The Grimscribe's Puppets (35 page)

That Linus’s disappointment would spur him to action, and that said action would consist of a minimum of one, lengthy blog post on the woeful deficiencies of
Medusa’s Fruit
was for Smythe a foregone conclusion. It was hardly the most gracious response, but neither was it unprecedented in the world of letters. In his somewhat less-invested estimate, Suzanne Kowalczyk’s stories were decently written efforts, one or two of which gave evidence that she might develop in genuinely interesting directions. There was enough in her present volume, though, in terms of technique and theme, for someone inclined to do so to find fault with.

What Smythe was unprepared for was Linus’s decision to ignore Suzy’s writing and to focus instead on her appearance. Suzanne Kowalczyk was a tall, striking woman who wore her blond hair up and whose crisp skirt-and-jacket combinations lent her the appearance of a mid-level executive on the rise. She was also similar enough to Dominika for the two to have passed as cousins, if not sisters, Irish twins. To his subsequent astonishment, Smythe failed to pick up on the resemblance until after Linus accused her of having used her “charms” to bamboozle an electorate unaccustomed to the attention—and manipulation—of so attractive an individual. During the resulting firestorm that swept their corner of the internet, another of Smythe’s writer-friends e-mailed him, “Wasn’t it enough for Linus to get his ass handed to him by Dominika once?” and the scales had dropped from his eyes. He had wanted to write to Linus, to try to make him see what he was doing, but Linus had always resisted any effort at analyzing his behavior that put it in doubt. There was nothing to do except let the conflagration burn itself out, which it had started to do, when Linus unleashed his second round of accusations. These focused on the brief afterword Suzy had written for her collection, in which she discussed writing its stories in the aftermath of the loss of her daughter, aged seven, to leukemia. This, Linus had opined, was an obvious attempt at playing on her readers’ emotions, which the attendees of Weirdcon had fallen for like so many rubes.

Smythe had thought the reaction to Linus’s first rant pronounced—Suzy Kowalczyk was well-liked and the Internet tended to fan what fires broke out on it—but that was nothing compared to the response to his follow-up remarks. There were no actual death-threats as such, but there were offers from an assortment of men and women from around the globe to inflict bodily harm on Linus the next time they encountered him. Linus’s reaction was to announce that he was reporting them all to the police, and then to do so. Especially once the facts in the case were made clear to them, though, the police were less than sympathetic. All that saved Linus from the debacle he had created was a new controversy that sprang up a few days later and sucked all the oxygen away from his. For a short while, Linus did his best to keep the argument alive, but by the time he decided to level his scorn at Suzy’s writing, no one was interested, anymore.

Smythe had hoped the lack of interest in his dissection of
Medusa’s Fruit’s
shortcomings would communicate to Linus that it was time to move on. Since everyone else had left the fight before he did, Smythe imagined he could count that as a kind of victory. A few weeks later, when the World Fantasy Award nominations were announced and both Linus and Suzy’s names were absent from the ballot, Smythe figured that would provide Linus something new to stew over.

Not until Linus’s next stories appeared, six months later, did it become clear to Smythe that, rather than easing it, the passage of time had only deepened his outrage. He hadn’t spoken much about it to Smythe, but then, he hadn’t spoken much to Smythe, at all. Almost no one had seen or heard from Linus since his post-Blackwood meltdown. Every now and again, Smythe had considered dropping him an e-mail, just to touch base, but he had been occupied with a number of unanticipated projects whose short deadlines left him scant room for anything else. If he were telling the truth, he didn’t mind the excuse to maintain his distance from Linus for a little while. Smythe had witnessed Linus go off the rails before, usually at a slight real or perceived from a writer he admired, but this last incident had seemed to carry him further away that in the past. Linus could contact him when he felt ready.

As the stories debuted, however, two at small online ‘zines and one in
Lovecraft’s
, Smythe found himself unable to imagine what, if anything, he would say to Linus, were he to answer the phone and hear his sometime friend’s voice. It was the story in
Lovecraft’s
that was the real problem, a piece about a beautiful émigré from an unnamed former Eastern-Bloc country whose picturesque house concealed a hideous secret: the child she kept bound and tortured in the attic, whose agonies were channeled through occult means to feed its mother’s success as a painter. The actual details of the story were executed with as much tact, as much artistry, as anything Linus had written, but its significance was clear. This time around, Linus played coy, greeting the anger that sprung up virtually overnight with the insistence that he didn’t know what anyone was talking about. He had written a work of fiction: that was all. His protests had sounded perfunctory, as if written to forestall any legal action from Suzanne Kowalczyk, who was, unsurprisingly, livid. Claiming to have contacted a lawyer, she did indeed threaten to sue Linus for libel. It was so much bluster—libel was next to impossible to prove in the U.S.—but Smythe could picture Linus blanching at the prospect of having to put yet another lawyer in his employ.

The second phase of Linus’s feud with Suzy should have been the last, especially after she announced that she’d decided not to seek redress through the courts. But Smythe had had a queasy feeling the matter had yet to be settled, and this past week, that nausea had been justified. Suzy’s neighbors had reported a man loitering outside her house, checking her mail, investigating her garbage, whose description matched Linus. Each time the police arrived, though, he was nowhere to be found. Suzy, herself, did not complain of a stalker, but that appeared to be because she had her own plans for him. Through means of which no one was certain, she had lured Linus into her house. Once the front door was closed, she had subdued him, possibly with a taser, stripped, bound and gagged him, and dragged him into her large kitchen. There, she had used her collection of very sharp, restaurant-grade cleavers and knives to joint him like a chicken. In the coroner’s estimate, he had remained alive much further into the process than Smythe would have guessed possible. Suzy Kowalczyk had scattered his body throughout her house and fled for parts unknown; as yet, she had not been captured. During the initial investigation, the police had been afraid that she had taken Linus’s head with her, since it was the only part of him they had been unable to locate. Only when an enterprising young cadet decided to unload the freezer was Linus’s head discovered, wedged in a corner behind the rounded bulk of a frozen turkey.

What Linus had been doing at Suzy’s house had not been discovered. Speculation had been voiced in some quarters that he had been staking out her place preliminary to assaulting her, which sounded plausible unless you had seen Linus. Suzy’s motivations were considered self-evident: at the sight of the man who had bedeviled her this past year, she finally had snapped—which also sounded as if it made more sense than it did. There was nothing in her history to indicate that she would lose her mind, or that she would do so in so spectacular a fashion. Yes, that was the point to saying she had snapped, but Smythe judged such reasoning flimsy, weak.

And now, here was Linus’s manuscript, which further muddied the waters. Smythe supposed you would have to call it a collection; although Linus had attempted to knit the stories within it (which included the
Lovecraft’s
piece) into something approaching a larger narrative. The result was a study in resentment and paranoia, threaded through with gnostic mysticism. Punishingly candid, beautifully-written sections about the breakup of his marriage, his descent into self-loathing and depression, his envy of and anger at Suzanne Kowalczyk’s success, alternated with shorter, more elliptical and ornate sections concerning a fragment of gnostic writing on which Linus had become fixated. Supposedly discovered as part of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, this sheet of papyrus had been included with the
Gospel of Thomas
until certain inconsistencies of grammar and syntax had caused other differences of content to become apparent. Debate continued as to whether the text to which the selection belonged had been part of the original library of early Christian texts, or if its origins lay with another sect. What was known as the demiurgic fragment began with the maxim Linus had chosen for the epigraph to his book: “And as God, turning within Himself, found a world to bring forth, so might man, turning within himself, find a world to bring forth.” It moved on to a discussion of the word through which the Deity had accomplished His act of creation, a sample of the divine speech that was represented pictographically, as a pair of ovals, one contained within the other, the outer oval open on the left side, the inner on the right. With this word, the passage concluded, a man might give rise to that which was within him.

The conceit of this ancient text formed the basis for a brief parable about a man who came to the court of the great caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, before whose assembled courtiers the man declared he would replace the ruler this very night. When the court guards went to slay the man, the caliph stayed their hands and asked him what cause he had to speak so boldly. He had learned, the man replied, the word that is known as the egg, against whose power the messengers of paradise dared not contend. Ah, the caliph said, truly, that was a powerful weapon to have at one’s disposal. But, he went on, it seemed to him that its possession was like gripping a sword by the blade, of no less danger to the one holding it than to those he faces. For who could say all that a man might find in himself? What man but he who was utterly at peace with himself would dare to grant exit to the residents of his soul? Nonetheless, the man said—albeit, with a tremor in his voice that had not been there, before—this night is your last upon this earth. If it be God’s will, the caliph said, then so be it, and he gestured for his guards to allow the man to depart the court unmolested. Nor did Haroun al-Rashid speak of the matter again. However, a number of the caliph’s most trusted advisors, disturbed by so blatant a threat to their ruler, gave orders that the man should be followed. This proved more difficult than those advisors anticipated, with the result that the man’s lodgings in one of the poorer quarters of the city were not discovered until early the next morning. The guards who broke open the door were greeted by a scene of horror–– the man torn to shreds as if by a pack of wild dogs. What had done so crouched in the middle of the room, licking the blood pooled on the floor. None of the guards would describe it, but when they slew it with their swords, the neighbors heard the sound of an infant shrieking. Those advisors who were summoned to view the thing ordered it burnt and its ashes scattered. To no man who was part of these events did sleep ever come easily, again.

In turn, this parable was succeeded by the
Lovecraft’s
story, which Linus had positioned between a pair of lengthy expository paragraphs in which he did his best to explain his fiction as a means of representing the truth behind Suzanne Kowalczyk’s lies. The second paragraph led into a kind of prose-poem in which Linus portrayed himself meditating ceaselessly on the double-ovals, what the man in his story had called the egg. If this was the avenue by which creation had come to be, then might there not be some trace of it remaining in that creation? For a long time, he searched for such a trace. And then, one day, while he was sitting at his local diner prolonging a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie, the accidental flash of sunlight on a serving platter had caught his eye, and like Jacob Böhme, he had seen through to the center of things. Before he understood what his lips and tongue were doing, they were uttering that word, the egg, whose sound was almost silent. He looked down, and found his mug filed to the steaming brim with fine, strong coffee, not the watery mix he’d been sipping for the last half-hour. On the plate next to it sat a thick slice of apple pie, the buttery taste of whose flaky crust blended perfectly with the crisp sweetness of its filling. Unable to believe fully what had happened—what he had made happen—Linus left the diner and went straight home. There, he had locked the door, drawn the blinds, and commenced experimenting with the word. He was somewhat vague as to exactly what uses he had put his discovery; although he mentioned causing a tank full of half a dozen white and orange goldfish to appear on his kitchen counter. At the end of his session, Linus had been convinced of the authenticity of his breakthrough. Granted such an ability, Linus wrote, it would have been easy enough to indulge in more venal pursuits, to make himself rich, to surround himself with women beside whom Dominika would appear the slattern he had found her to be. To do so, as he saw it, would be to admit a kind of defeat. His life’s goal had been nothing more and nothing less than to earn a modest living through his writing, and he still deemed it a worthy ambition. What the word could give him was a means to make the world see the truth in what he had been saying about Suzanne Kowalczyk, namely, that she was a manipulative, talentless fraud.

How like Linus
, Smythe thought.
He writes a fantasy in which he grants himself ultimate power, and the best use he can think of putting it to is settling a score
. The section concluded with Linus turning off all the lights in his apartment, seating himself cross-legged on the living room floor, and commencing the process of opening the door to what was inside him. The manuscript ended with a narrative written in the form of a journal. Its style, Smythe judged, was Poe filtered through Beckett, terse paranoia. There were no proper names, only pronouns and generic descriptions. Its action was disjointed. Its narrator received a visit from a beautiful woman with whom he had immediate and ferocious sex. Later, he wandered streets whose names were familiar but whose houses were strange. He felt feverish. He found a park and sat on one of its benches. The woman reappeared beside him. They had some kind of sex on the bench. When they were done, he saw a figure watching them across the park. It was short, dressed in a winter coat with the hood up. He could not see its face. Later, he saw the figure at the end of a street he could not remember walking to. It ran down an alley between two houses. The way it moved made him feel sick. He approached the end of the street. The door of the second-to-last house on the left was open. The woman was standing in it. She was naked. The small figure in its coat slouched behind her. He turned up the walk towards them. That was the end of the manuscript.