The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

by Paul Malmont

  The walls of the lounge room were paneled with dark cherrywood, and the Persian rugs on the floor were deep red, so even though the glow of the oil lamps seemed to be swallowed up, the room remained comfortable and warm. A leather banquette, a pair of leather club chairs, a sideboard with liquor decanters, and a small bookcase stocked with books on magic made up most of the furnishings. There was a small workbench supplied with tools of the trade where Gibson could tinker with magic tricks. If he had any time on this trip, he intended to continue his efforts to re-create Blackstone’s astonishing exploding fireball effect, which had stymied him for months.

  Unless he could bring himself to write.

  At the end of the room, beside the corridor to the main cabins, galley, and head, was another small desk set. A typewriter sat on it with a fresh sheet of paper in the roller. Thanks, Chester, he thought. Thanks for reminding me. Next to the typewriter lay a neat stack of the latest mags in case he would rather read than write.

  Gibson went straight to the desk and opened one of the drawers. Good. He was pretty sure he had left a half-finished manuscript here after a trip to Chicago many months ago, and seeing the papers confirmed that he had. One of the reasons he was taking the overnight train was that it took a roundabout route and made many stops, so it wouldn’t pull into Providence until late morning, giving him plenty of time to work on this book. Or start a new one. He flipped to the back page and read the last sentence to see if it would remind him what he’d been writing: “Lamont Cranston had a premonition of Death.” For a moment he stared at the words, which appeared halfway down the page. He turned the phrase over in his mind, whittling it down until just one word remained: premonition. Had Litzka really had a premonition of Howard’s death?

  He put the thought out of his head and instead focused on the work that had to be done. He’d be able to finish the book on this trip. And maybe he’d start something new. Something different.

  If only Hubbard gave him a break.

  “How much did you spend on this? Are you still making payments? Can I borrow it sometime?”

  There was something else rolling around in the drawer. At first Gibson thought it was a cigarette, but it wasn’t one he had rolled. He picked it up and sniffed it. Reefer. Interesting. Without putting it down he looked at the mag on the top of the stack. It was the recent issue of Bronzeman, one of the only Negro pulps. This particular mag was actually published in Harlem. Underneath the striking image of a handsome Negro—face turned to the sun, sleeves rolled up, indicating readiness to work or to join the revolution—was the list of names of this issue’s story writers. He saw Chester’s name and smiled, guessing that Chester had been planning to throw himself a little debut party. Looking at the reefer stick and the mag, he knew that Chester would probably be moving on soon. Gibson would read the story and congratulate Chester, but the two of them would never speak of the marijuana that went missing on the run to Providence.

  He’d smoked the stuff once or twice before and hadn’t seen any demons. Anyway, maybe this would help him relax. After all, he hadn’t slept for nights, ever since the theater, and Litzka and her disturbing premonition. And the booze just wasn’t cutting it.

  Sleep? Hadn’t he been thinking about writing all night moments ago? To sleep or write, the writer’s eternal boxing match. If sleep weren’t such a damn good fighter, there would be a lot more books to read.

  “Do they make these to order or can you buy them from a showroom?”

  He wasn’t quite certain how Hubbard had managed to invite himself. He certainly was a persuasive and ingratiating little son of a bitch. If writing didn’t work out for him, Gibson suspected politics would. One minute Gibson was in his office making travel arrangements and the next Hubbard was offering to tag along. As the president of the American Fiction Guild, Hubbard felt it was important that a representative pay his respects to one of their fallen own.

  “You ever read Howard?” Gibson asked, surprised that he didn’t already know whether Hubbard had any knowledge of Lovecraft.

  “Sure. Nothing that comes to mind right now. But folks say he was good. Doc Smith says he was great.”

  “Yeah.” Gibson felt like telling him that he didn’t have to lie. Howard’s stories were hard to find and even harder to like. Gibson moved to the sideboard and held up a decanter of scotch. Hubbard nodded and Gibson poured.

  “Yeah,” Gibson continued. “He was good. Could have been the next Edgar Allan Poe. He was that good.” Lovecraft—just another writer passing from obscurity to oblivion.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I guess most Americans think we already have one Poe too many.”

  “Oh.” Hubbard settled easily into one of the club chairs. “How’d you meet him?”

  Gibson looked out at the sun setting over the Hudson River. The ice was thick and silvery in the pinkish light; boats wound their way through channels hacked through it. “Our wives,” he said. “Our wives introduced us.”

  “You’re married?” Hubbard was surprised.

  “I was.”

  “I know what that’s like.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  Hubbard shook his head. “My wife threw me out. She heard I had an affair with an actress out in Hollywood.”

  “How’d she hear that?”

  “Well, it was true, for one thing. What a mistake! Walt, I’m telling you…” He stopped, carried away with his memories. “My lawyer calls it a trial separation. She’ll take me back when she cools off. I hope so anyways. I miss my damn kids.”

  “Didn’t want to go back to your actress?”

  “Well, the picture didn’t really do what everyone hoped. So…” He trailed off for a moment. “I s’pose she’s screwing the next writer by now. So’s Hollywood, for that matter.”

  Gibson smiled and loosened his tie. Hubbard could be an agreeable person when he wasn’t trying to shine a fella on.

  Hubbard sighed. Then he gave a dismissive flip of his hand. “So how’d your wives introduce you?”

  “When I was married, I used to get lots of fan letters.” He paused, then decided to back up a little bit. “Lovecraft was a huge letter writer. He spent as much time writing letters during the day as you or I do writing our stories. Anything or anyone that struck his fancy would get a letter. So he started writing me because he liked my codes which I stuck in some of the books. I was working on one of those at the time, so I sent him a special code key for it. I gave him his own layer so everyone who had the code key that I published in the story would read it one way, but only he could read it another. I’ve done that occasionally for other people who are interested in the codes. It’s a good brain teaser for me to write one code that has two keys. Y’know, I’d just stick in something personal like, ‘Hi, Howard. Ain’t scotch swell? Drink more scotch.’”

  With a whistle and a shudder, the train began to move. Gibson continued, “Howard was a really smart guy. Self-taught about biology and math, in particular. He had always wanted to be a scientist, but he’d had to drop out of college and I guess he was embarrassed about that so he tried to make up for it by learning and doing these little experiments.

  “He loved the codes and he would keep writing me. I got a letter a week, mostly about writing and how frustrating he found it. He never asked me to read his stories, which he could hardly ever get published. But he talked about them and he spoke about writing as if he were a bestseller.

  “After a while I was getting so busy with my books that my wife started reading and answering my mail. She came across a letter from Howard telling me that he and his wife were moving to New York and she was going to open a hat store. Well, among other things, my wife loved hats. I think for about three months she single-handedly kept that store open. So, she and Sonia, Howard’s wife, were getting together and eventually we went out to visit them in Red Hook and I met Howard.

  “It was obvious that this was a nervous guy. I guess his family was blue-blooded. So Red Hook was
a real comedown for him and I think he really resented it; all the immigrant Italians distressed him in particular. I don’t think he had ever been really exposed to anything even vaguely foreign or exotic. I think he was humiliated by the poverty of their apartment and their neighborhood and their life. He was kind of a momma’s boy and Sonia really tried to mother him. She didn’t exactly cut his steak for him, but fairly close. We had drinks a couple of times after that. He was just miserable in New York. I think he hated that his wife had to work. Even though he was where the mags were, he couldn’t get his stories published on any kind of regular basis. I mean, even Weird Tales has a limit to how far they’ll actually push ‘weird.’ And his stuff was weird. Y’know. Poe weird.” He trailed off.

  “I tried to get him a gig before things got too bad. Weird Tales had a license from Harry Houdini to print some of his true adventure stories. And by true, I mean completely made up. Harry asked me if I could do it, but I was too busy with The Shadow. So I recommended Howard. So he met with Harry and wrote a crackerjack little story called “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs.” Well, we all thought this was going to be the big one. He waited for it to be published so the eds could really discover him.

  “Of course, first Tales decided it was a good spring issue fit, and it was winter. Then in the spring they decided maybe it was a better summer story. So they sat on it. Howard didn’t get that things like this happen all the time.”

  Hubbard nodded; he had stories all over town that were waiting for publication for one reason or another.

  “I told him to get busy and write another story. And another. And another. Take the fact that he got paid well for this one as a sign of encouragement. He really wanted to see that story in print, more than anything. Really thought it was going to break his career in a really big way. But it just took too long. And when it finally did get published, it didn’t even get the cover.

  “The bigger problem was that Harry hadn’t read the story before it was published, and he didn’t like it. In the story his character keeps fainting from sheer terror. He found that rather unmanly. Houdini never faints! And he never asked Lovecraft to write for him again.

  “I don’t think Howard could take it here anymore. He left Sonia and moved back to Providence. I’d get a letter from him every now and then. He took a job writing science papers at some research lab. Once or twice a year he’d publish a story in the shudders and he’d let me know. I’d write him back in our code, y’know, just a short, secret note of congratulations.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “I don’t know. My marriage…” He let it hang, unwilling to talk to Hubbard about it. “Lose the wife, lose her friends, y’know?”

  Hubbard nodded empathetically.

  Gibson rose, swaying gently with the rhythm of the train. He could hear Chester in the main cabin unpacking his bags.

  “I’m going to try and get some work done,” he said, moving to the desk set.

  “Sure thing,” said Hubbard. “Pretend I’m not here.”

  Gibson took a seat and lit a cigarette.

  “What’s your story called?” Hubbard was stretching out on the sofa with one of the books from the cabinet: The Great Raymond Presents 200 Tricks You Can Do!

  Gibson took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the cover of the book in Hubbard’s hands. Seeing the cover of the book he had ghosted with the elderly magician five years ago gave him a pang of guilt.

  “Murder Rides the Rails,” he said, trying to remember more about the unfinished book.

  Hubbard stuck out his lower lip in thought, as if he had heard better. He thumbed through the book. “I saw Lester Dent at the Knickerbocker. Said he was thinking about trying to solve the Ah Hoon mystery.”

  “Mystery. History. I wish him luck.”

  Gibson looked at that last line again.

  …premonition of Death.

  He took a long swallow from his glass. Why was Lamont Cranston having a premonition of Death? Where had Gibson been intending to take that thought? His glass was empty, so he rose and went for a refill, turning the words around in his head. Should he have called Litzka? Maybe he’d compose a telegram to her and have Chester pass it along to the conductor to be sent at the next stop.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “To what?”

  “To Ah Hoon. What do you think happened?”

  “I think for the purposes of the story I was telling it doesn’t really matter and if old Lester Dent wants to try and dig up something, then that’s his story to tell. I’m ready to start the next one.”

  “What’s your secret?” Hubbard asked a while later from behind the book. Gibson gritted his teeth. Just because a man’s not typing and is staring out the window watching the Hudson Valley open up to him doesn’t mean he’s not writing, he wanted to blurt out.

  “How do you keep cranking out the words? You gotta have a secret is what I figure. I mean, I can write a lot. But you. Everyone says you’re like a machine.”

  Gibson shrugged. “Sure, a machine,” he said. “I don’t know about secrets but there’s some tricks I keep in mind that keep problems from getting in my way and stopping my flow.

  “Don’t worry about getting it right, just get it on paper. Never, ever try to describe New York in its entirety, only by blocks, neighborhoods, or atmosphere. I never use the word occasionally because I can never spell it right.

  “When you write about a dame always start with what her legs look like. ‘Dashing’ is the quickest way to describe a hero. ‘Hirsute’ is the quickest way to describe a villain. Never take a job from an ed who says he’ll pay you better next time around after you earn your stripes; he’ll never respect you and he’ll just toss you scraps from there on in. And he’ll never pay you better. Never.

  “Don’t try and write a whole book at once. Throw everything you know on the page. Only write a story that you really know, because only you can come up with the right ending. Don’t steal a story; you’ll be found out. Keep writing. Don’t stop. Ever. Because there’s always the chance that you won’t start again.”

  …a premonition…

  He had it! The book had been started before the Allard thing. But Gibson must have already been toying with the idea in the back of his mind and let it spill out onto the page. Lamont’s premonition had been about his death as a character. That would never do. His fingers began to move against the keys. He struck out the line and started a new sentence.

  “Although The Shadow wore many disguises, he would always be Lamont Cranston, and when he laughed, weak men would experience a premonition of their death.”

  “That’s better,” he muttered to himself.

  Hubbard arched an eyebrow and then returned to his book.

  Gibson wrote like the train itself—relentlessly, driving forward into the night. Long after Hubbard had turned in, he slammed away at the typewriter keys. The pages began to pile up. The skin on his fingertips cracked, then bled. When he finally lit the reefer cigarette early in the morning, he watched with interest as the thin paper turned red from blood which hissed and bubbled away into tiny wisps of steam as it burned.

  Episode Thirteen

  THE PIGS had screamed all night.

  Mei had been unable to sleep. Even if he hadn’t been so excited, the sounds of the tormented pigs would have kept him up anyway. So he was alert to the sound of someone creeping down the hall to his sleeping chamber.

  “He’s coming,” Xueling whispered from the door.

  Mei threw his cover off and leapt up. He was already dressed.

  Of his eight adopted brothers, Xueling was the closest in age to him. He was also his closest friend. The two studied many things together, from history to sword fighting to riding to languages such as French (it was important to know the language of diplomacy) and English (it was more important to know the language of the foreign invaders).

  They padded silently together through the halls of Shenyang Palace. Mei was bigger
and faster than Xueling and most other boys his age, and Xueling had to quicken his pace to keep up. Dawn had yet to arrive and everyone but the guards was asleep.

  There was a man awake, however, standing near the entrance awaiting the sun: Mi-Ying, the diplomat from Beijing, who counseled their father on the intricacies of dealing with the Russians and Japanese who flocked to his court like goldfish to crumbs.

  “Your father is triumphant. The foreign invaders have been driven from the land. It is only a shame that you are not old enough to be at your father’s side at his victory,” he said to them.

  “There are many battles yet to fight,” Xueling said back to him coldly. “Though China is divided by civil wars, an emperor will sit in Beijing yet again.”

  “Indeed.” The diplomat nodded and took a step aside so the boys could pass him. His eyes were dark and mercenary, and malice and contempt lurked behind his thin, unctuous smile. Mei could feel the man’s hard eyes driving into his back as he retreated into the dark of the hall.

  They entered the courtyard with its eight pavilions. The sky was lightening and the stars were winking out. The cool dew on the flagstones made his feet tingle. They ran up the stairs of the Phoenix Tower. At the top of the turret they could see the vast palace below them, across the city, even to the land beyond.

  Slaughtered pigs on raised platforms lined the wide, tree-lined road which led toward the palace gate. The heralds had arrived yesterday at noon the previous day with word of the victory. Each house had been commanded to produce an animal for the feast. The pigs were decorated with painted symbols of victory, flower blossoms filled their eyes and mouths, and colorful flags were staked into their flanks. Many were draped with firecrackers.

  “Look,” said Mei. His eyes were sharper than Xueling’s. He pointed into the distance. A cloud rose on the horizon. “Dust,” he added. “Our father comes. He will be at the gates by midday, at the head of an army of triumph.”