For this reason, he had been unhappy to learn that Dominika had remained in charge of Linus’s estate. In Smythe’s experience, the amicable divorce was a fairy tale concocted by lawyers to encourage couples to begin a process that had more in common with a bare-knuckle boxing match. Even by that standard, Linus and Dominika’s split had been brutal, an exchange of dirty blows that had continued long beyond the usual time limit, leaving the combatants bloody, broken, and bitter. Dominika had blamed Linus for misrepresenting himself as a famous writer during the course of their (mostly online) courtship, leading her to abandon her budding career as a model in Warsaw for a job waiting tables at a local diner. Linus had accused Dominika of feigning affection for him in order to gain her green card. The separation proceedings had achieved a low level of notoriety in the local press, the consequence of a bored reporter wandering into the courtroom and being struck by the contrast between the tall, statuesque woman with the head of shining blond hair and the short, dumpy man with the stubbled head and protruding eyes. To be frank, there was a beauty-and-the-beast quality to their relationship, but the papers had exaggerated it, recasting Dominika as the beautiful, hapless immigrant ensnared by the unsavory, cunning writer—a writer of horror stories, to boot. She had emerged from the courtroom with a position as the weather-person for a local cable news channel, whose owner she was rumored to be dating. Linus gained nothing but the confirmation of the conviction he had long nurtured that the world was actively hostile to him. Smythe had little trouble believing that Dominika would be happy to let whatever manuscripts Linus had left behind molder in their filing cabinets unpublished; if she didn’t consign them to the dumpster, or tip them into a metal drum and add gasoline and a match.
He had debated contacting her about the matter, but the situation was complicated by the fact that, a few years earlier, he had made a protracted and sloppy pass at Dominika. It was at the annual Weirdcon, which he’d convinced Linus to attend because it was being held in Albany, just up the river. Smythe had spent most of the weekend parked on a stool at the hotel bar, measuring his hours in shots of Johnnie Walker red, neat. It was, in his experience, the preferred method for enduring these events, whose attendance had long since moved from pleasure to duty. For every writer of merit who stopped to exchange a few words with him, a dozen or more, of varying degrees of inconsequence, lowered themselves beside him and attempted to engage him in a protracted conversation, usually on the merits of their work. If he was lucky, they at least stood him a round. This weekend, he had not been especially lucky. By the time he realized Dominika was standing beside him, waiting for the bartender to deliver her white wine, Linus nowhere to be seen, the drunk Smythe had maintained at a steady level just this side of belligerence had tipped over into naked hostility. The sight of Dominika leaning over the bar, her arms crossed over her full breasts, her round ass thrust out behind her in a tight denim skirt, and Linus still absent—Smythe had glanced about the bar—had filled him with a sour rage. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had said to her—it had begun as a question about whether she wouldn’t prefer to join him in his room, away from all of this, and escalated to an extended description of the things he would do to her that had stretched from the sadistic to the masochistic. Throughout, she had watched him impassively, the fingers of her right hand tracing the stem of her wineglass. By the time Smythe had finished, his face was flushed, and he was panting. He had been certain that Dominika was going to dash her wine at him; either that, or grab his hand and take him up on his proposition. Nothing ventured…
Instead, she had burst out laughing, laughter spraying from her lips as if Smythe had related the single funniest joke she ever had heard. Nor had she stopped: she had thrown her head back and continued to fill the bar with the sound of her mirth. It wasn’t an explosion of good humor; it was harsh, mocking. His cheeks burning, Smythe had sat where he was, trying to compress himself into the smallest possible space he could. When he could stand her laughter no longer, he had swallowed the remainder of his drink, pushed himself up from his seat, and delivered a long string of invective to that grinning mouth, those pearled teeth. Though he liked to consider himself well-practiced and skilled at insult, Smythe’s second outburst had evoked the same response from Dominika as the first, that braying laughter. Even through the Scotch mixed with his blood, Smythe had felt himself lessened in ways he didn’t like to contemplate. He had flipped her the bird, and stalked out of the bar, the assembled eyes of the writers gathered there on him.
Afterwards, Linus did not confront him about the episode, which Smythe was anticipating and which he was preparing to deflect through an appeal to his inebriation and possibly Dominika’s uncertain grasp of English. When nothing was said via phone, e-mail, or at their next meeting, Smythe started to tell mutual acquaintances that, in his view, Linus and Dominika’s marriage was doomed. Smythe had not seen her since that weekend, for which he considered himself generally grateful but which made contacting her following her estranged husband’s death seem more complicated.
It appeared, however, that his worrying had been for naught. Smythe supposed he couldn’t blame Dominika if she wasn’t inclined to deal with him face to face, right now. As long as she had delivered this manuscript to him, he could excuse—anything. There wasn’t much point in pretending he was going to accomplish anything with Linus’s manuscript sitting here, was there? He lifted the heap of paper from the table and carried it to the couch, under the living room’s picture window, where he settled down to read. A book written by a dead man: it was like the plot to one of Linus’s stories.
II
Three (?) hours later, something flapping past the window caused Smythe to start. It hadn’t been a bird, had it? Not one that big, not in the middle of the city. It must have been a trick of the light, a reflection from a passing car thrown on the glass. No matter—he needed a break, anyway.
Smythe lowered the manuscript. Had he been asked what he expected from Linus Price’s latest work, his answer would have been, More of the same. More disaffected characters whose dead-end existences admitted them to scenarios in which the futility and hostility of life was made manifest through some cryptic supernatural agency. In one of his college classes, Smythe had encountered the argument that every writer rewrites the same story over and over again. While the statement was as reductive as most critical generalizations typically were, he had recognized a grain of truth to it, which three decades as an editor had confirmed. Writers were obsessives. The trick was to return to your obsessions in a way that made them seem fresh each time. From the beginning, Linus had achieved this feat. His new work was no exception. What was different—unprecedented—about it was the element of undisguised autobiography. Specifically, the manuscript dealt with the six months leading up to his murder.
Linus’s death. Christ, there was a subject for a horror story, and not of Linus’s stripe. This was no collection of hints and allusions wound in labyrinthine prose; this was brute blood and gore delivered in blunt, declarative sentences, the very kind of narrative against which he and Smythe had railed in print and online, the sensational, lowest-common-denominator type. Well, God was supposed to be a lousy writer, wasn’t He?
It had started with a woman. Scratch that: it had started with whatever confluence of inclination and experience had caused the teenaged Linus Price to haul his mother’s old typewriter out of storage, balance it atop a card table, and begin composing the ancestors of the stories he one day would deliver to Smythe’s doorstep. That joining of talent and memory had tangled a host of emotions with itself, chief among them arrogance, jealousy, and insecurity. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about a writer displaying these feelings; in Smythe’s experience, it would have been remarkable for Linus not to have demonstrated them. Linus’s problem lay in his inability to maintain any kind of balance or perspective on his feelings. When he received a positive review, it was proof that he was the best writer of his generation. When someone else earned
a six-figure advance for their trilogy of vampire novels, it was symptomatic of the fundamental idiocy of the publishing industry. And when his stories and collections were passed over for the field’s short list of awards, Linus plunged into black moods which released themselves online, in extended screeds on his blog or on those of the writers who had claimed the awards he deemed his. This last tendency had escalated over the last several years, immediately before, during, and in the aftermath of his marriage’s collapse. Smythe had gone so far as to write him a brief, bluff e-mail suggesting that maybe it was time to stop confronting every billy-goat that trip-trapped across his bridge, but his caution had gone unheeded. Linus liked playing the troll; he appeared to take a perverse pleasure in living down to everyone’s worst expectations. Smythe had been concerned, but Linus was far from the first writer to play the part of the obnoxious gadfly, and his irritation at Linus’s refusal to heed his advice had kept him from repeating it.
If you had to select a more recent starting point for the chain of events that had resulted in Linus’s murder, Smythe supposed it had to be last year’s Blackwood Awards. Linus’s most recent book, Epistles to the Damned, had garnered a nomination in the single-author collection category, along with work by a few, perennial favorites and Medusa’s Fruit, a collection from a newcomer, Suzanne Kowalczyk. His friendship with Linus aside, there was no doubt in Smythe’s mind that Epistles to the Damned merited and would win that year’s award. All the reviews agreed that it was far and away Linus’s best collection of stories, and since the Blackwood was decided by the votes of those attending that year’s Weirdcon—held in Columbus—Smythe assumed Linus had the category sewn up—as did Linus. What neither Smythe nor Linus had counted on was Suzy Kowalczyk making electronic copies of her collection free to whichever members of the convention requested it, with the result that more of them would read and cast their votes for her book than Linus’s. So sure had Linus been that the award was his that, as the title of Suzy’s book was being read out, he was already halfway to his feet. Once the name of the actual winner registered, he stood where he was, in the fourth row of a crowded room, while Suzy Kowalczyk rushed to the front of the room to accept her plaque and offer tearful thanks. After the ceremony had concluded, Smythe had pushed through the groups of people milling around to where Linus was sitting, slumped. Smythe had not won his category (original anthology) either, but though the loss piqued him, as they always did, Linus was stunned by the upset to his expectations. Putting aside his own disappointment, Smythe had squired Linus to the hotel bar, where over a couple of ludicrously expensive double-martinis, he had done his best to cheer up Linus, reminding him of all the great works of art that had gone similarly unrecognized. Where was The Sound and the Fury’s Pulitzer? Where was Vertigo’s Oscar? Where was Let It Bleed’s Grammy? Not such a bad club to be a member of, Smythe had told him. Linus had nodded, but said little. Eventually, Smythe had had to leave him in order to catch his ride to the airport.
That Linus’s disappointment would spur him to action, and that said action would consist of a minimum of one, lengthy blog post on the woeful deficiencies of Medusa’s Fruit was for Smythe a foregone conclusion. It was hardly the most gracious response, but neither was it unprecedented in the world of letters. In his somewhat less-invested estimate, Suzanne Kowalczyk’s stories were decently written efforts, one or two of which gave evidence that she might develop in genuinely interesting directions. There was enough in her present volume, though, in terms of technique and theme, for someone inclined to do so to find fault with.
What Smythe was unprepared for was Linus’s decision to ignore Suzy’s writing and to focus instead on her appearance. Suzanne Kowalczyk was a tall, striking woman who wore her blond hair up and whose crisp skirt-and-jacket combinations lent her the appearance of a mid-level executive on the rise. She was also similar enough to Dominika for the two to have passed as cousins, if not sisters, Irish twins. To his subsequent astonishment, Smythe failed to pick up on the resemblance until after Linus accused her of having used her “charms” to bamboozle an electorate unaccustomed to the attention—and manipulation—of so attractive an individual. During the resulting firestorm that swept their corner of the internet, another of Smythe’s writer-friends e-mailed him, “Wasn’t it enough for Linus to get his ass handed to him by Dominika once?” and the scales had dropped from his eyes. He had wanted to write to Linus, to try to make him see what he was doing, but Linus had always resisted any effort at analyzing his behavior that put it in doubt. There was nothing to do except let the conflagration burn itself out, which it had started to do, when Linus unleashed his second round of accusations. These focused on the brief afterword Suzy had written for her collection, in which she discussed writing its stories in the aftermath of the loss of her daughter, aged seven, to leukemia. This, Linus had opined, was an obvious attempt at playing on her readers’ emotions, which the attendees of Weirdcon had fallen for like so many rubes.
Smythe had thought the reaction to Linus’s first rant pronounced—Suzy Kowalczyk was well-liked and the Internet tended to fan what fires broke out on it—but that was nothing compared to the response to his follow-up remarks. There were no actual death-threats as such, but there were offers from an assortment of men and women from around the globe to inflict bodily harm on Linus the next time they encountered him. Linus’s reaction was to announce that he was reporting them all to the police, and then to do so. Especially once the facts in the case were made clear to them, though, the police were less than sympathetic. All that saved Linus from the debacle he had created was a new controversy that sprang up a few days later and sucked all the oxygen away from his. For a short while, Linus did his best to keep the argument alive, but by the time he decided to level his scorn at Suzy’s writing, no one was interested, anymore.
Smythe had hoped the lack of interest in his dissection of Medusa’s Fruit’s shortcomings would communicate to Linus that it was time to move on. Since everyone else had left the fight before he did, Smythe imagined he could count that as a kind of victory. A few weeks later, when the World Fantasy Award nominations were announced and both Linus and Suzy’s names were absent from the ballot, Smythe figured that would provide Linus something new to stew over.
Not until Linus’s next stories appeared, six months later, did it become clear to Smythe that, rather than easing it, the passage of time had only deepened his outrage. He hadn’t spoken much about it to Smythe, but then, he hadn’t spoken much to Smythe, at all. Almost no one had seen or heard from Linus since his post-Blackwood meltdown. Every now and again, Smythe had considered dropping him an e-mail, just to touch base, but he had been occupied with a number of unanticipated projects whose short deadlines left him scant room for anything else. If he were telling the truth, he didn’t mind the excuse to maintain his distance from Linus for a little while. Smythe had witnessed Linus go off the rails before, usually at a slight real or perceived from a writer he admired, but this last incident had seemed to carry him further away that in the past. Linus could contact him when he felt ready.
As the stories debuted, however, two at small online ‘zines and one in Lovecraft’s, Smythe found himself unable to imagine what, if anything, he would say to Linus, were he to answer the phone and hear his sometime friend’s voice. It was the story in Lovecraft’s that was the real problem, a piece about a beautiful émigré from an unnamed former Eastern-Bloc country whose picturesque house concealed a hideous secret: the child she kept bound and tortured in the attic, whose agonies were channeled through occult means to feed its mother’s success as a painter. The actual details of the story were executed with as much tact, as much artistry, as anything Linus had written, but its significance was clear. This time around, Linus played coy, greeting the anger that sprung up virtually overnight with the insistence that he didn’t know what anyone was talking about. He had written a work of fiction: that was all. His protests had sounded perfunctory, as if written to forestall any legal actio
n from Suzanne Kowalczyk, who was, unsurprisingly, livid. Claiming to have contacted a lawyer, she did indeed threaten to sue Linus for libel. It was so much bluster—libel was next to impossible to prove in the U.S.—but Smythe could picture Linus blanching at the prospect of having to put yet another lawyer in his employ.
The second phase of Linus’s feud with Suzy should have been the last, especially after she announced that she’d decided not to seek redress through the courts. But Smythe had had a queasy feeling the matter had yet to be settled, and this past week, that nausea had been justified. Suzy’s neighbors had reported a man loitering outside her house, checking her mail, investigating her garbage, whose description matched Linus. Each time the police arrived, though, he was nowhere to be found. Suzy, herself, did not complain of a stalker, but that appeared to be because she had her own plans for him. Through means of which no one was certain, she had lured Linus into her house. Once the front door was closed, she had subdued him, possibly with a taser, stripped, bound and gagged him, and dragged him into her large kitchen. There, she had used her collection of very sharp, restaurant-grade cleavers and knives to joint him like a chicken. In the coroner’s estimate, he had remained alive much further into the process than Smythe would have guessed possible. Suzy Kowalczyk had scattered his body throughout her house and fled for parts unknown; as yet, she had not been captured. During the initial investigation, the police had been afraid that she had taken Linus’s head with her, since it was the only part of him they had been unable to locate. Only when an enterprising young cadet decided to unload the freezer was Linus’s head discovered, wedged in a corner behind the rounded bulk of a frozen turkey.
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