Mr. Cables (Novella #9)

by Ronald Malfi

  In the kitchen, I noticed the napkin on the counter on which I’d jotted down the address and phone number of a book dealer in Manhattan named Finter. I picked up the phone and dialed the number, waited, waited. It never rang. I hung up the phone then tried again, but this time there was no dial tone—just the dim hum of distant static.

  “Wonderful.”

  I replaced the receiver on the cradle then stood there with my hands on my hips, for some reason feeling like a stranger in my skin. I was thinking again of my days teaching English and creative writing at Montclair Community College, though this time those thoughts surfaced because of the pages I’d read. Having exhausted all the books in his personal collection and in the local library, Quimby had gone to the local college to scour the library shelves. On this occasion he dressed in a wide-brimmed fedora and a trench coat, which was the same attire the character Mr. Cables wore when riding the bus and scribbling his cryptic notes in memo pads—the only similarity between the two characters that I was able to discern during the hours I’d just spent reading. How my agent was able to figure out that Mr. Cables was Quimby’s alternate personality was beyond me.

  That isn’t what she said, I thought then, my gaze returning inevitably back to the book on the table beside the armchair. She never said Mr. Cables was Quimby’s alternate personality. She said they were the same person, and maybe that means something different than someone having an alternate personality. As if they’re the same person while simultaneously being two separate and distinct people.

  I realized that my thoughts were no longer making sense. This whole Mr. Cables thing had spun me for a loop and it was occupying too much of my time. I needed to clear it from my head.

  Because the urge to keep reading the book was too great—an urge to which I did not wish to succumb—I returned to my den, not to write, but to hunt around for an altogether different text among my myriad bookshelves. My stuff was in good order, and I was able to locate it with little difficulty.

  It was the yearbook from Montclair Community College, graduation year 2000—my last year as a teacher before I began writing full time. It was the year my first novel, The Body Fields, was published. The advance hadn’t been huge but translation rights sold to twenty-four countries and there was a sizable film option from a major studio on the heels of publication. I finished out the school year then quit and never looked back.

  I’m looking back now, I told myself, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the yearbook opened up in my lap. I’m creeping back down memory lane, aren’t I? And for what reason? Why am I back here, after all these years? What ghosts do I expect to find?

  I didn’t know what ghosts I expected to find, but I knew why I had returned and why I was now thumbing through the pages of this old yearbook. In the novel, there was no name given to the college that Quimby visits, but its similarities to Montclair Community, right down to the green-and-gold school colors and the whippoorwill mascot, couldn’t be denied. The description of the quaint residential street that bordered the northernmost part of the campus in the novel matched my recollection of Primrose Avenue, the quaint residential street that bordered the northernmost part of the real Montclair’s campus. The street where I’d lived while teaching at the school.

  It was silly, of course. I was filling in the descriptive gaps with my own memories, knowledge, and life experiences, just like any other reader, nothing more than that—

  But then there it was, laid out before me, the yearbook photograph taking up both pages so that the crease ran down the center of Primrose Avenue, that picturesque little boulevard on the outskirts of Montclair Community College, with its tidy row of identical homes, a lamppost between each house—

  I snapped the yearbook shut. Sweat had oozed from my pores and was trickling down my forehead, stinging my eyes. I could taste my heartbeat at the back of my throat.

  I had always been amazed at a boardwalk artist’s ability to capture the likeness of a person in just a few simple, well-placed lines. Comparing the photograph of Primrose Avenue in the yearbook to the rudimentary sketch of houses on the dust jacket of Mr. Cables was no different. I knew without a doubt that the drawing was a reproduction of the street that bordered the college where I used to teach, now almost twenty years ago.

  Impossible? It was…unless the person who fabricated the novel had done so with the intention of tormenting me…that if they’d done their homework, they would have eventually come to know that I had taught classes at Montclair Community College, that I had mentioned it on occasion in interviews, that…

  But why? Why would someone go through the effort? Particularly if they couldn’t ensure that the book would ultimately wind up in my hands. That round-faced woman at the book signing said she’d picked up the novel years ago at a garage sale. Was she lying? Was she the pivotal character in this sinister plot against me?

  I laughed aloud, knowing that if I didn’t release some pressure the entire framework of my mental stability might break apart at the seams. I slid the yearbook back into its accustomed slot on the bookshelf. Trembling—I won’t deny it—I got up, went back down the hall, and picked the book up off the end table.

  Throw it away for good this time.

  Trash collection was tomorrow morning. All I’d have to do was dump it in a trash bag and drive it down to the curb. Simple as pie. And as I held that book and looked at its cover, knowing damn well that the drawing was a reproduction of that real-life street, I had every intention of doing just that.

  But instead, I wound up sitting back down in the armchair and reading the rest of the book, straight to the end.

  7

  Every time I visited Manhattan, I felt the tendrils of my childhood agoraphobia tighten like a straightjacket around my body. It wasn’t so much a fear of open space as it was a strident and escalating discomfiture upon being infused in that tidal crowd of people, one bobbing cork on a sea of bobbing corks, with no means of extraction—of salvation—in sight.

  Finter’s Used Books was a tiny storefront on Worth Street, incongruously situated in the city’s financial district. Had it been a luncheonette or a bank or a bar, it might have thrived; but the tattered cloth awning and cracked front windows expressed just how neglected and unprofitable this out-of-place business was.

  The copy of Mr. Cables tucked under one arm and wrapped in a plastic bag, I stepped into the tiny store. A bell tinkled overhead—a charming if useless flourish. The bookstore was basically a narrow passageway whose walls were overflowing with thick, musty volumes. My agent had called the place an emporium, but this was nothing more than the corridor of a submarine. My agoraphobia was replaced with claustrophobia, and I undid the top button of my shirt and tugged at the collar of the undershirt beneath.

  There was a small desk cluttered with books framed in the daylight of the front window, but there was no one in the place. It even smelled unused; I imagined this must be what it’s like to crack open a pharaoh’s tomb.

  I said, “Hello?” and my voice became the opposite of an echo: The sound seemed to thud dully in the air directly in front of my face and fall to the scuffed linoleum floor, dead as a bird that had struck a window.

  Nonetheless, it did the trick—a frazzled, gnomish gentlemen in a tweed vest and sleeve garters peered around a shelf of books toward the rear of the shop. He scowled at me, then hustled an armload of paperbacks toward the front of the store where he allowed them to tumble onto the sunlit desk.

  “Can I help you?” His tone suggested he was well aware of the store’s lack of patronage, and found my arrival not only inopportune but suspicious.

  “Are you Mr. Finter?”

  His wizened old eyes narrowed, the suspicion increasing. “Yessss,” he said, drawing out the word the way a cartoon snake might.

  I explained who I was, how I’d gotten his name, and how I’d attempted to call several times before coming out here but that his phone seemed to be disconnected. Before I could get into my reason for my visit
, he scooped up the telephone receiver from beneath the desk and pressed it to one ear.

  “Sounds fine to me,” he said, as if catching me in a lie. He buried the receiver back beneath the desk, then, in a lower voice, muttered, “What is it you want, Mr. Paventeau?”

  I explained how a woman at a book signing had given me the strange book with my name on it—I book I hadn’t written. I told him my efforts to locate any information about the publisher were futile, and that I was hoping he could provide me with some answers.

  “Let’s see it,” he groused, tugging a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from the breast pocket of his vest.

  I took the book out of the plastic bag and set it down on the desk. It occurred to me that this old, tattered hardcover looked perfectly at home in this bookshop, a relic within a relic, a ghost inside a ghost. At that moment, I realized just how much I wanted to be rid of it.

  Finter picked up the book, turned it over in his hands, opened the cover…sniffed the pages within. “Gorgon and Heavenward,” he muttered, gazing down at the copyright page.

  “Ever heard of them?”

  “No. They don’t exist.”

  “They don’t?”

  He flipped to the bio, read it, then stared up at me. His eyes were magnified behind the lenses of his glasses. “Is this your biography?”

  “It is, but it’s incorrect. I’ve written twelve books. This bio says I’ve only written eleven.”

  “Which book is missing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turned back to the front of the book, studied the copyright page again, the title page, searching.

  “There’s no card page,” I said, referring to the page that lists all the other works by the author, usually opposite the title page. “I’ve already checked.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “Also, there’s this,” I said, flipping to the end of the book. I turned toward the last page of the story and pointed to the bottom, where the sentence ended abruptly, unfinished.

  “There’s no page missing?” Finter asked.

  “There must be, because a book usually doesn’t end in the middle of a sentence like that.” The book had concluded with Mr. Cables, the last remaining commuter on a city bus, meticulously printing in one of his memo pads. The bus stopped at an intersection, the doors hissed open…but then the story had ended in mid-sentence.

  Finter grunted like an animal then proceeded to unwrap the dust jacket from the book. Dust particles took flight and swirled about in the sunlight coming through the window. Finter gave a cursory glance at the book’s spine before setting the volume down on the desk and turning his attention to the dust jacket. As he studied it, he said, “Is it any good?”

  “The book? It’s pretty boring, actually. Nothing happens. I’m not sure I even understand it. But…” And here I let my voice die.

  He looked up at me over the lenses of his glasses. “But?”

  “But it seems to scare the hell out of anyone else who’s read it,” I finished.

  One of the man’s wiry salt-and-pepper eyebrows arched. “Is that so?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  He dropped his gaze back down to the dust jacket, which he had unfolded and spread out along the desktop. He smoothed out the creases with one gnarled, hairy-knuckled hand. His fingers traced the detail of the pencil-drawn artwork, caressed the blocky text of the title and my name.

  “My cousin, Pembroke, would be the one to call about this,” Finter said.

  “Then let’s call him.”

  “He’s vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Disappeared. Gone.” He waved a hand at the book. “These types of books can be…dangerous.”

  “All honest books are dangerous books,” I said.

  Finter looked up sharply. “What’s that?”

  “Just something I used to tell my students.”

  “This book here,” he said, tapping not the book but the dust jacket. “This is not an honest book.”

  “No?”

  “It’s a guise. A ruse.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “It means that you’ve been baited by it, and now you’re on the hook, my friend.” The smile Ross Finter summoned to his lips possessed no humor, no good nature. It was like the smile the wolf gives Little Red Riding Hood. I felt a chill ripple up my spine. “It’s the reason you find it boring while others, as you say, have had the hell scared out of them. It doesn’t want them—in fact, it detracts them, makes them uncomfortable so they turn away from it and leave it alone.”

  It was almost exactly what my agent had told me over the phone—that the book didn’t want to be read. Not by her, anyway.

  “But you,” Finter continued. “You say it’s boring, that nothing happens. You search through it, perhaps, trying to find the important things you may have missed. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you still cannot find anything.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yet it holds your attention, keeps you captive. Yes?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right. How do you know that?”

  “Baited,” said Finter, not answering my question. “A guise.”

  “So if I’m on the hook, how do I get off it?” I asked.

  “I’m not so sure that you do. However…” He curled a finger at me, then pointed down at the dust jacket. “Come. See here.” He traced the blocky yellow text of my name. “The text was applied to the cover in the second part of a two-part offset printing process. Which means first you have the original artwork that is reproduced for the image on the cover, and then you have a second process—another layer, if you will—as the text for the title and author’s name is applied.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure what was so significant about this revelation.

  “There is artwork beneath the text,” Finter went on. “See how the swirling clouds that make up the sky exist behind the lettering?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there is more.” He pressed an index finger over the first letter of my name—the W. “There is more than swirling sky behind your name. There is something else. See? See here? How brief little lines protrude from the corners, sticking out only slightly from behind your name. Do you see?”

  I leaned over the desk and studied the dust jacket in the sunlight. “Yes,” I said. “I see. There’s something written in pencil behind the text of my name.”

  “Something that appears on the original artwork but has been covered up by the text,” Finter said. “A word. Or possibly—”

  “A name,” I finished for him. “The artist’s name?”

  “It’s anyone’s guess. But if you find the original artwork then you can see what your name covers up.”

  “And how the hell do I do that?”

  “That,” said Finter, “I cannot tell you.”

  I thanked him and left the bookstore, the copy of Mr. Cables back in its plastic bag and tucked under my arm. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, the cold struck me, and I buttoned my coat.

  A commuter bus lumbered slowly in front of the bookstore, a shiny metallic dinosaur that glinted with sunlight. I stared up at it as it passed, and at the slack profiles in the windows. I kept expecting to find one of the riders staring back at me—a figure in an outdated fedora whose brim cast his face in shadow.

  I shivered just thinking about it.

  The bus chugged toward the intersection, clouds of black exhaust belching from its tailpipe. When it stopped at the crosswalk, I felt my entire body go rigid. I was certain a man who fit the description of the swarthy, noirish Mr. Cables would step off. But the doors did not open, and a moment later, the commuter bus was groaning through the intersection and merging with traffic.

  8

  I was already an hour into my drive before I realized I wasn’t heading in the direction of home. Autopilot had taken over the controls, and when I glanced up at the road signs, I realized I was driving toward Montclair
.

  There was some logic to this: I recalled the Montclair Community College’s library boasting a vast collection of artwork on its walls, done by local artists, faculty members, and students. Many were simple pencil sketches, much like the artwork on the dust jacket of the book. And of course, if the artwork was a reproduction of Primrose Avenue—the street that bordered one side of the college—then it was possible the original piece was framed somewhere in that library. It was a stretch, but I felt compelled to check it out.

  I glanced down at the passenger seat. The book had somehow gotten free of the plastic bag and was sitting on the seat, upside-down so that my outdated author photo stared up at me.

  Who is that young, pompous ass? The thought brought a smile to my face, though my whole body was trembling in my winter coat. Who is that moron who thinks he understands the world and can impart some wisdom about it in his scary books?

  My cell phone chirped, and I dug it out of my pocket.

  “Wilson.” It was my agent. “Those pages you sent me…”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it a joke?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you copy it straight from that book?”

  “Susan, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can—Wilson—I can’t even—”

  Static was devouring the line.

  “Susan, I can’t hear you. Are you in Montauk? We must have a bad connection.”