The girl was studying the far end of the house with her dark, almost expressionless eyes.
He’d had enough.
He put down his coffee cup, stood, stretched, and started for the entryway, trying to ignore the way even those slow, simple movements intensified the pounding of his heart. He considered and rejected a half-dozen explanations for her presence on his property, the most obvious of which was that she lived in one of the new houses that had sprouted up in the last year or two along Millstream Road. But even that seemed unlikely, since the closest of those houses was nearly a mile away. Since the girl had come up the hillside from the woods, that most likely meant she had been following the creek, and that meandering path would have made it closer to a mile and a half – a rugged, difficult mile and a half.
He reached the door and went outside, where the humid morning air enveloped him like a blanket. He felt the pressure in his chest – a near constant these days – tighten to the point of genuine pain, and the simple act of breathing – not so simple anymore – immediately became a crushing labor.
He made his way around to the front of the house, reminding himself to be nice. He was painfully aware of how his appearance had changed, that his visage and carriage would delight a casting director looking to fill a bit part called “Crotchety Old Man.” The change, which seemed to come about in a series of rapidly-accelerating phases over the past eighteen months or so, was a source of endless, clinical fascination to him. But it would probably terrify the poor girl, who was, after all, just out for a walk, or perhaps had gotten herself turned around and lost, and in any case meant no harm. If he approached her loudly or brusquely or any way but cautiously, it would just compound the difficulty of the situation.
He forced a smile on his face, hoping he didn’t look too much like a grinning skeleton, and rounded the corner.
“Are you–” he started to say, but the words died on his lips.
The girl was gone.
He looked left and right and straight ahead, down toward the woods, but she was nowhere in sight.
He opened his mouth to call out, to say, “Little girl, are you there?” but stopped himself when he heard the words in his mind and realized they would make him sound like a wizened pedophile trying to lure his latest victim out of hiding. He spent the next few moments trying to determine just what to say – why was it so damnably hard to simply think these days? – and finally settled on an understated and relatively harmless single word.
“Hello?”
There was no answer. There was no sound at all except a steady drip of water off the eaves of the house. The heavy mist enveloped everything and stole even the possibility of an echo coming back to him.
He looked for footprints, hoping to figure out what direction she had gone, but the only thing he could see was her original trail coming up the hillside from the woods and the creek, stopping at the edge of the dirt. The grass where she had walked was already beginning to lose the rough shape of the prints, the tall blades gradually springing back into place one and two at a time.
Where did you go, Clarissa? he wondered.
The question came abruptly. More than that, it came out of left field – the farthest, leftest of left fields he had ever imagined in his life. It caught him off guard, flustered, and entirely baffled him. That name, Clarissa – where had that come from? He couldn’t begin to say, yet it felt… right. It felt proper. More than that, it felt familiar. What he couldn’t tell is if that name and its familiarity was actually significant, or if it was just another of those endlessly surprising mental detours or short circuits or meltdowns that just a year or two ago would have been alarming but now seemed to be an inescapable part of his daily routine.
He waited a few moments more, scanning the fog, then turned and limped slowly back around the house. That single word, the name Clarissa, echoed in his brain with every step. On three separate occasions he came to an abrupt halt, certain that he’d heard footsteps behind him. But it was just the sound of his own ragged breathing, and when he looked behind him there was no one there.
****
That afternoon he actually got some writing done – only seven paragraphs and part of an eighth, but it was the most progress he had made on his current novel in several months.
Page normally sat at his desk for at least an hour every morning, and if his aching joints were not too bad and that constant band of pressure around his chest was not too tight, he sometimes managed another hour or two in the afternoon. But despite the minutes clocked at his keyboard, his forward momentum was halting at best, and the stack of manuscript pages next to his printer had not really grown in a year. He often found himself rewriting the same paragraphs, sometimes the same sentences, several dozen times before he was able to inch forward again, and occasionally he rewrote the same chapter over and over for weeks on end, hoping each new version would be better, though in truth they seldom changed much, if at all. He sometimes wondered if he was a ghost, if he had actually died years ago while working on this section of the book and now was condemned to repeatedly write and rewrite the same pages for all eternity.
Today, after his usual halting start, the words flowed a little easier. For a short time it almost felt as if some mental logjam had – not broken, but shifted just a little, letting bits and pieces of real language through for the first time in ages. While seven and a half paragraphs was nothing to advertise in The New York Times Book Review, it felt wonderful to him, the way he used to feel decades ago on those magic days, those days he would go on a tear, on a roll, when the words came out in a white-hot flood. On those days, instead of his usual five pages, he might churn out eight, ten, even twelve pages of good, solid copy. Today’s work felt almost like that. For a brief, beautiful time, he had even been able to imagine that the pain in his hands had eased and the pressure in his chest had loosened.
Eventually, of course, it all dried up again and he found himself engaged in the all too familiar pastime of watching the flashing cursor on his computer screen. He tried backing up a bit and rewriting the last few sentences, hoping to build enough momentum to smash through the block, but as usual it did not help. After a time he felt himself getting drowsy, as often happened during his afternoon sessions, and then he did that other thing he had been doing far too often lately: he fell asleep at his desk, slumped back in his chair, chin on his chest, mouth open, snoring raggedly.
He dreamed that he was on the phone with his agent, although he had not had an agent for more than ten years. Then he dreamed he was talking to his editor, although he didn’t have one of those, either, not since his last short story collection was released in 2006. When he awoke, he was no longer at his desk or even in his office. He was standing in front of the bookcase in his living room, which held the remains of what had once been an impressive collection, the few hundred volumes he had left after countless eBay sales to make ends meet.
The shock of awakening in another part of the house made him cry out – a small, strangled croak – and grip the nearest shelf for balance.
That was when he saw that he was holding a book. He stared at it blankly for a moment before recognition dawned. It was a copy of his first story collection, Black Stones, which had been published long, long ago – long enough to be considered an antique.
Like its author, he thought.
Obviously, he had walked here in his sleep. It seemed improbable, impossible, but there was no doubt it had happened. He had come here in his sleep and plucked the volume off the shelf. He could see the gap in the row of books before him, the narrow slot where Black Stones had been quietly residing just moments before.
Without thinking, he opened the cover and thumbed past the frontispiece and title page, past the listing of copyrights, past the dedication to his sister, until he reached the table of contents.
That was when it came to him.
Even before he scanned down the list of seventeen tales – tales that spanned the earliest years of his car
eer, when he was publishing mostly in small, fan-produced publications and getting paid mostly in copies instead of cash – he knew what he had come here for. The answer arrived in an unaccustomed burst of clarity, so big and bright and bold that it seemed impossible he had missed it before.
The third story in the book was called “Shadow Child.” It was a modest effort, written when he was only twenty-three and sold to a magazine called Midnight Revels that was produced on a mimeograph machine and hand-folded, sometimes stapled and sometimes not. He recalled actually being paid cash for this particular story. An eighth-of-a-cent per word. Two thousand words, two dollars and fifty cents.
The main character of “Shadow Child” was a young girl, a runaway who lands on the streets of Chicago and is befriended by an older woman who may or may not be – but probably is – the devil. The girl was twelve, thin almost to the point of emaciation. Blonde. Pale.
Her name was Clarissa Berman.
He felt no shock at the revelation, and why should he? He had known all along that the young girl in his yard reminded him of a character he had written about more than forty years ago. He had known it the minute he saw her coming up the hill. It just took him a while to realize what he knew.
He flipped to page thirty-nine and read the first lines of the story: She was just a kid, no more than twelve, fair-haired and white-skinned, dressed in washed-out jeans with holes in the knees and a red nylon windbreaker. She was just a kid coming out of the Greyhound station with no suitcase, no backpack, no belongings of any kind, looking around as if searching for something, but even she could not say what.
He felt a chill reading those words – a single finger of ice that traced a fine line down the back of his neck. He looked up suddenly, sure that he had seen a flash of color or movement out the corner of his eye. There was no one there, but he still took a step toward the window to get a better look.
Was she still out there somewhere?
All he saw was his old truck and the first hundred yards of the driveway, before it curved out of sight into the woods on its winding way to Millstream Road.
His heart gave a sudden walloping flip-flop and a wave of dizziness washed over him. He groped for the shelf again and Black Stones slipped from his grasp, thumping on the floor at his feet. Only later, after the tilt-a-whirl sensation had passed, did he notice how the book had fallen, cover down, pages open.
“Of course,” he said aloud, as he saw how perfectly the volume had opened to page thirty-nine. “Why not? Of course.”
He bent to pick it up, but hesitated at the last second, as if afraid it might leap at him or bite him or burst into flames. But nothing of the sort happened, so he merely slapped the covers shut and slipped the book back into its slot on the shelf.
****
The next incident happened two days later, and this time there was no doubt, no misunderstanding, not even any momentary confusion.
Page was in the Mountaintop Market, loading his cart with Campbell’s vegetable beef soup, which on many days was the only thing he could reliably eat without upsetting his stomach, when a voice behind him said, “Excuse me, sir, did you drop this?”
He turned and saw a pretty young woman standing there, smiling politely and holding something out to him. At first he thought it was a box of Kleenex, but then he took his glasses from their perch atop his head, rested them on his nose, and saw that it was a book. Not just any book. His book. It was a battered, dog-eared paperback copy of his third novel, The Night Road, and an early one at that. He recognized the garish, purple-black-crimson, foil-embossed cover art as either a first or second edition from the late 1980s, before the book had gone out of print and was eventually picked up by another publisher, who reissued it with a more sedate – more literary, he had told himself hopefully at the time – design.
He wondered how to answer the woman, and decided she was not looking for a lengthy conversation. That ruled out the obvious gambit: No, I didn’t drop it, but it’s funny you should ask, because, well, this is going to sound crazy, but I actually wrote that book. I’m John Page. Can you believe it? Small world, isn’t it? Nor did she look the type to be charmed by a doddering has-been of a writer, to ask for his life story or even just an autograph. She was young and busy and had places to be. All she wanted was an answer to her question, so he gave it to her.
“I’m afraid not, miss, but thank you for asking.”
He turned back to his soup, and froze.
There was a man standing in front of him. A man he knew. A man he recognized immediately. A man who could not be there.
There was none of the bafflement he had felt watching Clarissa Berman walk up the hillside toward his house. There was only one man who looked like this, one man who was broad and towering, with shaggy snow-white hair and a wild walrus mustache to match, who wore a brown cowboy hat tilted back on his head and a worn denim jacket half unbuttoned. Most of all, there was only one man who had that scar – a jagged, angry, reddish-white splotch that covered half of his left cheek.
It was Jarrod Walsh, the hero – antihero, actually – of The Night Road.
He looked for the young woman with the book, but she was gone. There was no one in the aisle but Page and Walsh, a writer and a man who did not exist, who lived only between the covers of an out-of-print pulp novel, who had sprung from Page’s own imagination and come to life in 1985 through the keyboard of an old Royal typewriter.
It occurred to him how lucky he was that Walsh did not exist. If the man was real, there would already be a dead writer lying on the cold tile floor of the Mountaintop Market. That was Walsh’s way. He did not take time for conversation. He didn’t even take a moment to size up his target, having already done that long before ever making physical contact. The way it worked with Walsh was that you saw him for one brief instant, barely enough time to register that someone was standing in front of you. There was a flash of steel, a whisper of sound, and you were on the floor with your throat cut, bleeding out.
In the same half-second that Page thought these things, he also realized how insane it sounded. Thinking about a fictional character, his own fictional character, as if he were a real person – that was beyond the boundaries of craziness.
Then again, that fictional character was standing before him right now. He was, in words that Walsh himself might have used in the novel, as real as life, as big as sin, and twice as ugly.
The killer was looking at him with an odd expression. It was not the glassy, dispassionate gaze Page had written for him in the book. It seemed to him that there was a brighter light in Walsh’s eyes, a trace of real emotion. And the smile on his lips was not the sardonic expression you might expect. It was softer, more genuine, almost kind.
“Hello, Jarrod,” he said in a low, soft voice, not wanting anyone to overhear. He needn’t have worried; they were still alone in the supermarket aisle.
Walsh reached out slowly and rested a big, gnarled hand on Page’s forearm.
Page yelped and pulled back, shocked by the touch, which felt as cold as January granite. It sent a ribbon of pain unfurling up his arm and into his chest. His eyes widened, and he struggled to draw a breath.
“Jarrod–” he croaked, but it was too late. The killer was no longer there.
“Sir? Are you all right? Are you–”
He pivoted and let out a second, smaller cry when he saw the young woman still standing there, still giving him the same polite smile, but with a trace of concern now, as well.
“Do you need a doctor?” she said, and reached out for him. He shrank back, irrationally terrified of being touched again.
“Sir?”
He noticed that she was still holding the book. Except –
Except it was not a copy of The Night Road, not with the gaudy 1980s cover or the sophisticated design of the later editions, not battered and dog-eared, not with his name on the cover, not his book at all. It was the farthest thing from one of his books imaginable, an almost new trade paperbac
k edition of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, one of Page’s favorites, although he had not read it in years.
He turned away abruptly and hurried up the aisle, leaving behind his shopping cart full of soup and a very confused woman holding a book that was not his and never had been.
****
“It’s sort of fascinating, don’t you think?”
Roger Norton’s voice on the phone was light and cheery, but it irritated Page nevertheless.
“In what way, exactly, do you find it fascinating?”
“Are you kidding me? A writer being visited by his characters? That’s pretty darn fascinating to me. It’s like an old episode of The Twilight Zone.”
Page grunted. “Starring Burgess Meredith as the broken-down old writer, I suppose. I’m glad you find my situation amusing. But you’ll excuse me if I’m not amused.”
It had been a mistake to tell Roger about the visitations. He had realized that almost as soon as he launched into the story. He’d blurted out the first few sentences and suddenly realized that it was impossible to tell the tale without sounding like an utter lunatic. But by then it had been too late.
It was three days after the incident at the Mountaintop Market, and there had been two more visits since then. The first had happened that same day, just twenty minutes later, while he was driving home from Kingston Mills. He had seen a man standing on the side of the road, a hitchhiker, holding a sign that said SAN FRANCISCO BOUND, which just happened to be the title of another one of his early stories, another story that had been collected in Black Stones. As he had with Walsh – consciously – and with Clarissa Berman – unconsciously – he immediately recognized the hitcher as Franklin Hill, a secondary but colorfully memorable character in the San Francisco story, a drifter who runs afoul of a vampire truck driver while thumbing for a lift to the titular city by the bay. Page’s foot had come off the gas for just a moment, until he realized what he was doing and accelerated again, speeding past the grinning Hill, his swollen, aching hands shaking on the steering wheel.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 26
