The Grimscribe's Puppets (34 page)

A GRAMMAR OF DREAD, A CATECHISM OF TERROR

BY

LINUS PRICE

Smythe’s vision contracted to a dark tunnel at the other end of which the name,
LINUS PRICE
, appeared to float above the page. His ears filled with buzzing, the din of a field of locusts. His legs shook; he gripped the edge of the table to steady himself. The towered manuscripts to his left shifted.

Even as he was thinking,
There’s no way
, the thought laying the track for the train of anger, of fury, that was lurching into motion in response to this outrage, this fucking
travesty
, his hands were lifting the cover sheet, feeling the flimsy onionskin that Linus had favored. His fingers traced the letters of the title, the name, incised in the paper by the strike of an electric typewriter’s keys. The title’s religious reference fit Linus, whose passion for esoteric metaphysical traditions had led to some of his best work. The page beneath bore an epigraph, unattributed:
“And as God, turning within Himself, found a world to bring forth, so might man, turning within himself, find a world to bring forth.”
He had encountered the sentiment in others of Linus’s stories. Smythe let the page drop, took up the next one. Single-spaced, one space after the periods, quarter-inch margins, prose an unbroken block. He scanned the middle of the text.
“The lines of its roof, its sides broken by ornaments that would have been more appropriate to a Medieval castle—gargoyles resting their pointed chins on taloned hands, faces too-broad, vines that coiled like serpents—the house had been stuffed between its neighbors in a manner that suggested a bundle of papers shoved between two sturdy volumes of an encyclopedia.”
It certainly read like Linus. Cars clashing together, the train of Smythe’s anger shrieked to a halt. He replaced the page on the manuscript.

How?
He hadn’t noticed anyone walking away from his front door, let alone lingering to one side or the other as he picked up the manuscript. And by anyone, he meant Dominika, Linus’s wife—widow. While technically separated (a rupture Smythe had forecast years earlier) Linus’s failure to amend his abbreviated will (despite Smythe’s urging that he do so) had left her executor of his meager estate. In the days since the e–mail that had brought the first word of Linus’s murder, Smythe had contemplated the fate of his writing. In several interviews, Linus had claimed to have file cabinets full of stories in various stages of completion; though in other interviews, he also had declared writing an almost intolerable agony, so there was reason to take those brimming cabinets with a helping of salt. From having worked with him, Smythe knew that the man was a relentless, meticulous reviser, submitting additional changes to his stories even after the volumes containing them had gone to print. Yet every time he had asked him for a submission to an anthology, Linus had responded with two and sometimes three stories, each of them eight to ten thousand words long. His writing absorbed him, Linus had said, an ambiguous enough statement, but Smythe judged it likely he had left at least some work behind. Assuming it was publishable—and Smythe was confident that some if not most of it would be—there might be enough for one, even two posthumous collections. There wasn’t much money to be made from such a project—at its most accessible, Linus’s fiction had been an acquired taste, with much of it so hermetic as to be opaque to all save a small company of devoted readers. But while it was a principle difficult to keep in clear view in this era of diminishing book sales and The End Of Publishing As We Know It, there was more to the industry than the bottom line. There was the pursuit of art. If Linus’s work had reached that goal for a relative few, cross that finish line it had, and Smythe thought such an accomplishment ought not to be forgotten.

For this reason, he had been unhappy to learn that Dominika had remained in charge of Linus’s estate. In Smythe’s experience, the amicable divorce was a fairy tale concocted by lawyers to encourage couples to begin a process that had more in common with a bare-knuckle boxing match. Even by that standard, Linus and Dominika’s split had been brutal, an exchange of dirty blows that had continued long beyond the usual time limit, leaving the combatants bloody, broken, and bitter. Dominika had blamed Linus for misrepresenting himself as a famous writer during the course of their (mostly online) courtship, leading her to abandon her budding career as a model in Warsaw for a job waiting tables at a local diner. Linus had accused Dominika of feigning affection for him in order to gain her green card. The separation proceedings had achieved a low level of notoriety in the local press, the consequence of a bored reporter wandering into the courtroom and being struck by the contrast between the tall, statuesque woman with the head of shining blond hair and the short, dumpy man with the stubbled head and protruding eyes. To be frank, there was a beauty-and-the-beast quality to their relationship, but the papers had exaggerated it, recasting Dominika as the beautiful, hapless immigrant ensnared by the unsavory, cunning writer—a writer of horror stories, to boot. She had emerged from the courtroom with a position as the weather-person for a local cable news channel, whose owner she was rumored to be dating. Linus gained nothing but the confirmation of the conviction he had long nurtured that the world was actively hostile to him. Smythe had little trouble believing that Dominika would be happy to let whatever manuscripts Linus had left behind molder in their filing cabinets unpublished; if she didn’t consign them to the dumpster, or tip them into a metal drum and add gasoline and a match.

He had debated contacting her about the matter, but the situation was complicated by the fact that, a few years earlier, he had made a protracted and sloppy pass at Dominika. It was at the annual Weirdcon, which he’d convinced Linus to attend because it was being held in Albany, just up the river. Smythe had spent most of the weekend parked on a stool at the hotel bar, measuring his hours in shots of Johnnie Walker red, neat. It was, in his experience, the preferred method for enduring these events, whose attendance had long since moved from pleasure to duty. For every writer of merit who stopped to exchange a few words with him, a dozen or more, of varying degrees of inconsequence, lowered themselves beside him and attempted to engage him in a protracted conversation, usually on the merits of their work. If he was lucky, they at least stood him a round. This weekend, he had not been especially lucky. By the time he realized Dominika was standing beside him, waiting for the bartender to deliver her white wine, Linus nowhere to be seen, the drunk Smythe had maintained at a steady level just this side of belligerence had tipped over into naked hostility. The sight of Dominika leaning over the bar, her arms crossed over her full breasts, her round ass thrust out behind her in a tight denim skirt, and Linus still absent—Smythe had glanced about the bar—had filled him with a sour rage. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had said to her—it had begun as a question about whether she wouldn’t prefer to join him in his room, away from all of this, and escalated to an extended description of the things he would do to her that had stretched from the sadistic to the masochistic. Throughout, she had watched him impassively, the fingers of her right hand tracing the stem of her wineglass. By the time Smythe had finished, his face was flushed, and he was panting. He had been certain that Dominika was going to dash her wine at him; either that, or grab his hand and take him up on his proposition.
Nothing ventured…

Instead, she had burst out laughing, laughter spraying from her lips as if Smythe had related the single funniest joke she ever had heard. Nor had she stopped: she had thrown her head back and continued to fill the bar with the sound of her mirth. It wasn’t an explosion of good humor; it was harsh, mocking. His cheeks burning, Smythe had sat where he was, trying to compress himself into the smallest possible space he could. When he could stand her laughter no longer, he had swallowed the remainder of his drink, pushed himself up from his seat, and delivered a long string of invective to that grinning mouth, those pearled teeth. Though he liked to consider himself well-practiced and skilled at insult, Smythe’s second outburst had evoked the same response from Dominika as the first, that braying laughter. Even through the Scotch mixed with his blood, Smythe had felt himself lessened in ways he didn’t like to contemplate. He had flipped her the bird, and stalked out of the bar, the assembled eyes of the writers gathered there on him.

Afterwards, Linus did not confront him about the episode, which Smythe was anticipating and which he was preparing to deflect through an appeal to his inebriation and possibly Dominika’s uncertain grasp of English. When nothing was said via phone, e-mail, or at their next meeting, Smythe started to tell mutual acquaintances that, in his view, Linus and Dominika’s marriage was doomed. Smythe had not seen her since that weekend, for which he considered himself generally grateful but which made contacting her following her estranged husband’s death seem more complicated.

It appeared, however, that his worrying had been for naught. Smythe supposed he couldn’t blame Dominika if she wasn’t inclined to deal with him face to face, right now. As long as she had delivered this manuscript to him, he could excuse—anything. There wasn’t much point in pretending he was going to accomplish anything with Linus’s manuscript sitting here, was there? He lifted the heap of paper from the table and carried it to the couch, under the living room’s picture window, where he settled down to read. A book written by a dead man: it was like the plot to one of Linus’s stories.

II

Three (?) hours later, something flapping past the window caused Smythe to start. It hadn’t been a bird, had it? Not one that big, not in the middle of the city. It must have been a trick of the light, a reflection from a passing car thrown on the glass. No matter—he needed a break, anyway.

Smythe lowered the manuscript. Had he been asked what he expected from Linus Price’s latest work, his answer would have been,
More of the same
. More disaffected characters whose dead-end existences admitted them to scenarios in which the futility and hostility of life was made manifest through some cryptic supernatural agency. In one of his college classes, Smythe had encountered the argument that every writer rewrites the same story over and over again. While the statement was as reductive as most critical generalizations typically were, he had recognized a grain of truth to it, which three decades as an editor had confirmed. Writers were obsessives. The trick was to return to your obsessions in a way that made them seem fresh each time. From the beginning, Linus had achieved this feat. His new work was no exception. What was different—unprecedented—about it was the element of undisguised autobiography. Specifically, the manuscript dealt with the six months leading up to his murder.

Linus’s death. Christ, there was a subject for a horror story, and not of Linus’s stripe. This was no collection of hints and allusions wound in labyrinthine prose; this was brute blood and gore delivered in blunt, declarative sentences, the very kind of narrative against which he and Smythe had railed in print and online, the sensational, lowest-common-denominator type. Well, God was supposed to be a lousy writer, wasn’t He?

It had started with a woman. Scratch that: it had started with whatever confluence of inclination and experience had caused the teenaged Linus Price to haul his mother’s old typewriter out of storage, balance it atop a card table, and begin composing the ancestors of the stories he one day would deliver to Smythe’s doorstep. That joining of talent and memory had tangled a host of emotions with itself, chief among them arrogance, jealousy, and insecurity. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about a writer displaying these feelings; in Smythe’s experience, it would have been remarkable for Linus not to have demonstrated them. Linus’s problem lay in his inability to maintain any kind of balance or perspective on his feelings. When he received a positive review, it was proof that he was the best writer of his generation. When someone else earned a six-figure advance for their trilogy of vampire novels, it was symptomatic of the fundamental idiocy of the publishing industry. And when his stories and collections were passed over for the field’s short list of awards, Linus plunged into black moods which released themselves online, in extended screeds on his blog or on those of the writers who had claimed the awards he deemed his. This last tendency had escalated over the last several years, immediately before, during, and in the aftermath of his marriage’s collapse. Smythe had gone so far as to write him a brief, bluff e-mail suggesting that maybe it was time to stop confronting every billy-goat that trip-trapped across his bridge, but his caution had gone unheeded. Linus liked playing the troll; he appeared to take a perverse pleasure in living down to everyone’s worst expectations. Smythe had been concerned, but Linus was far from the first writer to play the part of the obnoxious gadfly, and his irritation at Linus’s refusal to heed his advice had kept him from repeating it.

If you had to select a more recent starting point for the chain of events that had resulted in Linus’s murder, Smythe supposed it had to be last year’s Blackwood Awards. Linus’s most recent book,
Epistles to the Damned
, had garnered a nomination in the single-author collection category, along with work by a few, perennial favorites and
Medusa’s Fruit
, a collection from a newcomer, Suzanne Kowalczyk. His friendship with Linus aside, there was no doubt in Smythe’s mind that
Epistles to the Damned
merited and would win that year’s award. All the reviews agreed that it was far and away Linus’s best collection of stories, and since the Blackwood was decided by the votes of those attending that year’s Weirdcon—held in Columbus—Smythe assumed Linus had the category sewn up—as did Linus. What neither Smythe nor Linus had counted on was Suzy Kowalczyk making electronic copies of her collection free to whichever members of the convention requested it, with the result that more of them would read and cast their votes for her book than Linus’s. So sure had Linus been that the award was his that, as the title of Suzy’s book was being read out, he was already halfway to his feet. Once the name of the actual winner registered, he stood where he was, in the fourth row of a crowded room, while Suzy Kowalczyk rushed to the front of the room to accept her plaque and offer tearful thanks. After the ceremony had concluded, Smythe had pushed through the groups of people milling around to where Linus was sitting, slumped. Smythe had not won his category (original anthology) either, but though the loss piqued him, as they always did, Linus was stunned by the upset to his expectations. Putting aside his own disappointment, Smythe had squired Linus to the hotel bar, where over a couple of ludicrously expensive double-martinis, he had done his best to cheer up Linus, reminding him of all the great works of art that had gone similarly unrecognized. Where was
The Sound and the Fury
’s Pulitzer? Where was
Vertigo
’s Oscar? Where was
Let It Bleed
’s Grammy? Not such a bad club to be a member of, Smythe had told him. Linus had nodded, but said little. Eventually, Smythe had had to leave him in order to catch his ride to the airport.