Devil House(105)

But this other one, he said, the one I’m presently in hot water about. It’s during the so-called Satanic Panic. What little coverage I could find was extremely lurid and sensational, the sort of thing you’d think everybody would have heard more about, especially the sort of thing I’d think I would have heard more about, being that whole field is my beat, right, but Ashton’s pitch was, “Move into the house,” so I—

You moved into the murder house? I said.

Yeah, that was the whole plan, he said, taking a huge bite, like a very hungry person, and so that’s what I did, and then I did the thing I do, you know, getting as many primary sources as possible, I’m like a bloodhound, I need the scent of blood on a swatch of a shirt before I can get my barking up to its proper volume. And I got my hands on some crime scene photos, unpublished stuff, and hotline tapes, and then I fixed up the house so it would look just like it had looked on the night the crime, or crimes, took place. And all the while I’m writing the book, right, there’s an element of mystery involved, because there are two dead bodies and no criminal charges as far as I can tell, and—

He pulled himself up short then. His face relaxed into a look of worry, or sadness, I wasn’t sure—both, probably—and he said: Look, when I get going about this, I go pretty far down the rabbit hole, I’ve been neck-deep in all this stuff for several years now, are you sure you want to do all this? We could just, you know, eat some pizza.

I took a long sip from the translucent red plastic cup full of generic cola over ice that I can never help ordering whenever I’m at a pizza place, and I said: No, I’m good, this is good, in for a penny, in for a pound, right, let’s hear it.



* * *



IT WAS A WEIRD PITCH in the first place, he said, because when you do what I do, people are always telling you what you should write about next, and half the time it’s the same thing, you know, some ancient story wakes up for whatever reason and everybody gets reminded about it at the same time, and then somebody who’s read one of my books will say to themselves, Hey, that one guy who wrote that other book might be into this, and they write me letters, or emails, now, it’s both ways, but they get in touch, and even when the idea’s cool, I usually feel like I don’t want to be running with something somebody else picked up, I do my own research. And then most of the time the idea doesn’t really actually feel like something I’d do: like, maybe it’ll be bloody enough, I do tend to lean in on the blood, but there won’t be the complications, the knots in the thread, the parts that make you feel like everything was sort of doomed to happen the way it happened, that’s kind of my zone.

Frankenstein’s Revenge, I said.

He looked hard at me, like a jeweler inspecting an opal for imperfections, and then, as the memory awoke for him, said: Exactly. Exactly. Wow, yeah. The whole point of the game is that the monster gets free, right? There’s no game if he doesn’t break the chains, we should have called that game “Frankenstein’s Chains.” So, yeah, when people send me something, a lot of the time I’m just, like, Cool, wild stuff, and I don’t ever think of it again, but Ashton is a smart guy, very little of my stuff would be half as good as it is without these little gentle prods he gives along the way, innocent questions about character or whatever that end up pushing me in the direction that leads to the good stuff—and, just here, there was a bubble in his monologue, a ripple in the current of the low-level mania that seemed to be animating him, and he took a bite of pizza and mumbled, with his mouth full: Good stuff, his eyes searching for something somewhere in the grain of the table.

The good stuff, I said, just to fill up the empty space in the conversation while he chewed his food.

Yeah, he said, wiping his mouth with the paper napkin—it was printed in checkered red-and-white, the way all Italian restaurants seemed to prefer their décor when I was a kid. The stuff that gets me going, anyway. So I read the story he sends me, and he’s right, it feels like exactly my thing, I worry a little that I’ve already done the kids-slaughtering-the-grown-ups thing a little, but it’s also just the one clipping, there has to be more to it, and besides, it’s in Milpitas, and I remembered you, and our letters, and—listen, writers are terrible people, everything’s just material to us, it’s nothing personal but I’m still sorry about it, but the point is, I was thirty-seven years old at the time, and the second I saw the word Milpitas in the story I felt a very deep resonance, an echo from childhood, and I remembered you, how you used to write me about the movies you were watching on the TV your parents let you keep in your room, it was always monster movies, and it just set my mind going, there was something in there, you know?

I remembered my small black-and-white television, and the feeling of security when I’d watch it late at night: everyone else in the house asleep, and me watching cheap but terrifying B-movies by myself; and I thought about Gage’s lost ages and that maybe I gleaned a little of them.

Well, now, I said, I’ll read that when you’re done with it, are you almost done?

Oh, I’m done, he said. It’s sort of going through some major growth pains right now, there are several problems with it, I think it might end up running aground before it sees daylight. It’s hard to explain. You can read the manuscript I sent Ashton if you want.

We finished the pizza and I said I should be getting some sleep, my flight left the next afternoon and I had to allow for drive time. I’ve got a couch you can crash on, he said, and I said I’d probably better try to split a little distance between here and the city, I saw several Super 8s from the highway, and he said he understood, he’d spent some time on the road himself.