Dispatch (42 page)

Neither of them looked up; neither of them spoke.

"Hello?" I called. My voice sounded hesitant and uncertain, tinnier than the Victrola music and far fainter. Already the tune being played was starting to grate on me, the relentless parade of notes becoming ever more dissonant in my head as my brain failed to focus on the melody.

I glanced over at the mirror and realized that it did not reflect the writers, the bleachers or anything else within the tent. There was only me, elongated and hideously misshapen, suspended in a black universe.

On their opposing bleachers, surrounded by sawdust and popcorn boxes and crumpled paper cups, Mark Twain and Truman Capote continued to write on clipboards.

The feeling of dread had not lifted, had not even abated. I was not claustrophobic, but I felt trapped and stifled. I was still sweating from the heat, the music was driving me crazy, and underneath the scent of sawdust was a faint foul stench that made me want to vomit. Trying to hold my breath and inhale as little as possible, I approached Truman Capote, the writer closest to me. I circled the concrete edge of the center ring—

And he hissed at me. Like a feral animal. I jumped back, startled. He giggled in a smug effeminate way, and for a second I thought I had an opening. But then he was writing again, head down, scribbling on the clipboard. I was glaring at myself from the mirror, all twisted body and misshapen head, and I knew that if I did not get out of the tent at that instant I was going to either pass out or be sick.

I ran back out through the opening, past the still-flapping canvas, stopping by one of the pegs anchoring the tent to the ground. Looking around at the desert, I tried to figure out what I should do next. From inside came that maddening old-time music, and I thought of the mirror and the writers and that faint sick smell and knew I could not go back. But where should I go from here? Down the road? Which way? I was stranded here in this haunted nowhere land and didn't know how to get out or what I should do.

I decided to continue forward the way I'd been traveling. Logic dictated that the Ultimate Letter Writer was ahead somewhere and that if I wanted to find him, confront him and figure out how to escape this nightmare world, I would have to press on.

The desert was not as barren and empty as it seemed. I had walked for a little more than ten minutes when I saw a low small building ahead and off to the right. Heat waves distorted its appearance, and I couldn't tell whether it was a store or an outhouse or a bunker or a home. The only thing I could see was that it was dark and vaguely rectangular. Sweat was dripping into my eyes, making them sting, and I untucked my shirt and used the tails to wipe my face. I had never felt heat this intense, and although I wasn't even remotely religious, the thought occurred to me that I was someplace close to hell.

I picked up the pace, hoping that whatever the building was, it had running water or something I could drink. I was dying of thirst.

Dying.

Gradually, the road beneath my feet changed from dirt to asphalt, the shift so subtle that by the time I finally noticed it and looked behind me, I could not see the line of demarcation. Likewise, the desert was no longer exactly a desert. It was still open ground, but in place of rippled sand and spiny cactus, there were now scrubby faded bushes and dried brown grass.

I stopped in front of the building. It was my house. Not the house I lived in now but my parents' house, the house of my childhood—

the house where my mom was murdered

—only it was not in a subdivision among a tract of similar homes. It stood by itself on a weedy patch of land, its windows broken, its paint peeling, its front door open.

Inside, of course, was blackness.

A white figure passed by the open door, a faint wisp of misty cloud stuff that could have been nothing, could have been my mom.

The only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to be away from here; I didn't want to be anywhere near this house. I sure as hell didn't want to go inside, but that was where I seemed to be heading. It was just like the apartment, just like the circus tent, and I felt as though I were Maxwell Smart, going through that endless series of secret doors.

I walked up to the porch, passed through the entryway.

And stopped.

From outside, the interior of the house had appeared to be dark. It
was
dimmer than the harsh glare of the midday sun, but inside, the house was by no means dark. In fact, I could see quite clearly. And what I saw was an entryway and living room devoid of furniture, with every square inch of wall, floor and ceiling covered with rectangles of yellow legal paper, white typing paper and imprinted stationery. I knew what they were, but I moved closer to the wall to check, to make sure. Paper rustled and tore beneath my feet as I stepped to the left. They were letters. My letters. Someone had found or copied or reproduced seemingly every piece of correspondence I had ever mailed, and had meticulously pasted each missive into a continuous mosaic that resembled a madman's wallpaper.

Dear Sirs
, I read,
I am a longtime customer, and I am very unhappy with your new style of french fries...

I turned quickly around, catching movement out of the corner of my eye, but I saw nothing, only the empty living room and the entrance to the kitchen at the far end. I thought of that misty white shape that had reminded me of my mom, and suddenly I didn't want to go in the kitchen. I wasn't too keen on exploring the bedrooms, either.

I backed up, feeling the papered wall on my side as I made my way toward the front door the way I'd come in. Had this whole world been built for me, designed around my dreams and thoughts and letters and life? I didn't know how that was possible, but I could not seem to come up with an alternate explanation.

I reached the door, turned and found myself looking out at that weedy patch of land. Only across from me was not unbroken plain beneath a hot unforgiving sky but something else, a ... building of some sort.

The place where the Ultimate lived.

It was not a house per se. There was a door in the windowless structure, and it did bear some slight resemblance to a Navajo hogan, albeit a much, much larger one. But more than anything else, the building looked like a giant overturned wasp's nest. It appeared to be made from the same type of gray papery material, and it seemed equally flimsy. I walked forward slowly, unable to stop myself. When I got closer, I could see sections of the wall that looked darker than the others, and small strange patterns of squiggles and dots and curves and lines that reminded me of that alien writing.

It had been made from pulped and recycled letters. Pages and envelopes that had been eaten and extruded by whatever monster lived within.

Monster.

I was no longer imagining some effete geeky creature with perfect penmanship. Whatever lived in this house was stranger and far more terrible. I thought of that stamp from hell, the picture of burning mutilated bodies. I'd been wrong, I decided. He
could
do more than write letters. He could tear me apart and kill me. He could torture me beyond reason. He could do anything to me he damn well pleased.

So why hadn't he done so yet?

I was about to find out.

As terrified as I was, I continued to walk forward, reassuring myself with the thought that the walls of the structure looked thin enough for me to slice through with my scissors should I need to escape.

More frightened than I had ever been in my life, I passed through the open doorway.

Inside it was dark, although not so dark that I couldn't see. Light from the sky outside and from some unknown source up ahead showed that I was in a sort of hallway, although it was narrow enough that I could barely pass through it without turning to the side, and so high that the ceiling was lost in dimness. I reached out my fingers, touched a wall. It was indeed made from paper but was much stronger than I'd expected, as though by some alchemy it had been turned back into wood.

I walked through the hallway and into the open doorway at the far end.

And there he was.

The Ultimate Letter Writer.

He was big, as I'd thought. As tall as two men but extraordinarily thin, not scrawny but lean, hard. He had multiple arms, like one of those Hindu gods, and over his chest he wore a vest made of severed tongues. I remembered those Letter Writers in that hellish secretarial pool, the world leaders who had had their tongues cut out and were spending their eternities cranking out letter after letter.

His pants or skirt or whatever it was that he wore over the bottom half of his body was stitched together with detached human hands, the writing hands or typing hands of his conquered enemies, I assumed. His body itself was hideous, the outline of bones visible in the wrong places, the skin that was stretched over his rail-thin form jaundice yellow and wrinkled beyond belief, like the skin of a well-preserved unwrapped mummy. He had cloven hooves.

But it was his face that, if I lived through this, would forever after give me nightmares. Beneath a mop of black rag doll hair, his eyes were wild, crazy, one wide open and much too big, the other little more than a suspicious slit, as though a brain-damaged child had made his own Mr. Potato Head with parts stolen from a witch's workshop. There was no nose, but the mouth was huge and fixed in a gigantic permanent grin. His teeth were not really teeth but long, thin, sharp-pointed objects that it took me a moment to place.

Quills.

His teeth were quills.

I didn't know what he was or how he'd been made, whether he was a creature that had always existed, whether he'd been put together like Frankenstein's monster or whether he had somehow arisen from the collective id of generation after generation of Letter Writers.
God did not create man
, more than one philosopher had theorized;
man created God
. Perhaps we had created
him
.

Whatever his origin, however, he was real, he was in front of me, and I was going to have to deal with him right now.

We were in what looked like a cross between a throne room, an office and ... I don't know what. The only real piece of furniture in the huge chamber was an oversized chair upon a small dais. Made from stone and decorated with elaborate carvings, it faced the doorway through which I'd entered and it was where he sat. Next to the chair, on both sides, were pile after pile of various forms of paper, stationery, cards and envelopes. The floor was covered knee-deep with shredded newspapers and magazines, giving the whole place the appearance of some giant animal cage. On a shelf that circled the entire room were hundreds of televisions and radios, all simultaneously blasting their programs at top volume from countries around the globe.

I didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do, was not even sure I could be heard above the cacophonous din. I'd planned out many introductory statements, but all of my preparation went by the wayside in the face of this overwhelming horror.

It was as though the Ultimate had read my thoughts and decided to make the first move himself. With that one huge eye trained crazily on me, the small slitty one shifting back and forth at the same time, he expertly picked up a sheet of lined notebook paper from one of the piles next to him, then bit into it. And a message appeared, fully formed. Like a magician's hands or those of a juggler, his multiple arms were moving, twisting, fingers folding the paper, placing it in an envelope, stamping it and throwing it my way. It landed directly in my open hands. A split second later, a small stack of bound paper landed on top of that, a box of envelopes on top of that, a package of ballpoint pens on top of that.

We weren't going to speak, I realized. We were going to write letters to each other.

It was the way both of us communicated best anyway.

I put the paper, the envelopes and the pens between my knees, pressing my legs tightly together to hold them there. I was about to open the letter he'd thrown at me, when I paused, stopped. I thought of those strange swirling characters that had hypnotized me and brought me to this place, and decided that I would not, could not, look at anything else he wrote. There was no telling what might happen if I allowed myself to become lost in another letter. As scared as I was, I met his gaze and shook my head. I let his envelope fall to the floor, where it disappeared among the strips of shredded newsprint.

Noise like the hiss of a cat, amplified so loud that for a few seconds it drowned out all of the radios and televisions, issued from between the quills that were his teeth. The floor beneath me rumbled like a hungry stomach. The wasp nest walls shuddered, rustled. Both of his lunatic eyes were focused on me. He was angry, and I winced, waiting for the blow that would end my life.

Only it didn't come.

Instead, he bit another sheet of paper, made another message, folded it, sealed it, sent it to me.

I moved backward, let it fall into the shredded newsprint. The paper, envelopes and pens I'd been holding between my knees dropped, as well.

This would be it; this was the end.

I was testing him, I realized, and I suddenly understood something else: I was pretty sure I was going to survive. He wasn't going to kill me.

He
couldn't
kill me.

That's what I really thought, and I remembered what I'd been told by other Letter Writers.

You were public enemy number one around here
, Hemingway had said.
They were having their toadies try to outflank you, sending reams of letters to combat your correspondence.

But they couldn't do it

You are very powerful
. James Baldwin.

Writers like you come along once in a generation.
Stan.
And whether the Ultimate realizes it or not, you're the real deal.

As ludicrous as it sounded, as ridiculous as it might be, there really was something different about me. I didn't know what it was, I didn't know why I had it, but I believed that it was there.

That hissing sound came again, and the Ultimate stood to his full height. There was a sudden flurry of movement from all those arms, his gigantic grinning mouth was biting into page after page of paper, and I was deluged by a storm of letters that came at me straight on, from above, from down below.