Honoria Paige Lovecraft?
Heather Phyllis?
Hester Prynne?
I’m certain that you and Mr. Pennyworth will be able to come up with something.
Robin Pennyworth caught himself chewing the tip of his thumb again. Something about these weekly editorial meetings with Ms. Conran always aggravated his urge toward self-cannibalization.
Perhaps, he rationalized, I’m trying to eradicate my own fingerprints so that when I finally do pick up something hefty and bash in Marybeth’s skull, they’ll never be able to pin the rap on me. In his heart, he knew he had about as much chance of acting out these homicidally macho thoughts as of opening a Budweiser bottle with his teeth. Sooner would the Velveteen Rabbit go Rambo. Meetings with Ms. Conran only made him desperate to hide somewhere—anywhere!—even if only inside his own digestive tract.
What would the Lavender Ogress have in store for him this time? The mind boggled, then screamed and hid under the sofa. Waiting for the meeting to start was almost as bad as the torture session itself. Ms. Conran liked to play hardball with the psyches of her editorial underlings. Her favorite method was to name a meeting time, then leave them to cool their heels for a half-hour minimum in the ghastly bread-mold-and-gristle-colored waiting area outside the conference room.
Robin did not handle tension well. He had been forced to quit his last editorial position at March or Die Books when reading too many espionage/suspense manuscripts gave him chronic vertigo and nose-bleeds. So far today Ms. Conran had kept everyone waiting nigh onto a full hour. This augured more than a few strychnine-laced surprises to be hand-fed to the editorial staff at the meeting proper. Ms. Conran always did have her little ways.
Robin gnawed faster, a cold sweat dampening his brow. Three hours spent that morning with blow-drier and mousse went to hell in a hand-basket as his carefully coiffed locks were infected by rampaging molecules of raw panic. In a brief, unequal struggle, his hair went limp as month-old lettuce. He brushed clammy blond bangs out of his eyes and stared at the closed conference-room door, willing it to go away.
Despite half a week’s salary spent on self-actualization tapes, the unleashed powers of Robin’s mind didn’t change squat, except for giving him a baby migraine. The door stayed where it was, finally opening when Ms. Conran’s secretary announced that the meeting was about to begin. There was a dovelike rustling of papers and a ’gatorish snapping of leather portfolios all around Robin as the other editors gathered up their things and filed in. They were actually smiling, the beasts! Why was he the only man among them who felt as if he were being marched aboard a Roman galley, chained at wrist, neck, and ankle?
Maybe because he was the only man among them.
Robin’s coworkers jostled for the seats nearest Ms. Conran’s throne of office while he hung back, content to shrivel into the most insignificant position available. People who knew him well often remarked that here was a man who made Yorkshire terriers seem emotionally stable. In saying so, they wronged the terriers. Robin Pennyworth might have nerves tauter than size 3 Spandex shorts on a size 10 rock star, but he also had a wonderful array of self-preservation devices.
He would need them.
The meeting went about as well as Robin’s second-worst nightmares predicted. Ms. Conran used flip-charts the way a seasoned ninja used his shurikens. One by one the vapid smiles were sliced away as Robin’s female colleagues received swift, cold shots to the heart in the form of sales reports, input on returns, bad reviews, and the arcane, occult, mystic, dread, and horripilating “Word from Upstairs.” Not one man-jack (or woman-jill) among them but had championed a title that had failed to perform up to snuff. Snuff was now the operative word in Ms. Conran’s gently upcurving mouth, referring to the fate of their several editorial futures.
Every time Ms. Conran mentioned “the numbers” on someone else’s book, Robin cringed. It was a reflex, rather like the way Transylvanian peasants crossed themselves and cast a weather-eye on the garlic supply whenever someone took the name of the local neighborhood vampire in vain. Through all this terrifying litany of shortfalls, letdowns, and documented financial failures, he alone remained unscathed. For some reason, this was no comfort. Rather his continued immunity made him ever antsier as the meeting wore on and bodies toppled every which way around him. Only by crushing his favorite nibbling finger in a grip of steel did he manage to keep from chowing down on it up to the wrist in Ms. Conran’s very presence. And then…
“Now Robin, dear—” El momento de la verdad, as Hemingway would say. Hemingway also would have disdained to use Robin Pennyworth as shark chum.
Robin gave a yip and a badly restrained jump in his seat as Ms. Conran swerved her beady gaze to rest upon him at last. Exquisitely applied makeup and three pairs of false eyelashes notwithstanding, Marybeth Conran’s benign countenance still made Robin think of a king cobra with prickly heat.
“Yes, Ms. Conran?” he replied, controlling the instinct to cut and run all the way back to Des Moines (provided he survived his planned leap out the window nearest him). They can smell fear, he told himself, mentally clinging to his mantra like a drowning man.
“Robin, I’d like to take this chance to compliment you. Our sales force tells me that buyer response to Silk Seduction, Satin Sins and Velvet Voluptuary has been too utterly delicious. The way you handled Jasmine O’Hara’s books is an example to us all. Isn’t it?” She stared meaningly at the other editors.
They stared just as meaningly at Robin, who felt his veins fill with freon. Flawlessly lipsticked mouths that moments past had all been dutifully puckered, ready to kiss whatever Ms. Conran specified, were now drawn back into rigid little ricti baring wicked teeth. Long, sharp acrylic nails drummed Robin’s funeral dirge on the tabletop. The autodefenestration plan was looking better by the nanosecond.
“And so”—Ms. Conran steepled her fingers daintily—“I have decided to put you in charge of Columbine Press’s latest discovery, Ms. Sarah Pickman. I would like to see you privately after the meeting to discuss specific plans.”
“Yes, Ms. Conran,” Robin said dully.
“Good. Any new business?” Her voice gave it to be known that there had better not be. “Good. Now let’s all see if we can’t do better by next week, hm?” She rose, and the editors scattered before her like geese in a cyclone.
Shortly later, alone with Ms. Conran in her office, Robin listened fascinated as his boss briefed him on certain aspects of the Pickman file which were most emphatically not for dissemination.
“No publishing experience whatsoever. Precious little experience of any sort at all, truth to tell. I’ve never met the girl myself, but Chuckie Ward assures me that she’s led a life that makes Emily Dickinson’s look like the Playmate of the Year’s by comparison.”
Robin blushed. Ms. Conran was so wrapped up in dishing out the details of Sarah Pickman’s bizarre background that she didn’t notice.
“—raised in some godforsaken Yankee white trash town called Arkham, where I suppose the main industry is marrying your sister, and never went anywhere else. She even went to school right there: Miskatonic. Chuckie swears up and down that it’s an actual University! I never heard of it, of course.”
Robin could understand Ms. Conran’s scorn for Miskatonic. She made damn sure that everyone who worked at Columbine Press knew that she herself had attended Vassar, completing the ever-popular interdisciplinary major, English Literature for the Hermetically Sealed Mind. It must have been difficult for her to imagine higher education existing anywhere outside the cosmopolitan whirl of Poughkeepsie.
“She came right straight home after graduation, and there she stayed. Went nowhere, saw nothing. Chuckie even claims she holed up in a shuttered room at the top of the old family pesthole for ages—but then, Chuckie can be such a tease.” Her eyes sparkled avidly as she arched one playful brow at Robin “You do see what all this means to us, don’t you, dear boy?”
Robin gulped down the truth, but it stuck i
n his throat. “Not—not as well as I’d like to, Ms. Conran.”
Ms. Conran, triumphant, shoved a signed copy of the contract for Fires on the Sea across the desk. Robin read it, his eyes growing wider by the clause. Done, he looked up.
“Twelve hundred dollars?” His voice achieved orbit. “For a whole advance?”
“Payable on publication, no less. And we get to keep subsidiary rights!” Ms. Conran all but slurped and smacked her lips. “Every last one. Plus an airtight option clause. No other publisher can so much as look at one of Sarah Pickman’s used Kleenex tissues before we do.”
“I take it she has no agent.”
“Amazing deduction, Robin. Where do you get such stupendous powers of insight?” Ms. Conran’s talons wrung the neck of an invisible pigeon. “Yes, you are correct: Ms. Pickman has no agent. What agent with more than Tinkertoys for brains would negotiate a deal like that? One payment of twelve hundred dollars on signing, one on submission of the complete manuscript, and one on our acceptance of the book—well, that would still be niggardly, but at least it would make more sense.”
“Like the deal Jasmine O’Hara’s agent just proposed for her next book, Damask Deception,” Robin commented. “Only he wants three payments of twelve thousand.” The numbers on O’Hara books being what they were, he’d get it, too.
Ms. Conran’s eyes got small. “Jasmine O’Hara’s agent.” The words were bile. “The agent little Miss Rayon Rape got herself when she stopped being so bloody grateful to have anyone look twice at Denim Doo-Doo and realized that we mean business. One day she’s a dowdy little Kmart cashier from Grand Rapids, whose real name is Ethel Bukowski, and the next she’s a shark; a shark with the smarts to hire one of the best lampreys in the business to represent her!”
Marybeth Conran plucked the gold Mark Cross pencil from her desk set and snapped it in half as if it were a toothpick. “If Jasmine O’Hara only had stayed just as sweet—and stupid—as she was, I can’t begin to tell you how many yumsy deals we might have milked out of her before she woke up. Writers with the talent and exploitation potential of Ethel ‘Flannel Flatulence’ Bukowski are no common commodity. We lost our chance with her.” She sighed. “You don’t often get second chances in publishing, Robin.”
The way she looked at him when she said that spoke volumes, with all sequels and book-club sale rights included. Suddenly Robin knew that he was a man with a mission, and he knew just what that mission was.
“I’m supposed to make sure that Sarah Pickman never does wake up,” he stated.
“Bingo.”
August 18, 1990
Dear Ms. Pickman,
I’m so glad to hear that our Mr. Pennyworth has expressed such immediate enthusiasm for your work-in-progress. I knew I was doing the right thing by entrusting your fabulous book to him. I do so hope that you will place as much trust in him as I do.
Please excuse my earlier assumptions with regard to your pen name. I had no idea that Fires on the Sea was not entirely your own creation, but based on the work of a deceased distant relative under whose actual name you chose to submit the book. How thrilling for you to have discovered all of those charming manuscripts in that quaint old trunk in your family’s attic room! No wonder you were able to provide us with the complete text of Fires so quickly.
Mr. Pennyworth informs me that you have expressed some doubts about appropriating and adapting your ancestor’s work for the romance market. Your scruples are admirable, if misdirected. If you had not used Ms. Lovecraft’s text as the basis for our novel, Fires on the Sea would have languished as unknown as its first authoress. What a loss to us all that would have been!
Do let’s keep the truth about your deceased relative our little secret. Once we have established Lovecraft as one of the leading names in Romance, the publicity resulting from eventual revelation of the authoress’s true identity should generate scads of reader interest. I know that you will come to look upon this, as I do, as both tribute and homage to the too-long-neglected artistic gifts of the late Ms. Lovecraft.
There are a few questions Mr. Pennyworth has brought to my attention concerning Fires. He has already underscored many words which he feels are just too complex for our readers. This in no way implies that our audience is uneducated! For the most part they are bright, successful young careerwomen who turn to Columbine Press books for a brief respite from the demands of the workaday world.
I’m certain you understand that they just don’t want to be bothered looking up words like “tesselated” and “batrachian.” Could you see your way clear to meeting our Mr. Pennyworth in Boston so that the two of you could work out these little glitches together? He is awfully eager to make your acquaintance and establish the working arrangement of mutual trust, respect, honesty, and integrity that is the basis of every writer-editor relationship.
Best,
Marybeth Conran
P.S. You are quite sure that you are Ms. Lovecraft’s only living relative? We wouldn’t want any contretemps to fuss our Legal Department later on, would we?
By the bye, what is her full name? Here’s hoping it’s something divinely romantic! Hesper Pegeen? Henriette Patricia? Do tell!
For the twentieth time in as many minutes, Robin Pennyworth tried to make himself comfortable on the dented aluminum bench. The plastic dome overhead was supposed to shelter anyone unlucky enough to be caught waiting at the bus stop; it didn’t. It had more holes in it than poor Ms. Pickman’s contract. He pulled up the collar of his raincoat, shivering miserably in the oily drizzle. Although Labor Day was more than a week away, he felt as if he’d stepped into the bleak heart of November the instant he’d stepped off that bus and onto the main street of Arkham.
Main Street! There’s a laugh! he thought, in no mood for laughter. It was Saturday afternoon, but not one of the stores was open. There was nowhere for him to take shelter from the rain, nowhere for him to go, and no way for him to escape until Monday, when the next bus back to Boston passed through this pig-piddle of a town.
Freely he cursed himself, Ms. Conran, and Ms. Pickman: Ms. Conran for insisting he meet with Ms. Pickman; Ms. Pickman for being just as insistent that she couldn’t possibly deal with the fluster and expense of a trip to Boston; himself for gallantly offering to visit Ms. Pickman on her home turf instead. Her acceptance was so ecstatic it almost leaped off the page and licked his face. She gave detailed driving directions, but in case he would rather use public transportation she included train and plane schedules to Boston, bus schedules to Arkham, and the promise to pick him up promptly on arrival at the depot. Depot! There was another laugh for him, if he had the heart left to take it. Well, here he was at the so-called depot, but where was Ms. Pickman?
The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was cold and determined to break his spirit. That would be easy: there were sea cucumbers born with more intestinal fortitude than Robin Pennyworth. He could feel the heebie-jeebies inching farther up his shins with every drop of rain that oozed down the back of his neck. In desperation for any kind of distraction, he stood and paced up and down the broken pavement, gazing morosely into the grimy shop windows.
Most of Arkham’s merchants appeared to be in the cobweb trade. The only storefront holding anything of interest was the travel agency. That figured. Robin knew that if he had to live in a place like Arkham, his every ambition would be focused on getting the hell out. He stared at dusty brochures for exotic destinations: Fiji, Aruba, Club Med Leng, Sunken R’ly—What did that last folder say? Though he wiped the rain from his glasses, he still couldn’t make it out and soon gave up.
Farther up the street he saw the white marquee of a movie theater, a kindled beacon against the gloomy weather. Now that made sense. If you couldn’t escape Arkham one way, you could always fly out on Imagination Airlines. He hurried toward the lights, only to stop when he saw that the ticket seller’s window was deserted, the first show not scheduled to start until eight that night. There were no posters to tell him what was playing, and
when he tilted his head back to read the marquee he saw that most of the letters were missing:
THE NECR OMIC N!
W YNE NEWT N DE BY BOONE LYMPIA D KAK S
You L ved T e Bo k, Now Se The Movie!
“Mr. Pennyworth?”
Robin felt his heart try for a new pole-vault record. He spun around so fast he got a return attack of his old March or Die Books vertigo. His vision swam, but still he managed to identify the speaker: a young woman behind the wheel of a car that was three parts rust to one part vehicle.
“Oh! Did I startle you? I’m so sorry.” She was out of the car and at his side with a fluid grace Robin had only seen in his childhood collection of tropical fish, before his mother claimed that algae aggravated his allergies and flushed the lot of them.
Suddenly, the universe stood up on its hind legs and barked like a seal. The world slipped from its axis and executed a beerhouse polka across the cosmos. Shy and gentle hormones, long wrapped in the tender sleep of ages, opened their drowsy eyes within the secret places of Robin Pennyworth’s body, put lampshades on their heads, turned on MTV, and ordered out for dim sum. The heavens opened up and glad-handed an indifferent earth with the joy-buzzer of Love.
Robin gasped. Why … she’s beautiful. His lips were dry, his eyes moist, his palms damp, and his feet soaking wet. The relative humidity no longer concerned him. He could only gaze, enchanted, upon the face and form of Ms. Pickman.
No one could accuse Sarah Pickman of being a model of conventional beauty. Even the besotted young editor had to admit that her physical attractions were not cut from the standard mold. No, the mold from which she had sprung was of another sort altogether.
“Mr. Pennyworth? Are you—are you quite well?” Ms. Pickman laid a solicitous hand on Robin’s sleeve. “I’m sorry to be so late, but I had another of those awful altercations with the terrible old man who lives next door to us. I came as soon as I could. Won’t you—?” She indicated that he should get into the car.
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