Black Rock
Page 36
‘To your wife that doesn’t exist.’
‘… and you’ve lost me. A moment ago I’d never met you, then you offer to drive me home, now you want to string me up by the balls.’
‘Right, wrong, right, right,’ Dawn Tauber said. ‘University of East Anglia, ninety-one. University of Southampton, ninety-two. University College London, ninety-three. Mean anything?’
Martin shook his head.
‘You haven’t got Alzheimer’s, have you? You’ve got a very shaky memory,’ Dawn said.
‘Remind me,’ Martin said.
‘You did courses. Creative Writing. Science Fiction and Fantasy. How to Succeed in Cyberpunk.’
Martin nodded.
‘I was on all three. You asked me out after one of them when you were drunk. I refused. You invited me to send you my manuscript. I did. You rejected it, probably because I rejected you. Then you rejected another. Then another. Do these words mean anything to you? “I cannot see a place in today’s market for something as hackneyed as Slick City Blues. The style is stilted, the delivery is hesitant, the characterization and motivation are ill-judged. In ninety-five thousand words all you’ve succeeded in doing is confusing me beyond measure.”’
‘I didn’t write that,’ Martin lied. He remembered the submission as soon as he heard the title. He wondered briefly what kind of world it was that sent him a rejected author as his saviour, then cancelled the query. It was obvious what kind of world it was: one that - as far as he was concerned anyway - Peter Perfect was running.
‘You signed it,’ Dawn said. ‘I got the manuscript back this morning.’
Martin shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just didn’t like it.’
‘So I gathered,’ Dawn replied tartly. ‘Now, I’m willing to take you to Bude, if that’s where you want to go, but it’s going to cost you more than two hundred pounds. Quite a lot more, in fact.’
Martin knew what was coming. ‘I’ll walk,’ he said, and turned away.
‘No one else here will take you,’ Dawn said. ‘You know that, don’t you? Anyone you approach now is going to think I changed my mind and they’ll wonder why.’
Martin ignored her and began to walk off. Peter Perfect had arranged events so that Dawn would show up - which meant that he expected Martin to accept her offer. Which, in turn, meant that if he did he would be travelling at Peter Perfect’s mercy. Which means that you won’t get very far, he told himself. She’ll probably crash the car within two miles.
‘It’s going to cost you two grand,’ Dawn said from behind him, keeping pace. ‘But the two grand won’t be for the lift, it’ll be for this manuscript. Listen to me. “Slick City Blues shows that you have a sharp eye for a fast-paced story.” Hodder Headline said that. “Excellent characterization and a stunning ability to evoke a fully-realized parallel world.” Richard Evans at Gollancz wrote that.’
Yeah, but talk’s cheap when you’re rejecting a story, Martin thought. Neither of those publishers wanted the book, did they?
‘I think two thousand is nothing for a first novel by an exciting new talent, don’t you?’ Dawn asked.
Martin stopped and turned to her. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Done!’ Two miles down the road would be two miles closer to Essenjay. He put out his hand to shake on the deal. Handshakes were cheap too, when it came down to it. Who was going to believe a rejected writer with a chip on her shoulder when she started yelling that he’d reneged on a deal? No one, that was who. She had his original rejection letter and he had a copy of it, so making this promise now wasn’t going to mean a thing when it was all over.
Dawn glared at his hand. ‘I’m not such a poor judge of character as you think,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t clinch a deal with someone like you on a handshake. You’re gonna have to write all this down and date it and sign it. Then, before anything else happens, I want to know why you’re in such a hurry to get back to Cornwall where you don’t have a wife.’ She ferreted about inside her string bag and brought out the title page of Slick City Blues and a pen. ‘Take this,’ she told Martin, ‘and write the date on the top of the page then write this: “Ace Publishing hereby undertake to license British and Commonwealth volume publishing rights in Slick City Blues by Dawn S. Tauber for a period of ten years at the sum of two thousand pounds sterling to be paid within one calendar month of this agreement. Publication will follow within twelve calendar months of the above date. Should Ace Publishing decide not to undertake to print and publish twenty thousand copies as agreed above, the rights will revert to the author and a cancellation fee of twenty-five thousand pounds will become payable.”’
Martin looked at her.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘And sign it legibly. Please note that there’ll be a witness, added by the next time you see this piece of paper. It doesn’t cover everything but it’ll do for now.’
Martin wrote and signed. It didn’t matter whether or not the contract was legal - it wouldn’t be acted upon.
Dawn S. Tauber snatched the sheet from his hands when he had finished, folded it and stashed it away beneath her poncho, saying with a cold smile, ‘OK, now we can go.’
As they walked across the car park, where not ten minutes ago Martin had looked in horror at the empty space where Harold and his wife’s car should have been, Dawn said, Tell me why you have to get back to Cornwall in such a hurry. You’re divorced, apparently and your ex-wife lives in London. She didn’t understand you, did she?’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘You were drunk, weren’t you, when you tried to pick me up that time? You told me all this in the Students’ Union bar at the University of East Anglia. You also said you wanted to fuck me into oblivion. Except you were so drunk you said you wanted to fuck me into a Bolivian. I told you what you could do with your dick - stick it up your arse if it would reach - and you asked me if I’d ever heard of the Publishers’ Blacklist, upon which my name would be going. “You’ll never get published in this country,” you said, “I’ll make sure of it”, and I didn’t believe there was such a thing as a blacklist until my submissions collected three hundred rejections. Then I thought, please God, let me meet Martin Dinsey again and let him need my help and now my prayers have been answered. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?’
‘Hilarious,’ Martin replied sourly.
‘And now I’ve got me a publishing deal.’
Or so you think, Martin thought and said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re gonna do well, too.’
‘So why are you in such a hurry to get down to Bude?’
‘My girlfriend,’ Martin said. ‘She’s in a fix.’
Dawn nodded. ‘Something to do with this Black Rock thing you’re so frightened of, I take it.’
‘Yeah,’ Martin said. ‘There’s a guy down there in a house called Black Rock and he’s crazy.’
‘And he’s threatened to get your girlfriend because you rejected him, right?’
<
br /> Martin stopped and turned to Dawn. ‘Are you real?’ he asked.
‘Of course I am. Why?’
‘Because you sound like one of those story characters who happen by and just know all about what’s going on. You’ve been having visions, haven’t you?’
Dawn smiled. ‘You have gone crazy, Snips. The pressure got to you did it? You always used to say that publishing had a high rate of nervous breakdowns and that you had to be tough to survive. You weren’t tough enough, were you?’
Martin glared at her. ‘What do you know about Black Rock?’ he demanded.
‘It was a film starring Spencer Tracy. Only it was Bad Day at Black Rock. It was a good film too. Then there was the Dicky Attenborough film, only that was Brighton Rock. I once read a short-story called Straker’s Island which was about a writer named James Green who’d written a book called Black Rock but that book was only alluded to. I don’t know what happened in it.’
‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ Martin said.
Dawn grinned. This time it was a sunny grin that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the face of Essenjay herself. ‘There’s a certain magic in writing that you must have come across yourself,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s like… Serendipity, they call it, don’t they? Like a great big fat coincidence that makes you wonder if you’ve actually predicted something. A guy called William Gerhardie did it with a book about an unsinkable ship. The book was called Futility. The boat was called Titan, and guess what?’
Martin already knew what. The story was legendary.
Dawn’s grin got wider. ‘Titan hit an iceberg and sunk. That was published ages before the Titanic thing. It was like reality was mimicking fiction. Sometimes that does happen. It’s like reality doesn’t have enough ideas of its own to go round, so it borrows some of the good ones from literature. There was a woman called Judith Wax who wrote a book called Starting in the Middle. On page 696 of the book she said she was convinced she would die in a plane crash. She did die in a plane crash and the flight number was 696. That’s real life for you. Stranger than fiction.’
‘And?’ Martin asked. There was more - it was written all over her smug face.
‘And, after my first rejection from you, I wrote a venomous short story called Black Rock in which an editor’s girlfriend was attacked by a rejected writer as revenge. The message was: “You don’t publish my book, you suffer.” Does that just about sum up what’s happening to you?’
‘What do you think?’ Martin asked.
Dawn nodded and grinned.
Martin felt a very strong urge to plant his fist in the centre of that serves-you-right smile. He did not do this. Dawn had a car and the car probably wouldn’t start for him. The only way he was going to get back to Bude was by hitch-hiking, that much was certain. He shrugged in an OK-you’ve-got-me-now-what look and said, ‘Let me take a guess at what your middle name might be. The initial is “S” isn’t it?’
Dawn nodded.
‘Snowdrop, right?’
Dawn looked amazed. ‘How did you know?’
‘Like we agreed, truth is stranger than fiction. Except that sometimes it is fiction. Now how about taking me to your car and fulfilling your side of the bargain?’
Dawn Snowdrop Tauber’s car turned out to be an ancient Fiat 500. It was about as far away from the Ferrari as the Earth was from Alpha Centauri. Two cylinders and five hundred cubic centimetres of raw power, Martin thought bitterly. Flat out, it probably goes about forty.
Then he stopped being bitter and started wondering if he ought to run because in the clear blue sky a hundred feet above the car, a very familiar brown cloud was forming.
‘What’s that}’ Dawn said, looking up.
Martin began to back away. There were two reasons why he didn’t answer Dawn’s question, and the first was because he could barely believe what was happening. The second reason was that if there was anyone who more deserved to be engulfed in a rain of fire at this particular moment than Dawn S. Tauber, he didn’t know who it was.
Dawn didn’t notice that Martin was no longer beside her. She stayed where she was, her key in the door of the Fiat while she stared up at the coalescing cloud. Martin backed into a car and slid down its length, his eyes flicking from the cloud to Dawn and back again. He gave Dawn about another thirty seconds on the planet Earth.
The cloud built up and darkened, the brown coloration fading.
Not fire then, Martin thought moving steadily away from the Fiat. He’s done a proper lightning cloud this time.
There was about ten seconds left now. ‘It looks like a little thundercloud,’ Dawn said, suddenly looking round for him. She did a double take at the empty space beside her, then spotted Martin fifty feet away, facing her but walking backwards.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked in a surprised voice.
Martin fought a brief battle with himself. Half of him wanted to see dear little Dawn turned to a pile of ashes, and the other half wanted to warn her.
‘Get out of the way!’ he shouted, hating himself for it. ‘Lightning! You’ll be struck!’
Dawn smiled at him as though she’d seen the joke he was playing on her. ‘Oh,’ she said and nodded. She glanced back at the cloud, then looked round again. ‘You’re joking,’ she called. ‘Aren’t you?’
Go on then, get it over with! Martin thought. Dawn was down to be hit, apparently. Above her head the cloud rolled and thickened.
‘Should I run?’ Dawn asked, confused now.
‘I would if I were you,’ Martin called back. But I think it’s probably too late for you even if you can run as fast as a Russian sprinter.
Dawn shrugged her bag off her shoulder and began to prove that she could indeed run as fast as a Russian sprinter - if not faster.
The trouble was, Martin realized, as soon as she’d begun, that she was running towards him. Which meant that if she got zapped, he would get zapped too.
He turned away from her and dodged through a series of parked cars.
As he glanced over to see where she was, a double bolt of lightning flashed from the cloud and thunder rocked the parking area.
The twin strike - as far as Martin could discern before the flash blinded him - hit the Fiat and Dawn. In the seconds it took for his vision to recover, he was showered with thousands of pieces of burning ash, which he took to be the remains of the girl.
Tucking hell,’ a voice exclaimed from beside him. Someone took his arm in what felt like a cast-iron grip. Martin turned and was both relieved and disappointed to discover that the voice belonged to Dawn. She hadn’t only not been hit, she hadn’t suffered any damage at all.
Martin blinked away the after images of the lightning and when he realized what the burning ash was, he giggled.
The lightning had blasted Dawn’s manuscript out of existence.
And that, as they say in the trade, is a deus-ex-machina, he told himself.
A ghost from the machine. A direct intervention by God. Feter Ferfect is a jealous god, apparently. He doesn’t much care for other writers’ work.
That was the only frigging copy I had of that, too,’ Dawn protested in a voice that bore so much shock and horror it was comical. ‘The disks I saved it on were in the bloody envelope. I was taking them over to my boyfriend to have them printed out.’
That’s show business,’ Martin said, grinning at her.
Dawn slapped him. Hard.
‘Don’t worry,’ he chortled, I’ll publish your other books. If you can get them to me in one piece that is.’
Dawn slapped him again.
‘I just saved your life,’ Martin reminded her, trying to get a grip on his hysterical giggling. ‘That could have been you raining down on the car park!’ he added, stifling the remainder of the giggles to chest-juddering hiccoughs.
The cloud above the car had gone now.
‘Come on, we’d better see if your Fiat’s OK,’ Martin said.
Dawn didn’t look even the teeniest bit self-satisfied any more. She looked frightened. She took Martin’s arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘For hitting me? Don’t be.’
‘For thinking you were crazy. The story I wrote came true. I can’t believe that it’s happened! It’s like I’m responsible.’
‘Don’t think that,’ Martin replied. ‘You’re no more responsible for this than Gerhardie was for the Titanic disaster. It’s just coincidence.’
She shook her head. ‘No, it’s more than that. I can feel it.’
‘You’re still going to take me to Cornwall?’
Dawn nodded. ‘You’re in trouble. I don’t know what kind and I don’t want to know. I’ll take you there and I’ll drive away again and try to forget about it. And you can forget about the contract too. I’ll tear it up.’