"Wilson, F Paul - Adversary 4 - Reborn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson F. Paul)

Suddenly came a violent jolt, a scream of agonized metal, and the 707 tilted a crazy angle. Someone behind them in coach screamed something about a wing tearing off, and then the plane plummeted, spinning wildly.

The thought of his own death was no more than a fleeting presence in Hanley's mind. The knowledge that there would be no one left to destroy the records crowded out everything else.

"The boy!" he cried, clutching Derr's arm. "They'll find out about the boy! He'll find out abouthimself !"

And then the plane came apart around him.

One

«^»

 

Tuesday, February 20, 1968

1

A form was taking shape out of the darkness, shadows were merging, coalescing into an unholy shape. And it moved. In utter silence the night became flesh and glided toward her.

 

Jim Stevens leaned back in his chair and stared at the paper in the typewriter. This wasn't going the way he wanted. He knew what he wanted to say but the words weren't capturing it. It was almost as if he needed new words, a new language, to express himself.

He was tempted to pull one of those Hollywood scenes. Rip the paper out of the platen, ball it up, and toss it at the wastebasket. But in four straight years of writing every day, Jim had learned never to throw anything away. Somewhere in the mishmash of all the unpublished words he had committed to paper might lurk a scene, an image, a turn of phrase that could prove valuable later on.

No shortage of unpublished material, unfortunately. Hundreds of pages. Two novels' worth neatly stacked in their cardboard boxes on the top shelf of the closet. He had submitted them everywhere, to every publishing house in New York that did fiction, but no one was interested.

Not that he was completely unpublished. He glanced over to where "The Tree," a modern ghost story, sat alone on the otherwise bare ego-shelf in the bookcase. Doubleday had acquired that two years ago and had published it last summer with the publicity budget accorded most first novels: zero. What few reviews it received had been as indifferent as its sales, and it sank without a trace. None of the paperback houses had picked it up.

The manuscript of a fourth novel sat at the far left corner of his desk, the Doubleday rejection letter resting atop it. He had hoped the astonishing success ofRosemary's Baby would open doors for this one, but no dice.

Jim reached over and picked up the letter. It was from Tim Bradford, his editor on "The Tree." Although he knew it by heart, he read it again.

 

Dear Jim,

Sorry, but I'm going to have to pass onAngelica.I like its style and I like the characters. But there's no market for the subject matter. No one will be interested in a modern-day succubus. I'll repeat what I said over lunch last year: You've got talent, and you've got a good, maybe great, future ahead of you as a novelist if you'll just drop this horror stuff. There's no future in horror fiction. If you've got to do weird stuff, try sci fi. I know you're thinking of how Rosemary's Babyis still on the best-seller list, but it doesn't matter. The Levin book is an aberration. Horror is a dead end, killed by the A-bomb and Sputnik and other realities that are scary enough …

 

Maybe he's right, Jim thought, flipping the letter onto the desk and shaking off echoes of the crushing disappointment that had accompanied its arrival in the mail on Saturday.

But what was he to do? This "weird stuff" was all he wanted to write. He'd read science fiction as a kid and had liked it, but he didn't want to write it. Hell, he wanted toscare people! He remembered the ripples of fear and jolts of shock he'd received from writers like Bloch and Bradbury and Matheson and Lovecraft when he'd read them in the fifties and early sixties. He wanted to leave his own readers gasping, to do to them what the masters had done to him.

He was determined to keep at it. There was an audience for his writing, he was sure of it. All it took was a publisher with the guts to go find it. Until then he'd live with the rejection. He had known it was an integral part of a writer's life when he started; what he hadn't known was that it could hurt so much.

He closed his research books on Satanism and witchcraft and got up from the desk. Time for a break. Maybe a shave and a shower would help. He got some of his best ideas in the shower.