by Johnny Mains
She had got back from the hospital around twelve hours ago, with barely enough strength left to stagger into her bedroom and collapse into bed, peeling off clothes and leaving them in her wake as she went. The adrenaline crash after the trauma of the previous evening had caused her to sleep solidly and dreamlessly for the past twelve hours. Checking her phone again Chloe saw that she had a couple of missed calls and several texts, mostly from work, wanting to know where the hell she was. There was also a message from Nick, who sounded tired but okay, asking her if she was all right, and a text from Jo which said: How are you? Feeling better after our talk?
Still sitting in the dark, Chloe scrolled through her address book until she came to ‘Home’. She selected ‘Dial’ from the Options menu and snuggled down into bed as the cricket-like burr at the other end of the line broke the silence.
‘Hello?’ Her father’s voice was like honey. Emotionally raw after waking up, Chloe was shocked to feel tears springing instantly to her eyes.
‘Dad, it’s me. Can I come home?’
A moment of surprised silence. Then her father said, ‘Chloe, my love? Are you all right?’
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing so well at the moment. Can I come home?’
‘Well . . . of course. At the weekend, do you mean?’
‘No, I was thinking now. Well, tomorrow. I thought I’d catch an early train.’
‘I see.’
‘Is that all right?’
‘Well, yes. But what about your work?’
‘They’ll be fine about it,’ she said, not caring whether it was true or not. ‘They know about Mum. They said if I needed any time off . . .’
There was another moment’s silence, and then her father said. ‘Right, well, I shall expect you tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it.’
‘Me too, Dad. And . . . Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need to talk to you about something. Something important.’
‘Right. Well, I shall look forward to that too.’
Chloe rang off, feeling as though she had taken a step in the right direction, as though she had achieved something. Perhaps it was naïve to think her dad would solve all her problems, but talking to him would help, she felt sure of it. His was the voice of reason and compassion. He would untangle her muddled thoughts and put everything into perspective.
‘I’m trying, Lord,’ she whispered. She threw back the duvet, crossed the room and switched on the light.
The door was back.
Chloe almost dropped her mug when she saw it. As it was, she jerked back from the window, slopping hot coffee over the back of her hand. ‘Ow!’ she yelled, gritting her teeth as she ran through to the kitchen to douse the reddening skin in cold water. Once she’d patted her stinging hand dry with a tea towel, she returned to the main room, sidling round the edge of the kitchen doorframe and keeping low, like someone targeted by a sniper. It was ridiculous to think she was being stalked by a door, and yet she couldn’t help but feel that she was under scrutiny. She crept along the wall on bended knees until she was underneath the light switch, then reached up and snapped it off. With the flat in darkness, illuminated only by the glow of the street lamp outside, she felt marginally less exposed, though her heart was still thumping hard as she scrambled across to the window and jerked the curtains across, shutting out the night.
She rose, parted the curtains a chink with her finger and peered through the gap. She half-expected the door to have vanished, but it was still there, the peeling red gloss that coated it shimmering in the lamplight. It was on a section of wall that was part of the frontage of a second-hand furniture warehouse directly across the road from her apartment block. It was several metres to the left of the rolling metal shutter that was both wide enough and high enough to admit a sizeable truck, and that served as the warehouse’s main entrance. As ever, the door was half-way up the wall and upside-down, and to Chloe it seemed to be flaunting its wrongness.
‘You’re not there,’ she muttered, and then, when that was not enough to dispel the image, ‘Go away, go away.’
She let the curtain drop back into place, telling herself that if she ignored it, it would disappear, that next time she looked it would be gone.
She turned on the TV, checked her emails, made herself another cup of coffee, flicked through yesterday’s Metro, even though she’d already read it. Try as she might, however, she couldn’t put the door out of her mind; it was like an itch she was desperate to scratch. Her flat was full of clocks – there was one on her kitchen wall, one on her computer, one on her phone, one on her DVD player tucked neatly beneath the TV – and every few moments she found her eyes straying to one or another, whereupon she would catch herself mentally calculating how many minutes had passed since she had last looked out of the window. She moved restlessly from room to room, sitting down for no more than two or three minutes at a time before feeling compelled to jump up and prowl again. Finally she tried to lie on her bed and close her eyes, but her mind was buzzing with anxiety, her stomach churning, and in the end she jumped to her feet, marched into the main room and twitched the curtains aside again.
The door was still there. Chloe gasped, feeling something between despair and fear curl inside her. She wondered whether, ultimately, she would be able to outrun the door, whether it was confined to London, and whether if she left the city and returned home it would somehow be unable to follow her.
She tried to glean comfort from that thought, though couldn’t help but be aware that she was only speculating, and that sometimes the only way to overcome a fear was to confront it. Allowing the curtain to drop she made herself a promise: if the door was still there in an hour she would attempt to discover what lay behind it.
For the next hour she forced herself to sit in front of the TV, to stare at the screen, even though her mind was elsewhere and she had no idea what she was watching. For the last ten minutes her eyes kept flicking to the digital clock on the DVD player, and with a minute to go, she shuffled to the edge of the settee, hands braced either side of her. As soon as the green numerals changed, completing the hour, she shoved herself to her feet and rushed across to the window. Jerking aside the curtain she cried out, as though at a sharp stabbing pain, and felt her legs begin to shake.
The door was still there.
‘Oh God,’ she breathed, unsure whether her words were an oath or an appeal for strength, ‘oh God.’ As she pulled on a jacket and gloves, the shaking spread from her legs, into her hands and belly.
‘Come on, Chloe,’ she told herself, ‘you can do this.’
She walked out of her flat and down the stairs, gripping the banister as though it was her only connection with reality, as though without it she would drift away and become lost. At the bottom of the stairs she hesitated a moment, then plunged towards the front door. As she twisted the Yale lock and pulled the door open, her heart was pounding so much it hurt.
Please be gone, she thought, please be gone.
She stepped outside.
And there was the red door, across the road, waiting for her.
Chloe descended the steps at the front of the house and moved down the path towards the gate. There were several seconds when the red door was hidden from view by the high hedge bordering the front of the property. When I step through the gate, it will be gone, she thought.
But it wasn’t. She crossed the road towards it as though in a dream. She wanted it to flicker and vanish, wanted something to distract her so that when she looked back she would see only a blank wall. She reached the opposite pavement and the door was metres away. It looked as real and as solid as everything around it.
‘One more chance,’ she whispered, and closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a count of ten, breathing hard and fast. When she opened them again there was the door, its surface red and peeling like burnt skin.
‘Okay,’ she said, crossing the pavement in four strides. The door was directly above her now, its lowest point level with her chin. She reached out, forming her hand into a tight fist. When she knocked what would she feel beneath her knuckles? Wood or solid brick? If brick, perhaps it would break the illusion, snap her out of whatever was causing this.
She knocked. Knuckles on wood. The sound echoed away from her, as though carried along some unseen, impossible corridor.
Three, four seconds slipped by. Then she heard something beyond the door. Slow, approaching footsteps. She wanted to turn and run, forced herself to stand still. The footsteps stopped. The door opened.
Light spilled out. Chloe took a step back, screwing up her eyes. Through the door she saw a corridor, almost as narrow as the door itself. A cylinder on a thin pole jutted from a white floor about half-way along; much closer to her, just beyond the door, something large hung from what appeared to be a carpeted ceiling. She couldn’t make sense of it at first, and then she realised that what she was seeing was upside-down. The cylinder on the pole was a lamp hanging from a ceiling flex. And the large, dark shape drooping from what appeared to be a carpeted ceiling like an over-sized bat was a figure, its feet planted firmly on a carpeted floor, to which upside-down furniture clung as if glued or nailed into place.
With the light behind it the figure was mostly in silhouette, though Chloe got the impression that it was a woman – small and hunched and wizened.
‘Mum?’ she said before she was even consciously aware that she had made the connection. ‘Mum, is that you?’
The figure remained silent. Chloe could not even hear her – if it was a her – breathing.
‘What’s happening?’ Chloe whispered. ‘What do you want from me? Why are you upside-down? How can you defy gravity like that?’
The figure leaned forward. It creaked and rustled, as though made of parchment, as though it was nothing but a dried-up husk.
Its voice, too, was papery. ‘Gravity is an act of faith,’ it whispered.
‘What do you . . . ?’ Chloe began, and then her eyes widened in horror. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No!’
And all at once her feet were leaving the ground, she was kicking at the air, she was falling. As she plummeted helplessly towards the infinite blackness of space, the night sky rushed up to engulf her.
Author of the Death
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Finally I decided I’d had enough and I wasn’t going to put up with it any more and it was high time something was done the hell about it. My father was a vague character at best but there’s one way in which I evidently do take after him. Once he’d decided to do something, apparently, that was it. That thing was going to happen, and it was going to happen now. As soon as I realized I was clinically fed up with the situation, compelling verbs were required – and there was only one immediate course of action I could think of. I grabbed my coat and looked for my gun, but I couldn’t find it. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not, and probably it wasn’t such a great idea to take it anyhow. I had a mission, a simple goal. I didn’t need a weapon.
I needed focus.
I knew tracking down a writer wasn’t going to be an easy task. They’re everywhere but yet nowhere, too – a state of affairs I’m sure reminds some of them of one conception of deity. (Is it called ‘Pantheism’? I can’t remember. I probably shouldn’t know anyway). I have only ever been in New York, except for a couple of short chapters in a small town nearby called Westerford. It was never clear to me how I even got to Westerford, however – as I was just cut there and back on chapter breaks – so that idea was a non-starter and to be absolutely honest I suspect he just made the place up anyhow.
Bottom line was that I was stuck with looking for him in the city. If I’d believed he knew the place very well then this would have been a very daunting prospect – NYC is a hell of a big patch of ground even if you stick to the island and don’t start on the other boroughs. I had reason to suspect that his knowledge was limited to Manhattan, however, and far from comprehensive even there.
I made a list of locations, the places I knew well, and got out into the streets.
Six hours later my feet hurt and I was getting irritable. I’d looked everywhere. Everywhere I could remember having been, or where scenes with other characters had taken place, or that I’d heard described by other people – finally washing up at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Station, a bar surprisingly few people know about. I’d been there once for a meeting about a job that got derailed. The meeting had always felt to me like filler, but I’d liked the venue. Dark, subterranean-feeling, dirty light filtered through a big stained glass window. It looked and felt exactly as described, and so I thought it likely the guy had actually been there, rather of merely having read about it. He wasn’t there now, though.
I had a drink anyway and left and started to walk wearily back down 5th Avenue, cigarette in hand. It was mid-afternoon and starting to get colder. I’d had plenty of time to consider whether what I was doing was a good idea (and if it even made any kind of ontological sense), but something I evidently inherited from my mother (much better fleshed out as a character than my father, featuring in two long, bucolic memory sequences and a series of late-climax flash-backs) is that once I’ve embarked on a project, it does tend to get done.
So I walked, and I walked some more. Instead of cutting over to 3rd and down into the East Village – which is where I live, for better or worse – I went the other way, switching back and forth between 6th, 7th and 8th, down through Chelsea, back over to Union Square, then over and down into Meatpacking, though only briefly, because I didn’t seem to know it very well.
No sign of him, anywhere. I didn’t know what I was expecting, if I was hoping I’d just run into him on a street corner or something, but it didn’t happen.
He evidently didn’t know what was going to happen next, how to get me onto the next series of events.
The short paragraphs were a giveaway.
He was treading water.
It was a hiatus.
So I made my own choice.
I was down on the fringes of Soho when I spotted another Starbucks. I’d already been in about ten. He is forever dropping a Starbucks into the run of play – situating events there, revisiting recollections, or having people pick up a take-out to engineer a beat of ‘real life’ texture. Each was well-described, as though he’d actually been there, and so I’d taken the trouble to seek them out. This one was new to me, however.
The interior was big enough to have three separate seating areas, and looked comfortable and welcoming. It smelled like they always do. There was the harsh cough of steam being pumped through yet another portion of espresso. Quiet chatter. Anodyne music. People reading Letham and Frantzen or Derrida and Barthes.
Weird thing was, it felt familiar.
Not familiar to me, but still . . . familiar. I know that sounds strange. I knew that I didn’t know the place personally, but it felt like I could have done. I decided I might as well have yet another Americano, and was wandering over toward the line when I realised some guy was looking at me.
I turned and looked back at him. He was in an armchair by a table close to the window. Late twenties, with sharply defined and well-described facial features. Something about him said he was no stranger to criminal behaviour, but that’s not what struck me most about him.
He looked how I felt. He looked weary.
He looked stuck.
I took a pace in his direction. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Don’t see how.’
‘That’s what I thought. So why are you staring at me?’
‘You look familiar,’ he said. ‘Like . . . I dunno.’
‘Can’t be. I’ve never been in here before.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. I’ve done stuff in the Starbucks on the corne
r of 42nd and 6th, the one on 6th between 46th and Times Square, and another at an unspecified street address up near Columbus Circle. Also I’ve stuck my head in a bunch more today, uptown, and on the way down here, just in case. But I’ve never been in this particular one. I’m sure.’
He shook his head, sat back in his chair, ready to disengage. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’
I was struck by a crazy thought.
‘Who’s your writer?’
‘Michael Marshall Smith,’ he said, diffidently, fully expecting the name not to mean anything to me.
I stared at him. ‘No way.’
‘What,’ he said. He sat forward again in his chair, looking wary. ‘You’re . . . you’re one of his too?’
‘Well yes, and no. Actually I’m in a Michael Marshall novel – different name, different genre, but the same guy.’
‘Holy shit.’ He looked at me, dumbfounded. ‘That’s outside the box. I never met someone else before. I mean, the people in this place, obviously, but not someone from a whole other story.’
‘Me neither,’ I said. I pulled a chair over to the table. ‘You mind?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said, and I sat.
We looked at each other for a full minute. It felt very weird. I’ve met other characters before, of course – but only ones from my own story, like the guy said. They had their place and were all situated in relation to the star at the centre of their firmament: which would be me.
This guy wasn’t like that. He was totally other. I had no idea what he was about.
‘How come you’re here?’ he asked, eventually. ‘I mean, suddenly, like this. You’ve never been in this place before. But now here you are.’
‘I got tired of waiting,’ I said. ‘Bored of being in that scummy apartment in the East Village. He barely even knows the area. Spent half a morning walking around it, like, five years ago. That’s all. There’s a couple of streets that are pretty convincing and he nailed a few local shops – including a deli and a liquor store, thank God – but after that it’s basically atmosphere and a few well-chosen adjectives.’
