by Unknown
Amid the babble of fawning praise and trite questions from the fans, Baxter waited patiently for the inevitable “Where do you get your ideas?” While other writers, real writers, groaned at this chestnut, Baxter enjoyed it. It gave him a chance to bloviate and pontificate all the meaningless slogans and shibboleths spouted by writers since, well, probably since Plutarch. All the crap about using your life experience, writing from the soul, distilling the one true word from random thought. Empty words, but they ate it up, these writer groupies. So on this occasion when he opened his mouth to lay some platitude on the eager young faces, he was as surprised as any of them to hear what came out.
“Where do I get my ideas? I steal them.”
There followed a moment of stunned silence in which it seemed you could hear the non-ringing of the cash register. Then the laughter began as the group of youngsters concluded that the semifamous writer was making a joke. A beat later Baxter joined the general merriment, hoping his own laughter did not ring as false as it was. For what he had just told the assembled fans was the truth. He was a thief.
It was in his freshman year at one of the California state colleges that Hamilton Baxter discovered his knack for taking the work of other writers, changing some words, restructuring a few sentences, and rearranging paragraphs. He could then present the piece as his own and be assured of an acceptable grade. As his skill at word thievery grew, Baxter sailed through college and graduated with a degree in English without producing a single piece of original writing.
On graduation Baxter discovered the career opportunities for English majors were severely limited. He had but one real skill, and he concentrated on some way to use that in making a living. It did not take long for him to settle on fiction writing. There were untold millions of stories in long-forgotten books just waiting to be lifted. Baxter was careful never to use the work of an author whose name people might know, or a story too familiar to the public. He haunted the back shelves of used-book stores and the dusty stacks of unread works in the library. He avoided the Internet as a source because there were too many ways an inquisitive geek could nail him there.
For fifteen years now he had made a comfortable, if not sumptuous living, using the words of others. He was content to be a midlist writer, never breaking into any bestseller list, winning no prizes, selling his work moderately and occasionally playing Author for small groups like the one at the bookstore today.
Shaken now by the inadvertent blabbing of the damning truth to his young fans, Baxter excused himself, pleading a meeting with his publisher. No such meeting was scheduled, but he felt the need to escape before he revealed any more embarrassing facts.
An hour later, in his library refuge, Baxter inhaled the bookish air as a diver might suck in oxygen on emerging from the depths. The smell of the pages, the bindings, and the words themselves invigorated him. The building was new and bright, but the warm musty smell was as old as literature. The friendly middle-aged woman at the desk greeted him with a smile.
“You’re later than usual today, Mr. Baxter. No problem, I hope?”
“No problem, Claire. I had to stop off and sell a few books. The artist’s curse.”
The woman laughed dutifully as Baxter headed for one of the little cubicles at the rear. He was relieved to see that his favorite space was not occupied. He laid his worn briefcase on the desk between the shoulder-high partitions and headed back among the shelves. He was to begin a new book today, and he planned to search among some old material for inspiration. He picked out a volume of stories from long-out-of-print pulp magazines. The writing was rudimentary, but those old penny-a-worders came up with some solid plot ideas. A volume of twentieth-century biographies would provide background for a cast of characters. Play scripts from the 1920s and ‘30s would juice up his dialogue. An anthology of pretentious fiction from obscure literary magazines would impart a touch of class.
With an armful of stealable literature Baxter returned to the cubicle and settled in. He opened the first book and snatched his hand back with a yelp of pain. A fresh paper cut sliced his forefinger. Damn, on his writing hand, too. He sucked at the wound, blew on it, swore at the drop of blood that oozed out and plopped onto his shirtfront.
Baxter looked around quickly to see if he had disturbed any of the other patrons. Not that he cared, but in his position it did not pay to attract attention. He was relieved to see that no one had looked in his direction. He picked up the book for a closer look at the page that had cut him. Puzzled, he frowned. The paper was old, soft, and pulpy, not the kind of slick linen that inflicted a cut. Whatever the cause, he had a deep nick in his finger that throbbed in time with his heartbeat.
With his left hand he opened another of the volumes. Emitting a strange grunting sound, the heavy cover slammed shut on his hand with bone-cracking force.
“Ow, goddammit!” He tried to pull back, but the book kept his hand clamped where it was. Only when he jammed the book under his right arm and pulled did his hand come free and let the book snap shut. He examined his bruised knuckles and looked around. Again, no one took notice of his outburst. These idiots had to be deaf, or too immersed in their own stupid reading, or maybe they were deliberately ignoring him. Baxter found himself unreasonably angry with these people for not acknowledging his irritation.
All right, to hell with them. Get some work done.
Baxter opened the book, cautiously this time. He was relieved that no page sliced his finger, no jawlike covers snapped shut on him. It was just an ordinary old book. Relaxing a little, he turned to the title page. The letters there blurred as though he were trying to read through Vaseline. Automatically he touched his temple to be sure he was wearing his glasses. He was. He took them off, huffed on the lenses, and wiped them vigorously with a clean handkerchief. He replaced the glasses and looked down again at the page. No longer blurred, the letters stood out in bold black type:
jzsopkn jsrekk poknjjnsd
mw
Ijkhodss pnn sijemdoj
“What the holy hell?”
Baxter realized he had spoken aloud, but he didn’t care. Nor, it seemed, did anyone else in the library. Had he somehow picked up a book in some foreign language? No, those random letters looked like no earthly language. He flipped through page after page. Nothing on them but the apparently random scattering of letters, sometimes in wordlike clumps, sometimes in solid blocks down a whole page. Not a bit of it made sense. Crazy.
He pushed the book away like some venomous creature and opened another. It held the same meaningless jumble of letters. The remaining books were just as indecipherable. Baxter sat back in the plastic chair, sweat seeping through his shirt at the armpits. He had carefully chosen each of these volumes from the shelves, checked their pub dates and flipped through the pages before selecting them. Everything was as it should be. There were real words on the paper that had formed themselves into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Now nothing had meaning.
Baxter closed his eyes and forced himself to draw in four deep breaths and hold them as he had learned to do while plagiarizing a book on relaxation. When he looked again at the pages they were the same incoherent mess.
He lurched up from the little cubicle and stumbled back into the stacks. At random he pulled first one volume then another from the shelves, riffled through the pages, and dropped them one after another to the carpeted floor. Not a one of them is remotely readable. Am I going mad? he thought. Or am I the victim of some dreadful cosmic joke?
Something nudged him from the rear. Baxter spun around, his shoulder slamming against the opposite steel shelf, which had been a comfortable distance away when he entered the aisle. With a grinding, growling sound the tall, heavy shelf edged closer to him. A horrifying vision swam into his head of his body caught there, crushed until his bloody entrails spilled over the books.
He squeezed out from between the shelves, barely escaping before they clanked together. The bright and airy library had darkened as shadows crept in from
all sides. The pastel walls now looked like gray stone; the ceiling was lost in murky darkness. The people at the tables and in the cubicles were hunched over their books, silent and unmoving as stone images. Baxter stumbled toward the front desk.
The graying head of Claire the librarian brought him a flood of relief for the sheer familiarity. Something was definitely wrong here, but Claire was an anchor to reality. He coughed, trying to clear his throat.
Claire looked up. It was her face, but it was not the face she wore minutes ago. Something in the eyes was wrong. Very wrong. The heavy brows slanted down in a deep V. Her mouth stretched in a smile. And stretched. And stretched. Until the terrible orifice spread literally ear to ear. Brown and broken teeth protruded from suppurating gums. Baxter staggered back, his own mouth hanging open.
A rasping croak rattled from the ghastly mouth of the librarian. Nothing resembling words came out, though there was a rising inflection suggesting that this hag was asking a question. She extended a clawlike hand toward his face.
Abandoning all attempts at composure, Baxter leaped back and bolted for the door. Through the glass he could see the outside world where the sun shone on soft green grass, cars rolled past on the street, ordinary-looking people strolled on the sidewalks, pigeons pecked at the remains of a popcorn bag. A boy ran happily by playing with a black and white dog. Baxter fought for composure. Once he was back out there in the familiar world of reality everything would be all right.
He hit the bar with both hands to open the door, and bounced back. The bar was fixed in place; the door did not budge. He tried again with the same result. Whimpering, he pounded on the heavy glass with his fists until the pain shot up his arms. He kicked at the door with all his strength. His trendy jogging shoes made no impact.
Crying openly now, Baxter threw himself against the glass. He rebounded, blood dripping from his nose. As he gathered himself for another lunge a heavy blue-clad arm barred his way. The arm was attached to the powerful shoulder and uniformed chest of a security guard. The man was well over six feet tall with a broad, clean face. Baxter had never seen him here before, but on this nightmarish day he seized on the man as a savior.
As panic seized his throat, Baxter tried wildly to pantomime his distress and the need to get outside the heavy glass doors and away from the nightmare world his library had become.
For a moment he thought he had at last found an ally. The guard looked down at him with an almost sympathetic expression. Then the smile began. As with Claire the librarian, the terrible grin stretched and spread across his cheeks, up and back, until the corners of his mouth met his ears. The revealed teeth were long and sharp, not human at all. The ghastly maw gaped wide and a series of short growling sounds spilled out.
Baxter jerked his arm away from the guard and ran back past Claire, still wearing the hideous grin, past the silent lumpish patrons, past the tall murderous shelves filled with gibberish, to the tiny cubicle where he had left his briefcase and the four dreadful books that had kicked off this terror. He fumbled through the briefcase, found his cell phone, popped it open, and thumbed the button to activate it. The familiar tinkly tone came through, but Baxter scarcely noticed. He was staring at the logo on the tiny screen. It read:
womzilj
That was certainly not the name of the company that manufactured his phone. Nor was it any word in any language Baxter knew. He was not even surprised when the short list of names for his frequently called numbers made no sense. It fit with the bizarre world of nonwords he had somehow fallen into. Gripping the little phone with one hand he stabbed at the numbered keys with his split forefinger. After a couple of fumbled tries he hit 911. An almost comforting electronic buzzing ring sound came through immediately. A click sounded as a female voice answered on the other end and said…
What the hell did she say? There were only crackling, meaningless syllables in his ear. Baxter flung the instrument away from him and turned to the dark interior of the library. There the lumpish people at last began to move. As in slow motion they rose from their seats and turned toward him. He opened his mouth to scream at them, get their attention and plead for help if there was a sympathetic soul among them. Then as they came at him he saw their faces. Oh my God, their faces!
The sounds he made were the burbling prattle of an idiot child. Try as he might, Hamilton Baxter, who liked to say, “Words are my business,” could not form a single intelligible utterance. He fell back in the plastic chair and let his head bump forward on the surface of the desk. He heard the shuffling sounds of the others advancing on him. He cried like a baby as his world exploded.
The two men in white uniforms eased the gurney with its motionless burden down the steps of the library. The shorter of the men, who steadied the front end, said to his partner, “Did the doc say what killed him?”
“Who knows. Sometimes they just go, poof, like that.”
“They say he was some kind of a writer. Sitting there surrounded by books. I guess he died happy.”
BETWEEN EIGHT AND NINE O’CLOCK
RAY GARTON
ERIC VOLKER WALKED into the Fox and Hound on the night his wife was to be killed, and smiled into the crowded English pub. It was located at the northern end of the small California mountain town of Newbury, fully decorated for Christmas, and noisy even on this, a Tuesday night. It was the kind of place that had a lot of regulars, people who came in weekly, or nightly, and they did not come only for the ale. They came in after work for the music and dancing, to play darts or pool or air hockey with friends or even strangers, or to sing on Thursday nights when the pub engaged in that most drunken of all bar activities, karaoke. They came to see friends, to get out of the house and away from the television, to laugh, to have one of Maggie’s “exploding onions” with their drinks. They came because the owners, Denny and Maggie Jollie, always made them feel welcome. It was an open, roomy, well-lighted place that was usually fairly crowded and full of comfortable laughter. A good place to get your mind off the fact that your wife was about to be murdered.
Make sure you’re seen by plenty of people Tuesday night, the hit man had said. I’ll be doing the deed between eight and nine o’ clock. Make sure you’re someplace where people can see you between six and ten. You’ll need as many witnesses as you can possibly get. More than that, if we can swing it.
Eric took in a deep breath and moved forward into the pub. He saw familiar faces and smiled, waved to some, spoke to others briefly on his way to the bar.
In the rear of the pub, on a small wooden platform, a local quartet called Jazz Socket played jazzy Christmas songs. The tree was huge in a corner of the pub, decorated only in sparkling red and black. There were garland, tinsel, and small twinkling white lights everywhere.
“Eric, honey!” Maggie called. “Where’s Alma tonight?”
“I left her home tonight, came out by myself.” He perched on a stool and slipped off his long black cashmere-blend coat Alma had bought him so many Christmases ago, and let it drape over the stool’s back. He leaned forward, folded his arms on the bar.
“Everything okay?” Maggie said, leaning close so she wouldn’t have to shout to be heard.
Eric took in another deep breath, then shrugged as he exhaled. “Same as ever. You know. Same old stuff.”
Maggie was in her early sixties, with short, curly, lightening red hair. While unlined, her entire pale face, with its brownish half-moons under the eyes, sagged as one down her skull. In the wrong light, it appeared to be melting. Age was part of it. Maggie and Denny were both heavy drinkers, and that was part of it, too.
“I still think it’s communication,” she said, putting a hand on Eric’s hand. Her breath smelled of wine. Denny was a whisky drinker, but Maggie loved her wine. She claimed that was because she was born in the Napa Valley. “You two just need to talk. That’s all.”
He shook his head slowly as it sagged forward heavily. “We’ve done so much of that, from every conceivable angle, and what it comes down t
o is this—she doesn’t love me anymore. She won’t admit it, but that’s the problem.”
“How about you?” Maggie said. “You love her?”
After several long seconds, without meeting her gaze, Eric simply shrugged. “The usual, please.”
She stepped away and came back seconds later with a pint of Guinness. The mug thunked to the bar in front of him when she set it down.
“I want you both to come to the Christmas party, okay?” she said. “Please? Will you do that?”
He pulled a few bills from his right pants pocket, plucked out a five, and put it on the bar for the ale. He stuffed the rest of them back into his pocket with the change that kept jingling annoyingly in the bottom. “When is it?” he said.
“Same as always, Eric, Christmas Eve.”
He frowned as he took a few healthy swallows of the ale. He put the mug down and took a napkin from the dispenser on the bar, wiped his foamy mouth. “I’m pretty sure we have plans for Christmas—”
“Honey, everybody has plans for Christmas Eve. All I ask is that you stop by for a couple drinks. We got this way cool band coming in from out of town, from Redding, and Luigi’s Deli is catering the whole thing, so there’s gonna be lotsa good stuff to eat. Just come by for a little while, okay? Both of you?”
He smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Aw,” she said as she leaned over the bar and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “That’s sweet. Look, I’ll see you around, honey.” Then she was gone, off talking to someone else, and then someone else, each little conversation quickly leaving her wine-soaked mind to make room for the next. She would come to him again later and tell him the same things and ask the same questions, and give him the same advice, all over again, with no memory of having said almost exactly the same thing a couple hours before.
Eric took a few more swallows of his ale and noticed it was almost gone already.
Slow down, he thought. You’re going to be here awhile.
