Skeleton Crew

  "Oh my Lord," the writer's wife said.

  "According to Thorpe, each Fornit has a small device, like a flitgun, full of ... good-luck dust, I guess you'd call it. And the good-luck dust--"

  "--is called fornus," the writer finished. He was grinning broadly.

  "Yes. And his wife thought it quite funny, too. At first. In fact, she thought at first--Thorpe had conceived the Fornits two years before, while he was drafting Underworld Figures--that it was just Reg, having her on. And maybe at first he was. It seems to have progressed from a whimsy to a superstition to an outright belief. It was ... a flexible fantasy. But hard in the end. Very hard."

  They were all silent. The grins had faded.

  "The Fornits had their funny side," the editor said. "Thorpe's typewriter started going to the shop a lot near the end of their stay in New York, and it was even a more frequent thing when they moved to Omaha. He had a loaner while it was being fixed for the first time out there. The dealership manager called a few days after Reg got his own machine back to tell him he was going to send a bill for cleaning the loaner as well as Thorpe's own machine."

  "What was the trouble?" the agent's wife asked.

  "I think I know," the writer's wife said.

  "It was full of food," the editor said. "Tiny bits of cake and cookies. There was peanut butter smeared on the platens of the keys themselves. Reg was feeding the Fornit in his typewriter. He also 'fed' the loaner, on the off chance that the Fornit had made the switch."

  "Boy," the writer said.

  "I knew none of these things then, you understand. For the nonce, I wrote back to him and told him how pleased I was. My secretary typed the letter and brought it in for my signature, and then she had to go out for something. I signed it and she wasn't back. And then--for no real reason at all--I put the same doodle below my name. Pyramid. Eye. And 'Fornit Some Fornus.' Crazy. The secretary saw it and asked me if I wanted it sent out that way. I shrugged and told her to go ahead.

  "Two days later Jane Thorpe called me. She told me that my letter had excited Reg a great deal. Reg thought he had found a kindred soul ... someone else who knew about the Fornits. You see what a crazy situation it was getting to be? As far as I knew at that point, a Fornit could have been anything from a lefthanded monkey wrench to a Polish steak knife. Ditto fornus. I explained to Jane that I had merely copied Reg's own design. She wanted to know why. I slipped the question, although the answer would have been because I was very drunk when I signed the letter."

  He paused, and an uncomfortable silence fell on the back lawn area. People looked at the sky, the lake, the trees, although they were no more interesting now than they had been a minute or two before.

  "I had been drinking all my adult life, and it's impossible for me to say when it began to get out of control. In the professional sense I was on top of the bottle until nearly the very end. I would begin drinking at lunch and come back to the office el blotto. I functioned perfectly well there, however. It was the drinks after work--first on the train, then at home--that pushed me over the functional point.

  "My wife and I had been having problems that were unrelated to the drinking, but the drinking made the other problems worse. For a long time she had been preparing to leave, and a week before the Reg Thorpe story came in, she did it.

  "I was trying to deal with that when the Thorpe story came in. I was drinking too much. And to top it all off, I was having--well, I guess now it's fashionable to call it a mid-life crisis. All I knew at the time was that I was as depressed about my professional life as I was about my personal one. I was coming to grips--or trying to--with a growing feeling that editing mass-market stories that would end up being read by nervous dental patients, housewives at lunchtime, and an occasional bored college student was not exactly a noble occupation. I was coming to grips--again, trying to, all of us at Logan's were at that time--with the idea that in another six months, or ten, or fourteen, there might not be any Logan's.

  "Into this dull autumnal landscape of middle-aged angst comes a very good story by a very good writer, a funny, energetic look at the mechanics of going crazy. It was like a bright ray of sun. I know it sounds strange to say that about a story that ends with the protagonist killing his wife and infant child, but you ask any editor what real joy is, and he'll tell you it's the great story or novel you didn't expect, landing on your desk like a big Christmas present. Look, you all know that Shirley Jackson story, 'The Lottery.' It ends on one of the most downbeat notes you can imagine. I mean, they take a nice lady out and stone her to death. Her son and daughter participate in her murder, for Christ's sake. But it was a great piece of storytelling ... and I bet the editor at the New Yorker who read the story first went home that night whistling.

  "What I'm trying to say is the Thorpe story was the best thing in my life right then. The one good thing. And from what his wife told me on the phone that day, my acceptance of that story was the one good thing that had happened to him lately. The author-editor relationship is always mutual parasitism, but in the case of Reg and me, that parasitism was heightened to an unnatural degree."

  "Let's go back to Jane Thorpe," the writer's wife said.

  "Yes, I did sort of leave her on a side-track, didn't I? She was angry about the Fornit business. At first. I told her I had simply doodled that eye-and-pyramid symbol under my signature, with no knowledge of what it might be, and apologized for whatever I'd done.

  "She got over her anger and spilled everything to me. She'd been getting more and more anxious, and she had no one at all to talk to. Her folks were dead, and all her friends were back in New York. Reg wouldn't allow anyone at all in the house. They were tax people, he said, or FBI, or CIA. Not long after they moved to Omaha, a little girl came to the door selling Girl Scout cookies. Reg yelled at her, told her to get the hell out, he knew why she was there, and so on. Jane tried to reason with him. She pointed out that the girl had only been ten years old. Reg told her that the tax people had no souls, no consciences. And besides, he said, the little girl might have been an android. Androids wouldn't be subject to the child-labor laws. He wouldn't put it past the tax people to send an android Girl Scout full of radium crystals to find out if he was keeping any secrets ... and to shoot him full of cancer rays in the meantime."

  "Good Lord," the agent's wife said.

  "She'd been waiting for a friendly voice and mine was the first. I got the Girl Scout story, I found out about the care and feeding of Fornits, about fomus, about how Reg refused to use a telephone. She was talking to me from a pay booth in a drugstore five blocks over. She told me that she was afraid it wasn't really tax men or FBI or CIA Reg was worried about. She thought he was really afraid that They--some hulking, anonymous group that hated Reg, was jealous of Reg, would stop at nothing to get Reg--had found out about his Fornit and wanted to kill it. If the Fornit was dead, there would be no more novels, no more short stories, nothing. You see? The essence of insanity. They were out to get him. In the end, not even the IRS, which had given him the very devil of a time over the income Underworld Figures generated, would serve as the boogeyman. In the end it was just They. The perfect paranoid fantasy. They wanted to kill his Fornit."

  "My God, what did you say to her?" the agent asked.

  "I tried to reassure her," the editor said. "There I was, freshly returned from a five-martini lunch, talking to this terrified woman who was standing in a drugstore phone booth in Omaha, trying to tell her it was all right, not to worry that her husband believed that the phones were full of radium crystals, that a bunch of anonymous people were sending android Girl Scouts to get the goods on him, not to worry that her husband had disconnected his talent from his mentality to such a degree that he could believe there was an elf living in his typewriter.

  "I don't believe I was very convincing.

  "She asked me--no, begged me--to work with Reg on his story, to see that it got published. She did everything but come out and say that 'The Flexible Bullet' was Reg's last cont
act to what we laughingly call reality.

  "I asked her what I should do if Reg mentioned Fornits again. 'Humor him,' she said. Her exact words--humor him. And then she hung up.

  "There was a letter in the mail from Reg the next day--five pages, typed, single-spaced. The first paragraph was about the story. The second draft was getting on well, he said. He thought he would be able to shave seven hundred words from the original ten thousand five hundred, bringing the final down to a tight nine thousand eight.

  "The rest of the letter was about Fornits and fornus. His own observations, and questions ... dozens of questions."

  "Observations?" The writer leaned forward. "He was actually seeing them, then?"

  "No," the editor said. "Not seeing them in an actual sense, but in another way ... I suppose he was. You know, astronomers knew Pluto was there long before they had a telescope powerful enough to see it. They knew all about it by studying the planet Neptune's orbit. Reg was observing the Fornits in that way. They liked to eat at night, he said, had I noticed that? He fed them at all hours of the day, but he noticed that most of it disappeared after eight P.M."

  "Hallucination?" the writer asked.

  "No," the editor said. "His wife simply cleared as much of the food out of the typewriter as she could when Reg went out for his evening walk. And he went out every evening at nine o'clock."

  "I'd say she had quite a nerve getting after you," the agent grunted. He shifted his large bulk in the lawn chair. "She was feeding the man's fantasy herself."

  "You don't understand why she called and why she was so upset," the editor said quietly. He looked at the writer's wife. "But I'll bet you do, Meg."

  "Maybe," she said, and gave her husband an uncomfortable sideways look. "She wasn't mad because you were feeding his fantasy. She was afraid you might upset it."

  "Bravo." The editor lit a fresh cigarette. "And she removed the food for the same reason. If the food continued to accumulate in the typewriter, Reg would make the logical assumption, proceeding directly from his own decidedly illogical premise. Namely, that his Fornit had either died or left. Hence, no more fornus. Hence, no more writing. Hence ..."

  The editor let the word drift away on cigarette smoke and then resumed:

  "He thought that Fornits were probably nocturnal. They didn't like loud noises--he had noticed that he hadn't been able to write on mornings after noisy parties--they hated the TV, they hated free electricity, they hated radium. Reg had sold their TV to Goodwill for twenty dollars, he said, and his wristwatch with the radium dial was long gone. Then the questions. How did I know about Fornits? Was it possible that I had one in residence? If so, what did I think about this, this, and that? I don't need to be more specific, I think. If you've ever gotten a dog of a particular breed and can recollect the questions you asked about its care and feeding, you'll know most of the questions Reg asked me. One little doodle below my signature was all it took to open Pandora's box."

  "What did you write back?" the agent asked.

  The editor said slowly, "That's where the trouble really began. For both of us. Jane had said, 'Humor him,' so that's what I did. Unfortunately, I rather overdid it. I answered his letter at home, and I was very drunk. The apartment seemed much too empty. It had a stale smell--cigarette smoke, not enough airing. Things were going to seed with Sandra gone. The dropcloth on the couch all wrinkled. Dirty dishes in the sink, that sort of thing. The middle-aged man unprepared for domesticity.

  "I sat there with a sheet of my personal stationery rolled into the typewriter and I thought: I need a Fornit. In fact, I need a dozen of them to dust this damn lonely house with fornus from end to end. In that instant I was drunk enough to envy Reg Thorpe his delusion.

  "I said I had a Fornit, of course. I told Reg that mine was remarkably similar to his in its characteristics. Nocturnal. Hated loud noises, but seemed to enjoy Bach and Brahms ... I often did my best work after an evening of listening to them, I said. I had found my Fornit had a decided taste for Kirschner's bologna ... had Reg ever tried it? I simply left little scraps of it near the Scripto I always carried--my editorial blue pencil, if you like--and it was almost always gone in the morning. Unless, as Reg said, it had been noisy the night before. I told him I was glad to know about radium, even though I didn't have a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. I told him my Fornit had been with me since college. I got so carried away with my own invention that I wrote nearly six pages. At the end I added a paragraph about the story, a very perfunctory thing, and signed it." "And below your signature--?" the agent's wife asked.

  "Sure. Fornit Some Fornus." He paused. "You can't see it in the dark, but I'm blushing. I was so goddammed drunk, so goddammed smug ... I might have had second thoughts in the cold light of dawn, but by then it was too late."

  "You'd mailed it the night before?" the writer murmured.

  "So I did. And then, for a week and a half, I held my breath and waited. One day the manuscript came in, addressed to me, no covering letter. The cuts were as we had discussed them, and I thought that the story was letter-perfect, but the manuscript was ... well, I put it in my briefcase, took it home, and retyped it myself. It was covered with weird yellow stains. I thought ..."

  "Urine?" the agent's wife asked.

  "Yes, that's what I thought. But it wasn't. And when I got home, there was a letter in my mailbox from Reg. Ten pages this time. In the course of the letter the yellow stains were accounted for. He hadn't been able to find Kirschner's bologna, so had tried Jordan's.

  "He said they loved it. Especially with mustard.

  "I had been quite sober that day. But his letter combined with those pitiful mustard stains ground right into the pages of his manuscript sent me directly to the liquor cabinet. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to drunk."

  "What else did the letter say?" the agent's wife asked. She had grown more and more fascinated with the tale, and was now leaning over her not inconsiderable belly in a posture that reminded the writer's wife of Snoopy standing on his doghouse and pretending to be a vulture.

  "Only two lines about the story this time. All credit thrown to the Fomit ... and to me. The bologna had really been a fantastic idea. Rackne loved it, and as a consequence--"

  "Rackne?" the author asked.

  "That was the Fornit's name," the editor said. "Rackne. As a consequence of the bologna, Rackne had really gotten behind in the rewrite. The rest of the letter was a paranoid chant. You have never seen such stuff in your life."

  "Reg and Rackne ... a marriage made in heaven," the writer's wife said, and giggled nervously.

  "Oh, not at all," the editor said. "Theirs was a working relationship. And Rackne was male."

  "Well, tell us about the letter."

  "That's one I don't have by heart. It's just as well for you that I don't. Even abnormality grows tiresome after a while. The mailman was CIA. The paperboy was FBI; Reg had seen a silenced revolver in his sack of papers. The people next door were spies of some sort; they had surveillance equipment in their van. He no longer dared to go down to the comer store for supplies because the proprietor was an android. He had suspected it before, he said, but now he was sure. He had seen the wires crisscrossing under the man's scalp, where he was beginning to go bald. And the radium count in his house was way up; at night he could see a dull, greenish glow in the rooms.

  "His letter finished this way: 'I hope you'll write back and apprise me of your own situation (and that of your Fornit) as regards enemies, Henry. I believe that reaching you has been an occurrence that transcends coincidence. I would call it a life-ring from (God? Providence? Fate? supply your own term) at the last possible instant.

  " 'It is not possible for a man to stand alone for long against a thousand enemies. And to discover, at last, that one is not alone ... is it too much to say that the commonality of our experience stands between myself and total destruction? Perhaps not. I must know: are the enemies after your Fornit as they are after Rackne? If so, how
are you coping? If not, do you have any idea why not? I repeat, I must know.'

  "The letter was signed with the Fornit Some Fornus doodle beneath, and then a P.S. Just one sentence. But lethal. The P.S. said: 'Sometimes I wonder about my wife.'

  "I read the letter through three times. In the process, I killed an entire bottle of Black Velvet. I began to consider options on how to answer his letter. It was a cry for help from a drowning man, that was pretty obvious. The story had held him together for a while, but now the story was done. Now he was depending on me to hold him together. Which was perfectly reasonable, since I'd brought the whole thing on myself.

  "I walked up and down the house, through all the empty rooms. And I started to unplug things. I was very drunk, remember, and heavy drinking opens unexpected avenues of suggestibility. Which is why editors and lawyers are willing to spring for three drinks before talking contract at lunch."

  The agent brayed laughter, but the mood remained tight and tense and uncomfortable.

  "And please keep in mind that Reg Thorpe was one hell of a writer. He was absolutely convinced of the things he was saying. FBI. CIA. IRS. They. The enemies. Some writers possess a very rare gift for cooling their prose the more passionately they feel their subject. Steinbeck had it, so did Hemingway, and Reg Thorpe had that same talent. When you entered his world, everything began to seem very logical. You began to think it very likely, once you accepted the basic Fornit premise, that the paperboy did have a silenced .38 in his bag of papers. That the college kids next door with the van might indeed be KGB agents with death-capsules in wax molars, on a do-or-die mission to kill or capture Rackne.

  "Of course, I didn't accept the basic premise. But it seemed so hard to think. And I unplugged things. First the color TV, because everybody knows that they really do give off radiation. At Logan's we had published an article by a perfectly reputable scientist suggesting that the radiation given off by the household color television was interrupting human brainwaves just enough to alter them minutely but permanently. This scientist suggested that it might be the reason for declining college-board scores, literacy tests, and grammar-school development of arithmetical skills. After all, who sits closer to the TV than a little kid?