EQMM, September-October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Governments, if not scientists, had largely lost interest in the study of lunar terrain in the decades after the last Apollo flight. But Edgar had read in the Sunday papers that this was changing. Not only the United States but several other nations were developing plans to launch lunar flights. According to the article, an unmanned Japanese flight would soon be hurling missile-like instruments onto the moon to penetrate deep inside its surface to study the composition of the moon's innermost interior.

  The novel he'd been reading that evening seemed to echo these developments. A team of multinational scientists had launched a manned rocket to the moon and the astronauts proceeded to drill far below its gray surface. Presenting their discoveries to an international quorum of astrophysicists in Stockholm, Sweden, the team leader made an astonishing claim: “Following extensive analysis of samples taken, we've found that the moon's core is composed of living tissue, containing cells that resemble neurons."

  That was where Edgar had put the book down—hours ago, though he had a pretty good idea of where the plot was going. The scientists would claim that through telepathy, or perhaps through its rays of reflected light, the moon was projecting thoughts into the minds of the inhabitants of Earth, affecting how human beings behaved.

  Such fictional imaginings were too far removed from reality to interest Edgar in any very meaningful way; they simply helped pass the lengthy evening hours of an accountant who had lived alone with his numbers for many years. But tonight those hours had been stretched almost beyond endurance by the noisy intruder on the street.

  The drunk wailed: “I'm gonna boot your mother's ass off the planet, too, Irma—just like a football.” Appreciating his own simile, he repeated it again and again, finally breaking into a burst of grating laughter. Whenever the drunk paused in his shouting, Edgar knew it was only to take a swallow from his bottle.

  Next-door, through the wall, Edgar heard something heavy drop onto the floor, and suddenly his next-door neighbors, a young couple to whom he'd nodded once or twice, began arguing, though he couldn't quite make out what they were saying. The couple had always seemed to get along well, but Edgar understood the strange things that being awakened abruptly in the middle of the night could do to people.

  He considered opening his window and telling the drunk to get lost, but he knew that would only encourage him to continue barking at the moon. His bare feet chilled, he returned to his bed and wriggled his bony body onto the limp mattress. Immediately he drew the blanket over his head, but it didn't help.

  "Hey, Mr. Moon—I'm sendin’ you a coupla earthlings to bury in your craters!"

  Now Edgar remembered the dream he'd been immersed in when the drunk had jolted him out of sleep: The moon had grown angry over the intrusion of astronauts probing beneath its surface, with the likelihood of more to come now that China, India, Japan, and Europe had announced plans for lunar explorations. And so, with its powerful icy rays, it had frozen all feelings of love in every human heart on Earth. The accountant smiled coldly at the thought that maybe the moon had frozen his own heart already, many years ago.

  Finally, at 1:53 A.M., Edgar heard another voice outside, and it sounded authoritative. “It's about time,” Edgar said gratefully, getting up and scuffling across to the window.

  Raising two slats of the blind, he saw a tall, square-shouldered policeman, arms crossed, standing over the much shorter drunk. The bottle, lying in the gutter, glistened in the moonlight. “You've had a little too much to drink, old-timer, and the neighborhood's had a little too much of you. Why don't you and I take a walk."

  "I'm stayin’ right where I am,” the old man declared. “Not one inch am I gonna move!"

  "Where do you live?” said the cop in a tolerant yet insistent tone.

  "Nowhere—as of tonight, I don't live nowhere."

  "In that case you'd better come along with me to the station and sleep it off."

  "You can't make me leave—this sidewalk's public property."

  In the apartment above Edgar's, the mother yanked open the window and screamed, “Throw the bum in jail!"

  From a window below his apartment came a chesty voice: “He's keeping the whole damn neighborhood awake, Officer. Get him outta here. I gotta work in the morning."

  "Gonna chop all of you up into pieces like chunks o’ cheese!” the drunk roared at the building. Enjoying his latest simile, he repeated it a couple of times. “Like chunks o’ cheese!"

  "Pipe down, Pop,” the policeman said, his voice growing agitated.

  Deep in the alley, the cat made a trio out of this duet of distress, releasing that nerve-shriveling meowwwwwww again. A block or two away the huge tire of a delivery truck blew out, and an auto-theft alarm went off somewhere. On the ground floor in Edgar's tenement an infant began wailing, coughing, choking to catch its breath. On a nearby street, a dog barked hoarsely, triggering a howl from another backyard dog.

  The turmoil caused Edgar to recall something he'd read about mental patients ascending to the heights of their madness under the gravitational pull and marble glare of a full moon.

  As the voice of the drunk began to fade down the street, followed by the policeman's voice goading him along, Edgar heard the young couple moving around, bumping and thumping, in the next apartment. Aroused from their sleep by the unrest of the night, he figured, they'd begun to take it out on each other, and their voices quickly grew loud and bitter.

  "You didn't seem to mind Greg putting his hands all over you."

  "Look who's talking! Don't think for one second I didn't see you hanging on to Dahlia all night."

  Suddenly they broke loose, screaming wildly at each other—one of them throwing something made of glass, maybe a lamp, against the wall with a great crash.

  "You're nothing but a slut!” roared the young man.

  "I hate your guts!"

  Edgar Snipe gave up on sleep. Staring at the scratches of moonlight clawing their way across the tangled sheets on his bed, he began piecing together the events of the night, passages from the novel he'd been reading, details of that news item, and fragments of his dream—and in the wooziness of a thick fatigue began to wonder whether some sort of vengeful force might truly be at work in the moonlight.

  * * * *

  At 2:16, lying in bed against the wall that separated their apartments, Edgar heard the slap of what sounded like a fist meeting a wad of flesh. The young woman began shrieking hysterically. Edgar stiffened.

  "If you ever touch me again,” she sobbed, “I'll cut off your fingers,” her voice fading as she escaped into another room.

  After a few moments of silence, Edgar heard the young man yell, “Put that down, Susan—have you gone nuts?"

  "What's the matter, Jack? Not such a big man anymore?"

  Good Lord! thought Edgar, sitting up, wondering if he should do something. Now he heard them struggling, apparently falling onto the floor with a clatter, as if they'd knocked over a night table on the way down. Edgar kneeled on his mattress and pressed his ear against the wall. The young woman sounded very much like that cat in the alley, letting out a piercing screech.

  "Give it back—it's mine, give it back!"

  "Who's afraid now?” he demanded. “Come on, tell me—who's afraid of the big bad knife now?"

  Alarmed, Edgar jumped out of bed and dashed to the window, opened it wide, and leaned out: He could not see the policeman or the drunk anywhere on the street. And he heard someone running across the floor next-door. Without a notion of what he ought to do, he felt himself moving toward his front door, his pajamas striped by horizontal slices of moonlight.

  The doors of the two apartments opened at the same moment: The young woman, dark-haired, wild-eyed, wearing a pink nightshirt that didn't quite reach her knees, sprang against Edgar, startling him as well as herself. In the dull light the young man, a head taller than both, suddenly loomed over them, his taut body covered only by a black T-shirt and white undershorts.

  Though Edgar saw the descent of
the steel blade all the way—as if it were approaching in slow motion—he was powerless to stop it from plunging into his shoulder. Backwards into his apartment he staggered, the pain seeming to come on slowly, and then making him dizzy. He collapsed, his limbs sprawling awkwardly across the floor. He could taste a salty thickness, hear the rasp of shrill voices, sense the suddenness of movement around him. But when he tried to see what was going on, he was too weak to raise his head.

  With his mind lolling near the craters of unconsciousness, he focused on the only image that came to him, clinging to it as if it would help prevent him from falling off the edge of the Earth: A figure in a silvery, puffy, one-piece suit, with a transparent globe for a head, was jabbing the sharp point of an aluminum flagpole into a spongy gray surface.

  Stripes of sheer whiteness continued to spread over the linoleum in his apartment, until they touched Edgar's nicotine-stained fingertips, and the sound of the ambulance grew louder.

  (c)2007 by Tom Tolnay

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  IDEAS IN MY HEAD by Janice Law

  Janice Law is a prolific short story writer and also an accomplished novelist, who created one of the earliest modern female detectives, Anna Peters. The Edgar-nominated author's most recent novel, Voices (Forge, 2003) was a finalist for the Connecticut Center for Book Fiction Award. The Hartford Courant praised the book's “depth and grace.” Booklist called it “quietly compelling."

  You know that old saying, Don't try to put ideas in my head? I've had an interesting example of that, and I can tell you that once certain ideas get into your mind, they lodge there like grit. You can't get them out and you can't leave them alone; pretty soon, you can't think of anything else.

  That's the way it was with Jack and me. Once Herbie had planted the suggestion, there was nothing we could do about it. And anyone who knew Herbie, that's Herbert A. Rothberger to those of you outside the business, probably wouldn't blame us at all.

  Where was I? Alien ideas in the brain are seriously distracting and some days I have problems putting my thoughts in order. Which is a laugh, being that Jack and I are professional wordsmiths. Arsen and Dutton—you can ask around—everyone knows us. We're maybe not your top-of-the-line scriptwriters and script doctors—no auteur stuff, no Oscars on our shelves—but we've had a couple of pilots made, and we've written for most of the top cop shows and hospital dramas, and we've both made major money in the soaps. Several film scripts, too—one of them made—I want you to see we're pros.

  Nonetheless, even pros get the blues in the form of rejection slips from baby-faced execs with their feet on their desks and your script bound for the shredder. Jack and I'd hit a run of bad luck, which is why we wound up one wet day—a bad L.A. omen right there—in the offices of Distracting Productions, the bailiwick of Herbert A. Rothberger, a.k.a. Herbie, pitching an action yarn.

  Slipstream was a solid piece of work with a nice role for the child phenom of the moment, a moppet with blue eyes and blond hair named Ashley Button. I kid you not. She was known around the studios as Cute-As, as in cute as a button, and she was a serious talent with a good memory and precocious eyes.

  Our plot was watertight. That's Jack's doing. His dialogue is for the bin, but his plot construction is a thing of beauty, and I think Herbie got to him before he got to me. I think so.

  Anyway, we're sitting in Herbie's big office beside a NordicTrack with zero miles on its odometer and a spidery Bowflex that looks carnivorous, and a decorative secretary who's probably not as dumb as she looks. I usually do the talking, so I launch into our spiel: “A big-time hijacking goes bad when the cargo turns out to be nuclear fuel rods. The robbers go on the lam with the representatives of a rogue state behind them and both the CIA and the FBI bringing up the rear."

  "Think The X-Files without the aliens,” says Jack. “Advanced paranoia."

  Maybe wrong to mention a Fox show to Herbie, who had, I seem to recall, a death feud with the network.

  "So what the hell is it?” he says, not waiting to find out. “Is this a heist picture?"

  "Yeah, a heist picture, but not just a heist picture, because, see, along the way, they're spotted by this little girl, who gets her father involved, plus we've got the subplot with the agents, kind of a father-son or brother-brother thing going..."

  This goes nowhere with Herbie. To Herbie, Moby Dick is a fishing story, pure and simple.

  "Heist pictures are dead. With Tom Cruise, maybe. Cast of unknowns and the little blond brat—no way."

  "We don't have to cast unknowns,” I says.

  Herbie snorts. He has a particularly repulsive nostril-clearing snort, like a pig with a fly up its nose, that brings his own porcine nature front and center.

  "You guys bring me a Tom Cruise, a Cate Blanchett, a Will Smith picture, I'll be the first to let you know."

  See the kind of guy we're talking about here? Gratuitous, right? As if he wasn't resident in the B-picture universe himself.

  "However,” I says, “this is a heist picture with a difference. And the script's like a clockwork toy.” I start to describe the novelties and beauties, the many ingenuities that Jack has concocted and which I have adorned with razor-sharp dialogue.

  "Heists are dead,” says Herbie. “Plus, there's no romance. How're you going to pull in the date audience with no romance?"

  "All right, all right,” says Jack, who's quick off the mark plotwise. I can see the wheels turning in his mind, clear as one of those old clocks with glass front and back so you can see the gears moving. “There's the kid, we start from the kid, all right, and we add—"

  He doesn't even get the sentence out before Herbie says, “No kids. Kids are for Oxygen, Lifetime, housewives in the afternoon. Forget the kid."

  "Forget the kid,” Jack repeats.

  "I wouldn't touch the kid for an Oscar nomination—her mother's poison and her dad's a lawyer."

  "We make her an adult,” says Jack.

  Herbie purses his lips. “A hot babe?"

  "Combustible,” Jack says.

  "Maybe with a thing for one of the robbers?” I suggest.

  "Yeah,” says Herbie. “You try that and get back to me.” His hand's already hovering over his intercom button.

  Jack and I get out onto the street. We've forgotten umbrellas and it's pouring. “Remind me never to buy a gun,” Jack says. “I wouldn't trust myself."

  We go back and rework Slipstream. Cute-As has transmogrified into an eighteen-year-old bombshell who's definitely trouble. She's friends with one of the heist team, a fact her FBI agent father only belatedly registers. “We got parental angst, we got family, we got high drama,” I tell Herbie when we see him next.

  "And we've sharpened up the suspense,” Jack says. “The guys on the heist are really pawns of terrorists. They don't realize, and when they do..."

  His Film Eminence frowns. “People don't want to be scared,” says Herbie. “They want to be scared, but not of something that could really happen to them."

  "You want Godzilla?” says Jack. “You want Creature of the Black Lagoon?"

  "Listen, I'm trying to help you guys.” Herbie's all offended. “What's her name, the broad with the father complex—"

  "Heather."

  "Heather's a dumb name, Heather's been overdone."

  "We can change the name,” I says.

  "So change it. She has possibilities. Fuel rods—who the hell understands fuel rods? See what I mean? That's why I say, heist pictures are dead."

  "Slice of life? A smaller drama?” Jack asks. “Father-daughter conflict—strait-laced agent versus rebel daughter? Heist in the background?"

  "Some small pictures have done well lately—good return on investment,” I says.

  Herbie agrees to look at the rewrite.

  By this time, we're beginning to sweat. Jack's been borrowing from me and I've been pawning stuff acquired in my palmy days. We buckle down, anyway. Like I say, we're pros all the way. We lose most of the heist except the actu
al theft and focus on the conflicting loyalties of the father and daughter.

  "We've got a different angle on the perpetrators, too,” I tell Herbie at the next meet. “No more professionals. Small-timers, desperate men. There might even be a role for a good kid actor—one of them has a sick child. See, it's desperate men on both sides."

  Herbie listens to all this. At least this time we get through the whole pitch. “You know, you guys got no sense of the times,” he says when we're done. “Sympathetic criminals—tricky at best. Okay if they're rich, get what I mean? You redo Topkapi, professional thieves, glamour guys—women love outlaws—you're okay. Poor and desperate—no way. Throw the book at them. Where've you been?"

  Back to professionals. Back to square one, but we don't mention that. “That can be done,” I says. I'm thinking that we have most of what's needed back in version one.

  But that's not enough for Herbie. He basically doesn't like the heist at all.

  "Suppose it goes wrong even earlier,” says Jack. “Suppose our juvenile female winds up a hostage? Ropes and bondage,” he adds—Herbie's tastes being well known.

  "I'll look at it,” he says, and then as an afterthought, he adds, “You get it done fast, drop it off at my house. I'm out of the office for a couple of days."

  This sounds like interest, so, back at the computers, Jack and I pull three straight all-nighters. Now the daughter is hanging out with a trucker who's unwittingly been assigned the nuclear cargo. Missy's with him in the truck when they are hijacked at a rest stop. He gets shot—we debate over his fate—and she becomes expendable, but maybe irresistible, supercargo. Lots of opportunity for cleavage and noir closeups; heavy breathing in semidarkness—Herbie stuff all the way.

  Jack and I exchange high-fives and figure we're home free. We messenger the script, and sure enough we get called back into his office pronto, but when we start talking about the fine points of the new story, he's suddenly not sold. That's Herbie—New England weather in Southern California—the worst of two worlds.