One moment rage like a fire swept through Hatch, and the next moment it
was extinguished. His jaws relaxed, his tense shoulders sagged, and his
hands unclenched so suddenly that he dropped the magazine on the floor
between his feet.
He continued to sit on the edge of the bed for a while, stunned and
confused. He looked toward the bathroom door, relieved that Lindsey had
not walked in on him while he had been.. . Been what? In his trance?
Posession?
He smelled something peculiar, out of place. Smoke.
He looked at the issue of Arts American on the floor between his feet.
Hesitantly, he picked it up. It was still folded open to Honell’s
article about Lindsey. Although no visible van rose from the magazine,
the paper exuded the heavy smell of smoke. The odors of burning wood,
paper, tar, plastics. and something worse. The edges of the paper were
yellow-brown and crisp, as if they had been ex to almost enough heat to
induce spontaneous combustion.
7
When the knock came at the door, Honell was sitting in a rocking chair
by the fireplace. He was drinking Chivas Regal and reading one of his
own novels, Miss Culvert, which he had written twenty-five years ago
when he was only thirty.
He re-read each of his nine books once a year because he was in
perpetual competition with himself, striving to improve as he grew old
instead of settling quietly into sea the way most writers did.
Constant betterment was a formidable challenge because he had been
awfully good at an early age. Every time he re-read himself, he was
surprised to discover that his body of work was considerably more
impressive than he remembered it.
Miss Culvert was a fictional treatment of his mother’s self-absorbed
lite in the respectable upper-middle-class society of a downstate
Illinois town, an indictment of the self-satisfied and stiflingly bland
“culture” of the Midwest. He had really captured the essence of the
bitch. Oh how he had captured her. Reading Miss Culvert, he was
reminded of the hurt and horror with which his mother had received the
novel on first publication, and he decided that as soon as he had
finished the book, he would take down the sequel, Mrs. Towers, which
dealt with her marriage to his father, her widowhood, and her second
marriage. He remained convinced that the sequel was what had killed
her. Officially, it was a heart attack. But cardiac infarction had to
be triggered by something, and the timing was satisfyingly concurrent
with the release of Mrs. Towers and the media attention it received.
,1 When the unexpected caller knocked, a pang of resentment shot through
Honell. His face puckered sourly. He preferred the company of his own
characters to that of anyone who might conceivably come visiting,
uninvited. Or invited, for that matter. All of the people in his books
were carefully refined, claahed, whereas people in real lite were
unfailingly … well, rezzy, murky, pointlessly complex.
He glanced at the clock on the mantel. Ten past nine o’clock.
The knock sounded again. More insistent this time. It was probably a
neighbor, which was a dismaying thought because his neighbors were all
fools.
He considered not answering. But in these rural canyons, the locals
thought of themselves as “neighborly,” never as the pests they actually
were, and if he didn’t respond to the knocking, they would circle the
house, peeping in windows, out of a country-folk concern for his
welfare.
God, he hated them. He tolerated them only because he hated the people
in the cities even more, and loathed suburbanites.
He put down his Chivas and the book, pushed up from the rocking chair,
and went to the door with the intention of giving a firy dressing down
to whoever was out there on the porch. With his command of language, he
could mortify anyone in about one minute flat, and have them running for
cover in two minutes. The pleasure of meting out humiliation would
almost compensate for the interruption.
When he pulled the curtain back from the glass panes in the front door,
he was surprised to see that his visitor was not one of the neighbors-in