The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 9
That was the title, all right. Dan rubbed his eyes with the end of his sleeve, got a grip of himself, and focused on the book. The words were spelled out in a child’s crayon scrawl over a photograph of a little boy hiding under a table, fists screwed into his weeping eyes. He looked just about how Dan felt, in fact. Why hadn’t he thought to hide under a table? Mechanically, Dan flipped the book open, looking for a synopsis of the plot.
The inside cover blurb told a story of familial horror even Virginia Andrews would have thought twice before using. Apparently the young man on the front cover had been raised by the chickens on his family farm, his operatically dysfunctional family (father, stepmother, sundry half-brothers and -sisters) having obliged him to live in the shed since his fifth birthday. From then until adulthood, they’d more or less left him to the roosters, except to look in on him once every week or so and subject him to Wagnerian passages of escalating abuse, group and solo, all conducted by Daddy—hence the title. This until he escaped, and moved to California to write his memoirs, described by Marie-Claire as “heart-rending” and by Cosmopolitan as, bizarrely enough, “uplifting and inspiring”.
“I tell myself: if you only had a fraction of his courage, Molly.” The woman was gripping his elbow still, patting his forearm with her free hand in reassurance. As if replacing an unexploded hand grenade, Dan set the book back on the shelf and looked at her more closely. She was thin, painfully so, with a figure that complemented the expensive designer clothes she was wearing. Her hair was possibly not quite the rich shade of auburn under which it advertised itself, and repeated shots of Botox had smoothed ten years’ worth of lines from her face without touching the underlying worries that had caused them. Still, you know what they say about beggars. Dan, who in his best suit looked like a named and shamed Fred Flintstone dragged before the magistrate’s court, swallowed hard and chose anyway. “You’re very kind,” he told her, engulfing her birdlike hand in his hot bear’s paw and returning her friendly squeeze. “Look, there’s a Costa over there. Can I get you a coffee or something to say thank you?”
Molly, it turned out, was absolutely thrilled to be sharing a cappuccino with a real live writer. Dan, only too aware that this flattering description was now obsolete in several respects, did his best to appear modest. Yes, he’d had five books out. Yes, they’d done pretty well. Yes, he was working on something at the moment.
Well, that last was stretching it a bit, maybe. For over a year now he’d been trying to breathe life into the flatlined, faintly odorous corpse of Storm’s Doom: The Sixth Chronicle of Nevernesse. He’d finally given up on it soon after Christmas, round about the same time Angie had served notice on their relationship. Now, he found it impossible to return to the wreckage of one without being confronted with the shambles of the other. They were inextricably linked in his mind, twin aspects of his general uselessness, guarantors of his indignity. Still, the file did actually exist on his hard drive, so there you were. “Trying to knock it into shape, you know,” he explained, and Molly gazed at him with wholly unfeigned admiration, as she might have gazed on Michelangelo finding David inside the obdurate lump of marble. There was one question yet to come, though—
“Where do you get your ideas from?”
That’s the one. Like a number ten bus rolling up to the stop. “Well, there’s this site on the Internet,” he said, and Molly snorted with laughter, in a way she clearly felt unbecoming—she covered her mouth with a hand—but which Dan actually found rather cute. She was quite pretty when she laughed. Vivacious, even. It took years off her. “No, seriously: ideas dot com, slash, better-ideas-than-yours, all one word. Absolute godsend. They take all major credit cards.” She was laughing again. God, this was going well. Still got it, he told himself hollowly.
“But you’re interested in tragic life stories too,” she said, regaining her composure.
“I’m sorry?” Tragic what?
“Like Ando McElwee. Tragic life stories?”
Oh, Christ. Misery-lit. A Child Called Shit. That balloon juice she’d been going on about in the bookshop. “Well,” he began, playing for time, “well, yeah, I suppose I do find that sort of thing, you know, quite, um, interesting . . . ” Interesting. Right. Cheap holidays in other people’s misery, was what he’d actually said: at the last Nevercon, it was, a bunch of them propping up the bar, Dan holding boozily forth while Angie sat abandoned at their table, the only sane woman in a room full of geeks and blowhards.
“I think it goes beyond interesting,” Molly said. It was one of the things he found attractive about her: she didn’t waste time with the commonplaces. “I actually find it quite humbling, to read about these people’s struggles. Uplifting, too, in a way. I mean, it gives me such a perspective on my own life.”
Yeah, but that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? They were suffering to make you feel good about yourself, then, these poor sods? It was almost like the old argument against fox hunting: one was against it not only because of the discomfort suffered by the fox, but because of the enjoyment derived by the spectators. After a while, misery must surely become as addictive, not to say as formulaic, as pornography—two subjects on which Dan felt supremely well qualified to comment. When you slurped down shelf after shelf of this stuff, what did it say about your discernment? If you started to empathize with it, what did it say about your self-image?
Of course, he said none of these things, not wanting the doe-eyed and frankly doting expression on Molly’s face to cloud over. Instead, he said: “I saw the film of Angela’s Ashes. Do you go to the cinema much, at all?”
By the time they’d finished their coffees, there existed a more-or-less definite commitment to a film, perhaps a meal as well, or a drink, or both. The Cheshire Oaks had been mentioned, a retail village complete with multiplex just up the M53. Molly lived in Mickle Trafford, not ten minutes away from the misery hutch in Hoole that Dan called a bachelor flat. He could pick her up, no trouble: Pizza Hut and a movie, then let’s see what happens. That was the plan, to be enacted sometime in the very near future. Not right away, though, since the Easter holidays would make the multiplex all but unbearable for a week or so. This led to a question, which Dan hesitantly pitched . . .
And received the expected answer. Though divorced, Molly had no children: imagine, all those nurturing instincts, and no kids on which to squander them. Dan used to dream about that sort of thing.
He was under no illusions as to the long-term prospects of their dating. He was aware, after all, of the neon sign that flashed on and off above his head, spelling out the salient points of his situation to potential partners: HUNGUP, SELF-CENTERED AND WORRYINGLY INFANTILE—PLEASE PASS. The wise ones did, and as for the rest of them? At least when it all went tits-up in the end, they couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned.
In the meantime, though, Molly should be just the job. It was fair to say she was the first good thing that had happened to him all year—and after the time he’d had, he needed several very good things indeed, coming one after another. Stroke after stroke of luck, good fortune stacked up in wedding-cake layers, just to tempt him out from under the table, away from the lugubrious company of Ando McElwee and his brothers in pain.
Like giggly adolescents, the two of them exchanged contact details outside on the street. Dan gallantly punched his number into the memory of her Blackberry (which she clearly had no idea how to use) and stored her own on his Samsung—work phone, home landline, and mobile, just to be on the safe side. Her words, not his. He remembered just in time the photo of Angie that was still set to display as the wallpaper on his phone’s screen, and managed to shield it off without making it look too obvious.
Having seen Molly off along the Rows—she kept turning round for one last wave, which he found slightly needy yet undeniably appealing—Dan set out for “home” with a strange mixture of emotions. On the one hand, he’d lost his deal. Crap, crap, crap: that was the deal gone, unbelievable. His deal, his precious seven-booker. On th
e other, a well-off, presentable woman who was neither his dentist nor his bank manager had shared his company for just over an hour, and showed every sign of wanting to repeat the experience, pretty much as soon as possible. True, said woman was heavily into misery-lit—not to mention angel-lit, a swoony sub-genre of inspirational New Age which Dan viewed with the utmost foreboding. Still, sensitive souls like that could occasionally surprise you with a startlingly uninhibited attitude in the sack. Low self-esteem, he supposed, coupled with a tendency to the histrionic. Swings and roundabouts, then.
Looked at objectively, of course, and with a proper sense of proportion, losing his book deal was bad, very bad. However, the events of the afternoon had given him an idea. Maybe all was not lost after all. First, though, there was the rest of the day to get through.
The evening fizzled out to nothing, like a bullet fired into a water tank for forensics. After forking down his singleton’s microwave slop-pail and flicking through the electronic programme guide for the least annoying channels of distraction, Dan spent the hours before sleep downing can after can of Stella, going over his cunning new plan, and most importantly of all, not calling his old number to talk to Angie. Definitely not doing that. Malcolm had a habit of picking up first, for all the world as if he lived there—which, of course, he did. Damn. Dan slept the sleep of the inexpertly anesthetized, and woke some time before six the next morning, feeling pretty much the way you might expect.
He put the coffee on to drip while he attended to the most pressing of his hygienic requirements. Taking his brimming mug of Colombian roast through to the back room, he powered up the computer, before abandoning it on a whim for his Powerbook. He wrote Nevernesse on the desktop machine, and this would be something different, after all.
Sitting at the desk like a diner who isn’t particularly hungry and who sees nothing on the menu to tempt him, Dan eyed the white screen of a blank new Word file with bleary distaste. Experimentally he clicked on the Open File icon: there they were, seven directories’ worth of Nevernesse. Drafts, revisions, fair copies, PDF proofs. How many words? How many million billion characters tapped out in his stiff four-finger typing? How much of his precious time on this earth?
Well, that last one was easy enough to work out. Nevernesse spanned with pretty fair exactitude the duration of his relationship with Angie: from the first short tales of Hawkheart in Galibion, round about the time they’d met, to the wreck of the sixth chronicle, when she’d moved Malcolm in to their fatally compromised wedding bed. Fuck it, anyway. Fuck Nevernesse, and fuck Angie. Fuck the lot of you, actually. Crabbily, Dan clicked on the red X at the corner of the window to make it go away.
Back on the blank white page, the cursor blinked on and off like a metronome. Dan fiddled with the blink rate in the Control Panel for a while before catching himself. No more diversionary tactics. He’d be changing his default font next.
Almost without thinking, he typed “My uncle used to burn the soles of my feet.” It had been running through his head since yesterday, ever since he’d looked at the Ando McElwee book. He read the sentence back, then pressed Home and amended its beginning. “When I was a little boy, my uncle used to burn the soles of my feet.” The End key took him back to the end of the line, where he added “with cigarettes” to give the line a better balance. “When I was a little boy, my uncle used to burn the soles of my feet with cigarettes.”
There was a voice in there, he thought: simple, declarative, with a naïve kind of narrative authority. This, you felt, was what had happened. You were buying it from the off. You wanted to find out more.
So let’s see what comes next. Kindling the narrative spark, urging the fire to catch a hold, he typed on. “He used to come back from the pub and come into my bedroom . . . ” No. Two comes in the one sentence, that wasn’t good. Make that “barge into my bedroom, smelling of beer.” Smelling of ale. Better. Gives it a geographical reality. He had in mind the north country, where he was born, and he wanted to get the phrasing right. Nobody spoke like this in Nevernesse; but then, nobody there had bad uncles barging into their bedrooms all aled up, either. Also, in Nevernesse everyone tended to be either hero or villain, and this new protagonist was neither—he was a victim, possibly the victim, the all-time award winning injured party. For Dan, it was a total departure from the known: his first work of misery-lit.
He’d always found the start of a new project an exciting, even a magical thing. He’d tried to capture a flavor of it in the very first Chronicle, in the opening scenes where young Berain stands on the hilltop of fair counsel and gazes over the long marches of Nevernesse receding into hazy distance, the towers of far Indricium rearing up in the spring sunshine many leagues to the West. Etcetera, etcetera. And yet that was how Dan always felt, starting a story: as if he were standing on a hilltop, surveying the spread of possibilities ranged below. Truly surveying them: the eidetic image is really nothing like the image produced by mental recollection. Dan knew not all writers shared this gift, but privately he didn’t reckon much to the work of those who hadn’t got it. You could always tell.
So you beheld your creation, unfolded as if by magic before you. There were landmarks by which to navigate: plot points you’d thought out beforehand, action you needed to incorporate, but all the rest was up for grabs. There might be anything out there in those misty golden reaches—anything at all! —and discovering it would be like a great adventure, a journey for both the hero and the child popularly held to cohabit inside us all.
Why did people knock escapism in literature? he’d once asked the audience at a convention. Why, when you spend thousands of pounds on a holiday where everything goes wrong and you spend the first three nights stuck at the airport and they lose your bags, and the hotel’s appalling when you get there and the sandflies buzz you all the while and you come back with the squirting shits and a bank balance that could crawl underneath a settee, and you swear you’ll never go back there again . . . why, when you were prepared to go through all that twice a year, would you want to knock the greatest escape of all, the one you made simply by opening the cover of a book? He’d actually got a round of applause for that, though to be fair he had been preaching to the converted, not to say borderline obsessive. Most people—most normal people, the ones who watched the soaps where narrative was brought to your plate ready pureed, all the meat cut up for you in case you choked on an uncomfortably chewy plot development—they would still have dismissed him as an irredeemable saddo. A book-owl, a weirdo, a wimp. Fuck them, anyway (as previously noted). Fuck the lot of them. He was breaking through now. Going mainstream with a vengeance.
The plan, as he’d envisaged it the night before, was to spend no more than a couple of months knocking out an unbelievably harrowing yet totally spurious work of misery-lit, the completed MS to be hawked round the publishers under a nom-de-plume, as was standard practice to protect the innocent. Specifically, him. In the absence of any childhood trauma—no uncles, drunk or sober, had ever burned the soles of his feet—he would fall back on his powers of invention. If he could conjure all the complicated grandeur of Nevernesse into being, he ought to be able to manage the tale of one child’s formative years among the cigarette-ends. Sell one of these babies, and he’d never have to work again. How many lustrals since Gorlain was regent in Indricium? Who gave a flying toss?
And it was coming together, that was the great thing. It was coming to life. He had a handle on it. There was the child cowering in his bed; there, the bad uncle looming in the lighted doorway. Now he had to find the surroundings. What sort of place was it all happening in? The easiest thing to do was to use this very room as his template, of course. The back room of this flat, which had obviously been a bedroom once upon a time. So: out with all these books, move that filing-cabinet, shift those shelves. Let’s have . . . a wardrobe in the recess there, a knocked-around wardrobe with mirrors in the doors and model airplanes on the top. Model tanks? No, airplanes. They’d signify his desire to escape, late
r on. And there was the bed, against that wall. Single bed, with an old-fashioned coverlet, sheets and blankets. And on the other side, the fitted cupboards; they could stay. Maybe the young lad would hide in there from time to time. Yes, the young lad. What was his name, now?
That was a tough one, for some reason or other. Dan auditioned a whole litany of boys’ forenames, none of which seemed right somehow, before shaking his head and typing in X. X was fine for now—in a way, X might even do as a permanent solution. Like those black activists in the 1960s trading in their slave names. So, there’s X in the bed, with a picture on the wall, a picture of . . . The Light of the World? Creepy Jesus, looming in the gloaming? Religious was good. If abusers were the worst kind of hypocrites, then the subset of the religious hypocritical had to be worse still—they were the ones all the other nonces looked down on, surely. The Light of the World, then? Maybe. Wasn’t sure. But leave it there for the time being. Flying fingers, flying fingers.
Curtains at the window. The sort of house where the curtains would often stay closed in the daytime, he thought. Stuffy. Secretive. House of secrets. Neighbors never guessed a thing. And outside? Dan glanced through his own window, over the rooftops of Hoole at the railway lines receding into the distance. That would do. Again, might be used later: symbol of child’s wish to escape. He could bring all that out in the second draft, where you picked out the symbolism and polished it to best effect. First draft, you followed the seam of the narrative, knocked in the pit-props of plot, and let the symbols look after themselves.
This was good, it was actually working. He knew where he was now; he had his bearings, his handle on the reality of things. The eidetic image was strong in his head, alive already. Onward, ever onward. He typed quickly, as if taking dictation, “Afterwards, I used to look out of my window at the railway lines and wish I was somewhere far away.” Judiciously, he arrow-keyed back to the space before “away,” to add a comma and another “far.” Outside, the sun rose over the Chester suburbs. Dan, oblivious to everything but the story, typed on.