Richard Laymon - The Stake

“Did they catch the guys who did it?” Lane asked.

Jessica shook her head.

“I didn’t think stuff like that happened around here.”

“It habbens, all right.”

Lane pulled into the student parking lot, found an empty space, and shut off the car.

“Thanks a lot bor the ride,” Jessica said.

“Glad to help. I’m awfully sorry you got messed up.”

“Be too. So long.” She climbed out and headed away.

“Wouldn’t you just die to know what really happened?” Betty said.

“You think she lied?” Lane asked.

“Let’s put it this way. Yes.”

Henry shoved the seat back forward. “Why would she lie about a thing like that?”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

Larry drank coffee and read a new Shaun Hutson paperback for an hour after Lane went off to school. Then he set the book aside, said, “I’d better get to it,” and rose from his recliner.

“Have fun,” Jean told him, glancing up from the newspaper as he strode past her.

He shut his office door and sat down in front of the word processor.

He had already decided not to work on Night Stranger today. The book was going well. Two more weeks should take care of it.

Then what?

Ah, he thought, there’s the rub.

Normally, by the time he was this close to finishing a novel, the next was pretty well set in his mind. He would already have pages of notes in which he had explored the plot and characters, and have several of the major scenes worked out.

Not this time.

Gotta get cooking, he told himself.

When the day came to write “The End” on Night Stranger , he wanted to slip a fresh floppy disk into his computer and begin Chapter One. Of whatever.

Two weeks to go.

That should be plenty of time.

You’ll come up with something.

You’d better.

Eighty, ninety pages to go. Then he would find himself facing an empty disk, a void, a taunting blank that would push him to the edge of despair.

It had happened a few times before. He dreaded going through a period like that again.

I won’t, he told himself.

He formatted a new disk and brought up its directory; 321,536 bytes to play with.

Let’s just use up a couple thousand today, he thought.

A page or two, that’s all it’ll take. Maybe.

He punched the Enter key and the screen went blank. A few seconds later he had eliminated the right margin justification, which would’ve left odd spaces between the words, spaces that drove him nuts when he tried to read the hard copy. He punched a few more keys. “Novel Notes — Monday, October 3,” appeared in amber light at the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

Then he sat there.

He stared at the keyboard. Several of the keys were grimy. The filthy ones were those he used least often: the numbers, the space bar except for a clean area in the shape of his right thumb, some keys at the far sides that could apparently be used to give commands for a variety of mysterious functions. He didn’t know what the hell half of them did. Sometimes he hit one by mistake. The consequences could be alarming.

He spent a while cleaning the keyboard, scratching paths through the gray smudges with a fingernail.

Stop screwing around, he told himself.

He scraped Saturday’s ashes out of a pipe, filled it with fresh tobacco and lit it. The matchbook came from the Sir Francis Drake on Union Square. They’d had lunch there during a vacation along the California coast two summers ago. The vacation he thought of as the “wharf tour.”

He set the matchbook down, puffed on his pipe, and stared at the screen.

“Novel Notes — Monday, October 3.”

Okay.

His fingertips tapped at the keys.

“Come up with something hot. Original and big. Try for at least 500 pages, more if possible.”

Right. That accomplished a lot.

He typed in, “How about a vampire book? Ha ha ha. Forget it. Vampires are done to death.

“Need something original. Some kind of a NEW threat.”

Good luck, he thought.

How about a sequel? he wondered.

“Maybe a sequel. The Beast II , or something. Worth considering, if you can’t turn up anything better.”

Come on, something new.

Or a new variation on an old theme.

“Nobody but Brandner’s done anything decent with werewolves. Come up with a fresh werewolf gimmick? Forget it. That TV show’s got the whole thing covered. But that’s not a book.”

Larry scowled at the screen.

“Forget werewolves.

“What else is there?”

His pipe slurped. He twisted the stem off, blew a fine spray into the wastebasket beside his chair, put the pipe back together and lighted it again.

A few minutes later, he had a list:

werewolves

ghosts (boring)

zombies

aliens

misc. beasts

demonic possession (shit)

homicidal maniac (done to death)

curses

wishes granted (“Monkey’s Paw”)

possessed machinery (King’s realm)

crazed animals (see above, and BIRDS)

haunted house (possibilities)

“How ABOUT a haunted house book?” he wrote.

He’d always wanted to do one, and always reached the same stumbling block. By and large, he didn’t consider ghosts sufficiently scary. Something else had to be in the house. But what?

That question took him back to the list.

He stared at it for a long time.

“Something horrible inside the house,” he wrote. “But what?”

How about a vampire under the staircase?

Right. Just thinking about it made his insides crawl.

He was on his knees beside the coffin again, staring at the withered corpse. Feeling fear and disgust.

He wanted to forget he ever saw the thing, not spend the next few months dwelling on it.

Would make a good story, though.

“A blond corpse under the hotel stairs,” he wrote. “A stake in its chest. Found by some people exploring a ghost town. Could tell it just the way it happened. Fun and games.”

He wrinkled his nose.

“But they don’t run off, scared shitless, like we did. Maybe some of them do. But one is fascinated. Is this a vampire, or isn’t it? A character like Pete, but a little crazier. He has to know. So he pulls the stake. Right in front of his eyes, the thing comes back to life. Changes from a hideous brown cadaver (use Barbara’s line about looking like salami?) into a gorgeous young woman. A gorgeous, naked young woman. Pete character is enthralled. And turned on. He wants her. But she has a different idea, and bites his neck.

“They don’t come out, and don’t come out. The others get worried, go back into the hotel to see what’s keeping the guy. Nobody under the stairs. The coffin is empty.

“Little problem, bud. Vampires don’t screw around in the daytime. So how come our merry band is exploring a ghost town after dark?

“Easy. They’re driving through town, on the way home from an outing in the desert, and the van breaks down. Flat tire, or something.”

Ah, he thought, the old car-breaking-down-in-just-the-worst-possible-place gag.

It could work, though.

And it had a nice bonus: that wasn’t the way things happened yesterday.

“Make it different enough from the truth,” he typed, “and maybe you can handle it.

“How about taking One Big Step, and changing what’s under the stairs? Not a dead gal with a stake in her chest, but a... a what? (A crate with a monster in it? Been done.) Could be anything. The body of a creature from outer space? A troll? Have open spaces between the stairs, and it reaches through and drags people in by the feet. Gobbles ‘em up. He he he.

“Chicken.

“What’s wrong with the way it really was?