Black Evening

  "Hell, I'll triple what I offered."

  Six more days, he thought. I've got to finish that new book by then. I'll just have time to do it. If I type every day and night.

  "You've got to let me have it."

  "I don't need the money. I'm an old man. What does money mean to me? I'm sorry."

  Eric lost control. He scrambled past the counter, racing toward the workshop. He grabbed the other model. When the old man tried to take it from him, Eric pushed. The old man fell, clutching Eric's legs.

  "It's mine!" the old man wailed. "I built it for my children! You can't have it!"

  "Four! Four million dollars!" Eric shouted.

  "Not for all the money in the world!"

  The old man clung to Eric's legs.

  "Dammit!" Eric said. He set the model on the counter, grabbed the old man's cane, and struck his head. "I need it! Don't you understand!"

  He struck again and again and again.

  The old man shuddered. Blood dripped from the cane.

  The shop was silent.

  Eric stared at what he'd done. Stumbling back, he dropped the cane and put his hands to his mouth.

  And then he realized. "It's mine."

  He wiped his fingerprints from everything he'd touched. He exchanged the models so his broken one sat on the workshop table. His chauffeur wouldn't know what had happened. It was likely he'd never learn. The murder of an old man in a tiny village on Long Island — there was little reason for publicity. True, Mrs. Davis might recall her evening visitor, but would she link this murder with her visitor? And anyway, she didn't know who Eric was.

  He took his chance. He grabbed his prize, and despite its weight, he ran.

  ***

  His IBM word processor sat on the desk in his study. For pure show. He never used it, but he needed it to fool his guests, to hide the way he actually composed. He vaguely heard the limousine drive from the mansion toward the city. He turned on the lights. Hurrying toward his desk, he shoved the IBM away and set down his salvation. Six more days. Yes, he could do the job. A lot of champagne and television. Stiff joints in his aching fingers after all the automatic typing. He could do it, though.

  He poured a brimming glass, needing it. He turned the Late Show on. He lit a cigarette, and as The Body Snatcher's credits began, he desperately started typing.

  He felt shaky, scared, and shocked by what had happened. But he had another model. He could keep his yacht, his jet, his three estates. The parties could continue. Now that Eric thought about it, he'd even saved the four million dollars he would have paid the old man for this model.

  Curious, on impulse Eric glanced at what he'd typed so far.

  And began to scream.

  Because his random typing had become something different, as he'd expected. But not the gushy prose of Parson's Grove. Something far more different.

  See Jack run. See Jill run. See Spot chase the ball.

  ("I built it for my children. Now they're married. They have children of their own, and when they visit, my grandchildren like to play with it.")

  He screamed so loudly he couldn't hear the clatter as he typed.

  See Spot run up the hill. See Jill run after Spot. See Jack run after Jill.

  ***

  The neighbors half a mile away were wakened by his shrieks. They feared he was being murdered, so they called 911, and when the state police broke into the house, they found Eric typing, screaming.

  They weren't sure which sight was worse — the man or the machine. But when they dragged him from the monstrous typewriter, one of the state policeman glanced down at the page.

  See Jill climb the tree. See Jack climb the tree. See Spot bark at Jack.

  Then farther down — they soon discovered what it meant — See Eric murder Mr. Donovan. See Eric club the old man with the cane. See Eric steal me. Now see Eric go to jail.

  Perhaps it was a trick of light, or maybe it was the consequence of the machine's peculiar keyboard. For whatever reason, the state policeman later swore — he told only his wife — the damned typewriter seemed to grin.

  Dennis Etchison is both a gifted fiction writer and a respected editor of short story anthologies. In 1991, for the third volume of his Masters of Darkness series, he asked me and a number of other contributors — Clive Barker, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Joyce Carol Oates, and more — to choose a favorite from the stories we had written. He also requested that we compose an afterword, explaining our choice. The following is what I submitted.

  A Trap for the Unwary

  « ^ »

  How does a writer choose a story, among many, that typifies what he or she has been trying to accomplish? Prior to selecting "But at My Back I Always Hear" (1983), I reread several others and finally settled on this one, not because it's my most horrific (although I did find my skin go cold but not to the frigid degree that was caused by "For These and All My Sins" or the middle section of my novel, Testament) and not because its style was experimental (as was "The Hidden Laughter"), but precisely because this story was so typical, an example of a technique and various themes I've returned to again and again.

  Let's deal with the technique first. Like many novelists, I find the discipline, the compression, of a story enormously difficult. There's an irony here. In the early seventies, my initial effort at fiction was First Blood, but after I sent it to my agent, I had a nightmare that so compelled me I wrote it verbatim, a story called "The Dripping," which was purchased by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and became my first sale, two weeks before my agent phoned to tell me a publisher had accepted First Blood. Other writers will understand. "The Dripping," to me, will always be special. A validation of my dreams.

  But as I labored on my next book (the dreaded second novel syndrome: Can I possibly do it again ?), short story nightmares failed to visit me. And as that second novel, Testament, continued to give me problems, to aggravate my insecurity, I craved the satisfaction of writing another short, microcosmic, "I can do it with luck in a couple of days" validation of my ambition to be a hypnotist, a magician, a teller of tales.

  I was then a professor of literature at the University of Iowa. By chance, preparing for a class, I picked up Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" and felt a prickle of revelation. You see, "The Dripping" had been a first person narrative, but I've always been suspicious of first person narratives because of my admiration for Henry James. "The master," commenting on his consummate horror novel, The Turn of the Screw, had called his tale "a trap for the unwary" — because its first person technique made it impossible to decide if the narrator was telling the truth about the ghosts she encountered or if she was hopelessly insane. James in fact disdained the first-person technique, calling the device a trick in which the only interest for the reader was to decide if the "I" of the story was self-deluded, a liar, or crazy. So how could I, devoted to "the master," feel justified in following my instincts to repeat, to build on, what I'd done in "The Dripping" if the viewpoint I felt compelled to use had been dismissed by one of my literary heroes?

  Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" supplied the answer.

  It's called a "dramatic monologue," a technique he's given credit for creating, not in a play (where a soliloquy's an accepted convention) but on a page, in a poem! "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall," Browning begins, or rather his narrator does. And I thought, Who is the speaker addressing? And how did the reader happen to receive these words? The technique is unbelievable, artificial, yet wonderfully effective. Around the same time, I fell in love with the novels of James M. Cain. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon." That's how The Postman Always Rings Twice begins, one of the all-time great first sentences, in one of the greatest thrillers ever written.

  But Cain's narrator wasn't addressing an imagined audience viewing a stage. No, that damned fate-controlled aggressor/victim was writing his story as a form of confession while he waited, tough and controlled, to be executed for murder.

  So I asked myself,
Why not pretend you never read James?

  Why not concentrate on Browning and Cain? And that decision broke my short story writer's block. I embraced the first person technique. It's direct. It's intimate. It's vivid. And it allows a writer to compress. The tormented narrator blurts out his tale of horror. Until the end of "But at My Back I Always Hear," the story is due to Browning. But when the hero-victim picks up the pen and paper in his hotel room and reveals that all along he's been writing his tale of terror, as a document, so the people who find his body will understand his predestined doom, that's Cain, and God bless him. He showed me the way.

  Now about theme. For reasons too complex to elaborate in this brief space, I'm obsessed about security. That topic is manifest in all of my work. The worst horror I could ever imagine was to lose my family, to lose a member of my family, to be separated from those I love. In real life, that horror became all too factual. On June 27,1987, my wonderful fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died (after six months of agony) from bone cancer. I described that ordeal in a book called Fireflies. But in "The Dripping" and other stories before Matthew's death, I was already terrified by versions of that ultimate horror. The narrator in "But at My Back I Always Hear" loses everything he cherishes. Not because it's his fault. But because of fate. Because sometimes things don't work out. Because, God help me, life isn't fair.

  Then too, I was a professor of literature, and I did have a student who claimed I was sending sexual telepathic messages to her. She did keep calling, threatening, haunting — not only me (I can deal with that) but my family. Most of "But at My Back I Always Hear" is true. Except that the student is still alive and, for all I know, lurking.

  Finally, after I moved from where I was raised in Canada to graduate school in Pennsylvania and then to the University of Iowa, I fell in love with the boundless sky and intoxicating fertile beauty of my adopted state. I call it exotic. Watch the movie Field of Dreams to understand what I mean. It occurred to me that horror didn't have to fester in the traditional Hawthorne-invented gloom of New England, or in the oppressive ghettos of decaying major cities, but in bright sunlight, in the midst of splendor. Remember Cary Grant racing desperately to escape the machine-gun bullets from the "innocent" cropduster in Hitchcock's North By Northwest? I began to envision a series of stories that would take advantage of the broad Midwest and Interstate 80 and the space, the sublime, hence terrifying space between one isolated community and another. I explored that notion in several stories: "The Storm," "For These and All My Sins." Others. Even the time zone changes are fraught with danger.

  So if you desperately need security (as the hero of "But at My Back I Always Hear" does and as its author does), you choose this story as representative of your work. My alter-ego professor sacrifices his life and his soul for his family. Good man. I understand him all too well. Because given the chance, I would gladly have sacrificed my life and soul to save my son.

  But at My Back I Always Hear

  « ^ »

  She phoned again last night. At three a.m., the way she always does. I'm scared to death. I can't keep running. On the hotel's register downstairs, I lied about my name, address, and occupation. Although I'm here in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, I'm from Iowa City, Iowa. I teach — or used to teach until three days ago — American literature at the University. I can't risk going back there. But I don't think I can hide much longer. Each night, she comes closer.

  From the start, she scared me. I came to school at eight to prepare my classes. Through the side door of the English building I went up a stairwell to my third floor office, which was isolated by a fire door from all the other offices. My colleagues used to joke that I'd been banished, but I didn't care, for in my far-off corner I could concentrate. Few students interrupted me. Regardless of the busy noises past the fire door, I sometimes felt that there was no one else inside the building. And indeed at eight a.m., I often was the only person in the building.

  That day I was wrong, however. Clutching my heavy briefcase, I trudged up the stairwell. My scraping footsteps echoed off the walls of pale red cinderblock, the stairs of pale green imitation marble. First floor. Second floor. The fluorescent lights glowed coldly. Then the stairwell angled toward the third floor, and I saw her waiting on a chair outside my office. Pausing, I frowned up the stairs at her. I felt uneasy.

  ***

  Eight a.m., for you, is probably not early. You've been up for quite a while so you can get to work on time or get your children off to school. But eight a.m., for college students, is the middle of the night. They don't like morning classes. When their schedules force them to attend one, they don't crawl from bed until they absolutely have to, and they don't come stumbling into class until I'm just about to start my lecture.

  I felt startled, then, to find her waiting ninety minutes early. She sat tensely: lifeless dull brown hair, a shapeless dingy sweater, baggy faded jeans with patches on the knees and frays around the cuffs. Her eyes were haunted and wild. Deep and dark.

  I climbed the last few steps and stopped before her. "Do you want an early conference?"

  Instead of answering, she nodded bleakly.

  "You're concerned about a grade I gave you?"

  This time, though, in pain she shook her head from side to side.

  Confused, I fumbled with my key and opened the office, stepping in. The room was small and narrow: a desk, two chairs, a wall of bookshelves, and a window. As I sat behind the desk, I watched her slowly come inside. She glanced around uncertainly. Distraught, she shut the door.

  That made me nervous. When a female student shuts the door, I start to worry that a colleague or a student might walk up the stairs and hear a female voice and wonder what's so private that I want to keep the door closed. Although I should have told her to reopen it, her frantic eyes aroused such pity in me that I sacrificed my principle, deciding her torment was so personal that she could talk about it only in strict secrecy.

  "Sit down." I smiled and tried to make her feel at ease, although I myself was not at ease. "What seems to be the difficulty, Miss… I'm sorry, but I don't recall your name."

  "Samantha Perry. I don't like 'Samantha,' though." She fidgeted. "I've shortened it to — "

  "Yes? To what?"

  "To 'Sam'. I'm in your nine-thirty Tuesday-Thursday class." She bit her lip. "You spoke to me."

  I frowned, not understanding. "You mean what I taught seemed vivid to you?"

  "Mr. Ingram, no. I mean you spoke to me. You stared at me while you were teaching. You ignored the other students. You directed what you said to me. When you talked about Hemingway, how Frederic Henry wants to go to bed with Catherine — " She swallowed. " — you were asking me to go to bed with you."

  I gaped. To disguise my shock, I quickly lit a cigarette. "You're mistaken."

  "But I heard you. You kept staring straight at me. I felt all the other students knew what you were doing."

  "I was only lecturing. I often look at students' faces to make sure they pay attention. You received the wrong impression."

  "You weren't asking me to go to bed with you?" Her voice sounded anguished.

  "No. I don't trade sex for grades."

  "But I don't care about a grade!"

  "I'm married. Happily. I've got two children. Anyway, suppose I did intend to proposition you. Would I do it in the middle of a class? I'd be foolish."

  "Then you never meant to…" She kept biting her lip.

  "I'm sorry."

  "But you speak to me! Outside class I hear your voice! When I'm in my room or walking down the street! You talk to me when I'm asleep! You say you want to go to bed with me!"

  My skin prickled. I felt frozen. "You're mistaken. Your imagination's playing tricks."

  "But I hear your voice so clearly! When I'm studying or — "

  "How? If I'm not there."

  "You send your thoughts! You concentrate and put your voice inside my mind!"

  Adrenaline scalded my stomach. I frantically sought an argument
to disillusion her. "Telepathy? I don't believe in it. I've never tried to send my thoughts to you."

  " Unconsciously?"

  I shook my head from side to side. I couldn't bring myself to tell her: of all the female students in her class, she looked so plain, even if I wasn't married I'd never have wanted sex with her.

  "You're studying too hard," I said. "You want to do so well you're preoccupied with me. That's why you think you hear my voice when I'm not there. I try to make my lectures vivid. As a consequence, you think I'm speaking totally to you."

  "Then you shouldn't teach that way!" she shouted. "It's not fair! It's cruel! It's teasing!" Tears streamed down her face. "You made a fool of me!"

  "I didn't mean to."

  "But you did! You tricked me! You misled me!"

  "No."

  She stood so quickly that I flinched, afraid she'd lunge at me or scream for help and claim I'd tried to rape her. That damned door. I cursed myself for not insisting she leave it open.

  She rushed sobbing toward it. She pawed at the knob and stumbled out, hysterically retreating down the stairwell.

  Shaken, I stubbed out my cigarette, grabbing another. My chest tightened as I heard the dwindling echo of her wracking sobs, the awkward scuffle of her dimming footsteps, then the low deep rumble of the outside door.

  Silence settled over me.

  ***

  An hour later, I found her waiting in class. She'd wiped her tears. The only signs of what had happened were her red, puffy eyes. She sat alertly, pen to paper. I carefully didn't face her as I spoke. She seldom glanced up from her notes.

  After class, I asked my graduate assistant if he knew her.

  "You mean Sam? Sure, I know her. She's been getting D's. She had a conference with me. Instead of asking how to get a better grade, though, all she did was talk about you, pumping me for information. She's got quite a thing for you. Too bad about her."