by Steve Harris
Martin only arrived at the track that led down to Black Rock after an uphill struggle.
Which was what he’d thought was going to happen.
When Dawn S. Tauber’s car had been crushed to pulp beneath a juggernaut they’d given up on the idea of walking to the emergency phone. It hardly seemed worth it since every emergency vehicle within miles was going to be heading for the scene of the accident.
When Dawn had dried her eyes and demisted her little round glasses, they’d climbed the bank beside the motorway, walked across a couple of muddy fields to the nearest road and had begun to hitch.
Martin didn’t even know what town they’d been dropped in. The important thing was that it had an Avis office. Martin had headed for this, and Dawn - who wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible - had gone to the police station to report what had happened to her car. She would make her own travel arrangements from here, she’d told him, thank you.
Things took a turn for the worse while he was still in the Avis office. Just as he’d signed his name on the rental agreement, the ice block inside his brain lit up again.
Except that this time it didn’t show him any pictures.
This time it began to shoot out spiked bolts of red light that seemed to burn their way through the matter of his brain. The ice block pulsed in time with his heart; each beat causing a fresh blast of light.
Which was a very good joke on the part of Peter Perfect, because the agonizing pain of the light-blasts (and the deep, dull ache that was left behind them) was causing his heart-rate to increase. It was a closed loop. The more it hurt, the faster his heart pounded, making it hurt even more.
Martin took deep breaths and tried to keep calm. The Avis girl began to look at him askance - which, he supposed distantly, wasn’t surprising since each blast of pain made his facial muscles twitch in a gymnastic grimace of agony.
He made it to the car - a Vauxhall Cavalier, which was no Ferrari but infinitely better than a Fiat 500 - and collapsed into it, no longer sure that he was going to be able to drive it anywhere.
But the Avis girl was out there, carefully watching his facial churning and waiting to see what he would do next, so he started the car and gave her what he hoped was a cheery wave.
The girl didn’t go back inside the office, just stood there watching.
‘You little shit bag!’ Martin hissed at her, grinning sweetly.
He put the car into gear and drove away.
Two hundred yards away from the office, he parked the car, put his head in his hands and cried with the pain.
Which didn’t go away.
When he finally looked up, a spot in the centre of his vision was blurred and pulsing. Martin tried not to think about how high his blood pressure must be and what it must be doing to his kidneys and his heart. A stroke which paralysed him, he could live with, he knew. What he was frightened of was suffering a stroke that would wipe his memory or disable his sharp mind.
He searched his jacket pockets and eventually came up with a single grubby and misshapen Co-Proximal. It had half dissolved in his pocket. Martin dry-swallowed the mashed remains.
Eventually the pain subsided to a bearable degree and Martin began to drive.
When he arrived at Tintagel he could not recall most of the drive. This suited him just fine. At some point he’d broken his journey and found his way to an ironmonger’s. He knew this because there was now a brand new pickaxe handle on the passenger seat and it hadn’t been there earlier. He knew why he’d chosen it, too. Because unlike James Green’s crowbar, it wouldn’t act as a lightning conductor.
Now, here he was at the top of the track to Black Rock, asking himself the question everyone asked: If I go down here, will I be able to get back up again? But this particular man was asking himself this question for a different reason entirely.
His heart in his mouth and his brain-haemorrhage headache returning, Martin began the descent. There were two cars a hundred yards ahead of him: the Cadillac that James had come in last night and Essenjay’s Sierra. The Caddy was burnt to a crisp.
Martin wondered how Peter Perfect had tricked Essenjay into asking to be admitted to the house. That was pivotal, apparently. She’d had to enter of her own accord.
All that matters now is getting her out, he thought as he brought the car to a standstill behind hers.
The pain in his head increased. He suspected that his brain was now haemorrhaging; that he would be left crippled and mentally disabled.
But this wasn’t happening, he thought as he turned off the car’s engine. Then he wondered why he’d just spoken to himself as though he were the narrator of a story stating a fact. Either someone had just committed this sentence to paper or disk, or his mind was going.
But although this wasn’t yet happening, Martin knew it soon would. His fingers had begun to tingle and his mental vocabulary seemed to be diminishing.
Get her out, that’s all you have to remember, he told himself, flexing his tingling fingers and trying - and failing -to collect his scattered thoughts. He picked up the pickaxe handle, got out of the car and looked nervously around him.
Somewhere inside that house is S’n’J, he thought, and I’ll get her back or die trying.
Die trying, probably, he added cynically.
He could hear something moving, off the side of the track, about ten feet ahead of him. The dog? He walked towards the source of the noise, peering around, his head bobbing from side to side like a boxer on the defensive.
Martin will not die! his mind thought, apparently on his behalf. It felt just as if someone had just planted the idea there for him to think. The thought provided him with the exact amount of comfort he’d expected to derive from it. Absolutely none at all.
He went to the side of the bank and peered down into bushy undergrowth. There was something there crawling slowly through the bushes.
‘Who’s that?’ he demanded, poised and ready to strike if necessary.
There was a pause in which time seemed to come to a standstill.
During this moment all sound ceased: the gentle breeze stopped blowing, the noise of the sea faded, the solitary wheeling gull that had been cawing fell silent and the thing under the bushes seemed to have vanished.
Martin waited, as tense as a bowstring.
To the side of him - down towards the house - a noise began. It was a kind of slow, swishing noise which reminded Martin of the way the huge axe had swung in the film of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. It sounded like a huge, well-oiled machine beginning to run.
Martin didn’t turn to look at it because he had a pretty good idea of what was making that steadily speeding swoosh swoosh sound.
‘Who’s down there?’ he demanded again and was relieved when he heard a cough that sounded distinctly human. The undergrowth began to move again.
�
�It’s me,’ a voice croaked. ‘I fell and hit my head. Knocked myself out. Christ almighty, I’ve got the granddaddy of all headaches.’
‘James?’ Martin heard himself asking in astonishment. He didn’t know why he’d said it with a question mark - he already knew that the voice belonged to James.
Except that you do know why, he told himself. Because down there in Black Rock, Peter Perfect wrote it for you like that. And since you’re aware of that, he must be losing his grip. He’s trying to take over your mind and he’s failing. That’s why he wanted to keep you away. He’s frightened of you because you know fiction when you see it. You can see joins where other people wouldn’t.
‘You’re dead. I saw you fall into a wall of fire,’ Martin said suspiciously.
And knew that these words had been scripted for him too. What he’d really wanted was to ask how close to death James was and whether he was going to be of any use in rescuing Essenjay.
‘Dead, but I won’t lie down,’ James said from somewhere about ten feet away. ‘Hang on. You’ll have to give me a hand up when I crawl out of here.’
Martin’s mouth dropped a little further when James finally appeared. No one could possibly look that badly burnt and live.
Outside fiction, that is, he reminded himself. James could have survived a searing this intense if he was a character in a novel.
James crawled up the bank towards Martin and reached out a hand.
In close-up he didn’t actually seem to be so damaged. His hands and arms were reddened and blistered, he’d lost a lot of his hair and his eyebrows, but everything else looked like window dressing. As if an astounding make-up job had been done on him.
Trickster! Martin thought at Peter Perfect, as he grabbed a sweaty hand, braced himself and heaved James up on to the track.
James picked himself up from the ground, tested his limbs and then turned to Martin, grinning. His face was so sooty he looked like a failed Al Jolson impersonator.
‘James Green, slightly singed, but otherwise alive and well,’ he said breathlessly. ‘And you’re Martin. We’d better do something pretty damned quick, Martin, because very soon, someone’s going to start trying to kill us.’
Martin was shaking his head. There were words in his mouth, just ready to tumble out, but they felt like the careless and clumsy dialogue of a writer in a rush. He knew he was supposed to say that he couldn’t believe it and that he’d seen what had happened to James and so on, ad nauseam, so he resisted.
‘Someone is putting words into your mouth for you to say,’ he warned.
They don’t call me Mister Nifty Footwork for nothing,’ James responded, as if Martin had spoken the words that Peter Perfect had written for him.
Think man! Start speaking for yourself!’ Martin barked. ‘Resist. Don’t take the easy path. It’s fiction. You have to think your own thoughts. If you think his we’re sunk.’
James frowned. Then his face cleared and he nodded. The house is haunted, just like it says in the book. Drezy’s inside. We have to get her out. The trouble is, the guy who wrote the book is in there and he doesn’t want us to.’
Martin fought off the ready-made sentence that appeared in his mind for him to say: ‘Have we gone crazy, or what?’ and actually said, ‘If you don’t assert your own mind, I’m going to hit you over the head with this pick handle. I don’t need any more hindrances.’
James nodded and responded to the question Martin should have asked but didn’t: ‘You know what’s going on here, don’t you?’ he said, then repeated, The house is haunted, just like it says in the book. Drezy’s inside. We have to get her out. The trouble is, the guy who wrote the book is in there and he doesn’t want us to.’
His voice was starting to sound very wooden now, and his expression suggested he was trapped. He knew what was happening to him and could do nothing to prevent it.
‘Fight it!’ Martin shouted. The swishing noise was growing louder now and for the first time Martin glanced down towards the house.
Where a white cloud had formed at roof-level. It was huge and misshapen and revolving like a centrifuge. The swishing noise happened each time a protruding arm of vapour passed.
James was still being fictionalized, still acting out his script even though he was getting none of the necessary responses. His face was a picture of supreme confusion. He looked like an actor who has learned the lines for Macbeth and half-way through finds himself in the middle of The Tempest.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m going to give it a bloody good try. I brought a crowbar. Did you see it?’
‘One last chance, James,’ Martin said to this latest non sequitur. ‘Snap out of it!’
‘Just back there, where you dropped it last night,’ James prompted and nodded at Martin knowingly.
Tm not saying it,’ Martin hissed. ‘Break out of it!’
James nodded frantically. ‘Just back there,’ he said, glancing at where his crowbar lay.
Hit him! Martin told himself. There was a fifty-fifty chance he’d be doing the right thing. No there isn’t, he realized. Peter Perfect really has sucked James and Essenjay into his story. They don’t have to suspend their disbelief to appreciate fiction. They don’t have any disbelief to suspend. They may get sucked into a good book, but it doesn’t happen to Martin Dinsey because you don’t get fooled by fancy footwork. That’s what makes you such a good editor. He might be able to do the magical effects for real, but he knows I can see how he’s putting it all together. He knows that if there’s a little flaw in his story, I’ll find it and work on it.
Suddenly Martin understood exactly what that flaw was. It was being acted out in front of him, by James. If Martin hadn’t arrived, James would have gone down to the house and been killed. After which things would have been past the point of no return. Fiction would have turned to fact.
Which meant, Martin realized, that he was here only to bring James out of the web of lies that was being woven around him. James was the one who would get Essenjay out, not Martin Snips Dinsey. The story was rolling and couldn’t be stopped and there wasn’t a place in its finale for him. All he existed for was to free James from the enchantment he was under. And having done this he would bow out.
This wasn’t good news. Not merely because it relegated him from hero to bit part, but because being a bit part meant one of two things. Either he was going to die, or he was going to go home without the girl. But the circle around him was now closed. Whatever he did from here onwards was going to be bad for him.
‘Just back there,’ Martin said, speaking the words that James (and Peter Perfect) so badly wanted him to say. ‘Where you dropped it last night.’ He pointed at where the crowbar lay on the track.
James went and retrieved the tool.
Martin watched him, thinking, Well this is it, Dinsey. You’ve been well and truly stitched up. If you let it carry on, you’ll
lose Essenjay to Peter Perfect, and if you interfere with the story, you’ll lose her to James. And you may well die, too. What’s it gonna be, big boy?
James came back, looking for all the world like a storybook hero. He was tall and muscular and determined. Martin felt it was a bit like watching Clint Eastwood stride towards you. He could suddenly see what it was Essenjay saw in this manual labourer. And something extraordinary happened.
For the first time in his whole life, Martin Dinsey acted altruistically. For the first time in his life he did something without wanting a reward. He did it for the love of Essenjay and in spite of knowing that it was likely to be the last important thing he ever did.
He spoke the words he knew Peter Perfect had scripted. ‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ James said, giving the required response. His look of confusion had faded now that things had got back to the script. ‘We’d better go quickly,’ he added. ‘It’s starting. There’s a cloud forming. Look!’ He pointed up above the forecourt of Black Rock.
Martin didn’t need to turn. He already knew the score.
‘I warned you, James,’ he said, lifting the pickaxe handle from his shoulder and raising it into the air. ‘This is what you get for stealing my woman. And for not listening to me. I hope it hurts, you shithouse and I want you to know something. If I get through this alive, I’ll win her back from you.’
James heard none of this. He was staring at the revolving cloud waiting for Martin to say that this time it was a thundercloud.
After a short pause, James said, ‘Can it strike us from there?’
Martin shook his head. ‘No, but this can,’ he said, and brought the pick handle down.
It was a single-handed blow, but it landed true and made James drop to his knees; a strange, far-away look in his eyes and blood blooming from the crown of his head.
