under her claw and pleased as punch. Good ol’ Punch. Or, maybe just maybe it was Judy who’d become a real girl. “I can see that you’ve seen. Infinite dark, infinite cold, infinite sleep. Much better than the alternative—infinite existence as a disembodied spirit. Awareness for eternity. All you have to do is let go. Let Mandibole eat your consciousness. Then, trot back to your little hotel room and go on permanent vacation.”
“My choice is non-being via having my mind dissolved or be a screaming head for eternity? What the fuck happened to door number three?” I said.
“Be glad of the choice. Most don’t receive one. Talk to L after the gig. He can help you get your mind right for the voyage into nothing. Don’t quit your quest a few miles from home. Don’t linger like HP and die of a tumor, last days spent wasting away on tins of cat food and the indifference of the universe. Don’t end it foaming and raving in a ditch as dear Edgar did. Who’d come to your grave with a flower and a glass of brandy every winter to mark your sad demise? You don’t rate, I’m afraid.”
Something cold and hard pressed against my temple and across the way, Mandibole, haloed in a shaft of hellish angelic light, the far wandering ice-light of devil stars, swiveled and stared into the gloom directly at me, into me, and winked, and an abyss was revealed.
“Oh, what is this bullshit again?” A bulb in the liquor case behind the bar blinked to life as a diving bell surfacing from the deeps, and worldfamous publisher GVG appeared and pried the bottle from the woman’s hand where she’d stuck it to my head. “Go tell Tom I don’t care how many Horror Writer’s Guild Awards he’s got rusting on his mantle. I still don’t regret not publishing that crap.” He smacked her sequin-studded ass and shooed her away, and she retreated to her friends with a hiss and a glare.
GVG owned a venerable science fiction magazine and had given me my first pro sale. I hadn’t seen him since the previous year’s World Fantasy Convention.
“Thanks,” I said, slumping with sudden weariness. “Quite a scene. One minute I’m getting lucky, the next I don’t even know what.”
“You weren’t getting lucky, farm boy. In New York City we call that shit getting unlucky. Take a hedge trimmer to that beard and you might not scare away all the nice girls. Or, on second thought, write something remotely commercial for once. Yeah, try that second thing.”
“The girlies like a man with folding green,” I said.
“Ain’t that the truth, my friend.” He smiled sadly and looked me in the eye. “The secret is chicks don’t dig seldom-read hosers like Mark S. So don’t be that guy. A little less of your Henry James lovin’-grampa’s favorite toilet reading and a bit more twenty-first century. Come into the light.”
I didn’t have the heart to crack wise, or to confess that it was way too late for a career-defining shift. We listened as Mandibole dispassionately described skulls stripped to bloody bone kicked around the equivalent of an Elysian soccer field while the gods cheered and diddled each other in the grandstands. But for me the spell was broken. I said, “Not giving Tommy boy the spring cover, huh?”
GVG shrugged and adjusted his Buddy Holly glasses. “I’m immune to the charms of pseudo philosophizing horror writers and their vampire bride entourages. Wanna see horror, come see what my three year old and a bottle of rubber cement did to the cat and a pile of slush manuscripts in my living room. Gonna have to bite the bullet and go electric one of these days. Just remember something, okay? Dunno what that spooky chick told you, what you’ve got planned, but the only thing that changes when you check out is that nothing ever changes again. It’s no different on the other side. No different at all.” With that, he squeezed my shoulder and darted back into the shadows, good deed for the evening accomplished.
“The faithful shall be eaten first as a reward. The non believers, the scoffers, the faithless, shall be eaten last, or not at all. As for you, my sweets, your fate is this—” Mandibole ceased speaking midsentence and became inert. As slowly as it had appeared, its body now receded into L’s sleeve and the sleeve collapsed upon the brief, discomfiting jangle of rusty bells, an echo of Poe and a