In the morning, Denton sprawled among the newspapers in his armchair, sipping tea and looking for articles about Mulcahy. They were disappointingly small, except in one sensational rag (‘Man’s Corpse Found Fifty Feet from Busy Street — Lay There for Four Days — Jumped to Ghastly Death’), suggesting third-string reporters cadging details from police desks, not from anybody who had actually been on the scene. The Times buried the story deep inside and barely raised its voice above a hieratic murmur:
MAN’ S BODY FOUND IN ISLINGTON
The dead body of a man identified as Regis Mulcahy, instrument maker, was discovered yesterday behind a hoarding in Islington. Metropolitan police refused to give details, but an open window four storeys above appears to have indicated the spot from which the victim may have precipitated. A coroner’s jury will sit on the matter on Saturday.
‘They make it sound like he slipped on a patch of mud,’ Atkins said. ‘Nothing about suicide, is there?’
‘They’re keeping the note to themselves. God knows why.’
‘Nail it down at the inquest before they give it to the papers — “death by his own hand while temporarily insane”, then give a juicy account of him killing the girl. What’d the note say?’
‘He loved her.’ Denton cocked an eye at Atkins. ‘Not a word to your pals at the Lamb, mind.’
‘What d’you take me for?’ Atkins gathered up the dishes. ‘Time you was dressed to go and see your publisher, isn’t it? Money don’t wait, you know, Colonel.’
Denton had sent his editor a note asking to see him at eleven. It wasn’t a meeting he wanted to have: he hated asking for anything, especially money; he hated having to admit that his book was in the trash. Still-
‘He must needs go whom the devil driveth,’ he said. He clambered out of the chair.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Horrors! Horrors, Denton! I want horrors.’
Diapason Lang had been his English editor since Denton’s second book. Lang was older than Denton, almost emaciated, his skin taut over his cheekbones but ruddy with good health. His father had been a noted organist, hence the first name. Denton liked him well enough but found Lang’s seemingly wilful mislabelling of his books as ‘horror’ irritating. More than irritating, in fact.
He had come to his publishers by way of Mrs Johnson’s, charging her again to mobilize her women for an assault on the Metropolitan Schools Board. She had, with a toughness she usually masked, pointed out that the women hadn’t been paid in full as yet. Embarrassed, Denton had stood at her door and counted out notes, then coins, not finding it easy to make up the total. ‘The bonus — for finding each Mulcahy — ah, I’ll bring that by — another time-’ He had walked away very quickly.
And so he had come to his publishers. The firm was in a narrow building off Fleet Street, only two houses from the one once occupied by Izaak Walton; it had a look of untidiness that correctly embodied the business it housed: door jambs tilted, floors sagged, cracks in the plaster had become so institutionalized that baseboards had been cut to accommodate them. Yet the firm itself was a good one with a notable backlist in fiction and botany, the combination pure accident, the reasons no longer remembered. Diapason Lang had been with them for more than thirty years and was in good part responsible for the fiction list. A type not unknown among editors, he often misunderstood the books he selected but selected well, nonetheless. Like his saying now, ‘Horrors, Denton! I want horrors!’ Then he leaned forward and said, as if they were friends with a common passion, ‘You know!’
In fact, Denton didn’t know. He would never have told Lang that he was there because if he didn’t get some money, his manservant was going to leave him; and he hadn’t yet had the gumption to tell Lang that he had decided to abandon the book that he was due to deliver in three months. Or — the worst — that he nonetheless wanted another advance. ‘I’m never quite sure what you mean by “horror”,’ he muttered. Playing for time.
Denton hadn’t started out to be a horror writer — if that’s what he was, and he didn’t see it — or in fact to be a writer at all. All he’d managed to become after the war was a failing young farmer who didn’t know he was failing, able to keep going by not adding up his debts. Then, after he failed completely and everything was gone, his wife dead and his sons sent off to his sister because he had failed as a father, too, he had gone farther west and rattled about, done his marshalling, gone on to California. Then he’d begun writing because his head was so stuffed with sorrow he thought it would burst, and he had had to get it out. He had written half of a novel called William Read before he realized it was self-pitying claptrap — more failure. Then, disciplining the self-pity by realizing that it was not the same thing as sorrow, he had begun to set down experiences as if he were writing instructions on how to harness a team to a plough, and the result was The Demon of the Plains. That first novel ended with the farmer-hero hanging himself in the barn he had built with his own hands, and his body being wrapped in a horse blanket, already frozen, and stacked with the cordwood until the ground might thaw enough to bury him. Denton had found his method: a plain, unfeeling style that embodied appalling events.
The Demon of the Plains had given him a reputation beyond America. The French had made comparisons to Poe (whom he despised), the English to Le Fanu (whom he didn’t know). In fact, he saw no horror in The Demon of the Plains except the horror of solitude and unending labour and failure, and the hero’s sense that a force, a demon or perhaps a ghost of the Indians who had lived there, persecuted him. Denton thought he had made it clear that the demon was only in the character’s mind, a way of making the untractable and the appalling comprehensible, but the word ‘demon’ set people going. When his second book, At Battle’s End, proved to have ghosts in it (who were not ghosts to him but fantasies of the war-maddened hero’s collapse), the word ‘horror’ was everywhere in the reviews. At Lang’s urging (at that time not yet met in the attenuated flesh, expressed as a letter to his American publisher), his third book was titled Jonas Sniden’s Horrors, and it was compared favourably to the Stevenson of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Diapason Lang, when they finally met in the late nineties, had told him he was the best horror writer in the English language.
It had made Denton squirm.
Now Lang bent forward over his desk. ‘We English love horrors. It comes from hiding everything from us as children; we have dreadful nightmares. Unaskable questions answered out of our imaginations. Do you know my picture of the nightmare?’
Lang had spoken of it before, so of course he knew it; Lang in fact had a print on the wall, was pointing at it with a bony finger without turning his eyes towards it. Elihu Vedder. Denton nodded. ‘I suppose it refers to something sexual,’ Denton said. It showed a hideous figure — demonic but certainly male — crouching over a nude woman in a bed. He thought of Janet Striker’s idea of men and women.
Lang looked pained. ‘Americans are so much more outspoken than we are.’ Now he glanced at the painting. ‘Perhaps — perhaps. You think she’s having a nightmare about the sex act itself?’ His voice was high, a bit cracked. ‘Fearing it? All women do, you know.’
‘Not knowing what it is, more likely. But possessed by it.’
‘It isn’t titled “Desire”, my boy. I’ve never asked a woman what she thought the painting meant. Nor would I, of course.’ He tittered. Lang’s sexual preferences were matters of speculation but no evidence.
Denton smiled. ‘I don’t think it’s just children you English keep things from.’
‘There are some things one doesn’t mention. To women, I mean.’
Denton thought that Lang travelled in the wrong circles. Among Emma Gosden’s friends, anything could be said; the same was true among the artists who clustered at the Café Royal. Denton looked again at the painting. And, he suspected, anything could be said to Janet Striker. ‘I had a man tell me recently that he’d been watching another man cut a woman’s throat while coupled with her. Maybe that’s what the nightm
are is.’
Lang blinked. ‘Ah. Mmm.’ He grew cheerful. ‘Might be a book in that.’
‘The sex act itself a kind of murder,’ Denton said, still looking at the picture. Like his wedding night. The blood, of course. He shook the idea off. ‘I wanted to see you, Lang.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, and I wanted to see you! I have an idea — a horrible idea!’ He cackled. ‘But routine business first — how’s the new book coming?’
There it was. Denton looked into his eyes, pursed his lips, said, ‘I’ve thrown it into the trash.’
Lang tried blankness, then a titter — it must be an American joke, he seemed to imply — then severity. ‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m afraid I am.’ He tried to explain the revelation he’d had while he’d talked with Janet Striker — the woman not a real woman, the marriage all wrong, the book sick at its very heart.
‘I’ve always thought your women quite good,’ Lang moaned. Denton didn’t say that this might say more about Lang than about Denton’s women, or that perhaps Hench-Rose had been right when he’d said Denton knew nothing about women. He brushed residual drops of rain from his hat, which was on his lap; the warren of publishing offices had no place for visitors’ clothes — hardly room for visitors, in fact. ‘But you can’t have thrown it out,’ Lang said. ‘You can’t!’
‘I did.’
‘It’s what first novelists do. It’s what young men do.’
‘I have a better idea. A new book.’
‘Pull it out of the trash, Denton, we can salvage it. I can salvage it.’
Denton waved a hand. ‘I’ve got a better idea, I told you.’ Lang looked sick, then profoundly annoyed, then, with an effort, attentive — that smiling, wide-eyed look that women learn to put on when men talk. ‘It’s called The Machine,’ Denton said.
‘The Machine. A little too H. G. Wells?’
Denton sketched it for him: a young husband and wife who build together the machine that destroys them, their marriage.
‘But a machine? I’d think something organic would be more likely, something that they nurture-’
‘I see it as a machine.’
‘Well — of course, it’s your idea-’ Lang sounded dubious. ‘Rather fashionable, perhaps — machines, I mean. Fear of the clang and bang of modern life, the dark Satanic mills, all that. Motor cars.’ He raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. ‘But a machine as the embodiment of horror, Denton-’
‘Oh, forget your damned horror!’
‘Oh, dear, oh, no-’
‘Lang, the horror is something you’ve all read into the books. I write about people, about suffering, about-’
Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear-’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’
Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’
‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’
‘It’s exactly that way.’
Lang looked about as if for a secret exit he’d forgotten the exact location of. ‘I suppose we could do something-’
‘My royalty account.’
‘Statements aren’t due yet, you know.’
‘But there’s money you owe me. There always is!’
‘Well, I suppose-Oh, well, of course — as you’re such a pillar of the backlist-’ He rang a little bell. Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a young man materialized in the doorway. Lang cleared his throat. ‘Ask Mr Frewn to step around, please, Meer.’
The heavy footsteps went away, went up some stairs, faded. Lang tapped on his desk. He said, ‘Frewn doesn’t get around as well as he used to.’ Denton put his coat and hat on the floor and crossed his legs. When slow, light footsteps sounded overhead, Lang smiled and murmured, ‘There we are,’ but it was another long silence, marked by increasingly loud footsteps, before a white-haired, bent man looked in. His black suit hung on him, giving him the look of a wet raven. In a surprisingly deep voice, he said, ‘You wanted something?’
‘Mr Denton — you know Mr Denton, one of our best authors, one of our most successful authors, Frewn — would like a cheque for the balance current in his account.’
The old man stared at Lang, then at Denton, as if he couldn’t believe his own rather large ears. ‘A cheque?’
‘Yes. Now, we’ve done this before, Mr Frewn — you remember, I’m sure, it can’t have been more than half a dozen years ago-’
Frewn shook his head. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’
Lang smirked at Denton and muttered, ‘We’ve done it again and again; it’s just-’ He smiled at Frewn. ‘Of course there’s a balance in Mr Denton’s account, Mr Frewn.’
‘No idea.’
‘There is, of course there is. So please, have Mr French write a cheque for the full amount for Mr Denton to take with him when he goes.’
The old man sucked in his breath. ‘Today?’
‘Now, Mr Frewn, this is too bad of you — of course, today — look here, I’m writing it out so you’ll have something on paper, eh? An authorization, all right? “Balance of account to this date, to be paid by cheque-” That’s quite clear, eh?’
He came around the desk and put the sheet of paper into the old man’s hand; he brought it close to his eyes, and his breath hissed in again. He muttered something, in which Denton caught only ‘ruin’, and patted off up the corridor, his voice mumbling on. Denton saw, as he left the doorway, that he was wearing carpet slippers that were almost hidden by remarkably long trousers, possibly somebody else’s, possibly his own from some earlier, longer-legged self.
‘Mr Frewn is rather a character,’ Lang said. ‘Quite the stuff of legend in the firm. I don’t know what we’d do without him.’
‘He’s the accountant?’
‘Ah, no, not-He’s actually a, mm, the-Mmm. Hard to explain — rather a vestige of an older way of-’ He smiled wanly. ‘He’s a kind of bottleneck for anything one wants to get done.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘But things do get done. They really do. You’ll see-’ He tapped some more on his desk, looked at The Nightmare, and, apparently taking inspiration from it, said, ‘Well, this gets no books written. Not to pry, Denton, but — do you want to pay us back the advance on the book you’ve so rashly thrown away?’
‘Of course I don’t. I can’t.’
‘Then-’
‘Then I want to substitute The Machine for it.’
Lang made a face. ‘On the same schedule?’
‘Can’t be done. There isn’t time, Lang.’
‘No-o-o, there isn’t. Well, I suppose an extension of six months-’
‘During which I have to live.’
‘One would assume so, yes. Yes, quite.’ Lang squeezed the bridge of his nose between long, thin fingers. ‘You’re going to ask for more money, aren’t you?’
‘It won’t hurt you to raise the advance on the book I trashed to something like what my books actually command. ’
Lang rapped on the desk with a knuckle. Denton fell silent; it was as if the editor had called a meeting to order. Lang gave another, more decisive rap, and sat up very straight. ‘I told you I have an idea,’ he said.
Denton looked at him, thinking, My God, not a book idea-
‘Transylvania,’ Lang announced. He sat back. ‘There!’
‘Transylvania.’ Denton had the vaguest idea what Transylvania was. He lacked the British elite’s passion for travel, usually for sport — Norway for salmon, Switzerland and beyond for game — and lacked as well the Latin that might have led him to make a translation of the word. But he was honest. ‘What is Transylvania?’
‘Oh, my dear!’ Lang tittered. ‘It’s the far end of the Alps, the place everyone was thinking of when they used to write about haunted castles and ghastly vales and mountain peaks. A place of legend and lore — an
d peasants who speak unintelligible languages.’ He leaned forward. ‘Werewolves! Vampires!’
‘Fairy tales.’
‘My dear Denton, I’ve made a study of vampires. Hardly fairy tales, unless very grown-up ones. Did you know there was a play called The Vampire way back before our dear Queen was crowned? Now Stoker’s gone and written Dracula, and why, oh, why didn’t you get in ahead of him with the idea?’
Denton shook his head. ‘Sucking blood? Doesn’t interest me.’ Although the mind, he thought, of somebody who believed he was a vampire would interest him.
‘The vampire in the old play had to marry a virgin before sunrise or die. Doesn’t that touch a chord in you, man?’ It didn’t, and Denton let his stoic face say so, although he had a brief and bad moment thinking again about his wedding night. Lang put a pleading note into his voice. ‘They rise from the dead!’
‘So do my debts. I need money, Lang.’ He stuck out his lips under his drooping moustache. ‘I can try to finish The Machine in four months, how’s that?’ Lang made a face and Denton said without conviction, ‘I suppose I could write about this man who told me he’d seen a tart murdered — it was in the newspapers-’
‘You cannot! I won’t let you.’ Lang sounded like a petulant child. ‘Real crime’s been quite taken over by the lowest kind of journalist; you’d ruin your reputation by associating with it. Prostitutes. Oh! Unspeakable mutilations, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘No, no — I want literary material, Denton, artistic material. Like the vampire. You may say it’s sensational, and that of course is part of the point, but I believe that there is something in vampirism that touches us. Deeply. Blood — insatiability — the application of great force in pursuit of a perverse sort of desire-’ He sighed and leaned back. ‘You don’t see it, I can tell. Oh, dear.’ He groaned, then threw himself forward to try again. ‘Vampirism could do for you what She-who-must-be-obeyed did for Rider Haggard!’
‘Haggard is claptrap.’
‘But claptrap that touches our souls, Denton! There’s something in his fantastic stuff — something — repellent but irresistible-Something — forbidden-A profoundly desirable horror, how’s that?’
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