Ranks of pebbledashed houses, street after street of identical Siamese twins, marched him home. They reminded him of cells in a single organism. He wouldn’t starve if he didn’t write—not for a while, at any rate—but he felt uneasy whenever he had to dip into his savings; their unobtrusive growth was reassuring, a talisman of success. He missed his street and had to walk back. Even then he had to peer twice at the street name before he was sure it was his.
He sat in the living room, too exhausted to make himself dinner. Van Gogh landscapes, frozen in the instant before they became unbearably intense, throbbed on the walls. Shelves of Miles’ novels reminded him of how he’d lost momentum. The last nightmare was still demanding to be written, until he forced it into the depths of his mind. He would rather have no ideas than that.
When he woke, the nightmare had left him. He felt enervated but clean. He lit up his watch and found he’d slept for hours. It was time for the Book Programme. He’d switched on the television and was turning on the light when he heard his voice at the far end of the room, in the dark.
He was on television, but that was hardly reassuring; his one television interview wasn’t due to be broadcast for months. It was as though he’d slept that time away. His face floated up from the gray of the screen as he sat down, cursing. By the time his book was published, nobody would remember this interview.
The linkman and the editing had invoked another writer now. Good God, was that all they were using of Miles? He remembered the cameras following him into the West Derby house, the neighbors glaring, shaking their heads. It was as though they’d managed to censor him, after all.
No, here he was again. “Jonathan Miles is a crime novelist who feels he can no longer rely on his imagination. Desperate for new ideas, he lived for several weeks in a house where, last year, a murder was committed.” Miles was already losing his temper, but there was worse to come; they’d used none of his observations about the creative process, only the sequence in which he ushered the camera about the house like Hitchcock in the Psycho trailer. “Viewers who find this distasteful,” the linkman said unctuously, “may be reassured to hear that the murder in question is not so topical or popular as Mr. Miles seems to think.”
Miles glared at the screen while the program came to an end, while an announcer explained that “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?” had been broadcast ahead of schedule because of an industrial dispute. And now here was the news, all of it as bad as Miles felt. A child had been murdered, said a headline; a Chief Constable had described it as the worst case of his career. Miles felt guiltily resentful; no doubt it would help distract people from his book.
Then he sat forward, gaping. Surely he must have misheard; perhaps his insomnia was talking. The newsreader looked unreal as a talking bust, but his voice went on, measured, concerned, inexorable. “The baby was found in a microwave oven. Neighbors broke into the house on hearing the cries, but were unable to locate it in time.” Even worse than the scene he was describing was the fact that it was the last of Miles’ nightmares, the one he had refused to write down.
Couldn’t it have been coincidence? Coincidence, coincidence, the train chattered, and seemed likely to do so all the way to London. If he had somehow been able to predict what was going to happen, he didn’t want to know—especially not now, when he could sense new nightmares forming.
He suppressed them before they grew clear. He needed to keep his mind uncluttered for the meeting with his publisher; he gazed out of the window, to relax. Trees turned as they passed, unraveling beneath foliage. On a platform a chorus line of commuters bent to their luggage, one by one. The train drew the sun after it through clouds, like a balloon.
Once out of Euston Station and its random patterns of swarming, he strolled to the publishers. Buildings glared like blocks of salt, which seemed to have drained all moisture from the air. He felt hot and grimy, anxious both to face the worst and to delay. Hugo Burgess had been ominously casual: “If you happen to be in London soon we might have a chat about things . . .”
A receptionist on a dais that overlooked the foyer kept Miles waiting until he began to sweat. Eventually a lift produced Hugo, smiling apologetically. Was he apologizing in advance for what he had to say? “I suppose you saw yourself on television,” he said when they reached his office.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“I shouldn’t give it another thought. The telly people are envious buggers. They begrudge every second they give to discussing books. Sometimes I think they resent the competition and get their own back by being patronizing.” He was pawing through the heaps of books and papers on his desk, apparently in search of the phone. “It did occur to me that it would be nice to publish fairly soon,” he murmured.
Miles hadn’t realized that sweat could break out in so many places at once. “I’ve run into some problems.”
Burgess was peering at items he had rediscovered in the heaps. “Yes?” he said without looking up.
Miles summarized his new idea clumsily. Should he have written to Burgess in advance? “I found there simply wasn’t enough material in the West Derby case,” he pleaded.
“Well, we certainly don’t want padding.” When Burgess eventually glanced up he looked encouraging. “The more facts we can offer the better. I think the public is outgrowing fantasy, now that we’re well and truly in the scientific age. People want to feel informed. Writing needs to be as accurate as any other science, don’t you think?” He hauled a glossy pamphlet out of one of the piles. “Yes, here it is. I’d call this the last gasp of fantasy.”
It was a painting, lovingly detailed and photographically realistic, of a girl who was being simultaneously mutilated and raped. It proved to be the cover of a new magazine, Ghastly. Within the pamphlet the editor promised “a quarterly that will wipe out the old horror pulps—everything they didn’t dare to be.”
“It won’t last,” Burgess said. “Most people are embarrassed to admit to reading fantasy now, and that will only make them more so. The book you’re planning is more what they want—something they know is true. That way they don’t feel they’re indulging themselves.” He disinterred the phone at last. “Just let me call a car and we’ll go into the West End for lunch.”
Afterward they continued drinking in Hugo’s club. Miles thought Hugo was trying to midwife the book. Later he dined alone, then lingered for a while in the hotel bar; his spotlessly impersonal room had made him feel isolated. Over the incessant trickle of muzak he kept hearing Burgess: “I wonder how soon you’ll be able to let me have sample chapters . . .”
Next morning he was surprised how refreshed he felt, especially once he’d taken a shower. Over lunch he unburdened himself to his agent. “I just don’t know when I’ll be able to deliver the book. I don’t know how much research may be involved.”
“Now look, you mustn’t worry about Hugo. I’ll speak to him. I know he won’t mind waiting if he knows it’s for the good of the book.” Susie Barker patted his hand; her bangles sounded like silver castanets. “Now here’s an idea for you. Why don’t you do up a sample chapter or two on the West Derby case? That way we’ll keep Hugo happy, and I’ll do my best to sell it as an article.”
When they’d kissed good-bye Miles strolled along Charing Cross Road, composing the chapter in his head and looking for himself in bookshop displays. Miles, Miles, books said in a window stacked with crime novels. NIGHT OF ATROCITIES, headlines cried on an adjacent newspaper stand.
He dodged into Foyles. That was better: he occupied half a shelf, though his earliest titles looked faded and dusty. When he emerged he was content to drift with the rush-hour crowds—until a newsvendor’s placard stopped him. BRITAIN’S NIGHT OF HORROR, it said.
It didn’t matter, it had nothing to do with him. In that case, why couldn’t he find out what had happened? He didn’t need to buy a paper, he could read the report as the newsvendor snatched the top copy to reveal the same beneath. “Last night was Britain’s worst night of murder
s in living memory . . .”
Before he’d read halfway down the column the noise of the crowd seemed to close in, to grow incomprehensible and menacing. The newsprint was snatched away again and again as if he were the victim of a macabre card trick. He sidled away from the newsstand as though from the scene of a crime, but already he’d recognized every detail. If he hadn’t repressed them on the way to London he could have written the reports himself. He even knew what the newspaper had omitted to report: that one of the victims had been forced to eat parts of herself.
Weeks later the newspapers were still in an uproar. Though the moderates pointed out that the murders had been unrelated and unmotivated, committed by people with no previous history of violence or of any kind of crime, for most of the papers that only made it worse. They used the most unpleasant photographs of the criminals that they could find, and presented the crimes as evidence of the impotence of the law, of a total collapse of standards. Opinion polls declared that the majority was in favor of an immediate return of the death penalty. “MEN LIKE THESE MUST NOT GO UNPUNISHED,” a headline said, pretending it was quoting. Miles grew hot with frustration and guilt—for he felt he could have prevented the crimes.
All too soon after he’d come back from London, the nightmares had returned. His mind had already felt raw from brooding, and he had been unable to resist; he’d known only that he must get rid of them somehow. They were worse than the others: more urgent, more appalling.
He’d scribbled them out as though he had been inspired, then he’d glared blindly at the blackened page. It hadn’t been enough. The seething in his head, the crawling of his scalp, had not been relieved even slightly. This time he had to develop the ideas, imagine them fully, or they would cling and fester in his mind.
He’d spent the day and half the night writing, drinking tea until he hardly knew what he was doing. He’d invented character after character, building them like Frankenstein out of fragments of people, only to subject them to gloatingly prolonged atrocities, both the victims and the perpetrators.
When he’d finished, his head felt like an empty rusty can. He might have vomited if he had been able to stand. His gaze had fallen on a paragraph he’d written, and he’d swept the pages onto the floor, snarling with disgust. “Next morning he couldn’t remember what he’d done—but when he reached in his pocket and touched the soft object his hand came out covered with blood . . .”
He’d stumbled across the landing to his bedroom, desperate to forget his ravings. When he’d awakened next morning he had been astonished to find that he’d fallen asleep as soon as he had gone to bed. As he’d lain there, feeling purged, an insight so powerful it was impossible to doubt had seized him. If he hadn’t written out these things they would have happened in reality.
But he had written them out: they were no longer part of him. In fact they had never been so, however they had felt. That made him feel cleaner, absolved him of responsibility. He stuffed the sloganeering newspapers into the wastebasket and arranged his desk for work.
By God, there was nothing so enjoyable as feeling ready to write. While a pot of tea brewed he strolled about the house and reveled in the sunlight, his release from the nightmares, his surge of energy. Next door a man with a beard of shaving foam dodged out of sight, like a timid Santa Claus.
Miles had composed the first paragraph before he sat down to write, a trick that always helped him write more fluently—but a week later he was still struggling to get the chapter into publishable shape. All that he found crucial about his research—the idea that by staying in the West Derby house he had tapped a source of utter madness, which had probably caused the original murder—he’d had to suppress. Why, if he said any of that in print they would think he was mad himself. Indeed, once he’d thought of writing it, it no longer seemed convincing.
When he could no longer bear the sight of the article, he typed a fresh copy and sent it to Susie. She called the following day, which seemed encouragingly quick. Had he been so aware of what he was failing to write that he hadn’t noticed what he’d achieved?
“Well, Jonathan, I have to say this,” she said as soon as she’d greeted him. “It isn’t up to your standard. Frankly, I think you ought to scrap it and start again.”
“Oh.” After a considerable pause he could think of nothing to say except, “All right.”
“You sound exhausted. Perhaps that’s the trouble.” When he didn’t answer he said, “You listen to your Auntie Susie. Forget the whole thing for a fortnight and go away on holiday. You’re been driving yourself too hard—you looked tired the last time I saw you. I’ll explain to Hugo, and I’ll see if I can’t talk up the article you’re going to write when you come back.”
She chatted reassuringly for a while, then left him staring at the phone. He was realizing how much he’d counted on selling the article. Apart from royalties, which never amounted to as much as he expected, when had he last had the reassurance of a check? He couldn’t go on holiday, for he would feel he hadn’t earned it; if he spent the time worrying about the extravagance, that would be no holiday at all.
But wasn’t he being unfair to himself? Weren’t there stories he could sell?
He turned the idea over gingerly in his mind, as though something might crawl out from beneath—but really, he could see no arguments against it. Writing out the nightmares had drained them of power; they were just stories now. As he dialed Hugo’s number, to ask him for the address of the magazine, he was already thinking up a pseudonym for himself.
For a fortnight he walked around Anglesey. Everything was hallucinatorily intense: beyond cracks in the island’s grassy coastline, the sea glittered as though crystallizing and shattering; across the sea, Welsh hills and mist appeared to be creating each other. Beaches were composed of rocks like brown crusty loaves decorated with shells. Anemones unfurled deep in glassy pools. When night fell he lay on a slab of rock and watched the stars begin to swarm.
As he strolled he was improving the chapters in his mind, now that the first version had clarified his themes. He wrote the article in three days, and was sure it was publishable. Not only was it the fullest description yet of the murder, but he’d managed to explain the way the neighbors had behaved: they’d needed to dramatize their repudiation of all that had been done in the house, they’d used him as a scapegoat to cast out, to proclaim that it had nothing to do with them.
When he’d sent the manuscript to Susie he felt pleasantly tired. The houses of Neston grew silver in the evening, the horizon was turning to ash. Once the room was so dark that he couldn’t read, he went to bed. As he drifted toward sleep he heard next door’s drain bubbling to itself.
But what was causing bubbles to form in the grayish substance that resembled fluid less than flesh? They were slower and thicker than tar, and took longer to form. Their source was rushing upward to confront him face to face. The surface was quivering, ready to erupt, when he awoke.
He felt hot and grimy, and somehow ashamed. The dream had been a distortion of the last thing he’d heard, that was all; surely it wouldn’t prevent him from sleeping. A moment later he was clinging to it desperately; its dreaminess was comforting, and it was preferable by far to the ideas that were crowding into his mind. He knew now why he felt grimy.
He couldn’t lose himself in sleep; the nightmares were embedded there, minute, precise, and appalling. When he switched on the light it seemed to isolate him. Night had bricked up all the windows. He couldn’t bear to be alone with the nightmares—but there was only one way to be rid of them.
The following night he woke, having fallen asleep at his desk. His last line met his eyes: “Hours later he sat back on his haunches, still chewing doggedly . . .” When he gulped the lukewarm tea it tasted rusty as blood. His surroundings seemed remote, and he could regain them only by purging his mind. His task wasn’t even half finished. His eyes felt like dusty pebbles. The pen jerked in his hand, spattering the page.
Next morning Susie
rang, wrenching him awake at his desk. “Your article is tremendous. I’m sure we’ll do well with it. Now I wonder if you can let me have a chapter breakdown of the rest of the book to show Hugo?”
Miles was fully awake now, and appalled by what had happened in his mind while he had been sleeping. “No,” he muttered.
“Are there any problems you’d like to tell me about?”
If only he could! But he couldn’t tell her that while he had been asleep, having nearly discharged his task, a new crowd of nightmares had gathered in his mind and were clamoring to be written. Perhaps now they would never end.
“Come and see me if it would help,” Susie said.
How could he, when his mind was screaming to be purged? But if he didn’t force himself to leave his desk, perhaps he never would. “All right,” he said dully. “I’ll come down tomorrow.”
When tomorrow came it meant only that he could switch off his desk lamp; he was nowhere near finishing. He barely managed to find a seat on the train, which was crowded with football fans. Opened beer cans spat; the air grew heady with the smell of beer. The train emerged roaring from a tunnel, but Miles was still in his own, which was far darker and more oppressive. Around him they were chanting football songs, which sounded distant as a waveband buried in static. He wrote under cover of his briefcase, so that nobody would glimpse what he was writing.
Though he still hadn’t finished when he reached London, he no longer cared. The chatter of the wheels, the incessant chanting, the pounding of blood and nightmares in his skull had numbed him. He sat for a while in Euston. The white tiles glared like ice, a huge voice loomed above him.
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