The Fictional Man (24 page)

“You were doing fine.” She grinned, winking her unblacked eye at him again. “I was really enjoying being Danica.”

Oh, God.

“Um, listen, that call,” Niles stammered, “I – I – I owe someone some work. So I have to go home now.” His voice sounded high-pitched and reedy in his ears, like a child’s, and he knew she’d think he was making some cheap excuse to run away from the situation.

Which was fine. It was the truth.

“Hmm. Well,” she said, tilting her head slightly, “maybe I’ll see you at the Victoria. First Thursday of the month, remember.”

He smiled and nodded, almost tripping over in his haste to get out, back to the car, back to the relative safety of his apartment. She watched him go, her smile fading. Just before he’d managed to fumble the lock open, she called out to him. “Niles!”

“Um, yes?” He forced a smile.

“I’m one of your characters now. You should watch out.” She grinned, and there was the ghost of something malicious in it. “If you stop writing me, one day soon I’ll just cease to exist. And then you’ll never be able to think up anyone like me again.”

He looked at her black eye. “Bye!” he trilled, and left.

O
UTSIDE, THE CAR
wouldn’t start. The persistent rattle in the engine had evidently spread to something more important. For a moment, he considered taking it as a sign – maybe he should go back up there, apologise again to Liz, or whatever her name was, see if there could be anything between them. Maybe there could be something between them after all. Maybe this ‘meta’ was something he could get into.

“There is one thing that bothers me,” the ‘filmmaker’ roleplaying in the latex steam-punk outfit said to the author, as the ‘meta’ play raged all around them. “What you’re doing now, narrating to yourself – does it count as masturbation?”

“Oh, shut up,” Niles muttered, and started looking up auto repairs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE REPAIR PEOPLE
were very good about rescuing the Taurus, giving him a lift as far as the garage – he could take a bus the rest of the way – and getting back to him almost immediately with a diagnosis. Something very basic had gone wrong with the battery connections, nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a day or so for a couple of hundred bucks – that said, it was very lucky he’d called, as the fan belt was about to go, the tyres were looking very bald indeed, the brake lining was a death trap and there were a number of other minor and major problems which would turn his car into a screaming fireball of death the very second he put his foot on the accelerator. Unless, of course, they were dealt with immediately at a cost of nearly two thousand dollars.

Niles wondered if this was the moment to shop around for another garage, but they had his car as a hostage now. Besides, he’d never been very good at dealing with that type of person. He’d meekly agreed, looking around the bus to make sure nobody realised he was being swindled in front of their eyes and thinking that Kurt Power – the authentic American working man – would never connive a client out of two thousand dollars. Not unless that client was a terrorist, of course.

When he eventually arrived back at his apartment, there was a largish flat brown package waiting for him in his mailbox, courtesy of eBay –
The Doll’s Delight,
he supposed. He’d get to it later. Right now he needed a shower, a change of clothes, and a stiff drink, in that order.

The drink ended up as a vodka and orange, with very little orange to it. He needed the vodka more than the Vitamin C – the events of the past few days had left him feeling frazzled and hollow, tired down to the marrow of his bones. It had been days since he’d had any kind of decent night’s sleep. He’d not had a full eight hours since... well, since he’d seen Maurice and Dean in the diner, really. Before all of this had started. Before he’d somehow managed to burn down his entire life.

He sat on the couch for a while, staring into the black eye of the television, thinking of the black eye he’d left behind him, and wondering where exactly one got new friends from. Was there an online service for people who had alienated every single person they’d ever met? There was always Maurice, he thought – although Maurice was more a colleague than a friend, and even so, he hadn’t taken Niles’ calls for days now.

Still, maybe Maurice could offer a contest of some kind. Kurt Power devotees around the world could compete – whichever fans knew the most Kurt Power trivia would become his official friends. Say about five of them for the first round – then, after he’d alienated those five, he could have another contest for five more and drive them away in turn.

It was foolproof.

As the author smiled at the five sycophants joining him around the table, a very strange thing happened. Bolstered by such uncritical, unconditionally loving company – like Dr Fischer of Geneva, surrounded by a cadre who would forgive him his every fault – his usual self-regard reached a terrifying critical mass and he began to collapse in on himself, quickly imploding into a smallish black hole which went on to dictate its autobiography, in the manner of
The Diving-Bell And The Butterfly,
by firing pulses of radiation from its surface in a strict pattern. The autobiography was, needless to say, dreadful.

“Welcome back,” muttered Niles sarcastically, in response to the narrative voice. “Here was I thinking you’d gone for good.”

He shook his head, burying his face in his hands for a moment, and then reached for the flat brown package, shucking it open and sliding
The Doll’s Delight
out of the cardboard sleeve.
By H.R. Dalrymple,
he read.
Illustrations by Mervyn Burroughs.

It was a thin book, perhaps twenty pages with a hardback cover – he recognised the illustration from the grainy photo he’d seen on that website of ’fifties ephemera. He’d assumed its disturbing quality had been an accident of the low resolution, but if anything the front cover was worse now that he could see it clearly with his own eyes.

It was a painting of a little girl, sleeping in a field at night. At least, he assumed she was meant to be sleeping – she looked dead. The anatomy of the neck was all wrong and it looked like it had been twisted and broken – meanwhile, the girl’s skin had a waxy sheen to it, as though it had already begun to rot. The delighted smile on her face made her look like a member of a suicide cult.

Around the corpse danced a number of creepy-looking dolls and toy soldiers, each with a fixed glare and a macabre grin painted onto their varnished wooden faces. Any one of them would give a child nightmares – together, they looked like they were going to crawl out of the cover
en masse
and devour the first maternity ward they laid eyes on.

Finally, in the corner of the illustration, hiding in a clutch of wild flowers, there hunched the
coup de grace.
It took Niles a good minute to work out that the creature was supposed to be a little brown field mouse, as opposed to a slavering rat.

Either
The Doll’s Delight
was some covert branch of the MK-ULTRA program designed to cause the maximum trauma in a young mind, Niles decided, or Mervyn Burroughs was spectacularly unsuited to be an illustrator of children’s books.

He settled back on the couch, opened the book up and began to read:

THE DOLL’S DELIGHT

By H.R. Dalrymple

Illustrations by Mervyn Burroughs

In the watches of the night

We gather for the Doll’s Delight

We laugh and play and never fight

When boys and girls are sleeping.

Here’s the ballerina fair

And here is Mr Teddy Bear

You never saw a sweeter pair

When boys and girls are sleeping.

Here’s the soldier with his gun

Who’s run away to join the fun

He won’t make war with anyone

When boys and girls are sleeping.

See them laugh and see them sing

A-dancing in the fairy ring

Your dolls can do most anything

When boys and girls are sleeping.

Here’s the peg-boy made of wood

Saying things he never should

Not all your dollies can be good

When boys and girls are sleeping.

See him shout and see him curse

He started bad, he’s getting worse

He’s so unpleasant and perverse

When boys and girls are sleeping.

Little dolls who can’t be nice

Must learn to be, or pay the price

And be devoured by rats and mice

When boys and girls are sleeping.

Now the dolls are full of grace

And every dolly knows their place

There’s not a single frowny-face

When boys and girls are sleeping.

In the watches of the night

They gather for the Doll’s Delight

They laugh and play and never fight

When boys and girls are sleeping.

“When boys and girls are screaming, more like,” muttered Niles.

The cover was the least of it.

Each of the poem’s nine verses was copiously illustrated in a double-page spread by the extraordinary talent of Mervyn Burroughs, children’s literature’s answer to Francis Bacon. The first four, admittedly, weren’t quite as bad as the rest – once you’d seen the cover, and you had a stiff screwdriver inside you, you could just about stand to look at them. The illustration for the fourth verse in particular – the ‘fairy ring’ – was almost pleasant in comparison to the others, or at least only mildly ugly. If you were an art teacher in some adult education class and you saw Mervyn Burroughs paint an illustration like that in your class, you’d only take him aside and gently explain things like ‘perspective’ and ‘how to mix paint,’ before refunding his money and sending him merrily on his way. You wouldn’t attack him bodily with a T-square.

On the other hand, if you saw him working on the illustration for the fifth verse – the ‘wooden peg-boy’ that Niles now found himself gazing in horror at – you’d most likely go straight to the police and warn them about the dangerous serial killer.

If Mervyn had been forced to play with the ‘peg-boy’ as a young child, it might explain a few things. Niles had never seen any toy remotely like it in his life. He doubted anyone else had either. If he was being particularly charitable, he could claim it reminded him of a Victorian clothespin doll, but where those dolls were usually beautifully carved and lovingly painted, the ‘peg-boy’ was a whittled lump of driftwood, with horrifically thin limbs, dark, piggy eyes gouged out with the point of a knife and a hateful, sneering slash carved across its face to serve as a mouth. He made the other dolls in the scene, hideous as they were, seem like beautiful
objets d’art
. Niles had finished his second vodka looking over that picture, and had to go and make a third.

He’d run out of orange, but it didn’t matter. If he was going to keep looking at the ‘peg-boy,’ he’d take it neat.

Flipping over the page, he grimaced and made a little noise in his throat. The next illustration was even worse – a shot of the ‘peg-boy’ dancing and shrieking, the slit of his mouth yawning open in a way that seemed comical at first glance but got progressively more horrific the longer you looked at it. It was like something out of Heironymus Bosch. The other toys shrank back from him as if he was a terrifying homunculus they’d called into being, while in the shadows there lurked the faintest suggestion of demonic eyes.

Niles tilted his head, letting the warmth of the third vodka run through him. It occurred to him that if he stopped looking at
The Doll’s Delight
as a children’s book, it actually made some sense. The perspective was still off, the colours still veering between muddy and garish, there was still no clear idea that Burroughs knew anything about the anatomy of humans or dolls... but take this out of the context it was allegedly meant for and it might be a fascinating piece of outsider art. Burroughs might be the Henry Darger of his generation – well, aside from Henry Darger, of course. Maybe that was the point?

The next page showed a rat – Niles had been right the first time, it couldn’t be a mouse – emerging from the bushes and gnawing grotesquely at the peg-boy’s face, carving deep gouges into the wood. Around the unfolding nightmare, the other dolls cheered, dancing much as they had in the fairy ring. Niles felt his belly crawl up to his chest, do a lazy loop and then slowly dig its way back down again. No, he decided, this wasn’t for children. It couldn’t be. There was a terrible, savage bitterness to the verses – what had Matson called it?
Vicious camp.

Listlessly, he flicked through the remaining pages – the peg-boy was simply gone from the world, leaving only the toys with their glassy expressions, dancing and playing as relentlessly as they had at the book’s opening, while the verses seemed to suggest some ghastly Orwellian nightmare. Who
was
Henry R Dalrymple? A situationist? A performance artist? Some pseudonym for Burroughs, or the other way round? Or a disgruntled children’s author rebelling against the medium?

He flipped through it again, looking for clues. There was a dedication on the inside front cover, in pencil –
To Aspy; Well, I gave it a shot. Uncle Hank.
Curiouser and curiouser. He found himself wondering what the story behind it was – how the whole book had come to be.

He sighed and tossed it onto the table. Well, he didn’t have time to waste on that now – he had a pitch to write. The back cover stared up at him – a single image of the red wooden soldier, his painted grin leering mockingly, fascinating him. He reached out to flip it over, but that just brought him back to the front cover again. He could see now that the thing in the flowers was definitely a rat. He thought about rats in flowers, flowers in dustbins, the juxtaposition of images...