Dreams (22 page)

Yeah, Lou had a million stories and he was always eager to give them away as long as the audience kept the cash register ringing.

Why the heck couldn't Jimmy Kerr think of a story?

He picked up the absinthe bottle and looked through it at the city lights beyond. Seen through the green liquid, the brilliant green light he'd seen earlier disappeared. When he lowered the bottle he thought he saw two green lights instead of one.

The coffee maker made a ding and he took a cup and added some sweet aloe from a free sample bottle he'd picked up at the supermarket and opened a packet of powdered creamer that he'd pocketed at Crazy Crepes and stood there looking out at the dancing snowflakes and the bright green lights. He was sure there were two of them, now. There had probably been two of them all along, he told himself.

He drank a cup of coffee while he watched the snow and twinkling city lights, then poured himself another cup and settled in front of his computer, coffee cup to the left where he always kept a notebook when he wrote and absinthe bottle to the right, near the mouse pad.

The mouse pad was one of a kind. It had the cover of the issue of
Grand Detective Cases
with his prize-winning story on it, ".45s for My Lady" and his by-line blazoned on the picture.

He picked up his cup, drank some coffee, put the cup down and ran the cursor back to the top of the screen. Then he changed the name of the story from "The Diamond Brooch" to "The Black Diamond."

He raised his eyes and peered out across the city. He was lucky to have this room, small and dingy as it was, on top of one of the city's hills. The room was drab but the view was spectacular.

There was a clock radio on his night table. He looked at the clock. Oh, boy, he'd been frittering away the time when he should have been writing. He'd got off work at six o'clock, come home and eaten a couple of soggy crepes, drunk a couple of cups of coffee, listened to some boring music on the radio, turned on the computer, thought about rolling a joint, thought about opening the bottle of absinthe, looked at the snow, looked at the absinthe, drunk some more coffee, opened the file, and stalled.

Four hours down, seven words written. And that included his by-line. Okay. Elster had a favorite lecture about getting started. He said that it was always tougher to start a story than to keep going after it was started. Once you've got your characters down and doing things, as often as not they'd practically write the story for you.

But – how to get started?

Elster said that every writer had to find his own way, but his own way – Elster's way – was something he called the Pin the Tail on the Donkey method. You picked up a dictionary, opened it at random, closed your eyes and pointed at the page. Then you opened your eyes and keyed in the first word you saw. Then do it again. And again. And pretty soon you'd see some kind of pattern, some kind of meaning in a meaningless sequence of words.

Jimmy decided to try it.

He called the row of tattered paperbacks and library discards that he kept on top of his dresser the James Otho Kerr Reference Library. He opened his fat, battered, red-covered dictionary and poked it with his finger.

Okay. That was a start. He opened his notebook, spread it on the desktop beside the dictionary, scrabbled through a souvenir coffee mug from Lefty Lou Ransome's Pitcher's Mound until he found a pencil that actually had a point on it and scribbled the word. He tried it again.

Once more. Open the book, give it a poke, see what you get.

Hey, maybe this is going to work after all. Try another.

Jordan Elster hadn't said how many words you'd need before the magic lightning struck, but five seemed like a good number. Let's try it one more time.

He tried putting the words together. Would they make sense?
giving pincers resume borough unbend

He heaved a sigh. Thought about the skinny teenager with the black diamond brooch. Did
giving pincers resume borough unbend
mean anything at all? Did the girl fit into that picture? He stared into his coffee mug and thought about filling it again but he'd lost track of how many cups he'd drunk. He could tell, though, that he was pretty damned wired. Not a good idea to drink any more of that stuff.

In fact his hands were trembling and he could feel his teeth starting to grind the way they did when he'd OD'd on caffeine. Stupid, stupid dunce. He'd overdone. Nerves were quivering. He needed something to quiet them down.

He looked in his wastebasket and picked up the bottle of cheap whiskey. Unscrewed the cap, inverted it over his mouth and got a whiff and a drop of the stuff, just enough to remind him of why it was so cheap, not enough to do him any good. He thought about buying some more but he didn't want to go out in the falling snow. Even so, if it would help him with his work, it might be worth getting snowed on. Then he looked in his wallet and decided that there was no point in even trying.

He sat down at his desk and looked at the notebook near his left elbow. He wrote
giving pincers resume borough unbend
on an otherwise virgin page. Lot of good that was gonna do him. He looked right at the computer mouse, the custom mouse pad, the bottle of Vieux Carré absinthe. He'd meant to save the bottle for a special occasion, and now he decided that this was a special occasion.

He looked at the monitor screen, hoping that the Green Fairy – Zachary Grand had told him that absintheurs called their favorite beverage the Green Fairy – hoping that the Green Fairy would have helped him by miraculously adding a couple of pages to his story. Or a couple of paragraphs. Or a couple of sentences.

She had not.

Huh. Jordan Elster was right. He wasn't sure, but he thought a pattern was starting to emerge. Maybe the skinny girl with the bad complexion was from a borough. How many cities did he know that had boroughs? London, he thought, but he'd never been in London and certainly didn't know that city's boroughs. But he'd been in New York, even lived there at one time, and knew that city was divided into boroughs.

What the hell were they? He could probably find the information in an almanac. Or for that matter, just do an internet search. But in fact he was able to drag the info out of his mental storehouse. The boroughs were New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Bronx. Better known as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and
the
Bronx, the last for no reason that he knew or cared to find out.

In his mind he transferred Crazy Crepes from the city where he now resided to midtown Manhattan. That's where the action would surely be, and decided that the girl was from one of the other boroughs. Brooklyn. Why Brooklyn? No idea. Just seemed more interesting than Bronx –
the
Bronx, he reminded himself — or Queens or Staten Island. And he needed a name for her. Grabbed a book of baby names that he'd picked up at a thrift store and used when he needed a name for a character.

Used the Pin the Tail on the Donkey method for a name for the skinny girl. Came up with a good one.
Madeline
. Where had he come across a Madeline before? A fellow student? Someone he'd once dated?

Outside, the snow was still falling. It was accumulating on the window sill behind his computer. It was beautiful, would be beautiful for a little while, then turn to gray slush. But for now it was beautiful. Maybe Madeline had been a character in a movie he'd seen. Yes. Not one he'd watched on TV or even at some sterile multiplex. No. He'd seen it in a classic movie palace from the golden age of film, when he was an impressionable kid, before television had captured most of the audiences and killed most of the palaces. And it had been a movie palace. A haunted movie palace. "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe.

For a little while he was a kid again. He had his allowance clutched in his hand. Standing in line with his pals. Buying a ticket. Going into the dark, the magical movie palace. A horror movie was playing. He envied the ushers in their resplendent uniforms, pointing their flashlights like royal scepters. The movie was from a Poe story.
The Fall of the House of Usher.
Vincent Price, the great Vincent Price, played Roderick Usher. And his sister, his wan, dying sister, Madeline, was played by Myrna Fahey. The lovely Myrna Fahey who had lived and died her role, succumbing at the age of forty.

Yes. Movie ushers, House of Usher, Madeline Usher. He decided that the skinny girl was Madeline Usher from the Borough of Brooklyn. He couldn't call her Madeline Usher, could he? Who had directed the picture? He grabbed a Maltin reference book. Roger Corman, of course. Good. Madeline Corman.

Roger Corman, the great director. But Corman didn't own the name, the character, the story. It was Poe's creation, and Poe was hardly in a position to complain if Jimmy Kerr used his character's name. It certainly wasn't plagiarism. Think of it as homage.

Madeline Usher. Madeline Usher from the Borough of Brooklyn.

That was worth celebrating.

He broke the seal on the bottle of Vieux Carré absinthe, found a dirty shot glass and swabbed it out with a damp cloth. He poured a hefty shot and held it up to the light. It was definitely a gorgeous shade of green.

The cursor was still pulsing away but at least there were more words on the monitor screen than the story's title and Jimmy's by-line.

Madeline Usher, fifteen years old. Mother an alcoholic. Father a tyrant. No siblings. Raids mom's jewelry box. Full of junk. Favorite pin has fascinated her since she was little. Black, shiny stone. Used to make believe it was alive. Looked like an Egyptian scarab. Stole brooch, pinned it on pea coat, stole money and took subway into Manhattan.

Now he was getting somewhere.

He lifted the shot glass and took a little of the absinthe into his mouth. Don't toss this down. This isn't some cheap rotgut from the corner booze outlet. This was good stuff, a gift from Zachary Grand himself, the man who wrote the checks.

Jimmy decided the absinthe was amazing stuff. The inside of his mouth lit up as if it was filled with an ice cold green flame. He swallowed what couldn't have been more than a thimble-f of absinthe and felt it all the way down his gullet and into his belly.

He was sold.

He took a more generous sip of the Green Fairy and felt a grin spread over his face.

Okay, so Madeline Usher, teenaged runaway from a rotten home life in Brooklyn with her drunken mother and her abusive father, turns up at Crazy Crepes in Manhattan. It's snowing. She's wearing a knitted cap and a navy-style pea jacket. She's wearing a brooch that she stole from her mom's jewelry box along with some cash. From Mom's stash. Her stash of cash.

Jimmy giggled.

Time to resume the story. Don't know if that's exactly what Jordan Elster would have had in mind, but that's what he's going to do.

Resume the story.

He glanced at the clock face beside his bed. It was getting late but he didn't feel especially tired. Maybe the absinthe was doing that for him. Fighting his fatigue. Pepping him up. Good stuff. Good, good stuff.

The black stone in the stolen brooch. How do we work this into the story? What's left in our impromptu outline?

Now there's a good word! Talk about a lucky find. What has pincers? He knew what the word meant, at least in a vague way. Pincers, pinchers. Some retired lieutenant colonel playing studio hack on one of those military history programs on TV was always talking about pincers movements. German pincers around a Russian city. American pincers, General Patton, that crazy old military genius, planning a pincers movement against the retreating Nazi army on the western front.

Jimmy snatched up his battered paperback dictionary and turned to the p's. Might as well get the definition right.

Yes!

A claw (as of a lobster)!

The black stone in Madeline Usher's brooch – actually her mother's brooch that Madeline had stolen – looked something like a lobster. Or – some kind of creature. Black, shiny shell. Little metal clips like insect legs holding it against the metal backing, the backing pinned to Madeline's pea jacket. Not so much like a lobster, though. More like a beetle. A big, black, shiny beetle, something like a lady bug but without the red shell and cute little polka dots.

This thing looked more like an Egyptian scarab. The Egyptians were fascinated with scarabs, used them as decorations and fashioned jewelry after them.

Jimmy shook his head, striving for clarity, placed his fingers on the keyboard, reached for the computer mouse, scrolled upward and changed the title of his story.

THE STOLEN BROOCH

By James Otho Kerr

And –

The clock radio clicked on, startling him out of the weird, almost trance-like state he'd fallen into. He turned around again and looked at the clock. The numerals were picked out in little electronic lines. They were green. The same shade of green as the absinthe he'd been sipping and the lights of the city that he could make out through the downward-drifting snowflakes.

The radio was set on a classical music station and they were playing a composition by Alan Hovhaness, a favorite of Jimmy's,
And God Created Great Whales.
He sat, mentally and physically captured by the strange, reverential music, until the composition ended and a seductive-voiced female announcer began reading an obviously scripted biographical sketch of the composer.