Frankenstein’s Revenge, I said.
He looked hard at me, like a jeweler inspecting an opal for imperfections, and then, as the memory awoke for him, said: Exactly. Exactly. Wow, yeah. The whole point of the game is that the monster gets free, right? There’s no game if he doesn’t break the chains, we should have called that game “Frankenstein’s Chains.” So, yeah, when people send me something, a lot of the time I’m just, like, Cool, wild stuff, and I don’t ever think of it again, but Ashton is a smart guy, very little of my stuff would be half as good as it is without these little gentle prods he gives along the way, innocent questions about character or whatever that end up pushing me in the direction that leads to the good stuff—and, just here, there was a bubble in his monologue, a ripple in the current of the low-level mania that seemed to be animating him, and he took a bite of pizza and mumbled, with his mouth full: Good stuff, his eyes searching for something somewhere in the grain of the table.
The good stuff, I said, just to fill up the empty space in the conversation while he chewed his food.
Yeah, he said, wiping his mouth with the paper napkin—it was printed in checkered red-and-white, the way all Italian restaurants seemed to prefer their décor when I was a kid. The stuff that gets me going, anyway. So I read the story he sends me, and he’s right, it feels like exactly my thing, I worry a little that I’ve already done the kids-slaughtering-the-grown-ups thing a little, but it’s also just the one clipping, there has to be more to it, and besides, it’s in Milpitas, and I remembered you, and our letters, and—listen, writers are terrible people, everything’s just material to us, it’s nothing personal but I’m still sorry about it, but the point is, I was thirty-seven years old at the time, and the second I saw the word Milpitas in the story I felt a very deep resonance, an echo from childhood, and I remembered you, how you used to write me about the movies you were watching on the TV your parents let you keep in your room, it was always monster movies, and it just set my mind going, there was something in there, you know?
I remembered my small black-and-white television, and the feeling of security when I’d watch it late at night: everyone else in the house asleep, and me watching cheap but terrifying B-movies by myself; and I thought about Gage’s lost ages and that maybe I gleaned a little of them.
Well, now, I said, I’ll read that when you’re done with it, are you almost done?
Oh, I’m done, he said. It’s sort of going through some major growth pains right now, there are several problems with it, I think it might end up running aground before it sees daylight. It’s hard to explain. You can read the manuscript I sent Ashton if you want.
We finished the pizza and I said I should be getting some sleep, my flight left the next afternoon and I had to allow for drive time. I’ve got a couch you can crash on, he said, and I said I’d probably better try to split a little distance between here and the city, I saw several Super 8s from the highway, and he said he understood, he’d spent some time on the road himself.
As we were saying good night on his front porch, he said, Wait here, and went inside for a minute. When he returned, he was carrying a wooden box that looked like something you might pick up at an auction or a yard sale. It was dusty but sturdy. There were no distinguishing marks or labels on it, save for the dings and scratches old things tend to pick up over time. It looked big enough to hold several dictionaries, big ones. Good luck, he said, you can send this back to me whenever, we’re into much, umm, later edits now, I don’t need it.
I flew home from San Francisco the next day on a half-empty plane with my mysterious cargo in the overhead bin.
6.
MY WIFE LOOKED ACCUSINGLY at Gage’s wooden box when I brought it home: in my travels, I rescue things like Gage’s box from dusty shelves around the world. All over our house lurk its wide-ranging brethren: matryoshka dolls, monster model kits, manual typewriters, old radios; big rocks, knobby sticks, oversized chunks of glass sanded smooth; off-brand comic books no one remembers, and trade publications that I will never read. It would be fair to characterize me as a collector of paperweights that haven’t yet learned their function. No, no, I said, this wasn’t me, you remember I told you about my friend Gage, the writer, the guy I knew in San Luis Obispo, he sent me home with a draft of his new book, the box holds it.
And to demonstrate good faith, I opened the box, which spoke rather more convincingly to her case than to mine. Even the title page was a mess; it presently read DEVIL HOUSE, but the same page had borne six other titles beforehand—OGRE HOUSE, TITAN HOUSE, SPECTER HOUSE, FIEND HOUSE, and BEAST’S LAIR—all of them struck through in turn with a ballpoint pen. I’d have thought you’d just make a new title page if you changed the name of your book, but reasoned that this might have been part of his procedure—tracking changes, keeping a record of the book as it grew from its beginnings to its final form. Maybe he’d typed them all out on one page to see how they looked, then scribbled through the ones that weren’t as good?