The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  No, the thing to do is subvert the chain of command, the established order. So Phil drives to the White House: to the White House gate. Where he gives the letter to one of the immaculately turned out Marine guards.

  Because of an act of wanton piracy, Sir, the young people, the Black Panthers etc etc do not consider me their enemy or as they call it The Establishment. Which I call America. Which I love. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out. I have done an in-depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist Brainwashing Techniques . . .

  Phil walking up to the White House gates in the damp March chill, handing the letter, written on American Airlines notepaper and sealed in an American Airlines envelope, to the Marine. While still buzzing from the uppers he dropped in the LAX washroom.

  And driving away to find the hotel he’s booked himself into.

  Everything going down smoothly. Checking in. Washing up in his room. Wondering if he should use the room menu or find a restaurant, when the phone rings. It’s his agent. Emmet is downstairs in the lobby. Emmet wants to know what the hell he’s up to.

  And suddenly Phil is struck by another flash of light, igniting at the centre of his panic, and by the terrible thought that he is on the wrong path.

  Phil’s agent, Anthony Emmet, is smart and ferocious and tremendously ambitious. A plausible and worldly guy who, as he likes to put it, found Phil under a stone one day in the early 1950s, when Phil was banging out little sci-fi stories for a living and trying to write straight novels no one wanted to publish. Emmet befriended Phil, guided him, mentored him, argued with him endlessly. Because (he said) he knew Phil had it in him to be huge if he would only quit puttering around with the sci-fi shit. He persuaded Phil to terminate his relationship with the Scott Meredith Agency, immediately sold Phil’s long mainstream novel Voices from the Street to a new publishing outfit, Dynmart, guided Phil through endless rewrites. And Voices, the odyssey of a young man who tries to escape an unfulfilling job and a failing marriage, who is seduced by socialists, fascists and hucksters, but at last finds redemption by returning to the life he once scorned, made it big: it sold over two hundred thousand copies in hardback, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was made into a movie starring Leslie Caron and George Peppard.

  But the long struggle with Voices blocked or jammed something in Phil. After the deluge, a trickle: a novel about interned Japanese in the Second World War, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which received respectful but baffled reviews; a slim novella, Earthshaker, cannibalized from an old unpublished novel. And then stalled silence, Phil paralysed by the weight of his reputation while his slim oeuvre continued to multiply out there in the world, yielding unexpected translations in Basque and Turkish, the proceedings of a symposium on the work of Philip K. Dick and Upton Sinclair, an Australian miniseries that blithely transposed the interned Japanese of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into plucky colonial prisoners of war.

  Phil hasn’t seen his agent for ten years. It seems to him that Emmet still looks as implausibly young as he did the day they first met, his skin smooth and taut and flawless, as if made of some material superior to ordinary human skin, his keen black eyes glittering with intelligence, his black hair swept back, his black silk suit and white silk shirt sharp, immaculate, his skinny black silk tie knotted just so. He looks like a 1950s crooner, a Mob hit man; he looks right at home in the plush, candlelit red-leather booth of the hotel bar, nursing a tall glass of seltzer and trying to understand why Phil wants to see the President.

  ‘I’m on the case about the piracy,’ Emmet tells Phil. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I’m going to make this –’ he touches the frazzled book on the table with a minatory forefinger ‘– go away. Just like I made that short-story collection Berkley wanted to put out go away. I have people on this day and night,’ Emmet says, with a glint of dark menace. ‘The morons responsible for this outrage are going to be very sorry. Believe me.’

  ‘I thought it was about the book,’ Phil says. He’s sweating heavily; the red-leather booth is as snug and hot as a glove, or a cocoon. ‘But now I’m not sure—’

  ‘You’re agitated, and I completely understand. A horrible act of theft like this would unbalance anyone. And you’ve been self-medicating again. Ritalin, those huge doses of vitamins . . .’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the vitamins,’ Phil says. ‘I got the dosages from Psychology Today.’

  ‘In a paper about treating a kid with schizophrenic visions,’ Emmet says. ‘I know all about it. No wonder you’re agitated. Last week, I understand, you called the police and asked to be arrested because you were – what was it? – a machine with bad thoughts.’

  Phil is dismayed about the completeness of Emmet’s information. He says, ‘I suppose Mike told you about that.’

  Mike is Phil’s driver and handyman, installed in a spartan little apartment over Phil’s three-door garage.

  Emmet says, ‘Of course Mike told me that. He and I, we have your interests at heart. You have to trust us, Phil. You left without even telling Mike where you were going. It would have taken a lot of work to find you, except I just happen to be in Washington on business.’

  ‘I don’t need any help,’ Phil tells Emmet. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’

  But he’s not so sure now that he does. When the light hit him he knew with absolute certainty that something was wrong with his life. That he had to do something about it. He fixed on the first thing that had come into his head, but now he wonders again if it is the right thing. Maybe, he thinks unhappily, I’m going deeper into what’s wrong. Maybe I’m moving in the wrong direction, chasing the wrong enemy.

  Emmet, his psychic antennae uncannily sensitive, picks up on this. He says, ‘You know exactly what to do? My God, I’m glad one of us does, because we need every bit of help to get you out of this mess. Now what’s this about a letter?’

  Phil explains with great reluctance. Emmet listens gravely and says, ‘Well, I think it’s containable.’

  ‘I thought that if I got a badge, I could get things done,’ Phil says. The martini he’s drinking now is mixing strangely with the martinis he drank in the air, with the speed and Ritalin he took in LAX, the speed he took just now in his hotel bedroom. He feels a reckless momentum, feels as if he’s flying right there in the snug, hot booth.

  ‘You’ve got to calm down, Phil,’ Emmet says. Candlelight glitters in his dark eyes as he leans forward. They look like exquisite gems, Phil thinks, cut with a million microscopic facets. Emmet says, ‘You’re coming up to fifty, and you aren’t out of your mid-life crisis yet. You’re thrashing around, trying this, trying that, when you just have to put your trust in me. And you really shouldn’t be mixing Ritalin and Methedrin, you know that’s contraindicated.’

  Phil doesn’t try and deny it; Emmet always knows the truth. He says, ‘It’s as if I’ve woken up. As if I’ve been dreaming my life, and now I’ve woken up and discovered that none of it was real. As if a veil, what the Greeks call dokos, the veil between me and reality has been swept away. Everything connects, Emmet,’ Phil says, picking up the book and waving it in his agent’s face. Loose pages slip out, flutter to the table or to the floor. ‘You know why I have this book? I took it from some bum who came up to me in the airport. Call that coincidence?’

  ‘I’d say it was odd that he gave you the copy I gave you,’ Emmet says. ‘The agency stamp is right there on the inside of the cover.’ As Phil stares at the purple mark, he adds, ‘You’re stressed out, Phil, and that weird diet of yours has made things worse, not better. The truth is, you don’t need to do anything except leave it all to me. If you’re honest, isn’t this all a complicated ploy to distract yourself from your real work? You should go back to LA tonight, there’s a Red Eye that leaves in two and a half hours. Go back to LA and go back to work. Leave everything else to me.’

  While he talks, Emmet’s darkly glittering gaze transfixes Phil like an entomologist’
s pin, and Phil feels that he is shrivelling in the warm darkness, while around him the noise of conversation and the chink of glasses and the tinkle of the piano increases, merging into a horrid chittering buzz.

  ‘I hate this kind of jazz,’ Phil says feebly. ‘It’s so goddam fake, all those ornate trills and runs that don’t actually add up to anything. It’s like, at LAX, the soupy strings they play there.’

  ‘It’s just background music, Phil. It calms people.’ Emmet fishes the slice of lemon from his mineral water and pops it in his mouth and chews, his jaw moving from side to side.

  ‘Calms people. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It deadens them, Emmet. Turns them into fakes, into unauthentic people. It’s all over the airwaves now, there’s nothing left but elevator music. And as for TV . . . It’s the corporations, Emmet, they have it down to a science. See, if you pacify people, take away all the jagged edges, all the individualism, the stuff that makes us human – what have you got? You have androids, docile machines. All the kids want to do now is get a good college degree, get a good job, earn money. There’s no spark in them, no adventure, no curiosity, no rebellion, and that’s just how the corporations like it. Everything predictable because it’s good for business, everyone hypnotized. A nation of perfect, passive consumers.’

  Emmet says, ‘Is that part of your dream? Christ, Phil. We really do need to get you on that Red Eye. Away from this nonsense, before any real damage is done. Back to your routine. Back to your work.’

  ‘This is more important, Emmet. I really do feel as if I’m awake for the first time in years.’

  A man approaches their booth, a tall overweight man in a shiny grey suit and cowboy boots, black hair swept back and huge sideburns framing his jowly face. He looks oddly bashful for a big man and he’s clutching something – the paperback of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. He says to Phil, ‘I hope you don’t mind, sir, but I would be honoured if you would sign this for me.’

  ‘We’re busy,’ Emmet says, barely glancing at the man, but the man persists.

  ‘I realize that, sir, so I only ask for a moment of your time.’

  ‘We’re having a business meeting,’ Emmet says, with such concentrated vehemence that the man actually takes a step backward.

  ‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Phil says, and reaches out for the book – the man must have bought it in the hotel shop, the price sticker is still on the cover – uncaps his pen, asks the man’s name.

  The man blinks slowly. ‘Just your signature, sir, would be fine.’

  He has a husky baritone voice, a deep-grained Southern accent.

  Phil signs, hands back the book, a transaction so familiar he hardly has to think about it.

  The man is looking at Emmet, not the signed book. He says, ‘Do I know you, sir?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Emmet says sharply.

  ‘I think it’s just that you look like my old probation officer,’ the man says. ‘I was in trouble as a kid, hanging about downtown with the wrong crowd. I had it in my head to be a musician, and well, I got into a little trouble. I was no more than sixteen, and my probation officer, Mr McFly, he straightened me right out. I own a creme doughnut business now, that’s why I’m here in Washington. We’re opening up a dozen new franchises. People surely do love our deep-fried creme doughnuts. Well, good day to you, sir,’ he tells Phil, ‘I’m glad to have met you. If you’ll forgive the presumption, I always thought you and me had something, in common. We both of us have a dead twin, you see.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Phil says, when the man has gone. The last remark has shaken him.

  ‘You’re famous,’ Emmet tells him. ‘People know stuff about you, you shouldn’t be surprised by now. He knows about your dead sister, so what? He read it in a magazine somewhere, that’s all.’

  ‘He thought he knew you, too.’

  ‘Everyone looks like someone else,’ Emmet says, ‘especially to dumb-ass shit-kickers. Christ, now what?’

  Because a waiter is standing there, holding a white telephone on a tray. He says, ‘There’s a phone call for Mr Dick,’ and plugs the phone in and holds the receiver out to Phil.

  Even before Emmet peremptorily takes the phone, smoothly slipping the waiter a buck, Phil knows that it’s the White House.

  Emmet listens, says, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ listens some more, says, ‘He’s not calm at all. Who is this Chapin? Not one of – no, I didn’t think he was. Haldeman says that, huh? It went all the way up? Okay. Yes, if Haldeman says so, but you better be sure of it,’ he says, and sets down the receiver with an angry click and tells Phil, ‘That was Egil Krogh, at the White House. It seems you have a meeting with the President, at 12.30 tomorrow afternoon. I’ll only ask you this once, Phil. Don’t mess this up.’

  So now Phil is in the White House – in the ante-room to the Oval Office, a presentation copy of Voices from the Street under his arm, heavy as a brick. He’s speeding, too, and knows Emmet knows it, and doesn’t care.

  He didn’t sleep well last night. Frankly, he didn’t sleep at all. Taking a couple more tabs of speed didn’t help. His mind racing. Full of weird thoughts, connections. Thinking especially about androids and people. The androids are taking over, he thinks, no doubt about it. The suits, the haircuts, the four permitted topics of conversation: sports, weather, TV, work. Christ, how could I not have seen it before?

  He scribbles notes to himself, uses up the folder of complementary hotel stationery. Trying to get it down. To get it straight. Waves of anger and regret and anxiety surge through him.

  Maybe, he thinks in dismay, I myself have become an android, dreaming for a few days that I’m really human, seeing things that aren’t there, like the bum at the airport. Until they come for me, and take me to the repair shop. Or junk me, the way you’d junk a broken toaster.

  Except the bum seemed so real, even if he was a dream, like a vision from a reality more vibrant than this. Suppose there is another reality: another history, the real history. And suppose that history has been erased by the government or the corporations or whatever, by entities that can reach back and smooth out the actions of individuals that might reveal or upset their plan to transform everyone and everything into bland androids in a dull grey completely controlled world . . .

  It’s like one of the weird ideas he used to write up when he was churning out sci-fi stories, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Maybe back then he was unconsciously tapping into some flow of greater truth: the truth that he should deliver to the President. Maybe this is his mission. Phil suddenly has a great desire to read in his pirated novel, but it isn’t in his jacket pocket, and it isn’t in his room.

  ‘I got rid of it,’ Emmet tells him over breakfast.

  ‘You got rid of it?’

  ‘Of course I did. Should you be eating that, Phil?’

  ‘I like Canadian bacon. I like maple syrup. I like pancakes.’

  ‘I’m only thinking of your blood pressure,’ Emmet says. He is calmly and methodically demolishing a grapefruit.

  ‘What about all the citrus fruit you eat? All that acid can’t be good for you.’

  ‘It’s cleansing,’ Emmet says calmly. ‘You should at least drink the orange juice I ordered for you, Phil. It has vitamins.’

  ‘Coffee is all I need,’ Phil says. The tumbler of juice, which was sitting at the table when he arrived, seems to give off a poisonous glow, as of radioactivity.

  Emmet shrugs. ‘Then I think we’re finished with breakfast aren’t we? Let’s get you straightened out. You can hardly meet the President dressed like that.’

  But for once Phil stands his ground. He picked out these clothes because they felt right, and that’s what he’s going to wear. They argue for ten minutes, compromise by adding a tie Emmet buys in the hotel shop.

  They are outside, waiting for the car to be brought around, when Phil hears the music. He starts walking, prompted by some unconscious impulse he doesn’t want to analyse. Go with the flow, he thinks. Don’t impose anything on top of
it just because you’re afraid. Because you’ve been made afraid. Trust in the moment.

  Emmet follows angrily, asking Phil what the hell he thinks he’s doing all the way to the corner, where a bum is standing with a broken old guitar, singing one of that folk singer’s songs, the guy who died of an overdose on the same night Lenny Bruce died, the song about changing times.

  There’s a paper cup at the bum’s feet, and Phil impulsively stuffs half a dozen bills into it, bills that Emmet snatches up angrily.

  ‘Get lost,’ he tells the bum, and starts pulling at Phil, dragging him away as if Phil is a kid entranced beyond patience at the window of a candy store. Saying, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That it’s cold,’ Phil says, ‘and someone like that – a street person – could use some hot food.’

  ‘He isn’t a person,’ Emmet says. ‘He’s a bum – a piece of trash. And of course it’s cold. It’s March. Look at you, dressed like that. You’re shivering.’

  He is. But it isn’t because of the cold.

  March, Phil thinks now, in the antechamber to the Oval Office. The Vernal Equinox. When the world awakes. Shivering all over again even though the brightly lit ante-room, with its two desks covered, it seems, in telephones, is stiflingly hot. Emmet is schmoozing with two suits – H.R. Haldeman and Egil Krogh. Emmet is holding Haldeman’s arm as he talks, speaking into the man’s ear, something or other about management. They all know each other well, Phil thinks, and wonders what kind of business Emmet has, here in Washington, DC.

  At last a phone rings, a secretary nods, and they go into the Oval Office, which really is oval. The President, smaller and more compact than he seems on TV, strides out from behind his desk and cracks a jowly smile, but his pouchy eyes slither sideways when he limply shakes hands with Phil.

  ‘That’s quite a letter you sent us,’ the President says.