Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Looks just like his daddy. You’re lucky you got him. Lucky you got both those pretty children.”

  After saying she knew it and stroking Teddy’s head as if to acquire by touch an iota of his practical glamour, she led Sister C. across the hall to her study. The unplugged Exceleriter emitted from its contoured surfaces only the cold gleam of blue metal. The eldritch luminosity with which it had earlier burst on Stevie’s sight had wholly faded away.

  A typewriter is a typewriter is a typewriter, Stevie thought, beholding it, almost feeling friendly toward it again. The machine had not conspired against her. It had suffered ill usage and demonic takeover at the hands of a pudgy blond fiend with great manual dexterity and a masturbatory fixation on his own mother. Sister Celestial had called him “a potion of free-floatin’ cosmic evil,” but everyone had good and bad days, and maybe the Sister had overstated the case to keep Stevie from underestimating her opponent during their showdown. In any event, you could not hold this unfortunate machine accountable for Seaton’s many despicable villainies.

  Or could you?

  “Plug it in and type on it,” the Sister said. “Before I leave, that is.”

  Although Stevie grasped the advisability of having a friend nearby when she tried the Exceleriter again, her gut flip-flopped and her hands trembled. However, she had a clean sheet of paper in the machine (in an effort to comply with the Sister’s suggestion) when it turned itself on and rapidly typed out the following sentimental imperative:

  GO TO HELL, YOU INTERFERING SLUTS.

  Stevie yanked the paper free of the platen and the plug from the wall socket.

  “You got to get shut of it, Stevie.”

  “Shut of it?”

  “Scrap it. Destroy it. Two choices only: one to drive to Columbus and shoot Seaton Benecke, and the other to take the typewriter he’s corrupted and put it out of your misery.’’

  “It cost Ted seven hundred dollars, Betty. It’s my livelihood.”

  “Murder a man or cast off a machine. It’s your choice. Either way you’ll find a type of salvation from this week-long nightmare you been suffering.”

  “Do you plan to destroy your Remington?”

  This unexpected question gave the Sister pause. “I don’t use mine the way you do—not usually. I’ll have to see. If it keeps misbehavin’, though, I’ll hafta scrap it, whether Emmanuel Berthelot gave it to my daddy for a heirloom or not, and he most certainly did.”

  “Will you help me lose mine?”

  “Stevie, you’ve got to do it yourself. I suggest tomorrow afternoon about the same time your typewriter broke down last Tuesday. That’ll round off the week ’n’ wrap up the whole episode nice and neat.”

  “What if Benecke comes back? And the monkeys—” Stevie nodded toward Marella’s bedroom—“they’re still here, Benecke’s familiars, haunting my attic and closets.”

  “One thing at a time, Stevie.”

  “But—”

  “Destroy the Exceleriter. Everything else’ll line right up.”

  This advice did not sit well (the Sister had lost her bearings in Chapter Forty-seven, as even she had admitted), but the capuchins had vanished from sight and scrapping her typewriter was preferable to murdering the man who had set them loose. Therefore, she bit her tongue and acquiesced in the Sister’s less than infectious self-confidence. Her reasoning seemed to be that you could not deal absolute evil a single devastating knockout punch, but must wear it down with elusive footwork and a cunning series of debilitating body blows. To shoot young Benecke would eliminate the vessel containing Sister C.’s “potion of free-floatin’ cosmic evil,” but the poisonous substance itself would thereby increase and flow into other empty human voids. You could not accurately tabulate the number of times that frightened folks had unwittingly contributed to the world’s stores of evil by assuming a divine commission to exhaust these stores utterly. . . .

  Downstairs Stevie asked the Sister’s permission to take a quick look at the chapters in the carpetbag, now that they had run Seaton off and settled the question of what Stevie must do next. What harm, at this stage, a supervised peek at her own story’s final paragraphs? How would it be possible for her to feel more manipulated and volitionless than she did now? The Sister plainly did not care for the tenor of Stevie’s inquiries, but, allowing that she deserved consideration for her spunky steadfastness in the attic, the prophetess relented and bent to extract the paper-clipped pages from her carryall.

  But like the slide tray in the projector, the carpetbag was found to be empty, and Stevie and Sister C. looked at each other and divested themselves of imperceptible, unhappy shrugs. Maybe the intruder who had plummeted through the ceiling had made off with this important evidence, although, thinking back, Stevie could hardly credit the notion. Seaton, the author of his own hurried escape and their present befuddlement, had had no time to rifle the carpetbag.

  “Another no-account conjuration,” the Sister said. “But we’ve still got him whipped. Just do what I told you.”

  After the Sister left, Stevie returned to the kitchen and tried to clean up the fallen insulation and the fractured gypsum board. Too bad Marella’s remarkable command of inanimate objects had not communicated itself to her. If it had, a Wonder Woman of the parlous night, she would have finished in a finger snap. As it was, she did not get to bed until 2:45 A.M., and did not fall dreamlessly asleep until much, much later.

  XLIX

  Teddy and Marella ate their Rice Krispies casting skeptical glances at the hole over the kitchen table. Stevie told them that she had dropped a carton of books between the joists while trying to evict the clutter up there. Although they accepted this explanation faster than they would have a synopsis of the events that had actually taken place, their glances both at the ceiling damage and back and forth between themselves suggested that only a Crazy Woman would have sought to do her attic cleaning unassisted at such an hour. Poor Old Mom had gone off her gourd again, even after a carefree outing to Columbus on Sunday. Stevie, lifting a cup of coffee to her lips, strove to discredit this judgment by asking in responsible maternal fashion how they had slept.

  “Okay,” said Teddy.

  “Fine,” piped Marella. “Butcept I had a funny dream about my animals. I was leading them in a parade . . . something like that.”

  “Stupid,” Teddy said. “Sounds like a Shirley Temple movie.”

  This assessment of Marella’s dream precipitated an argument that Stevie interrupted with a threat. She would dock the allowance of the next kid who spoke a provocative or disparaging word. Her threat clotured debate, and, a few minutes later, the kids left for school, mumbling about holes in the ceiling and the cruel February cold. Stevie lingered over the Constitution’s daily scrambled-word game with the nub of an obtuse pencil (none of the words in the paper were unjumbling for either her or it), her coffee cooling beside her.

  According to Sister C., she must scrap her Exceleriter, put it out of her life as she would a two-timing man. How was she going to accomplish this pressing task? At the moment she had no idea. Nor did she wish to think about the question much. She kept trying to solve the Jumble.

  An hour or so later a caller’s knocks rattled the windowpane in her front door, and Stevie hurried to see if Seaton Benecke had come back. Instead she saw an employee of the United Parcel Service—not an obvious imposter, either, but a balding fellow in a dark brown uniform—who lifted for her inspection as she neared the door a small package wrapped in whitish-brown paper. Observing that the man’s truck stood beneath the tulip tree where Sister Celestial had parked last night, Stevie greeted the UPS man, signed for the package, and stepped back into the foyer to tear the paper off and examine the object inside. She was only a little surprised to find the editorial offices of the Briar Patch Press in Atlanta listed as the return address, but greatly more alarmed to discover herself holding a mint-condition copy of the novel that David-Dante Maris had promised, during their telephone talk, to send to her. Afte
r all, that talk had never taken place. . . .

  Her fingers numb, Stevie returned to the kitchen to study this impossible artifact. The dust-jacket photo of the author showed a man in coy silhouette, well disguised by shadows and glare, one hand reaching toward the camera as if to wrench it from the person wielding it in his presence. The room in which the author affected this theatrical stance appeared as vast and lonely as an unoccupied gymnasium or warehouse. Stevie thought at once of the typewriter graveyard in the rear of Hamlin Benecke & Sons in Columbus. She flipped the book over and turned to the title page:

  THE TYPING

  One Week in the Life

  of the Madwoman of Wickrath County

  A Novel of Contemporary Horror

  A. H. H. Lipscombe

  THE BRIAR PATCH PRESS • ATLANTA

  What else should she have expected? Young Benecke, who claimed to have no talent for writing, had perhaps proved this deceptive contention by making her the protagonist of “A Novel of Contemporary Horror.” The Typing, of all ghastly, self-descriptive entitlements! Under, to boot, the superstodgy pseudonym A. H. H. Lipscombe, as if he were the H. P. Lovecraft of the 1980s or the J. R. R. Tolkien of American horror fiction, a spinner of gruesome fables and noisome provincial epics. The most intolerable horror that Stevie could imagine was to awaken to the fact that one such busy literary dung beetle had imprisoned her in the fetid brood ball of a narrative. That was exactly what Benecke had done to her—made her a character in a book, the book she was now riffling in helpless obedience to its sentence-by-sentence dictates.

  Stevenson Crye—her friends called her Stevie—was nearing the end of her feature story on detection-and-diagnosis procedures at the West Georgia Cancer Clinic in Ladysmith when a cable inside her typewriter . . .

  And farther on:

  The day had gone scratchy and sour. Not even a gross of Sucrets would take away the soreness and sweeten . . .

  And farther still:

  The editor-in-chief of the Briar Patch Press, Inc., again chuckled heartily. “Oh, I’m still here, Mrs. Crye. We’re both still here, me up here in Hot’lanta and you down there . . .”

  And even farther yet:

  Teddy and Marella ate their Rice Krispies casting skeptical glances at the hole over the kitchen table. . . .

  Well, no matter what Seaton Benecke, alias A. H. H. Lipscombe, thought, she had a life and a will apart from those he attributed to her in this trendy chiller from the Briar Patch Press. Evidence of her independence sprang from a variety of sources, almost invisible because they were psychological. Today, for instance, she did not feel like a character in a book, but like a human being in control of her future, if not necessarily of this fleeting scene. Moreover, she harbored a healthy contempt for any mind trying to foist a pre-set pattern upon her movements, and she believed she could defeat it by exerting herself to that end. Maybe the best evidence of the bankruptcy of The Seaton Benecke Version—this almost three-hundred-page opus in her hands—revealed itself in the startling omission of the novel’s final chapter, for the pages after the last Roman-numeral heading were snow-white blanks.

  Until, that is, you came to some pages entitled “Author’s Open Remarks to Filmmakers in Search of Hot Commercial Properties.” These remarks, which Stevie scanned, read as follows:

  I wrote, or typed, the gripping story you have just read, The Typing, for one purpose only: to sell it to the movies. People like to watch television and go to the movies. They do not usually like to read unless they have nothing better (i.e., more urgent, more profitable, or more fun) to do.

  Typing prose requires an expenditure of energy, even when it only grunts or sputters along, but because many movies begin as books, we must keep writing them as stepping-stones to fame and fortune. Maybe you have just read this story because a Hollywood studio or an independent filmmaker of real ambition has hired you to search for “hot commercial properties.” If so, you have come to the right place.

  “But wait,” you may object, “a novel in which a typewriter goes berserk and starts composing at the behest of a demonic would-be writer does not readily lend itself to effective visual treatment. A typewriter only sits and types. It does not emote.”

  That is the challenge that this highly original story poses any talented new filmmaker. Cunning camera angles, imaginative crosscuts, and compelling special effects will enable you to turn the stationary PDE Exceleriter into a character as vivid and engaging as R2-D2 in Star Wars. Further, in Chapter Forty-four I have introduced a scene in which my inanimate, unplugged machine emits an eerie glow. No director worth his salt can fail to simulate a believable eerie glow, and the march of the toy animals in Chapter Forty-eight contains parenthetical reference to Disney’s Fantasia. Only the most blinkered film executive would dismiss The Typing as a potential “hot commercial property” because one of its major characters happens to be a typewriter.

  Besides, I have also included capuchin monkeys and several human beings, the most important of the latter being the widowed writer Stevenson Crye. The monkeys may be effectively played by unknowns, but an actress of great beauty, talent, and box-office appeal should take the part of Stevie. In descending order of preference my choices include Meryl Streep, Sally Field, and Goldie Hawn, all of whom I have written anonymous letters of undying love, in either crayon or felt-tipped marker. I am myself available for the role of Seaton Benecke, although to maintain the integrity of my two parallel careers, I would of course play it under a name other than A. H. H. Lipscombe.

  Incidentally, I have left the final chapter out of the published version of my novel to pique the curiosity of potential filmmakers and those members of the film-going public who have chanced upon my book by mistake. To learn the details of its finale, the former need only hire me to do a screenplay and the latter to turn out in droves for the forthcoming celluloid translation of my dream. Those few of you who purchased the book expecting to find it complete in this volume should hang on to your sales receipts, which, later, you may redeem at box-office windows for half the full ticket price for admission to the movie. Rest assured that I will not sell an option on The Typing that does not include a clause to this effect.

  Whoever makes the film adaptation of The Typing will of course have first shot at my next “hot commercial property,” for which project, having by then learned the ropes on this one, I will probably wish to act not only as screenwriter and supporting star but also as producer and technical advisor. For more information, please contact David-Dante Maris at the Briar Patch Press in Atlanta.

  —“A. H. H. Lipscombe”

  Columbus, Georgia

  “Jesus,” mumbled Stevie when she had read this document, but, truth to tell, she recognized in herself a certain sheepish admiration for the chutzpah animating it. Seldom did writers laboring in one arena admit so openly that they were whoring for the chance to enter another. Probably, his mother having failed both to take on the full weight of his unreasonable emotional dependency and to still the tingle of his adolescent libido, Seaton had decided to write exploitative potboilers as a means of gaining entry to the boudoirs of Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, et al. The poor deluded twerp. His fantasy was itself the subject matter of exploitative potboilers. Even more than Stevie, he belonged in a novel full of amateurish sociological speculations and pseudo-Freudian character analyses. The poignantly transparent twerp . . .

  Whereupon Stevie read the author’s brazen addendum and grew angrier and angrier the closer she read.

  First, although Seaton Benecke, alias A. H. H. Lipscombe, might contrive to sell the film rights to those portions of his manuscript surrounding her story “The Monkey’s Bride,” he had no legal claim to the story itself. If he sought to profit from her creative labor, well, she would sue the bastard. Any film version of The Typing appropriating even a single line of dialogue from “The Monkey’s Bride” would invite litigation, and she would stick Benecke and his film-producer cohorts for all the punitive damages they
could handle. Indeed, she secretly hoped they would try to pull a fast one.

  Second, outside of being a moderately attractive female, Stevie did not look very much like Meryl Streep, Sally Field, or Goldie Hawn. She more nearly resembled a mature, somewhat muted Sissy Spacek, and Sissy Spacek with her natural command of a variety of Sun Belt accents and locutions would sound more like the real Stevie, too. Besides, she would willy-nilly communicate to the film-going public a degree of that fragile ambience still adhering to her from Brian De Palma’s Carrie. A fragile ambience waiting to erupt. It was hardly Ms. Spacek’s fault that Seaton had failed to write her a single anonymous letter of undying love in crayon or felt-tipped marker.

  Third, Seaton’s calculated omission of his final chapter deserved only contempt. That the Briar Patch Press had gone along with this cynical scheme branded Maris and his associates the kind of small-time operators whose example they purported to despise. You did not deliberately leave the last few pages out of a book if you were a quality publisher with the interests of your readers, as well as your sales figures, at heart. Moreover, Stevie told herself, this strategy might well backfire on young Benecke. In fact, she would see to it that it did. She would sharpen her pencil nub with a kitchen knife and compose an acceptable ending herself. The blank pages before Seaton’s self-serving appeal to “Filmmakers in Search of Hot Commercial Properties” would serve her for folded foolscap. She would skewer Seaton thereon and thereby save herself.