by Harvey Click
***
Through the door Jason heard Drew playing his accordion and singing:
Marma, Marm, O Marmalade,
she’s sweeter yet than honey.
I spread her on my crisp hot toast,
she tastes so warm and runny!
The accordion stopped playing, and Drew said, “Things are coming to a head—the boy, the change of season, these dreadful memories, my row with Rue Anne, everything conspires to confound me. Must record the dream I had this morning.
“We were on the hilltop, our hilltop, dancing beside the apple tree, casting our legs to and fro after the scole of Oxenforde, as Chaucer might say. How happy I was, how happy…but I remember I was crying.
“There was something somber about our dance, something solemn. The leaves crunched ‘neath our feet, a great thick carpet of blood-red leaves. When we stopped dancing, she began to pick the few remaining leaves from the tree. Bright, dazzling leaves, as red as fire, one leaf at a time she picked them and handed them to me. Finally only one leaf remained, one lovely scarlet leaf blazing like a terrible sunset. We both stared at it with tears in our eyes, and we blessed and praised the final leaf.”
The accordion began to play a mournful tune, and Jason knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Jason.”
The door opened, and Drew looked awful, big bags under his bloodshot eyes as if he’d been drinking heavily or crying or most likely both.
“I have important news,” he said. “I regret to say you were right about Rue Anne. You need to stay away from her.”
Jason plopped down in the armchair and said nothing.
“I called Jerry Mingler yesterday,” Drew said, “and he told me some very specific details that no one except a student of the dark arts could possibly invent. So I spoke with Rue Anne, and though she didn’t exactly admit anything, she told me enough so I could put two and two together. I’m convinced she’s been using young men in a most horrible way to gain occult power. I know quite well the method she’s using because unfortunately I taught it to her myself a couple years ago, purely as a matter of scholarly interest.”
Jason still didn’t say anything. Though he was tired of hearing Drew’s hokum and hooey, he was thinking maybe he could use this particular hokum to his advantage.
“Did you hear me?” Drew said. “I’m telling you there’s serious danger. You need to stay away from her.”
“I can’t,” Jason said solemnly. “She’s got me in her clutches. She draws me like a magnet.”
“Yes, that’s a perfectly predictable effect of the method she’s using. But you must resist it with every atom of your soul.”
“I can’t,” Jason said. “That envelope you give me had a pair of her drawers inside it. One sniff, and I was like her slave forever. I throwed the evil things away at once, but the smell is still in my nose and it will be there forever.”
“That’s no problem. I can make a potion to clear your nose. Whenever you think of her, you just sniff the bottle and her spell will be vanquished.”
“It won’t work,” Jason said gravely. “Her smell goes deeper than my nose, it’s in my heart and my head. The only thing that’ll take my mind off her is another woman.”
“But you have Holly! I gave you a love spell, and now she wants you.”
“No, your spell didn’t work. Holly wanted to see me just so she could tell me how much she hates me. She’s gonna marry another man and she wants to rub it in. I’m ‘fraid I’m done for ‘less you can help me. They’s only one thing that’ll work. I need me a woman to take my mind off Rue. I need a spell to make Kyra love me.”
Drew said nothing. He looked too tired and miserable to speak.
“I reckon this is pretty much all your fault, Mr. Drew,” Jason said. “I mean, you’re the one that hooked me up with Rue in the first place, so I guess you’re the one that’s gonna have to fix things up for me.”
Drew lifted his thick red glasses and rubbed his red eyes. “My dear boy, I can see that we need to establish a few facts. Fact number one: My name is not Mr. Drew—my name is Drew Dieborn.
“Fact number two: Rue Anne has been my close friend for seven years, and now because of you our friendship is over and she’s bitterly angry with me.
“Fact number three: Another important matter, which I don’t feel free to discuss with you, has been weighing heavily on my mind these past few days, and because of it I feel obliged to conduct what I call a spirit quest. A spirit quest is a grueling and potentially dangerous procedure that requires perfect concentration, so for the remainder of today and all day tomorrow I wish to be left alone.
“Fact number four: I got very little sleep last night, so I’m not feeling particularly cheerful this morning, and if you do not vacate these premises within the next twenty seconds I intend to beat you soundly over the head with my walking stick.”
Jason didn’t need twenty seconds. He did it in less than ten.
He wandered around for a while tired and depressed with nowhere to go. He was in no mood to visit Holly, but he didn’t want to be alone either, and Rue wouldn’t be home till 3:00.
Finally he found a phone booth and called the number Hatter had given him. A free lunch might make up for the dismal fact that he’d been able to afford only two Big Macs. The desk clerk rang the phone in his room, but nobody answered.
Hatter had scrawled the number on a folded sheet of paper, and when Jason unfolded it he saw it was a handbill saying that somebody named Lawford Laughinghouse, author of Daniel’s Vat, was going to give a reading today at 1:00 p.m. in the auditorium of some place called Haggerty Hall. The last thing Jason felt like doing was listening to some damn fool read some stupid book, and he was about to refold the advertisement when he took a second look at the photograph.
It was sort of blurry, and it wasn’t a good likeness, but unmistakably it was a picture of Hatter.
Chapter Fourteen
There were only a few people in the auditorium of Haggerty Hall, so Jason had his choice of seats, but when he noticed an attractive young woman sitting in the very center of the front row he decided to sit beside her.
“Is this seat took?” he asked her.
She glanced at him, glanced around the nearly empty auditorium, pushed up her glasses and frowned at him. “Well, I suppose it isn’t,” she said.
He sat down beside her and looked at the open notebook lying in her lap with a ballpoint pen poised above it to take notes. She had written “Lawford Laughinghouse” and the date at the top of the page and had drawn a fancy little doodle beside it that looked something like a flowering thistle with bees buzzing around it.
She was small and quite studious looking, with bookish glasses and light brown hair tied back in a bookish ponytail, but her face was girlish and unbookish with pretty unpainted lips set in a wistful expression, which for some reason caused Jason to picture her fishing beside him on a grassy creek bed while a great number of butterflies fluttered about and a chorus of songbirds sang harmoniously from the trees.
His attention, however, soon strayed to her small breasts, which looked like sweet little pears beneath her thin brown sweater. She noticed him staring, frowned again, and collected her book bag from the next seat. It seemed she was preparing to move, so he unfolded his flier and pointed at the picture of Hatter.
“I know this guy,” he said. “We’re good friends, and I happen to know his name ain’t Lawford Laughinghouse.”
The young woman pushed up her glasses and regarded him rather warily. “Oh? Then what’s his name?” she asked.
“Madison Hatter.”
“Did you say Hatter?”
“Yep. H-a-t-e-r, Hatter.”
She wrote this down in her notebook and said, “How do you know him?”
“Oh, I just do. I know a lotta people, and me and him are pretty good friends. In fact we come into town together. Yesterday we met up for some lunch, then we went to a fancy nightclub and had us a real good time.
He drives an old Hudson with bad brakes, likes to call it Jane.”
“So do you know where he lives?”
“Uh, well, I don’t know ‘xactly where, but I got his hotel room number right here.” He turned over the flier to show it to her.
She wrote down the information and asked, “Have you read his books? What do you think of Daniel’s Vat?”
“Uh, well, I ain’t read quite all of it just yet, but I guess it’s pretty good.”
An ancient skeletal man with a long white beard crept up to the podium and began to drone inaudibly, pausing occasionally to chuckle at his own inaudible witticisms. After many minutes of this he shuffled away, and Hatter stepped out to a small smattering of applause. He was wearing his fedora and a brown tweed suit again, but maybe it was a different one because it looked slightly less shabby than before.
He glared at the audience for a moment, coughed, cleared his throat, spent a minute riffling through a pile of pages he had brought, mumbled “Hell’s bells” and “Damn it all,” maybe not realizing how the auditorium speakers amplified his words, and then tapped on the microphone several times, causing ugly bursts of electronic noise.
“Good afternoon,” he said, staring down as he read tonelessly from his top page. “I suppose most of you are English students, and no doubt some of you hope to make your fortunes as novelists. Please give me a show of hands—how many of you are writers of fiction?”
The woman sitting beside Jason raised her hand with her ballpoint pen wiggling back and forth with excitement, as if it were writing a novel in the air.
“Splendid, splendid,” Hatter read tonelessly, without even bothering to look up from his page. “It gives me great pleasure to address you avid scriveners today. I suppose it’s even possible that one or two of you may have a small flicker of talent, though I strongly doubt it. If so, I urgently advise you to drop out of this so-called learning institution at once. Creative writing departments, and in fact English departments as a whole, are rest homes for those terminally afflicted with mediocrity.”
There were a few uneasy chuckles. Hatter cleared his throat noisily a few more times and then continued reading in a monotone, stumbling over some of the words.
“I wish to thank the English Department of The Ohio State University for inviting me here today, though the stipend they offered me is pitiful. In fact it’s downright insulting, and it’s only by an act of pure charity that I’m taking my time to address you. Believe me, I have better things to do with my time, and the handful of chump change they’re giving me wouldn’t buy a grunt from a ninety-year-old hooker with bad breath and no teeth. I ask you, how much money does this so-called learning institution spend every year on football? Obviously to the wise minds of this mediocrity mill jock straps are far more important than writers. It’s no wonder most college students today can barely spell their own names.”
There were a few more uneasy chuckles mixed with some hisses. Hatter coughed and cleared his throat without bothering to look up from his notes.
“Though I was invited to give a reading, I have no intention of actually reading any of my fiction. It’s my firm belief that college students should know how to read all by themselves and therefore shouldn’t need someone to read to them. If any of you actually entertain curiosity about any of my books, you may go out and buy your own damn copies and puzzle over the words all by yourselves.
“I am, however, giving a reading in that I’m reading this speech. I’m reading it in order to fulfill my part of the contract and thereby earn my pitiful little stipend, which is barely enough to buy a dozen jock straps for the beloved football team. And also I’m reading it because I dislike spontaneity. I dislike spontaneity because there’s nothing more contrived.”
He chuckled and coughed, but nobody chuckled along with him.
“Before I go any further, I should inform you that I’m not Lawford Laughinghouse. In fact, Lawford Laughinghouse does not exist. Lawford Laughinghouse is merely a pseudonym, one of many that I have used, and I don’t intend to use it again because, frankly, it takes too damn long to type. To maintain the integrity of my work, I find it necessary to remain anonymous. In fact, aside from myself, the only person who knows my true identity is my agent.”
At that moment he glanced up from his notes and noticed Jason in the center of the front row. Hatter stared for several seconds, his expression frozen. Then he cleared his throat a few more times, tapped the microphone again, and continued.
“I choose anonymity because writers who become celebrities can no longer write anything worth reading. Every time you turn on the TV you see Norman Mailer making a damn fool of himself, and he’s written nothing but crap since the TV cameras first spotted him.
“Dick Cavett has been desperate for me to appear on his program for many years, but he’s unable to track me down. I’m told he has even hired a detective, but to no avail. Certainly I could sell more books by making a damn fool of myself on his show, but I’d soon be writing crap just like Norman Mailer and dozens of other unreadable clowns I could name. My deliberate avoidance of the limelight means I’ll never get rich, but then neither did…”—Hatter turned the page—“…putrid memories sloshing through the policeman’s brain like runny dog shit.”
He stopped and stared at the page with a baffled expression, mumbled “Hell’s bells” and “Damn it all,” and riffled through his pile of paper until he found a different page. He cleared his throat a few times and began reading again.
“My self-imposed obscurity of course explains why so few of you are here today. But your scarcity offers you a grand opportunity because I’m going to give you some valuable clues, and only you will know them. Imagine the brownie points you can earn from your professors by tracking down all of my pseudonyms and compiling a complete bibliography of my works. It sounds like a useless task, of value to no one, but that’s why English departments exist. Your professors will be happy because they can steal your work and publish it under their own names, thereby earning tenure so they can wallow in their own worthlessness with impunity for many years to come.”
Big words always made Jason sleepy, so he shut his eyes and began to drift. He imagined he was standing behind the podium with a big magic wand in his hand. He was waving it over the audience, making them sway to his command. He decided to make them all go to sleep except for the woman with the bookish glasses. She was amazed by his powers and strolled slowly up to the podium, as if in a trance.
“Can I touch your wand and feel its power?” she asked.
“It ain’t something I let ordinary folks handle,” he said, “but I guess I can let you.”
The woman grasped his wand and stroked it gently with her soft little hands. Jason began to moan with pleasure, and then something sharp poked his arm.
It was the woman’s ballpoint pen. “You were snoring,” she whispered. “It’s very rude.”
“Here’s what some prating Pollyanna wrote about Daniel’s Vat,” Hatter was saying. “ ‘Through all the blasphemies and obscenities of Laughinghouse’s tormented prose, one can perceive the sad but beneficent face of a man whose tender concern for human anguish transcends his vituperative imprecations.’
“Apparently some other genius must have read what this pleonastic pinhead had written, because a couple weeks later I found this in another journal: ‘Although Laughinghouse faces the sad human condition with anguished curses, tenderness is present in every blaspheming word of his obscenely brilliant novel.’
“Is it any wonder why writers very often feel compelled to vomit? In fact, when Daniel’s double comes floating up out of his vat, he has no intention of uplifting anyone, except possibly with a noose. His vision of humanity is…”
Jason shut his eyes and drifted again. The woman grasped the folds of his long purple sorcerer’s robe and begged him to take her with him on his perilous adventures and teach her the secrets of magic.
“I can’t do that,” Jason said. “I got so many other women
chasing after me, you’re just gonna have to wait in line.”
The poor woman began to weep. “Please don’t leave me,” she cried. “I’ll follow you to the very ends of the earth. I’ll worship the ground you walk on.”
In desperation she began to undress. She was pulling her thin brown sweater over her head when the ballpoint pen poked him again.
“Well now, I promised you literary detectives some nice juicy clues, and here’s where you’ll find them,” Hatter was saying. “They’re all buried in a novel I published under the pseudonym Hardin Hotwet. I won’t tell you the title because that would make your work too easy, but I’ll briefly sketch the plot.
“Communist Garcia Hateshit kidnaps a bunch of famous people, including folksinger U. Dylan Croonheart, starlet May Landshot, radical rock star Krank Zaffa and his frumpy groupie Ellen Hammliver, born-again transvestite Wilbur Mae Lilyteats, millionaire heiress Helena Hanna Rotwith, congresswoman Ayn Shamdolt, and TV chef Hilda H. Smeltmeat, and he makes them perform perverted atrocities that are beamed into every television set in the country. It is, in the words of one critic, ‘A bitterly ironic but ultimately tender and impassioned embrace of downtrodden humanity.’
“As some of you brilliant scholars have probably already figured out just by listening intently, the author’s name and the names of all the characters are anagrams based on the names of some of my favorite writers, and that alone should be worth an article or two. But more important to your task, the entire novel is riddled with riddles concerning my true identity and even my home address complete with directions. If you can track down this obscure book and decode all the anagrams and puzzles, you’ll be able to publish a major article in some prestigious quarterly that no one ever reads, and your academic careers will be assured.”
The audience was yawning with great enthusiasm. Hatter glared at them and said, “Well then, no doubt your precious time can be better spent researching the clues I’ve given you, and certainly mine can be better spent at a tavern, so unless you have some questions I’m going to go have a drink.”