"The Stake" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)ElevenExcept for the struggle on Monday morning to come up with a new story, Larry had spent the entire week on He didn’t feel like wracking his mind for a new idea. So much easier to stick with the familiar territory of This was Friday. He couldn’t keep avoiding the problem forever. Think how much better you’ll feel, he told himself, once you’ve come up with a great plan for the next book. A great plan that does not include a stiff under the stairs with a stake in its heart. He found the disk from Monday, put it into his word processor and tapped out commands until “Novel Notes — Monday, October 3” appeared at the comer of the screen. As he cleaned a pipe and loaded it with fresh tobacco, he skimmed the amber lines. About three pages worth of material. And nothing. A lot of crap about their vampire. “In effect,” he read, “you have this gorgeous thing as your slave. “Real possibilities.” Sure. Better luck today. Larry lit his pipe. Below “Real possibilities” he typed, “Notes — Friday, October 7. “How about a tribe of desert scavengers?” he wrote, recalling the idea he’d toyed around with shortly before the van reached Sagebrush Flat. “They arrange ‘accidents’ on the back roads, then fall upon the unlucky travelers. “Too much like Larry scowled at the screen. He wished he hadn’t reminded himself of Don’t think about it, he told himself. Come on, a new idea. “How about a guy who finds the remains of an old jukebox? He restores it to working order, and...” And what? “It doesn’t have any records in it. He puts in his own. But it doesn’t play the new ones. All it will play are the oldies-but-goodies that used to be in it. Back before it was shot to pieces by... Hey, maybe it wants revenge on the vandals who used it for target practice. “Great. A pissed-off jukebox. What does it do, scoot around and electrocute people? “Could be like a time machine. The guy gets it working, and it shoves him into the past. So he finds himself stranded in Holman’s — or a dive of some kind — back in the mid-sixties. “Has possibilities. “Maybe the box wants him there to have a showdown with the jerks who plugged it. A motorcycle gang, or something. A real nasty bunch. “The poor guy doesn’t know what’s in store for him. But he’s plenty upset. It’s Twilight Zone time. One minute he’s with his wife and kids, has a nice house and a good job. Suddenly, bam, he finds himself in a diner in a dying town twenty-five years in the past. Freaks him out. All he wants to do is get home. “Until he finds himself falling for a beautiful young waitress. At that point he begins to appreciate his situation. “Things start to get ugly when a gang of biker thugs thunders into town. “Suppose the real reason the jukebox took him there was to save the waitress? Neat. The jukebox “The way things went down, first time around, the bikers raped and murdered her. The jukebox has brought our hero back to the diner to alter the course of history — to save her. “Which, of course, he does. “Mission accomplished, the box let’s him go home again. But he misses the beautiful waitress. (Okay, he didn’t have a wonderful wife and kids. He was divorced, or something.) He goes looking for the gal. Finds her. “She’s his mother. He’s his own father. He got her pregnant during their brief time together back in ‘65, and he was the baby she had. “He’d have to be about thirty years old in the present. She could be about twenty-five when he met her in the diner. “She had to give up the baby (our hero) for some reason. He was adopted, and always curious about the identity of his parents. “If she is his mother, we could give him back his wife and kids. “Neater if he finds the waitress in the present and they resume as lovers. But how would that work with their ages? Say he’s thirty in the present. How could the gal be anywhere near his age when he finds her again? If she’s thirty now, she would’ve been five when he saved her from the bikers. “What if the waitress he fell in love with was her mother? That would make the daughter just his age in the present. And she is the spitting image of her mother, the gal he loved. “Not bad. Might work.” Larry’s pipe had gone out. He could tell by the easy draw that nothing remained in the bowl but ash. He set the pipe into its holder and returned his fingers to the keyboard. “Our main guy resurrects the jukebox. It seems evil at first, but turns out to be a force for good. And a matchmaker. He falls for the waitress, who happens to have a really cute little girl at the time. Plenty of thrills and spills and nasty crap with the bikers (make them total degenerates, monsters). By facing them down (he’s scared, but comes through, proving to himself that he’s a man), he ends up saving the kid who will later become his true love. “Why not?” Larry grinned at the screen. All right! You’ve got it. Spend the next couple of days working out the details, and... The next couple of days. He muttered a curse. The weekend was shot. As soon as Lane got home from school today, they would be hitting the road for Los Angeles to visit with Jean’s folks. Just what he wanted to do. Especially now, with the new idea sizzling in his mind. Can’t get out of it, though. You’ll just have to put the idea on hold till Monday. It would give him something to think about while he drove. He might be able to work out a few of the main scenes, maybe even come up with some nifty new angles. But he knew very well that daydreaming about the story while he steered down the freeway would accomplish very little compared to working at the word processor. The act of typing out his thoughts seemed to give them a focus that wasn’t there when he simply let his mind wander. Daydreams seemed to meander and drift. But sentences were solid, and one led to another. Not this weekend, they won’t. This weekend’s down the toilet. Well, he tried to console himself, Jean’s folks are okay. And it is their anniversary. I’ll probably end up having a good time, even though I’d rather be... He heard the door bell ring. Jean would take care of it. He wondered whether he should get back to Call it And grinned. “THE BOX,” he typed. “Great title. Has a mysterious ring to it. And Box not only refers to the jukebox that sends him back in time, but also the ‘box’ or trap he finds himself stuck in. He’s boxed in by circumstances. No apparent way out. Also, the sex thing. Have one of the bikers refer to the main gal as a box. ‘Foxy box.’ And maybe the main guy is a former boxer — killed an opponent in the ring, and swore off fighting? No, that’d be pushing it. Trite, too. But maybe there are some other ‘box’ angles. Fool around with it.” He heard Jean’s footsteps approaching. She might come in and look over his shoulder, so he scrolled down until “foxy box” climbed out of sight at the top of the screen. She rapped on the office door and pushed it open. In her hand was an Overnight Mail bag that looked large enough to hold a manuscript. “This just came for you,” she said. “It’s from Chandler House.” His publisher. Jean watched while he tore open the bag. Inside, he found a fat manuscript held together by rubber bands. And a typewritten note from his editor, Susan Anderson: Larry Here is the copyedited manuscript of MADHOUSE. The corrections are light, so I’m sure you’ll be pleased. We would like you to make whatever changes you consider appropriate, and return it to us if possible by October 13. Best, Susan Larry grimaced. “What?” Jean asked. “It’s “They didn’t give you much time.” “That’s for sure,” he muttered. “They’ve had it for about a year and a half, and now I get... six days.” “Have fun,” Jean said. She left the room, closing the door again to keep his pipe smoke from contaminating the rest of the house. Larry pushed his chair back, crossed a leg, rested the thick manuscript on his thigh and rolled the rubber bands off. He tossed Susan’s note and the title page onto the cluttered TV tray beside his chair. Then he groaned. For “light” corrections, page one seemed to have an awful lot of changes. Halfway down the page his paragraph used to read, “She tugged at the door. Locked. God, no! She whirled around and choked out a whimper. He was already off the autopsy table, staggering toward her, his head bobbing and swaying on its broken neck. In his hand was the scalpel.” Larry struggled to decipher the changes. Words had been crossed out, others added. The paragraph was a map of lines and arrows. At last he figured it out. “Tugging at the door, she found it to be locked. No! Snapping her head around, she whimpered in despair, for she saw that the corpse was staggering toward her with a scalpel in his hand. His head was swinging from side to side atop its snapped neck.” “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Larry muttered. He found Jean in their bedroom, gathering clothes from an open drawer of her bureau and taking them to her suitcase. Both suitcases lay open on the bed. He sat down at the end of the mattress. “We’ve got a problem.” “The manuscript?” “I just looked through the whole thing. It’s been wrecked.” “Not again.” “Yeah.” “What’re you going to do?” Jean asked. “I have to fix it. I don’t have any choice.” He scowled at the carpet. “Maybe I could get them to take my name off and publish it under the name of the copyeditor.” “It’s that bad?” “And then some.” “Why do they let it happen?” “God, I don’t know. It’s the luck of the draw, I guess. This time, they happened to send my book to some idiot who thinks she’s a writer.” “Or he,” Jean said, standing up for her gender. “Or it.” “Couldn’t you just write a letter to Susan, or something, and explain the situation? Maybe they could send a fresh copy to someone else.” He shook his head. “I don’t think she’d appreciate that. It’d be like calling them jerks for sending it to some illiterate butcher. Besides, they already paid to have it done. And they’re on a tight time schedule by now, or they wouldn’t want the damn thing back in six days.” “Maybe you should phone Susan.” “The last thing I need is to get a reputation as a troublemaker.” “So you’re just going to take it lying down?” “I’m going to take it sitting on my butt with a red pen in one hand and a copy of my British edition in the other. If the people in London didn’t fix it, it didn’t need fixing.” He hung his head and sighed. Jean stepped in front of him. She rubbed his shoulders. “I’m sorry, honey.” “Fortunes of war. The thing is... it’ll have to be mailed Wednesday for next-day delivery. If I go to your folks’ place, that only gives me about three days to go through the whole damn thing and try to... save it.” “You could take it along.” “I wouldn’t be fit to live with, anyway. Maybe you and Lane should just go ahead without me.” As he spoke the words, he realized that he didn’t want to be left behind. Not for this. But he couldn’t go. “If I spend the whole weekend working on it, maybe I’ll be feeling human again by the time you get back.” “I suppose we could call it off,” she said, stroking his hair. “Go up next weekend instead.” “No, don’t do that. It’s their anniversary. Besides, you’ve been looking forward to it. No need for all of us to suffer because of this crap.” “If you’re sure,” she muttered. “I don’t see any choice.” Larry went back to his office. His throat felt tight. You didn’t want to go in the first place, he reminded himself. But that was before he found out he would have to be laboring over He stared at his computer screen. “Maybe there are some other ‘box’ angles. Fool around with it.” Right. Sure thing. Maybe sometime next week. No more working out the details for The next few days belonged to “So who said life is fair?” he muttered, and shut his computer off. |
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