The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

THE LIBRARY OF THADDEUS TRIPP

3. Showdown At Chimney Rock

          I don't remember how we got onto the subject of William Burroughs but I was the one who brought up the idea of whether words could kill.
          “Burroughs once said that ‘the right combination of words can kill a man’.”
          “The quintessential dream of the unpublished writer,” said Thaddeus, allowing a smile to play across his lips, so that the image of Buddha forsaking his banyan tree for a leather armchair in Stoke, was complete.
          I sometimes wonder whether there is a touch of the psychic in Thaddeus. Maybe we spend too much time together. Maybe like an old married couple we can communicate our thoughts and finish each other’s sentences. We were talking about Burroughs and I happened to mention that ‘the right combination of words can kill a man’ and the conversation could surely travel in any number of different directions from that point, but Thaddeus, with unerring accuracy, chooses the right path and jumps ahead and chops down a tree to halt my carefully planned hike through the woods.  If we met to play chess and not merely to talk (and smoke) then each game would comprise a few deft manoeuvres with my knights and bishops followed by a “Checkmate in five moves” from Thaddeus. 
          I could let it go. I could change the subject. I could let the silence hang between us for a suitable length of time and then move the discussion on to another celebrated figure of the Beat Generation, or another drug-addled dreamer (there were plenty to choose from) or even another writer who had accidentally killed his wife (admittedly none immediately sprang to mind, but we live in hope). Or I could carry on down the route I’d planned.
          “I’ve been playing around with the idea for a story.”
          Thaddeus visibly resisted the urge to squirm and managed a polite, “Oh?”
          There was a time when I actually gave Thaddeus my stories to read. My manuscripts still rested on the bottom shelf of the bookcase by the fire, trapped between old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. Each night I visit I can never resist a furtive glance to see if the dust has been disturbed. Back then I would be eager to know what Thaddeus had thought of my stories and I would ask him as soon as I crossed the threshold. He would reply that he had not found the time to read them yet. There was so much inferior material he had to get through first. He wanted to shift that out of the way and then prepare his mind, empty it of all the common dross, so that he could give my work his complete and undivided attention. As a friend and trusted colleague, he felt he owed me that.
          After a while I waited until the first cigarette was lit before asking whether he’d cleared his mind sufficiently to read my stories. Soon it became the final question as I left his house. And then it went outside with me and stayed there, like a lazy cat, used to the warm hearth, being chucked out into the wind and the rain and spending the night scratching at the door, an annoying presence that we chose to ignore.
          It is the curse of the unpublished writer of course. The intimate knowledge of what you have written, the belief that it is the equal (for we are modest) of all that has been given the stamp of approval conferred by the great publishing houses of the world and thus deemed worthy to be imprinted on the pulp of dead trees. No one seems able to share the secret, no one reads the words and sees the connections, the sly allusions, the cunning construction, no one seems to concur with your opinion. And no matter how many times your work is not found suitable for their lists, it never seems to make the blind bit of difference to how you view your own creation.
          This lack of perception on the author’s part is like some noisome boil of pus which weighs you down and turns your progress through life from a pleasant journey full of wonders into an epic trudge more akin to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Cold and hungry, hunchbacked and snow-blind, buried beneath a drift of rejection slips, still you struggle on following the flickering fairy light of publication, a dancing Tinkerbell of desire, kept alive by a power of faith that in any other person would result in visions of the Virgin Mary and bloody holes in your hands and feet.
          So you seek out others, people with no connection to the book trade, people whose opinions, in effect, do not matter, for they cannot wield the sword to dub you ‘writer’. At this stage all you want is flattery, the kind word to trim the guttering wick to keep your dream alive. So it is disappointing, to say the least, when even your friends find your work unreadable, unsuitable even for their own paltry lists.
          Now, in deference to our friendship, I carry the burden of my lack of literary talent alone and Thaddeus disappears into the crowd, having rejected the more substantial role of Simon the Cyrenian. Still, in that pleasant time when a story is an ethereal thing, drifting around on whim and fancy, blown here and there on warm summer breezes, a sprite of ideas and possibilities and the odd line of poetic verisimilitude - before a single key has been pressed and a word has been typed and it crashes to earth, the wreckage strewn across the white landscape - in that prelapsarian state of a story, I would occasionally use Thaddeus as a sounding board. I would try out my ideas and see if they raised any response. The sound of one hand clapping is silence.
          “It’s about this hitman...”
          “Why are all your stories about hitmen?” asked Thaddeus.
          “They’re not,” I replied. Some certainly, but not all. In fact my major project at the moment was ‘The Study of Winthrop Lyle’ which was an episodic novel about this egregiously overweight, self-opinionated consulting detective and his charming, witty amanuensis, who together solve baffling mysteries without ever setting foot outside the fat bastard’s study.
          “Continue then,” said Thaddeus. “Once upon a time there was a hitman.”
          On occasion Thaddeus would blithely traverse the space that separates cruel wit. But I continued nonetheless. “And he comes across the Burroughs’ quote ...”
          “A well-read hitman,” interjected Thaddeus. “I see.”
          “This particular one is, yes. And so he decides to try and find ‘the right combination of words to kill a man’.”
          “Presumably to save on the cost of bullets.”
          “Not necessarily.” I had in fact decided on that as his motive but the way Thaddeus said it made it appear a little petty and mean. My hitmen were a varied bunch and although the streets they went down were invariably mean, they themselves were not. “This hitman is a linguistic philosopher, down on his luck.” It was a feeble bluff which failed to wipe the smirk off Thaddeus’ fat face. “Anyway, he tries to find the magic words. Before every hit he says a certain phrase to see if it has the required effect. He begins with the most obvious combinations of words, ‘I’m going to kill you’, ‘the end is nigh’, ‘death can come in many disguises’, with no result. Then he begins to use random collections of words, ‘sofa, chair, bedspread’, ‘marquetry, whale, petunia’. Again he comes up empty.”
          “I’m not surprised. Tell me, how many victims is he getting through, this hitman? At the rates they charge I would think by now that he had made more than enough money to retire to South America and abandon his picayune quest.”
          “Well, that doesn’t really come up. It’s set in this alternate reality where a lot of people require his services.”
          “Oh,” said Thaddeus, “I see.”
          “It’s like a gang war situation and there are a lot of hitmen and so they have to go around killing each other to reduce the competition and so the pay isn’t that good because market forces have driven down the wages and ....” I let it go there. Obviously I would have to work on the background a bit.
          “Times are hard for the hitmen in this alternative reality, I get the picture,” said Thaddeus, swigging back his wine. “Yes, I see. Go on.”
          I was beginning to wish I’d never started. “Well, after one encounter when he's reciting a particularly tricky phrase from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and his victim seizes the opportunity to grab a knife, he decides it will be safer to use the telephone. So he rings up before he does the job. After a while....”
          “What are the police doing all this time,” interrupted Thaddeus.
          “They’re all corrupt and turn a blind eye.”
          “Such is their lot, I suppose. I see. They don’t.”
          “So, after a while, he rings this man up and says, ‘Then came into the land of now and cried beneath tomorrow.’” I paused for a second to see if the phrase elicited any response from Thaddeus. It didn’t. “When he calls round to see the man he finds him dead on the floor, so the hitman goes off convinced that he’s found the killer words. The story ends with the police investigation. They find an empty bottle of painkillers and a message on the man’s answerphone. It’s a woman saying, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’”
          I waited for Thaddeus to comment. I thought it was neat. I was particularly pleased with the ‘then went into the land of now and cried beneath tomorrow’ bit. After the silence had become uncomfortable I said, “Well?”
          “You think the words, you write the words, you say the words, you hear the words. When do they do the trick? That’s your problem. Or at least it was Manuel Garcia Monteros’ problem when he wrote a similar story. He got round it by having a deaf protagonist, so he speaks the fatal words with impunity. Monteros never reveals the words themselves because that would defeat the object of the story. The reader’s willing suspension of disbelief would be sorely tried if they read the words and did not drop down dead on the spot.
          Pepito, an indian boy, is walking in the foothills of the Andes when he comes across an old man half-buried beneath a landslide. The boy tries to free him but with no success. The old man cries out in pain, although the boy doesn’t hear him. The old man realises the boy is deaf. He forces a slip of paper into the boy's hand. The boy reads the words written on the paper. He does not understand what the old man wants him to do. The words make no sense. He reads them out loud. The old man dies. The boy leaves the old man and starts walking to the nearest town. As he stumbles down the rough path he is surprised by a rattlesnake. The snake is poised, ready to strike. The boy stands there, terrified. He has no way to kill the snake, whose fangs are just inches away from his naked feet. The boy starts to say his prayers. He asks God for forgiveness. He says the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail Mary’, as the good Sisters had taught him. Then, for some reason unknown, he adds the words which the old man had written on the screwed-up piece of paper. And the snake dies. The boy is ecstatic at his miraculous release. He chants the words of the old man and sees ants stop dead in their tracks. He calls out to a passing bird and watches it fall from the sky. Finally the boy understands the power of the words and as he walks into Santa Juanita he considers ways in which this knowledge could be turned to his advantage. He thinks of raising an army of the deaf who could ride into battle screaming the dread phrase and vanquishing all in their path. For he is but a young boy and his dreams are the simple things of power and glory. He begins to see himself as a great superhero, like Batman or Green Lantern. He will fight crime and right wrongs and the name of ‘El Sordo’ will ring through the land like a mighty bell. As he wanders the streets of Santa Juanita, his mind engaged in childish dreams, he spots an act of villainy. A man is tugging at a woman’s handbag and threatening her with a knife. Pepito creeps up behind the man and whispers the magic words in his ear. The man, startled, turns round and sticks the knife in Pepito’s chest. And the story ends with the words: 'Pepito wasn't the only deaf person in Santa Juanita that day.’”
          Thaddeus did the Buddha thing again and waited for my reaction. I wanted to say, ‘Well, my story’s better because...’ but I knew I would need more than three dots to prove my case, so I let it go and Thaddeus continued.
          “It is an old idea of course, the wizard’s spell, ‘talitha koum’. The words which can kill or bring back the dead. I tried an experiment once. I knew an assistant undertaker by the name of Carew. One of his duties was to collect the bodies of his firm’s customers and so I asked him to make a note of any books he saw lying around at the scene of death. Perhaps I was amiss in calling it an ‘experiment’, that does imply the exercise of scientific method whereas Carew’s information was gathered in a more random fashion. I managed to weed out the books that obviously had no bearing on the victim’s decease. The bloated copy of ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ stuffed in the pocket of the drowned suicide. The blood-spattered copy of ‘The A.A. Touring Guide To The British Isles’ on the passenger seat of the smashed car. The endless pile of John Grisham’s and Stephen King’s on the bedside table. What I was looking for were instances of an open book clutched in a dead man’s hands. The possibility that they had just read the ‘fatal form of words’ and had been suddenly whisked off to meet their maker. Such tableaux de mort usually featured the elderly. On average, women live longer than men and so are statistically more likely to die in their beds from the simple effects of old age. I therefore decided to discount Catherine Cookson as a prime suspect. Old men, on the other hand, tended to favour cowboy books, westerns, and I was intrigued by the fact that one particular title kept cropping up in Carew’s lists: ‘Showdown At Chimney Rock’ by Jake Z. McKay.
          The experiment went on for about five years, until Carew was dismissed by his employer for petty theft. Presumably his crime was so petty that it was deemed unnecessary to involve the police. Either that or his employer did not wish to draw the attention of the public to what had been going on. Who knows what an undertaker’s assistant might take a fancy to? The last time I saw Carew I told him of my speculations about ‘Showdown At Chimney Rock’. I must admit I regret that a little. Two weeks later he was dead.
          “Run over by a bus?” I threw in, hoping to catch Thaddeus off guard and undermine his wild farrago.
          He merely guffawed and said, “I would it were so. No, he died at home, sitting in his armchair, in front of his fireplace. A heart attack, brought on by the stress of losing his job. A common enough occurrence, but it came as a bit of a shock to his neighbour. Carew was only thirty-three and although not what you'd call a fitness fanatic, he was in relatively good health.
          It was the neighbour who found the body and I asked him if Carew had happened to be reading anything at the time. He thought it an odd question but, then again this is Stoke, where you can pull out a book at a bus stop to while away your wait with a chapter or two and have a magic circle open up around you into which your prospective fellow travellers will not dare to tread for fear of contamination. Still, he humoured me and said Carew was reading a cowboy book. But no, he could not remember the title.”
          Thaddeus rose to his feet and fetched the set of steps which he used to reach the more inaccessible volumes in his library. He lifted himself up and brought down a tattered paperback from the top shelf. He blew off the dust and handed it to me. Of course, it was ‘Showdown At Chimney Rock’.
          “Have you ever read it?” I asked.
          “No. It is the one book in my library which remains unread.”
          I glanced across at my manuscripts on the bottom shelf and wondered if they had a place in his library. I studied the cover, the shadow of the titular rock spreading across a desert scene, seemingly in pursuit of a riderless horse. At the chimney's top a small black figure was bent over, presumably shot by the rifle which thrust its way into the foreground of the picture, poked between sagebrush and boulders. There was a curious dichotomy to the illustration, the naturalistic detail in front contrasting with the dreamlike quality of the scene in the distance. The latter reminded me of the work of de Chirico and I wondered if he ever turned his hand to book covers. I was just about to flick through the pages, an act of bravado to show Thaddeus that I had not been taken in by his ridiculous tale, when I saw the figure on the chimney top fall. Or rather, I noticed that he was no longer standing at the summit, but was now caught in mid-air, arms and legs akimbo. I stared at the picture for a while longer, then put the book down and reached for a cigarette. When I looked at the book again, the little man was still cart-wheeling through space to his inevitable doom. Curious, but these things happen. The brain sometimes fills in the details without bothering to consult the eyes. I must have imagined seeing the little man standing on the top of Chimney Rock.
          “Would you like to borrow it?”
          If I said yes, would Thaddeus then refuse to give it to me? Or would he let me take it home, and read it? Is that any way to treat a friend? Or was it all a game, based on a nonsense? Was he just seeing how far he could take it? Mate in five moves. “No, that’s o.k. I’ve got a big pile of stuff on the go right now, it’d take me ages to get round to it. Some other time, maybe.”
          I watched him put the book back in its appointed place and sucked some more smoke into my lungs. Maybe Thaddeus had indeed read my stories and wanted to remove the faint awkwardness that existed between us. Maybe he just wanted to put me out of my misery. Maybe he was tired of waiting for cigarettes to do the job and was frustrated by my relaxed approach to suicide. Or maybe the experiment continued. Maybe, one day, I would ask to borrow ‘Showdown At Chimney Rock’.

          At the door, as I buttoned my coat, Thaddeus asked, “By the way, do you happen to know what William Burroughs’ last words were?”
          “’Love... what is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. Love.’”
          “The sentimental old sausage,” said Thaddeus. “No wonder you like him. By the way, if you ever finish that story you must let me see it.”
          “Of course,” I said, but I had no intention of doing either. I had resolved to put my hitmen to one side and try another genre. I felt it was time to explore a new set of literary conventions and a different vocabulary. There was an Audie Murphy film on TV tomorrow afternoon. A perfect way to begin my research.