by Mal Peet
She leaned forward to take another. The photographer was standing on a chair behind her in order to get a high angle. As Dyana moved in on the canapés he took the photograph that became the most memorable of the many portraits of Philip Murdstone. In it, his collar and tie are loosened and the unbuttoned cuff of his shirtsleeve hangs Byronically. His elbow rests on the arm of the sofa, and his chin rests on the fingers of his right hand. The fingers of his left hand are pressed against his chest. He looks slightly younger than he really is. His hair is gently disordered, as if by the uplift of intense thought. His legs sprawl apart; the body language suggests that he is either defenceless or immune. The expression on his face is equally enigmatic: it might convey benign surprise, sudden amusement, even slight alarm. In the foreground, slightly out of focus, is the back of the head and upper torso of Dyana Kornbester. The feared critic of the NYR is reaching forward to stab at Philip’s monkfish goujons with a cocktail stick.
*
In the cab en route to WNYM Minerva said, ‘You OK, Mister Murdstone?’
‘Never perkier.’
‘You’re sure you’re not too pissed? In the English sense of the word?’
‘Whatever makes you think that?’
‘The fact that you’ve been glugging champers since breakfast.’
He turned his head to look at her. Her profile was backlit by changing shades of neon. ‘I was all right in the interviews, wasn’t I? They went OK?’
‘Oh, more than OK. Beautifully. You were magisterial, darling. You even managed to be charming when you were being snotty. You had that hard-nosed bitch Kornbester eating out of your hand.’
‘I thought she was sweet.’
‘Sweet? You know what they call her, behind her back? Dyana Thesaurus Rex. She eats writers’ heads for lunch, broiled, on a bed of thistles.’
‘She certainly has a hearty appetite.’
The cab driver reached up and adjusted his mirror. The back of his head was shaved into runic patterns like crop circles in a burnt wheat-field.
‘Hey, ’scuse me,’ he said. ‘I catch the name Murdstone? You the same Murdstone, the Dark Entry guy?’
‘Er, yes, I—’
‘Hey, respeck. That is some good shit, man. I loved it. Loved it. I wanna tell you sumpun. There’s a buncha kids in my hood, mean little motherfuckahs? Used to call ’emselves The Fire Crew, sumpun like that? Now they call themselves The Swelts. You unnerstan what I’m saying? You made it, man. You street. You mind signin’ my copy? I got it up here with me.’
‘I’d be delighted to.’
The driver held the book up. The covers were buckled. ‘You wanna make it out to Legion? My name is Legion.’
Minerva gazed out at the flowing lights, the eddying souls on the sidewalk. ‘Hell’s teeth,’ she said very quietly.
‘But I suppose, Tip, the real answer to your question is that until recently I was too young to be truly original.’
Tip Reason leaned closer to his microphone and chuckled. It was the sound of honey trickling from the rock. ‘I know the feeling.’ He sighed. ‘Philip, it’s been a true pleasure. I could talk to you all night. But we’re out of time, and it feels like a personal tragedy.’
He glanced across at the window into the control room. The young Korean man wearing a headset raised a single finger.
Tip said, ‘You have been listening intently to The Tip Reason Show, which nourishes the mind, brought to you by the makers of True To Life Dietary Supplements, which nourish the body. Our guest tonight was Philip Murdstone, author of the astonishing mega-seller Dark Entropy, published by Gorgon. If you just missed it, weep. And tune in at the right time next week, when my guest will be an old favourite on The Tip Reason Show, Tom Pynchon. He and I will be discussing the latest volume of his autobiography. Until then, you’ll just have to try to cope without us. Goodnight.’
The red light on the studio wall changed to green.
Philip said, ‘I do hope that was all right.’
Tip smiled. The bright regular teeth were a surprise in the dark pudgy face. He said into the mike, ‘Kim? Philip wants to know if that was all right.’
A click, then the sound engineer’s voice emerged from a speaker that Philip could not see. ‘Not orright. Boodifuh. Mr Murdstone is a radio naturah, I think. The accent is so nice.’
‘There you go, sweetheart,’ Tip said. ‘If Kim says you were beautiful, you were beautiful. He knows about these things.’
Back out in the reception room, Tip put a hand on the small of Philip’s back, then slid it downwards and curled the fingers inwards and upwards. Philip felt his trouser cuffs lift a few centimetres further from the floor.
‘Gosh,’ he said; he sounded almost rueful.
He looked across at Minerva, who rolled her eyes, smiling.
10
He sat at a long black table. Its feet and his own feet and those of the chair he sat on and of the people in the queue were lost in a low cloud of dry ice. Behind him, his vast photographic portrait hung from the ceiling on almost invisible wires. At either end of the table, Gorgon security men with wires coming out of their ears kept careful watch. The queue was apparently endless; he was vaguely aware of disturbances on the sidewalk outside the bookstore. His aching right hand dedicated copy after copy of Dark Entropy.
‘Thank you. I’m so happy that you enjoyed it.’
‘Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoy it.’
One book he took to sign was significantly heavier than the others. It looked just like the others but felt about a hundred pages longer. He felt a chill in his lower body which he recognized as fear.
He wanted to know what was in the extra pages but did not dare to look.
He didn’t want to look up at the customer but had to.
Child-sized, but not a child. Clad in a greenish coat with a hood that shadowed the upper part of the smooth white face. Two small green lights where the eyes should be.
Philip let out a fearful cry.
The Gorgon man on his right leaped over the table and seized the hooded creature, grappling him to the floor. When he stood up he was gripping an empty coat and the creature had vanished. The Gorgon man turned to Philip, grunting frustration. He had the face of a Swelt.
Philip sat up while the room was still full of his cry. The two green eyes watched him from a distance. Eventually he understood that they were the small lights on the air-conditioning unit. His brain flickered with nonsensical memory like a rebooted laptop, then steadied, showing a darkened hotel room.
The bedsheet was wet. Piss?
No, sweat. Christ.
Red digits winked at him from the bedside: 3.24 A.M. In a series of panicky robotic movements he found the light switch, crossed the room, opened a door, saw a row of twitching coat hangers, tried another door. The harsh bathroom light came on automatically. He washed his face, drank water from his cupped hand, dried himself with an impossibly soft towel.
‘I have had a dream,’ he said aloud.
‘I do not have dreams.’
‘This does not happen to me.’
The man in the mirror who looked more or less like him said, ‘None of this happens to you.’
Philip, in GarBellon costume and beard, having been comprehensively photographed by both fixed and hand-held cameras, was escorted into Digital Realization Studio 3. A glass wall separated an array of technology from the performance floor, a space twice the size of a squash court in which a maze of blue partitions had been devised. Minerva, trembling slightly from nicotine deprivation, was not very deep in conversation with Jerzy Karmakemelian, the show’s director.
‘Philip,’ Jerzy cried, spotting him. ‘Welcome to the Warlock’s Workshop. Seems to me like you’re the only one properly dressed.’
‘Ah yes, thank you,’ Philip said, fingering beard-frond out of his mouth. ‘Was I all right? Did the pictures come out OK?’
Jerzy looked puzzled for a second. ‘Come out? Oh, yeah. We had a coupla gremlins locked them u
p right at the beginning, but we fixed it. Come over to the desk and we’ll check it out.’
He led Philip and Minerva to where two men and a woman sat in swivel chairs churning images through a bank of monitor screens.
‘Hal? Have we imported Philip yet?’
Hal was a bald person who looked approximately thirteen. He said, ‘Twenty-seven seconds.’
‘Cool. So then how about we give him a taste of what we’re gonna do to him?’
‘Sure,’ Hal said, still watching his screen. Three dialogue boxes popped up, which he rapidly mouse-clicked into oblivion. The screen turned purest blue. Hal patted the seat of the chair next to his own. ‘Sit, maestro.’
Philip hoisted up the skirts of his shamanistic robes and sat.
‘OK,’ Hal said. ‘Let’s bring you in on what we call a bloop. We’re still working on the Dark Entropy mats, so we’ll bring you in through a generic. That OK?’
‘Absolutely.’
Hal clicked his mouse and the screen filled with icons. ‘Right, er … yeah. This’ll do.’
He clicked again and a sky appeared. A brooding greenish sky above a circle of stone monoliths. Hal parked his cursor towards the top right of the scene.
‘The dialogue comes through a different matrix and it ain’t ready yet, so I can’t make you speak. But I can patch in an entry dub for now. Here we go.’
Where Hal’s cursor had been there now occurred a sort of writhing in the sky. A tiny, pinkish-white, three-dimensional nodule materialized. Simultaneously, there came from somewhere a faint noise that swelled alarmingly into the sound of an angry rattlesnake being thrashed against a cymbal. As it did so, the nodule enlarged and unfurled like a hirsute haemorrhoid extruded from a vent in the spacio-temporal continuum. It ripened into the head of Murdstone-GarBellon. Its mouth moved silently. It scowled. Then, to the reverse of the first sound, it was sucked back into the louring nothingness from which it had emerged.
‘That’s your basic bloop,’ Hal said. ‘We can bring you in on a bolt of lightning, and other stuff. There’s a really cool one we’re working on where you’re like ripples in a chalice of blood.’
‘Brilliant,’ Minerva said, and snuck a look at her watch.
Philip sat gazing like a stunned carp at the point of his vanishing.
The restaurant was lit only by guttering candles within lanterns cunningly wrought from recovered materials. On the ceiling, dots of luminous paint replicated a desert starscape. The music was a slow thrilling lament for lost erotic opportunities. On other divans other diners conducted their business in murmurs. The food was soft, delectable, unidentifiable. Minerva and Philip ate it reclining on embroidered cushions that smelled vaguely of beautiful animals in oestrus.
She reached over and laid a hand lightly on his wrist. ‘OK? Nice place?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘Did I do well? You like it here?’
He swallowed something that might have been marinaded suckling kid, then focused on her liquescent eyes. He tried on a smile that had once belonged to Cary Grant.
‘Well, it’s a long way from Flemworthy.’
‘I can think of no higher commendation. More wine?’ She poured from a smoked glass carafe with an antique silver stopper. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you’ve done fantastically well this last couple of days. I’m quite awed, actually. You have been a revelation. An absolute bloody revelation.’
‘Thank you, Minerva.’
‘Oh piss off, Murdstone,’ she said tenderly. ‘The thanks travel in the other direction. I can admit this now, OK? I was ever so slightly dreading it. No, I was, really. I’ve brought clients to New York before, and some of them have screwed up most awfully.’
‘Really? Who?’
‘When they’re all dead, you can read my memoirs. No, what I was going to say was that you’ve handled it, all of it, like a true pro. Taken to fame and fortune like a duck to Chablis. And I know why. And so do you, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘It’s because you bloody love it, Phil. Simple as that.’
‘Well, I … It has its moments, I must say.’
Minerva studied his face, nodding seriously as though at some slow-dawning mystery. Then she lowered her eyes to her glass, unable to meet his gaze any longer. ‘It does. And I think this might be the moment for me to make a certain … confession. Something I’ve been wanting to say to you for some time. But we haven’t had many private moments, have we?’
She glanced at him; she might have blushed, although the dim lighting made it uncertain. But he was stirred by the discrepancy between her demure expression and the languorous dispersal of her limbs upon the divan.
He tried to say ‘No’, but a sudden tightness in his throat reduced the syllable to a dry ejaculation. He swallowed wine from his trembling glass.
‘When I, that first time, finished reading the manuscript of Dark Entropy,’ Minerva began hesitantly, ‘I was, well, as I’ve told you, amazed. Astounded. I heard birdsong.’ She smiled. ‘Well, it was five o’clock in the morning. But you know what I mean. And what I thought, OK, was I don’t know this man at all. You know what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Because I knew straight away that you’d produced something huge. And do you know what? It frightened me.’
‘God. Did it?’
‘Yes. Because I knew that all this’ – her small gesture suggested that her client’s global success and this intimate moment were the same thing – ‘was inevitable. And I seriously doubted that you were up to it. I thought about your seriousness. Your self-imposed rustic exile. Your privacy. Your integrity. I imagined you crushed and wilting under the weight of the world’s attentions. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. So here I am thinking, again, I don’t know this man at all. You’re a series of unfolding bloody enigmas, Philip Murdstone. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about you.’
He was deeply moved by this confession of inadequacy. He put out a hand in the general direction of her shoulder, but she shrank away from it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t touch me. Not yet. There’s something else I need to say. In a previous life’ – and here she frowned with the effort of recalling the memory – ‘I said to you something like, “Write me a book that’ll make loads of money, then you can go back to writing about inadequate boys”. Remember that?’
‘Erm, yes, I think so. I had the Mexican Platter. It—’
‘So, OK, here we are. We have made boodles of money, like I said we would. And now the moment has arrived, OK, when I release you from your bond. Like whassisname, Prospero and Ariel. We can call it a day, now. I dare say you’ve been spending the time between celebrity engagements developing a new novel about a boy with OCD or something. Tell me about it.’ She leaned toward him attentively. The movement deepened her cleavage; the single pearl on her pendant was softly enfolded.
Philip managed to disguise a sob of desire as a thoughtful clearing of the throat. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not really. I mean. I hadn’t thought. No.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Believe me.’
‘I could probably sell it to somebody now.’
‘It’s not that. There isn’t anything.’
‘We could sleep on it. You could tell me in the morning. You might feel differently then.’
‘I’m sure I would. But not about this.’
Minerva plunged a hand into her tumbling hair and lifted it. She consulted the astrological ceiling of the restaurant. ‘OK,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you. I realize what it must have cost you to say that. I respect you for it.’ She pressed her teeth into her moist lower lip. ‘So,’ she said.
‘So,’ he said. It came out higher-pitched than he’d intended.
‘Part two of the trilogy, then. What d’you reckon? Three months? Four, tops? You go like a fucking train, Phil, once you’ve got started. You obviously know where we’re going. Even a non-fantasist like me can tell that.’
He
nodded and drained his glass. As before, the wine filled his mouth with dark satin fruit. Its long complex finish contained notes of aloe, wormwood and gall.
Book Two
Warlocks Pale
1
Philip Murdstone sat considering the phrase ‘depths of despair’. Its plural implied that there were, even now, levels of it he had yet to experience. He found himself thinking of a TV documentary he’d once watched, in which an unmanned submarine descended into the unplumbed darkness of some oceanic chasm. Its lamps had lit horrors: vast sightless worms; fish that were no more than X-rays with sets of fangs; forms of living slime.
He poured himself another shot from the duty-free bottle of Glenmorangie.
He was at the gate-leg table in his living room. Three days previously he had abandoned the study and the sleek new laptop with its bright blank screen, and had reverted, in a desperate act of superstition, to pens and paper. He had filled one and a half ruled notepads with scrawl, most of it crossed out, and doodles – several of them inept pornographic sketches of Minerva. Then he’d recalled reading somewhere that certain authors mapped out their plots on big sheets of paper. So he’d driven the Lexus to Tavistock and bought two thick pads of A3. Now sheets of it – some fastened to others with Sellotape – covered the table top. They were diagrams of madness, maps of nothingness. From boxed and circled names and phrases, arrows in multi-coloured felt-tip headed out on purposeful expeditions that ended nowhere. In blank space. In question marks. In ghost-circles left by tea mugs or whisky glasses.
Just once, he’d thought he might have hit upon something. He’d listed the name of every single character in Dark Entropy and, using two colours of highlighter, separated the living from the dead. Then it had occurred to him that Morl was a necromancer and, therefore, could resuscitate deceased characters at will. This seemed to offer rich possibilities. But, in a horrible lurching moment, he realized that rich possibilities were the opposite of what he needed; they were merely extensions of the labyrinth of mirrors in which he was hopelessly lost.