The Frightened Man

about-’

Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear-’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’

Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’

‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’

‘It’s exactly that way.’

Lang looked about as if for a secret exit he’d forgotten the exact location of. ‘I suppose we could do something-’

‘My royalty account.’

‘Statements aren’t due yet, you know.’

‘But there’s money you owe me. There always is!’

‘Well, I suppose-Oh, well, of course — as you’re such a pillar of the backlist-’ He rang a little bell. Heavy footsteps sounded in the corridor, and a young man materialized in the doorway. Lang cleared his throat. ‘Ask Mr Frewn to step around, please, Meer.’

The heavy footsteps went away, went up some stairs, faded. Lang tapped on his desk. He said, ‘Frewn doesn’t get around as well as he used to.’ Denton put his coat and hat on the floor and crossed his legs. When slow, light footsteps sounded overhead, Lang smiled and murmured, ‘There we are,’ but it was another long silence, marked by increasingly loud footsteps, before a white-haired, bent man looked in. His black suit hung on him, giving him the look of a wet raven. In a surprisingly deep voice, he said, ‘You wanted something?’

‘Mr Denton — you know Mr Denton, one of our best authors, one of our most successful authors, Frewn — would like a cheque for the balance current in his account.’

The old man stared at Lang, then at Denton, as if he couldn’t believe his own rather large ears. ‘A cheque?’

‘Yes. Now, we’ve done this before, Mr Frewn — you remember, I’m sure, it can’t have been more than half a dozen years ago-’

Frewn shook his head. ‘Never heard of such a thing.’

Lang smirked at Denton and muttered, ‘We’ve done it again and again; it’s just-’ He smiled at Frewn. ‘Of course there’s a balance in Mr Denton’s account, Mr Frewn.’

‘No idea.’

‘There is, of course there is. So please, have Mr French write a cheque for the full amount for Mr Denton to take with him when he goes.’

The old man sucked in his breath. ‘Today?’

‘Now, Mr Frewn, this is too bad of you — of course, today — look here, I’m writing it out so you’ll have something on paper, eh? An authorization, all right? “Balance of account to this date, to be paid by cheque-” That’s quite clear, eh?’

He came around the desk and put the sheet of paper into the old man’s hand; he brought it close to his eyes, and his breath hissed in again. He muttered something, in which Denton caught only ‘ruin’, and patted off up the corridor, his voice mumbling on. Denton saw, as he left the doorway, that he was wearing carpet slippers that were almost hidden by remarkably long trousers, possibly somebody else’s, possibly his own from some earlier, longer- legged self.

‘Mr Frewn is rather a character,’ Lang said. ‘Quite the stuff of legend in the firm. I don’t know what we’d do without him.’

‘He’s the accountant?’

‘Ah, no, not-He’s actually a, mm, the-Mmm. Hard to explain — rather a vestige of an older way of-’ He smiled wanly. ‘He’s a kind of bottleneck for anything one wants to get done.’ Almost to himself, he added, ‘But things do get done. They really do. You’ll see-’ He tapped some more on his desk, looked at The Nightmare, and, apparently taking inspiration from it, said, ‘Well, this gets no books written. Not to pry, Denton, but — do you want to pay us back the advance on the book you’ve so rashly thrown away?’

‘Of course I don’t. I can’t.’

‘Then-’

‘Then I want to substitute The Machine for it.’

Lang made a face. ‘On the same schedule?’

‘Can’t be done. There isn’t time, Lang.’

‘No-o-o, there isn’t. Well, I suppose an extension of six months-’

‘During which I have to live.’

‘One would assume so, yes. Yes, quite.’ Lang squeezed the bridge of his nose between long, thin fingers. ‘You’re going to ask for more money, aren’t you?’

‘It won’t hurt you to raise the advance on the book I trashed to something like what my books actually command. ’

Lang rapped on the desk with a knuckle. Denton fell silent; it was as if the editor had called a meeting to order. Lang gave another, more decisive rap, and sat up very straight. ‘I told you I have an idea,’ he said.

Denton looked at him, thinking, My God, not a book idea-

‘Transylvania,’ Lang announced. He sat back. ‘There!’

‘Transylvania.’ Denton had the vaguest idea what Transylvania was. He lacked the British elite’s passion for travel, usually for sport — Norway for salmon, Switzerland and beyond for game — and lacked as well the Latin that might have led him to make a translation of the word. But he was honest. ‘What is Transylvania?’

‘Oh, my dear!’ Lang tittered. ‘It’s the far end of the Alps, the place everyone was thinking of when they used to write about haunted castles and ghastly vales and mountain peaks. A place of legend and lore — and peasants who speak unintelligible languages.’ He leaned forward. ‘Werewolves! Vampires!’

‘Fairy tales.’

‘My dear Denton, I’ve made a study of vampires. Hardly fairy tales, unless very grown-up ones. Did you know there was a play called The Vampire way back before our dear Queen was crowned? Now Stoker’s gone and written Dracula, and why, oh, why didn’t you get in ahead of him with the idea?’

Denton shook his head. ‘Sucking blood? Doesn’t interest me.’ Although the mind, he thought, of somebody who believed he was a vampire would interest him.

‘The vampire in the old play had to marry a virgin before sunrise or die. Doesn’t that touch a chord in you, man?’ It didn’t, and Denton let his stoic face say so, although he had a brief and bad moment thinking again about his wedding night. Lang put a pleading note into his voice. ‘They rise from the dead!’

‘So do my debts. I need money, Lang.’ He stuck out his lips under his drooping moustache. ‘I can try to finish The Machine in four months, how’s that?’ Lang made a face and Denton said without conviction, ‘I suppose I could write about this man who told me he’d seen a tart murdered — it was in the newspapers-’

‘You cannot! I won’t let you.’ Lang sounded like a petulant child. ‘Real crime’s been quite taken over by the lowest kind of journalist; you’d ruin your reputation by associating with it. Prostitutes. Oh! Unspeakable mutilations, I suppose.’ He shuddered. ‘No, no — I want literary material, Denton, artistic material. Like the vampire. You may say it’s sensational, and that of course is part of the point, but I believe that there is something in vampirism that touches us. Deeply. Blood — insatiability — the application of great force in pursuit of a perverse sort of desire-’ He sighed and leaned back. ‘You don’t see it, I can tell. Oh, dear.’ He groaned, then threw himself forward to try again. ‘Vampirism could do for you what She-who-must-be-obeyed did for Rider Haggard!’

‘Haggard is claptrap.’

‘But claptrap that touches our souls, Denton! There’s something in his fantastic stuff — something — repellent but irresistible-Something — forbidden-A profoundly desirable horror, how’s that?’

‘Like The Nightmare?’ Denton said.