The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

As I said in the note to ‘Batman and Robin,’ sometimes – once in a great while – you get the cup with the handle already attached. God, how I love that. You’re just going about your business, thinking of nothing in particular, and then, ka-boom, a story arrives Special Delivery, perfect and complete. The only thing you have to do is transcribe it.

I was in Florida, walking our dog on the beach. Because it was January, and cold, I was the only one out there. Up ahead I saw what looked like writing in the sand. When I got closer, I saw it was just a trick of sunlight and shadow, but writers’ minds are junkheaps of odd information, and it made me think of an old quote from somewhere (it turned out to be Omar Khayyam): ‘The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on.’ That in turn made me think of some magical place where an invisible Moving Finger would write terrible things in the sand, and I had this story. It has one of my very favorite endings. Maybe not up there with ‘August Heat,’ by W. F. Harvey – that one’s a classic – but in the same neighborhood.