Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,7

the crowded shelves of his books, his desk, substantial.

Or were they? When he looked more closely, the walls of his study seemed to recede. Perhaps instead he was the phantom, for through the ghostly walls of books, he began to see strange cities rising. Pre-Babylonian towers washed by a silent sea. Medieval castles lost within thick forests. Frontier forts standing guard beside unknown rivers. He recognized London, New York, Paris—but their images shimmered in a constant flux of change.

The writer watched in silence, his black eyes searching the faces of the throng that moved about him. Now and again he thought he glimpsed a face that he recognized; but he could not call their names. It was like meeting the brother of an old friend, for certain familiar lines to these faces suggested that he should know them. But he had never seen their faces before. No one had.

A heavy-set man in ragged outdoor clothing passed close to him. The writer thought his virile features familiar. “Don’t I know you?” he asked in wonder, and his voice was like speaking aloud from a dream.

“I doubt it,” replied the young man. “I’m Ethan Blackdaw. You would know me only if you had read Jack London’s Spell of the Snows”

“I’m not familiar with that book, though I know London well.”

“He discarded me after writing only a fragment.”

The writer called to another visitant, a powerful swordsman in antediluvian armor: “Surely I’ve met you.”

“I think not,” the barbarian answered. “I am Cromach. Robert E. Howard would have written my saga, had he not ended his life.” A lean-faced man in dirty fatigues nodded sourly. “Hemingway doomed me to limbo in the same way.”

“We are the lost books,” murmured a Berber girl, sternly beautiful in medieval war dress. “Some writer’s imagination gave us our souls, but none of us was ever given substance by his pen.” The writer stared in wonder.

A young girl in the dress of a flapper smiled at him wistfully.

“Jessica Tilman wanted to write about me. Instead she married and forgot her dream to write .”

“Ben Pruitt didn’t forget about me,” growled a tall black in torn fieldhand’s overalls. “But no publishers wanted his manuscript. The flophouse owner tossed me out with the rest of Pruitt’s belongings that night when he died.”

A slim girl in hoopskirts sighed. “Barry Sheffield meant to write a sonnet about me. He had four lines completed when a Yankee bullet took him at Shiloh.”

“I was Zane Grey’s first book,” drawled a rangy frontier marshal. “Or at least, the first one he tried to write.”

A bleary-eyed lawyer adjusted his stained vest and grumbled, “William Faulkner always meant to get started on my book.”

“Thomas Wolfe died before he started me,” commiserated a long-legged mountain girl.

The walls of his study had almost vanished. A thousand, ten thousand phantoms passed about him. Gothic heroines and brooding figures in dark cloaks. Cowboys, detectives, spacemen and superheroes in strange costumes. Soldiers of a thousand battles, statesmen and explorers. Fat-cheeked tradesmen and matrons in shapeless dresses. Roman emperors and Egyptian slaves. Warriors of an unhistoried past, children of a lost future. Sinister faces, kindly faces, comic and tragic, brave men and cowards, the strong and the weak. There seemed no end to their number.

He saw a fierce Nordic warrior—a companion to Beowulf, had a war-axe not ended his stave. There were countless phantoms of famous men of history—each subtly altered after the conception of a would-be biographer. He saw half-formed images of beauty, whose author had died heartbroken that his genius was insufficient to transform his vision into poetry. A Stone Age hunter stalked by, gripping his flint axe—as if seeking the mammoth that had stolen from mankind its first saga.

And then the writer saw faces that he recognized. They were from his own imagination. Phantoms from uncounted fragments and forgotten ideas. Characters from the unsold novels that yellowed in his files. And from the unfinished manuscript that lay beside his typewriter.

“Why are you here?” the writer demanded. “Did you think that I, too, was dead?”

The sad-eyed heroine of his present novel touched his arm. “You are the last writer. This new age of man has forgotten you. Come join us instead in this limbo of unrealized creation. Let this ugly world that has grown about you sink into the dull mire of its machine imagination. Come with us into our world of lost dreams.”

The writer gazed at the phantom myriads, at the spectral cities and forests and seas. He remembered the dismal reality