It wasn't Philip's novel that had torn them apart. It was MicroMeg—and what had happened there.
Philip darted out of his car and into the earnest rain. He made the porch and was pushing the doorbell when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that the driveway contained a second car, something silver, low to the ground and polished.
A broken gutter uttered a thin stream of water that licked the back of Philip's neck.
A reservation, a doubt, flared like an arsonist's match. Then the door opened, and Philip blinked at a broad, muscled chest.
"Yeah?" The man was wearing red briefs and nothing else.
A woman, dark-haired and wearing a blue negligee, clung to the man's right arm. Philip knew Amelia's sister from his days of watching the house. She looked at Philip and said, "Who's this?" She turned and licked the man's bicep.
The man said, "You got me."
"Rita? Who's there?" Amelia pushed past the two of them.
"Philip," she said.
"Hi," Philip said.
Amelia was wearing a yellow bathrobe. The make-up was gone from her face, and she looked defenseless. A dab of cold cream adorned the end of her nose.
“I got off work, early," Philip said. "Thought I'd drop by."
"Yeah," Amelia said.
The man and the dark-haired woman had gone away from the door. The woman suddenly laughed, a piercing, lascivious shriek, conjuring, somehow, an explicit and precise image of oral high jinks.
Amelia flinched slightly, shoulders rising as though someone had clutched the back of her neck. "That's Robert, Rita's boyfriend," she said. "You can see why I want to move out."
"Yes," Philip said.
"Are you okay?" Amelia asked.
"I'm fine," Philip said. "I guess I should have called. I'll talk to you later."
He left, driving home in a state of heightened misery.
He could not sleep and so worked furiously on his novel, as though he might actually flee to that fictional land where he ruled—admittedly over a disenfranchised crew that no one wanted and that one editor had called "implausible, unmotivated madmen."
He sat typing furiously, crouched over his computer as the rain came through the ceiling and an army of pots and pans uttered froglike exclamations of delight.
The novel could not shelter him. He kept seeing Amelia's face. The thought bloomed wickedly in his mind, inspired by the arrogant male loutishness of bikini-briefed Robert: What if she finds someone else?
13.
In the morning, Amelia called. "I'm sorry," she said. "You can see why I have to get my own place." He could.
After the call, he got out of bed and showered. The cast had been removed two days ago, and its absence felt unnatural. He still couldn't move his leg at the knee and had been instructed in various exercises to restore muscle tone. He scrubbed the pale flesh and the bright scar at the knee. He thought about the general flimsiness of human beings, and the specific, blown-glass fragility of Philip Kenan.
As he came out of the shower, the phone rang again.
"Philip Kenan?"
"Yes," Philip said, instantly wary, always ready for bad news.
"My name is Richard Klausner, and I'm an editor at Wingate House here in New York."
Wingate House, Philip thought. Maybe the second biggest independent publisher out there.
"Sorry we took so long getting back to you, but nobody here knew what to make of your book. I loved it, but you know how it is, you have got to get a lot of heads nodding in unison these days before you can do anything. Everyone said, 'Yeah, sure, Richard, maybe you didn't notice, this book is two thousand pages long. And this guy Kenan is nobody, not Norman Mailer, not Stephen King, not Jackie Collins. We are talking an unknown author, with no track record, dropping a thirty dollar plus book on a sluggish market. Forget it.'" Klausner paused, chuckled.
"They had a point," he said. "But I was ready for them. Listen. See how this sounds. I said, 'You're right. We can't do that. I understand that. So forget a two-thousand-page book. Think five books.'" Klausner stopped speaking abruptly. Philip leaned into the receiver's silence, expecting more. The silence expanded.
"Well, what do you think?" Klausner finally asked.
"I don't follow you," Philip said.
"Five books," Klausner repeated. "We take The Despicable Quest, and we chop it into five neat, marketable, repeat-business, cycling sales fantasy novels. That's what I told them. And guess what, Philip?"
"Ah—" Philip said.
"Yep, they loved it. You are in. Congratulations."
Philip hardly heard the rest of the conversation. He had sold his novel. After years of labor, after it had developed a bloated life of its own and had come to seem more of a parasite than a potential breadwinner, it had sold.
Philip called Amelia back but got no answer. He realized, then, that she was at work, had probably called from there during a break. He didn't have that number. He decided he would call her from Ralph's that evening.
With a moment to think, he realized that Amelia might not be delighted with this news.
She hated the book, after all.
#
That night, Bingham congratulated him, shaking his hand gravely. "May it bring you no grief," he said. They stood in the back door of the shop while Bingham smoked a cigarette. Rain hissed across the parking lot and the sky trembled with lightning. Thunder was a constant, no- nonsense, mean-dog growl rolling from massive cloud-speakers.
"I can't believe I have finally sold this book," Philip said.
Philip was so cheered by his sudden good fortune that he even announced the news to Monica.
Philip hadn't expected much enthusiasm, zombies being notoriously reserved. Her reaction was heated. She glared at Philip.
"I guess you'll get famous now," she said. "I guess you will quit here. I guess it is all over between us."
She turned quickly back to her keyboard and began banging the keys with savage fury.
Yes, I'll quit, Philip thought. Editor Klausner had suggested a ten-thousand-dollar advance for the first in the series. "I'm sending along a contract and the names of a few agents. You might like to get an agent before going ahead on this. This sort of multiple book series deal can be a little trickier than the standard contract."
Ralph Pederson flew by, snapping an order from the fax and dropping it on Monica's table.
I'm quitting, Philip thought. The impulse was to grab Ralph as he raced by and say, "I quit," but Philip found an equal exhilaration in holding the knowledge within him where it sang with self-contained power.
Philip had had a lot of jobs in his life. The euphoria of quitting a bad job was rivaled only by good sex. In the endless series of job interviews that were a direct consequence of this quitting ecstasy, Philip had often fantasized of a time when he was rich. He would continue, he thought, to go on interviews. He would listen to the fat man with three chins say, "We are important people handling important documents written by important people, and it is imperative that we work efficiently. I want you to tell me why you feel you would be a real asset to our team. What skills and insights could you bring us? What...."
He would let the words wash over him. He would nod his head and look rabbit-scared and at the end of the interview, he would shake the man's hand and thank him, as unctuous as Uriah Heep, and he would walk out of the office, past all the desks of bored secretaries and clerks and typists and photocopiers, and he would take the stale elevator, crowded with men in wrinkled, sweat-permeated suits. He would land in the air- conditioned moonscape of the lobby, and he would walk quickly across the marble floor, push the glass doors open, and step into the sunlight, the slow, ponderous heat of Austin's summer, and he would shout, as though calling down angels, "I'm rich. I don't have to work there. I don't ever have to work there." He would feel as clean and clear as a pilgrim purged of sin at a holy shrine.
"Dear God thank you," he would shout, falling to his knees in a green square of city park. And
by that means, he would never grow jaded or indifferent to his freedom.
The computer screen in front of Philip flickered, and Philip's heart jumped, as it always did at such moments. If the electricity went out, the computer went down and the file was lost if it hadn't been saved. Quickly, Philip saved the job and continued keyboarding. Thunder shook the building.
To Philip's left, Monica typed quickly and angrily. He could observe her blurred, stocky form out of the corner of his eye. As Philip watched, she banged the keys with one last dramatic flourish, saving the file and clearing the screen. Then she got up and marched out of the room.
Philip remembered that he had intended to call Amelia. He punched her number and she answered on the first ring.
Her voice cheered him instantly, and when he told her the good news she shouted with genuine delight.
Philip felt a sense of intense relief. "I thought you might not be happy for me. I mean, I know how you feel about the book."
"No," Amelia said. "I don't think you do. You think I hate it, and I don't. I've just hated the way it ruled you. Now, you see, they will be taking it away from you. It will be finished; it won't be so suffocating... so dominating. It will be just a novel in a bookstore."
Philip didn't entirely understand her reasoning, but he was pleased that she was happy for him. "Great news, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Bitch."
"What?"
"Bitch. Cheap little cunty bitch..."
Amelia's voice faltered. "Philip. What..."
"Monica! Get off the line!" Philip shouted. "This is a private conversation. Get off."
"Bitch, bitch," Monica muttered. She sounded as though she were speaking through mud.
"Amelia," Philip shouted. "Look, I'll call you back. I'll call you right back, okay?"
"Sleazy cheap dirty slut bitch..."
"Philip?"
"Amelia, I'll call you right back."
"Well, okay."
"Bitch cunt..."
Philip heard the click as Amelia hung up. He dropped the receiver and ran out into the hall. He paused, listening. He could hear her voice, rolling on in a guttural litany of invective. He ran toward it.
She sat behind Mrs. Burrell's desk, muttering into the phone.
"Monica," Philip said, standing in the doorway. "What do you think you are doing?"
Monica looked up. She grinned and giggled evilly, the phone poised at her ear. The only light in the room came from a small desk lamp that sent its yellow rays upward into her eyes. Her single eyebrow, in combination with the long, blasted shadows, created a sardonic, ghastly effect.
"I'm giving your bimbo a piece of my mind," Monica said. "I'm telling her to fucking mind her own fucking business."
"There's nobody on the phone," Philip said. "She hung up."
Monica scowled, dropped the receiver. She swept the phone off the desk. It clattered impressively, made a single jing sound.
"What do you want with a bitch like that? What can she type? Maybe forty words a minute, max, I bet. Ha! You are not saying different because it's true. I bet she couldn't tell Helvetica from Times. What do you want with a bitch like that?" Monica laughed, leaping an octave in mid- laugh as though goosed by invisible demons of injustice.
"Don't apologize," Monica screamed—a superfluous injunction. "I don't know why I bother. You fucking men are all the same. Probably she's got a bubble ass and tits like headlights on a jeep and that's plenty to make you forget about me. But you couldn't just come right out and tell me there was someone else. I had to find it out. I had to pick up the phone and there she was, breathing and squealing like one of those nine hundred numbers."
"Monica," Philip said. "You are insane. There was never anything between you and me."
"Ha!" Monica said. She yanked the desk drawer open, fumbled through it, looked up. "Ha," she repeated. She looked down again and returned to her search of the desk drawer. A third "ha" brought her head up with a smile of triumph. "We'll see about what's between us."
She waved the brass letter opener in her right hand.
Just then a loud bark of thunder made the window pane hum, and the desk lamp and the hall light faltered and failed. The room dove into darkness except for the small, stuttering square of the window where lightning seemed to jump in sync with Monica's choked laughter.
Philip pushed away from the office door, for he had seen, in the jerky, strobe-parsed images of the storm, Monica's raised hand and unmistakably murderous intent.
He stumbled backward, heard her in front of him, moving fast. He pushed away and ran, as fast as his gimp leg would allow, down the hall.
Slam! His nose flared with pain. What was that? Of course. The goddam, monster filing cabinet that reduced the hall to a one-man corridor for about ten feet. The goddam, awful—
His shoulder erupted in pain. Monica leaned forward and screamed in his ear.
Again. She jabbed him again, the blade glancing off a rib.
Jesus God. He flailed wildly. His elbow connected with something, her jaw, he thought. She grunted and lurched backward.
Philip scrambled forward, each file drawer knob banging his injured rib with that petty love of torture that characterizes inanimate objects. He burst into the lobby; vinyl sofas pulsed with the beat of the lightning. It was after office hours. The doors would be locked. He had a key, but it was the fourth or fifth generation, and it required some jiggling and Monica was behind him and filled with insane, scorned fury and strength.
Philip fled toward the back of the building, banging through swinging doors in the dark, bouncing off more cabinets. There were people back in printing. Charlie and that new guy Owen, Mowen, whatever. And Bingham, of course.
Strength in numbers. Put that goddam shiv down Ms. Gibson. As you can plainly see, you are outnumbered. You are— This hope, bright and energizing, lived for perhaps two seconds. Lights rolled across the far wall, twin orbs, headlights, and Philip followed their course to the window as the car rolled by through the rain. There went the printers. They would be doing what they always did when the electricity went off. Taking a break. Flying down to the local Seven-Eleven for a couple of cold ones.
Down time in the storm.
Philip heard something crash behind him. "Hey!" Monica screamed. "Philip."
Philip banged through swinging doors and into the back storeroom. He collided immediately with stacked boxes of paper, toppled forward, righted himself. It was before-god dark here, no windows, and there was an overpowering burnt-sulphur reek.
The acrid scent of the Old Ones, the smell of Time itself.
No. This was not a good time for exercising the imagination. The dirty lung-clogging smoke came from the thermography presses, overheated again.
He heard the doors bang behind him, felt a gust of cooler air.
He needed a weapon, something to hit with. He felt the shelves behind him. Something shifted, tipped, and it seemed then like a hundred, a thousand cockroaches tumbled over him, danced across his face, his neck... "Ugh-"
He brushed them from his face. Business cards Surprise.
What a mess you are, he thought. What an inept, dismal buffoon. What—
Monica embraced him.
He fell back against the shelf and more boxes shifted, a rain of small, cardboard appeals.
Monica pushed her face toward him. Her breath was coated with the licorice cough drops she ate like candy.
She kissed his cheek.
There were hissing things in the dark now, things possessed of alien teeth and talons, and although the darkness was absolute, Philip could sense their writhing, feel the darkness folding and looping upon itself and hear a sound that was not the wind or the rain or any of the scuffling sounds he made as he struggled on the concrete floor, and he had to get out of there.
Monica sought his lips.
He was no longer afraid of her. He was not afraid of her deranged passion or the possibility that she still had the letter opener and meant to thr
ust it into his heart. The fear of Monica had been trumped, effortlessly, by the hideous things that floated over her, the minions of Yog-Sothoth, the outcast, star-headed creatures, the Shub-Niggurath, Yig, the Mi-Go, Tsathoggua.
He had to get away.
He struggled to his feet in the dark. She clung to him. He clutched her shoulders, shook her savagely, and hurled her from him. He ran, colliding with more boxes, sprawling forward. He could almost see the cold, lidless eyes, the size and shape of dinner plates.
Résumé With Monsters Page 9