A Thousand Deaths (47 page)

The Threadwell manuscript was entitled "The Cellini Salt Cellar." It started off well enough:

 

"What a crazy boy he is!" smiled Carolyn as she walked down the long, narrow, white gravel-paved pathway to the Liberal Arts building, which stood like a great angry red demon among the ancient oaks which have given this university the nickname "Tulane of the North." She had just had lunch with a friend, a boy named Bill Taylor from her hometown. Bill was handsome and serious, yet he had a way of making her laugh which was why she thought often about becoming intimate with him, but he had inadvertently knocked over the saltshaker on the table. Carolyn had thought nothing of it, but Bill acted very strangely. He threw a pinch of salt over his shoulder, swept the rest away, closed his eyes, and recited some inaudible incantation. "How amusing!" Carolyn had thought. But later, after they had parted with many mutual expressions of fondness, she remembered something he had said to her only the day before.

"You have to look out for the tableware in the U.C.," he had warned her, with what she had thought was an amusing imitation of desperation in his voice. At the time, she had thought it had been just another of his lighthearted jests. Now, however, she wasn't so sure. She decided to discuss the matter with Old Mose, the kindly, wise, white-haired old janitor of Ruggles Dormitory.

 

From there it went rapidly downhill in a contrived way and developed into a horror story about a curse that had been placed upon an elaborate salt cellar fashioned by the great Italian goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571). The curse itself had been an error, because it had been laid down by a mad philosophy student in Prague or from Prague (Threadwell didn't make this clear) who had mistaken the artifact for something else entirely. How the Cellini masterpiece became involved with the college cafeteria saltshaker was too incredible even for the readers of
Awesome
to swallow, and how Bill Taylor became involved in the matter was never adequately explained. In any event, it turned out that Old Mose, the janitor, had once done some small service for Madame Blavatsky herself and had been given by her a lucky amulet, which saved all their lives in a denouement of great terror and modifiers. The end result was that Carolyn learned how strong and resourceful Bill Taylor was (even though he would have been chopped liver without the old janitor's mojo), and also she changed her major from French to Elementary Education.

Courane absolutely hated the story. It didn't have the slightest redeeming feature, except a mildly titillating section between a creature of pure evil and a walk-on co-ed who
did
become chopped liver shortly thereafter. So he clipped on the regular rejection slip, but felt obliged to pen a few words; he had established that precedent and now he was sorry. "Glad to see this," he wrote. "In the future, you might want to cut down on the adjectives." He was going to say further that the young man should study the stories that were published in
Awesome
and its competitors, but he supposed Threadwell was doing that already. Many of his stories were lifted in whole or in part from the best material appearing in the field. He always showed good taste in his thievery.

Courane yawned and looked at his watch. He had been at work for fifteen minutes and read two stories. It seemed like a reasonable time to take his first break. He went out to get a cup of coffee and pass a few witticisms by Miss Weber, but he was disappointed to see that her desk was unattended. Maybe she was in an important meeting with the Editor, laughing or weeping with him, deciding the fate of the novel in America, or something equally vital. Courane shrugged, poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee, and went back to his cubicle. He sat down and selected a story, tore open the envelope, and put the manuscript, "My Most Unforgettable Night of Sheer Horror," down in the tiny clearing he had made among the stacks. The first step he took in critically appraising the story was to spill the cup of coffee all over it. He jumped up, swearing, and tried to mop up the coffee with the discarded envelope. He went out and grabbed a handful of paper napkins and did the best he could, but "My Most Unforgettable Night" was a sodden ruin. Courane gave a sad little smile, clipped a rejection slip to the limp, marinated pages, and tucked them into the return envelope. It sailed through the air into the large brown Out box. In a way, it was a shame there wasn't an endless river of coffee in the outer office; it would speed up his job enormously.

The next story came from some person in Brazzaville, the capital of the People's Republic of the Congo. All that Courane knew about Brazzaville was that it was where Humphrey Bogart and

Claude Rains talked about going at the end of
Casablanca.
It had taken several months for the envelope to wend its way from the Heart of Darkness to Courane's desk on the Great White Way, and it was in ragged condition. Making sure that no coffee remained in his small workspace, he pulled the typewritten pages out of the envelope and glanced curiously through the cover letter:

Dear Sirs,
the author began,
I have always had a yen to write, but being a missionary doctor has left me little time for such pleasures. Yet I always felt that I had a few little shreds of wisdom that I might pass on, particularly since my work has taken me to many of the more fascinating and out-of-the-way spots on our globe. I hope you enjoy reading the enclosed story, and I will be waiting enthusiastically for your reply. Yours sincerely, Dr. Francis X. Misouké.

For five, maybe ten seconds, the story captured Courane's imagination. To tell the truth, it was Dr. Misouke's cover letter that intrigued him. Courane frankly expected a story of some exotic nature, something with an exciting foreign flavor, nothing he would be able to use in the magazine, of course, but at least a change of pace from the usual run of pieces set in New York or Los Angeles. A weakness of beginning writers is that often they resist telling about the very things they know most about, and prefer instead to make great galloping intermigrations into places and situations that only show up their profound ignorance.

To this extent, Courane was gratified; the story was set in a small, native village to the northeast of Brazzaville. It was about a saltshaker left behind by Henry Morton Stanley that was now possessed by the spirit of a terrible tribal demon. Rather than creating some Old Mose character, which in this instance would have really been coals to Newcastle, Dr. Misouké's hero saved everyone's life by reciting about an hour's worth of Holy Scripture.

"Well," murmured Courane, as he wrote out a note to the Congolese author, "that certainly is a coincidence."

Hours passed; stories cried out at being from their envelopes untimely ripp'd; they shivered naked beneath Courane's merciless scrutiny, then retired, meek and submissive, to their purgatorial fate in the big brown box. By lunchtime Courane had read over a hundred stories. Seven of them had been about haunted saltshakers.

It was unusual, to say the least, to receive so many stories on a similar storyline. It's all well and good to say that there's nothing new under the sun; and authors speak all the time of picking story ideas out of the air, so that two writers in different places may respond to the same combination of news items, pop song lyrics, specials at the A&P, or whatever else it is that seduces inspiration. There are many instances of well-respected professionals turning out stories on identical themes with no plagiarism or even discussion between them. That is coincidence. Seven saltshaker stories before lunch, now,
that
was something else.

And it got worse.

Courane went to lunch at a great little place on East Fifty-ninth Street that served the best veal parm in town. All the first readers (as they called themselves) in the New York publishing world ate there, and when he entered the restaurant they greeted him warmly and fraternally. He was young and bright and cheerful, and none of his own novels had done any better than theirs, so he was well liked. He sat down at a table across from Norris Page, who read the slush pile for Cipher Books. His job was a little different from Courane's; novel submissions were, of course, longer, bulkier, and more time- consuming. Yet Page approached them in exactly the same way, by looking briefly at the first chapter, maybe the second chapter, then flipping to the end. A lot of the time the last line was "
And my name is Eve," she said,
and it made decisions very simple. But one time in a hundred there was a good book lurking in the pile; and Page was proud of two novels that he had discovered, recommended to his boss, seen through all the editorial decision-making, and at last watched proudly as they sprang forth, fully armed, into the world. It was a matter of some irony that one of these books had beaten out one of Page's own for a Robbie the Robot Award the year before.

"Read any good stories lately?" asked Page, after Courane ordered his lunch.

Courane winced. "Not one all morning that I could pass up the ladder. You've never seen such a pile of pure muck."

Page shrugged. "I know the feeling. I wanted to save this one book to show you. It was a classic. In only a hundred and fifty pages, this guy managed to drag in every single cliché in the business, and still have time left over for a great adolescent wish-fulfillment love interest and a surprise ending where it turns out the characters haven't been people at all but giant mutant vegetables living in what was once New York City, following the destruction of civilization. And guess what the names of the boy vegetable and the girl vegetable were?"

Courane just raised a weary hand. "Why would you think I'd want to take a look at something like that? I get enough aggravation. Just today—" Courane paused; a fugitive thought made him shiver with something like fear, but he couldn't bring it clearly into focus. "Norris, have you ever noticed that sometimes stories will come in batches? Like one day you'll have a lot of UFO stories and another day you'll have a lot of Hollow Earth stories?"

Before Page could answer, Howard Glessman spoke up. He was sitting at the next table; he was the first reader for a line of books that everyone else in the restaurant considered far below theirs in quality. In fact, Glessman's publisher seemed to think his audience consisted of casually literate people with the intelligence of simple sponges or coelenterates. "It happens all the time, all the time," said Glessman. "And it's something you have to watch out for. It's
not
just a harmless coincidence. You can't just pass it off. It means that there's something happening in the collective unconscious, that the great mass mind is mulling something over and if you're smart you'll go along with it."

Courane and Page exchanged knowing looks. Glessman had been a reader for the same publisher for twenty-seven years, and it was common knowledge that more than a little of the slush he had waded through had seeped upstairs and irreparably affected his powers of reason. When he used phrases like "collective unconscious," the others immediately disregarded anything that he said afterward. Glessman got up and took his bill to the cashier. Courane watched him leave. "Twenty-seven years," he said, fear and wonder in his voice.

"It shows, though, doesn't it?" said Page. "I heard how he got his job in the first place. His publisher needed a slush reader, so he dug a deep pit in front of the office on Fifty-fourth Street and covered it over with branches and shrubbery. Then he put up a big sign that said,
Warning! This Is a Trap!
And if anyone was dumb enough to come along, read the sign, and still fall into the pit, he was perfect material to read the kind of submissions they get."

"That can't be true," said Courane, but he had heard stranger stories and many of them
had
been true. "I brought it up because I had seven stories this morning all about saltshakers possessed by the devil or cursed or something like that.
Saltshakers.
That was just too weird."

"It happens," said Page with a shrug. "A statistical quirk."

"Or the collective unconscious toiling toward a thought."

"Well," said Page, "I got to go. I just can't wait to get back to the office and see what else is in that stack."

"I'll bet." Courane left with his friend, and they parted outside the restaurant. Page could walk back to work, but Courane had to take a crosstown bus.

There were five more saltshaker stories in the afternoon's reading, bringing the total to twelve. Each time a manuscript looked like it was heading in the direction of silverware or receptacles of condiments of any kind, Courane's heart began to beat faster. His face broke out in a cold sweat, and he had several other symptoms that he had often read about but never before experienced. At last, well past suppertime, he had disposed of the last of the three hundred forty manuscripts. Twenty or so had been good enough for him to put in a special pile for the Editor to read, and the others were even now mixed together in the Out box like the offensive and defensive squads of the absolute worst football teams in the NFL: beneath it all a fumble may have taken place, but it was almost not worth it to sort through the whole mess to find out. It was Courane's supreme good fortune that he didn't have to, because that was the post office's duty, which may well explain several things about their attitude.

Ten days later, with the saltshaker story phenomenon all but forgotten, he was slashing his way through the morning's produce (sometimes he thought of his cubicle as a kind of old-fashioned farmer's market, where people brought the fruits of their gardens to offer for sale and, at the end of the day, when none of it had brought a profit, the stuff could at least be trundled home and thrown on the compost heap to enrich the next crop), and there was another story from Edmund Schooner Threadwell. Courane groaned. "My lucky day," he said. This one had a brief cover letter; Threadwell had taken to speaking to Courane in a very conversational, friendly way, as if they were well acquainted, which, in a manner of speaking, they were, although they had never met in person.