Seeing Red, page 16
Angus stopped his advance. Bray was dead.
Bray was dead, and the typhoon of yellow force petered to nothingness in a second. Standing ridiculously alone in the quiet of the cathedral-like hallway, Angus realized, with a plummeting kind of bright, orange horror in his stomach, that he had lost.
He looked up and down the hallway. Nothing.
Then, distant, indecipherable sounds. Hungry sounds.
The book! The book! his mind screamed. His thumb automatically worked the lighter, and a jet of blue propane fire at least half a foot long spurted up, caressing the Liber Daemonorum. It billowed into flame along with his soaked coat sleeve.
But the two iron gargoyles from the lobby were already winging toward Angus with metal-muscled strokes. He heard the grating of their black, iron flesh pumping and looked up to see their diamond eyes fix on him. They peeled to either side of him as the book touched off; one swooped past in a blur, hooking the book away to smother it against its bellows chest, the other jackknifing upward in midair to strafe Angus. He felt cold, sharp pain. His feet left the floor and he crashed onto his back, rolling clumsily, blood daubing into one eye from the gashes the gargoyle's iron, butcher-cleaver claws had carved in his forehead.
His name was still being called, fast and slow and fast and—
"Angus." The tone was first disapproving, then pitying. "Angus, you poor old sod."
Turquine Bray stood over him holding the still-smoking Liber Daemonorum. The violet ribbons were charred.
The iron gargoyles circled high in the corridor, lighting behind Bray. They cringed and fidgeted, like greyhounds, grinding their javelin teeth and snorting mist through cast iron nostrils with impatience.
"Since you've delivered this book to us," Bray said, "I think you're owed a few words." His hands slithered proudly around the tome and his chromium eyes glittered at Angus.
"The gargoyles—" Angus gasped from the floor.
"Oh, yes, they're real enough. They're a bit piqued because I haven't given you to them yet." Angus could see that Bray spoke around a mouthful of needled fangs like the dental work of a rattlesnake. "Your disbelief in monsters posed an intriguing problem. How to chink such metal armor? How to trick you, the expert on all the tricks? You wouldn't believe in the patently unreal, so we made you believe in something else you'd accept with less question. The gargoyles are now real, thanks to your mind. Turquine Bray, however, died in 1974. On Valentine's Day." The Bray thing, its hair gone jet black, eyes sunken to mad ball bearings in seductive, dark pits, grinned wolfishly.
"Impossible!" Breathing was becoming difficult for Angus, as though his lungs were filling with hot candle wax. "Impossible . . . the power burst . . . you existed before the interface took place . . ."
"My dear Angus," the creature rasped in a phlegmatic voice, "you're not paying attention. This power burst was the biggest of all so far. People are more superstitious than ever. They go right on stacking it up. This surge was preceded by what young Nicholas characterized as a 'squirt,' a considerable leakage that primed the paranormal pump, you might say." It pretended to inspect its elongated, spiked nails. "How do you think something as melodramatic as the Hermitage got here in the first place? It came out of your mind. It was what you expected; know-nothing cultists and pop Satanists and horror-movie props—supernatural furniture. It was all an illusion, as was I. But it's real now. The Liber Daemonorum will help to keep our family corporeal."
Two shuffling corpses battered down the stairway door leading into the hallway. Their sightless, maggoty eye sockets sought Angus's prone form. They made for him with inexorable slowness, rotting flesh dropping off their frames in clots. They hungered.
"Your H.P. Lovecraft might be pleased to know that his Old Ones are finally coming home," the monster growled. It stretched cavernously, bursting from its human clothes, revealing a wide body of insectile armor plating with double-jointed, birdlike legs whose hooked toes gathered the carpet up in bunches. "It's all quite real now, friend Angus." The steely, silver eyes transfixed Angus from a nine-foot height. "As are my other friends. Here. Now."
The gargoyles jumped into the air and hovered like carrion birds. From 713 the reptilian scavengers continued to swarm, champing their oversized jaws, streamers of drool webbing the carpeting. Beyond the steaming, toothy thing that had been Bray, Angus saw a translucent horde of ghostly, humanoid leeches. The scuttling things advanced, worrying their bloodless, watchmaker's claws together in anticipation of a dark, burgundy-hued snack.
He recognized them now, all of the monsters, all of his lifetime's research into the occult, echoing back upon him. If he could be made to believe Bray had been real, then anything could follow . . . Zaebos, a demon with a human head and the body of a crocodile, entreated him from the end of the corridor. Near the ceiling floated the Keres, the Greek vampire entities who appear before death. Windigos—cannibalistic Indian ghosts—crowded past the living-dead corpses to get to Angus' position. They licked their lips. Now Angus knew the name of the monster before him, the spirit who had assumed Bray's form to trick him. It was the Master of Ceremonies to the Infernal Court.
"Verdelet!" he croaked, holding the talisman forward. "Swallow this!"
"Now, now," the demon said. "Too late for that hocus-pocus, Angus. You believe now." It waved an ebony claw carelessly, and the talisman melted, sizzling through Angus's clothing, scalding and eating into his chest with a geyser of golden steam.
He managed a howling scream.
"I have nought but gratitude for you, friend Angus," Verdelet said. "Thanks to you, as of this night, the Hermitage is open for business." The last thing Angus heard was the wet sounds of jaws opening.
PULPMEISTER
If my own atrophied story sense had had its say, I suppose I would have been dispatched on the spot. Savate kick. A specially dum-dum'ed .38-caliber slug from a hammerless Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight would then have followed, scattering my brains in two dozen directions like mattress ticking.
But that sort of convenient plotting only happens in the books.
Alpha Beta's liquor department was the last place in the cosmos I would have picked for a rendezvous with a Spy Crusher, too. Shows you what in hell I know. The son of a bitch didn't add a bullet to my forebrain, either. He just stood two aisles over, arms folded, waiting for me to react, with the same kind of smug expression you see on chimpanzees in the zoo . . . right before they heave one of their turds at you through the bars.
Splat! The Kahlua bottle took advantage of my abrupt slackness of grip and gravitated. It did not explode dramatically across the floor into flying brown wedges of glass and a gooey spray of licor de café; again, that sort of image only occurred in fiction. It just spun around madly. All it needed was a circle of adolescents waiting to smooch.
When I looked back, the man with the unmistakable dress and mien of a black-card-with-red-slash Spy Crusher was gone. The counterman rolled his eyes at an underling as I sheepishly replaced the bottle on the shelf. Other gawkers attracted to my clumsy performance huffed back to their shopping. Embarrassment City.
The man I glimpsed had disappeared, but I was positive it had been Brock deSade. A character I had created.
It's tough to resist the tug of narrative economy, especially when it rings so histrionically across the printed page. I did not create Brock deSade. Sue me now.
That fate had befallen a failed journalist I never had the misfortune to meet: Rocky Stovington, late of the Chicago Tattler, "Rocko" to his intimates, and I hope to god it was a pseudonym. Right now Rocko was holed up somewhere in the West L.A. smogscape, reaming out prestige soft-porn novels for ten large per bang— amazing, when your standard sluice/pump stiffeners drag in less than a thousand per book anywhere else.
How Rocko snagged that cushy assignment is as good an introduction as any to another of the principal characters in this farce—Shayne Byrne. Possibly the least imaginative literary agent on Publishers' Row, but maternal enough to never let any of her stable starve, at least as far as my tummy knew. She had unearthed the porn line on Rocko's behalf. They're called "prestige soft porn" because they're the paperbacks you see on the mainstream fiction racks shoulder to shoulder with Stephen King and John D. MacDonald, with their foil and die-cuts. Thus far, Rocko had humped his merry way through ten of these epics. I had two of the latest ones on my odds and sods shelf— Ginger, the Wanton and Corinne, the Fickle. They all had titles like that. I never read either past the back cover copy: Ready for uncaged sensuality? A firm whip hand is what Corinne craves, but cheat on her and she'll turn the tables. Who dominates who when behind her tame foxiness waits the soul of a lusty wolf? Corinne— if you don't turn her on, she'll turn on you!
Who knows who reads them? Rocko was content enough to love 'em and leave 'em (read: write 'em and forget 'em), full-time. Which meant that Peephole Specials—the novel arm of FancyFree magazine's publishing interests—was ecstatic enough to sign him up for ten titles per contract. Which meant that even though Shayne Byrne took fifteen percent off the top, she was not better off than before, because thanks to this milestone in male chauvinist tale-spinning, Rocko had just become too highfalutin' for his previous alias, "Ingram Gunn," head honcho of Brock deSade: Spy Crusher.
Huzzah for ironic timing.
This was the year that Kraft modified the composition of the artificial "cheese food" in those four-for-a-buck macaroni dinners. Now they were twice the price and tasted like gypsum board and lead shavings. A steady rebound diet of rice flavored with boullion cubes was etching tributaries of orange-slag lunacy into my concentration. I knuckled under and called Shayne from a pay phone. I billed the call to a First National Bank office I knew was closed . . . that ought to give you an idea of how far back this happened.
I'm afraid I babbled a bit.
"Anything, Shayne, anything, I'm destitute, anything as long as it pays money; World War Two junk, bodice rippers, Red Threat novels, TV novelizations. I'll do the comic-book flesh-outs you mentioned in July . . . Listen to me, Shayne—I'll do Spiderman. I'll do the Incredible Hulk, for christsake . . ."
"Sorry, Ollie, they've all been snapped up." Her voice sounded sweet but she kept her huckster's soul. We were a continent apart, had met by mail, and had never been introduced in the flesh, as Rocko undoubtedly would put it. "Nothing new in the pipe until after Labor Day. You know how the Industry plays dead in August. Everybody goes on vacation."
At first, I hadn't known. But I clammed up; I was supposed to be part of the goddamned Industry and did not wish to appear out of touch with its pulsebeat. "Yeah." Mentally I advanced to the preordained next step of my telephone tango with my agent-of-record.
The step called the Ten-Second Pause.
The Ten-Second Pause is like a game show where the contestant and host try to out-stare each other, seeing who will blink first. It's a window of dead air. If the writer breaks down during the Pause, he or she begs, plain and simple. If the agent breaks down, he or she proffers whatever loose tidbits opportunity float to the surface after an Eight Second consideration of her client's straights.
Shayne must have heard my stomach rumbling, nearly three thousand miles to the west.
"Oh—hey, I might have something for you, Ollie. Maybe you could help me out of a rut Rocko stuck me in . . ." Long distance, I could hear silk-wrapped nails drumming on a laminated wood desktop. "You ever see those Spy Crusher books?"
"You mean, um, hard-boiled sex 'n' violence for gun-lobby loons? God, guns and guts?"
"Huh?"
"You know, terse sexist action for the red necks, White Sox, blue-ribbon beer crowd? The books with numbers instead of titles?"
"These have both—huge pastel numbers, itty bitty titles. Think you could do one of those for five thou?"
Here's a check, you gonna cash it or frame it, ha-ha.
"Interested, Ollie?"
"Fascinated. Do tell?"
"I ran off a Xerox of Rocko's bible for the series. Don't worry; it's mostly bullshit to sell the series and it's already sold. Past the first one you can write however you want as long as it's readable on a sixth-grade level."
"Past the first book sounds like there's more than one. You splitting the series between two starving writers? C'mon, Shayne, you know I can handle more than one . . ."
"Listen, Tensor Books is panicked since Rocko dropped out to write Cynthia, the Sinful. They'll want novel outlines from you yesterday and a finished book by this afternoon. You're being hired for speed, not star billing . . . and if you bring off the first one, you'll get more follow-ups than you can stomach."
"Right, okay." Shayne's time lag plus the usual fuckery publishers call "processing" plus late documents meant that it would be four to eight weeks, minimum, before I ever saw a check. But there's some mystic quality about checks due that turns writers into reckless fools.
"Give me the fine print," I said, unsheathing my trusty Razor Point.
It could have been mucho worse.
The Book Bin's amiable clerks suspected I was the one responsible for boosting their back wall sections dry for some months now. The back wall sections—reference and novels M-Z—were the most difficult to monitor from the front counter. One employee or another hovered perpetually at the rim of my vision, watchdogging, maybe wondering what the hell I was doing, branching out into a new section of the store. I kept my eye on them, too. This was research.
I was introduced to Brock deSade: Spy Crusher in the company of the baddest and the best—The Eviscerator, The Annihilist, Commie Stomper, and The Mutilation Squad all stood erect in their wire pockets, with the inevitable salting of Doc Savage oldies in their hairy, masculine company. The Death Merchant was still going strong alongside The Rat Bastards and The S.O.B.s. Some series ran to fifty-plus volumes. Don Pendleton had a whole shelf all to his lonesome.
The first, Spy Crusher I saw was #7: The Kill Cadre. I plucked it and gobbled up Tensor's promotional gambits.
Brock deSade, Spy Crusher, locks horns with a fanatical gang of barbarian zealots, the Kill Cadre! By Ingram Gunn.
So this was fame. All the sister series had "authors" as cute as their titles—Bruno Groin, Christian White, Hawk Hunter, Turk Thrust, Buff Rigid—and the advertising squibs dealt out as many monosyllables and hard Germanic glottals as possible. Everything was calculated to sound not just tough, but primal.
Sex is his middle name! Death is his trademark. Unbridled ACTION and gut-ripping TENSION as seething maniacs plot to napalm AMERICA! Only ONE man stands against them: BROCK deSADE, international troubleshooter, chameleonic specter of intrigue, hard and cold as a.44 Magnum, a keenly honed killing machine with a computer mind! It's a hit-and-miss cross-country juggernaut as dynamiting radicals try to make the SPY CRUSHER EAT FLAMING DEATH!!
Well, okay.
Apparently the Kill Cadre was composed of pussies, since Brock deSade creamed them in time to tackle his next assignment, #8: Deathtrap of Terror. Even more obvious was deSade's healthy showing on the racks you should pardon the expression. There were plenty of cockeyed and vacant pockets. Other hooks in the series had sold briskly. Part of the reason—a cunning strategy on the part of Tensor Books—was that Spy Crusher, at $2.25 per book, was the cheapest violence series on the rack. That explained the doghouse advances.
My pocket was full of bus-fare change from my kitchen's Dunes Hotel ashtray. Actually paying money for a book was part of my strategy. In my mind Tensor was giving it back to me two-thousand fold. The piddling two-percent royalty promised by the fart joke that was their boilerplate contract meant that I'd never see any cash beyond the first whack . . . unless Spy Crusher sold better than Lose Weight with Cocaine, or whatever was currently number one according to the New York Times.
SpyCrusher #7 was worth the out-of-pocket expense just for me to see the Book Bin's overlord grimace his way through a mock coronary at the sight of real money in my outstretched hand. He was a decrepit mental case who trundled about his mildewing paper empire in a motorized wheelchair. He buzzed over and made a face when he saw the cover of the purchase. His grunt was all-knowing. God forbid a derelict such as myself should exhibit anything approaching taste once I ponied up hard American cash. My thought that the star of this feeb's nightstand was probably Corinne, the Fickle restrained me from locking his electric joystick in the direction of the nearest cliff.
I made my exit toting a Book Bin bag of puffed orange plastic. Contents: one Spy Crusher. The rest of the Brock deSade canon was stuffed securely into my Dingo boots, beneath my pants. They ran pretty skinny as novels—fifty-five thousand words each, tops—so it was easy to snug a pair of them down each side of my legs while the clerks weren't watching. Two legs meant eight books; in my haste I wound up with duplicate copies of #3: Banzai Knifekill. I breezed away, having outfoxed the enemy again. So much for real espionage.
A week and a half later I sat down to commence Spy Crusher #13: Death Mongers. Oliver Lowenbruck was about to werewolf into his combat-crouched, patriotically paranoid alter ego, Ingram Gunn, for the first historic time.
Alter ego—now there was an idea. Writer spots the living embodiment of Brock deSade at the supermarket as the first manifestation of latent schizophrenia. Writer has become so suffused with the machismo nonsense required to make deSade's world sound plausible that he has swapped his uneventful leisure moments for the fantasy life of a Spy Crusher.
The first pulpist habit I assimilated was to rehearse everything I did mentally, to see how mundane, normal actions would translate into Spy Crusher prose. It made the boring courtyard of my apartment seem filled with menace in the dark.
Brock's proximity sense tingled red alert as he scanned the black perimeter in efficient hundred-twenty-degree visual sweeps every two seconds. He jacked back the slide of his cobalt-colored service and faded against the wall, covering the hostile turf while edging with Ninja stealth closer to the door . . .
