I couldn’t get hold of Luca that night. He wasn’t answering his e-mail and when I tried him at home—and then at work—the phone just rang and rang. It wasn’t that unusual. Sometimes there were emergencies, and Luca would become so totally absorbed in them he would forget everything else.
There were emergencies like that, I knew, one every few days it seemed. So eventually I left a message saying I loved him. I tried the TV but got nothing but static. Eventually I settled down to read. It was another story from Strangers and Friends, but this one was about a haunted house called ‘Question the Foundations’. It was a twist on the trope: the houses weren’t haunted by people so much as the people by houses. In St. John’s world each person had a tiny space within them, an impression of the place where they had been born. And it remained there, like a scar, or a memory. And everyone else could see it too, who you were and where you came from. Except there was this young boy who didn’t have a place like that. He had nothing. He had come from nowhere. And because he had nothing he scared people.
I put the book down, confused and unsure of myself. The story bothered me but I didn’t know why. It was different from the others, softer, sadder. There was no real horror in the story. It had been about loneliness. How it felt to be hollow, an outsider. Rootless.
Maybe it was just those constellations of images, emptiness and violence. Luca had told me a story once about how his family used to keep chickens. He had lived in the middle of a wood. One day a fox broke into the henhouse and tore open all the chickens. He’d found their bodies, or what was left of them, the next morning. Inside their bodies he had found strings of growing eggs, like pearls.
After he told me that I couldn’t sleep and it was the same feeling now. I didn’t have any regrets. Luca and I had talked, and he had left the decision to me. There had been no pressure, none from him anyway. But I’d been watching the news. And when the first bomb exploded in Paddington Station it had been like a warning sign. Not now. It wasn’t safe. Things would settle down soon, they had to. And then we could try again.
I put the book down and touched my stomach gently, tentatively. Beneath my fingers all I could feel was my own thick flesh.
Three times I passed the café before I finally had the courage to meet Lily Argo. I could see her—at least I thought it was her—sitting in the courtyard with her walker folded up beside her. She had long white hair and a red-and-grey printed dress with long sleeves. I knew her because of how tall she was, even a little stooped over. She still had at least six inches on me.
“Ms. Argo?” I asked her and she nodded politely while I pulled up a seat.
“So you’re the one who’s come asking about Barron St. John.”
“That’s right.” I tentatively launched into my pitch: an article on St. John’s early publication history, documenting her involvement in acquiring and editing his first title. She stopped me with a wave of her hand.
“Sure, honey,” she said with a wide, generous smile, “you don’t need to go on like that. I’m happy to talk about those days though I confess they seem a while ago now. You know I got that manuscript by accident, don’t you?”
I nodded and she seemed relieved.
“Good, so we’re not starting from scratch. What you want is the story, I take it, of how Bear—that’s what I always called him—and I got along in those early days? Where the horror came from?” I nodded again and took out my phone but she eyed it warily. “I’ll tell it as best I can and you can make of it whatever you will—but no recordings, okay? You can listen and you can write down what you get from it but you only get to hear it once.”
What was I supposed to say? Already I could feel a kind of strange buzz around her, the magnetic pull of her charisma. I had wanted her story and here she was, ready to give it to me.
“I was pretty young in those days,” she began, “when I first started working for Doubleday. I’d grown up in Ohio which I never liked very much in part because it didn’t seem like I was much use to my parents. I was a reader, even then, but they had wanted me to go to one of the nursing schools but I knew I’d never be happy with something like that, taking care of people all the time. So when I was seventeen I ran off to New York City.
“Publishing was still very much a gentleman’s sport back then and if you were a woman you were either someone’s secretary or you were publishing feminist pamphlets and burning your bra. I was the former.” She paused and took a delicate sip from her Coke. Her lipstick remained unsmudged though it left a trace of red on her straw. “Most of us at the time wanted to be writers. I suppose I did as much as anyone, and so we’d spend our days editing and we’d spend our nights writing. What was funny was that we knew all the people we were sending our drivel to, we’d met them at luncheons or for after hours drinks. I was embarrassed. I was a good editor and because I was a good editor I knew I wasn’t a very good writer. I thought, how on earth will these men take me seriously if they see what I’m coming up with?
“So I did what most women did at the time, or anyone who wasn’t Daphne du Maurier anyway, and I made up a name. Mine was Victor Wolf, which today seems so damned fake I don’t know why no one thought anything of it. Or maybe they did but they just didn’t care. Anyway I may have been writing gar-bage but eventually the garbage got better and I started getting some of it published. It was what they called Kooks and Spooks stuff, I suppose, sort of crime fiction but with some other bits thrown in, monsters sometimes, and ghosts. Possession—or Russian spies using hypnosis to control young American teenagers, that sort of thing. There was a real taste for that sort of thing back then. By the early seventies the papers were going crazy, telling us the irrationalism of our reading was helping the Commies and we had to get back to old-fashioned American literature. But Rosemary’s Baby was an absolute hit, and then there was The Exorcist and people just wanted more of it.
“That was when Bear’s first manuscript came across my desk. The two of us call it an accident but it wasn’t that, not really. See, I was used to reading submissions for Donnie Rogers and when I finished Bear’s first one I knew there was magic in it; raw, maybe, but magic nonetheless. And I knew Donnie was slated for laparoscopic gallbladder surgery. He was going to be off for at least a week recovering. That was when I tried to pitch the manuscript.
“Of course, I got laughed out of the offices. No one took me seriously and when Donnie came back he heard what I’d done and he bawled me out in front of the whole crew. Jesus, he took a strip off one side of me and then the other. After that I didn’t dare try anything like that for a good long while.
“Still, Bear had appreciated the support. He was poor as a church mouse and he and Mya had a second little one on the way. He tried me with this and that a couple of times but it never really made it anywhere. I guess it was while he was sending me his stuff that I sent him one of mine. God, the nerve I had!” she chuckled and I couldn’t help but chuckle along with her. “Well Bear wrote back and said it was pretty good, and I said it was better than pretty good, that Playboy had taken it. Bear had been trying to crack Playboy but hadn’t managed it by that point.
“For six months Bear went silent after that and I guess I thought maybe I’d offended him. Men don’t like being shown up; not then, not now. That’s why there’s all the craziness there is today. Women are afraid of violence, but men? Men are afraid of humiliation. Humiliation to them is like dying over and over and over again. And speaking of humiliation I had just about survived mine. Donnie Rogers had moved over to New American Libraries and I was covering for him while they looked for a replacement. That was when the next manuscript crossed my desk.”
“That was Rosie?” I asked her.
“Indeed it was, though it was called Revenge of the Stars at the time which was a godawful title, I have to say.”
“And this time it stuck?”
“Not right away it didn’t. The ending was clunky. It had Rosie transforming into this giant radioactive slug thing and devouring
the town that way. Pure St. John, you know. He always loved the EC comics stuff. People want to say he’s got literary chops, and sure he does, but a part of him is pure pulp and is perfectly content to stay that way, thank you very much.”
“So what happened?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, that’s the easy bit. Some good luck, I suppose. Ira Levin was big and Bear’s book was enough like that for me to pull together an advance for him. Small, you know. The real success came later with the paperback sales and that wasn’t me, not exactly. But I suppose if what you’re after is who found Barron St. John then it’s me as much as it was anyone.”
She paused there to take another long drag of her Coke. While she’d been talking she seemed so animated, so full of vigour but as the seconds stretched on I could see how old she was now, how time had etched fine lines around her lips. Her wrists were thin and frail, the skin bunching and slack at the same time.
She moved then, pulled up a black leather handbag and began to dig around in it. Eventually she came up with a Christmas card. “Look at that,” she said, her eyes sharp. The paper was old and creased in several places. When I opened it there I found a simple hand-written note. To Lilian, it said, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. We owe you so much. Love, Bear and Mya St. John
Lily was smiling slightly as she showed it to me, smiling and watching to see my reaction. I tried to smile back but there was a part of me that felt disappointed. Most of the story was what she had published in that chapter. Little of it really surprised me. It felt rehearsed, the way you keep old memories by telling yourself the story behind them again and again. Whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t there.
I was getting restless and it seemed like she was finished when she cocked her head to the side. “That’s not what you wanted to hear, was it?”
I tried to tell her it was great, wonderful stuff. It would certainly make it into the article.
“Sure it will,” she said, “but you didn’t need any of it. Certainly you didn’t need to fly over here from England just to get this story, did you? I could’ve told you that over the phone. You didn’t need to come.”
I shrugged.
“What you wanted was him, wasn’t it? You wanted Bear.”
“Maybe,” I told her wearily. The heat was starting to get to me, making me a touch queasy.
“It isn’t easy, you know,” she said, “to try to tell your story when the best parts are about someone else.” She sighed. “You know, I had to give up writing once I found St. John. It wasn’t like it had been before. We were so busy all the time. St. John could write like a madman, he was fast. There was always another book. And then things got tricky with the contracts. You must know about this?”
I did. Everyone did. St. John had left Doubleday after a series of well-publicised contract disputes. Doubleday had been keeping most of the profits on the paperback sales and he felt he deserved a bigger cut. Doubleday wouldn’t budge and eventually he left.
“There wasn’t much I could do for him. They wouldn’t give him a better deal and they wouldn’t listen when I told them how serious he was about leaving. When he finally did switch publishers all those men at the top said it was my fault. I got parked for a while editing books on what types of music you can play to help your plants grow, that sort of kooky trash. After a year or so they fired me.”
I fiddled with my own straw, unsure how to react to any of this.
“Bear didn’t take me with him, see. I told him not to. I told him I had enough status in the company—but I was wrong. When you’re on top you always think you’re going to stay there forever, that there aren’t sharks circling beneath. But I guess Barron knew about those sharks. The one thing he knew about was the sharks. He could be one himself when he needed to.”
“You didn’t want to go back to writing?”
“Nah, I felt I’d spent my chance by that point. I think I had one lucky break in me—and it went to St. John. There wasn’t going to be another. I got by after that. I moved over to another house for a little while and convinced St. John to come do a book for us. But by that point things were different. He was a superstar and I felt spent. I had had enough of horror. It was the ’80s. Despite everything it still felt as if the world was falling apart. There was the banking crisis, the AIDS epidemic. The people weren’t reading the news though. They were reading Bear.
“I did write one more story though. I tried to sell it myself but no one would buy it. Victor Wolf had been forgotten. Bear liked it though. And he knew I was in danger of losing my mortgage. So he sent it out for me, under his name. When it sold to the New Yorker—his first real literary sale though God knows he deserved others and got them eventually—he gave me the profits.” Her smile then was bitter. “I was grateful, you know. At the time he said it was only fair. I had made his name after all. I should get the use of it whenever I wanted.
“And I was grateful at the time. I kept my brownstone, paid it off eventually. When he sold the collection he gave me the whole advance. For a while I thought about going back to Ohio but I still couldn’t admit to my parents I hadn’t been able to last in New York. So instead I stayed.”
She stared at me for a moment or two after that and I could feel the cool ripple of sadness passing over me like a shadow.
“Someone told me you died,” I said, just to break the spell of her silence.
“Of the two of us, Barron was always the shark, you see?” she told me wryly, “No, I didn’t die. I just learned something he never figured out: how to stay alive when you stop moving.”
That evening I collected my things from Hotel 31.
Benny offered to drive me to the airport but I told him he didn’t need to do that. I could get a taxi. The university had given me a budget for that. When he said okay it sounded like there was relief in his voice, and I wondered if that meant Emmanuel was home. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to get so close to the airport. There were regular protests still going on. People were angry about the deportations but no one knew how to stop them.
“Did you get what you wanted from Lily Argo?” Benny asked me. “She wasn’t just a ghost?” I told him I hadn’t really known what I wanted but I was certain, despite everything, I had met Lily Argo. But probably I was going to scrap the story. My Head of Department would be pissed but that was how these things went. Sometimes you thought you had something and you didn’t.
What she had told me felt too invasive to write about. What I had wanted, I realised, was not just her story but a glimpse of her secret self. I didn’t have a right to it. And that’s what had made me want it even more. Maybe we all have a secret self: some of us keep it chained in the basement of our minds while others like St. John learn how to feed it.
“Well,” he said, “it was good to see you anyway. Give my love to Luca. You tell him to take proper care of you.”
I promised I would.
While I waited for my flight to board I watched the news. We were all watching the news. We couldn’t help it. Tense security officers patrolled the hallways with machine guns at the ready, just in case. There were fewer travellers those days, fewer coming in, fewer getting out. But I felt a kind of solidarity with the others as my eyes were glued to the screens. We were liminal people moving from one reality to another. We were going home.
So we watched the footage of explosions in Yemen. Pleas from refugees who had found themselves trapped in abandoned tenements, living in filth. It was only when I saw the story about the bomb that had gone off on a train along the Victoria Line that I remembered Luca still hadn’t called me back.
I was watching them pulling survivors out of the rubble and the blood gelled to ice in my veins. I couldn’t move. It had happened then. It had happened. Time seemed to slow. Luca mostly worked from Cambridge but the NGO had offices in London. He went there from time to time. When had I last heard from him? Who could I call to check? But by that point the attendant was calling me forward. I didn’t move. She called me aga
in and the people behind me began to murmur. I must have had a dazed expression on my face, a look they didn’t like. The attendant called me a third time as an officer drew near. It was only then I was able to move. I showed them my passport and made my way down the ramp.
Inside the plane most of the seats were empty. The air was canned, stale tasting in my mouth. I wondered if I might have a panic attack but out on the runway I didn’t dare check my phone again. The hostesses were murmuring to each other. I could tell they were twitchy. But already a strange calm was taking hold of me—a sense of icy horror. There was something inevitable about what was happening. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever had happened had happened.
And this feeling? It wasn’t the same as all those St. John books I had read. There I could find purpose, structure—meaning in all the bad things that had happened. But outside there was only chaos. The unravelling of beautiful things into violence. It signified nothing.
As the plane taxied down the runway I settled back in my chair and tried to sleep.
CONRAD WILLIAMS
CWTCH
CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of nine novels: Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire, Sonata of the Dead and Hell is Empty. His short fiction is collected in Use Once Then Destroy, Born with Teeth and I Will Surround You. He has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards and the Crime Writers’ Association Daggers. He lives in Manchester with his wife and three sons. He is currently working on a new novel.
‘Cwtch’—which has also recently been reprinted in Best British Short Stories—was inspired by a family walk through the countryside while camping in the Lake District. “There was a section of the walk through knee-high grass,” recalls Williams. “I looked back at the tracks I’d made and immediately had a vision of another set of tracks added later, giving a suggestion of casual pursuit. It gave me the creeps, and I knew I’d have to find a way of incorporating it into a story.
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