The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  “Sounds painful.”

  “It was.”

  “Authors are vain bastards!”

  “So we hear.”

  “See you, Hattie.”

  “Bye now!”

  The Basement

  DEVOUT mainstreamist Cheddar Yolk—bestselling author of Two Guyz, A Gurl, & Aheckafun Part-tay—was rather aggrieved when one Tuesday he was hurled into a grungy basement against his will, left to shiver for an hour in the cold until an overhead light was turned on by a man with deep divots on his scalp in the shape of blooming chrysanthemums, spreading as if in motion along his forehead to form an ace of spades on his right cheek; Brillo-pad hair singed free, leaving only one wiry strand, combed over and enhanced with tattooed-on follicles that traversed the neck to form an amusing caricature of a ramfeezled librarian; and bearish hands with scratches spirocheting at festive levels of engorgement up his knuckles towards his fingertips—this was Alan, the leading experimental writer of his generation and head of the experimental dept. (A mishap with an ethanol-soaked effigy of Stephen King had wiped out a chesterfield, twelve stationery cabinets, and half of his face).

  Cheddar was collared into the lair of the experimentalists: a studio basement where ten restless, twitchy, and hairy men leapt around the room composing prose in every and any form except conventional. A squirrely ginger named Charywarble was making an origami novel, writing a chapter in biro on the twelfth wing of an A5 swan. A scowling goth named Cyphertz was composing an automatic novel by staring into space and typing entirely from her subconscious: the text comprised the words KILL and HATE among two million pages of non sequiturs. A skinny one named Hoopoe lay on the floor channelling his prose through the spirits of the masters, flinging his words upwards after gluing them to beefsteaks— ten mouldering sirloins, forming a curious kind of beefy poetry, dangled from the ceiling. The others included Bryswine, a sweaty ferret composing a book about Shakespeare by whispering the sonnets into a tethered monkey’s ear, proffering a banana for every sentence knuckled onto a fat-keyed keyboard; a skeletal oaf named Mortickle who wrote conventional sentences longhand, administering electric shocks every third sentence to create a sense of mental dislocation and physical extremity in the prose, a technique known as Plathitudinizing; and a squat smirker named Poppov who listened to Beethoven’s symphonies and typed at the speed of the music—slow, laborious description during the legato stretches and wild illegible spurts during the allegro. Because the rest were busy, Cheddar was dragged to a wide-eyed man in his eighties doing nothing in a chair.

  “This is Tendon Palmer. He published books ages ago.”

  “Nice to shake you. I was the first person to write an entire novel through a stick of Blackpool rock. They called it Suck-lit,” he said.

  “Unfortunate name,” Cheddar said.

  “Yes, well. I put my words in people’s mouths.”

  “Must have been a pleasant feeling, having your prose sucked.”

  “The glory days.”

  “Tendon is one of the more balanced of our writers. The others have relapsed into Creative Trances,” Alan said.

  “What you see before you,” Tendon said, “are the last dregs of innovation. Reduced to starveling humps of stuttering desperation. To mewling boils of nevereverness. Sad scientists clinging to their hopeless and bizarre attempts to collapse the totalitarian superstate through writing experimental fiction.”

  “You don’t believe you can change anything?”

  “I’m waiting to die, guy. Sadly the damp atmosphere seems to be proving beneficial to my health. I should have been dead years ago.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I keep the place tidy. I send Horace up to forage for food,” he said. He pointed to Horace, a hulking creature cleaning the floor.

  “Is he a writer?”

  “No, he’s a security guard who ate a radioactive Caramac during the stock dump of ’40. We use him as a janitor and hunter in exchange for loving words and a comfy bed.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’re moving on,” Alan said.

  “It was nice to meet you, Tendon,” Cheddar said.

  “Likewise. Hopefully I’ll be dead before we meet again.”

  “I hope so.”

  Alan sat the irksomely unfazed Cheddar (success made him invulnerable) on an upturned bucket and produced a selection of his bestsellers, including Don’t Gooooo There, Gurlfrenz!, Love Iz Kindza Weirdz Sometimez, and Put Your Heart upon My Shoulder. Alan trained his wild bloodshot eyes on the place where Cheddar’s soul might have been.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What do you have to say for yourself, you vermin?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Just the titles of these books makes me want to tear out your kidneys and use them as Christmas decorations.”

  “What’s Christmas?”

  “Oh, some holiday we used to have ... never mind that. What are you playing at?”

  “Erm ... being a bestselling writer and not some chump in a basement?”

  Alan slapped Cheddar on the cheek. His unfazed face changed to frantic faze as the tears flowed. In the words of Vic Chesnutt, the gravity of the situation became apparent, and Cheddar stammered out his mea culpa.

  “I’m giving them what they want, they want to read about Stacey and her gurlfrenz—”

  “DON’T use that word!”

  “Sorry, sorry, I—”

  “Look. Here’s what is going to happen to you. I am going to brainwash you into believing in experimental techniques by subjecting you to one month of continuous play, and send you back among your own kind to cause untold damage in the department. You are to become one of us.”

  And Alan began immediately, opening the week by melting “inked” butter pats into brioches so upon melting texts would form for a brief second before being devoured; writing stanzas on paper plates to be spun on sticks in the traditional manner, creating a continuous spinning movement of combinatorial poetic variations each unreadable until the spinning stopped, at which point the plates would fall to the ground before reading was possible; red-inking letters onto the backs of ants and following their progress in the anthill and across the woodland, capturing their movements until a coherent text formed from the scrambling army; lying on the ground staring at the clouds until shapes and impressions formed that might make interesting narratives; writing a straightforward literary story, then replacing each word with its opposite meaning, and in the case of words without opposites, using the word SATCHEL; writing long-winded epics onto the walls and setting fire to the walls to create a new fragged-mented text; and other sorts of kooky notions to create illusions of the new.

  As soon as Cheddar was released, he committed suicide by leaping from the roof (he had inked his torso, so the resultant splatter created a very moving text).

  Mhairi

  4

  HELPING maintain food supplies is the most important aspect of what I do. Some floors choose to cultivate a dietary aesthetic, such as the High-Quality Literary Fiction department, which prefers to subside on a diet of Madeira cake and sherry, whereas others aren’t particularly fussy what is served. To save, I usually import damaged produce from the Netherlands, or send raiders to steal day-old pastries from the ScotCall Compound bins. This has caused some issues, notably instances of tooth cave spiders in tuna; Alabama cave shrimps in ambrosia creamed rice; Salt Creek tiger beetles in oxtail and leek soup; dysderid spiders in Highland spring water; Xenobolus carniflex millipedes in porridge oats; chinstrap penguins in raspberry marmalade; and on several occasions, Bengal tigers in tubes of toothpaste. The scarring effect of seeing a wild Bengal tiger leaping from the tip of a spearmint double-stripe toothpaste tube cannot be understated. This aberration is caused by products dumped through charities in Third World countries and returned to the distribution sites in the Netherlands unchecked. Unused toothpaste supplies must have been raided by the tiger, who climbed into the tubes to explor
e, and accidentally sealed themselves inside. C.D. Joelson went to the bathroom to brush his teeth one evening and spotted a hungry Bengal tiger crouching in his bath and narrowly managed to escape with only a gash down his chest and several loose intestines. These tigers are still roaming the building and, as a protected species, cannot be shot or wrestled unless they kill a writer first. If a tiger is seen on the stairwell, the procedure is to stand still and hope it doesn’t smell your fear—or, as I do, carry a piece of meat in your pocket at all times and direct the tiger towards the scrap. This can occasionally have repercussions, as when C.B. Radio wore a blazer full of rancid lamb and was mauled by two hunting Bengalis and devoured in the hallway. Diseases can sometimes be imparted via less-than-fresh foodstuffs. The following conditions are to be watched out for: bacterial vaginosis in chocolate brioches, diffuse sclerosis in custard, and Melkersson-Rosenthal syndrome in chocolate gateaux. I have designated a special staffroom for those afflicted with diseases (unkindly called the Leper Lounge), where drugs and treatments are hurled in until folks are cured. There was once the unusual case of C.D. Grunge, more on whom later.

  Cal’s Tour

  Science Fiction

  MY pop-up Irn-Bru book Whet Yer Whistles had been no-noed by CHAD and my ideas dried up (with 100 people beavering away on the same topic, original ideas are scarce), so I moseyed up to the fourth floor. Here, a suitably science-fictional wallpaper with swirling black holes, stars, shuttles, and quasars, styles the scenery. In the centre of a large office, four men sit around a saucer-shaped table, curving inwardly towards an antenna in the middle, where books are stacked up its protruding prongs. The carpet is modelled on Mars, with flaming craters streaking along its sensual furriness, and pinned to a back-wall notice board are sliced magazine and newspaper articles, outlining the latest advances in science or supernatural freakeries, with Post-it stickers saying DONE or MAYBE to indicate what ideas have already been filched and pounded into pulpy prose. The writers are middle-aged males in chequered huntsman shirts, unwarty, with partial beards, bestubbled faces, or burgeoning beer bellies. The writers define their depression thus: all ideas for truly innovative SF novels are no longer possible because every nightmare scenario conceivable in the human imagination has come true in the real world, beyond what even the cruellest minds could dream up. They are reduced to writing space operas, alien warfare sagas, zany robot comedies, and stuff about evil bacteria.

  They explained on my first day. “You have a new idea,” Patrick said, “and you’re halfway through a novel, when you open the paper to discover it’s already happened. Last month I finished a new work about a hi-tech prison on Mars. I pick up the ScotCall Science Express the next day and discover NASA have already began terraforming Mars to reduce overcrowding on Earth and make the planet streamlined and free from riff-raff. They’re sending all the degenerate elements to Mars to create a more sustainable family-centred Earth for the future. In my novel, a prison riot breaks out on Mars, and an interplanetary skirmish erupts.” He has stubble. “I wrote a story last week about cyborg elephants,” Paul said. “Lo and behold, I open the ScotCall Herald one morning to see that the cyborg animals in a new cyborg zoo have gone on the rampage!” He has a beer belly. “I wrote about this new drug that cures cancer,” Pete said, “but makes the user’s limbs expand in size. Opened the Scot-Call Enquirer last week to discover they’ve found a cure for cancer that gives the patient an encephalitic head.” He has a partial beard. “My first book was an unfunny comic novel,” Park said, “about a dystopian future where all the world’s artists are rounded up into a building in the middle of nowhere and made to fend for themselves in a society that treats culture with contempt. Can you ever imagine such a thing?” There was irony beneath his partial beard. “This is our problem, Cal. How do you write about a species in relapse when the species has already reverted back to Cro-Magnon status, working its way back via troglodyte to tetrapod?” Paul asked.

  Hackwork may be your fate, but this floor boasts the most interesting cupboards. One night, sockwalking along the Martian carpet, trying to prise an original SF concept from my unstirred imaginarium, my socks led me to a sequence of colour-coded closets containing vortexes to alternate realities. A former writer had constructed these portals to new hypothetical realms in between writing his novels, and since his defection to ScotCall, they had remained active but unused. The first vortex was a pretty purple swirl powered by the music of Jon Secada, which showed the user the world as it was several weeks after his or her death. I stepped into the purple blaze to a closed closet door on the other side, like walking through fog. No corporeal transgressions or powerful sensations. I opened the opposite door into the same office where the four writers sat at the saucer scratching their stubbles. I was invisible as I passed by. The second vortex, a yellow swirl powered by The Doors, inverts your present reality. I passed into an office where an army of writers was clacking out SF books for a ravenous population of readers, rattling off one a day to meet the demands of a book-devouring audience queuing in the corridor, itching to get their mitts on the latest book hot off the keys. The queuers hopped like meerkats in expectation. Some passed out from the tension. Others were sexually aroused and humped against the wall. A few were so desperate to read a new sentence, they leapt over the barriers to the writer and read over his shoulder, being dragged to the back of the queue by the security heavies, where they collapsed in a mess of despair and ecstasy!

  I fled the madness before they spotted me (famous, of course), and poked my head into the basement. Here, the authors of trashy bestsellers sat in a hot fanless room slowly handwriting their works on nonentities. The top floor was my next destination and I took the functioning lift, basking in the bustle of the building. The tower block had moved to a city entirely populated by identical tower blocks packed with writers and readers. The top floor was floor #147. Up top, the experimental writers (normally in the basement) were luxuriating in chaises longues and sipping cognac, delegating their writing duties to sexy minions. A documentary crew was filming their achievements. The skinny one named Hoopoe who lay back flat flinging beef at the ceiling was talking suavely about his pioneering technique of strapping various sentences channelled through the Immortal Bard to beefsteaks in order to symbolise the inhumanity of man to bovine, while Bryswine the sweaty ferret was clad in the full Oscar Wilde wardrobe, sipping wine and spooning caviar into his hole while whip-cracking a tethered monkey into adding another thousand gobbledybooks to his Shakesimian messterpiece. The others vomited forth about their art: the value of their works to the essentiality of living. I stopped a Cyphertz groupie in the corridor to ask about ScotCall. It was a crumbling shack on the outskirts of Crarsix where desperate phonewhores eked out a useless living selling advice to ill-read dolts. Naturally!

  My sister Kirsty turned up one week to try and trump me as a writer. A fan of random revenges, she hightailed her pony and mussed up her locks for a staticky artist style—a van de Graaphic coltish voltage—and moseyed over to the despairing writers. She believed her ideas were amazing because she believed she was amazing and so any product from her must, by simple logical deduction, be amazing too. The writers sat stunned that a creature of such attractiveness had appeared from nowhere and was talking at them with such unlicensed pluck—the fact of her femaleness sparked some sexual memories, despite having long ago shut down their libidos to lead lives of asexual hermitry. “All right,” she said, bounding before the noticeboard where she made herself a pitching platform. “So how about this alien and this robot fight over a hot human, but at the end we discover the hot human is a hologram? Or how about there’s this planet where everyone has like huge chins and everyone in the universe laughs at them until in the next interplanetary war, they’re called up to use their chins to deflect asteroids, and everyone respects them, before having them killed and their chins served to the alpha-species as lunch? Or how about this super-whizz space computer is outsmarted by a really thick little urchin bo
y, and the whole universe becomes a dribbling mess of brainless duncery?” There was stunned silence. “What do you mean becomes?” Park said. “Or this planet where everyone has to shag thirty times a day to survive, and these two horny guys from Earth are dropped there only to discover their libidos aren’t as restless as they bragged they were? Maybe they’re locked up and fitted with artificial cocks? Or how about this: two preggo women give birth to alien squids who strangle their mothers afterwards and all the dads have to raise the alien squids as their own kids, and later the human race can only be saved by inseminating a virgin who hates kids but who has to gestate the last remaining baby from some dude’s magic sperm and save the human race.” I offered a sarcastic cough. “Is anyone writing these down?” Pete asked.