Mr. Cables (Novella #9)

  4

  When I awoke, dusk had turned the sky outside the den window into a palette of deepening pastels. I’d wasted a whole day.

  “Crap.”

  I sat up, rubbed my face, then kicked my feet back into my slippers. The sound of Trudy’s vacuum cleaner sounded like it was right outside the door. She should have been gone by now—she hated driving at night, particularly along the winding, forested driveway that led down the hill from my house to the main road—and it would be fully dark soon.

  I opened the door to my den to find the vacuum cleaner roaring in the middle of the hall, the hose attachment leaning against the wall unattended.

  “Trudy?” I called over the vacuum’s roar. I went down the hall and pulled the plug; the vacuum whined as it died. “Trudy?”

  No answer.

  Trudy was in her late sixties and was maybe eighty pounds overweight. As I hurried down the hall, I feared I’d find her sprawled out on the living room floor, dead of a heart attack, her eyes swollen in their sockets and bulging out of her face. My own heart was thudding like mad by the time I turned the corner and came into the living room.

  Trudy was sitting in my armchair, that peculiar novel opened up in her lap. She was studying one of the pages with the intensity of someone engaged in prayer while gnawing ravenously at her thumbnail.

  “Trudy,” I said. And when she didn’t look up—when she didn’t respond at all—I put a little more force behind it: “Trudy!”

  My housekeeper looked up, startled. “Oh,” she said, popping her thumb from her mouth; I noticed a bead of blood around the cuticle. “Oh…” She glanced back down at the book then back up at me. While I was relieved that she hadn’t died on my floor, the expression on her face did not fill me with confidence that she was in perfect health: She had been red-faced from the cold when she’d arrived hours earlier, but now her face was pale, her eyes wide as flashbulbs. She stood up from the chair sharply, knocking the book to the floor.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, picking the book up off the floor.

  She glanced around the room, as if searching for something.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I guess I lost track of time, Mr. Paventeau. I haven’t cleaned in here. I…I haven’t cleaned anywhere. I’m sorry. I don’t know what…”

  I set the book on the end table, and when I looked up, I saw that Trudy was staring at it.

  “I saw the book,” she said, “and didn’t recognize it. You know I’ve read all your books, Mr. Paventeau, or at least I thought I had—”

  “It isn’t mine,” I said.

  “—so I thought I’d just read the first page,” Trudy went on, not hearing me. “Just the first page. But then I guess I got lost in it, and lost track of time, and, Mr. Paventeau, I apologize, I can come back tomorrow and do the work I should have done today. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Are you okay? You seem shaken up.”

  “That book,” she said, still staring at it.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s…” She looked at me. “Can I speak candidly, Mr. Paventeau?”

  “Of course.”

  “You know I just adore your work, and really, I’m no critic, what do I know? It’s just that…”

  “What, Trudy? What is it?”

  “It’s horrible.” She brought a hand up to her mouth, as if her own words had startled her.

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “In every way. It’s not like your regular books. This one is…it’s just awful. I feel so terrible saying that, Mr. Paventeau, but it’s awful.”

  It was clear that she didn’t mean it was boring or silly or trite or just poorly written; by awful, she meant it had scared the daylights out of her. She all but trembled as she stood there, and her gaze kept sliding back to the book on the end table. She looked at it the way someone might eyeball a rattlesnake to make sure it wasn’t creeping any closer.

  “What exactly did you find so unappealing about the book?” I asked her.

  Her mouth opened, and I waited for some explanation, some critique, a statement of any kind…but then she glanced out the windows at the darkening pine forest and at the purple-orange light draining from the sky.

  “I should leave,” she said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “I can drive you.”

  “No, Mr. Paventeau. I’ve wasted enough of your time today, sitting and reading when I should have been working. No, no. I’ll be back tomorrow to make things right.”

  “That isn’t necessary—”

  “It is. Goodnight, Mr. Paventeau. Goodnight.”

  She hurried down the hall while tugging her coat on. She only had one arm in a sleeve when she went out the front door. I got the impression that, for whatever reason, she didn’t want to spend another second in the house.

  It’s not the house, I thought. It’s the book. She’s frightened of it. Not just the story, but of the book itself.

  I turned back to the book on the end table. “Scared her pretty good, didn’t you?” Although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.

  I picked it up off the end table, and for a moment I was filled with the compulsion to take it straight out to the trash. To throw it away and not worry about it a second longer. But then the compulsion faded, and instead I took the book into my den. I fired up my scanner and copied the first eighty or so pages of the novel. I sent the file to my email, then logged into my email account and forwarded the pages to my agent, with a quick note asking her to give them a read and tell me her thoughts.

  When I was done, I turned the lights off in the den and was about to head back into the hall when I saw someone standing outside the window, staring in at me. The sight startled me and I nearly dropped the book. I closed the lid of my laptop, eliminating the last source of light in the room, so that it was brighter outside in the moonlight than it was inside the room. But it was still too dark out there to make out any details.

  Logic told me it was Trudy, having forgotten something…but what logic failed to supply was why Trudy would be peeping in the den window at me instead of coming back into the house.

  Because she doesn’t want to come back into the house. Because she’s afraid.

  I hurried down the hall and went out the front door. Trudy’s car was no longer parked outside, but by this point I had dismissed the notion that it had been my housekeeper staring at me from the other side of the window.

  The den windows were around the side of the house, and faced the northern slope of the pine forest. There was no one there, though this didn’t help ease my nerves. I stood motionless—even held my breath—while listening for sounds that might betray the location of the trespasser. But the surrounding forest was silent. This close to winter, even the birds and the crickets were gone.

  I glanced down and saw I was still clutching that mysterious, inexplicable book in my hands. The trashcans were lined up against the side of the house, and on impulse, I tossed Mr. Cables into the nearest bin.

  “To hell with it,” I muttered, suddenly aware of the cold. I hurried back inside, bolted the door, then took a shower.

  5

  It was two days later when I received the phone call from my agent. I had written ten pages and was feeling pretty good about the new novel I was working on, so when I recognized my agent’s phone number on the caller ID, I answered cheerily.

  “I read it,” she said, her voice flat, “and I’m not sure what to say about it.”

  For a moment, I thought she was talking about the new manuscript I was working on, and I tried to remember if I’d sent her an early draft of the first couple of chapters. “What exactly did you read?” I queried.

  “Those pages you sent me two nights ago,” she said. “The ones from that book.”

  It was like being struck openhanded across the face. Over the past two days I’d become so engrossed in my work that I’d forgotten all about the peculiar novel with my name on the cov
er, to include the fact that I’d emailed my agent a bunch of pages from it.

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling cold. I gazed out the wall of windows and could see my neighbor’s chimney unspooling a gray runner of smoke into the cloudless, bright blue sky. “What did you think?”

  “Well, it’s unsettling,” she said. She made no effort to mask the distaste in her voice. “To be honest, it’s been bothering me ever since I read it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “It’s boring, I’ll say that much, but I fail to see what’s so unsettling or frightening about the book.”

  “Haven’t you read it?”

  “Half of it,” I said, recalling that it was still outside in my trashcan where I’d tossed it two nights ago.

  “For starters,” she said, “the language is…I don’t know how to describe it…the language is just off. It’s almost as if it was a bad translation, or written by someone whose first language isn’t English. Did you notice the unusual phrasing? The way many of the sentences have different and sometimes even contradictory meanings the more you read them?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t notice any of that.”

  “But it’s not just a poor translation or bad writing. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite—I think the writing is so deliberate and precise that it tricks you into missing some of the meaning behind the words. You have to read some sentences two or three times to actually catch the meaning.”

  I was shaking my head, confused. “This is news to me,” I said.

  “And it’s not done just to be clever,” my agent went on. “I mean, it sounds paranoid, but I kept getting the impression that the way the sentences were structured was to hide some malicious intent buried in the words. Does that make any sense?”

  “No,” I told her. “None at all.”

  “Take another look at the structure of the sentences, the paragraphs. Pick a particular paragraph and read it over to yourself, three or four times. See what you come away with.”

  “All right,” I said, not bothering to explain that the book was currently taking up residence with some empty Michelob bottles and old Chinese food containers.

  “It’s completely unapproachable, and although I can’t explain why, I get the sense that it’s actually deliberate. It’s almost as if it doesn’t want to be read. Not by me, anyway.”

  “That’s pretty deep.”

  “And then there’s the story itself,” she went on. “The protagonist—”

  “Quimby,” I said.

  “Yes. Listen, I’ve read some gruesome manuscripts before—and I’m including your work in this category, Wilson—”

  “Jeez, thanks.”

  “—but the stuff described here is just…I don’t know. It’s like the difference between watching a violent slasher film and one of those videos of terrorists cutting people’s heads off.”

  “What are you talking about? Susan, I didn’t read a single thing in that book that’s half as violent as an old Road Runner cartoon. Are we talking about the same thing here?”

  “I don’t know how you could miss it,” she said. “And it’s not violence—I don’t mean that—but it’s more of this…this very palpable dread. Whenever Quimby rides the bus and watches those people, and then he gets off and follows them to—”

  “No, no, you’re wrong,” I said. “Quimby doesn’t ride the bus. Mr. Cables rides the bus. Quimby just reads about Mr. Cables riding the bus, and even then there’s nothing that actually happens.”

  “No, Wilson, you’re the one who’s wrong. Mr. Cables is Quimby. Those aren’t books he’s reading, those are things he’s writing about the people he’s following.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but found that my mind was blank. I didn’t know how to respond. Of course my agent was incorrect in her assessment…yet there was a part of me that realized she was right, too, and that I had somehow missed this huge detail among the mundane passages of that strange little novel. That Quimby was actually Mr. Cables made complete sense to me—it was like a puzzle piece snapping into place in the center of my head—yet it did nothing to explain the plot of the story. It explained nothing.

  I was reading the book wrong, I thought to myself, the phone growing hot against the side of my face. I do this for a goddamn living yet I was reading the book wrong. How is that possible?

  “One last thing,” my agent said. “The pages are misnumbered.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you had skipped some pages when you sent me the file—I’m missing pages thirty-three through forty-one—but there was no hiccup in the flow of the text, no break in continuity. So my guess is the page numbers in the book itself are incorrect.”

  This was something I hadn’t noticed either. I suddenly felt like a fool.

  “I’ll have to check,” I muttered into the receiver. “In the meantime, I’ll send you some more pages—”

  “No.” My agent’s voice was as sharp as a knife blade. “No, Wilson, I don’t want to read anymore.”

  “Come on, Susan, it couldn’t have messed you up that badly.”

  “I didn’t think so until I had some of the worst nightmares of my life last night. I mean, I felt like I was eight years old again. It’s just what I said—like it doesn’t want to be read, and it’s scaring me off, giving off a stink like a skunk to keep me away.” She laughed—a nervous titter void of humor. “It’s nuts, right? But no thanks. Enough is enough for me. However,” she added, an uptick in her tone, “I took the liberty of contacting someone I know who runs an old book emporium in the city. I told him about the book and he seemed interested in looking at it. You’ll have to come into the city, of course, but it might help shed some light on who published the thing.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  She gave me a Manhattan address, which I jotted on a napkin, and then she said, “Guy’s name is Finter, Ross Finter. If anyone can give you some insight into that book, it’s him.”

  “Thanks, Susan.”

  “How’s the new novel coming?”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Send some pages my way? I’m heading to Montauk with the in-laws and could use an excuse to hide in the guest room for a few hours.”

  “Sure. I’ll send you something later today.”

  “All right.” And then there was a pause, as if she wanted to say something more but couldn’t quite summon the words. For whatever reason, I convinced myself that had she spoken, it would have been some sort of warning, although a warning about what, I had no idea. The book? What could be dangerous about a book?

  A memory flickered to life inside me—or, more accurately, the ghost-words from my former self, orating before a classroom of college freshmen in a time before my first novel was published, saying something akin to all honest books are also dangerous books, which makes all honest writers dangerous writers. Fortunately for the unguarded populace, there were few honest writers. And the students would laugh. I hadn’t thought about my days in front of the classroom in several years, and even now the idea of it glimmered with an oily patina like some old clunky relic polished to a desperate shine.

  “Look, I gotta go,” she said, the old chipper quality back in her voice. “You take care. And go see Finter.”

  “Right,” I said, and hung up. I was just about to place the portable phone on the cradle when it rang in my hand. “Susan?”

  “Mr. Paventeau…” It was my housekeeper, her voice noticeably unsteady. “It’s Trudy Parrott. I want to apologize for not showing up yesterday.”

  “You weren’t scheduled for yesterday, Trudy.”

  “I said I would come and make up for the work I didn’t do the day before—”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “—but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it, Mr. Paventeau. I’m sorry.”

  “Trudy, what’s wrong? You sound upset.”

  “It’s that book, Mr. Paventeau. I just can’t stop thinking about it. And the nightmares! I’m te
rrified of it.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just a book.”

  “Is it? Is it really?”

  Not sure how to respond, I cleared my throat and said, “I’ve gotten rid of it. I’ve thrown it out. So…”

  “I’m not sure that matters.”

  “Trudy, please, you’re making me feel terrible. What can I do to make you feel better?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. I think it’s best we go our separate ways.”

  “This is silly.”

  “Not to me. Not to me.”

  “Trudy—”

  “Goodbye.” And before I could utter another word, Trudy Parrott hung up.

  6

  Of course, I was compelled to dig the book out of the trash and take it back inside. After my conversation with my agent, how could I not? I couldn’t fathom how she was able to come away with such a vastly different reading experience, and I was desperate to study the pages more closely to see what it was that I’d initially missed. But before I set myself to reading, I flipped to page thirty-three…only to discover that there was no page thirty-three. Just as my agent had informed me, the pages jumped from thirty-two to forty-three. Yet the sentence on the bottom of page thirty-two continued onto page forty-three without missing a beat. My agent had been right: The book was numbered incorrectly.

  I knew I shouldn’t waste any more time with the book, but when I sat down to put my own words to paper (or, more precisely, onto a computer screen), I found the word-maker in my head had gone dormant again. It was as if the novel with my name on the cover was a talisman keeping my muse at bay—a physical manifestation of Mr. Cables whose cold, pitiless stare had cast my muse into hiding. So instead of writing, I fired off my most recent pages to my agent then retired to the living room where, reclining in the armchair, I continued reading the strange novel.

  The next time I looked up from the page, it was dark outside again. This stunned me; it felt like I had only been reading for twenty or thirty minutes. But when I consulted the wall clock I saw that four hours had sped by. I glanced back down at the book in my lap and saw that I only had about a dozen pages left to go before I finished it, which only made me want to read on. Yet at the same time I was unnerved by the prospect of slipping back into Quimby’s mundane little world, for fear that even more time would slip by me unnoticed. I had this vision of closing the book after I’d finished reading, only to look over at my reflection in one of the large floor-to-ceiling windows and find that I’d become an old man. It was laughable…but the fear of it was enough for me to set the book aside for the night.