The Book of Counted Sorrows (3 page)

                   In recent days, ever since the opening of It Happened One Night, sans Langford's brilliant portrayal of Norman Bates, the actor had been obsessed with Counted Sorrows. He had read the volume into the wee hours of the night, and then into the even more wee hours, and then finally into the most wee hours of all, so wee that they could not be measured by any but the most sensitive weenometer. More than once he had told Mrs. Scuttlesby - his, not ours - that this volume contained such stunning insights into the nature of life and the condition of humanity that he was afraid his mind could not contain the dazzling knowledge he'd received from these pages. "Oh, Mrs. Scuttlesby," he had said earlier that very day, "sometimes I fear that the pressure of this dazzling knowledge will cause my head to explode and paste my brains to the ceiling, leaving you with a frightful mess to clean up."

                   At this memory of her employer's expressed fear, the faithful housekeeper - and, according to the historical record, highly skilled bird mimic - looked up at the ceiling. She did not actually expect to find the handsome mahogany coffers splattered with gray matter, for she assumed that the actor had been speaking metaphorically, with that free and supple imagination that actors do not naturally possess but which he might have acquired by hanging around with a bunch of screenwriters, who do possess it, though not to the degree that you'll find it in novelists. Instead, she discovered that he must have meant to be taken literally. Not merely his head had exploded, but seemingly his entire physical entity, which now festooned the library ceiling in glutinous swags that were decidedly not an improvement to the decor.

                   Within half an hour, more than twenty police vehicles crowded the circular driveway in front of the mansion, and the cobblestones were littered with shards of glass from the automobile headlamps that had shattered under the assault of cheese stench. In the great house, uniformed and plainclothes personnel, noses wisely pinned, puzzled over the meager evidence and vigorously debated whether the victim should be scraped off the ceiling or sucked off with an industrial vacuum cleaner, or simply painted over.

                   According to the official report of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of Los Angeles, whose business card had to be unusually long to accommodate his full title, the cause of death was "forces unknown and unknowable, of perhaps a supernatural nature, but at the very least damned peculiar. Even a medical scientist trained in forensic investigation is left with a palpable sense of dread and a desire to move back home with Mommy." The same report described the remains as "monumentally icky," and "too repellently grotesque to be depicted in a motion picture for at least another sixty years or until Quentin Tarantino is allowed to direct, whichever comes first."

                   The following morning, in the Los Angeles Times' front-page story, no mention was made of Langford Crispin's Academy Award for his performance as Jerry Jekyll, but he was described as "the actor who, in The Private Life of Henry the VIII, chose to play Lord Havingstoke as a mincing, one-armed, twelve-toed tyrant in a funny hat and elfin shoes, in total disregard of the wishes of the film's director and in spite of much advice to the contrary provided by a consulting board of 312 prominent and deadly serious historians." Los Angeles is a hard, cruel town.

                   The Book of Counted Sorrows was sold with the other volumes in Langford's extensive book collection. The purchaser was a rare-book dealer named Ed Thomas, from Orange County, who at that time operated out of a former burlesque house that had been stripped of its seating and its strippers, and that boasted one of the odder smells of any book shop of its era. This Ed Thomas is not to be confused with the Ed Thomas to whom - with his wife, Pat - I dedicated my novel Midnight. The Ed Thomas who purchased Langford Crispin's library from the actor's estate was 58 years old in 1934, which would make him 125 as I write this. Even if my dear friend Ed Thomas looked 125, which he pretty much does not, he could not possibly be the same man who acquired The Book of Counted Sorrows with the rest of Langford's collection, because in 1942, that Ed Thomas was run down by a 30,000-pound Acme steamroller driven - according to witnesses - by a coyote.

                   For a while, The Book of Counted Sorrows fell into hands unknown before surfacing, in 1938, in the possession of a doomed poet by the name of Addison Heffalope.

                   Now excuse me while I pause to eat a cracker, drink a lemon beer, floss my teeth, present the floss to Skippy at the carriage master's cottage, obtain my receipt, witness the tying, sign the appropriate legal forms, visit the bathroom, complete an entry in the official 1avatory log, wash my hands with three soaps, finishing with Aunt Jemima's Maximum-Power Lye Cake, present my hands to Mrs. Scuttlesby for inspection, and return here to the study, wonderfully refreshed.

                   You might wish to nap.

6

The Curse of Too Much Knowledge and a Trail of Frightful Destruction.

                   I feel wonderfully refreshed. Sedley Nottingham, the estate's Com-mander of Beverages, provided a lemon beer and a wealth of amusing stories about his days as Defender of the Ardent Spirits at the Queen of England's secret getaway castle in Misery Lake, Arkansas, where he was more than once forced to maim and even kill commoners who tried to steal a bottle or two of Her Majesty's most precious vintages of fine Cabernet, some of Which date to the time of Moses, and her most exquisite Merlots, some of which date to the time of Og the caveman and the age of the mastodons. Sedley is a marvelous storyteller with an appearance that greatly enhances his every tale: a mane of white hair, huge muttonchop sideburns, twinkling blue eyes as bloodshot as those of a survivor of any Megadeath concert, a nose the size of a formidable yellow squash and the color of an overripe tomato, pendulously fat lips, a tattooed tongue, a robust and barrel-chested body, and hands large enough and strong enough to strangle an ox. Indeed, to keep fit for his work, he had just finished strangling an ox quite near the back door to the kitchen as I arrived for my lemon beer, and we sat on the cooling hulk of the enormous horned beast while we chatted - or at least until Mrs. Scuttlesby arrived to drag it away.

                   Justin Parsimonious, our mumbling but esteemed Comptroller of Cookies and Crackers here on the Koontz estate, provided me with the single saltine that I requested, served on a plate of polished jackal bone, and then sat with Sedley and me upon the unfortunate ox until Mrs. Scuttlesby dragged it away, whereafter we all moved to the bench-style veranda swing, upon which we sat uncomfortably close to one another, pondering the meaning of existence, until Mrs. Scuttlesby arrived to drag Justin away for God knows what purpose.

                   At the carriage master's cottage, while Skippy measured my floss with a laser micrometer and photographed it against a black velvet cloth, he wondered aloud if there might be a Mr. Scuttlesby and, if so, what the lucky man might be like. The possibility of a Mr. Scuttlesby had never occurred to me, and I was so thoroughly boggled that I needed to sit down. Unfortunately, Skippy occupied the only chair in the measuring room, and no dead ox was handy. I could tell that Skippy himself was boggled by his question, for the third eye spun like a pinwheel at the pinnacle of his handsome face.

                   On my return trip here to the study, exercising the free and supple imagination of a novelist, in an uncharacteristically lewd mood, I found myself puzzling over what positions the Scuttlesbys, husband and wife, might assume in their marital bed, and in what mutually satisfying actions they might engage - assuming, of course, that Mr. Scuttlesby actually existed and that there was not, in his place, merely a disgusting electrical-powered eros machine fashioned from pig iron, latex, Spandex, cow hide, skin of eel, and cadaver cartilage, with giant meshing gear wheels and rattling pistons and whirling thingies and lights flashing in the urgent and insistent rhythms of animal lust.

                   For reasons entirely mysterious to me, I suddenly found myself in a state of absolute terror, running this way and that, weaving through the topiary as though I were a pathetic panic-stricken piece of potential road-kill on a freeway streaming with hurtling semis. I collided with two topiary gardeners, frightened the mustache off one of our decorative-rock technicians, and caused our worm auditor to drop his sonic nightcrawler-detection device and lose count in his vitally important worm census, before at last dropping to the grass in exhaustion in the scrub-pine grove that we have whittled out of a once-majestic grouping of giant redwoods.

                   I'm okay now, feeling wonderfully refreshed, and happy to be back here in the study, grateful that you have waited for me, and thankful that fate has not seen fit to visit upon you any of the horrors that have befallen some visitors in the past when they have been left alone in this room.

                   Where was I?

                   Perhaps the more profound question is: Where am I going?

                   I do believe that life has purpose and meaning, that there is a fabulous (and tasteful) design to our days in this troubled world, and that every one of us has been put here with an important mission that he or she must discover and fulfill. Should we fail to fulfill these missions, we might be forgiven and generously granted a studio apartment in Heaven, with chintz curtains and cable TV, or provided with another life in which to try again - or our souls might be ripped out of us like pits being torn from peaches, to be cast down into an abyss of eternal darkness crawling with film-studio executives and other things that feed on the damned.

                   Some of us may have humble missions, and others may have grand missions. Perhaps you are meant single-handedly to rescue 104 helpless young children from a burning orphanage, while I am here to write a few pretty metaphors using roses as an image. You might be required to negotiate world peace, while I am expected only to help two or three elderly women across busy intersections at certain important points in my life. We don't know what's expected of us. It's very mysterious. What if I help the wrong elderly women across the street, and the one I fail to help is exactly the one I was meant to help, but she gets hit by a bus? Yet a fair God surely can't expect me to help even enfeebled elderly woman across the street; I'd get nothing else done.

                   When I was a naive but well-meaning boy, I believed that I knew my destiny. I had no doubt that I was meant to work in a meat-packing plant, bringing Vienna sausages and white chunk-meat chicken to a hungry world. You cannot ever know the depth of my despair when I discovered that I lacked sufficient physical strength to operate the massive levers of the sausage-arranging machine, which inserts the little sausages in concentric circles in each can, and that I was not possessed of sufficient judgment to be trusted to route the chunks of chicken, according to size, into cans variously marked "regular," "choice," "supreme," and "cat food."

                   I became a writer, and a fairly successful one, but some nights when I lie sleepless, I hear the meatpacking plant calling to me, calling, calling.... On these occasions, a yearning of indescribable intensity fills me, rather like a gas bloat but poignant. Perhaps I have failed God by not making a life in meatpacking. But on the other hand, perhaps meat packing is my false destiny, and perhaps the plant that calls to me in such sweet melancholy tones in the night is owned by Satan, who means to mislead me from my one true mission into a frustrating and useless career in processed pork.

                   This is precisely the type of skull-busting quandary that has driven the great philosophers to fill libraries with their musings on the nature of creation and the plight of humanity. Therefore, I doubt that I will be able to resolve these weighty issues in a conversation with you, regardless of how long we sit here or how many lemon beers we consume. How much better if each of us had been born with detailed instructions tattooed on his or her buttocks. We would need a mirror to read them, of course, and an ability to decipher reversed images, but these would be simple problems compared to those we now face.

                   Which obviously brings me to Addison Heffalope, the doomed poet, who came into possession of The Book of Counted Sorrows in 1938.

                   Heffalope - Heff to his friends, Alope to his enemies - knew that he was doomed from the day he was born. His first word, spoken even before Dada or Mama, was simply death, in a most somber tone for a mere toddler. His second word was despair, his third was hopeless; and his fourth was brontosaurus, because even suicidally depressed tykes love dinosaurs. He didn't get around to saying Dada or Mam a until he was nineteen, by which time he was already carrying a gold-embossed business card identifying himself as "Addison Heffalope, Poet (Doomed)."

                   In 1936, at the age of 21, Heff married a female wrestler named Bea Scuttles, whom he had met in a conga line at a funeral for his friend, Toynbee Doob, whose business card had read "Toynbee Doob, Songwriter (Doomed)." The doomed tend to find one another in this cold lonely world, and to take a warm fuzzy solace in their shared burden of utter hopelessness. By the age of 22, Toynbee had written six smash hit songs, whereupon he had been pecked to death by a flock of rabid young actresses who had come to Hollywood seeking fame, with stars in their eyes, with hope in their hearts, but without all the necessary vaccinations.

                   Bea Scuttles, by all reports, did not consider herself to be doomed, but she was drawn to Heff anyway. Together they produced a child named Hisser, of indeterminate sex, whom they tried so very desperately to love, but who was, in fact, a hideous mutant with six legs, four arms, sucker pads on its hands and feet, a mouth half as big as its misshapen head, blazing red eyes, and an adorable mass of springy blond curls that once made Shirley Temple weep bitterly with envy. Hisser spent most of the day hiding from the sun, most of the night crawling across ceilings, and would eat little more than raw carrots and live cats. Hisser would drink anything, but only through a straw, and it had the annoying habit of loudly blowing bubbles in whatever beverage it was consuming.

                   Eventually the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals became suspicious after Heff and Bea adopted 3,624 cats from various animal shelters in the greater Los Angeles area. When the ASPCA representative paid a surprise visit and interrupted Hisser at dinner - a live-cat sandwich and a side of carrot slaw - the jig was up. By order of the court, the child was made a ward of the state and was conveyed to the compassionate but high-security facility known as the Malibu Home for Monstrous and Dangerous Mutant Children.

                   To us, in this more enlightened age, it seems all but impossible to believe that mutant children, regardless of how monstrous or how dangerous, would ever forcibly be separated from their parents and kept in a locked facility. We now understand that the right thing to do is embrace even the most monstrous and dangerous mutants - nay, not merely embrace them but celebrate them - in recognition of our awareness that there is a little of the mutant in every one of us, even if we don't eat live cats, the brains of unwary schoolteachers, or masses of steaming cow guts. In that intolerant and ignorant era, however, all dangerous mutant children were sequestered, men were expected to be courteous to women, women were expected not to discuss gynecological problems over dinner in a fine restaurant, and all non-mutant children uniformly respected their elders and never used the word ass in any context whatsoever. We have come a long way, and we have every reason to be proud.

                   The court-ordered seizure of Hisser was the blow that destroyed the Heffalope marriage. After the divorce, Bea at first resumed her career as a female wrestler, but soon she disappeared from human ken. Heff struggled to earn a few dollars here and there, writing doggerel for tawdry magazines about naked female scientists and for other tawdry magazines about busty blonde philosophers. (Pornography was illegal in those days, very much underground, and salacious material had to be disguised as publications with redeeming social purpose. Fortunately for pornographers, most of the upstanding citizens were so innocent and naive that the thinnest tissue of serious intention could convince them that a collection of photos of bare-naked women fondling themselves was entirely pure if a microscope or Bunsen burner, or volume of Plato's writings, were included in each shot.)

                   Sickened by the venereal verse that he composed for these sleazy rags, and inspired by something that he had read in The Book of Counted Sorrows (which was at that time in his possession), Heff fled to a shabby room in a shabby seaside motel in a shabby beach town on the magnificent Pacific coast and in one week wrote Ode to My Mutant Child in 754 rhyming quatrains. The film rights sold immediately to Orson Welles for $612,004, a colossal fortune in those days, and not exactly chump change in our own time.

                   This astonishing good fortune had a profound effect on Heff. He confided to friends that for the first time in his life, he did not feel doomed, and to those enemies who knew him as Alope, he confided the same thing. A cloud had lifted from him. A dark storm had at last passed through and moved on. A slough of despond had drained. His sinuses were clearer, too, and he credited the wisdom of The Book of Counted Sorrows for all these improvements in his life. He purchased a fine house in the flats of Beverly Hills, made plans to marry a pretty and good-hearted former high-school sweetheart named Tess, purchased a cute little kitten with no intention of feeding it to a mutant, acquired a brighter and more cheerful wardrobe than the black robes that had been his usual attire, and in September, 1939, he began work on Ode to My Wrestler Wife: Good Riddance and Goodbye, which sold to films for $806,045 on the basis of the first eight rhyming lines and a two-word synopsis.

                   In early October, 1939, his head exploded. This was as great a disappointment to his friends as it was good news to his enemies, but the most profound effect was on the tender members of the children's choir in front of whom it occurred. Because Heff always had as great an interest in music as in doom, and because his newfound optimism motivated him to give something back to his community, he had become the unpaid and highly enthusiastic director of the choir at Our Ladv of the Timid Waifs Orphanage. The orphans were indeed waifs, and timid; consequently, the horrid spectacle of Heff's exploding head traumatized them so thoroughly that most never sang again, and one of them was unable to pee for a week, though all the others peed a split second subsequent to poor Heff's violent self-decapitation. And peed copiously, I might add.

                   In Heff's defense, if he'd known that his head was going to explode, he would doubtlessly have arranged to be elsewhere: maybe home alone or on the beach, perhaps in a rose garden or at a dime-a-dance hall in the arms of a lovely and coquettish stranger. He would never have intentionally detonated in front of children. After all, no one can reasonably be expected to anticipate such a thing as a head explosion, and the Los Angeles Times, as usual, was judgmental and sensationalistic when it headlined the story IRRESPONSIBLE POET TRAUMATIZES ORPHAN WAIFS WITH EXPLOSIVE DENOGGINIZATION, recalling their equally shabby treatment of Langford Crispin.