Aftershock & Others (33 page)

With that settled, he headed upstairs for a well-deserved night’s rest. In his bedroom he pulled out the third drawer in his antique pine dresser. As he bent to retrieve a pair of pajamas, the top drawer slid open and slammed against his forehead.

Clutching his head, Morley staggered back. His foot caught on the leg of a chair—a chair that shouldn’t have been there,
hadn’t
been there a moment ago—and he tumbled to the floor. He landed on his back, groaning with the pain of the impact. As he opened his eyes, he looked up and saw the antique mahogany wardrobe tilting away from the wall, leaning over him,
falling!

With a terrified cry he rolled out of the way. The heavy wardrobe landed with a floor-jarring crash just inches from his face. Morley started to struggle to his feet but froze when he saw the letters worked into the grain of the wardrobe’s flank: ANNA.

With a hoarse cry he lunged away and rose to his hands and knees—just in time to see a two-foot splinter of wood stab through the oriental rug—exactly where he’d been only a heartbeat before. He clambered to his feet and ducked away as his dresser tumbled toward him. On its unfinished rear panel he saw the name ANNA wrapped around one of its knots.

Caught in the ice-fisted grip of blind, screaming panic, Morley lurched toward the door, dodging wooden spears that slashed through the rug. Julie…Anna…or whoever or whatever it was had somehow seeped out of the footstool and infected the entire room. He had to get out!

Ahead of him he saw the heavy oak door begin to swing shut. No! He couldn’t be trapped in here! He leaped forward and ducked through the door an instant before it slammed closed.

Gasping, Morley sagged against the hallway wall. Close. Too close. He—

Pain lanced into his ankle. He looked down and saw a foot-long splinter of floorboard piecing his flesh. And all up and down the hall the floorboards writhed and buckled, thrusting up jagged, quivering knife-sharp spikes.

Morley ran, dodging and leaping down the hall as wooden spears stabbed his lower legs, ripping his clothes. Where to go? Downstairs—out! He couldn’t stay in the house—it was trying to kill him!

He reached the stairs and kept going. He felt the wooden treads tilting under his feet, trying to send him tumbling. He grabbed the banister and it exploded into splinters at his touch, peppering him with a thousand wooden nails. He slammed against the stairwell wall but managed to keep his footing until the next to last step when he tripped and landed on the tiled floor of the front foyer.

What now?
his fear-crazed mind screamed. Would the tiles crack into ceramic daggers and cut him to shreds?

But the foyer floor lay cool and inert beneath him.

Of course, he thought, rising to his knees. It’s not wood. Whatever was in the footstool has managed to infiltrate the wood of the house, but has no power over anything else. As long as I stay on a tile or linoleum floor—

Morley instinctively ducked at the sound of a loud
crack!
behind him, and felt something whiz past his head. When he looked up he saw one of the balusters from the staircase jutting from the wall, vibrating like an arrow in a bull’s-eye. At that instant the upper border of the wainscoting splintered from the wall and stabbed him in the belly—not a deep wound, but it drew blood.

And then the entire foyer seemed to explode—the wainscoting panels shredding and flying at him, balusters zipping through the air, molding peeling from the ceiling and lancing at him.

Morley dashed for the front door. Moving in a crouch, he reached the handle and pulled. He sobbed with joy when it swung open. He stumbled into the cool night air and slammed the door shut behind him.

Battered, bruised, bleeding, he gripped the wrought iron railing—metal: cold, hard, wonderful, reliable metal—and slumped onto the granite slabs of his front steps where he sobbed and retched and thanked the stars that years ago he’d taken a contractor’s advice and replaced the original oak door with a steel model. For security reasons, the contractor had said. That decision had just saved his life.

He’d lost his home. No place in that building was safe for him—even being this close to it could be dangerous. He fought to his feet and staggered across the glorious concrete of the sidewalk to lean against the magnificent steel of one of the parked cars. Safe.

And then something bounced off his head and dropped to the sidewalk. Morley squinted in the darkness. An acorn. Dear God!

He lurched away from the overhanging oak and didn’t stop moving until he was a good dozen feet from the tree.

An accident? A coincidence? After all, it was October, the time of year when oaks began dropping acorns.

But how could he be sure that even the trees hadn’t turned against him?

He needed a safe place where he could rest and tend his wounds and clear his head and not spend every moment fearing for his life. A place with no wood, a place where he could
think!
Tomorrow, in the light of day, he could solve this problem, but until then…

He knew the place. That newly restored hotel on West Thirty-fifth Street—the Deco. He’d been to an art show there last month and remembered how he’d loathed its decor—all gleaming steel and glass and chrome, so completely lacking in the warmth and richness of the wood that filled his home.

What a laugh! Now it seemed like Mecca, like Paradise.

The Deco wasn’t far. Giving the scattered trees a wide berth, Morley began walking.

“Sir, you’re bleeding,” said
the clerk at the reception desk. “Shall I call a doctor?”

I know damn well I’m bleeding, Morley wanted to shout, but held his tongue. He was in a foul mood, but at least he wasn’t bleeding as much as before.

“I’ve already seen a doctor,” he lied.

“May I ask what happened?”

This twerp of a desk clerk had a shaved head, a natty little mustache, and a pierced eyebrow that rose as he finished the question. His name tag read Wölf. Really.

“Automobile accident.” Morley fumbled through his wallet. “My luggage is wrecked, but I still have this.” He slapped his Amex Platinum down on the black marble counter.

The clerk wiggled his eyebrow stud and picked up the card.

“I must stress one thing,” Morley said. “I want a room with no wood in it. None. Got that?”

The stud dipped as the clerk frowned. “No wood…let me think…the only room that would fit that is the Presidential Suite. It was just refurbished in metal and glass. But the rate is—”

“Never mind the rate. I want it.”

As the clerk nodded and got to work, Morley did a slow turn and looked around. What a wonderful place. Steel, brass, chrome, marble, glass, ceramic. Lovely because this was the way the future was supposed to look when the here-and-now was the future…a future without wood.

Lovely.

He did not let
the bellhop go—though Morley had no luggage, the man had escorted him to the eighth floor—until he had made a careful inspection. The clerk had been right: not a stick of wood in the entire suite.

As soon as he was alone, Morley stripped and stepped into the shower. The water stung his wounds, but the warm flow eased his battered muscles and sluiced away the dried blood. He wrapped himself in the oversized terry cloth robe and headed straight for the bedroom.

As he reached for the covers he paused, struck by the huge chrome headboard. At its center, rising above the spread wings that stretched to the edges of the king-size mattress, was the giant head of a bald eagle with a wickedly pointed beak. So lifelike, Morley could almost imagine a predatory gleam in its metallic eye.

But no time for aesthetics tonight. He was exhausted. He craved the oblivion of sleep to escape the horrors of the day. Tomorrow, refreshed, clear-headed, he would tackle the problem head on, find a way to exorcise Julie or Anna from his home. But now, tonight…

Morley pulled back the covers and collapsed onto the silk sheets. Hello, Morpheus, good-bye, Anna…

Wölf spots the night
manager crossing the lobby and motions him over.

“Mr. Halpern, I just had a guest here who insisted on a room with no wood—absolutely no wood in it. I gave him the Presidential Suite. I believe that’s all metal and glass and such, right?”

“It was until yesterday,” Halpern says. He’s fortyish and probably thinks the curly toupee makes him look thirtyish. It doesn’t. “The designer moved in a new headboard. Said he found it in a Massachusetts wood shop. Brand new and carved out of heavily grained maple. But he went and had it coated with so many layers of chrome paint it looks like solid steel. Said he couldn’t resist the eagle. Can’t say as I blame him—looks like it came straight off the Chrysler Building.”

“Should I inform the guest?”

“What? And disturb his sleep?” Halpern waves a dismissive hand and strolls away. “Let the man be. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

Now I go three years without a short story.

I have a good explanation for that. No, I didn’t return to the interactive field. Novels…novels and novellas were to blame.

2000

I guess you could call this my Cemetery Dance year.

I started off writing the first two
Sims
novellas back to back, finished them, then sent them to Rich Chizmar. I wanted to keep rolling on the story but I was under contract to deliver the fifth Repairman Jack novel in the fall, so that took precedence. I decided to call it
Hosts
.

The
Conspiracies
trade edition was published in February and Dark Delicacies, the famous Burbank bookstore, flew me out for a signing. Afterward I sat down with Craig Spector and Richard C. Matheson who convinced me to throw some of my backlist in with a new publisher named Stealth Press. It didn’t take much convincing: Pat Lobrutto was the editor and he wanted to put my old sf back into print. He’d been one of the editors with Doubleday back in the 1970s who’d first put it into print. (Amazing how the wheel turns.) What else did I have to hear?

On the movie front, a guy named Scott Nimerfro was chosen to rewrite
Repairman Jack
. Since things seemed to be flowing smoothly, I okayed another option renewal. By June the Nimerfro rewrite was “not quite there yet.” In October, while out in L.A. for an
All the Rage
signing at Dark Delicacies, I had breakfast with producers Barry Rosenbush and Bill Borden who told me that Nimerfro was out, all scripts had been scrapped, and they were looking for a new writer. They eventually hired a guy named Trevor Sands. I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of a recurring scenario.

In March I traveled to St. Augustine to see the opening of “Syzygy.” A modest production, to say the least, but an enthusiastic cast. And the audience screamed and laughed in all the right places.

While talking to Rich Chizmar in June he asked me if I had anything lying around that he could publish. I said the only unpublished piece was a Christmas story I used to read to my daughters when they were young. I thought it was still on a disk somewhere. He wanted to see it so I sent him
The Christmas Thingy
. He called back the next day and said he wanted to publish it. In fact, he’d already lined up Alan Clark to do the art. How could I say no?

Sims
-1 (
La Causa
) was published in July and quickly sold out. I finished a draft of
Hosts
in September and started in on
Sims-3
.

Here I ran into a bit of a problem. I hadn’t fully outlined the series (I’m one of those anal types who likes to travel with a map, but here I thought I’d indulge in a tightrope-without-a-safety-net approach), and now when I went back to the story I discovered things I wished I’d put in the first two novellas. But it was too late:
La Causa
was in print and the second,
The Portero Method
, was on its way.

So I adjusted. I finished the third,
Meerm
, by mid-October and
Zero
by early December.
The Portero Method
had yet to appear.

By now a number of the regulars on the
repairmanjack.com
forum had become so close and were in contact so often in virtual space that they decided to get together in person. They chose the last weekend in October in Baltimore for what they called the Grand Unification (after the story cross-reference graphic on the Web site). I shocked them by driving down and joining them for dinner on Saturday night. (How could I not? One fellow had come all the way from En gland.) Great fun, great people. They love each other like family and I feel like a proud father for having brought them together. The GU, as it’s called, has become an annual event, and each year it gets a little bigger.

All the Rage
was published in October,
The Christmas Thingy
in November, and the Stealth Press reprint of
Healer
in December.

Two new novels, a novella, and a Christmas story published, plus my first novel resurrected. But no short story.

2001

A nothing-special year.

Beacon wanted to extend the film option on
The Tomb
for eighteen months this time. I gathered that Trevor Sands was not wowing anyone with his rewrite. It occurred to me to say no. I’d signed the original option when there had been only one Repairman Jack novel. Now there were four and a fifth due soon. My agent was getting calls from one studio or production company after another asking about film rights to Jack. I could auction them for a tidy piece of change. And if not for Barry Rosenbush, a true believer in putting Jack on the screen since the 1980s, I would have. Instead we renegotiated a few points and I signed.

I finished the last
Sims
novella and handed in volumes three, four, and five to Cemetery Dance in a single package. Then I started Repairman Jack number 6. The working title was
Spirits
which I later changed to
The Haunted Air
.

Sims
-2 was being held up by delayed art but Rich assured me that all five parts would be published within the next twelve months.

I’d written the
Sims
novellas with an eye toward collecting all five in one volume after CD published them. So I melded them, changing the order of some events for a smoother flow, and took the novelized version to Forge. They bought it but said it couldn’t be scheduled until 2003. This was fine with me because that would give Rich extra time to get all five novellas into print first.

I’d optioned the
Midnight Mass
novella to a local fellow named Tony Mandile who managed to come up with half a million in financing. He began shooting his film.

And that got me thinking about
Midnight Mass
again. I’d long intended to blend it with “Good Friday” and “The Lord’s Work” and expand them to a novel. Now seemed like the time to do it. Since a good portion of the novel had already been published elsewhere, I doubted a regular trade publisher would be interested. So on the way back from Baltimore one Sunday morning in October I had breakfast with Rich and offered it to him. He wanted it.

Later on my agent reminded me that Forge had first look at my next novel—it was in all my contracts. Fine. I sent the stories and a treatment of how the rest of the novel would go to my editor, David Hartwell. I figured he’d pass. But no. He wanted it. So now I had to tell Rich the deal was off. He did do a beautiful, Harry Morris–illustrated limited edition, however.

The paperback of
All the Rage
was a September release, followed by the
Hosts
hardcover in October. Both tanked for an obvious reason.

I was in Nantucket, speeding through the last quarter of
The Haunted Air
, when Bin Laden’s puppets destroyed the World Trade towers. Like everyone else, I was a long, long time recovering from the shock (but not the rage—that’s a keeper). When I finally returned to the novel I found myself, for the first time in my life, unable to write. Thriller fiction seemed so…pointless. Who was I kidding? I was a piker. Nothing I put on paper could hold a candle to present-day reality. But I pushed into it. I wasn’t writing about the real world. In the novel I was in control. I could make sure the bad guys got what they deserved. I found some comfort in that.

2002

The Haunted Air
came in much longer than I’d anticipated (150,000 words) and I didn’t finish it until the end of January—two months late. I immediately started on the
Midnight Mass
novel.

Meanwhile my agent had found a publisher for
The Fifth Harmonic
: a new-age imprint in Virginia called Hampton Roads. The money wasn’t much, but at least the novel would be available.

On the movie front, Trevor Sands was out and another screenwriter was in. I’d heard that somewhere along the line, studio head Army Bernstein had written his own
Repairman Jack
script and sent it out to a number of directors. Chuck Russell (
The Scorpion King
) and Jim Gillespie (
I Know What You Did Last Summer
) reportedly told him they were Repairman Jack fans and that the Jack in his script was not the guy they knew. Whatever. I was fed up. I let it be known that there’d be no new option for Beacon.

In May I was impaneled as a judge for the World Fantasy Award. More than two hundred books and magazines would arrive at my door over the next few months.

In July I finished
Midnight Mass
and jumped into
Gateways
the following week. I didn’t want to deliver late again.

In the summer Beacon Films got a
Repairman Jack
script they loved from a writer named Chris Morgan. A day before the option ran out they triggered their right to buy. They now owned film rights to my guy. It was a bittersweet situation: I received a nice fat check but I’d lost control of my novel and my character. Repairman Jack belonged to someone else.

Sims
-3 (
Meerm
) was published in August, and
The Haunted Air
in October.

In November I was wined and dined by the Beacon folks, invited to the premiere of their latest film,
The Emperor’s Club
, and told that Touchstone’s projected budget for
Repairman Jack
was in the $70 to 80 million dollar range. Nothing but open road ahead, baby.

Yeah, right.