The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Survival Strategies ^{Helen Marshall}

Barron St. John must have been nearing his seventies by that point. The pictures I’d copied from magazine covers and newspapers charted his rise from a rake-thin tower of a man, nearly six-three, clad in a badly fitting white wool jacket with a thick crop of black hair cut like a bowl around his ears to his older self: hair grey but still as thick as it had ever been, fine laugh lines etching the curve of that grinning, maniac mouth. In his heyday people had taken him to calling him the King of Horror, a real scaremeister—that term always made me laugh—but the man I saw in those later pictures had the look of a grandfather, which I suppose he was, one who could spin a yarn, sure, but not the kid who’d posed with a shotgun for his university paper under the headline “Vote dammit!”

My university had given me a small grant for my research project into St. John’s career. I had planned to stay in Hotel 31, the cheapest place Luca and I had agreed we could afford. He had wanted me in midtown so I could walk most places. He was a worrier, had never been to New York and the idea of me riding the subway right then made him uneasy.

“It’ll be fine,” I told him, “nothing will happen. It isn’t like that anymore. It hasn’t been since the ’90s.” We both knew that wasn’t exactly true. The situation was different now, but scarier in other ways. There were journalists being stopped at the borders, asked invasive questions. Not everyone was allowed in. And Luca, for all his woolly sweetness and soft English manners, had a serious stubborn streak. He was protective, I knew, and didn’t like the idea of me traveling on my own, not after I’d reacted so badly to the procedure, and certainly not “abroad” as he called it in that charmingly old-fashioned way of his.

But “abroad” was what I had wanted. Even if it wasn’t home for me, which lay four-hundred miles north across the border in Toronto where my sister lived, New York still felt more familiar than the still-drizzly streets of London in the summer. Besides, I suppose there was a part of me that wanted to see how bad things had got.

And St. John was a new obsession of mine, one I’d taken up in my recovery. Luca had been reading his pulpy looking paperbacks for years but I’d never touched them. They were too scary, I’d thought, too low brow. I remembered the garish paperbacks though, the ones that showed off his last name in huge embossed letters. They’d been ubiquitous when I was a kid. Each had a plain black cover with a silhouette cutaway so you had to turn the page to get the full effect. Rosie was the first I ever saw, his debut, the starting point for his surprising upward trajectory. It featured a small New Hampshire town—eerily similar to the one where I’d grown up, what had once been a small farming community until the petroleum processing plants transformed it. The town was engulfed in a crackling lightning storm. Gory and horrifying, read the cover, you can’t put it down!!!

St. John didn’t live in New York, but his former editor did: Lily Argo.

I’d found her email address online. Like St. John she must have been in her seventies, but was still working freelance. There were no pictures. The best I could find was a black and white shot of her and St. John at the signing of his fourth book, What Is Mine, the last they worked on together. Lily Argo was an inch of two taller than St. John, glorious, an Allison Janney look-alike, which meant the two of them towered over the line of moist-lipped teenage girls who were clustered around the table. That was back in ’79.

When I first approached one of my friends—an anthology editor named Dylan Bone (real name or not, I never knew)—about the possibility of an article on the publication of Rosie, he told me Argo had died. Dylan had even written up her obituary for Locus—but in retrospect he couldn’t remember how he’d first found out. She’d been one of the few female editors at Doubleday back then, mostly due to her lucky discovery of St. John. When I mentioned I’d been in contact with her, that she’d agreed to meet me, Dylan had stared at me thoughtfully.

“Just be careful,” he said.

“About what?”

He’d just waved his hand. “You know,” he said before lurching off to the bar to fetch another round.

I didn’t have any problems with the border guards. The customs line was tense, but I’d always had that feeling whenever I entered the States. Once I’d swallowed two painkillers before a flight back to London and the random swipe they’d done on my hands had registered a false positive for explosives or drugs. I’d been taken to a small backroom where a dark-haired woman in a uniform demanded to know why I had been in the country. I kept apologizing, I don’t know why. She had to search me by hand and the process was brusque and businesslike. She asked me to remove my bra. Then someone else came in, a heavy-set man with a broad forehead. He didn’t look at me. Neither of them did. Afterward they let me go but ever since I’d been stopped for “random” checks whenever I boarded a plane. This time though the guard took one look at me and waved me through. I must have looked harmless to him.

Hotel 31 was as old as the Overlook, mostly derelict with a walk-in elevator whose grill door you had to close yourself. The room was sparse, but by that point exhaustion had sunk into my skin. I called Luca to tell him I’d arrived and then collapsed under the thin covers.

All night I could hear animal sounds in the walls. The bodies of whatever moved beyond the peeling wallpaper hummed like batteries. Still, I slept. And in the morning I felt better than I had in weeks. Not mended, but stronger.

I was still in that dusky phase of grieving so that sometimes when I slept it felt I had fallen through a hole in the world. Each morning I woke up as a different person, discovered new wrinkles at the corner of my eyes, wires of thick, unrecognizable, gray hair. The doctor warned me of changes in my body, cramping, small clots of blood between my legs. I had expected my breasts to shrink but they’d only gotten larger. I read online the best thing to do was to bind them tightly with a snug towel and apply ice for ten minutes on, twenty minutes off. He hadn’t told me how old I would feel after.

I had given myself three days to acclimatize to jetlag before I met up with Lily Argo.

In the mean time I’d arranged a visit to Doubleday, St. John’s first publisher. In the last thirty years Doubleday had joined with Dell and Bantam which in turn joined up with Random House. Size, they had thought, was the best way to survive an uncertain economic climate.

Two weeks ago I’d contacted an editor at Random House in the hopes he might know if the company had kept some of the records from St. John’s days. But after the bag search and the metal detectors, when I was buzzed into the offices, a blond receptionist told me my meeting had been postponed. She was young, slickly made up in that New York way with manicured fingers and perfect plucked eyebrows. I was wearing a dark blue cardigan which, seeing her, suddenly felt so English, so matronly I almost laughed.

So I waited in the reception for an hour, browsing the display copies of new books by Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. They too were slickly produced.

After a while I pulled out my beat-up copy of Strangers and Friends, a collection of short stories St. John had published in gentlemen’s magazines like Cavalier and Penthouse over the years. The book had never been one of St. John’s most popular but I’d been thumbing my way through it slowly for weeks. On the flight I had started a story called “The Survivalist” in which a doctor finds himself trapped alone in a bunker after a nuclear blast. He lives there for years, decades, devouring canned peaches and Spam until finally he comes to the end of his stashed supplies. He knows he doesn’t have many options left. He can open up the door, risk contamination for a sight of the outside world—or he can continue to wait. The doctor stares at the door, wanting desperately to go out, but he can’t bring himself to open it. The story ends as, driven half-mad with hunger, he begins to contemplate how long he could survive eating first the flesh of his legs, his thighs, how much he could withstand. He is a doctor after all, and he thinks it could be quite some time…

The story was gross, and it had all the macabre glee you would expect from a St. John chiller. But I didn’t feel scared by it. No, what upset me most was its sense of futility. The doctor had given up on hope. He wasn’t waiting for rescue. He didn’t believe anyone else in the world was alive. He was simply… persisting. If he was the last man on earth he wanted to last as long as possible. It was grotesque. Why didn’t he open the door? That’s what Luca would said when I tried to explain the plot him. But then Luca was the kind of man who would have opened the door. He couldn’t see another way of living.

Another hour passed. Eventually the receptionist waved me over. Her manicured nails glinted dully in the light. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, “but the records from those years haven’t been maintained. I didn’t even know we were the ones who published Barron St. John.” She gave a little laugh.

I asked her what that meant for me.

“No one’s free to meet you. We converted to digital years ago,” she said, barely sparing me a glance. “Whatever we had we dumped back then. Besides, who reads that trash anyway?”

After that I found myself at loose ends so I called up a friend of mine, Benny Perry.

Benny and I had gone to grad school together at the University of Toronto, both of us doing doctorates in medieval literature in those early days after the financial crash when we still thought the market would recover enough to give us jobs. I’d kept at it, spinning my work on the scribal culture that produced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into a postdoc in Oxford and then riding that into a full-time position in Publishing Studies of all things at a former polytechnic university. It wasn’t glamorous, not like Oxford had been, but I liked the students, I liked my colleagues and I liked the work itself: imagining how books moved through time and all the people who left their mark on them along the way.

Benny had taken another route. He’d always had talent with photography and after he dropped out of the program he’d moved to New York and taken a job with House & Garden before it closed. It’d paid well enough that he’d stuck with photography, jumping from one magazine to another until he had enough of a portfolio to go freelance. He’d taken one of those famous pictures of Trump, the one where his face seems to be receding into the folds of flesh around his neck. In the past couple of months I’d seen it on social media from time and reprinted in the papers.

“It’s made things a bit hard for me,” Benny told me as we sat sipping margaritas in The Lantern’s Keep, a classy place near Times Square where the cocktails cost four times what they would at home. There had been a teary week before Luca and I made our decision when I’d given up alcohol, and even after we changed our minds I still hadn’t felt like touching the stuff. This was the first drink I’d had in eight months.

“How do you mean?”

“Well it’s brought me lots of attention, sure, but not the good kind, you know? Trump supporters hate that picture. Trump does too, which is why it gets recycled so often.”

Benny’s face looked strained and he fidgeted with his glass. He wasn’t quite how I remembered him. Benny was always a big man, a cornfed Iowa type whose Baptist parents had taught him to shun dancing and drink. When I’d met him at orientation he’d been shy, a bit overwhelmed. But after those first awkward weeks he’d just thrown himself into everything. He had this irrepressible love of the new, and he’d taken to those things he’d missed out on most: booze, women—then men, dancing late into the night with this kind of unselfconscious clumsiness which made you want to join in.

He was much thinner now, that kind of thinness that didn’t look healthy. “I’m worried about Emmanuel,” he said, “worried about… well. Anyway. People can be absolute shits, can’t they?”

I agreed that they could.

“But you’re looking good,” Benny said, and I caught his eyes skimming over my breasts. Even though it didn’t mean anything coming from him I still blushed and pulled at the cardigan. “But not… I don’t know, maybe not entirely good?” he was going on. “Hell. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

I took his hand gently and told him not to worry about it.

As The Lantern’s Keep started to fill up eventually we wandered out into the street. It was hot and swampy, that kind of early August weather that makes you feel as if you’ve been wrapped in a damp blanket and beaten. We headed south toward the West Village by foot so I could see the sights. North was Central Park and Trump Towers, which were all basically off limits now. New York hadn’t changed so much, not in terms of that strange and beautiful blend of architecture and anger, but there were bits that alarmed me. Like all the police cars all had stickers listing the reward for information on cop-killers with a number you could call.

While I told Benny about the project I was working on. It turned out he’d read St. John as a kid, which surprised me, given his background.

“What I remember about him was that my parents were reading him. They never read anything like that otherwise. Murder and cannibalism and demons and all that stuff. But Faction of Fire, you know, it was all about faith, wasn’t it? In that book there was no getting around it: The Devil was real. And I suppose that’s what my parents thought anyway. Good and evil weren’t abstract concepts to them. There were good folk and there were bad folk. And it wasn’t just that the bad folk made bad decisions. They were… bad. It was something more fundamental. Badness worked through them. It was something tangible, real. And St. John, well, his books were all about that, weren’t they?”

Benny grinned at me and for a moment I could see his younger self peering out, that kid who’d never touched a drop of liquor in his life before I met him.

“How’re your parents doing?” I asked him because that was the kind of thing we were supposed to ask one another now that we weren’t kids anymore.

“Dad had a stroke two years ago,” Benny said with a shrug. “I go back when I can to help her out. She’s lonely, I know, but whenever I do go we just end up fighting.”

I didn’t ask him about Emmanuel, about whether his parents knew. I figured probably they did. There were enough profiles floating around about Benny’s photos so you could only avoid knowing if you really tried.

“How are you and Luca doing?”

“Good.”

“He didn’t want to come with you?”

“Couldn’t get away. You know how it is with these NGOs. Anytime he leaves he feels like he’s letting people down.”

“It’s good what he’s doing,” Benny told me. “We need more people like him right now.” After a moment he stretched and I heard the joints in his shoulders pop. “It must be hard writing horror stories now, you know? It seems like that’s all we’ve got these days. I can’t bear to watch the news anymore.”

I didn’t sleep well that night. When I’d glanced at the papers they were filled with stories about tensions escalating, something to do with the South China Sea islands and whether the US was being too aggressive. John McCain was trying to dial things back but you could tell he was getting tired of it. His eyes looked sharp and a little bit scared.

I’d had panic attacks all throughout the October leading up to the election. There’d been Brexit, of course, our own particular mess. At a conference last summer an American colleague had told me, “What we’re seeing is radical politics. People stopped believing that they mattered to the system—but all that’s different now. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Anything could happen.” Trump had seemed funny back then, dangerous but still avoidable. They called it all a horror show but you could tell there was fascination underneath it all. How close could we come to disaster? But Hillary was ahead in the polls. Some of the Republicans were denouncing Trump, trying to put a little distance between themselves for when the eventual shellacking came on November eighth.

But it didn’t come. For weeks after, all throughout the Christmas break, whenever I heard Trump’s name it was as if there was a loud gong echoing in my head. My feed was filled with anguish, betrayal, heartbreak. But I had seen all that already. I felt immured, resilient—and besides I still didn’t believe, not really, that it would happen. Then eventually the cold hard truth settled in when I watched the inauguration with Luca. As Trump walked to the podium I burst out laughing, I don’t know why, the sheer cognitive dissonance of the whole thing. I felt hysterical. My palms were sweating.

Afterward I learned St. John had written a novel about something similar, Answering the King, about a madman who cheats his way to becoming the President of the United States. Eventually it comes down to a fifteen-year-old girl tormented with visions of the past and the future to stop him. The question at the heart of it is: if you could go back in time to stop Hitler, would you? They had made a movie about it with Steve Buscemi. I don’t remember who played the girl, only how wide her eyes were, how she captured that world-weariness so well for someone so young. She was a Cassandra. No one would listen to her.

That was the night when the whole thing with Luca happened. Normally we were very careful. I hadn’t been in my job for very long and he’d just moved across the country to live with me. We had talked about having kids one day but… We weren’t careful enough. Disaster crept in the way it always does.

I called Argo the next day. It was the first time I’d spoken to her and her voice was thin and cagey with a flat Ohio accent. It sounded as if it were coming away from much further away than the Upper East Side.

It felt strange to be listening to her voice and I thought about what Dylan Bone had told me. I’d read the obituary in fact, half as a joke and half because I knew Dylan didn’t make mistakes very often. He’d cut his teeth in the eighties horror boom and still made most of his money by convincing writers like St. John and Clive Barker to give him new material. It might sound mercenary but it isn’t, not really: Bone was a believer, a horror fanatic. He loved the stuff and even when the market dropped out of it in the nineties he had kept at it, putting out anthology after anthology with cheesy hand-drawn skeletons or zombified hands reaching out of the grave. Argo had been part of that, someone who’d made the genre in its heyday.

One the phone Argo was polite and she agreed to meet me for lunch the next day at a cafe. “It’ll have to be close to my apartment,” she told me, “I can’t move very well now.”

I told her I understood, and could meet her wherever she wanted.

“What’s this about then? Really?” Her tone wasn’t querulous, but wondering. “You know I wrote a chapter about working with St. John for some anthology twenty years ago, Devilish Discussions or something like that.”

I hesitated because I didn’t really have an answer. Yes, I knew the story about how she’d been sent St. John’s first manuscript by mistake. It had been meant to go to her boss but he’d been on vacation. She’d liked it but her boss wouldn’t touch it, and she didn’t have enough support inside Doubleday to push it through, not then, a low-level assistant. But they’d kept in touch, writing letters when the mood took one or the other. Then when Rosie had come along it had been “a day of glory”—so she called it.

I gave her the answer I gave most of my colleagues. St. John had changed the genre, really changed it. For one brief moment horror hadn’t been the red-haired stepchild of fiction. Horror had been king. And I wanted to know how that had happened. Part of my answer was true. I’d always been fascinated by the way books were made, the countless decisions that went into them. But if I were really honest it was simply because I’d become a fan, a real fan—maybe not Dylan Bone level—but my admiration for St. John was genuine.

It was more than that though. The real reason was one I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it had something to do with stories of chance—which St. John’s certainly was. And that underneath every story is a pivotal moment when things changed. I wanted to know what that looked like. I needed to know if Argo had understood when that manuscript crossed her desk what it would mean, if she’d felt a chill when he opened the envelop. Like someone had walked on her grave.

That afternoon Benny took me out to the Cloisters for old time’s sake, and it was beautiful, just like he’d promised it would be. The place was a mishmash of architecture taken from a series of medieval abbeys in France, Catalan, and the Occitan, simultaneously peaceful and surreal, liminal, a sliver of another world transplanted into New York.

“I thought you’d like it,” Benny told me. We were staring at a tree that had been shaped to fit one of the alcoves in the garden. Its branches curved unnaturally like a menorah to fill the space. I couldn’t help but wonder how it had been manipulated, what sort of subtle violence had pressurized the wood to assume the shape it had.

“I do,” I told him, shivering despite the mid-day heat.

“So, tomorrow. The editor, what’s her name again?” He snapped his fingers. “Argo, right? Lily Argo. You’re going to interview her. What about St. John then? Any chance you’ll get to speak to him?”

I didn’t think so. St. John lived in New Hampshire and I had no idea what kind of relationship the two of them still had. If they kept in touch. If Argo would even like me.

“Of course she will. You’re—well, you’re the makeles quene, aren’t you?” He smiled. “You are without blot.”

“Someone back home said she was dead,” I told him uneasily. I still didn’t like that part of the story. Why would Dylan have thought that?

“Huh,” Benny said. “It sounds like the beginning of a ghost story, doesn’t it? Like she’ll bestow her wisdom on you, settle her unfinished business, and vanish into the night.”

“It sounds exactly like that.”

“But maybe you’re lucky, not seeing St. John.”

I asked him what he meant.

“You know. He’s bound to be pretty weird, isn’t he? I mean he’s been writing that stuff for more than forty years now. You can’t keep that close to the darkness without some of it sticking to you.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this before. I was used to getting it myself sometimes at the university. But the horror writers I’d met were among the most well-adjusted people I knew, certainly they were much calmer than the other writers I tended to deal with. Some people said it was because there wasn’t much money in horror writing these days. But I thought it was something else: writers were good at channeling their anxieties into something productive. We all have those nasty thoughts, those worries that maybe we don’t love our partners as much as we should, or maybe they don’t love us. Fears that maybe something awful will happen tomorrow. The phone will ring and it will be the police. An accident somewhere. Or a fight escalated, a button pushed.

“When I studied the Middle Ages,” I told him, “it always seemed like it must have been so difficult for those people. I mean, the Black Death wiped out forty percent of the population. Imagine whole villages lost, your family—everyone you’ve ever met—wiped out.”

“I know,” he said, “I just couldn’t take living like that. I’d, I dunno. I’d go crazy, I guess.”

I wondered if he really would go crazy. Or if he was going crazy right now, waiting for that call about Emmanuel. Waiting for Trump to finally get around to signing a new Executive Order. I had always liked Benny because he had a sense of outrage, a keen abhorrence of injustice. I knew he had marched in those early protests and knew that he wasn’t marching anymore. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Benny was strong but he was adaptable. He was finding ways to survive, to keep marking his art—but doing it so it didn’t hurt Emmanuel.

Luca was the same way. Most nights he didn’t come home until close to midnight. There was always more he felt he could be doing. For a while I’d felt really proud of him. And then when things got bad I’d just felt resentful, angry at him for spending so much time saving other people when what I really wanted was for him to save me.

In the gift shop I chose a postcard for him, a picture of the Flemish tapestry called The Hunt for the Unicorn. It showed five young men in aristocratic clothing with their spears and their dogs. If it weren’t for the title you wouldn’t have been able to tell what they were doing there. I wanted to choose one with the unicorn but all of them looked too violent or depressing. Something about the unicorn in captivity, collared, in a fence that can barely hold her, reminded me of Answering the King, and how the girl had been taken to prison after she shot the president. There had been a coda at the end of the novel, the little girl twenty years later, grown up, in solitary confinement. They had thought she had gone mad because she wouldn’t stop hurting herself.

But St. John showed the real reason. The girl had had another vision, one worse than what she’d stopped all those years ago. But this time there was nothing she could do about it.

I couldn’t get hold of Luca that night. He wasn’t answering his email and when I tried him at home—and then at work—the phone just rang and rang. It wasn’t that unusual. Sometimes there were emergencies, and Luca would become so totally absorbed in them he would forget everything else.

There were emergencies like that, I knew, one every few days it seemed. So eventually I left a message saying I loved him. I tried the TV but got nothing but static. Eventually I settled down to read. It was another story from Strangers and Friends but this one was about a haunted house called “Question the Foundations.” It was a twist on the trope: the houses weren’t haunted by people so much as the people by houses. In St. John’s world each person had a tiny space within them, an impression of the place where they had been born. And it remained there, like a scar, or a memory. And everyone else could see it too, who you were and where you came from. Except there was this young boy who didn’t have a place like that. He had nothing. He had come from nowhere. And because he had nothing he scared people.

I put the book down, confused and unsure of myself. The story bothered me but I didn’t know why. It was different from the others, softer, sadder. There was no real horror in the story. It had been about loneliness. How it felt to be hollow, an outsider. Rootless.

Maybe it was just those constellations of images, emptiness and violence. Luca had told me a story once about how his family used to keep chickens. He had lived in the middle of a wood. One day a fox break into the henhouse and tore open all the chickens. He’d found their bodies, or what was left of them, the next morning. Inside their bodies he had found strings of growing eggs, like pearls.

After he told me that I couldn’t sleep and it was the same feeling now. I didn’t have any regrets. Luca and I had talked, and he had left the decision to me. There had been no pressure, none from him anyway. But I’d been watching the news. And when the first bomb exploded in Paddington Station it had been like a warning sign. Not now. It wasn’t safe. Things would settle down soon, they had to. And then we could try again.

I put the book down and touched my stomach gently, tentatively. Beneath my fingers all I could feel was my own thick flesh.

Three times I passed the cafe before I finally had the courage to meet Lily Argo. I could see her—at least I thought it was her—sitting in the courtyard with her walker folded up beside her. She had long white hair and a red-and-gray printed dress with long sleeves. I knew her because of how tall she was, even a little stooped over. She still had at least six inches on me.

“Ms. Argo?” I asked her and she nodded politely while I pulled up a seat.

“So you’re the one who’s come asking about Barron St. John.”

“That’s right.” I tentatively launched into my pitch: an article on St. John’s early publication history, documenting her involvement in acquiring and editing his first title. She stopped me with a wave of her hand.

“Sure, honey,” she said with a wide, generous smile, “you don’t need to go on like that. I’m happy to talk about those days though I confess they seem a while ago now. You know I got that manuscript by accident, don’t you?”

I nodded and she seemed relieved.

“Good, so we’re not starting from scratch. What you want is the story, I take it, of how Bear—that’s what I always called him—and I got along in those early days? Where the horror came from?” I nodded again and took out my phone but she eyed it warily. “I’ll tell it as best I can and you can make of it whatever you will—but no recordings, okay? You can listen and you can write down what you get from it but you only get to hear it once.”

What was I supposed to say? Already I could feel a kind of strange buzz around her, the magnetic pull of her charisma. I had wanted her story and here she was, ready to give it to me.

“I was pretty young in those days,” she began, “when I first started working for Doubleday. I’d grown up in Ohio which I never liked very much in part because it didn’t seem like I was much use to my parents. I was a reader, even then, but they had wanted me to go to one of the nursing schools but I knew I’d never be happy with something like that, taking care of people all the time. So when I was seventeen I ran off to New York City.

“Publishing was still very much a gentleman’s sport back then and if you were a woman you were either someone’s secretary or you were publishing feminist pamphlets and burning your bra. I was the former.” She paused and took a delicate sip from her Coke. Her lipstick remained unsmudged though it left a trace of red on her straw. “Most of us at the time wanted to be writers. I suppose I did as much as anyone, and so we’d spend our days editing and we’d spend our nights writing. What was funny was that we knew all the people we were sending our drivel to, we’d met them at luncheons or for afterhours drinks. I was embarrassed. I was a good editor and because I was a good editor I knew I wasn’t a very good writer. I thought, how on earth will these men take me seriously if they see what I’m coming up with?

“So I did what most women did at the time, or anyone who wasn’t Daphne du Maurier anyway, and I made up a name. Mine was Victor Wolf, which today seems so damned fake I don’t know why no one thought anything of it. Or maybe they did but they just didn’t care. Anyway I may have been writing garbage but eventually the garbage got better and I started getting some of it published. It was what they called Kooks and Spooks stuff, I suppose, sort of crime fiction but with some other bits thrown in, monsters sometimes, and ghosts. Possession—or Russian spies using hypnosis to control young American teenagers, that sort of thing. There was a real taste for that sort of thing back then. By the early seventies the papers were going crazy, telling us the irrationalism of our reading was helping the Commies and we had to get back to old-fashioned American literature. But Rosemary’s Baby was an absolute hit, and then there was The Exorcist and people just wanted more of it.

“That was when Bear’s first manuscript came across my desk. The two of us call it an accident but it wasn’t that, not really. See, I was used to reading submissions for Donnie Rogers and when I finished Bear’s first one I knew there was magic in it, raw, maybe, but magic nonetheless. And I knew Donnie was slated for laparoscopic gallbladder surgery. He was going to be off for at least a week recovering. That was when I tried to pitch the manuscript.

“Of course, I got laughed out of the offices. No one took me seriously and when Donnie came back he heard what I’d done and he bawled me out in front of the whole crew. Jesus, he took a strip off one side of me and then the other. After that I didn’t dare try anything like that for a good long while.

“Still, Bear had appreciated the support. He was poor as a church mouse and he and Mya had a second little one on the way. He tried me with this and that a couple of times but it never really made it anywhere. I guess it was while he was sending me his stuff that I sent him one of mine. God, the nerve I had!” she chuckled and I couldn’t help but chuckle along with her. “Well Bear wrote back and said it was pretty good, and I said it was better than pretty good, that Playboy had taken it. Bear had been trying to crack Playboy but hadn’t managed it by that point.

“For six months Bear went silent after that and I guess I thought maybe I’d offended him. Men don’t like being shown up, not then, not now. That’s why there’s all the craziness there is today. Women are afraid of violence, but men? Men are afraid of humiliation. Humiliation to them is like dying over and over and over again. And speaking of humiliation I had just about survived mine. Donnie Rogers had moved over to New American Libraries and I was covering for him while they looked for a replacement. That was when the next manuscript crossed my desk.”

“That was Rosie?” I asked her.

“Indeed it was, though it was called Revenge of the Stars at the time which was a godawful title, I have to say.”

“And this time it stuck?”

“Not right away it didn’t. The ending was clunky. It had Rosie transforming into this giant radioactive slug thing and devouring the town that way. Pure St. John, you know. He always loved the EC Comics stuff. People want to say he’s got literary chops, and sure he does, but a part of him is pure pulp and is perfectly content to stay that way, thank you very much.”

“So what happened?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, that’s the easy bit. Some good luck, I suppose. Ira Levin was big and Bear’s book was enough like that for me to pull together an advance for him. Small, you know. The real success came later with the paperback sales and that wasn’t me, not exactly. But I suppose if what you’re after is who found Barron St. John then it’s me as much as it was anyone.”

She paused there to take another long drag of her Coke. While she’d been talking she seemed so animated, so full of vigor but as the seconds stretch on I could see how old she was now, how time had etched fine lines around her lips. Her wrists were thin and frail, the skin bunching and slack at the same time.

She moved then, pulled up a black leather handbag and began to dig around in it. Eventually she came up with a Christmas card. “Look at that,” she said, her eyes sharp. The paper was old and creased in several places. When I opened it there I found a simple handwritten note. To Lilian, it said, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. We owe you so much. Love, Bear and Mya St. John

Lily was smiling slightly as she showed it to me, smiling and watching to see my reaction. I tried to smile back but there was a part of me that felt disappointed. Most of the story was what she had published in that chapter. Little of it really surprised me. It felt rehearsed, the way you keep old memories by telling yourself the story behind them again and again. Whatever I was looking for it wasn’t there.

I was getting restless and it seemed like she was finished when she cocked her head to the side. “That’s not what you wanted to hear, was it?”

I tried to tell her it was great, wonderful stuff. It would certainly make it into the article.

“Sure it will,” she said, “but you didn’t need any of it. Certainly you didn’t need to fly over here from England just to get this story, did you? I could’ve told you that over the phone. You didn’t need to come.”

I shrugged.

“What you wanted was him, wasn’t it? You wanted Bear.”

“Maybe,” I told her wearily. The heat was starting to get to me, making me a touch queasy.

“It isn’t easy, you know,” she said, “to try to tell your story when the best parts are about someone else.” She sighed. “You know, I had to give up writing once I found St. John. It wasn’t like it had been before. We were so busy all the time. St. John could write like a madman, he was fast. There was always another book. And then things got tricky with the contracts. You must know about this?”

I did. Everyone did. St. John had left Doubleday after a series of well-publicized contract disputes. Doubleday had been keeping most of the profits on the paperback sales and he felt he deserved a bigger cut. Doubleday wouldn’t budge and eventually he left.

“There wasn’t much I could do for him. They wouldn’t give him a better deal and they wouldn’t listen when I told them how serious he was about leaving. When he finally did switch publishers all those men at the top said it was my fault. I got parked for a while editing books on what types of music you can play to help your plants grow, that sort of kooky trash. After a year or so they fired me.”

I fiddled with my own straw, unsure how to react to any of this.

“Bear didn’t take me with him, see. I told him not to. I told him I had enough status in the company—but I was wrong. When you’re on top you always think you’re going to stay there forever, that there aren’t sharks circling beneath. But I guess Barron knew about those sharks. The one thing he knew about was the sharks. He could be one himself when he needed to.”

“You didn’t want to go back to writing?”

“Nah, I felt I’d spent my chance by that point. I think I had one lucky break in me—and it went to St. John. There wasn’t going to be another. I got by after that. I moved over to another house for a little while and convinced St. John to come do a book for us. But by that point things were different. He was a superstar and I felt spent. I had had enough of horror. It was the ’80s. Despite everything it still felt as if the world was falling apart. There was the banking crisis, the AIDS epidemic. The people weren’t reading the news though. They were reading Bear.

“I did write one more story though. I tried to sell it myself but no one would buy it. Victor Wolf had been forgotten. Bear liked it though. And he knew I was in danger of losing my mortgage. So he sent it out for me, under his name. When it sold to the New Yorker—his first real literary sale though God knows he deserved others and got them eventually—he gave me the profits.” Her smile then was bitter. “I was grateful, you know. At the time he said it was only fair. I had made his name after all. I should get the use of it whenever I wanted.

“And I was grateful at the time. I kept my brownstone, paid it off eventually. When he sold the collection he gave me the whole advance. For a while I thought about going back to Ohio but I still couldn’t admit to my parents I hadn’t been able to last in New York. So instead I stayed.”

She stared at me for a moment or two after that and I could feel the cool ripple of sadness passing over me like a shadow.

“Someone told me you died,” I said, just to break the spell of her silence.

“Of the two of us, Barron was always the shark, you see?“ she told me wryly, “No, I didn’t die. I just learned something he never figured out: how to stay alive when you stop moving.”

That evening I collected my things from Hotel 31.

Benny offered to drive me to the airport but I told him he didn’t need to do that. I could get a taxi. The university had given me a budget for that. When he said okay it sounded like there was relief in his voice, and I wondered if that meant Emmanuel was home. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to get so close to the airport. There were regular protests still going on. People were angry about the deportations but no one knew how to stop them.

“Did you get what you wanted from Lily Argo?” Benny asked me. “She wasn’t just a ghost?” I told him I hadn’t really known what I wanted but I was certain, despite everything, I had met Lily Argo. But probably I was going to scrap the story. My Head of Department would be pissed but that was how these things went. Sometimes you thought you had something and you didn’t.

What she had told me felt too invasive to write about. What I had wanted, I realized, was not just her story but a glimpse of her secret self. I didn’t have a right to it. And that’s what had made me want it even more. Maybe we all have a secret self: some of us keep it chained in the basement of our minds while others like St. John learn how to feed it.

“Well,” he said, “it was good to see you anyway. Give my love to Luca. You tell him to take proper care of you.”

I promised I would.

While I waited for my flight to board I watched the news. We were all watching the news. We couldn’t help it. Tense security officers patrolled the hallways with machine guns at the ready, just in case. There were fewer travelers those days, fewer coming in, fewer getting out. But I felt a kind of solidarity with the others as I eyes were glued to the screens. We were liminal people moving from one reality to another. We were going home.

So we watched the footage of explosions in Yemen. Pleas from refugees who had found themselves trapped in abandoned tenements, living in filth. It was only when I saw the story about the bomb that had gone off on a train along the Victorian Line that I remembered Luca still hadn’t called me back.

I was watching them pulling survivors out of the rubble and the blood gelled to ice in my veins. I couldn’t move. It had happened then. It had happened. Time seemed to slow. Luca mostly worked from Cambridge but the NGO had offices in London. He went there from time to time. When had I last heard from him? Who could I call to check? But by that point the attendant was calling me forward. I didn’t move. She called me again and the people behind me began to murmur. I must have had a dazed expression on my face, a look they didn’t like. The attendant called me a third time as an officer drew near. It was only then I was able to move. I showed them my passport and made my way down the ramp.

Inside the plane most of the seats were empty. The air was canned, stale tasting in my mouth. I wondered if I might have a panic attack but out on the runway I didn’t dare check my phone again. The hostesses were murmuring to each other. I could tell they were twitchy. But I already a strange calm was taking hold of me—a sense of icy horror. There was something inevitable about what was happening. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever had happened had happened.

And this feeling? It wasn’t the same as all those St. John books I had read. There I could find purpose, structure—meaning in all the bad things that had happened. But outside there was only chaos. The unraveling of beautiful things into violence. It signified nothing.

As the plane taxied down the runway I settled back in my chair and tried to sleep.