Smoke and Mirrors (4 page)

The overnight train to Glasgow from London is a sleeper that gets in at about five in the morning. When I got off the train, I walked to the station hotel and went inside. I intended to walk down the hall to the reception desk and get a room, then get some more sleep, and then, once everyone was up and about, I planned to spend the next couple of days at the science fiction convention that was being held in the hotel. Officially, I was covering it for a national newspaper.

On the way down the hall to the reception desk, I passed the bar, empty but for a bemused barman and an English fan named John Jarrold, who, as the Fan Guest of Honor at the convention, had been given an open bar tab, which he was using while others slept.

So I stopped to talk to John and never actually made it to the reception desk. We spent the next forty-eight hours chatting, telling jokes and stories, and enthusiastically massacring all we could remember of
Guys and Dolls
in the small hours of the next morning, when the bar had started to empty out again. At one point in that bar, I had a conversation with the late Richard Evans, an English SF editor, that, six years later, would start to turn intoNeverwhere.

I no longer remember quite why John and I began talking about Cthulhu in the voices of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, nor why I decided to start lecturing John on H. P. Lovecraft’s prose style. I suspect it had something to do with lack of sleep.

These days John Jarrold is a respectable editor and a bastion of the British publishing industry. Some of the middle bits of this story began life in that bar, with John and I doing Pete and Dud as creatures out of H. P. Lovecraft. Mike Ashley was the editor who cajoled me into making them a story.

This was written for David Barrett’s
Digital Dreams,
a computer fiction anthology. I don’t play many computer games anymore. When I did, I noticed they tended to take up areas of my head. Blocks fell or little men ran and jumped behind my eyelids as I went to sleep. Mostly I’d lose, even when playing with my mind. This came from that.

This story was commissioned by
Penthouse
for their twentieth-anniversary issue, January 1985. For the previous couple of years I’d been surviving as a young journalist on the streets of London by interviewing celebrities for
Penthouse
and
Knave,
two English “skin” magazines—tamer by far than their American equivalents; it was an education, all things considered.

I asked a model once if she felt she was being exploited. “Me?” she said. Her name was Marie. “I’m getting well paid for it, love. And it beats working the night shift in a Bradford biscuit factory. But I’ll tell you who’s being exploited. All those blokes who buy it. Wanking over me every month. They’re being exploited.” I think this story began with that conversation.

I was satisfied with this story when I wrote it: It was the first fiction I had written that sounded in any way like me and that didn’t read like me doing someone else. I was edging toward a style. To research the story, I sat in the Penthouse U.K. Docklands offices and thumbed through twenty years’ worth of bound magazines. In the first
Penthouse
was my friend Dean Smith. Dean did makeup for
Knave,
and, it turned out, she’d been the very first
Penthouse
Pet of the Year in 1965. I stole the 1965 Charlotte blurb directly from Dean’s blurb, “Resurgent individualist” and all. The last I heard,
Penthouse
was hunting for Dean for their twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations. She’d dropped out of sight. It was in all the newspapers.

It occurred to me, while I was looking at two decades of
Penthouses,
that
Penthouse
and magazines like it had absolutely nothing to do with women and absolutely everything to do with photographs of women. And that was the other place the story began.

Steve Jones and I have been friends for fifteen years. We even edited a book of nasty poems for kids together. This means that he gets to ring me up and say things like “I’m doing an anthology of stories set in H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional town of Innsmouth. Do me a story.”

This story came from a number of things coming together (that’s where we writers Get Our Ideas, in case you were wondering). One of them was the late Roger Zelazny’s book
A Night in the Lonesome October,
which has tremendous fun with the various stock characters of horror and fantasy: Roger had given me a copy of his book a few months before I came to write this story, and I’d enjoyed it enormously. At about the same time, I was reading an account of a French werewolf trial held 300 years ago. I realized while reading the testimony of one witness that the account of this trial had been an inspiration for Saki’s wonderful story “Gabriel-Ernest” and also for James Branch Cabell’s short novel
The White Robe,
but that both Saki and Cabell had been too well brought up to use the throwing-up of the fingers motif, a key piece of evidence in the trial. Which meant that it was now all up to me.

Larry Talbot was the name of the original Wolfman, the one who met Abbott and Costello.

And there was that man Steve Jones again. “I want you to write one of your story poems for me. It needs to be a detective story, set in the near future. Maybe you could use the Larry Talbot character from ‘Only the End of the World Again.’ ”

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of
Beowulf,
the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of “Baywatch.” So I began retelling
Beowulf
as a futuristic episode of “Baywatch” for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do.

Look, I don’t give you grief over where you get
your
ideas from.

If the stories in this book were arranged in chronological order, rather than in the strange and haphazard well-it-feels-right sort of order I have put them in, this story would be the first in the book. I dozed off one night in 1983, listening to the radio. When I fell asleep, I was listening to a piece on buying in bulk; when I woke up, they were talking about hired killers. That was where this story came from.

I’d been reading a lot of John Collier short stories before I wrote this. Rereading it several years ago, I realized that it was a John Collier story. Not as good as any good John Collier story, nor written as well as Collier wrote; but it’s still a Collier story for all that, and I hadn’t noticed that when I was writing it.

When I was asked to write a story for an anthology of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, I chose to write a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction. I doubted I could say anything about Elric that wasn’t pastiche, but when I was twelve, Moorcock’s characters were as real to me as anything else in my life and a great deal more real than, well, geography lessons for a start.

“Of all the anthology stories, I liked your story and Tad Williams’s the best,” said Michael Moorcock when I ran into him in New Orleans several months after finishing the story. “And I liked his better than yours because it had Jimi Hendrix in it.”

The title is stolen from a Harlan Ellison short story.

I’ve worked in a number of different media over the years. Sometimes people ask me how I know what medium an idea belongs to. Mostly they turn up as comics or films or poems or prose or novels or short stories or whatever. You know what you’re writing ahead of time.

This, on the other hand, was just an idea. I wanted to say something about those infernal machines, computers, and black magic, and something about the London I observed in the late eighties—a period of financial excess and moral bankruptcy. It didn’t seem to be a short story or a novel, so I tried it as a poem, and it did just fine.

For
The Time Out Book of London Short Stories
I reformatted it as prose and left a lot of readers very puzzled.

This one began with a Lisa Snellings statue of a man leaning on a broom. He was obviously some kind of janitor. I wondered what kind, and that was where this story came from.

This is another early story. I wrote it in 1984, and I did the final draft (a hasty coat of paint and some grouting in the nastiest cracks) in 1989. In 1984 I couldn’t sell it (the SF mags didn’t like the sex, the sex mags didn’t like the disease). In 1987 I was asked if I would sell it to an anthology of sexual SF stories, but I declined. In 1984 I had written a story about a venereal disease. The same story seemed to say different things in 1987. The story itself might not have changed, but the landscape around it had altered mightily: I’m talking about AIDS here, and so, whether I had intended it or not, was the story. If I was going to rewrite the story, I was going to have to take AIDS into account, and I couldn’t. It was too big, too unknown, too hard to get a grip on. But by 1989 the cultural landscape had shifted once more, shifted to the point where I felt, if not comfortable, then less uncomfortable about taking the story out of the cabinet, brushing it down, wiping the smudges off its face, and sending it out to meet the nice people. So when editor Steve Niles asked if I had anything unpublished for his anthology
Words Without Pictures,
I gave him this.

I could say that it wasn’t a story about AIDS. But I’d be lying, at least in part. And these days AIDS seems to have become, for good or evil, just another disease in Venus’s armory.

Really, I think it’s mostly about loneliness, and identity, and, perhaps, it’s about the joys of making your own way in the world.

My only successful sestina (a verse form in which the last word of each of the first six lines repeat in ever-changing sequence over the next verses and in one three-line endpiece). First published in
Fantasy Tales
and reprinted in Steve Jones’s
Mammoth Book of Vampires,
for years this was my only piece of vampire fiction.

This story was written for the Pete Crowther-edited
Touch Wood,
an anthology about superstitions. I’d always wanted to write a Raymond Carver short story; he made it look so easy. Writing this story taught me that it wasn’t.

I’m afraid I actually did hear the radio broadcast mentioned in the text.

I wrote this in the top flat of a tiny mews house in Earls Court. It was inspired by a Lisa Snellings statue and by the memory of the beach at Portsmouth when I was a boy: the dragging rattle that the sea makes as the waves pull back over the pebbles. I was writing the last part of
Sandman
at the time, which was called “The Tempest,” and bits of Shakespeare’s play rattle through this as well, just as it rattled through my head back then.

Alan Moore (who is one of the finest writers and one of the finest people I know) and I sat down one day in Northampton and began talking about creating a place that we would want to set stories in. This story is set in that place. One day the good burghers and honest townsfolk of Northampton will burn Alan as a warlock, and it will be a great loss to the world.

One day a cassette tape arrived from Robin Anders, best known as drummer for Boiled in Lead, with a message, telling me that he wanted me to write something about one of the tracks on the tape. It was called “Desert Wind.” This is what I wrote.

This story took me four years to write. Not because I was honing and polishing every adjective, but because I’d get embarrassed. I’d write a paragraph and then I’d leave the story alone until the red flush had faded from my cheeks. And four or five months later I’d go back and write another paragraph. I began writing the story for Ellen Datlow’s
Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex,
an erotic SF anthology. I missed the deadline for that, carried on writing it for the sequel. Managed about another page or so before I missed the deadline for that as well. Somewhere in there I phoned Ellen Datlow up and warned her that, in the event of my untimely death, there was a half-finished pornographic short story on my hard drive in a file called
DATLOW
and that it was nothing personal. Two more anthology deadlines came and went, and, four years from the first paragraph, I finished it and Ellen Datlow and her partner in crime Terri Windling took it for
Sirens,
their collection of erotic fantasy stories.

Most of this story came about from wondering why people in fiction never seem to talk while making love or even while having sex. I don’t think that it’s erotic, but once the story was, finally, finished, I stopped finding it embarrassing.

A fable, written for a publication to benefit People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I think it makes its point. It’s the only thing I’ve ever written that has disturbed me. Last year I came downstairs to find my son Michael listening to
Warning: Contains Language,
my spoken-word CD. “Babycakes” started as I arrived, and it caught me by surprise when I heard a voice I scarcely recognized as my own reading this aloud.

For the record, I wear a leather jacket and eat meat, but I am quite good with babies.

When I had the idea for this story, it was called “City of Angels.” But around the time I actually began to write it, a Broadway show with that title appeared, so when the story was finished, I gave it a new name.

“Murder Mysteries” was written for Jessie Horsting at
Midnight Graffiti
magazine for her paperback anthology, also called, coincidentally,
Midnight Graffiti.
Pete Atkins, to whom I faxed draft after draft as I wrote and rewrote it, was invaluable as a sounding board and a paragon of patience and good humor.