Chapter One

The old man in the striped shirt and suspenders, glasses halfway down his nose, slumped in his chair with his chin on his chest. He looked as if he were contemplating either a nap or the sleep eternal. A young woman was running a comb through his thin hair, smoothing errant follicles with her other hand.

Behind one of the cameras, a man wearing a headset said in a loud voice: “And we’re back in three-two-one…” At “One,” he pointed at the old man.

Two things lit up simultaneously, a red light on Camera Two and the old man sitting at the table. He sat up bright and alert, with a friendly smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eye. He looked straight into Camera Two and said, “Welcome, welcome once again to the Fred Staunton Show. I’m delighted to be your host, Fred Staunton, and of course with us tonight…”

The red light on Camera One went on and audiences in the United States and select parts of Canada and Mexico were treated to the sight of a man who, though he was probably forty, could have passed for twenty-five. Slightly shaggy, scrupulously-unkempt blond hair framed a boyish face with a lopsided smile that fairly screamed, “Aw, shucks.” He looked into the camera, extended the lopsidedness of his grin, and then glanced at Staunton as if looking for instructions as to what do to next.

“…Sean Bishop,” the audience heard Staunton’s voice while still feasting on the face of the All-American Boy, “unarguably the world’s most successful writer of horror novels. He’s been called a combination of H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Robert McCammon, and Dan Prince all rolled up into one.”

The cameras now traded their red lights on-and-offing as the director favored the viewing audience with shots of Staunton, Bishop, or both, as was his wont.

“Gee, that’s…that’s very kind of you, Fred,” Bishop said with a little nod of his head.

“Well, it’s not just me,” Staunton chided him, waving an admonishing finger. “Let me quote from the New York Times Book Review from, ah, from last November.”

He adjusted his glasses and picked up a piece of paper, which, since he was looking at Bishop as he read, the audience believed he memorized. In truth, he was looking past Bishop, at giant cue-cards held off camera, because he couldn’t have read the small print on the paper in front of him had his life depended on it.

“‘The novels of Sean Bishop’,” Staunton intoned, “‘whether straight horror, supernatural ghost stories, science fiction-flavored horror, or stories of very non-surreal psycho killers, all have one thing in common, they’re all different. He never repeats himself. Indeed, the only thing repetitive about Bishop is how he manages to scare us over and over again while always coming up with a new way to separate us from our sleep and give us nightmares during our waking hours’.” He set down the paper.

“Well?” he challenged Bishop.

Bishop ducked his head, all but screaming, “AW SHUCKS,” at the top of his voice. “That’s a…that’s a very, uh…a very generous statement,” he murmured in a low voice.

“Well, look here, Sean,” Staunton almost insisted. “Your first novel came out ten years ago and was a bestseller. Since then, you’ve written eighteen other novels, not a one of which failed to make it to number one on the bestseller lists.” He paused, pretended to look at his notes. “As a matter of fact, your latest, The Death of Death, is at number one this week, while Something Borrowed, which came out four months ago, is still on the list at number six!”

The lopsided grin became lopsidier. “I said the statement was ‘generous’,” Bishop drawled. “I didn’t say it was false.”

He and Staunton shared a warm chuckle.

Staunton’s smile faded first. He was a journalist, after all, damnit.

“Okay, Bishop, come clean. Where do you get your ideas?”

Now the grin faded from the writer, to be replaced by the pursed lips and thoughtful brow-furrowing of the creative artist. “Well…” he began. “It’s…uh…it sounds silly to say it, to put it into, you know, uh, words…but I never stop thinking.”

“You never stop thinking,” Staunton stentorially verified.

“Yeah, uh, I mean, I mean, we all think all the time, you know, but I mean I never stop thinking, uh, stories, plots. I mean, all the time. Like, uh, when we go to the cemetery, to pay our respects, how many of us, uh, you know, do we think, like, ‘What would happen if two hands suddenly came out of the grave, like in a million movies?’ What I do, is, I think, ‘okay, what if the dead came back but instead of, y’know, brains, they wanted, um, sex?’”

“…that was the plot of your novel, Return of the Horny Dead, wasn’t it?” Staunton put in.

Bishop nodded. “Uh huh. My only venture into horror comedy, and, uh, as a matter of fact, the one that spent the least amount of time as number one on the bestseller list.” He sighed. “I mean, everybody has things that scare them. Not everyone has the ability, or maybe just the time, to put their fears into coherent form. I do, y’know, with all due modesty and everything, and, um, I guess I must be good enough at it since people are willing to buy my books and see the movies made from my books. So, uh, I get an idea, and, and, as you can tell, um…well, I’m actually a little shy in, in talking to people. Like tonight, how many times have I stammered?”

His apologetic grin was answered by an approving smile from the host. “But, uh, when I sit down at the computer with an idea, it’s like, whoosh I keep going. My fingers outpace my brain sometimes.” He paused. “Thank God for spell-check.”

“Thank God,” Staunton winked at the camera, “or thank Satan?”

“Ah, ah, ah, no,” Bishop corrected him with a wiggling index finger and a forgiving smile. “You’ll notice no matter how many people I kill in my novels, the bad guy or whatever always gets his in the end.”

~ * ~

About two hundred and fifty miles away from the Washington, D.C. studio where the Fred Staunton Show was being broadcast, in Seaford, NY, a shower of popcorn hit a television screen.

“You should get this in your end,” someone yelled at the TV.

Sitting on top of its cage, well away from the TV, a large blue and yellow macaw flapped his wings for a second and croaked, “Bishop sucks. Bishop sucks.”

Sitting on the couch…technically, sprawled on the couch, Gerald Check knocked a few small pieces of popcorn off his chest and nodded encouragingly at the bird. “You said it, Edgar.”

“Did you feed the bird, Gerry? Did you feed the bird?” the macaw asked.

“Shut up, Edgar,” he was answered.

Gerry looked for the remote, which he sitting on, recovered it and switched channels. A commercial for a self-shrinking garden hose came on, and he was content to watch it. It was better than looking at that smirking, smarmy, dirty, rotten, louse Bishop.

Gerry looked down at himself, at his butter-stained and popcorn-kernel bedecked Long Island University t-shirt along with the red-and-black fuzzy reindeer lounge pants that should have gone back into the attic two months ago, when the spring and summer clothes were supposed to have come out.

I look like a slob, he thought, but I wouldn’t if I was on the Fred Staunton Show, like I outghta be. Gerry scratched his copious belly, reminding himself that in all the publicity pictures and on the book-jacket covers, Sean Bishop always resembled a ‘60s surfer dude.

“Bishop sucks,” he said aloud.

“Bishop sucks,” agreed the macaw.

At that second a woman carrying a glass of raspberry-flavored sparkling water walked into the living room. Unlike Gerry, she was relatively flat of stomach, and her chest was reasonably prominent without the sags his own pectorals possessed. Her hair looked like there was a beauty parlor in the kitchen. She wore actual slacks, not jeans, and a shirt that Bloomingdale’s was proud to carry. Her face would never have been described as “beautiful,” but those who sought to describe it used words like “striking,” “handsome” or “expressive.”

She stopped in her tracks and surveyed the small pile of popcorn in front of the TV, tracing, as did Hansel and Gretel, the path of stragglers back to the couch.

“What.” She didn’t ask, she said, “What.” Again. “The hell is going on in here?”

Gerry Check, with some grunting, pulled himself to an erect seated position. He smiled a little-boy smile at her. “Hi, hon,” he said.

She hadn’t moved. “What the hell is going on in here?” she more or less repeated. “Was there a parade I wasn’t told about?”

“Oh, just a little editorializing,” Gerry said in a small voice. “I disagreed with what was on TV.”

She looked at the TV. The hose commercial was over, and she saw that Gerry was watching one of those “retro” channels so popular with the Baby Boomer crowd.

“You have an objection to Bonanza?” she asked, incredulous.

Gerry nodded his head. “Yeah. I always found it unnecessarily homoerotic.”

In one smooth motion, so fast he couldn’t stop her, she set her glass down and picked up the remote. Looking at him as if she just realized he was the architect of the Holocaust, she very ostentatiously pushed the ‘last channel’ button. Instantly, the large screen was full of the boyish, happy face of Sean Bishop. She groaned.

“Oh, for Christ-sakes, Gerry.” She picked up her glass, stepped over his feet, and settled herself down on the other end of the couch. “Shoot the damn TV, okay, but don’t go throwing popcorn all over my rug.”

Gerry picked up the remote from where she had dropped it on the couch and muted the show. “Well, he deserved it, Gloria. He put his face in my house.”

“MY house,” Gloria corrected. “I just let you live here ‘til I find the escape clause on the marriage license.” She took a sip of her water. “If you hate him so much, then why are you even watching him?”

“I like to remind myself how much he sucks.” Gerry almost sulked.

“Bishop sucks. Bishop sucks,” cried the macaw.

“See?” Gerry crowed, almost triumphantly. “Even Edgar thinks so, and he’s a birdbrain.”

“I think there’s more birdbrains in this room than are allowed by law,” Gloria said with a derisive snort. “You want to know what I think?”

“No, not now, not ever.”

“Good, then I’ll tell you. I think it’s time you get over this irrational hatred of Bishop and get on with whatever it is you call your life.”

Gerry shifted on the couch, turning toward her. He put on his serious face. “No, now listen to me for once. Support me for once. This…prick is on TV, pushing his twentieth novel in ten years. I met him…”

Gloria recited the rest of Gerry’s sentence along with him, word for word, inflection for inflection, as if she had heard it a hundred times before.

“…at the Monmouth Writer’s Retreat back in 1998, and this guy was the worst, most talentless jackass I had ever met in my entire life. He couldn’t write a successful laundry list, and woulda had trouble defining the plot of a See Spot Run book. He kept walking into the ladies’ room because he couldn’t spell ‘Men.’ And now, for some stupid godforsaken reason, just because he’s cute and editors are all brainless women who like to take out their titties and twiddle them when he walks in the room, he gets published while a true genius like me struggles in obscurity.”

They both stopped, sighed. “How’d I do?” Gloria asked.

“Not bad,” he admitted. “Though you usually giggle when you say ‘titties.’ I think you’re getting the hang of it.” He put on his most woebegone expression. “It’s who you know in the publishing business, not how good your stuff is. Bishop’s agent…I don’t even know who his agent is, but he or she’s gotta be a genius. Made a millionaire out of a sow’s purse…a damn colonoscopy receiver…”

“Yeah, well.” She took another sip of her water. “I’m a getting a little tired of this petulant act of yours. You have a job. You are a writer. I don’t know why you’re obsessed with him.”

“Because it ain’t fair,” Gerry whined. “I’m not a real writer. Not in my own mind, anyway. I write for some stupid goddamn soap opera.”

“You don’t write for some stupid goddamn soap opera,” she corrected him. “You write the whole stupid goddamn soap opera.”

“Yeah,” he fake-snarled at her, “and who won three daytime Emmys for best actress?”

He poked her in the abdomen. She slapped his hand away.

“Gloria Endgame, that’s who, star of the goddam soap opera. And whose were the words Gloria Endgame said that won her them damn Emmys, that no one ever thought to give an award to the creator thereof of those selfsame words, which if she didn’t say them, she wouldn’t’ve won any awards?”

Gloria looked at him like he had two heads. “I hope you don’t expect me to repeat that.”

“Repeat it?” he looked at her in wonder. “I don’t even know what the hell I said.”

Gloria graced him with an appreciative chuckle. “Well, what about Thomas?” she asked. “Can’t he do anything for you?”

Gerry made a soft Bronx cheer noise. “Thomas? He should quit the Writer’s Guild and sign up with the LAWFA.”

“The…LAWFA,” Gloria exaggeratedly repeated.

“Uh huh,” Gerry nodded. “Uh huh. League of Agents Who’re Freakin’ A-Holes. You know, I don’t think I told you, about a year ago I gave him a couple of novel manuscripts, one of which I already adapted into a screenplay, and asked him to market them for me. He comes back and you know what he says? ‘You’re a TV writer, Gerry, a soap opera guy. The publishing houses aren’t interested in TV writers, and the studios are only interested in seeing established movie writers.’ I mean, bullshit. Thomas Draw, Literary Consultant, he calls himself. Schmuck should be unloading trucks at Barnes and Noble, if he wants to be in the publishing business.”

“If that’s the case, why didn’t you get rid of him?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.

Her husband grimaced as if he had a gas pain. “Well…‘cause…I’m the only client he’s got that’s making him any kind of consistent money. I can’t…dump him, y’know…he’s been with me for more than fifteen years. Besides, his wife just left him, just up and left him, forty-two years they were married. Y’know, I just can’t…”

“Aww, my widdle witer has a soft spot for his fwiend,” Gloria cooed in a baby voice. “You know what’s going on? You, my love, my dove, my all, are just having a little hissy fit this evening and are crying out for a little attention.” She put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him. Kissed him again. Gave a little laugh and drew him on top of her as she lay back on the couch. He felt one of the reindeer on his pants getting a shiny red nose.

“Feed the bird, Gerry,” squawked the macaw. “Gerry, did you feed the bird?”

“Feed yourself, Tweety-pie,” Gerry murmured to him, and then said no more as his mouth became otherwise occupied.