Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“Of course, I got laughed out of the offices. No one took me seriously and when Donnie came back he heard what I’d done and he bawled me out in front of the whole crew. Jesus, he took a strip off one side of me and then the other. After that I didn’t dare try anything like that for a good long while.

“Still, Bear had appreciated the support. He was poor as a church mouse and he and Mya had a second little one on the way. He tried me with this and that a couple of times but it never really made it anywhere. I guess it was while he was sending me his stuff that I sent him one of mine. God, the nerve I had!” she chuckled and I couldn’t help but chuckle along with her. “Well Bear wrote back and said it was pretty good, and I said it was better than pretty good, that Playboy had taken it. Bear had been trying to crack Playboy but hadn’t managed it by that point.

“For six months Bear went silent after that and I guess I thought maybe I’d offended him. Men don’t like being shown up, not then, not now. That’s why there’s all the craziness there is today. Women are afraid of violence, but men? Men are afraid of humiliation. Humiliation to them is like dying over and over and over again. And speaking of humiliation I had just about survived mine. Donnie Rogers had moved over to New American Libraries and I was covering for him while they looked for a replacement. That was when the next manuscript crossed my desk.”

“That was Rosie ?” I asked her.

“Indeed it was, though it was called Revenge of the Stars at the time which was a godawful title, I have to say.”

“And this time it stuck?”

“Not right away it didn’t. The ending was clunky. It had Rosie transforming into this giant radioactive slug thing and devouring the town that way. Pure St. John, you know. He always loved the EC Comics stuff. People want to say he’s got literary chops, and sure he does, but a part of him is pure pulp and is perfectly content to stay that way, thank you very much.”

“So what happened?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, that’s the easy bit. Some good luck, I suppose. Ira Levin was big and Bear’s book was enough like that for me to pull together an advance for him. Small, you know. The real success came later with the paperback sales and that wasn’t me, not exactly. But I suppose if what you’re after is who found Barron St. John then it’s me as much as it was anyone.”

She paused there to take another long drag of her Coke. While she’d been talking she seemed so animated, so full of vigor but as the seconds stretch on I could see how old she was now, how time had etched fine lines around her lips. Her wrists were thin and frail, the skin bunching and slack at the same time.

She moved then, pulled up a black leather handbag and began to dig around in it. Eventually she came up with a Christmas card. “Look at that,” she said, her eyes sharp. The paper was old and creased in several places. When I opened it there I found a simple handwritten note. To Lilian , it said, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. We owe you so much. Love, Bear and Mya St. John

Lily was smiling slightly as she showed it to me, smiling and watching to see my reaction. I tried to smile back but there was a part of me that felt disappointed. Most of the story was what she had published in that chapter. Little of it really surprised me. It felt rehearsed, the way you keep old memories by telling yourself the story behind them again and again. Whatever I was looking for it wasn’t there.

I was getting restless and it seemed like she was finished when she cocked her head to the side. “That’s not what you wanted to hear, was it?”

I tried to tell her it was great, wonderful stuff. It would certainly make it into the article.

“Sure it will,” she said, “but you didn’t need any of it. Certainly you didn’t need to fly over here from England just to get this story, did you? I could’ve told you that over the phone. You didn’t need to come.”

I shrugged.

“What you wanted was him, wasn’t it? You wanted Bear.”

“Maybe,” I told her wearily. The heat was starting to get to me, making me a touch queasy.

“It isn’t easy, you know,” she said, “to try to tell your story when the best parts are about someone else.” She sighed. “You know, I had to give up writing once I found St. John. It wasn’t like it had been before. We were so busy all the time. St. John could write like a madman, he was fast. There was always another book. And then things got tricky with the contracts. You must know about this?”

I did. Everyone did. St. John had left Doubleday after a series of well-publicized contract disputes. Doubleday had been keeping most of the profits on the paperback sales and he felt he deserved a bigger cut. Doubleday wouldn’t budge and eventually he left.

“There wasn’t much I could do for him. They wouldn’t give him a better deal and they wouldn’t listen when I told them how serious he was about leaving. When he finally did switch publishers all those men at the top said it was my fault. I got parked for a while editing books on what types of music you can play to help your plants grow, that sort of kooky trash. After a year or so they fired me.”

I fiddled with my own straw, unsure how to react to any of this.

“Bear didn’t take me with him, see. I told him not to. I told him I had enough status in the company—but I was wrong. When you’re on top you always think you’re going to stay there forever, that there aren’t sharks circling beneath. But I guess Barron knew about those sharks. The one thing he knew about was the sharks. He could be one himself when he needed to.”

“You didn’t want to go back to writing?”

“Nah, I felt I’d spent my chance by that point. I think I had one lucky break in me—and it went to St. John. There wasn’t going to be another. I got by after that. I moved over to another house for a little while and convinced St. John to come do a book for us. But by that point things were different. He was a superstar and I felt spent. I had had enough of horror. It was the ’80s. Despite everything it still felt as if the world was falling apart. There was the banking crisis, the AIDS epidemic. The people weren’t reading the news though. They were reading Bear.

“I did write one more story though. I tried to sell it myself but no one would buy it. Victor Wolf had been forgotten. Bear liked it though. And he knew I was in danger of losing my mortgage. So he sent it out for me, under his name. When it sold to the New Yorker —his first real literary sale though God knows he deserved others and got them eventually—he gave me the profits.” Her smile then was bitter. “I was grateful, you know. At the time he said it was only fair. I had made his name after all. I should get the use of it whenever I wanted.

“And I was grateful at the time. I kept my brownstone, paid it off eventually. When he sold the collection he gave me the whole advance. For a while I thought about going back to Ohio but I still couldn’t admit to my parents I hadn’t been able to last in New York. So instead I stayed.”

She stared at me for a moment or two after that and I could feel the cool ripple of sadness passing over me like a shadow.

“Someone told me you died,” I said, just to break the spell of her silence.

“Of the two of us, Barron was always the shark, you see?“ she told me wryly, “No, I didn’t die. I just learned something he never figured out: how to stay alive when you stop moving.”

That evening I collected my things from Hotel 31.

Benny offered to drive me to the airport but I told him he didn’t need to do that. I could get a taxi. The university had given me a budget for that. When he said okay it sounded like there was relief in his voice, and I wondered if that meant Emmanuel was home. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to get so close to the airport. There were regular protests still going on. People were angry about the deportations but no one knew how to stop them.