by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“So I’m being punished for writing one great book? For being a one-hit wonder? That it, Marlene?”
“No, you’re being rewarded for it, you idiot!” Marlene said.
“Look, pal,” Cline said. “Do you know how many people would kill to be in your shoes? Why screw up a good thing?”
Jackson scoffed. “A good thing for who? I guess all of you.”
“Jackson,” Marlene began. “Just…sit around for another six, eight months, let’s get this book out. You have a contract you need to sign, and then we can all talk about what you want to write.” Marlene nodded. Cline smiled. That idea seemed to make sense to everyone. Except Jackson. And V. The place where V grew up? Well, writers were treated with dignity. Their craft a high art. She did not understand any of this. It was incomprehensible.
V picked up a book from the coffee table. She read aloud. “A Jackson Grey Novel.” It happened to be Novel Five. The novel, the time period wherein Jackson became aware of his self-hate. So aware he split himself in two. And he believed in both parts. He believed that both parts of himself could function side by side. Until Novel Fifteen. Until he was unable to believe anymore.
V looked at Jackson. “You don’t write these, do you, Jackson?”
The room remained silent for a moment.
“I do. In a way. I don’t know,” said Jackson. “In a way, I do. Right, Cline?”
“Sure, buddy. Yeah, in a way, you do.”
“Oh, fuck, Cline! Don’t tell him that. There are legal implications!” Marlene said, angrily.
Cline clenched his jaw. “Marlene, I’m a fucking lawyer. I know there are legal implications. But I do not have a signed executed copy of the contract for the new book. You get that, right?”
“Fine.” Marlene sighed.
V kept staring at Jackson. “If you don’t write these books, who does?”
“I do” came Lyla’s shy voice.
—
Perspective. Context. One ought to know the Setting, the Routine, the Process involved in creating a Jackson Grey Novel. For at this stage in his career, a Jackson Grey Novel was an industry, an industry flush with cash, with people, an industry with many moving parts. A precise industry.
The Setting: Somewhere unbearably expensive, preferably by the sea. Somewhere hidden, where people did not ask a lot of questions. A place where privacy was kept.
The Routine: Slip out of bed, without waking the woman, the beautiful woman, whom Cline contracted privately for Jackson. New novel, new woman. Slip out of bed at seven a.m., the woman asleep, coffee, cigarettes, quick browse of The New York Times, delivered daily to his gate and placed dutifully on his mahogany coffee table by V, his loyal housekeeper, to whom it was made clear that visas, green cards, sisters, citizenship, all would be paid for or all would be taken away depending on how V treated Jackson’s secrets. The secrets of his personal predilections. V waiting patiently to pour the coffee into Jackson’s cup, Jackson adding a splash of whiskey, the cigarettes, the paper, the nod of appreciation to V…and Jackson would begin not by slipping out of his own head and climbing comfortably into the new novel. No, Jackson had slipped out of his own head years ago. And stayed out of his head. He’d ceased slipping into novels after the mediocrity of his attempt at Novel Two. After his booze-laden coffee, Jackson would muster the courage to take a half hour and acquaint himself with his speaking schedule. He would then muster the courage to close his study door and watch television, read cheap gossip off the Internet, and send grotesque, hateful, often shocking notes to Marlene, who long ago had stopped reading them. Lyla read some of them, and Jackson simply assumed that Lyla assembled his profanities into a Jackson Grey Novel. That usually took about six months. Marlene preferred to stretch it to eight months. Eight months made sense. Then Jackson would go on the circuit and promote that novel. When, sixteen years ago, he stopped reading the novels that bore his name and spoke in such vagaries that the last bit of connective tissue between the novel and the words he used to promote the novel dissipated, Marlene and Cline forbade him from doing interviews. They created a new Jackson Grey brand: the mysterious Jackson Grey. The author who refused all interviews about present work, or works in progress. Promotion was done in house. Expensive, well-rehearsed speeches given to audiences who opened their wallets were permitted. And that brand worked. Everyone got paid, everyone was happy.
The calculus was fairly simple. Jackson Grey would pretend to be Jackson Grey and in exchange he got the estate, the women, the housekeeper, the fame, the fortune, the Regal, the Club, the power, the powder, the pills, the booze, all of which kept him pretending he was Jackson Grey. The author of the Jackson Grey Novels. This was the deal that Jackson had made all those years ago. A deal he made when Marlene explained that nobody bought books anymore, nobody read them—specifically, nobody took a chance on spending his money to read mediocrity. He made that deal after both Marlene and Cline explained that Jackson’s gift, Novel One, was indeed an anomaly. Novel Two was garbage. A solution to this problem resided in a decision: fame or obscurity. Jackson chose fame. Jackson chose power. Jackson chose to sign private contracts allowing others to write his novels. And in exchange, Jackson made manifest his fame and power. He did so by diverting his attention with expensive ocean views, with housekeepers who cooked his meals and ran his life, with private clubs, with concubines. Oh, there were promises, all those years ago, about letting him write what he wanted to write one day. However, by now, Jackson knew those promises were lies; they had been tossed off to him, just as he tossed off the nuggets to salivating audiences paying to hear him speak. Lies.
“So?” V asked. “When you get up in the morning and walk into your study for eight hours, what do you write?” It was a great question. It was the only question.
Jackson got up and calmly exited the living room and entered his study. He stared at his computer.
IT’S OVER, JACKSON GREY. FINISH IT.
The Process: Jackson’s simple task. Gather up all the ideas in his head—horrific, thrilling, grotesque ideas—and put them in an e-mail, send them to Lyla. There was a time when he believed that at least sending his own thoughts gave him some sense of ownership, some bit of dominion over the next novel. His novel. The next big, bestselling Jackson Grey Novel. But that time had come and gone. Around the time of Novel Ten, these “notes” Jackson sent morphed into booze-laden, drug-addled e-mails to Lyla. They were simply pieces of violent pornography. Even Lyla, half voyeur, witness, participant in this insanity, could barely stomach the e-mails. They were too disturbing. Marlene worried they would inhibit Lyla’s creativity.
Jackson’s other simple task, more an imperative, a dominating impulse: gather up every ounce of self-hate, every bit of disgust, every projection of other people’s thoughts, the people intimate with his process, their thoughts of derision toward him, their mockery of him, and write himself notes, self-loathing notes, hateful words and phrases he used to attack his cowardice, his sellout, sentences that extrapolated in the most base sense his self-loathing. Write them in large blinking multicolored fonts and remind himself of who he was, and who he wasn’t. Torment himself day after day, year after year. Performing such a task was the only way Jackson could navigate the day with anything resembling sanity. Lie to others? Sure. Lie to myself? Absolutely not.
Jackson returned from his study and went back into the living room. He stared into the faces of those, all of those who held him hostage to his fame. With good intent, of course, these hostage-takers. Good intent. At least that’s what they tell me, tell themselves, these liars. There is no good intent in holding a man’s dreams hostage. I can read people.
“Here’s the contract,” he said. “For the new book.”
Cline and Marlene looked at each other. “Okay,” said Cline. “Cooler heads have prevailed. Great.”
Yes, they had. And that is why the act of walking out onto the deck, up and over the railing, and jumping into his expensive views, landing forty feet below on the
craggy rocks like a broken jigsaw puzzle, made perfect sense to Jackson. If one is not let free, one must escape or die trying.
Yes, Jackson Grey could read people. Unfortunately, he could not read himself.
There was nothing to read.
And if there was, Jackson Grey didn’t write it.
—
After the police identified Jackson’s body and took statements—“Clearly a sad, drug-addled man, in constant battle with depression”—after Cline paid the right people to remove the phrase “drug-addled” from any police or coroner’s report, any obituary, after he and Marlene back-dated the contract, after Katherine and V were well taken care of financially, there remained a question. Marlene and Cline had briefly discussed the question privately. Lyla posed the question to Marlene but once, for she knew that asking the question again would cost her not only the promotion she had received, but her job.
“Did he really think he wrote all those books?” she asked Marlene. It was a question not to be asked. It was a question Marlene didn’t answer. “Don’t bring it up again, Lyla. Ever.”
The truth is no one knew the truth. Except Jackson, and he was long dead. One supposes that sometimes Jackson believed he did write all those books and sometimes he knew he didn’t. What he knew, what he understood, when he understood it, when he stopped understanding it? Simply unanswerable. Only one thing could be ascertained that ugly night with certainty: Jackson hated himself.
One afternoon, a few weeks after Jackson’s private memorial, Cline called Marlene.
“Marlene, I had a thought,” Cline said.
“Yeah?”
“When my guys did the cleanup at his house, I had them find all of those notes he wrote. I got his hard drive as well. I stashed it all in my safe.”
“Oh, Christ!” Marlene said, smiling. “I know where this is going…and I like it!”
Cline laughed. “I knew you would. And why the hell not?”
“The Unpublished Jackson Grey Collection,” she said. “You brilliant, sick son of a bitch, I fucking love it! Send the notes and the hard drive to Lyla.”
“Will do. I’ll be out your way next week. We can sit down and discuss strategy. You know, stretching it out over the next five, six years. The ‘posthumously discovered stories’—however the fuck you want to phrase it. That’s your game.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”
“And Lyla?” Cline asked. “She’d have no problem with doing something like this?”
“Oh, are you kidding me? We gave that bitch a huge package. Lyla does what Lyla is told to do. She’ll love this.”
Cline was uncharacteristically silent.
“What?” Marlene asked.
“I’ve got to tell you, Mar. I looked at a couple of the pages of scrawl he wrote, I mean, he must have written it sometime in the last twelve months. It’s really pure disease. Christ, he was a sick ticket.”
“I know,” Marlene said. “So fucked up. Years ago, I might have said I missed him.”
“We gave him a good life—all right, enough. I’ll have somebody scan the docs and send them,” Cline said.
“Someone you trust.”
“Of course,” Cline said. They both hung up.
Goddamn, Marlene said to herself. That man has skills.
A moment later Marlene felt a wistful sense wash over her. Wistful, yet a sense leaning toward something bigger, bigger than her, bigger than Cline. She hesitated, then called Cline back.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“I was thinking about that night.”
“What about it? I’m running late for a lunch.”
“You know, Cline, his body that night, on the rocks, the bones, the ocean, the blood? The way it all looked?”
“What about it?”
“It kind of looked like a Picasso,” she said.
“Okay.”
“What he did to himself, what he did to his body, I mean, that was the first piece of art he’d truly created in, what? Twenty years? Know what I mean?”
Cline did know what she meant but didn’t comment. They just hung up. That is how they communicated. That is how they did business. Nothing extraneous, no effluvia.
They were people of power.
The girl wasn’t especially attractive. But the darkish man didn’t mind; in fact, he preferred it. Her type was a more efficient target, lacking the natural suspicion with which good-looking women seem to be born, or perhaps acquire as they season. Besides, he didn’t hold himself to any particular standard of beauty. It was always something small that got his pulse racing, a modest charm or quirk he liked to think he was the only one to notice—a scar under the bottom lip, almost entirely concealed under foundation, or a premature gray hair peeking out of an otherwise luxuriant brown bob.
This one had eyes that were two different colors; in the muted half-light of the bar, he couldn’t see their exact hue but made out that one was light and the other dark. He knew there was a technical name for the condition, that it wasn’t entirely uncommon, but he’d never seen it before—no, he had, in a dog owned by a childhood neighbor—but not in a woman, and this excited him. Less stimulating was her voice, flat and droning, prone to proclaiming banalities as though they were revelations. It bothered him that a girl with such unique eyes could be so tedious. Later, maybe, she would submit to him and be silent, so he could focus on nothing else. He liked eyes because, no matter how skilled the actor to which they belonged, they always revealed the truth. He had seen it in every girl who had lain beneath him, culminating in the final moment of release, that ultimate truth laid bare in all its gasping beauty. No eyes could deny that.
They’d been talking at the edge of the bar, mostly unnoticed. This wasn’t the sort of establishment with table service. It didn’t even have a name, or perhaps just the simplest of ones: out front, the neon sign would intermittently flash a single word—DRINK. It was tucked away at the edge of Johnson City in an industrial area on the cusp of gentrification. He hadn’t been looking for a new girl—the scent of last night’s was still on him—but he’d stopped to relieve himself and, before he could even find the bathroom, noticed her. That was about thirty minutes ago. He’d downed three skunky-tasting Heinekens since then, and more than ever his bladder was screaming for relief. He leaned forward and smiled, cutting her off.
“Have you ever been choked while having sex?”
He said it just loud enough for her to hear. She stopped talking midsentence, her eyes widening, a small breath escaping from her lips. He knew he was being reckless, but he was bored and desired an outcome, any outcome. She glanced away, not wanting to seem shocked, but her expression betrayed her: it was as if she were ten years old again, being shown pornographic pictures in the schoolyard for the very first time.
“Is that your thing?” she eventually asked.
“Maybe.”
She went silent, and he realized with growing excitement that she was actually considering the proposition. It was his turn to hide his shock. Talking to her had just been a whim, yet here it might actually be paying off. He waited, not moving or breathing, just studying the internal dialogue that was playing out all too visibly on her face, like an especially amateurish student film. Finally, she edged back on her barstool.
“I have to go.”
For a moment, he could feel a palpable tweak of disappointment, as if a blade had nicked his insides. It swelled into a faintly throbbing anger. He smiled at her.
“If I was white you’d have done it, right?”
She flinched. He knew it would sting, having intuited that she was one of those girls embarrassed by their boorish origins, by parents who wore their prejudice as casually as a garish Kentucky Derby hat, and who would spend the rest of their lives fighting to prove how much better they were than that. Yes, he knew her type all too well, having often cajoled similar victims into leaving bars, coffee shops, and nightclubs with him, even if he knew that sometimes, deep down, they were not actually attrac
ted to him. He didn’t care. People always did things for the wrong reasons, and he saw no reason to stop them, especially when it was to his benefit.
She got to her feet and fished around in her bag for some cash. He waved her away, and she left without another word. He remained on his stool for a moment like a deposed king, posture erect, mouth slightly open, a faint aura of shame settling upon him. He scanned the room. Aside from the bartender, who was immersed in a text conversation on his phone, there was only one other customer, a bony senior with scraggly facial hair, skin drawn taut across his cheekbones as he buried his nose in his beer glass, feet tapping in frantic polyrhythm. Neither man seemed to have shown any interest in the fruitless flirtation that had just unfolded nearby.
At least now he could finally piss. He walked over to the bathroom. An off-white piece of paper was taped to the door, one word scrawled in black marker: BROKEN. He hesitated, tempted to use it anyway, but worried it might draw further attention if he was caught. As it was, the bartender noticed him lingering and pointed toward the exit.
“There’s one out back. Should work if you’re lucky.”
The skinny old man seemed to find that funny. His feet tapped even faster. The darkish man paid his bill and left five dollars on the bar, one for each beer he and the girl had consumed. It was a fair tip, neither too low nor high, and one the bartender would, he hoped, not recall.
Outside it had become night, and the temperature had fallen with the sun. He saw the bathroom, but it wasn’t much more than a filthy, dilapidated outhouse. His stomach lurched at the thought of the thousands who had already marked their territory after one too many watery beers and festering hot dogs, piss sprayed carelessly across the sticky floor, dried tarry feces clinging stubbornly to the inside of the bowl. He couldn’t bring himself to use it. Beyond lay a rectangular void that might have been a field. It was an option. The earth beneath his feet was cold. He pressed the toe of his boot into it and was surprised to find it yield under pressure. In the end, though, he decided to wait a little longer. He’d find a place once he was farther outside the city.