Tonight? You’re going up there now?”
“Yes. But I didn’t want to leave without finding out what happened to you. Now I know.” She almost bent forward to kiss him on the forehead, but stopped herself. Then she backed away and turned toward the door. “Goodbye, Daddy.”
“Karen, wait a minute!”
But Ivy-League-Chip had her by the arm and they were already moving together away from the bar. Their exit through the front door a sharp punctuation to the encounter.
Shaking his head slowly, Jerry wheeled back to the bar.
“Freshen me up, Frankie,” he said.
The bartender shook his head. “It’s damned sad when a father don’t think about his kid…”
Jerry grinned sloppily. “What you mean—Karen? Ah! She’ll get over it. C’mon! Fill ’er up!”
“I think you’ve about had it, Mr. Leigh,” said Frankie. “I think you better be gettin’ home.”
“Home?” Jerry looked fatuously at Frankie. “I ain’t got nothin’ at home.”
“Yeah, well, you ain’t got nothin’ here, either. Goodnight, Mr. Leigh.”
It must have been one of those fucking blackouts…
The next thing he knew, he was sitting at his desk in the Baltimore Sun building on Calvert Street. Ambient light from the city leaked through the nearby window to cast long, dim shadows across the sea of workstations, desks, and partitions. Other parts of the building hummed with nightshift hive-life, but all the reporters in this department were long-gone. It was late; even the bars and the after-hours joints had folded their tents for the night.
But still carrying a healthy buzz around in his skull, Jerry reached for the bottom-right drawer. It was like a galvanic response, or more appropriately, a tropic reaction. Like an amoeba being drawn toward a light source, Jerry was attracted to his Granddad bottle. He ignored the formality of his peanut butter jar, and pulled off a shot or so straight from the neck. The bourbon scorched a sweet path down his throat and he tried to remember what he was trying to forget this time…
Something bad.
Something embarrassing, he knew that.
And gradually, the memories reached him, like the inevitable rising of the tide, and he lapsed into ever-greater self-pity. What an asshole…! His own daughter. He was hopeless.
If he had any balls at all, he’d—
An odd sound interrupted his thought. Odd, but familiar too.
A rustling, crunching sound. Of newspapers being wadded up…
It was more than that. There was a rhythm, a cadence to the sound, as though someone was walking across a great plane of old, balled-up sheets of newsprint, and their footsteps were still crunching up everything pretty good.
Sitting there in the dark, Jerry held the bottle an inch from his lower lip, looking across the gray night of the newsroom. He was listening to the sound, as toasted as he might have been; his attention had been hooked.
Lurching forward, he tried to isolate the source of the noise.
Beyond the vast room, out in the corridor. It grew steadily louder. Whatever it was, it was coming down the main corridor, closer to him.
“Hey! Anybody out there?!” Jerry’s voice lost its power as it echoed across the room and slinked out the door.
The crumpling-papers sound stopped, as though his voice had in some way signaled it to halt. Jerry listed forward in his chair, waiting against the silence like a man leaning against a cold, stone wall.
Several eternities glaciered past.
Nothing.
Fuck it. Make yourself a nightcap and get the hell home.
He pointed the bottle towards his face, and the sound of newspaper whispered across the shadows.
“All right, what’s goin’ on! Who’s out there?”
Again, silence.
“Goddammit!” Jerry slammed the bottle on the desktop, lurched to his feet. He’d had enough of the goddamned games. He’d fix ’em, whoever it was…
Amidst the phalanx of desks and partitions, he worked his way to the open door. Some sonuvabitch thinks he’s funny, tryin’ to fuck with my head…Yeah, we’ll see about that…
Jerry reached the door, stepped out into the hall—
—and stopped abruptly. Gasping for a stale
breath, he felt his heart hammering. It was like opening your eyes and discovering you’re standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Something was wrong with the light, the corridor. The perspective was all wrong. Across had become down. Up had lost all meaning. Everything was…stretched. Distorted. Skewed. He grappled for the right word, then realized it didn’t matter, didn’t change the reality of what he was seeing. Jerry had been white-knuckling the doorjamb unconsciously. If he let go, he would go hurtling down the corridor like a body sailing down an open well. The sound had ceased again, but there was something moving far away, at the vertices of the corridor, where the lines of perspective converged. Beams of light spiked around the object, lancing the mist that accented the seemingly endless shaft.
Mist? Where the hell was he?
Jerry had heard of drunks that gave you these kinds of hallucinations, but he’d never had one till now. Time to change brands…
He tried to pull back from the edge of the gravity pit, but something held him there. Whatever it was at the far end of the hallway was moving, behind the light, breaking and re-fusing in its beams. The sound of the newspapers being crumpled up echoed up the hall. There was a rhythm to it, a cadence that commanded his attention. Gradually a shape resolved itself out of the distance. Something large was moving towards him and Jerry felt a tightening all over his body, as though his skin was no longer the right size.
The shape grew ever closer. Tall, thick, and bipedal. It lurched towards him. Mythic archetypes flooded him with images of menace. Minotaur, yeti, golem, whatever it was, he thought, it was bad news.
At that moment, he had no idea how terribly accurate his idiom might be.
The effects of a long night of alcohol and self-pity had been leached out of him in an instant. He was no longer stewed in his own foul juices, and his feelings of surly indifference had been replaced by a growing sense of unease, of true fear.
“All right, what the hell is this?!” His words fell limply down the shaft dripping gobbets of false bravado.
The shape lumbered closer. It was big, imposing, formidable.
The sound grew louder, more intense.
The sound of newspapers dying.
“Jerry…”
The thing spoke to him, and it was like somebody just tried to yank the bones out of him. Its voice, soft as a whisper, but serrated with dreaded familiarity, sawed through him.
He tried to back away, but there was no place to go. The door he’d passed through was gone, and he stood in the endless corridor, leaning forward, feeling like he’d drop through the center of the planet. Everything in him was drying up, and his nuts fell like a couple of dried peas rattling around in a gourd. A coldness entered him like smoke, and if he could have moved at all, he would have trembled. But even that was taken away.
The shape was close now. Close enough for Jerry to see it for what it was.
“Jerry…”
“Get away from me,” he said mindlessly. The thing was reaching out to him, beckoning, as though it meant to curl him into its tendrilled arm. Massive in size and bulk, its thickness was masked by the suggestion of robes; its head cowled in what might be a hood or some hideous extension of its own shape. Like some scarecrow gone wrong, it appeared to be made of newspapers.
A paper man. A newspaper man.
As it moved, the print of its flesh swirled and flowed like ink, forming rivers and estuaries of words, columns. Like a tattooed man from the darkest carnival, the figure loomed over him.
“Do you know who I am?” it asked in a voice that was the whispery folding and crushing of old papers. It was a mesmerizing sound.
“No,” Jerry forced a croak from his freeze-dried throat.
“Yes, you do, Jerry…I am the Newspaper Man.”
“What do you want…?”
“You said that I am Death…”
“What?” Jerry Leigh hung upon the words of the apparition, and as awash as he might be in the backwaters of alcoholic poisoning, he knew he faced an entity of cosmic proportion.
“And you know what, Jerry…? You’re right.”
“Right about what? What is all this? What do you want with me?”
“Look,” said the Newspaper Man. He leaned forward displaying the length of his arm with stylish flourish.
Against his will, Jerry watched the maelstrom of type upon the papered skin. Headlines formed for an instant, then sank beneath the surface…Hurricane Amy Claims 32…Terrorist Bomb Kills 5…Asian Flu Lethal For Elderly Couple…Suicide Rate Climbs For Troubled Teens…
“I am death. I am the ‘gooshy stuff’.”
Jerry twisted against the forces which toyed with him like a spider spindling its prey. A coldness had invaded him, a touch from the void of all that has lost life’s spark.
“Have you seen the news today?” it whispered.
The Type again moved and sank and resurfaced. Jerry watched a new headline rise up like the head of an ancient beast: Two Die in Fiery Crash near Deep Creek Lake
The cold that had been nesting within his soul collapsed like a dying star, it fell in upon itself, and sucked in all that was left of him.
Karen was gone.
The final connection, the last link to the fire and juice in life, had been severed. There was nothing left to keep him from plummeting into entropy’s heart. Nothing left. Inside or out.
Jerry threw himself at the Newspaper Man, but fell short.
“Help me! You gotta do something!” he screamed.
“I do nothing. I simply am.”
“Take me instead!”
“This is no cheap melodrama, Jerry. I did not come here to strike a bargain.”
He was sobbing openly now, and the sting of Karen’s loss had become the only heat-source in the dead-star coldness of his being. “Then what are you doing here? What’s the point of it all?”
“If you don’t know by now, then you are far more wretched then even I can grasp.”
“Then…what now?”
The Newspaper Man bowed mockingly and began to recede from him. “For you, more of the same. Unless you choose differently.”
“Wait!” cried Jerry. “It’s not supposed to end like this! Isn’t there something else?”
“Only this…” the Newspaper Man raised a hand and fanned his long fingers. In doing so a daily edition curled into being. Then with the smooth motion of a twelve-year-old boy, he launched the paper at Jerry. Like a Cruise missile, the rolled-up paper homed in on him, piercing his chest with a cleansing fire.
There was flash of golden heat, and then—
One of the cleaning ladies found him curled up in the third-floor hallway of the Sun building. Alarmed, she called 911 and the paramedics came to gather up Jerry Leigh.
As he rode in the back of the ambulance, the tortured visions of his ethanol nightmare refused to take their exit. Outside, the sun remained several hours away. What had happened to him? Had he been standing at the threshold to one of the universe’s composing rooms? Or had he been ass-deep in the worst episode of delirium tremens this side of the boneyard?
He was afraid to find out if he’d been handed a tout sheet for tomorrow, or maybe just a friendly warning from his conscience to be a better man, a better father. And somewhere in the darkness, the presses banged and stamped and rolled, and another Sun waited to be born.
Jerry knew that he would dread the sound of its birth as it slapped upon the wood of his front porch.
Have you seen the news today?
’Round the time Elizabeth and I were thinking about moving to New England, I get a letter from a writer in England who’d kind of burst onto the publishing scene with a bunch of stories and a few novels. His name was Peter Crowther, and in addition to a story he’d sold to our Borderlands anthologies, he had also written several unforgettable pieces for Cemetery Dance magazine. I was impressed with the guy’s energy and his clean, wonderfully readable style—mainly because (and I fully cop to being a reactionary nationalist on th
is one) he writes more like an American than the average Englishman. I like Pete’s writing and I like him as a person.
But I digress.
He had come up with an idea for an anthology called Touch Wood, stories which explored some aspect of a superstition—its origin, its power, it effectiveness, etc. I thought it was a challenging idea, and I promised him I would come up with something. I sat down and made a list of superstitions and waited for some sort of spark of white-heat inspiration to synapse through me, and…nothing was happening. Nada, Zerocity, Uh-uh, and all that. So I shared this with Elizabeth and she suggested taking the literal approach, saying “okay, the book is called Touch Wood…well, did you know that the real superstition about knocking on wood says that it’s good luck only as long as the wood does not have legs.”1
Well, I hadn’t heard that one, and it still didn’t give me an idea for a story, but it got me thinking about what kind of wooden objects had legs as opposed to those that had none. And then I started trying to free associate, and thought about Pete Crowther being British, and then I thought about Alfred Hitchcock being British, and maybe I would do an homage to the kind of story Hitchcock used to do on his absolutely brilliant television show from the Fifties and Sixties. That got me into motion, and it seemed to me that one of standard sub-genres of the TV show, and of the kinds of stories in the Hitchcock anthologies, were ones which used the staid, mannered setting of the Old World Gentleman’s Club—replete with polished wainscoting, cigar humidors, and the obligatory oil paintings of The Hunt.
All I needed were a few contentious characters and a plot device, which are always laying about the workshop. So I grabbed up the required items and went to work on this next one…
1 Don’t ask me how she knows this kind of stuff. My wife is an inexhaustible font of weird knowledge, and even though we are together 24-hours a day, she keeps me forever fascinated and entertained.
For an instant, Gordon Kingsley had forgotten where he was.
Had he drifted off to sleep? Impossible! After what he’d just experienced…no, it was plainly impossible.
And yet he’d felt himself blink, felt his entire body spasm, as though he’d been abruptly awakened, as though from a trance.
Fearful Symmetries Page 25
