The Plant Read online

  Anyway, they should all be query letters if this mudball lived up to its advance billing and really was the best of all possible worlds. Like 99% of the other publishers in New York, we no longer read unsolicited manuscripts-at least, that's our official policy. It says so in Writer's Market, Writer's Yearbook, The Freelance, and The Pen Newsletter. But apparently a lot of the aspiring Wolfes and Hemingways out there either don't read those things, don't believe them when they do read them, or simply ignore them-pick what sounds best to you.

  In most cases we at least look at the slush, if it's typewritten (please don't breathe a word of this or we'll be inundated with manuscripts and Roger will probably shoot me-he's close now, I think). After all, Ordinary People came in over the transom and was first read by some editorial assistant who just happened to recognize that it was a hell of a story. But that, of course, was a million-to-one shot. I've never seen an unsolicited manuscript that looked like any more than the work of a bright fifth-grader. Of course Zenith House is hardly Alfred A. Knopf (our lead title for February is Scorpions from Hell, by Anthony L. K. LaScorbia, his follow-up to Rats from Hell), but still... you hope...

  Detweiller, at least, followed protocol and sent a query letter. Herb Porter, Sandra Jackson, Bill Gelb, and I divvy those that came in the week before each Monday, and I had the misfortune to get this one. After reading it and mulling it over in my mind for all of twenty-five minutes (long enough to write Roger a long-winded memo on the subject that, under the circumstances, I'm probably never going to live down), I wrote Detweiller a letter asking him to submit a few sample chapters and an outline of the rest. And last Friday I got a letter that... well, short of sending it to you, I'm not sure how to describe it. He seems to be a twenty-three-year-old florist's assistant from Central Falls with a mother fixation and the conviction that he's attended witch's sabbats all over America while high on nutmeg, or something. I keep envisioning covens in Motel Six parking lots.

  I thought ole Carlos's True Tales of Demon Infestations (I have gotten to the point where the title alone has the power to make me blanch and shudder in my shoes) might be some kid's adolescent research hobby-something that could be cut down and juiced up and sold to the Amityville Horror audience. His original letter was short, you see, and so full of these punchy little sentences-subject-predicate, subject-predicate, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am-that one could believe that. And while I was never under any illusions that the man was a writer, I made an assumption of marginal literacy that turns out to be totally unfounded. In fact, just looking back at the original Detweiller letter makes me wonder how I ever could have scribbled the word This has a certain half-baked charm in the margin... and yet I see I did.

  So what? You're saying. Big deal. Give the schmuck's manuscript a token look when it comes in and then send it back with a form letter-“Zenith House regrets,” etc. That's right... but it's wrong, too. It's wrong because guys like Carlos Detweiller turn out all too often to be like a bad case of head-lice-easy to get, the very devil to get rid of. The worst of it is, I mentioned this very fact to Roger in my original overlong memo about the book, recalling General Hecksler and his Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers-you must remember me telling you how the General bombarded us with registered letters and phone calls after we rejected the book (you may not know, however, about the Mailgram Herb Porter got from him-in it Hecksler referred to Herb as “the designated Jew,” a reference none of us has figured out to this day). It got steadily more abusive, and just before his sister had him committed to an asylum up-state, Sandra Jackson confessed to me that she was getting scared to go home alone-said she was afraid the General might jump out of a darkened doorway with a knife in one hand and a bouquet of psychic posies in the other. She said the hell of it was that none of us even knew what he looked like-we'd have needed a writing sample instead of a mug-shot to identify him.

  And of course it all sounds funny now, but it wasn't funny when it happened-it was only after his sister wrote to us that we found out we were actually one of his lesser obsessions, and of course he did turn out to be dangerous; just ask the Albany bus driver he stabbed.

  I knew all that-even mentioned it to Roger-and still blithely went ahead and invited Detweiller to submit.

  Of course, the other thing (and knowing me as you do, you've probably already guessed it) is simpler-it upsets me to have goofed in such grand style. If a gonzo illiterate like Carlos Detweiller could fool me this badly (I did think his book would have to be ghosted, true, but that is still no excuse), how much good stuff am I missing? Please don't laugh; I'm serious. Roger is always ragging me about my “lit'ry aspirations,” and I suppose he has a right to (no progress on the novel this week if you're interested-this Detweiller thing has depressed me too much), considering where the erstwhile head of the Brown University Milton Society ended up (he ended up encouraging Anthony LaScorbia to get right to work on his newest epic, Wasps from Hell, for one thing). But I think I would happily accept six months of hectoring letters from the obviously mad Carlos Detweiller, complete with veiled threats becoming a little less veiled with each missive, if I could only be assured that I hadn't let something good slip by because of a totally deadened critical response.

  I don't know if this is more or less gloomy, but Roger mentioned in one of his Famous Memos that the Apex Corporation is going to give Zenith at least one more year to stop impersonating a dead dog and start showing some sales pizazz. He got the news from Harlow Enders, Apex's chief New York comptroller, so presumably it's accurate. I guess it's good news when you consider that not everyone in publishing has got an office to go to these days, not even with a company whose biggest steady seller is the Macho Man series and whose biggest in-house problem isn't spies making copies of manuscripts so that the movie studios can get an early look, but cockroaches in the water-cooler. It's maybe not so good when you think of how little money we have to spend (maybe you deserve to get the Carlos Detweillers of the world when the most you can offer as an advance against royalties is $1800) and how shitty our distribution is. But no one at Apex understands books or book marketing-I doubt if anyone there even knows why they picked up Zenith House last year in the first place, except that it happened to be for sale cheap. The chances that we can improve our position (2% of the paperback market, fifteenth in a field of fifteen) over the next year aren't very high. Maybe we'll end up getting married in California after all, huh, babe?

  Well, enough doom and gloom-I'll mail this off and hopefully get back to work on my book tomorrow-and the next letter I write will be of the “chatty, newsy” variety. Shall I ask ole Carlos to send you flowers from Central Falls?

  Forget I asked that.

  My love,

  John

  P. S. -And tell your roommate that I don't believe manufacturing “the world's largest edible Frisbee” has any merit whatsoever, Guinness Book of Records or not. Why not ask her if she has any interest in trying for the world's record of sitting in a spaghetti-filled bathtub? First one to shatter it wins an all-expense-paid trip to Central Falls, Rhode Island...

  J.

  interoffice memo

  TO: Roger FROM: John RE: True Tales of Demon Infestations, by Carlos Detweiller

  Detweiller's manuscript came this morning, wrapped in shopping bags, secured with twine (much of it broken), and apparently typed by someone with terrible motor control problems. It is every bit as bad as I feared-abysmal, beyond hope.

  That could and should be the end, but some of the photos he enclosed are intensely disturbing, Roger-and this is no joke, so please don't treat it as one. They are a weird conglomeration of black-and-white glossies (made with a Nikon, I would guess), color slides (ditto Nikon), and Polaroid SX-70 shots. Most of them are ridiculous-middle-aged men and women either got up in black bathrobes with cabalistic designs sewn on them or middle-aged men and women in nothing at all, displaying skinny shanks, dangling breasts, and pot bellies. They look exactly like what you'd guess the folks of Central Falls would ima
gine a Black Mass should look like (in some of them there is a much younger man who is probably Detweiller himself-this young man is always shot from the rear or with his face in deep shadow), and the locale appears, in most cases, to be a greenhouse-associated with the florist's where Detweiller told me he works, I imagine.

  There's one packet of six photos labelled “The Sakred Seance” which show plasmic manifestations so obviously faked it's pitiful (what appears to be a balloon frosted with Day-Glo paint is floating from the medium's fingertips). A third packet of photos (all SX-70 shots) are textbook-style “exhibit” shots of various plants which purport to be deadly nightshade, belladonna, virgin's hair, etc. (impossible for me to tell if the labels are accurate-I can't tell a maple tree from a ponderosa pine without help; Ruth would probably know).

  Okay, the disturbing part. Some of the photos (four, to be completely accurate) in the “Black Mass” scenes purport to show a human sacrifice-and it looks to me as if maybe they really did kill someone. The first photo shows an old man with an extremely realistic expression of terror on his face lying spread-eagled on a table in the greenhouse I mentioned. Several people in hokey robes are holding him down. The young man I presume to be Carlos Detweiller is standing on the left, naked, with what looks like a Bowie knife. The second shows the knife plunging into the old fellow's chest; in the third, the man I presume to be Detweiller is reaching into the chest cavity; in the last he is holding up a dripping thing for the others to look at. The dripping thing looks very much like a human heart.

  The pictures could be complete hokum, and I'd be the first to admit it-a half-decent special effects man could cobble up something like this, I suppose, especially in stills... but the efforts to mislead in the other photos are so painfully obvious that I wonder if that can be.

  Just glancing at them is enough to make me want to whoops my cookies, Roger-what if we've stumbled onto a bunch of people who are really practicing human sacrifice? Mass murder, perhaps? I'm nauseated, but right now I'm more scared than anything else. I could have told you all of this in person, of course, but it seemed important to get this down in writing, just in case it does turn out to be a legal matter. Christ, I wish I'd never even heard of Carlos Fucking Detweiller.

  Come down and take a look at these as soon as you possibly can, okay? I just don't know if I should pick up the phone and call the police in Central Falls or not.

  John

  SYNOPSIS

  JOHN KENTON, who attended Brown University, majored in English, and was president of the Literary Society, has had a rude awakening in the real world: he is one of four editors at Zenith House, a down-at-the-heels paperback publisher in New York.

  Zenith has 2% of the paperback market and is fifteenth in a field of fifteen paperback publishers. All of the Zenith House personnel are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may decide to put the house on the market if there isn't a sales turnaround in the calendar year 1981... and due to Zenith's poor distribution network, that seems unlikely.

  On January 4th of 1981, Kenton receives a query letter from CARLOS DETWEILLER, of Central Falls, Rhode Island. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers, and is hawking a book he has written called True Tales of Demon Infestations. It's obvious to Kenton that Detweiller has absolutely no talent as a writer... but then, neither do most of the writers on Zenith's roster (biggest seller: the Macho Man series). He encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline.

  Instead, Detweiller submits the work entire, which is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought that the book could perhaps be cut down, ghost-written, and juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is in the photographs Detweiller encloses. Some are painfully faked pictures of a seance in progress, but a series of four show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's chest is cut open and a dripping human heart is pulled out of the incision.

  The story, which is told in epistolary style, resumes with a letter from John Kenton to his fiancee, RUTH TANAKA, who is working on her PhD in California.

  January 30, 1981

  Dear Ruth,

  Yes, it was good to talk to you last night, too. Even when you're on the other side of the country, I don't know what I'd do without you. I think this has been just about the worst month of my life, and without you to talk to and your warm support, I don't know how I could have gotten through it. The initial terror and revulsion of those pictures was bad, but I've discovered I can deal with terror-and Roger may be locked in his impersonation of some crusty editor in a Damon Runyon story (or maybe it's that Ben Hecht play I'm thinking of), but the funny thing is, he really does have a heart of gold. When all that shit came down, he was like a rock-his support never wavered.

  Terror is bad, but the feeling that you've been a horse's ass is a lot worse, I've found. When you're afraid, you can fall back on your bravery. When you're humiliated, I guess you just have to call up your fiancee long distance and bawl on her shoulder. All I'm saying, I guess, is thanks-thanks for being there and thanks for not laughing... or calling me a hysterical old woman jumping at shadows. I had one final phone-call last night after I'd talked to you-from Chief Barton Iverson of the Central Falls P. D. He was also remarkably forgiving, but before I give you the final gist of it, let me try to clarify the whole sequence of events following my reception of the Detweiller manuscript last Wednesday. Your confusion was justifiable-I think I can be a little clearer now that I've had a night's sleep (and without Ma Bell in my ear, chipping off the dollars from my malnourished paycheck!).

  As I think I told you, Roger's reaction to the “Sacrifice Photos” was even stronger and more immediate than mine. He came down to my office as if he had rockets in his heels, leaving two distributors waiting in his outer office (and, as I believe Flannery O'Connor once pointed out, a good distributor is hard to find), and when I showed him the pictures, he turned pale, put his hand over his mouth, and made some extremely unlovely gagging sounds so I guess you'd have to say I was more right than wrong about the quality of the photos (considering the subject matter, “quality” is a strange word to use, but it's the only one that seems to fit).

  He took a minute or two to think, then told me I'd better call the police in Central Falls-but not to say anything to anybody else. “They could still be fakes,” he said, “but it's best not to take any chances. Put 'em in an envelope and don't touch them anymore. There could be fingerprints.”

  “They don't look like fakes,” I said. “Do they?”

  “No.”

  He went back to the distributors and I called the cops in Central Falls-my first conversation with Iverson. He listened to the whole story and then took my telephone number. He said he'd call me back in five minutes, but he didn't tell me why.

  He was actually back in about three minutes. He told me to take the photographs to the 31st Precinct at 140 Park Avenue South, and that the New York Police would wire the “Sacrifice Photos” to Central Falls.

  “We should have them by three this afternoon,” he said. “Maybe even sooner.”

  I asked him what he intended to do until then.

  “Not much,” he said. “I'm going to send a plainsclothesman around to this House of Flowers and try to ascertain whether or not Detweiller is still working there. I hope to do that without arousing any suspicions. Until I see the pictures, Mr. Kenton, that's really all I can do.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling him that I thought there was a lot more he could do. I didn't want to be dismissed as a typical pushy New Yorker, and I didn't want to have this fellow exasperated with me from the jump. And I reminded myself that Iverson hadn't seen the pictures. Under the circumstances I guess he was going as fast as he could on the basis of a call from a stranger-a stranger who might be a crank.

  I got him to promise he'd call me back as soon as he got the photographs, and then I took them down to the 31st Precinct myse
lf. They were expecting me; a Sergeant Tyndale met me in the reception area and took the envelope of photographs. He also made me promise I'd stay at the office until I'd heard from them.

  “The Central Falls Chief of Police—”

  “Not him,” Tyndale said, as if I was talking about a trained monkey. “Us.”

  All the movies and novels are right, babe-it doesn't take long before you start feeling like a criminal yourself. You expect somebody to turn a bright light in your face, hook one leg over a beat-up old desk, lean down, blow cigarette smoke in your face, and say “Okay, Carmody, where did you put the bodies?” I can laugh about it now, but I sure wasn't laughing then.

  I wanted Tyndale to take a look at the photos and tell me what he thought of them-whether or not they were authentic-but he just shooed me out with another reminder to “stick close,” as he put it. It had started to rain and I couldn't get a cab and by the time I'd walked the seven blocks back to Zenith House I was soaked. I had also eaten half a roll of Tums.

  Roger was in my office. I asked him if the distributors were gone, and he flapped a hand in their direction. “Sent one back to Queens and one back to Brooklyn,” he said. “Inspired. They'll sell another fifty copies of Ants from Hell between them. Schmucks.” He lit a cigarette. “What did the cops say?”

  I told him what Tyndale had told me.

  “Ominous,” he said. “Very fooking ominous.”