Duane Cribb subtly repositioned his posterior deeper into the well worn gluteal groove in the seat of his study’s comfy red leather chair. He was proud of the arse groove in his chair. It was, he felt, testament to his dedication as a writer. It was, in actuality, more of a testament to his sedentary lifestyle as the chair was less than a week old.
Duane turned his attention back to the gaudy pixilated scales of the fishes on his laptop’s screensaver and quickly fell back into the dejectedly mesmerized state of one burdened with innumerable commitments, but nowhere near enough time to even decide which one to fulfil first.
The responsibility weighing heaviest on him that day was the 1000 word concluding chapter of a noirish thriller he’d been serializing for True Detective. The last five segments of the story, entitled ‘The Mysterious Affair of the Laughing Falcon’ had been drafted, finalised, posted and published without delay and little consternation on Duane’s part, but the final instalment had been plaguing him for almost a week.
Duane drowsily slapped the side of his laptop’s monitor with his heavy left paw to break the spell of the screensaver and promptly fell under the spell of the cursor blinking on the empty screen. Time elapsed. The air outside chilled as the twilit sky darkened considerably. Duane’s eyes remained resolutely fixed on the blinking cursor. After about twenty minutes the myriad chemical impulses shooting through the deepest recesses of his subconscious coagulated into a disturbing thought which slowly bubbled up to the forefront of his mind.
“What…the hell…is wrong…with me?”
It had been almost three hours since he last typed a word on his laptop and that was his logon password. The blank screen had signed a cruel entente with the clock in the bottom right hand corner and they’d joined forces to mock him brutally.
He removed his wire frame glasses, massaged his eyes with his chubby, nicotine stained fingers and tried to catapult himself out of his mental rut. The final chapter had to be winding its way to his publishers desk by 8:00am the next morning to meet the magazine’s deadline. As it stood, the hero, Mack Mallett, was caught in a tense Mexican Standoff with his arch nemesis Xavier Kane (a.k.a. The Laughing Falcon) and his ex-lover, the sultry femme fatale Maria Dubois in an abandoned warehouse in a deserted area simply known as ‘The Waterfront’.
He cast his tired eyes over the shelves that obscured about 90% of the study’s oak panel walls, sagging under the vast weight of all his books, cheap pulp novels and weighty tomes. He ran his eye over the spines. Mickey Spillane, Agatha Christie, Kurt Vonnegut, The Bible and his prized literary posession, a leather-bound copy of ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac that he’d picked up for three quid from a stall in a Church fete. One day, he promised himself, one day his name would adorn the shelves of studies around the globe, one day he would be a permanently established luminary within the annals of crime fiction. People might even mention his name in the same breath as that of Mickey Spillane.
He turned back to the computer and tried to focus his thoughts.
After a few moments he was struck with inspiration The oak paneled walls of the study melted around him and he was in the Warehouse of his own creation. He could smell the blood of the Laughing Falcon’s henchmen (ruthlessly dispatched in chapter four), could taste the acrid brine on the breeze blowing over the docks, could feel Maria Dubois’ palpable terror and the steely cold muzzle of the Falcon’s snub nosed 22. against her temple. He was Mack Mallet. His fingers flew furiously across the keyboard.
*‘The scene was tense. The Falcon was edging towards the exit with his arm around Maria’s neck and a gun to her head. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs.
The Falcon cocked the gun.
“Quiet, kid or I’ll pop you where you stand”
“Drop the kid, Falcon” I said, screwing a Marlboro between my lips
“Drop the kid? You gotta be kidding me”
“Now’s no time to be a wise guy Falcon. The uniformed boys will be here any moment. You’ve nowhere to run.”
“Ah yes, but I have the girl. You’re gonna let us walk, see?”
“Ain’t gonna happen Falcon. Y’think I care about her?”
Marcia’s eyes widened. “Mack!” she exclaimed in shock “I thought you loved me.”
“Quiet, kid” I said, taking a drag on my cigarette. “You’re disturbing my concentration”.
I looked the Falcon straight in the eye and said
“Listen Falcon. You don’t need the Kid. She’s worthless. We’re not gonna bargain for her so you might as well let her go. Let’s you and me settle this like men”
“You think I’m a fool, Mallet?”
I let my gun fall to my side.
“Your move, Falcon.”
I took a final drag on my cigarette and threw it into a grimy puddle. The drone of police sirens was getting louder every moment. In two minutes the entire dock would be swarming with Cops. But I didn’t want to wait for them. The Falcon had killed too many of my friends to let him worm his way out of a date with Old Sparky on a lawyers trick. The only way he was leaving this warehouse was in a bag.’*
Duane paused for a moment.
“Wow”, he thought, “Where did that come from?”
He reread what he had just wrote. It was good. Very good, in fact. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something slightly…familiar about it but he put that down to a touch of déjà vu and dismissed it. He resumed writing
*‘The Falcon stared at me in disbelief, his eyes moved from the gun by my feet to meet my cold stare, then back to the gun. He looked at me and said
“…”’*
Duane paused. What could the Falcon say? Ideally, since time was pressing, it should be something that efficiently expedited the mano-a-mano fight to the death between him and Mack Mallet. He furrowed his brow in agitation and tried to force the appropriate rejoinder from his mind.
Ten minutes later he still had nothing, apart from a slight headache.
“See! That’s what you get for stopping when you’re on a roll. Idiot!” he thought, angrily. “Just proves what I’ve always said. Inspiration comes in fits and starts. You can’t just turn it on and off. It’s not a fucking toaster.”
Still berating himself, he got up and began pacing around his desk. A few years ago he’d heard from a copy editor that Mark Twain used to dictate his stories, chapter by chapter, to a secretary while striding to and fro about his living room and ever since then Duane believed he got better results when thinking on his feet. It was no use, however, his mind was blank.
He sat back down, morose and dejected. He looked back at his bookshelves, Spillane, Christie, Vonnegut…they’d all made it. And they must have had days like this. Comforting as that thought was it didn’t inspire him to write. It was no use. The tiny puddle of inspiration had evaporated. Or had it? Entirely without warning, the bubbling stew of rancor fermenting in Duane’s mind, like the primordial ooze, gave birth to a brainwave. He had it! Again, he began typing furiously.
*‘It was then that I observed a something of a change in the Falcons disposition. Whereas before it had been fraught and desperate, it was now more pensive. Serene, almost. As the shrill wail of the police sirens grew louder, I realised that the brute had surrendered to the idea that death or incarceration constituted his remaining viable options.
He relinquished his hold on Maria, who ran towards me and threw her arms around my neck. As a professional man, I naturally aim at discretion and so hurriedly disentangled myself from her grasp.
“Quickly, my dear.” I instructed sternly “Run to the police. They’ll be here momentarily.”
The Falcon and I watched her go, and then turned our attentions to eachother. The Falcon dropped his pistol and advanced towards me, his eyes black with thoughts of murder.
“So it has come to this” The Falcon said evenly, keen not to betray the extent of his fury.
“It would seem to have.” I replied.
“You really wish to beat me to death with your bare hands?” he said with a fint hint of incredulity.
“Nothing would give me greater satisfaction”
“I feared as much. Well, in that case” said the Falcon, reaching down towards his right boot “I hope you don’t mind if I compensate for your height advantage.”
To my horror, I saw that when he straightened up, he was brandishing a gleaming straight razor.
“You swine!”
“Well, much as I would have liked to have settled this over a game of chess, I’m afraid your foolish bravado has put me in a position where I have no recourse but to slit your throat like a pigs.”
The gleeful emphasis he put on those last three words sent a jarring chill through my bones.’*
Duane stopped and reread what he had just wrote. Again, there was something not quite right about it. It was almost as if he’d read it before. Since that was completely impossible he pushed the thought to the back of his mind. At any rate, there wasn’t time to analyse it. It was nearly midnight and he was nowhere near finished. His eyes ached from concentrating on the computer screen. He decided to rest them for a few minutes and recharge his batteries…
“Duane? Duane? Wake up Duane.”
Duane’s sleep caked eyelids cracked open and he was confronted by the gently smiling face of his wife, Louise.
“You weren’t in bed when I woke up so I guessed you’d nodded off down here again. Here, I brought you some coffee.”
“What time is it?” Duane grumbled
“About ten to nine” his wife replied sweetly.
As a general rule, the more terrible a revelation, the longer it takes to sink in. Duane sat paralysed, in stunned silence for nearly two minutes. All of a sudden every emergency switch in his brain flipped on, releasing buckets of adrenalin into his bloodstream as he frantically turned to his computer and began to write in a frenzy.
*“Listen:
The Falcon had pulled a razor on me. A razor was a domestic implement and its primary function was ensuring that people didn’t grow beards to get unsightly bits of tuna stuck in. Due to the uniquely human talent for figuring out the worst possible use for anything, the Falcon was attempting to use his razor to cut my throat.
However, implements with the secondary function of killing humans kill nowhere near as efficiently as implements whose sole function is to kill humans. It just so happened that I had one such implement, a gun, tucked into my waistband at the small of my back.
A gun is a weapon that fires lead projectiles at high speeds. Mine looked like this.”
When the Falcon saw it, his face turned the colour of curdled milk.
“Mack…be reasonable” he said. “The cops will be here any second and if you shoot me you’ll lose your badge”*
Duane stopped. What the hell? Had he just included a picture of a gun? Why? Why had he done that? It didn’t matter. He didn’t have time to proofread. His deadline had come and gone. He had to work.
“And so it came to pass that as the Falcon retreated I aimed my gun in between his eyes and pulled the trigger. And lo, the Falcon fell. And I advanced on him and saw that he was indeed dead. And I saw that it was good."
“Duane, honey. I’m making some bacon butties. Do you want some?”
“Honey, I have to work. Maybe later” Duane answered tersely.
He turned back to the keyboard.
*‘I strode towards the door just as the cop cars pulled up.
“He’s in there, fella’s” I muttered and turned towards the nearest exit from the docks thinking about life and death and all the glorious happenstances inbetween and about how much of it flew past like a benzedrine hallucination. And I shambled towards the city looking for Maria as I’d looked my whole life for people who interest me because the only ones for me are the wild and crazy one’s like her who never say anything dreary or commonplace and who conjur sparks of life from nothing and barely realise it. And I thought about the Falcon’s dead dead stare and my own pock marked face staring back at me from his dilated pupils and wondered if they’d ever come back to haunt me.
The End.”*
As there was no time to proofread it and no time to run out and post it, he attached it to an e-mail and sent it direct to his publishers. And then he breathed a gargantuan sigh of relief. The concluding chapter was finally finished. There was definately something not quite right about it, that was for sure, but it was too late to do anything about it now. It couldn’t have been anything important anyway, not if he couldn’t even put his finger on what it might be. He looked back at the bookshelf. Mickey Spillane, Agatha Christie, Kurt Vonnegut, The Bible and the one and only Jack Kerouac. Soon his manuscripts accompanied theirs. It was only a matter of time…
Right. That’s the story. Since you’ve gone to the trouble of reading it, I’d appreciate it if you took just one more minute to answer these three very simple questions. Thanks a million.
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Did you enjoy reading it?
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Did you get that Duane was unconsciously mimicking the style of the authors on his bookshelf?
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Do you think I mimicked the authors styles well or badly?
It’s only three pages. C’mon, I’ve seen you contribute to GD threads that are literally ten times as long with not so much as a single reference to arses or benzedrine. I’d really appreciate it if you told me what you thought.
