The name meant little to Ness. “That’s great.”
“No, it isn’t,” Richard replied. “It’s fucking unbelievable!” He finished his drink and set the glass aside. “Come here and sit, babe.” He patted his thigh.
Ness sat on his lap, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “What’s so great?”
“Dark Corner of the Mind is a big magazine. National. And they pay pro rates. This is my first big breakthrough, Ness. A story in a national publication!”
She hugged him and said, “Congratulations, darling.” A pause. Then: “How much are they paying?”
“I don’t have an exact figure yet, but I’d estimate about seven hundred.”
“Seven hundred dollars?” Ness wore a look of genuine surprise. “That much?”
“That much.”
Ness kissed Richard and then got up from his lap. “I guess I can excuse the afternoon celebration, then. Even if you smell like a brewery.”
Lounging in the chair, Richard wore a goofball grin. “Distillery,” he said. “I smell like a distillery.”
Ness took a place at the desk, behind the computer. “Whatever,” she said. “But if you want to celebrate, let’s get some champagne. I think we both had amazing days.”
Richard bounced to his feet. “You’re right. Let me take care of it. We’ll order supper and I’ll get us a bottle—hell, two bottles—of something expensive. On me, the literary lion.”
Ness tapped the computer keys. “Sounds good,” she said.
Richard disappeared from the office, going to the kitchen to order food. There was also a liquor store that delivered, so he ordered three bottles of champagne and a bottle of Wild Turkey. Fuck the cost—he was in the red. When he got back to the office, he found Ness sitting at the computer, frowning.
“What’s up, babe?” he asked.
“What’s with this message from the Gazette?”
Richard leaned over his wife’s shoulder. He stared down at an email from Gus Thomson, his supervisor at the newspaper. The day’s obituaries were late and the deadline couldn’t be extended. Gus’ words were irate.
Richard was also irate, but with Ness. “Why are you reading my messages?”
Ness looked up at Richard, surprised to see the dark thunderheads on his brow. “Don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I opened it accidentally. Seems a good thing I did. You spent the afternoon celebrating and forgot about work?”
Richard groaned. “Come on, this was a big deal for me. A huge deal! So, I pushed aside a few obits. So what? Gus can get anyone to write them if I miss a day.”
“That’s not the point,” Ness said. “It’s about responsibility. You have a job and you aren’t doing it.”
Richard bit his lower lip. He could respond quickly, without consideration, and propel them both into an argument. But why bother? It would be easy to tell Ness that with her big commission and high salary that his piddling job at the Gazette wasn’t worth having, but she wouldn’t get it. And right now, Richard didn’t want to fight.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got excited and carried away. Let’s not fight. I’ll email Gus and make good. Okay?”
Ness nodded. “Okay.” She glanced at the screen again. “And there’s another message from Mace. Congrats on the Sale! You already told him?”
Was that jealousy in her voice?
“He’s a writer, like me, so I had to. Besides, he suggested I send ‘And This Too Shall Pass’ to Dark Corner of the Mind. If it hadn’t been for his suggestions and revisions, I probably wouldn’t have sold it.”
“That’s the story you sold? The one I read and helped you with?”
Richard nodded. “Yeah, but I changed a few things back. You know, to the way they were.”
Ness wrinkled her nose. “I thought my suggestions were good ones.”
“Oh, they were, but the story, well, it needed a bit more punch. I went with my original ideas, and added a few new ones from Mace.”
If Ness was hurt, she didn’t let on. She closed the email application and stood. “If we’re going to celebrate, I want to get cleaned up first.”
Richard slipped past her and sat down at his desk. “Okay,” he said. “I want to do a few quick things.”
“Sending a love letter to Mace?” Ness asked, smiling.
Richard slapped her on the butt. “Fuckin’ A, babe,” he said. “Now get that hot bod in the shower. I might join you.”
Ness left the room, surprised at Richard’s behavior. She didn’t know if the surprise was pleasant or not.
***
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT:Kickin’ Ass and Takin’ Names
Richie!
I knew you could do it. From the get-go, I knew it. Congratulations again on the big sale. I told you that ‘And This Too Shall Pass’ was solid, didn’t I? You have to start listening to me. Pretend I’m your conscience or something. Your personal shadow that sees and knows all!
Has this sale helped broaden your outlook on things a little bit? I say that because I think you are selling yourself short, working for some crappy little paper writing shitty copy (obits, of all things. Talk about a dead-end job!). This sale could be the first in a series of real successes, major fucking successes. There’s no sense in stifling brilliance if you don’t have to and you don’t, do you? What I mean is, that wife of yours has a real money-making job, doesn’t she? Have you ever considered broaching the subject with her, about writing full-time? It isn’t going to make or break you, but it might do something for your writing career. And like I said before, writing is like breathing. You have to do it or you’ll die!
Anyhow, I guess I got all serious on you here. I want to help you along, Rich, ‘cause I know you’ve got real talent in you. Speaking of talent, I used a bit of my own today and sold a story to an online magazine called Last Rites. It pays shit, but it’s a published story and that’s what counts.
I should wrap this up, but before I do, let me repeat. Writing is like breathing, man. Don’t let someone smother you! Talk to Ness . . . that’s my advice. If she’s a loving wife, she’ll understand. How could she want to stand in the way of you achieving your dream?
She won’t. Not if she loves you.
Mace
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: What to do?
Hey Mace, thanks for all the congratulations. But if it wasn’t for you, that story would be sitting in a drawer (or on my computer) wasting away. I owe you big time for your suggestions and your insight. You really know me well!
This was a great day and Ness really seemed to ‘get it’, you know? Of course, she still doesn’t see the big picture. This is a real start for me and I have this feeling that there are bigger and better things to come. I mean, this is a big sale and only more of them can follow, right? I think I finally have the capital-fucking-C confidence that I needed! Of course, Ness might not see it the same way.
I don’t know about the whole ‘full time writer’ thing. Ness would never go for it. Sure, she makes good money, but she also thinks that sitting around all day, writing, is akin to pecking on a keyboard. Perhaps if I put it to her with real heart, framed in my recent success, she might see differently. But the way she reacted to an email I got from my boss today tells me otherwise (and that really pissed me off, too. She opened up my mail as if it were her own. I don’t care that much, I’m not hiding a second life or something, but still . . . invasion of privacy). My boss was also a bit of a prick, making it seem as if writing up the obituary for some old geezer who’d kicked off was the literary equivalent of The Tell Tale Heart.
Anyhow, I’m rambling. I’ll think about what you said. I do agree with you. Perhaps Ness is smothering me a bit. Right now, though, I’m too goddamn happy to care!
Rich
***
Vanessa pulled into the driveway after two in the afternoon. She’d had
an appointment to show the Feldmans several properties, but they had called and cancelled at the last minute. She was actually glad. The Feldmans had been looking for a house for the past six months and they were never satisfied with anything she showed them. It was the husband more than the wife; he found fault with everything. He’d rejected one house because he said the air smelled like his grandmother’s makeup.
With her afternoon now free, Vanessa left the office, gone by the supermarket to pick up a few items, and headed home. She planned to make some chicken parmesan for dinner, so she and Richard could have a nice romantic dinner. Things had been very strained between the two of them lately. She decided it was time she extended an olive branch.
Taking the bags from the backseat, she hurried into the house and put the groceries up in the kitchen. She half-expected Richard to come down and help her, or at least to see why she was home so early, but as she placed the last of the items in the cupboard, she was still alone. The house was eerily quiet. If she hadn’t seen Richard’s car in the garage, she’d have thought he had gone out somewhere. She went up the stairs and straight to the computer room. It was where Rich spent all of his time these days, even taking his meals there more often than not.
Vanessa reached for the doorknob but hesitated with her hand inches from it. Richard tended to get ill these days if she walked in unannounced. This upset her more than a bit; this was her house as well, damn it! As a compromise, she knocked lightly on the jamb as she opened the door and stepped inside. Much to her surprise, the room was empty. The computer was on, but for once Rich wasn’t sitting there pecking away at the keys. Beer cans littered the desktop and the floor around the chair, eliciting an annoyed frown from Vanessa. Richard had never been much of a drinker, but over the past two months he had really been indulging. Ever since Mace Hunter had come into his life.
It seemed preposterous that someone her husband had never even met in person could have had such a profound effect on him, but it was undeniable. Richard was almost like a different man since he’d starting corresponding with the other writer, and Ness didn’t much care for this new man with whom she shared her home.
Vanessa walked back down the hallway to the bedroom, pushing open the door to find Rich lying in bed on his back, an arm thrown across his eyes, resonating snores filling the room. His mouth hung open, and drool had dampened the pillow next to his head. He’d probably stayed up all night, writing and drinking, and he’d be passed out until the evening. Ness closed the door, shaking her head in distaste. She and her husband were headed for one hell of a confrontation, and she was tempted to wake him and get it over with. But she’d wait, she wanted Richard’s mind clear when she took him to task for his recent behavior.
She returned to the computer room and opened their email account. There were three new messages in the inbox, one from her sister in Ohio, one from her friend Judy, and one from Mace. The subject line of this last email was: Loved the Chapters You Sent. So Richard was letting Mace read what he’d written on the novel he was working on. He hadn’t offered to let Vanessa read any of it. Granted, she hadn’t asked to read it, but she usually didn’t have to ask. He was typically shoving his stuff at her like a drug pusher. Suddenly she wasn’t good enough to read his work now that he had his precious Mace.
Vanessa read her messages, replied to them, then exited the internet. She started to stand but then plopped back into the chair, casting a glance at the door. The file for Richard’s novel-in-progress, Subtle Changes, was right there on the computer’s desktop. All she’d have to do was double-click then take a peek. She cast another guilty glance at the door, but there was no reason she should feel guilty. Or so she told herself. She was simply taking an interest in her husband’s work. Hell, it was what he’d been badgering her about for months now.
Giving herself no time to change her mind, Ness opened the file. She scrolled past the title page to the first full page of text. She quickly skimmed over the seven-page prologue. By the time she reached the first chapter, she felt queasy. The prologue had started out with a group of preternatural creatures engaging in a wild, hedonistic orgy. The language was coarse and explicit, the sexual acts increasingly depraved and sadomasochistic. The whole thing had been more disturbing than titillating, but what was truly disturbing was what came after. The orgy had eventually devolved into a massacre, violent and vile, bloody and gruesome. What really troubled Vanessa wasn’t the violence, but the joy of the violence. Her husband had depicted the slaughter as something fun and enjoyable and it left her feeling dirty, like she needed a scalding shower to wash away a residue of filth and slime.
Ness closed the file without reading any more. Richard typically wrote meditative pieces about modern life, ruminations on society and the human condition. They could at times become longwinded and, if she were being completely honest, a bit boring, but she much preferred them to this almost pornographic smut. Perhaps she was being prudish, it was fiction, after all, but it seemed as if her husband had delighted in describing the depraved acts, as if he had taken real pleasure in them.
Vanessa wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. She stared at the desktop, chewing on her lower lip. There was a file in the bottom left corner labeled Rich’s Short Stories, and above it another labeled Mace’s Short Stories. After another glance at the doorway, she opened up Rich’s Short Stories. A window opened with a list of about fifty or so story titles. Many of them were older stories she’d already read, but several of them she was unfamiliar with. She clicked on one titled ‘The Thorn House.’
The story was twenty-eight pages long, but Ness only made it through page ten before turning away from the screen in disgust. The story was about a ten-year-old girl who had created her own little playland under the thick branches of a large, wild rosebush. At first Vanessa had been charmed by the girl, her boundless imagination, the elaborate otherworld she had created under the rosebush. Then the story had taken a sudden, violent turn. An escaped mental patient discovered the girl under the rosebush one afternoon and held her captive, brutally raping her repeatedly. The way the story was written, it was almost as if Richard were trying to put the reader’s sympathies with the mental patient instead of the little girl. Rich spared no detail, depicting the rapes with graphic relish. Vanessa closed the file, feeling that she might vomit at any moment.
She tried to tell herself she was being histrionic, but her husband’s writing had left her shaken. There was such darkness in his recent work. Soulless was the word that came to mind. It actually put her in mind of some of the more twisted stuff Richard had written in their college years, back when he’d thought it was cool to shock people just for the sake of shocking them. Vanessa had thought he’d outgrown that type of splatterpunk writing, but apparently not.
Vanessa suddenly experienced that mental tip-of-the-tongue sensation she often got when a thought hovered on the edge of memory. Something about Richard’s college writing, coupled with the pieces he was producing now, there was a connection she felt was waiting to be made, but then she lost it. Shrugging, she let it go.
She clicked on the file Mace’s Short Stories. She wanted to read some of the work by the man her husband couldn’t stop raving about, the man who had become more important to Rich than his own wife. There were about twenty stories in the file, and she picked one at random. A story entitled ‘Coming in For a Landing.’
The story wasn’t especially long, fifteen pages. It was a science fiction piece set in the distant future, where a group of space explorers land on a distant planet in search of intelligent life. What they find is a race of vicious creatures that enslave the explorers, using them as both sexual toys and servants. At first the explorers resist, but they eventually grow to love the abuse and degradation, ultimately sending word to Earth that the planet is a paradise so that more potential slaves will be sent. The story was sick, making victimizers into heroes, and she suddenly knew what had reawakened her husband’s interest in dark horror. Or she should sa
y who had awakened her husband’s interest in dark horror. There were several parallels between Mace’s story and what she’d read of her husband’s recent work. It was almost as if Rich had adopted the other writer’s style. Not copying, exactly, nothing so blatant, but the influence was unmistakable. Vanessa hated to sound so mom-ish, but Mace certainly seemed to be a bad influence on her husband.
No longer in the mood to fix a romantic pasta dinner, no longer with much of an appetite at all, Vanessa left the office, making sure to close the door behind her, and retreated down the hall. She paused at the bedroom door then hurried downstairs.
She was suddenly in no hurry for her husband to wake up.
***
Richard stumbled downstairs at a quarter past eight that evening. Vanessa sat in the living room, eating a sandwich with the TV playing softly across the room. She wasn’t really watching the inane reality show, but she kept her eyes glued to it as her husband came into the room, refusing to acknowledge him.
He stood there for a few minutes, his hair sticking up in wild corkscrews, scratching himself and staring at his wife, as if waiting for her to say something. When she continued to ignore him, he finally cleared his throat and said, “Hey,” in a husky croak.
Finally turning her eyes toward her husband, she said, “The sun sets and the creature arise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. You tend to keep vampire hours these days. Do you even remember what the sun looks like?”
“Big yellow ball of fire, right?” Rich said, yawning into his hand. Looking at his wife’s half-eaten sandwich, he said, “Did you fix anything for me?”
Vanessa leveled such a heated glare at her husband that he held up his hands and backed away, as if she had aimed a gun at him.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll go fix something myself. Then I have to head upstairs and get to work. I gotta finish a half dozen obits by morning.”
“Another all-nighter, huh? You didn’t used to get so behind.”
“I know,” Richard said, rubbing at his temples. Vanessa suspected he was hungover as well as tired. “This job is getting to be a real burden. I wish I could quit.”
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