FSF, March 2009

by Spilogale Authors

  The Conductor held out his hand again.

  Martin sighed and shook his head. “You cheated me after all."

  "You cheated yourself, Martin. And now you're going to ride that Hell-Bound Train."

  He pushed Martin up the steps and into the car ahead. As he entered, the train began to move and the whistle screamed. And Martin stood there in the swaying Pullman, gazing down the aisle at the other passengers. He could see them sitting there, and somehow it didn't seem strange at all.

  Here they were; the drunks and the sinners, the gambling men and the grifters, the big-time spenders, the skirt-chasers, and all the jolly crew. They knew where they were going, of course, but they didn't seem to give a damn. The blinds were drawn on the windows, yet it was light inside, and they were all living it up—singing and passing the bottle and roaring with laughter, throwing the dice and telling their jokes and bragging their big brags, just the way Daddy used to sing about them in the old song.

  "Mighty nice traveling companions,” Martin said. “Why, I've never seen such a pleasant bunch of people. I mean, they seem to be really enjoying themselves!"

  The Conductor shrugged. “I'm afraid things won't be quite so jazzy when we pull into that Depot Way Down Yonder."

  For the third time, he held out his hand. “Now, before you sit down, if you'll just give me that watch. A bargain's a bargain—"

  Martin smiled. “A bargain's a bargain,” he echoed. “I agreed to ride your train if I could stop Time when I found the right moment of happiness. And I think I'm about as happy right here as I've ever been."

  Very slowly, Martin took hold of the silver watch-stem.

  "No!” gasped the Conductor. “No!"

  But the watch-stem turned.

  "Do you realize what you've done?” the Conductor yelled. “Now we'll never reach the Depot! We'll just go on riding, all of us—forever!"

  Martin grinned. “I know,” he said. “But the fun is in the trip, not the destination. You taught me that. And I'm looking forward to a wonderful trip. Look, maybe I can even help. If you were to find me another one of those caps, now, and let me keep this watch—"

  And that's the way it finally worked out. Wearing his cap and carrying his battered old silver watch, there's no happier person in or out of this world—now and forever—than Martin. Martin, the new Brakeman on That Hellhound Train.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Plumage From Pegasus: An Editor Darkly by Paul Di Filippo

  "Who is Lucy Jackson?

  "That's a question even her editor and publicist at St. Martin's are asking, as they prepare to publish her novel Posh in January.

  "According to the St. Martin's catalogue—which lists Posh as one of its lead titles—Lucy Jackson is an alias for ‘an acclaimed short story writer and novelist’ whose ‘last novel was a New York Times Notable Book’ and whose ‘fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other magazines and anthologies.'

  "Pseudonyms in fiction are nothing new, of course. But the secret isn't usually this closely held. ‘I still don't know who it is,’ said SMP executive editor Elizabeth Beier. She said she's met the author only once and didn't recognize her as anyone famous. Mostly, she and ‘Jackson’ communicate by phone and e-mail (the author has an e-mail account under the name of Lazy Hoffman, one of the characters in the book)."

  —"Mysterious St. Martin's Author Remains Unknown—Even to Her Editor,” Lynn Andriani, Publishers Weekly Daily, 11-6-06.

  * * * *

  I was going out of my skull trying to decipher the true identity of “Lacey Johnson,” one of my authors.

  Johnson was about to make her debut from my employer, Cutcloak Books, under that pen name with her novel Tosh, a reggae-and-shopping novel about a beautiful young American heiress who falls in love with the famous Jamaican musician of that name at the height of his popularity, circa Legalize It in 1976. The book held incredible sales potential, and I was practically salivating at the notion of booking “Lacey Johnson” on innumerable talk shows.

  But it simply couldn't be done.

  Johnson insisted on total anonymity, even from me, her trusted editor, Beth Beyers. Well-mannered, businesslike but obstinate, she was intent, she claimed, on maintaining an impermeable barrier between this somewhat tawdry novel and her more respectable literary endeavors. We managed workmanlike but ultimately unsatisfying communications only through emails, not even by phone, and I had never come face-to-face with the writer.

  I really needed the career boost that the total success of Johnson's book would entail. That's why I was getting a little frantic.

  Truth be told, I had been partying a tad too heavily the past year, allowing the strains of working in the demanding field of modern publishing to overwhelm me and drive me to various forms of gratuitous relief. Drugging, drinking, bed-hopping—my nerves and confidence and professional acumen were frayed and near the breaking point. My work had suffered noticeably, and I had been called on the carpet more than once. Maybe if I could coast a while on the acclaim derived from shepherding Johnson's book to the bestseller lists, I could recoup my old verve and professional literary instincts.

  Likewise, there was the whole J. T. LeRoy angle to worry about. Ever since that byline had exploded as a hoax, the industry had gotten more leery of sourceless authors, even of fiction, inflicting heavy consequences for fraud. I needed to cover my tail.

  So for all these reasons—and also out of professional pride—I spontaneously embarked on a hunt for the real person behind the penname.

  That very afternoon, right after the sales meeting concerning Clint Flicker's My Favorite Hidden Obscene Literary Allusions, I surfed straight to Gawker, GalleyCat, and other literary/celebrity blogs, searching for any possible clues to Lacey Johnson's real identity.

  After an hour of tiresome digging—every book launch party looks identical from the outside, I realized—I had one!

  A photo of the crowd at the party for Philip Roth's long-anticipated sequel to The Breast, Boob Job, held at Elaine's, featured a mystery woman whom the caption hailed as “the enigmatic author of an upcoming Cutcloak groove-restoring Caribbean romp."

  I studied the fuzzy, faintly familiar image of the woman—trim, fashionably dressed, long dark hair, sunglasses—and felt certain that this had to be Lacey Johnson. And unless she had only been visiting the city—rather unlikely—she lived right here in New York.

  I walked through the door of Elaine's fifteen minutes after leaving the office that night. I seldom came here anymore, and actively disliked the restaurant. The old dive wasn't the essential hot spot it had once been, but I could sense the literary ghosts in the fabric of the place, and I had a good feeling I was on the right trail.

  I sat at the bar and chatted up one of the famously gruff bartenders. After a while, I discovered that he had served drinks during the Roth blowout and recalled the mystery woman, based on the hardcopy of the photo I showed him.

  "Yeah, not the first time she's been here, but definitely the most obnoxious. She was really talking up her novel, Tush, or something like that. Claimed she had done a lot of reggae research at S.O.B.'s."

  I knew the club, a world music venue down on Varick. Not my preferred style of music at all—I liked techno and dance stuff—but I knew I'd be paying them a visit tonight.

  S.O.B.'s was showcasing a hip-hop artist named L'il Crankee, and I could barely hear myself think over the booming beats. But I found the manager and braced him for the dope on Lacey Johnson.

  "We all knew her as LJ. She was a real stage-door janey whenever the reggae guys came through. The action in the dressing room got kind of heavy. Once I barged in by mistake—Well, I won't go into sordid details. But did you know LJ wore a wig? I saw her from the back without it. Wig looked to me like one of those custom jobs that a lot of the fashion models get from DOV Salon, over on 57th and Lex."

  In the cab, I contemplated what I had learned about Lacey Johnson so far.

/>   Something of a social climber and suck-up—it was obvious to me that she must have crashed the Roth affair—a braggart, promiscuous, expensively indulgent when it came to her looks—

  I wasn't so sure any longer that I really cared to get to know this writer any better, and I was starting to regret that I had ever become connected with her novel, despite any benefits that connection would accrue to me. Sure, Lacey Johnson was a skillful enough writer, and easy to work with. But as a person? She just turned me off completely, and I hadn't even met her yet.

  Why did all writers have to be such losers? Even my twenty years in the publishing business had failed to reveal the answer to that one.

  It was eleven o'clock that night when I reached DOV Salon, and I hardly expected it to be open, but it was. Turned out that one of Dov's clients, Tyra Banks, needed some immediate emergency repair work on her extensions, after getting into a catfight with Arianna Huffington. Peering through the store window, I assumed the man working so intently on Tyra was Dov himself. An assistant buzzed me in with merely a curt nod as greeting, and I sat quietly, if somewhat impatiently, until the intricate reconstruction job was finished.

  After air-kissing Tyra good-bye and washing his hands at the sink, the slender and trendily attired Dov turned to me, smiled, threw wide his arms and said, “Beth, darling, how have you been! I hope my masterpiece has changed your life!"

  I awoke on the cold tile floor with Dov and his assistant spritzing my face with pump bottles of Perrier, then fanning it with heated towels. And I remembered everything.

  Climbing clumsily to my feet, I said, “I—I have to go now...."

  "Au'voir, ma chère!"

  Back in my apartment, I cracked open the secret panel at the back of my closet, and found all the accoutrements of Lacey Johnson's life: wig, dress, sunglasses, the works. A hidden folder on my computer held all the files for Tosh.

  I cursed the months at the start of my career when I had edited Robert Bloch and his Psycho House. How many times I had watched the Hitchcock film in preparation ... and now I was living it!

  Collapsing in a chair, I fumbled on the adjacent table for a drink. Sipping it, I began to feel a little better.

  Booking “Lacey Johnson” onto the talk-show circuit had suddenly got a lot easier.

  So long as the host didn't ask her to bring out her editor for a chat.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Quickstone by Marc Laidlaw

  When the bard Gorlen returned to F&SF in our August 2008 issue, we promised you'd be seeing more of him soon. Promise delivered (and there's more yet to come!). If you haven't read any of the previous stories in this series, dive right in—you should have no trouble following this tale of the bard with the gargoyle hand.

  "Are there any gargoyles in what do you call your city? Dint?” Gorlen asked.

  It was a city of pillars thick as trees in a forest. From the outskirts, because the pillars were not set with any symmetry but sprang up wherever there was space to spare, it was impossible to see very far. But wherever he looked, at whatever distance, he saw figures squatting like this old man before him, busy carving chunks of indeterminate yellow matter, surrounded by dusty piles and shreds of the stuff.

  "Yes, Dint,” said the tattered old man. “You're a few days late for that, I'm afraid. They're all gone now."

  "Gone?"

  The man squinted up as if he suspected Gorlen of being deaf or daft.

  "They climbed down off their columns and took off in the dead of night. Moonless night, it was; that's when they stir. We figured ‘em bound for the quarry, but nobody's cared to follow ‘em, so it's only a guess, you understand. I don't imagine they want us looking in on their doings."

  "And this quarry? Where might it be?"

  "It might be north of town. The road's wide and stone-set, so you'll be able to find it sure in the weeds, and it only leads one-where, and that's the quarry. But nobody's took that road since the place shut down. That was a bad night, that was."

  "The night they left Dint, you mean?"

  "Nah. The night they showed up, years aback. Many a mason lost his trade that night, and those were the lucky ones. Them that was working the quarry lost worse than that."

  "I don't follow."

  "It's a quickstone quarry, canny? They hit a vein of living rock and it was over like that. Might as well to've wrapped up the town, picked it up, and dropped it off somewhere else entire where there's good dead rock to be mined and chiseled. Our whole life was that quarry. But we're stubborn, and we've learned to make these here moss terraces and carve some clever little villages out of shelf fungi. See this one here, made myself, how the bells all chime singly in the little towers? Course, it's shelf fungus, so it don't chime real loud, but still, you must admit, it's remarkable. Wish we still had stone to work, but no point getting morose. We've a sort of peace with the gargoyles now. After all ... they do scare off a good number of demons and strangerfolk, like yourself. So Dint's a fine safe place to raise children."

  "They wouldn't scare me off. They're what I'm looking for."

  "What are you, an artist? Architect? Geozoologist?"

  "Goodness. I'm a bard."

  "Singer-songwriter then. Meh. Well, thataway, like I said. North on the one road out of town. I hope ye find something to sing about there. I'd bid ye later, but something tells me you won't be coming back this way."

  "I thought you said it's the only road...."

  "That I did. That I did."

  And as Gorlen started northward: “Don't suppose you'd care to buy one of these here mushroom villages, would you?"

  "Not after all that, no."

  "Didn't think so. Don't hurt to ask."

  "And it's a distinct pleasure to say no,” Gorlen muttered as he hurried away, looking for the road he hoped to find half-hidden in tall grass and weeds. Throughout his brief conversation with the old fellow, he had felt an inexplicable loathing spreading through him. He could not precisely identify the cause of the feeling, but he had no trouble pinpointing its origin: The loathing had started in his right hand, which was itself a gargoyle limb, and spread from there in cold twitches, like a surging tide. He wondered how his hand came to bear such overmastering ill will toward a strange mushroom-carver. He'd begun to worry that if he lingered any longer in conversation, his hand might attempt to throttle the old gent, or beat him about the temples without Gorlen's intervention. Something in the stone itself despised the man. But it was a mystery he had no time to pursue.

  The road proved easy enough to uncover. Whatever weeds or growth might have choked it recently, they had been (even more recently) trampled, reduced to a green paste staining the stones. Heavy traffic. Dark moon would have been just two nights back.

  Rugged slopes rose ahead, and the road went all coy around the first curve. He wished he had thought to inquire about distances. Of course, there was no cause for a town whose existence revolved around heavy stone to be located very far from the quarry. But the sun had an even shorter distance to travel till it hit the horizon, and he didn't much care for the thought of sleeping by such a road in such country, especially seeing how the grass and the occasional peddlebug (along with its tiny grass cart) had been trampled.

  The road, after several bends and a gradual ascent, leveled off so suddenly he nearly lost his balance, caught by a forceful gust sweeping up along mountain gulches from the unseen plains below. The route traversed the rim of an enormous basin full of dusk; with the evening sky shining like gold, the shadows in the bowl seemed darker than they might have at noon. The road forked, its inward path snaking back and forth down the wall of the pit. Swimming in that bowl were enormous rectangular slabs, half-formed obelisks, the rough cylinders of Dint's pillars in embryo. There was also a great deal of quiet abandoned machinery, and tools scattered everywhere, marking how hundreds of workmen had hurried off and never returned. The whole place lay cloaked in the dust of disuse, save for the pale rock of the path itself, which bore elon
gated scuffs of recent traffic.

  Listening intently, Gorlen heard only wind. A few steps down the cart path, into the quarry and below the lapping gusts, he stopped and listened again. Apart from his own breathing, still coming heavy and fast after the climb, he heard...

  A chink of gravel, grating stones, a far-off grinding.

  To another it might have denoted a subterranean rockslide, but Gorlen knew the sound had a source more unusual ... more deliberate. He had heard it only rarely, and not in some years, but it was unmistakable.

  Forward and down he went, his pulse quickening. His left hand moved unconsciously to clasp its opposite, to run warm fingers of flesh over the cold hardness that formed his right hand all the way to the wrist bone. He probed the scarlike seam where flesh blended into stone; there was no clear demarcation, no place where one ended and the other began, but rather a zone where both shared properties, flesh and stone fused. It always felt strange, alien to the touch, no matter how many years he had lived with it. But tonight....

  Warmth.

  With a start, he drew his left hand back from the stone. Then, gently, touched his right hand again.

  It had never before felt anything other than cold to the touch. Even when he trekked through broiling desert wastes it was a reliably cool lump of matter.

  But now it was warm. Not quite as warm as flesh, but still ... this was something to monitor.

  The depths of the pit, shelved and terraced, made him feel like a child clambering down enormous steps. There were footpaths, difficult to see in the growing gloom. When he looked back for the track's origin, he found the stars had come out. The walls of the pit were fading into featurelessness. He threaded his way through nascent columns, the marks of unfinished labor, past dozens of white stone spheres a foot in diameter, whose purpose he could not fathom, scattered like a giant's abandoned game of marbles.

  At the lowest point, the quarry narrowed into something darker: A tunnel mouth led into a descending shaft.