Michael Ford: Jane Bites Back

“The hotel is that way,” Melodie protested.

“This is a shortcut,” said Jane curtly.

At the end of the street she pulled the car to the side and stopped in front of a house that blinked red and green with Christmas lights. On the lawn a life-size Mary and Joseph stared at the car. Behind them Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph gazed rapturously down at the baby Jesus asleep in his plastic manger. Giant candy canes provided a backdrop for three elves bearing gaily wrapped packages.

“Where are we?” Melodie asked. “What are we doing here?”

“I just need to take care of a little errand,” said Jane. She unfastened her seat belt and leaned toward her passenger, who was too busy looking at the bizarre Nativity scene to notice. As Jane opened her mouth the two fangs secreted in her upper jaw slipped from their bony sheaths and clicked into place. When her lips connected with Melodie’s neck, Melodie jumped and gave a little scream, which was cut short as Jane pushed the young woman’s face against her own coat and held it there as the blood began to flow past her lips.

A long hot shower helped remove Melodie’s smell from Jane’s body. Afterward she wrapped herself in a soft robe and went downstairs. Walking into the kitchen, she stepped on something soft and wet. When she turned the lights on she saw a small, dead bird lying on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Its light brown feathers were speckled with blood.

Tom, the black-and-white cat she’d adopted several years before, appeared and wound himself around her feet, purring as Jane bent to pick up the bird. She shuddered at the way the creature’s head lolled limply in her palm.

“Must you bring them inside?” she asked Tom as she deposited the bird in the trash can and washed her hands in the sink. She poured some dry food into Tom’s bowl and set it on the floor.

The cat trotted over and ate hungrily, crunching the bits between his teeth and watching Jane out of the corner of his eye.

“Horrid beast,” said Jane, scratching him behind the ear. She then turned her attention to the mail, which she’d brought in from the hall. Mostly it was junk, but at the bottom of the pile was a letter. Reading the return address, Jane felt her heart speed up. She ran her finger beneath the flap and pulled out the enclosed sheet of paper.

Dear Miss Fairfax:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript for our consideration. We regret to say that it is not right for our list. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Jessica Abernathy

Fourth Street Books

Jane crumpled the letter and tossed it to the floor. Tom eyed it, as if considering whether or not to bat it under the table, but did not stop eating. Jane opened a bottle of merlot, took a glass from the cabinet and a chocolate bar from one of the drawers, and left both the paper and the cat in the kitchen as she went back upstairs to her bedroom. She poured a glass of wine and set it on the bedside table. Then she pulled open a drawer in the nightstand and removed from it a small notebook. Turning to a page somewhere near the middle of the book, she added Jessica Abernathy’s name to the first unoccupied line, which in this case was almost exactly one-third of the way down, just below the name of Barlow McInerney of Accordion Press.

Beside Jessica’s name Jane wrote the number 116. “One hundred and sixteen rejection letters,” she muttered. “I’d say that makes the opinion unanimous.”

She flipped through the pages of the notebook until she came to the first one. She hadn’t been able to submit the manuscript to her usual publisher, John Murray, of course—that would have rather inconveniently given things away. So she’d been forced to seek elsewhere. At the top of the list of editors who had rejected her manuscript was one Geoffrey Martin Pomerantz of Pomerantz & Joygulb Publishers, London. Jane had no recollection of Mr. Pomerantz (or, for that matter, Mr. Joygulb). This lack of recognition, however, could be excused in light of the fact that her submission to them had taken place nearly two centuries before. Had the manuscript really been kicking around for that long? she wondered. She supposed it had, although that was difficult to imagine.

Tom, licking his chops, padded into the room and leapt onto the bed, where he settled himself on Jane’s lap and immediately went to sleep.

“Perhaps, Tom, it’s time to consider the possibility that I can no longer write,” said Jane.

Tom, opening one golden eye for only a second before closing it again, said nothing.

Jane closed the notebook and replaced it in the drawer. She told herself, as she had done many times before, that she should just throw the manuscript out. Having it around was depressing. But there was something masochistically satisfying about documenting her rejection. She didn’t save the actual letters—they would take up too much space, and anyway they would eventually fall apart from age—but the names she kept. Most of the people whose rejections she’d logged were dead now, which gave Jane some small amount of satisfaction. Yet the sting of remaining unpublished never fully faded.

“I’m a writer,” she announced to Tom. “That’s what I do . I ‘write.” She paused a moment, then sighed. “Well, I used to write,” she corrected herself.

The truth was she hadn’t written anything new since finishing the manuscript that had garnered 116 rejections. She had revised it slightly over the years, but for the most part it remained the novel she’d finished almost two centuries before. She’d had to abandon The Brothers— which her family had retitled Sanditon; she still wasn’t sure she was entirely happy about that—when she left Chawton cottage for the last time, but this manuscript she had kept a secret. She’d attempted to write new things since, of course, but the weight of the unpublished book on her thoughts had proved to be too great a block.

She suddenly felt very tired.

How long had she had the bookstore? She counted back. It was, what, eight years? No, nine. She’d moved to Brakeston after two decades spent in Phoenix, a city she’d chosen precisely because it was blessed with the polar opposite of the weather of her English childhood. But twenty years of unrelenting heat and sunlight had finally gotten to her, not for the reasons one might expect (the sun was not nearly as devastating to vampires as popular mythology would have the public believe) but because she was naturally fair. She turned pink after less than an hour in the sun, and never had been able to obtain even the semblance of a tan. The best she could manage was a kind of boiled puffiness, like a lobster or a cabbage. It was not a particularly attractive look.

For years she had tried to mimic the effects of time, dyeing her hair and simulating lines and liver spots. But there was only so much she could do, and besides, it was tiresome, so somewhere along the line (she vaguely remembered the year 1881, although it may have been 1900, which, being the start of the new century—and the year in which she had abandoned Europe for America—would have been a logical time to decide such a thing) she had given up trying and instead simply moved whenever her lack of aging began to be remarked upon. And so after many moves she had come to this town in upstate New York, choosing it more or less at random because she liked the sound of it.