Hideaway

* * *

One moment rage like a fire swept through Hatch, and the next moment it was extinguished. His jaws relaxed, his tense shoulders sagged, and his hands unclenched so suddenly that he dropped the magazine on the floor between his feet.

He continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a while, stunned and confused. He looked toward the bathroom door, relieved that Lindsey had not walked in on him while he had been … Been what? In his trance? Possessed?

He smelled something peculiar, out of place. Smoke.

He looked at the issue of Arts American on the floor between his feet. Hesitantly, he picked it up. It was still folded open to Honell's article about Lindsey. Although no visible vapors rose from the magazine, the paper exuded the heavy smell of smoke. The odors of burning wood, paper, tar, plastics … and something worse. The edges of the paper were yellow-brown and crisp, as if they had been exposed to almost enough heat to induce spontaneous combustion.

7

When the knock came at the door, Honell was sitting in a rocking chair by the fireplace. He was drinking Chivas Regal and reading one of his own novels, Miss Culvert, which he had written twenty-five years ago when he was only thirty.

He re-read each of his nine books once a year because he was in perpetual competition with himself, striving to improve as he grew old instead of settling quietly into senescence the way most writers did. Constant betterment was a formidable challenge because he had been awfully good at an early age. Every time he re-read himself, he was surprised to discover that his body of work was considerably more impressive than he remembered it.

Miss Culvert was a fictional treatment of his mother's self-absorbed life in the respectable upper-middle-class society of a downstate Illinois town, an indictment of the self-satisfied and stiflingly bland “culture” of the Midwest. He had really captured the essence of the bitch. Oh, how he had captured her. Reading Miss Culvert, he was reminded of the hurt and horror with which his mother had received the novel on first publication, and he decided that as soon as he had finished the book, he would take down the sequel, Mrs. Towers, which dealt with her marriage to his father, her widowhood, and her second marriage. He remained convinced that the sequel was what had killed her. Officially, it was a heart attack. But cardiac infarction had to be triggered by something, and the timing was satisfyingly concurrent with the release of Mrs. Towers and the media attention it received.

When the unexpected caller knocked, a pang of resentment shot through Honell. His face puckered sourly. He preferred the company of his own characters to that of anyone who might conceivably come visiting, uninvited. Or invited, for that matter. All of the people in his books were carefully refined, clarified, whereas people in real life were unfailingly … well, fuzzy, murky, pointlessly complex.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel. Ten past nine o'clock.

The knock sounded again. More insistent this time. It was probably a neighbor, which was a dismaying thought because his neighbors were all fools.

He considered not answering. But in these rural canyons, the locals thought of themselves as “neighborly,” never as the pests they actually were, and if he didn't respond to the knocking, they would circle the house, peeping in windows, out of a country-folk concern for his welfare. God, he hated them. He tolerated them only because he hated the people in the cities even more, and loathed suburbanites.

He put down his Chivas and the book, pushed up from the rocking chair, and went to the door with the intention of giving a fierce dressing-down to whoever was out there on the porch. With his command of language, he could mortify anyone in about one minute flat, and have them running for cover in two minutes. The pleasure of meting out humiliation would almost compensate for the interruption.

When he pulled the curtain back from the glass panes in the front door, he was surprised to see that his visitor was not one of the neighbors — in fact, not anyone he recognized. The boy was no more than twenty, pale as the wings of the snowflake moths that batted against the porch light. He was dressed entirely in black and wore sunglasses.

Honell was unconcerned about the caller's intentions. The canyon was less than an hour from the most heavily populated parts of Orange County, but it was nonetheless remote by virtue of its forbidding geography and the poor condition of the roads. Crime was no problem, because criminals were generally attracted to more populous areas where the pickings were more plentiful. Besides, most of the people living in the cabins thereabouts had nothing worth stealing.

He found the pale young man intriguing.

“What do you want?” he asked without opening the door.

“Mr. Honell?”

“That's right.”

“S. Steven Honell?”

“Are you going to make a torture of this?”

“Sir, excuse me, but are you the writer?”

College student. That's what he had to be.

A decade ago — well, nearly two — Honell had been besieged by college English majors who wanted to apprentice under him or just worship at his feet. They were an inconstant crowd, however, on the lookout for the latest trend, with no genuine appreciation for high literary art.

Hell, these days, most of them couldn't even read; they were college students in name only. The institutions through which they matriculated were little more than day-care centers for the terminally immature, and they were no more likely to study than to fly to Mars by flapping their arms.

“Yes, I'm the writer. What of it?”

“Sir, I'm a great admirer of your books.”

“Listened to them on audiotape, have you?”

“Sir? No, I've read them, all of them.”

The audiotapes, licensed by his publisher without his consent, were abridged by two-thirds. Travesties.

“Ah. Read them in comic-book format, have you?” Honell said sourly, though to the best of his knowledge the sacrilege of comicbook adaptation had not yet been perpetrated.

“Sir, I'm sorry to intrude like this. It really took a lot of time for me to work up the courage to come see you. Tonight I finally had the guts, and I knew if I delayed I'd never get up the nerve again. I am in awe of your writing, sir, and if you could spare me the time, just a little time, to answer a few questions, I'd be most grateful.”

A little conversation with an intelligent young man might, in fact, have more charm than re-reading Miss Culvert. A long time had passed since the last such visitor, who had come to the eyrie in which Honell had then been living above Santa Fe. After only a brief hesitation, he opened the door.

“Come in, then, and we'll see if you really understand the complexities of what you've read.”

The young man stepped across the threshold, and Honell turned away, heading back toward the rocking chair and the Chivas.

“This is very kind of you, sir,” the visitor said as he closed the door.

“Kindness is a quality of the weak and stupid, young man. I've other motivations.” As he reached his chair, he turned and said, “Take off those sunglasses. Sunglasses at night is the worst kind of Hollywood affectation, not the sign of a serious person.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but they're not an affectation. It's just that this world is so much more painfully bright than Hell — which I'm sure you'll eventually discover.”

* * *

Hatch had no appetite for dinner. He only wanted to sit alone with the inexplicably heat-curled issue of Arts American and stare at it until, by God, he forced himself to