“Great stuff, Mr. Custer,” said the man in the duffle coat. “Great stuff!”
Unfortunately, the cassette had been jammed for several minutes owing to the jolt it had received when he jumped over the wall.
* * * * * * *
“Listen Jack,” said Laurie Lorraine, who had now been Marcus Custer’s agent for twenty years. “I know Evil Ecstasy is overdue. Am I trying to con you? Am I trying to put you on with the old jam tomorrow routine? Marcus is having some really hairy problems. We have to stick with him. Of course you’re having doubts. Who wouldn’t? Believe me, Jack, even I have doubts. But you have to remember that we both have a big stake in this boy. We don’t just owe it to him to stick with him, we owe it to ourselves.” He paused to wipe the sweat off his brow with the wrist that was holding the phone. In so doing, he missed the first few words of Jack Bent’s reply. Jack had been Marcus Custer’s publisher for the same twenty years.
“…contract,” Bent was saying. “It says ‘time being of the essence’. That means you deliver on time. Now, I’m not a hard man, Laurie. I’m a reasonable man. The fact that I think Marcus Custer is a screwed-up shit with a chip on his shoulder like the rock of Gibraltar doesn’t enter into this. As long as Custer made money I was honored to be his publisher—but sales are going down like a lead balloon.”
“Jack,” said Laurie Lorraine, desperately, “there is no cause for alarm. This flak is temporary. It will all blow over—and I don’t know why you feel it necessary to slag off Marcus Custer because, as you so correctly state, that doesn’t enter into it. Marcus is crazy, and he hates everybody, including me, although I’ve been a second father to the boy, but all great artists are weird, and what we really ought to be talking about is a twenty-year sales record that speaks louder than words, not a matter-of-months blip. This is not any common-or-garden hack we are talking about but a walking goldmine.”
“An ex-goldmine, Laurie,” said Bent. “A played-out seam.”
“Jack, Jack,” said Lorraine in a pained voice. “Can this really be you talking? I never thought of you as a man without faith. I never thought of you as a man who would abandon his sacred trust at the first hint of trouble. Could you go to another thriller writer and say: ‘Evil Ecstasy is a write-off; we want you to do something that will fill the gap in our list’? Like hell you could, Jack. We have to stick by this boy.”
Jack Bent laughed humorlessly, rather like Mervyn Vetch the telephone terror, and Laurie Lorraine was chilled to the bone. He knew, in his heart of hearts, that Bent was chickening out, and that all the sweet talk in the world couldn’t save the day this time.
“The only reason,” said Bent, “that no-one else could write a Marcus Custer book is that no-one else has a mind so vile. I’m going back to publishing Luella Townsend, and I’ll sleep easier for it. Goodbye Laurie.” He rang off.
Laurie Lorraine stared at the dead receiver sadly. Traitor! he thought. Conscienceless bastard! He was so upset that he actually began to mutter out loud: “Maybe I could get someone else to turn in a manuscript. There’s that spotty schoolgirl from Bolton who sent me Bloody Blades of the Black Planet. She was certainly pretty free with the whips, and the entire dramatis personae died horribly—but it wouldn’t work. These sci-fi bums never know how to handle honest, gutsy degeneracy. They always want to drag in giant spiders.”
Tiredly, Laurie Lorraine fed a sheet of paper into the antique Remington that he stubbornly persisted in using, in spite of the ready availability of word-processors, because it was as comfortingly familiar as an old pair of slippers. Evil Ecstasy, he typed, by Marcus Custer.
His hands hovered over the keys like a cinematic Dracula about to drop on a blonde with big tits—but they never came down. “Oh hell,” he said, in a resigned voice. He threw his cigar at the signed portrait of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the wall, and picked up the phone again.
“Hello, Luella,” he said, as soon as she answered. “Look, I just had this fabulous idea about fixing you up with a new publisher: Jack Bent. I think he might go for it, if I sweet-talked him cleverly enough. What do you mean, who is this? It’s Laurie—Laurie Lorraine. I know you have an agent already, but can he fix you up with Jack Bent? Believe me, darling….”
* * * * * * *
Marcus Custer finished packing the overnight bag and got his fleece-lined leather coat from the hall cupboard. He stuck his Thriller of the Year award for Parasites of Passion into the pocket of the coat. He paused to kiss his collection of fan letters goodbye. He had decided that even his album of press cuttings would have to stay behind. He needed a fresh start. The cuttings were all abusive anyhow, except one.
Then the phone rang again. Instantly, he felt the horns of his perpetual dilemma jabbing him in the backside.
It might be one of his ex-wives offering to come back and stand by him in his hour of need. It might even be someone who liked him.
He answered it.
It was Vetch—or maybe Sellars.
“We’re on to you, Marcus,” he said. He was using the same tone of ‘unholy glee’ that he had used when urging Daisy Gates to slit her wrists with the shards of a milk bottle he had pushed through her letter box late one night. That is, he was if he was Vetch. If he was Sellars he had presumably used the same tone for something not entirely different.
Custer couldn’t find a word to say.
“We have all the exits covered,” said the caller. “Denis Cory from High Road to the Depths of Hell has his pale green XJ6 out the front and Victor Sharkey is watching the back in the stolen police car he used for the chase scene in Degenerate Delight. You haven’t a prayer of outrunning them. We’d find you anyway, but we intend to see to it that you don’t get away for even a single second. How do you feel, baby?”
Custer didn’t say how he felt, but he wrenched the telephone cable from the wall, cutting Vetch/Sellars off forever.
Then he collapsed on the bed and began weeping.
“Don’t cry,” said a small female voice. “It’s not all that bad really.”
The shock dried up his lachrymal excesses instantly. He sat up and stared at the speaker. She was kneeling at the bottom of the bed. It was Hope Anscombe, who had played a minor part in Beauty and the Brute. She had introduced a strangely moving note of pure pathos, quite uncharacteristic of Marcus Custer. He had been obsessed at the time with convincing his critics of his versatility. He hadn’t managed it. Hope had escaped being mangled in the denouement, and Marcus Custer had developed a slight soft spot for her.
“Why don’t you do what they want?” she whispered, gently. “They’re not all bad, you know. It might be all right, if only you’d show them that you care. And I know that you do. You cared about me, didn’t you? I’ve tried to tell them that you make them do such horrible things because you feel so sorry for everybody, that you have a deep sense of tragedy, that you’re trying to show the world what’s wrong with it. They think you do it because you get a cheap thrill out of it all, and to give your readers a cheap thrill, too, but I know there’s more to it than that.”
Marcus Custer was dazed.
“Oh yes,” he whispered. He remembered a scene he had written when he was very young, in an unpublishable item called Alone with Yesterday. “You do understand,” he went on, hoarsely. “You’re so right. Of course I cared about you. I loved you.” The chief characters of Alone with Yesterday were not among his haunters, presumably because it had been rejected by all thirty-nine of the publishers to whom he had submitted it. Nor, now that he came to think of it, were the characters who had featured in a couple of minor books he’d produced pseudonymously when he needed cash urgently, and which were long-since out of print. Hope Anscombe was probably the only one in the entire Pandora’s Box who didn’t have anything against him.
“Would it really be as bad as all that,” she said softly, “if you had to develop a new style? Wouldn’t it be a challenge to your consummate artistry? Wouldn’t it really show all those nasty critics if you proved
that you could work just as well in one mode as another?”
“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice sounding tiredly desperate, like Myles Windleband’s voice in chapter twelve of Kiss of Corruption. “My artistic integrity is on the line. I write what I have to write. Every word is torn from my very flesh. I’m not the pornographer they say I am…you’re the living proof of that. It’s the only way I can write.”
“Poor Marcus,” she said, softly.
“You see,” he said, trying hard to remember the exact piece of dialogue from Alone with Yesterday, “I’m really a very lonely man. My wives didn’t understand me, and refused me the love that I craved. But you’re different. You were always alive, in my mind. You haunted me—in the nicest possible way—long before all the others came to destroy me. I think you’ve always been the one that it was all about, the one that it’s all been for. You were the incarnation of the pure, innocent captive held prisoner by this appalling web of life—never, somehow, a part of the horror of it all. You were the counterpoint, the dream of perfection, the thing that I dared not bring into the foreground lest it be destroyed by the brutality of existence. You’re the angelic standard that mundane humanity fails so miserably to meet!”
He wasn’t sure that he’d got it quite right. It was a long time since he’d done any sloppy stuff—but it sounded really good, almost worthy of Noel Coward. “Why have you come, Hope?” he continued, his voice rising to a melodramatic treble. “You haven’t really come to ask me to deliver myself into the hands of the mob, have you? You’ve come to help, to stand by me! You’ve come to give me the courage and the fortitude to withstand what is being done to me, to carry on being me! Isn’t that why you’ve come?”
“Oh yes!” she gargled. A note of joy was in her delicate voice now. “My darling….”
He dived forward to grab her, but went straight through her and bumped his nose on the bed-head.
She began to laugh, and laugh and laugh.
It slowly sank in that she had made a fool of him.
“Lying bitch!” screamed Custer. “Traitress!”
He staggered into the kitchen to get the gin out of the fridge. The Irish whiskey had been a dead man for some time.
* * * * * * *
Jack Bent stared incredulously at the two women chained to his railings. The chains were symbolic, of course. The crowds loved them. Here, in central London, there was always a crowd gawking at the pickets, and, like the true blue Custer characters they were, the girls always tried to do a good show for them.
“I’ve cancelled the contract,” Bent wailed. “There’s no reason for you to hang around now. No reason at all. I’m finished with Custer. I’m no longer his publisher.”
The two girls cut a particularly sorry spectacle. One was Vanessa Lovejoy, who had been hacked to death by the psychopathic razor-wielding Montague Blake in Fury in the Fog. Her face was a mess of open cuts and her demure white dress was drenched in blood. The other was Delilah Pratt, dressed in the most amazing creation of black leather with lace and PVC trimmings. There were vast dark circles under her eyes and her livid red lipstick was set against a grey complexion. The career of Dorian Gray had been positively puritan compared to what she had gone through in Parasites of Passion before dying in the asylum.
Vanessa—who was, according to Fury in the Fog, much given to lengthy and melodramatic statements—launched into a juicy piece of oratory for the benefit of the crowd. “We are two out of hundreds, sir,” she thundered. “We are two who have suffered, although there are those among Marcus Custer’s characters who have suffered even more than we. We stand here today as the conscience of the publishing world, chained to your railings like an albatross around your neck. We are here to remind you of the evil that you have brought to the world in publishing Marcus Custer’s works. We are here to remind you that you, no less than he, are guilty of the torture, the misery, the degradation, the agony, the….”
The crowd was applauding vigorously.
“I’ve cancelled the contract,” yelled Bent, at the very top of his voice.
“Well, yes,” said Delilah Pratt, in the hollow, pain-wracked voice that Marcus Custer had given her. “But that’s only just the beginning. We want you to destroy your entire warehouse stock. And we want a solemn declaration that you’ll never reprint another Custer title.”
Bent moved closer to her, and put his lips close to her intangible ear, glancing furtively around at the crowd. “You don’t understand, Miss,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of money tied up in those books. I mean, with Evil Ecstasy I can get back the advance because of the time-clause in the contract, but with all the other books…you have to appreciate that I have an investment to look after.”
“When Custer’s rewritten the books to our instructions,” said Delilah steadfastly, “you can reissue them. But all the original versions are kaput. By Christmas, no decent person will buy one and all the libraries will have withdrawn them. You might as well pulp all yours because you won’t even be able to give them away.”
“It’s not fair!” protested Bent. “It’s censorship, that’s what it is. What about the freedom of the individual?”
“What about the freedom of Marcus Custer’s characters?” said Vanessa, interrupting in her stentorian tones. “We’re individuals too!”
“I’ll call the police,” threatened Bent.
“What good would that do?” mocked Vanessa, scornfully.
Bent was not a strong man. He had not known such terror, such utter hopelessness, since his early days at public school.
“It’s not my fault,” he sobbed, brokenly.
“If it would help,” said Delilah Pratt, “we could give you a copy of the approved synopsis we’ve prepared for Custer’s next book. It’s not called Evil Ecstasy any more—we call it The Miracle of Rainbow Valley. Quite a lot of us are in it, actually—the ones we’ve decided to put up as priority cases. If you could take it to Custer and suggest to him that….”
She stopped, presumably realizing that Bent could no longer hear what she was saying. He felt ghastly—dizzy and sick. He slowly sank to the pavement. He told himself, despairingly, that perhaps this was the perfect time to have the nervous breakdown he’d somehow never had the time for in years past.
“It’s nothing personal, you know,” said Vanessa Lovejoy, not so loudly but quite unrepentantly. “Maybe when this is all over, if you co-operate, we could maybe…make it all up to you somehow.”
After the ambulance had come and gone again, an old-age-pensioner who had seen the whole incident while she sat in an immobilized bus broke her journey to totter over to Delilah and say: “I’ve read Parasites of Passion seventeen times, and I think you were wonderful.” She then tried to press a 10p piece into Delilah’s insubstantial hand, but failed.
Muttering indistinctly, the senior citizen back to the bus that the traffic jam had obligingly held up for her.
* * * * * * *
Custer began talking to an empty chair in the sitting room, pretending that it was occupied by Jonathan Shaw. He had demolished both the gin and the Scotch, and all that was left was a bottle of vodka whose label boasted that it had been made in Warrington.
“You were my masterpiece,” he burbled, tearfully. “I poured everything I knew and felt into Accursed Humanity! It was the one book that was really and truly me. All the rest were just cardboard characters, but not you. You, Jonathan Shaw, were me. Your book was my ultimate indictment of the world. It had panache. It had guts. In fact, you were more me than I ever was. You were the ultimate me, the ideal me, the me that ought to have been. How could you do this to me? Me—I mean, you—of all people….”
Custer was tempted to turn on the tape recorder, because he could feel real, deep emotion welling up inside him and he was convinced that he could use the material in Evil Ecstasy, to give it even more realism than he usually poured into his books—but he didn’t. His despair was too great—he no longer believed that Evil Ecstasy ever could o
r ever would be written.
While he paused to belch, the empty chair blurred slightly, and when Custer had blinked the blur away Jonathan Shaw really was sitting there, with that ghoulish grin still on his face. Custer simply could not see how anyone could possibly be so insensitive as to find his plight amusing.
“Are you ready to talk?” asked Shaw. Custer noted that there was more than a hint of bland callousness in Shaw’s make-up. Had he written that in, or had Shaw managed to develop it himself? He couldn’t remember.
“Jonathan, Jonathan…,” moaned Custer. “Are you so hell-bent on destruction? Do you owe me nothing? Have you really no feeling for your creator? Why must you hound me this way?”
“Because,” said Shaw, with devastating simplicity, “you’ve been doing this kind of thing to your characters for years.”
Custer shook his head, sighing as deeply as he could. “Oh, I know that you suffered. You suffered and died. The world of Accursed Humanity! had no place for you. It relentlessly squeezed the life out of your metaphorical bones, stifled your hypothetical soul. You were driven to despair, an also-ran in the rat race, a miserable loser in the great game of life. But don’t you see…I’ve suffered too. I’m here, in this frightful world, helpless in the grip of its merciless persecution, its ignominious tortures. I’ve gone through the utmost depths of a hell that you can only imagine. I’ve lived every moment that you—all of you—have lived, and I’ve lived them ten or a thousand times. You have no idea what rewrites can do to a man. I’ve been with you all the way, Jonathan, all of you. The world has been as unfair, unreasonable and downright cruel to me as it ever was to you. You must see that it’s the world that is responsible, not me. I only tell the truth…the real truth that otherwise might lie buried beneath the layers of stupid hypocrisy….
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 11
