"I"m sitting way at the back, with an old man; fascinating old man. Used to be a writer, he says. I don"t doubt it. Jesus, he must have written some incredible books. Don"t know how I could have missed them.
I thought I"d read practically everything in the genre."
"What is his name?" Hans asked, with that soft lovely Scandinavian accent.
"Marki Stra.s.ser," I said. "What a G.o.ddam sensational story-sense he"s got."
They were staring at me.
"Marki Stra.s.ser?" Hans had frozen, his cup of tea halfway to his lips.
"Marki Stra.s.ser," I said again. "What"s the matter?"
"The only Marki I know, who was a writer, was a man who used to come to these evenings thirty years ago. But he"s been dead for at least fifteen, sixteen years."
I laughed. "Can"t be the same one, unless you"re wrong about his having died."
"No, I am certain about his death. I attended his funeral."
Then it"s someone else."
"Where"s he sitting?" Bob asked.
I stepped out into the pa.s.sage and motioned them to join me. I waited for the crowd to sway out of the way for a moment, and pointed. "There, back in the corner, in the big easy chair."There was no one in the big easy chair. It was empty.
And as I stared, and they stood behind me, staring, a woman sat down in the chair and went to sleep, a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s in her hand. "He got up and moved somewhere else in the room," I said.
No, he hadn"t. Of course.
We were the last to go. I wouldn"t leave. I watched each person pa.s.s out through the front door, standing right in front of the door so no one could get past me. Bob checked out the toilet. He wasn"t in there. There was only one exit from the apartment, and I was in front of it. "Listen, G.o.ddammit," I said heatedly, to Hans and Bob and our host, who wanted desperately to vomit and go to bed, "I donot believe in ghosts; hewasn"t a ghost, hewasn"t a figment of my imagination, hewasn"t a fraud; for G.o.d"s sake I"m notthat gullible I can"t tell when I"m being put on; those stories he told me were too d.a.m.ned good; and if he was here, how the h.e.l.l did he get out past me? I was right in front of the door even when I came to the kitchen to get the water. He was anold man, at least seventy-five, maybe older; he wasn"t a G.o.ddam sprinter!n.o.body could have gotten through that crowd fast enough to slip out into the hall behind me without banging into everyone, andsomeone would have remembered being pushed like that ... so ..."
Hans tried to calm me. "Billy, we asked everyone who was here. No one else saw him. No one even saw you sitting on the sofa there, where you say you were sitting. No one else spoke to anyone like that, and many of the writers here tonightknew him. Why would a man tell you he was Marki Stra.s.ser if he wasnot Marki Stra.s.ser? He would have known that a room filled with writers whoknew Marki Stra.s.ser would tell you if it was a joke."
I wouldn"t let go of it. I wasnot hallucinating!
Our host went digging around in the back closet and came up with a bound file of old Mystery Writers of America programs from Edgar Award dinners; he flipped through them, back fifteen years, and found a photograph of Marki Stra.s.ser. I looked at it. The photo was clear and sharp. It wasn"t the same man.
There was no way of confusing the two, even adding fifteen years to the face in the picture, even allowing for a severe debilitation from sickness. The Marki in the photograph was a round-faced man, almost totally bald, with thick eyebrows and dark eyes. The Marki I had talked to for almost an hour had had soft, blue eyes. Even if he had been wearing a hairpiece, those eyes couldn"t be mistaken.
"It"s not him, dammit!"
They asked me to describe him again. When that didn"t connect, Hans asked me to tell him the stories and the t.i.tles. The three of them listened and I could see from their faces that they were as impressed with the books Marki had written as I was. But when I ran down and sat there, breathing hard, Hans and my host shook their heads. "Billy," Hans said, "I was the editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club for seven years; I editedThe Saint Detective Magazine for more than ten. I have read as widely in the field of mystery fiction as anyone alive. No such books exist."
Our host, an authority on the subject, agreed.
I looked at Bob Catlett. He devoured them a book a day. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded his head in agreement.
I sat there and closed my eyes.
After a little while. Bob suggested we go. His wife had vanished an hour earlier with a group intent on getting cheesecake. He wanted to get to bed. I didn"t know what to do. So I went back to the Warwick.That night I pulled an extra blanket onto the bed, but still it was cold, very cold, and I shivered. I left the television set on, nothing but snow and a steady humming. I couldn"t sleep.
Finally, I got up and got dressed and went out into the night. Fifty-fourth Street was empty and silent at three in the morning. Not even delivery trucks and, though I looked and looked for him, I couldn"t find him.
I thought about it endlessly, walking, and for a while I imagined he had been my father, come back from the grave to talk to me. But it wasn"t my father. I would have recognized him. I"m no fool, I would have recognized him. My father had been a much shorter man, with a mustache; and he had never spoken like that, in that way, with those words and those cadences.
It wasn"t the almost-forgotten mystery novelist known as Marki Stra.s.ser. Why he had used that name, I don"t know; perhaps to get my attention, to lead me down a black path of fear that would tell me without question that he was someone else, because it hadnot been Marki Stra.s.ser. I didn"t know who he was.
I came back to the Warwick and rang for the elevator. I stood in front of the mirrored panel between the two elevator doors, and I stared through my own reflection, into the gla.s.s, looking for an answer.
Then I went up to my room and sat down at the writing desk and rolled a clean sandwich of white bond, carbon, and yellow second sheet into the portable.
I began writing LOVER, KILLER.
It came easily. No one else could write that book.
But, like my father, he hadn"t even said goodbye when I went to get him that gla.s.s of water. That tired old man.
Biography
Harlan Ellison.
Harlan Ellison has been called "one of the great living American short story writers" by the "Washington Post." In a career spanning more than 50 years, he has won more awards for the more than 70 books he has written or edited, the more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns, the two dozen teleplays, and a dozen motion pictures he has created, then any other living fantasist. He has won the Hugo award eight and a half times (shared once); the Nebula award three times; the Bram Stoker award, presented by the Horror Writers a.s.sociation, five times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996); the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America twice; the Georges Melies fantasy film award twice; two Audie Awards (for the best in audio recordings); and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by P.E.N., the international writer"s union. He was presented with the first Living Legend award by the International Horror Critics at the 1995 World Horror Convention. He is also the only author in Hollywood ever to win the Writers Guild of America award for Outstanding teleplay (solo work) four times, most recently for "Paladin of the Lost Hour" his Twilight Zone episode that was Danny Kaye"s final role, in 1987. In March (1998), the National Women"s Committee of Brandeis University honored him with their 1998 "Words, Wit & Wisdom" award.