The Stake

“Things start to get ugly when a gang of biker thugs thunders into town.

“Suppose the real reason the jukebox took him there was to save the waitress? Neat. The jukebox likesher. Sometimes, alone at night after the diner closes, she has it play her favorite tunes, and she dances alone in the dark.

“The way things went down, first time around, the bikers raped and murdered her. The jukebox has brought our hero back to the diner to alter the course of history — to save her.

“Which, of course, he does.

“Mission accomplished, the box let’s him go home again. But he misses the beautiful waitress. (Okay, he didn’t have a wonderful wife and kids. He was divorced, or something.) He goes looking for the gal. Finds her.

“She’s his mother. He’s his own father. He got her pregnant during their brief time together back in ‘65, and he was the baby she had.

“He’d have to be about thirty years old in the present. She could be about twenty-five when he met her in the diner.

“She had to give up the baby (our hero) for some reason. He was adopted, and always curious about the identity of his parents.

“If she is his mother, we could give him back his wife and kids.

“Neater if he finds the waitress in the present and they resume as lovers. But how would that work with their ages? Say he’s thirty in the present. How could the gal be anywhere near his age when he finds her again? If she’s thirty now, she would’ve been five when he saved her from the bikers.

“What if the waitress he fell in love with was her mother? That would make the daughter just his age in the present. And she is the spitting image of her mother, the gal he loved.

“Not bad. Might work.”

Larry’s pipe had gone out. He could tell by the easy draw that nothing remained in the bowl but ash. He set the pipe into its holder and returned his fingers to the keyboard.

“Our main guy resurrects the jukebox. It seems evil at first, but turns out to be a force for good. And a matchmaker. He falls for the waitress, who happens to have a really cute little girl at the time. Plenty of thrills and spills and nasty crap with the bikers (make them total degenerates, monsters). By facing them down (he’s scared, but comes through, proving to himself that he’s a man), he ends up saving the kid who will later become his true love.

“Why not?”

Larry grinned at the screen.

All right! You’ve got it. Spend the next couple of days working out the details, and...

The next couple of days.

He muttered a curse.

The weekend was shot. As soon as Lane got home from school today, they would be hitting the road for Los Angeles to visit with Jean’s folks.

Just what he wanted to do.

Especially now, with the new idea sizzling in his mind.

Can’t get out of it, though. You’ll just have to put the idea on hold till Monday.

It would give him something to think about while he drove. He might be able to work out a few of the main scenes, maybe even come up with some nifty new angles. But he knew very well that daydreaming about the story while he steered down the freeway would accomplish very little compared to working at the word processor. The act of typing out his thoughts seemed to give them a focus that wasn’t there when he simply let his mind wander. Daydreams seemed to meander and drift. But sentences were solid, and one led to another.

Not this weekend, they won’t.

This weekend’s down the toilet.

Well, he tried to console himself, Jean’s folks are okay. And it is their anniversary. I’ll probably end up having a good time, even though I’d rather be...

He heard the door bell ring.

Jean would take care of it.

He wondered whether he should get back to Night Strangeror spend the rest of the day fleshing out his jukebox story.

Call it The Box, he suddenly thought.

And grinned.

“THE BOX,” he typed. “Great title. Has a mysterious ring to it. And Box not only refers to the jukebox that sends him back in time, but also the ‘box’ or trap he finds himself stuck in. He’s boxed in by circumstances. No apparent way out. Also, the sex thing. Have one of the bikers refer to the main gal as a box. ‘Foxy box.’ And maybe the main guy is a former boxer — killed an opponent in the ring, and swore off fighting? No, that’d be pushing it. Trite, too. But maybe there are some other ‘box’ angles. Fool around with it.”

He heard Jean’s footsteps approaching. She might come in and look over his shoulder, so he scrolled down until “foxy box” climbed out of sight at the top of the screen.

She rapped on the office door and pushed it open. In her hand was an Overnight Mail bag that looked large enough to hold a manuscript. “This just came for you,” she said. “It’s from Chandler House.”

His publisher.

Jean watched while he tore open the bag. Inside, he found a fat manuscript held together by rubber bands. And a typewritten note from his editor, Susan Anderson:

Larry

Here is the copyedited manuscript of MADHOUSE. The corrections are light, so I’m sure you’ll be pleased.

We would like you to make whatever changes you consider appropriate, and return it to us if possible by October 13.

Best,

Susan

Larry grimaced.

“What?” Jean asked.

“It’s Madhouse. The copyedited version. I’m supposed to send it back by the thirteenth.” He glanced at his calendar. “Christ, that’s next Thursday.”

“They didn’t give you much time.”

“That’s for sure,” he muttered. “They’ve had it for about a year and a half, and now I get... six days.”

“Have fun,” Jean said. She left the room, closing the door again to keep his pipe smoke from contaminating the rest of the house.

Larry pushed his chair back, crossed a leg, rested the thick manuscript on his thigh and rolled the rubber bands off. He tossed Susan’s note and the title page onto the cluttered TV tray beside his chair.

Then he groaned.

For “light” corrections, page one seemed to have an awful lot of changes.

Halfway down the page his paragraph used to read, “She tugged at the door. Locked. God, no! She whirled around and choked out a whimper. He was already off the autopsy table, staggering toward her, his head bobbing and swaying on its broken neck. In his hand was the scalpel.”

Larry struggled to decipher the changes. Words had been crossed out, others added. The paragraph was a map of lines and arrows. At last he figured it out.

“Tugging at the door, she found it to be locked. No! Snapping her head around, she whimpered in despair, for she saw that the corpse was staggering toward her with a scalpel in his hand. His head was swinging from side to side atop its snapped neck.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Larry muttered.

He found Jean in their bedroom, gathering clothes from an open drawer of her bureau and taking them to her suitcase. Both suitcases lay open on the bed.

He sat down at the end of the mattress. “We’ve got a problem.”

“The manuscript?”

“I just looked through the whole thing. It’s been wrecked.”