request for assistance at 0935 AM local as the last contact from the expedition.
Table of Contents
Murder Your Darlings
Malcolm Dane was the best creation of my career, my Sherlock Holmes, my Parker or Jack Ryan. I remember an interview I gave to some small book review website (mostly because the interviewer was cute), where she asked how I created such a thoroughly remarkable villain. I'd thought about it before, though I'm still not sure if I was being clever, but I told her, "Simple: I don't write him as a villain. No one thinks of themselves as evil, or stands near train tracks they've tied damsels to, twisting their mustaches. Not Pol Pot, not Stalin, not even Hitler."
It was the facile answer, but there was something to it, too. Malcolm was a hero, and not just in his own mind. He was a hero who'd gone rotten. Like if Superman was a son of a bitch, or if Batman was a cunt, if Spider-Man's radioactive spiderbite pushed him over that social ledge and he pulled a super-powered Columbine.
But Malcolm didn't need superpowers, or even a mask to hide behind. He was a businessman- one so good he could talk his way around or through anyone, or nearly so. That was the trouble. I grew weary, coming up with increasingly more savvy and intractable protagonists for him to antagonize. So I decided to end his career.
I started an uproar killing him. If I’m really honest, I was tired of writing him, tired of his goddamned smirk, tired of having to one-up every prior outing just to sell more books (and feeling like a literary Michael Bay for my troubles).
But Malcolm was smarter than me. Because he didn't die. And he was never the sort to turn the other cheek when someone tried to kill him.
Not that I knew it was him- not at first. Honestly, that first night, I thought it was just a fan, deranged, and beautiful, but a fan who'd internalized my first novel, a tragic love story surrounding a failed double suicide. She was every bit my Mary Anne, big red hair that dated back to the nineties, soft strawberry lips, and freckles that sparkled in dim light but almost disappeared when I turned on my bedroom light.
She wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d been at a mixer pushing publicity for an anthology of short stories. I knew enough about the difference between a gift horse and a Trojan one not to confuse the two, and asked her what the hell she was doing on my bed.
She said she couldn’t leave me- no, that she couldn’t leave without me. She swore I was Dylan from the novel, up and down. I tried calling the police, but she tore the phone from my hands and threw it out the window. I tried to talk her down, convince her she was mistaken, convince her that she needed to let me take her to a hospital for her slit wrists. Instead, she came at me with the knife in her hand, and in the ensuing struggle she was stabbed. I use the passive because we fell together, and I don't know who pushed the blade home.
She bled out while I waited for the ambulance, with my hands in the wound vainly trying to keep her fluids in. When the paramedics came in the room I was still holding her, tears streaming down my face. One asked if I knew her, and I said “I, I’ve never met her before in my life.”
But it wasn’t simply that she died- though that was tragic. She knew things. Things I’d written down a long time ago, an epilogue to the novel that had been too clean, too pretty, and too personal. I’d never admitted to my publisher or even my agent it existed; I’d burned it without a soul ever seeing it. But she knew every word of it; they were the last words she spoke to me.
The police took me in for questioning. Her fingerprints were on a rock she’d used to smash a window to get into the kitchen. Her fingerprints were on the knife- and she’d quite honestly been bleeding a long time before I got home. But still they asked me questions, about who she was, what she wanted, what I said. And that likely would have been that.
Only I know a few people, not in high places, but we’ll call them above-ground places, a detective sergeant, a few aids in the mayor’s office, people who can learn things, not people who decide them. And as far as anyone could tell, the girl didn’t exist. Fingerprints weren’t on record. She didn’t match any missing persons account for several hundred miles- and she was the kind of girl someone was bound to notice missing and come looking for.
And finally, slowly, I found myself recognizing that she wasn’t some fan cosplaying, that it wasn’t a lovestruck girl in a push-up bra and a sundress from a thriftstore- every aspect, every line in her face, every speckle in her eye, was Mary Anne. It could have been one of those déjà vu moments- it had to be, after all- but I couldn’t just leave it alone.
So I had to make a call, to Lucy. Lucy was Mary Anne in most of her facets. When we were young and stupid, she’d even looked the part, except for her eyes, muddy brown eyes, which I’d never quite felt did the rest of her beauty justice. We’d changed since then, and that tragic love story that, even then, was a melodramatic retelling was even further from the truth now than it had been then.
Lucy was well. Her husband had taken a teaching position at Western Washington University, and as soon as she tied up some loose ends in Portland, she planned on moving up there for him. A little part of me was let down by that; the Lucy I’d known would never have uprooted like that, but the Lucy I’d known had never been married, either. My musings ended abruptly when she said, “I was pregnant.”
“Was?” I asked.
“A few weeks ago. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” but it was told, already, and I still loved enough of her that I wanted to comfort her, and told her to go on. “We- I lost the baby. It wouldn’t have been so hard, but the baby wasn’t supposed to come for a few more weeks, and Marc’s semester had started already- I’ve been so alone.”
But as she went on to describe it, how she woke up bleeding, my blood ran cold. “When did it happen, exactly?” I asked, already knowing the answer. It had been the night, that same night, when I’d killed Mary Anne. And I knew there wasn’t anything coincidental about that. There couldn’t be.
I’ve always liked my agent, Kati Richardson- she’s a shark with a heart of gold, but she’s part agent, part lawyer, and that combination can make her cold; I think it’s because of that more than anything else (her uptight librarian attractiveness, or even the fact that I’ve known her only a few years) why I usually confide in my manager, Albert.
“You’re nuts, kid,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that in general; I mean, all writers are whack-jobs, because if they weren’t they’d do something healthy like living their lives, rather than inventing better ones for themselves and their readers to live vicariously through. So inherently, there’s nothing wrong with you being nuts. But if you start internalizing this shit, if you start looking for ways to blame yourself for other people’s problems, you’ll start yourself on a very dark road indeed. Look, bottom line, what do you need? What do you want from me, to feel okay about all this? I can get you a gun, unregistered, if you think that kind of thing would help. Uh, if you don’t mind parting with some of that advance, we could hire you some protection.”
I sighed, and thought for a moment. “What I want, is for you to ignore how insane this really does sound, and indulge me. What if, somehow, there is a connection? I’m not making any guesses as to what, or how. But what if there is something rattling around in my subconscious, something that now has consequences for people I care and cared about.”
“Kid, you remember what I told you, first manuscript you gave me? I told you it was raw, but that it had potential, but that the one thing you had to do was fall out of love with it, by which I mostly meant out of love with yourself. You've got to get distance, closure, see that you’re not as clever or talented as people think, and that even sometimes when you are, you’ve got to cut things that don’t belong in your story.”
“Murder your darlings,” I whispered.
“That’s right. From the sounds of it, you murdered that epilogue because it didn’t belong- and from the sappy shit you’ve been dribbling at me, I think you did the right thing, there.
I still think you’re trying to do-good, with this Lucy business. She lost a kid, and that’s very sad, but it wasn’t your doing, unless by way of not knocking her up when you were young retards in love with nubile young bodies, you want to take the blame on yourself. Your call. But sleep more. Jerk off more, if you think it’ll help. But calm down. And if things go south, call me first.”
He talked a lot of sense. Albert lives and works out in the hills, so it was a long way back through town, and I was still driving when my agent called. “You need to come here. Hurry.” The phone went dead. I tried calling back, and got nothing but dial tone. I tried her cell, but after two rings it dumped me to voice mail. So I called Albert.
“Yeah, I know a guy. Technically a PI, mostly an enforcer by trade. Might want to wait for him outside Kati’s office.” I told him I’d try, “By which you mean I need to hang up right the fuck now so I can tell my guy to hurry because you’re not going to wait for him.” He did just that.
My agent’s office is in one of the scrapers downtown. I’ve never much liked it, because it all feels too corporate, too intimidating; or maybe I’ve never gotten used to this part of my success- maybe that’s why I still have Albert, who operates out of a home
Selected Short Stories Featuring New Corpse Smell Page 11