of his conversation focused on Barbara, and his inability to talk about anything else wore you out. During that convention, drink eventually did erode his speech, to the point where it became difficult to understand. After enough alcohol, he developed a gnomic twinkle which indicated that the vanity of human folly could still amuse him, but it was a sad echo of his former wit. He wandered through the convention like an unhappy ghost, visibly encased in his sorrow and isolated by it. Everyone who cared for him hoped he would soon come to terms with the end of his marriage and return to his best self.
Instead, at least from what I saw, he increasingly succumbed to his sense of loss. The Karl I met two years later at another convention in another city, this one forgotten, moved in a shuffle like an upright bear, was almost completely incomprehensible and existed within a profound, self-imposed isolation. His voice emerged in a dark brown, tarry rumble which obliterated individual words. Whatever he was taking kept him on his feet and ignited the gnomic twinkle, but the object of his amusement was incommunicable. He was glad to see me, and I to see him, and we embraced in our usual fashion. After that came only dismay. He was like a walking ruin.
Others closer to him, those who saw Karl on a daily basis or at least more frequently than I did, must have witnessed happier and more intact versions of the man. He continued to write and to edit, he travelled, he got out and did things. I wish I could have been with him at those times when he gathered himself together and again became something like that amazing person, the Karl Wagner I had the privilege of knowing for so many years. That person was splendidly one of a kind, and I miss him enormously. Karl’s degree of perception and the whole arduous, dedicated, observant balancing act it demanded of him during the course of his life could not but exact a cruel payment, whatever the conditions and terms by which it was rendered.
—Peter Straub
The Last Wolf
The last writer sat alone in his study.
There was a knock at his door.
But it was only his agent. A tired, weathered old man like himself. It seemed not long ago that he had thought the man quite young.
“I phoned you I was coming,” explained his agent, as if to apologize for the writer’s surprised greeting.
Of course... he had forgotten. He concealed the vague annoyance he felt at being interrupted in his work.
Nervously the agent entered his study. He gripped his attache case firmly before him, thrusting it into the room as if it were a shield against the perilously stacked shelves and shelves of musty books. Clearing a drift of worn volumes from the cracked leather couch, he seated himself amidst a puff of dust from the ancient cushions.
The writer returned to the chair at his desk, swivelling to face his guest. His gnarled fingers gripped the chair arms; his black eyes, bright beneath a craggy brow, bored searchingly into the agent’s face. He was proud and wary as an aging wolf. Time had weathered his body and frosted his hair. No one had drawn his fangs.
The agent shifted against the deep cushions and erased the dusty film on his attache case. His palm left sweat smears on the vinyl. He cleared his throat, subconsciously striving to clear his thoughts from the writer’s spell. It would be easier if he could see him just as another client, as nothing more than a worn out old man. Just another tired old man, as he himself had become.
“I haven’t had any success with your manuscripts,” he said softly. “No luck at all”
There was pain in his eyes, but the writer nodded stiffly. “No, it was obvious from your manner that you hadn’t been successful this time.” He added: “This time either.”
“Your last seven novels,” the agent counted. “Nothing.”
“They were good books,” the writer murmured, like a parent recalling a lost child. “Not great books, for all my efforts, but they were good. Someone would have enjoyed reading them.”
His eyes fell upon the freshly typed pages stacked on his desk, the newest page just curling from his ancient mechanical typewriter. “This one will be better,” he stated.
“That’s not the problem,” his agent wearily told him. He had told him before. “No one’s saying that you haven’t written well—it’s just... Who’s going to print them?”
“There are still