Bloody Horowitz (2 page)

Having written these stories, Henry wasn't sure whom to show them to. His wealthy parents were abroad most of the time and didn't seem to have a lot of interest in their only son. He didn't really have any friends. In the end, he went to his English teacher and asked him to look at the neatly bound manuscript that he'd carried to school in his backpack.

“I'd be very grateful if you would tell me what you think, sir,” he said. “Although, personally, I think they're very good.”

The teacher, whose name was Mr. Harris, accepted the task with pleasure. He was always glad when any of his young students showed initiative in this way. However, after reading the pages at home, he wasn't quite so sure.

“Your work does show promise, Henry,” he muttered uncomfortably. “But I have to say, I did find some of your writing a little . . . over-the-top?”

“What do you mean, sir?” Henry asked.

“Well, do you really have to be quite so explicit? This paragraph here, where the dentist's heart is pulled out and then minced. I read it after dinner and felt quite ill.”

“But it's a werewolf!” Henry protested. “Werewolves enjoy mincing human organs. It's well known.”

“And in this other story . . . the boy being nailed down in that way. Wouldn't it have been better to leave a little to the imagination?”

“My readers may not have any imagination,” Henry replied.

“I'm sure that's not true.” Mr. Harris sighed. “Have you considered writing any other genre? Romance, for example. Or perhaps a spy story?”

“I prefer horror.”

“Well, I don't want to discourage you. It's very good to see you taking an interest in anything at all. But I don't think you're going to succeed unless you tone it down a little. Scaring people is one thing. Making them feel sick is quite another.”

That night, Henry began a new story in which a stupid English teacher named Mr. Harris was captured by cannibals and eaten alive.

Two years went by. Inevitably, Henry wrote less as his high-school exams took over his life. He did not get brilliant results, managing only two C's and a D. His worst marks were for English Literature. In one essay he wrote five thousand words describing the murder of Duncan in Shakespeare's
Macbeth.
The woman who marked it resigned from the examinations board the very next day.

Henry didn't go to college. By the time he left school, he felt he had learned more than enough and that four more years of education would only get in the way of his becoming a world-famous author. His parents owned a large house in Reading where he could live. He was fairly sure that his father would support him while he wrote his first full-length novel. He already had the beginnings of an idea. Fame and fortune were surely only around the corner.

But then two things happened that changed everything. First, his parents died in a bizarre accident. They had gone to a circus outside Munich—Henry's mother had always been fond of trapeze artists—and they'd been having a wonderful time until the time had come for the human cannonball to perform. Something had gone wrong. Instead of being fired into the safety net, the human cannonball had been blasted, with some force, into the third row of the seats, killing Mr. and Mrs. Parker instantly.

The second disaster was that Henry discovered that his parents had left him no money at all. In fact, it was even worse than that. In recent years, their business (in dental equipment) had taken a distinct downturn and their borrowing had grown so out of hand that their home and all their possessions had to be sold off to meet their debts. And so, at just nineteen years of age, Henry found himself broke and alone.

Somehow, he needed to earn a living. With such poor grades and no college degree, that wasn't going to be easy, but a friend of his parents took pity on him and managed to get him a job as a real estate agent. This involved showing people around properties in Battersea, in south London—and he hated it. He sneered at the other real estate agents and he was jealous of the young couples moving into houses that he himself couldn't possibly afford. He was now renting a single room that backed onto the main railway line from Victoria station.

But he still had his dream. More than that, he had the use of a desk, paper and pens, the office computer. And so, every evening, once the agency closed, he would stay behind, tapping away into the small hours. He was writing his novel. Two thousand words a night, five nights a week—Henry figured it would be finished in less than three months.

In fact, it took him eleven years.

Writing is a strange business. You write a sentence and then you read it and one word leaps out at you. Or should that be
jumps
out at you? Or
bothers
you? And then you go over and over it and by the evening you find you haven't written two thousand words at all. You've only managed a couple of sentences and even they don't strike you as being quite right. So you start again and again, crossing out and crumpling the pages into balls, and no matter how hard you try you never quite reach the two words you're most keen to write: THE END.

That was how it was for Henry. Eleven long years of showing people around properties, working through the night and sleeping right through the weekends certainly took their toll. By the time he was thirty, he had lost most of his hair and much of his eyesight. He wore thick glasses and sat with a stooped back. A poor diet and lack of exercise had both hollowed him and drained much of the color from his skin. The honest truth was that if he had gone to a funeral, no one would have known if he was the undertaker or the corpse.

But at last he finished the novel. And reading it—while chewing on a cheese rind, which was all he had been able to find in the fridge—he knew that he had created a masterpiece. A horror novel for children, one hundred thousand words long and like nothing anyone had ever written before.

Curiously, it was the death of his parents that had inspired him. Although he had been shocked by their sudden end, and even more so by the disappearance of their wealth, Henry had never really missed them. His father had always been bad tempered and his mother too busy to look after him. But the way they had died had given him the idea of a story that would begin in a circus; not an ordinary circus, but a world inhabited by strange creatures . . . freaks.

His book was called
Ring of Evil
and it told the story of a young boy who ran away from home and got a job in the circus, only to find himself surrounded by ghosts, werewolves, witches and vampires. Henry described in loving detail how the vampires would chase members of the audience, tear their throats open and drink their blood. The hero's name was Justin and in Chapter Five he was turned into a vampire himself. He then spent Chapters Six, Seven and Eight killing people, gradually discovering that being a vampire was fun . . . certainly more fun than being a schoolboy. Eventually, Justin teamed up with the ringmaster—who was called Mephisto and who turned out to be the son of Count Dracula himself—and the two of them set off on an adventure that brought them into contact with two vampire armies fighting for control of the world.

The final chapter was set in New York and finished with the whole of Fifth Avenue turning into a river of blood. At least a thousand people were killed as the two vampire armies joined battle in the subway system. Mephisto himself was impaled on a metal spike, and Justin returned to England and took over the circus.

Henry typed the words in bold and underlined them twice.

That evening he left the office at the same time as everyone else and bought himself a half bottle of champagne, which he sipped, on his own, in his room as the trains rumbled past outside. He had spent twenty dollars having the manuscript photocopied and bound, and he couldn't stop himself from flicking through the pages, running his hands over the cover, reading his favorite paragraphs again and again. He had absolutely no doubt that
Ring of Evil
would be a huge international success. He went to bed that night working on the speech that he would make when he won the Carnegie Medal, which was only awarded to the very greatest writers. The book was everything he had hoped it would be . . . and more.

The next day he put the manuscript in an envelope and sent it to one of the most famous publishers in London. He had noticed their name on a number of bestsellers and guessed they must know a thing or two about children's fiction. Three days later, he received a polite note, thanking him for the manuscript and assuring him that the publisher would contact him shortly. The next month was a nightmare. Henry was in a state of such nervous excitement that he couldn't eat or sleep. When he showed potential customers around houses, all he could think of was blood and vampires, book signings and VIP travel around the world. The next month was just as bad. By the third month he was beginning to wonder just how long the famous publisher needed to read one hundred thousand words.

And then the letter came.

 

 

 

It was a bad start. They hadn't even gotten his name right.

Henry read the letter once. Then he read it again. He felt a rush of different emotions. The first was disbelief.
Ring of Evil
had been rejected! That was followed by dismay. All those hours of work, the weeks and the months—for nothing! Then came anger. Who was Hilary Spurling? What did she know? How could she be so shallow and arrogant, to dismiss his one-hundred-thousand-word manuscript with a letter that didn't even reach a dozen lines? Muttering a curse, Henry reached for a second envelope. There were plenty of publishers in London. A few weeks from now, Hilary Spurling would be weeping bitter tears. And she would be a senior editor no longer, fired from her job for missing the biggest bestseller of the decade when it had been sitting right there in her hands.

In the next twelve months,
Ring of Evil
was rejected by another eight London publishers as well as three literary agents. By now, Henry had left the real estate agency. Everyone in the office knew that he'd been writing a novel and he couldn't bear to tell them that he hadn't managed to sell it. He got a job in a warehouse in Shoreditch, supplying chemicals to laboratories around London. There was no computer here for him to work on after hours. Nor did he want one. If his first book—his masterpiece—wasn't going to be published, why should he even think about writing a second?

And that might have been the end of it. Henry could have ended his days bitter and defeated, unhappy, unmarried and alone. Perhaps he'd have been found in the corner of his local pub, propping up the bar with one whiskey too many, dreaming of what might have been. He could have worked at the warehouse until he retired and then, after a couple of years in a dreary old people's home, quietly died.

But everything changed one day when he walked into a bookshop near Victoria station. He hadn't even gone in there to buy a book. He had just needed somewhere to shelter from a sudden violent storm. But while he was inside, waiting for the rain to die down, his eye was caught by a pile of books on the front table. He picked one up. The book was called
Cirque du Freak
and it was written by someone named Darren Shan.

The back cover told him everything he needed to know. The hero was a boy named Darren Shan—it was strange that he had the same name as the author—who snuck away from home to visit a traveling freak show. Henry flicked through the pages. The book struck him as very short. Every chapter was topped with a picture of a skull. Before he had even left the shop, he had the general idea of the story. Darren Shan's best friend got bitten by a spider, and in order to save him, Darren had to become a vampire and . . .

It was his story! There could be no doubt about it. Of course, not all the ideas were the same. But the circus, the freaks, the vampires, the child hero, even some of the names were too similar to be pure coincidence. For example, there was a character named Mr. Crepsley in Shan's book—almost the same name as one of the clowns (Mr. Crispy) in Henry's. Shan's best friend was named Steve. In
Ring of Evil
a character named Steve was murdered in Chapter Twenty-seven. Henry looked at the cover. As he gazed at the name of the publisher, a black fury rose up within him. The same publisher had turned
Ring of Evil
down.

He bought the book and took it home and that night he spent several hours reading
Cirque du Freak,
underlining passages in red and circling words. As the sun rose, he was one hundred percent certain. The publisher had taken his manuscript and given it to another author. This author, Darren Shan, had copied the best bits and published the book as his own. He had stolen the result of eleven years' work!

And to make things worse, Shan was getting brilliant reviews. The next day Henry called in to say he would be late for work. He scuttled off to an Internet café down the road and Googled everything he could about
Cirque du Freak
. The critics were unanimous. Here was a well-crafted and completely original story that would attract even the most unwilling readers. There were another fourteen volumes planned and publishers were snapping them up all around the world. A major Hollywood film was on the way. Overnight, Darren Shan had become a star.