Black Evening by David Morrell Read Free Book Online Page B

years have led them forward. Flashes now and then, but little recollection, and he asks them, but they do not hear the laughter.
    And the answer? The police at first suspected that he killed her, but they found no body, and he managed to convince them of his innocence. He had seldom argued with her, had always seemed to like her. There was no other woman and no insurance as a motive. Still he often wonders. With this tendency of his to be both "I" and "he," in past and present, he could maybe have a double personality. He could have killed her, and as someone else, he never would have known about it, although he can't find a reason he would have.
    All right, she was kidnapped. But there was never a ransom note, and his mind can't sustain the thought of what a kidnapper who left no note would do to her. Imagining his wife alone and trembling, he continues to hope that one day she'll come back to him. He even hopes, although this would normally be painful, that she left him, that the changes they'd been going through weren't half so good as when they first had started, that the man whom someone might have seen had been a secret friend who led her to a better life.
    He wishes, and he grieves and, in his constant emptiness, imagines that she actually is with him, all around him, that she never went away but only back.
    To where? he asks himself and answers — to her youth, her innocence.
    His theory is fantastic, although consoling: that in every person's life there is a place that one can fall through, even by choice slip through, that she lives now with the laughter in a better time and space; and sometimes he can hear a woman in among the children's laughter, playing games perhaps or just enjoying, bringing home to him those words from Eliot again. What might have been. What has been. My words echo with the laughter.

 
    Four stories in ten years. I'm not prolific. Do authors who
are
prolific have a secret weapon, something that increases their output — a special typewriter, for example? The following story, a mix of darkness and humor, portrays the bleak side of author envy. It's longer than my previous stories and, with a few exceptions, establishes a trend — from this point on, you'll be reading mostly novellas. Many of the cultural references in this piece, Truman Capote and Johnny Carson, for example, are now out of date, but when I attempted to substitute current equivalents, the story didn't work. At first puzzled, I finally realized why Truman and Johnny had to stay. This story belongs in 1983, the year it was published. After all, if it were current, it would have to be about a word processor.
    Â 

The Typewriter
    Â« ^ »
    Â 
    Eric tingled as if he'd touched a faulty lightswitch or had stepped on a snake. His skin felt cold. He shuddered.
    He'd been looking for a kitchen chair. His old one — and the adjective was accurate — in fact, his
only
kitchen chair had been destroyed the previous night, crushed to splinters by a drunken hefty poetess who'd lost her balance and collapsed. In candor, "poetess" was far too kind a word for her. Disgustingly commercial, she'd insulted Eric's Greenwich Village party guests with verses about cats and rain and harbor lights — "I hear your sights. I see your sounds." — a female Rod McKuen.
Dreadful
, Eric had concluded, cringing with embarrassment.
    His literary parties set a standard, after all; he had his reputation to protect. The Subway Press had just released his latest book of stories,
After Birth
. The title's punning resonance had seemed pure genius to him. Then too, he wrote his monthly column for the
Village Mind
, reviewing metafiction and post-modern surreal prose. So when this excuse for a poetess had arrived without an invitation to his party, Eric had almost told her to leave. The editor from
Village Mind
had brought her, though, and Eric sacrificed his standards for the sake of tact and the continuation of his