Foul Matter (44 page)

Molly just gave him a patient shake of her pillow-tousled head, turned, and waved his news away. “Oh, that old place.”

He stared after her, mouth open. Then he called after her, “ ‘That old
place’
? What? What?”

Her voice floated back to him. “They’re all crazy there. ’Nighty-night.”

Paul sat, staring through his open door down the hall where she’d gone. Then he yelled, “They are not!” And he wondered why he didn’t want to believe they were all crazy at the Old Hotel. The idea disturbed him greatly. He mumbled something even he didn’t get.

Then Paul swiveled around and looked at his computer screen with the haunted house screen saver. He also had an old Royal portable that he used to type up rough copy because he liked the sound of the keys and because he felt as if he were working harder and more like a real writer. When he made a mistake he would
X
it out. The page would eventually look like nothing but cross-hatching.

There was a file on casters in which he kept manuscripts and parts of manuscripts. He rolled it over and pulled from it the thick copy of the novel he’d written before
Don’t Go There.
This was
Half a Life
and it had sold upward of two million copies. What had been returned to him was the original manuscript he had given to Queeg and Hyde. It had been returned some time after the book had been published, which was standard practice. What he wanted to look at now was the note that had come with it. Here it was, clipped to the manuscript. Paul recognized the handwriting—he had seen it often enough—of that officious little squirt, DeeDee Sunup, who had pompously written:

The first time he had seen this phrase he had laughed until he choked (and Hannah had run in to pound him on the back). But DeeDee Sunup (and others like her) failed to see any sort of humor, irony, or even anything cabalistic in the phrase. “Foul matter”: this was what publishers called all of those original manuscripts, frozen in time, before they had been blue-penciled, red-penciled, edited, reedited, chicken pecked to death. This was the first look at the book, the manuscript out of which they’d tried to suck the marrow, drain the blood, leach the life, while they hammered the book into fame or obscurity, it hardly mattered which.

What had been returned to him was his foul matter. The gunk, the sludge, the muck that preceded all the placement, the sales figures, the ads, the reviews. Yet the original had been the writer’s best effort, the work he was willing to send out into the world and be judged by.

Paul grinned his devilish grin and fed a sheet of paper into the old Royal. He typed:

Damned book would write itself.