“Yes. When the time comes, you can negotiate a deal with them. I’ll trust your judgment.”
“You will?”
“You haven’t let me down this far.”
“That’s great, Simon. I’ll get working on the proofs right away.”
Strickle drained his glass and stood up. “Remember, Nicholas—no changes.” He clapped Cleaver on the back and left the bar. Cleaver slumped back in his seat, exhausted. He couldn’t believe it. The book was his.
*
For the next month Cleaver devoted himself to the anthology. He prepared the proofs and sent them off to Strickle. He trawled through small press websites, looking at cover artwork, and found a young artist whose work impressed him. He contacted him, gauged his interest in the project and asked him to submit some sketches. He booked space in the dealer’s room at the World Fantasy Convention which was to be held in London in October. It would provide the perfect launchpad for the anthology. He emailed the organisers, telling them he had an anthology full of ‘lost’ stories by legendary writers in the field, but he gave no names. This solicited an invitation for an interview to appear in the programme book, which he accepted.
He wrote copy for a display ad which he placed in four of the leading horror magazines in the UK and the US. He talked up the book to a dozen genre reviewers and websites, promising that October would see the release of the most explosive book in the field since Sarrantonio’s 999. He fired off press releases, put teaser adverts on his own website, and sent the same ad to everyone on his mailing list. When the proofs were completed he sent them to Strickle.
He worked himself into a state of near-exhaustion but the stories sustained him. Each time he read one he got more out of it. Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Lamb’ became something much darker than the literate piece of Southern Gothic it had first seemed, as the strongly held beliefs of a young writer were undone by an encounter with a woman whose innocence was revealed as the absence of a soul. On third or fourth reading, Angela Carter’s ‘The Girl who was Liberty Valance,’ revealed itself as a brutal, nightmarish dissection of ambition and fame.
More startling still was the anthology’s title story, ‘The Rediscovery of Death’ by Willard Grant, an American fantasist whose bizarre stories had appeared mainly in a couple of obscure Deep South small press journals in the nineties. Grant had published no more than forty or so stories in his lifetime, and his reputation and cult status rested on two: ‘Yonder is the Clock’ and ‘Eyepennies,’ both of which had since been widely anthologised. He had been shot to death in a Memphis bar in 1999, following an argument over a woman, though nobody had ever been charged with his murder.
Cleaver had thought it odd that the book should be named after a piece by such an obscure writer, but after a third encounter with the tale, while his mind was still reeling from the impact of its intimate and unsparing account of the process of a murder—written in surreal and entrancing prose that seduced the reader into seeing the attraction of death—he knew that it was perfect as the title piece. Like so many of the stories in the collection its effect lingered in the mind, creating a kind of siren call, a yearning to return to it again and again.
*
As Cleaver worked on The Rediscovery of Death, his other clients grew restless. The returned proofs for a single author collection went unread and its slot in his publication schedule passed by. Another author denounced him for failing to promote his novella, and he somehow failed to attend the scheduled launch and author signing of an anthology of new body horror stories.
Apart from Allyson, he lost touch with the few friends he had outside the horror world. Time not spent on the book was time wasted, he told himself. Allyson grew more concerned about his obsessive behaviour. One night, returning from a convention in Leeds where he had been promoting the anthology, he ran into the back of a parked car on the A470. He hadn’t been drinking but he panicked and called Allyson. She drove up from Canton and took him back to his flat.
The kitchen sink was piled high with unwashed plates and the remains of take away cartons, and hundreds of manuscript pages were scattered around the living room floor. Cleaver gathered a few sheets together and slumped onto the sofa where he began reading.
“What’s the matter with you?” Allyson said, clearly appalled.
Cleaver looked up at her, confused. He had just read the opening lines of Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Toy’ and already its sensual, almost narcotic creepiness had begun to affect him. “Yes?”
“Look at this place? This isn’t you.”
“You don’t have to stay,” he said, his eyes drifting back towards the text.
“Christ Nick,” she cried, snatching the pages from his hand. “Take a look at yourself. This bloody book can’t be so important that you neglect yourself this way.”
A sharp, stabbing pain made Cleaver’s stomach cramp. He tried to stand up but in doing so he fell over. Allyson crouched beside him and tried to help him up. “Dear God, you’re freezing.” She got an arm round his back and helped him to his feet. Steering him into the bedroom she told him she was going to make sure he got some rest. He tried to protest, hitting out feebly at her arms but she easily overcame him and wrestled him down onto the bed. She helped him out of his clothes and pulled the sheets over him. She made him drink hot chocolate and swallow a couple of Ativan tablets. Shortly after, he was sleeping.
The room was cold and his breath misted in the grey morning light that filtered through the blinds. Weird images and fragments of description jostled for space in his head. When he tried to shut them down they were replaced by a vague anxiety that left him weak and dissolute. He shivered beneath the sheets, though his body was slick with perspiration. For a while he just lay there, willing himself to fall back to sleep. But soon his mind was once again replaying scenes from the anthology, with storylines from one tale suddenly straying into another. The more he tried to ignore them, the more lost he became in unfamiliar narrative strands. It was as though he had become a character in one of the tales, moving through a plot whose outcome he didn’t know. As unsettling as it was, he couldn’t drag himself out of that strange interior world.
Later, he heard the sound of breathing and became aware of Allyson’s presence in the room. He saw her curled up in the armchair by the window, her face bathed in a pool of light from the tall reading lamp behind the chair. All her attention seemed to be focused on whatever it was she was reading but there was something odd about her expression. He pushed himself up on his elbows and squinted through the gloom. Her face was oddly expressionless, the eyes vacant even as they moved back and forth across the page. It was as if she was reading without really seeing or absorbing the text. Something troubled him. He pulled back the sheets and swung his legs out over the bed. His body ached and shook as he pushed himself upright. “What is that?” he said, as he moved toward her.
She looked up, her mouth open in a slack-jawed smile, before she seemed to become aware of her surroundings. “Nicholas,” she said. “You’re awake.”
When he saw pages from the manuscript resting in her lap he a felt a sudden, intense rush of anger. “Give them to me,” he snarled.
“Jesus Nick. I’m only reading them.”
He snatched the pages from her lap. “You can’t,” he said. “You had no bloody right.”
“What are you talking about? I just wanted to see what you were spending so much time on.”
“Lying bitch! I know what you wanted.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Allyson said, standing. “You’re scaring me.”
Cleaver shoved her back into the chair. “Goddamn you. What have you read?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I can’t even remember it. It makes no sense.”
The blood pounded through Cleaver’s veins. “Don’t lie to me!”
“It’s crazy, Nick—it’s just gone.”
Rage consumed him. “You will tell me what you read,” he screamed, reaching for her. A fire
burned inside him, charring his flesh, blackening his bones. “I have to know.” He caught her and in doing so, he felt himself fall right though the world.
*
It had been raining for three days solid when Strickle came to examine the PDF file before it was sent to the printers. Fifteen minutes before he showed up the rain stopped and a splash of blue appeared in the sky. When he walked in the door he seemed to drag the sunlight in with him.
Cleaver came out from behind his desk, apologising for the untidy state of the office. Strickle waved his apology away. “Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
Cleaver nodded. “It’s all done,” he said. “Ready to go to the printer.”
“You don’t look so good, Nicholas,” Strickle said, moving toward the desk. “Should I be concerned?”
Something in his tone puzzled Cleaver. He didn’t sound concerned. Or was he imagining that? “Tired,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Well, not long more, hey?” Strickle gestured toward the computer. “Why don’t you show me.”
Cleaver stepped behind the desk and turned the computer screen to face Strickle. He opened a folder onscreen and clicked on the PDF file labelled ‘The Rediscovery of Death.’ The book’s cover filled most of the screen. “This is good,” Strickle said. His voice was strong and clear. “The artist?”
“Mason Swirzky. He’s done some cover work for Subterranean and Arkham House.”
“It’s perfect.”
Cleaver clicked on down through the sidebar, revealing the title, copyright, and contents page. He showed Strickle the four interior illustrations Swirzky had provided for the tales by Lovecraft, Blackwood, Jackson and the title story. He clicked on pages at random, waiting a moment for Strickle to nod his approval before revealing another page. He scrolled right through to the end before closing the file. Strickle looked over the monitor and smiled. “Good job, Nicholas. Outstanding.”
Cleaver felt relief and also a vague sense of doubt. “The first copy should be with me in two weeks. Most of the limited editions have been pre-ordered but I’ve held back fifty copies, along with two hundred of the paperbacks, for the convention. They’ll be shipped straight to the venue.”
“Everything is set then.” Strickle’s gaze moved around the office and came to rest on Cleaver. He stuck his hand out. Cleaver looked at it for a moment, confused. Then, nervously, he reached out and shook.
“See you in London,” Strickle said.
Cleaver sat down, turned the screen back around and began to read Richard Laymon’s ‘The Bone Machine.’
*
The convention drew near. Cleaver rarely left the building anymore, except to buy food or alcohol from the nearest convenience store. Even then he waited until nightfall, finding the darkness less oppressive than the October sunlight. He didn’t want to run into anyone he knew. His hair had grown long and his skin itched all the time. He’d been wearing the same jeans and t-shirt for over a month. They would ask questions. They would tell each other he had let himself go. It didn’t matter. Nothing did, apart from the anthology. When it was out there, they would know. It would be worth it all—the hunger, the sleepless nights, the isolation—in the end.
He communicated with the printers by email, and used the same means to complete a final round of promotional interviews. When these were done he retreated to the flat and spent most of the time sitting by the window looking down at the traffic moving along Albany Road. He no longer read the stories. He didn’t have to—they were everywhere, digitalised drafts on his laptop, hundreds of pages of hard copy scattered over every surface, competing narratives unfolding inside his head. Everywhere he looked, everyone he saw, reminded him of some scene or event from the anthology.
Once, he thought he saw Allyson emerging from the pharmacy across the street. Some half-remembered emotion flickered briefly inside him as he watched her pause for a moment and look up at his window, squinting he thought, as though she could see him there. But it wasn’t her, he told himself, it couldn’t be, and as though in response to some editorial command, she turned away and disappeared around the corner.
The first copy arrived three days before the convention. When he saw the courier’s van pull up outside, his heart suddenly began to beat faster and he nearly fell as he descended the stairs in his eagerness to get the door. His hand shook uncontrollably as he signed for the package. The courier muttered something about a smell as he handed it over but Cleaver didn’t care. An intense, almost euphoric sense of anticipation swept through him as he went back upstairs and tore open the package.
For five minutes he just sat by the window holding the book, savouring the feel and weight of it, staring at the cover, a close-up of a man’s face, his brow furrowed in concentration as he looked down at something whose image was reflected in his eyes. In the left were mirrored the words of the text he was reading, in the right the same words but blurred and fading. Behind his head a mirror on the wall revealed an image of the back of his skull, opened up, and nestling inside that dark space was a book with the title The Rediscovery of Death.
Opening the book he thumbed the pages from left to right, stopping when he came to the title page. There at the bottom were the words The Thingumbob Press. He turned a couple of pages and examined the table of contents which were listed over two pages. The last to be listed was the title story, which began on page 489, but beneath this was the number 513 with a blank space where the story title and author’s name should have been. Puzzled, Cleaver turned to the end of the book and found that all the endpages were numbered, beginning at 513. How had that happened? It was annoying as hell but too late to change now. Anyway, he figured, it added to the mystery and uniqueness of the anthology.
He turned back to the first story, Ambrose Bierce’s ‘A Listener by the Dead,’ and began to read. His eyes devoured the text, racing over the words, and he felt again a tremendous, ecstatic rush as the story came to life in his mind. He turned the page and read on, already noticing a subtle change in the sequence of events that would lead to Francis Melberson’s downfall. As his gaze flicked up and across to the facing page, some anomaly caught his eye. He started and almost dropped the book in alarm. He stared down at the page he had just read. It was blank. Turning it over, he saw that the words had also vanished from the first page of the story. A sense of doubt came over him but the compulsion to read on was stronger. He returned to the text and made a conscious effort to read more slowly. By the time he was halfway down the page, the first few lines had disappeared.
Bewildered, he read on, telling himself that it was some kind of hallucination, born out of exhaustion and over-excitement. By the time he finished, everything would right itself. For a while he continued to read slowly, ignoring the clear white pages he left behind. But as he moved into the second story, the speed with which the words vanished from the page seemed to increase. He found his eyes straying back to the start of the paragraph he was reading and was horrified to see the words already fading. He pressed on, a little faster now, but the text continued to dematerialise at a faster pace. By the time he reached the end of the third story, there were just a couple of sentences visible on the page.
Abruptly, he slammed the book shut and sat there, breathing hard and shaking, his eyes watering with the effort of staying ahead of the words. He decided to read no more that day but no sooner had he come to this decision than a sickening sense of panic fell over him. His skin itched and burned and the muscles in his joints began to cramp. He felt something cold expand inside him, a great, dark emptiness that only the stories could fill.
Cleaver read for the next thirty hours without stopping. When he had finished he collapsed and passed out. It was light outside when he came to. The book lay beside him on the floor. Though he was frightened he reached out and pulled it closer, flipped it open and saw two blank pages. He flicked through twenty more, all empty.
Dragging himself across the floor he found his phone on the table. “Nicholas,�
�� Strickle said, when he answered the call. “Where are you?”
“I—I’m at home,” Cleaver said. “Something’s happened. Something’s wrong.”
“What’s happened?”
“The book—it’s, it’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“The words. It’s empty.”
“It’s all right, Nicholas. You don’t have to worry.”
Cleaver almost choked. “Jesus Christ, you don’t understand.”
“I do and I’m telling you everything is fine. I’m here in London. At the hotel. The books are here. They arrived this morning.”
“They are? Have you seen them?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’ve held one? Looked inside?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s okay? It’s all there?”
“Everything is as it should be, Nicholas. Except for you. You should be here.”
“I haven’t been well,” Cleaver said, feeling ashamed at the extent to which he had let himself go.
“You need to get here for the reading tonight.”
“You’re doing a reading?”
“A midnight reading. I need you here for it. Without you it wouldn’t exist.”
“All right,” Cleaver said. “I’ll be there.”
*
It was after eleven when Cleaver checked into his room at the Ambassador Hotel. Down in the large annexe that housed the convention centre, he found the registration desk, got his tag and programme book. The dealer’s room was already shut and a panel discussion was underway in the main hall. The adjoining bar was full. Recognising some people he knew just inside the door, he turned away and looked through the timetable. Strickle’s reading was to be held in the Tudor suite.
He followed a map along a corridor that seemed to take a circuitous route through the complex. There were few people about apart from the odd cleaner and occasional drunk. On the door of the Tudor Suite he saw one of the posters he had had printed, showing the book’s cover and in the blank space beneath, the announcement of Strickle’s reading.
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