Umney's last case nad-21 Read online

  `What's happened to you back in your own world?” I was still keeping him talking, but now it was nothing but habit, like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning.

  He shrugged. “Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self – a husk – sitting catatonic in some mental institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though – all of this feels too real. No, I think I made it all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer... with no idea that he's disappeared into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't care.”

  “And me? What happens to me?”

  “Clyde,” he said, “I don't care about that, either.”

  He bent over his gadget again.

  “Don't!” I said sharply.

  He looked up.

  “I...” I heard the quiver in my voice, tried to control it, and found I couldn't. “Mister, I'm afraid. Please leave me alone. I know it's not really my world out there anymore – hell, in here, either – but it's the only world I'll ever come close to knowing. Let me have what's left of it. Please.”

  “Too late, Clyde.” Again I heard that merciless regret in his voice. “Close your eyes. I'll make it as fast as I can.”

  I tried to jump him – I tried as hard as I could. I didn't move so much as an iota. And as far as closing my eyes went, I discovered I didn't need to. All the light had gone out of the day, and the office was as dark as midnight in a coalsack.

  I sensed rather than saw him lean over the desk toward me. I tried to draw back and discovered I couldn't even do that. Something dry and rustly touched my hand and I screamed.

  “Take it easy, Clyde.” His voice, coming out of the darkness. Coming not just from in front of me but from everywhere. Of course, I thought. After all, I'm a figment of his imagination. “It's only a check.”

  “A... check?”

  “Yes. For five thousand dollars. You've sold me the business. The painters will scratch your name off the door and paint mine on before they leave tonight.” He sounded dreamy. “Samuel D. Landry, Private Detective. It's got a great ring, doesn't it?”

  I tried to beg and found I couldn't. Now even my voice had failed me.

  “Get ready,” he said. “I don't know exactly what's coming, Clyde, but it's coming now. I don't think it'll hurt.” But I don't really care if it does – that was the part he didn't say.

  That faint whirring sound came out of the blackness. I felt my chair melt away beneath me, and suddenly I was falling. Landry's voice fell with me, reciting along with the clicks and taps of his fabulous futuristic steno machine, reciting the last two sentences of a novel called Umney's Last Case.

  “ `So I left town, and as to where I finished up... well, mister, I think that's my business. Don't you?””

  There was a brilliant green light below me. I was falling toward it. Soon it would consume me, and the only feeling I had was one of relief.

  “ `THE END,”” Landry's voice boomed, and then I fell into the green light, it was shining through me, in me, and Clyde Umney was no more.

  So long, shamus.

  VII. The Other Side of the Light.

  All that was six months ago.

  I came to on the floor of a gloomy room with a humming in my ears, pushed myself to my knees, shook my head to clear it, and looked up into the bright green glare I'd fallen through, like Alice through the looking glass. I saw a Buck Rogers machine that was the big brother of the one Landry had brought into my office. Green letters shone on it and I pushed myself to my feet so I could read them, absently running my fingernails up and down over my lower arms as I did so:

  So I left town, and as to where I finished up... well, mister, I think that's my business. Don't you?

  And below that, capitalized and centered, two more words: THE END.

  I read it again, now running my fingers over my stomach. I was doing it because there was something wrong with my skin, something that wasn't exactly painful but was certainly bothersome. As soon as it rose to the fore in my mind, I realized that weird sensation was going on everywhere – the nape of my neck, the backs of my thighs, in my crotch.

  Shingles, I thought suddenly. I've got Landry's shingles. What I'm feeling is itching, and the reason I didn't recognize it right away is because –

  “Because I've never had an itch before,” I said, and then the rest of it clicked into place. The click was so sudden and so hard that I actually swayed on my feet. I walked slowly across to a mirror on the wall, trying not to scratch my weirdly crawling skin, knowing I was going to see an aged version of my face, a face cut with lines like old dry washes and topped with a shock of lackluster white hair.

  Now I knew what happened when writers somehow took over the lives of the characters they had created. It wasn't exactly theft after all.

  More of a swap.

  I stood staring into Landry's face – my face, only aged fifteen hard years – and felt my skin tingling and buzzing. Hadn't he said his shingles had been getting better? If this was better, how had he endured worse without going completely insane?

  I was in Landry's house, of course – my house, now – and in the bathroom off the study, I found the medication he took for his shingles. I took my first dose less than an hour after I came to on the floor below his desk and the humming machine on it, and it was as if I had swallowed his life instead of medicine.

  As if I'd swallowed his whole life.

  These days the shingles are a thing of the past, I'm happy to report. Maybe it just ran its course, but I like to think that the old Clyde Umney spirit had something to do with it – Clyde was never sick a day in his life, you know, and although I seem to always have the sniffles in this run-down Sam Landry body, I'll be damned if I'll give in to them... and since when did it hurt to turn on a little of that positive thinking? I think the correct answer to that one is “since never.”

  There have been some pretty bad days, though, the first one coming less than twenty-four hours after I showed up in the unbelievable year of 1994. I was looking through Landry's fridge for something to eat (I'd pigged out on his Black Horse Ale the night before and felt it couldn't hurt my hangover to eat something) when a sudden pain knifed into my guts. I thought I was dying. It got worse, and I knew I was dying. I fell to the kitchen floor, trying not to scream. A moment or two later, something happened, and the pain eased.

  Most of my life I've been using the phrase “I don't give a shit.” All that has changed, starting that morning. I cleaned myself up, then climbed the stairs, knowing what I'd find in the bedroom: wet sheets in Landry's bed.

  My first week in Landry's world was spent mostly in toilet-training myself. In my world, of course, nobody ever went to the bathroom. Or to the dentist, for that matter, and my first trip to the one listed in Landry's Rolodex is something I don't even want to think about, let alone discuss.

  But there's been an occasional rose in this nest of brambles. For one thing, there's been no need to go job-hunting in Landry's confusing, jet-propelled world; his books apparently continue to sell very well, and I have no problem cashing the checks that come in the mail. My signature and his are, of course, identical. As for any moral compunctions I might have about doing that, don't make me laugh. Those checks are for stories about me. Landry only wrote them; I lived them. Hell, I deserved fifty thou and a rabies shot just for getting within scratching distance of Mavis Weld's claws.

  I expected to have problems with Landry's so-called friends, but I suppose a heavy-duty shamus like me should have known better – would a guy with any real friends want to disappear into a world he'd created on the soundstage of his own imagination? Not likely. Landry's friends were his son and his wife, and they were dead. There are acquaintances and neighbors, but they seem to accept me as him. The woman across the street throws me puzzled glances from time to time, and her little girl cries when I come near even though I used to baby-sit for them every now and
then (the woman says I did, anyway, and why would she lie?), but that's no big deal.

  I have even spoken to Landry's agent, a guy from New York named Verrill. He wants to know when I'm going to start a new book.

  Soon, I tell him. Soon.

  Mostly I stay in. I have no urge to explore the world Landry pushed me into when he pushed me out of my own; I see more than I want to on my once-weekly trip to the bank and the grocery store, and I threw a bookend through his awful television machine less than two hours after I figured out how to use it. It doesn't surprise me that Landry wanted to leave this groaning world with its freight of disease and senseless violence – a world where naked women dance in nightclub windows, and sex with them can kill you.

  No, I spend my time inside, mostly. I have re-read each of his novels, and each one is like leafing through the pages of a well-loved scrapbook. And I've taught myself to use his word-processing machine, of course. It's not like the television machine; the screen is similar, but on the word-processor, you can make whatever pictures you want to see, because they all come from inside your own head.

  I like that.

  I've been getting ready, you see – trying sentences and discarding them the way you try pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And this morning I wrote a few that seem right... or almost right. Want to hear? Okay, here goes:

  When I looked toward the door, I saw a very chastened, very downcast Peoria Smith standing there. “I guess I treated you pretty bad the last time I saw you, Mr. Umney,” he said. “I came to say I'm sorry.” It had been over six months, but he looked the same as ever. And I do mean the same.

  “You're still wearing your cheaters,” I said.

  “Yeah. We tried the operation, but it didn't work.” He sighed, then grinned and shrugged. In that moment he looked like the Peoria I'd always known. “What the hey, Mr. Umney – bein blind ain't so bad.”

  It isn't perfect; sure, I know that. I started out as a detective, not a writer. But I believe you can do just about anything, if you want to bad enough, and when you get right down to where the cheese binds, this is a kind of keyhole-peeping, too. The size and shape of the word-processor keyhole are a little different, but it's still looking into other people's lives and then reporting back to the client on what you saw.

  I'm teaching myself for one very simple reason: I don't want to be here. You can call it L. A. in 1994 if you want to; I call it hell. It's awful frozen dinners you cook in a box called a “microwave,” it's sneakers that look like Frankenstein shoes, it's music that comes out of the radio sounding like crows being steamed alive in a pressure-cooker, it's –

  Well, it's everything.

  I want my life back, I want things the way they were, and I think I know how to make that happen.

  You're one sad, thieving bastard, Sam – may I still call you that? – and I feel sorry for you... but sorry only stretches so far, because the operant word here is thieving. My original opinion on the subject hasn't changed at all, you see – I still don't believe that the ability to create conveys the right to steal.

  What are you doing right this minute, you thief? Eating dinner at that Petit Dejeuner restaurant you made up? Sleeping beside some gorgeous honey with perfect no-sag breasts and murder up the sleeve of her negligee? Driving down to Malibu with carefree abandon? Or just kicking back in the old office chair, enjoying your painless, odorless, shitless life? What are you doing?

  I've been teaching myself to write, that's what I've been doing, and now that I've found my way in, I think I'll get better in a hurry. Already I can almost see you.

  Tomorrow morning, Clyde and Peoria are going to go down to Blondie's, which has re-opened for business. This time Peoria's going to take Clyde up on that breakfast offer. That will be step two.

  Yes, I can almost see you, Sam, and pretty soon I will. But I don't think you'll see me. Not until I step out from behind my office door and wrap my hands around your throat.

  This time nobody goes home.

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