Стивен Кинг - The Plant 3

JOHN KENTON, who majored in English and was President of the Brown University Literary Society, has had a rude initiation into the real world as one of Zenith House’s four editors. Zenith House, which captured only 2 % of the total paperback market the year before (1980), is dying on the vine. All of its employees are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may soon take extreme measures to stem the tide of red ink…and the most likely possibility is looking more and more like terminating Zenith House, with extreme sanction. The only hope is a drastic sales turnaround, but with Zenith’s tiny advances and creaky distribution system, that seems unlikely.

Enter CARLOS DETWEILLER, first in the form of a query letter received by John Kenton. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers and is hawking a book he’s written, called True Tales of Demon Infestations. Kenton, with the vague idea that Detweiller may have some interesting stuff which can be rewritten by a staffer, encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline. Detweiller instead submits the entire manuscript, along with a bundle of photographs. The mss is even more abysmal than Kenton — who thought the book could maybe be juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience — would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is contained in the form of the enclosed photographs. Most are shots of painfully faked seance effects, but four of them show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man’s heart is being pulled from his gaping chest…and it seems very likely to Kenton that the fellow doing the pulling is none other than Carlos Detweiller himself.

ROGER WADE concurs with Kenton’s feeling that they have stumbled into something which is probably a police matter — and a very nasty police matter at that. Kenton takes the photos to SGT. TYNDALE, who wires them to CHIEF IVERSON in Central Falls. Carlos Detweiller is arrested, then released when an officer assigned to surveillance sees the photos in question and remarks that he saw the so-called “sacrifice victim” sitting in the House of Flowers office that very day, playing solitaire and watching Ryan’s Hope on TV. Tyndale tries to comfort Kenton. Go home, he says, have a drink, forget it. You made a perfectly forgivable mistake in the course of trying to do your civic duty.

Kenton burns the “sacrifice photos,” but he can’t forget; he receives a letter from the obviously insane Carlos Detweiller, promising revenge. Two weeks later, he receives a letter from one “Roberta Solrac,” who purports to be a great fan of Zenith’s second-hottest author, Anthony La Scorbia (La Scorbia is responsible for a series of nature-run-amok novels such as Rats from Hell, Ants from Hell, and Scorpions from Hell). “She” claims to have sent La Scorbia roses, and wants to send Kenton, as La Scorbia’s editor, a small plant “as a token of esteem.”

Kenton, no fool, realizes at once that Solrac is Carlos spelled backward…and Detweiller, of course, worked in a greenhouse. Convinced that the “token of esteem” is apt to be something like deadly nightshade or belladonna, Kenton sends an interoffice memo to Riddley, instructing him to incinerate any package which comes to him from a “Roberta Solrac.”

RIDDLEY WALKER, who respects Kenton more than Kenton himself would ever believe, agrees, but privately adopts a wait-and-see attitude. Near the end of February 1981, a package from “Roberta Solrac,” addressed to John Kenton, actually does arrive. Riddley opens the package in spite of a strong feeling that the sender — Detweiller — is a terribly evil man. If so, the contents of the package are hardly in keeping with such notions; it is nothing more than a sickly-looking Common Ivy with a little plastic sign stuck into the earth of its pot. The sign reads:

HI!

MY NAME IS ZENITH

I AM A GIFT TO JOHN

FROM ROBERTA

Riddley puts it on a high shelf of his janitor’s room and forgets it.

For the time being.

February 25

Dear Ruth,

I’ve got a case of the mean reds, so I thought I’d pass some of them on — see the enclosed Xeroxes, concluding with a typically impudent communication from Riddley, he of the coal-black skin and three hundred huge white teeth.

You’ll notice that Roger kicked my ass good and hard — not much like Roger, and doubly sobering for that very reason. I don’t think one has to be very paranoid to see that he’s talking about the possibility of firing me. If I’d talked this out with him over martinis at Flaherty’s after work, I doubt very much if he would have come down so hard, and of course I had no idea he was waiting on a call from Enders. I undoubtedly deserved the ass-kicking I got — I haven’t really been doing my job — but he has no idea of the scare that letter threw into me when I realized it was Detweiller again. I’m too goddam thin-skinned for my own good, that’s what Roger thinks…but Detweiller is scary for other, less easily grasped reasons. Being the idle that’s gotten fixe in some crazy’s head has got to be one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world — if I knew Jody Foster, I think I’d give her a jingle and tell her I know exactly how she feels. There’s an almost palpable texture of slime about Detweiller’s communications, and oh boy, oh yeah, I wish I could get him out of my head, but I still have nightmares about those pictures.

Anyway, I have taken care of matters as well as I can, and no, I have no intention of calling Central Falls. We have an editorial meeting tomorrow. I’ll try to the best of my limited abilities to get back on the beam…except at Zenith House the beam is so narrow it almost doesn’t exist.

I love you, I miss you, I long for your return. Maybe you being gone is part of the problem. Not to make you feel guilty.

All my love,

John

From the journals of Riddley Walker

2/23/81

Like a stone thrown into a large and stagnant pond, the Detweiller affair has caused any number of ripples at my place of employment. I thought that all of them had gone by; yet this afternoon one more rolled past, and who is to say even that one will be the last?

I have included a Xerox of an exceedingly curious memo I received from Kenton at 2:35 P.M. plus my own reply (the memo came just after Gelb left, in something of a huff; why he should have been in a huff eludes me since today he brought his own dice and I did him the courtesy of not even checking them, but Ah g’iss Ah woan nevuh understand dese white folks). I think I have covered the Detweiller affair to a nicety in these pages, but I should add that it never surprised me in the least that Kenton was the one to bring Detweiller, the rogue comet, into the erratic (and, I fear, degenerating) orbit of Zenith House.

He is brighter than Sandra Jackson; brighter than that crap-shooting, Ivy League tie-wearing devil William Gelb; far brighter than Herbert Porter (Porter, as previously noted, is not above wandering into Ms. Jackson’s office after she has left for the day and sniffing the seat of her office chair — a strange man, but be it not for me to judge), and the only one of the staff who might be capable of recognizing a commercial book if it came within his purview. Right now he is eaten up with guilt and embarrassment over l’affaire Detweiller, and can see only that he made a rather comic faux pas. He would be incapable of seeing that his decision to even look at the Detweiller book demonstrated that his editorial ears are still open, and still attuned to that sweetest of all tones — the celestial notes of Sweda cash registers in drugstores and book emporia ringing up sales, even if it was pointed out to him.