Black Evening Read online

  The work was boring, really. Toward the end of Fletcher's Cove, he hadn't even faced the keyboard. He'd watched a week of television while he let his fingers tap whatever letters they happened to select. After all, it didn't make a difference what he typed. The strange machine did the composing. At the end of every television program, he'd read the last page the machine had typed, hoping to see The End. And one day, finally, those closing words appeared before him.

  After the success of Fletcher's Cove, he'd started typing again. He'd read the title Parson's Grove and worked patiently for twenty pages. Unenthusiastically. What he'd learned from his experience was that he'd never liked writing, that instead he liked to talk about . it and be called a writer, but the pain of work did not appeal to him. And this way, when his mind wasn't engaged, the work was even less appealing. To be absolutely honest, Eric thought, I should have been a prince.

  He'd put off typing Parson's Grove as long as possible. The money came so easily he didn't want to suffer even the one week he'd calculated would be necessary to complete the manuscript.

  But Jeffrey had alarmed him. There's no money? Then I'd better go back to the gold mine. The goose that laid the golden egg. Or what was it a writer's helper used to be called? Amanuensis. Sure, that's what I'll call you, Eric told his weird machine. From now on, you'll be my amanuensis. He couldn't believe he was actually a millionaire — at least on paper — flying in his own Lear jet, en route to New York and the Today show. This can't be really happening.

  It was, though. And if Eric wanted to continue his fine life, he'd better type like hell for one week to produce his second book.

  The jet streaked through the night. He shoved a sheet of paper into his amanuensis. Bored, he sipped a glass of Dom Perignon. He selected a cassette of Halloween and put it in his VCR. Watching television where some kid stabbed his big sister, Eric started typing.

  Chapter Three… Ramona felt a rapture. She had never known such pleasure. Not her husband, not her lover, had produced such ecstasy within her. Yes, the milkman …

  Eric yawned. He watched a nut escape from an asylum. He watched some crazy doctor try to find the nut. A babysitter screamed a lot. The nut got killed a half dozen times but still survived because apparently he was the boogey man.

  Without once looking at the keyboard, Eric typed. The stack of pages grew beside him. He finished drinking his fifth glass of Dom Perignon. Halloween ended. He watched Alien and an arousing woman in her underwear who'd trapped herself inside a shuttle with a monster. Somewhere over Indiana — Eric later calculated where and when it happened — he glanced at a sheet of paper he'd just typed and gasped when he discovered that the prose was total nonsense.

  He fumbled through the stack of paper, realizing that for half an hour he'd been typing gibberish.

  He paled. He gaped. He nearly vomited.

  "Good God, what's happened?"

  He typed madly, Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep.

  Those words were what he read.

  He typed, The quick brown fox.

  And that was what he read.

  He scrambled letters, and the scramble faced him.

  ***

  By the time he reached LaGuardia Airport, he had a stack of frantic gibberish beside him, and to make things worse, the typewriter jammed. He heard a nauseating crunch inside it, and the keys froze solidly. He couldn't make them type even gibberish. It's got a block, he thought and moaned. Dear God, it's broken, busted, wrecked.

  We both are.

  He tried slamming it to free the keys, but all he managed to do was hurt his hands. Jesus, I'd better be careful. I might break more parts inside. Drunkenly, he set a blanket over it and struggled from the jet to put it in the limousine that waited for him. He wasn't due at the television interviews until the next day. As the sun glared blindingly, he rubbed his haggard whisker-stubbled face and in panic told the chauffeur, "Manhattan. Find a shop that fixes typewriters."

  The errand took two hours through stalled trucks, accidents, and detours. Finally, the limousine double-parked on Thirty-Second Street, and Eric stumbled with his burden toward a store with Olivettis in the window.

  "I can't fix this," the young serviceman informed him.

  Eric moaned. "You've got to."

  "See this brace inside. It's cracked. I don't have any parts for something strange like this." The serviceman looked horrified by the sheer ugliness of the machine. "I'd have to weld the brace. But buddy, look, a piece of junk this old, it's like a worn-out shirt. You patch an elbow, and the shirt tears at the patch. You patch the new hole, and the shirt tears at the new patch. When you're through, you haven't got a shirt. You've just got patches. If I weld this brace, the heat'll weaken this old metal, and the brace'll crack in other places. You'll keep coming back till you've got more welds than metal. Anyway, a weird design like this, I wouldn't want to fool with it. Believe me, buddy, I don't understand this thing. You'd better find the guy who built it. Maybe he can fix it. Maybe he's got extra parts. Say, don't I know you?"

  Eric frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Aren't you famous? Weren't you on the Carson show?"

  "No, you're mistaken," Eric told him furtively. He glanced at his gold Rolex and saw that it was almost noon. Good God, he'd lost the morning. "I've got to hurry."

  Eric grabbed the broken typewriter and tottered from the building toward the limousine. The traffic's blare unnerved him.

  "Greenwich Village," Eric blurted to the bored chauffeur. "As fast as you can get there."

  "In this traffic? Sir, it's noon. This is midtown."

  Eric's stomach soured. He trembled, sweating. When the driver reached the Village, Eric gave directions in a frenzy. He kept glancing at his watch. At almost twenty after one, he had a sudden fearful thought. Oh, God, suppose the place is closed. Suppose the old guy's dead or out of business.

  Eric cringed. But then he squinted through the windshield, seeing the dusty windows of the junk shop down the street. He scrambled from the limousine before it stopped. He grabbed the massive typewriter, and although adrenaline spurred him, his knees wobbled as he fumbled at the creaky junk shop door and lurched inside the musty narrow shadowed room.

  The old guy stood exactly where he'd been the last time Eric walked in: hunched across a battered desk, a half-inch of cigarette between his yellowed fingers, scowling at a race-track form. He even wore the same frayed sweater with the buttons missing. Cobweb hair. Sallow face.

  The old guy peered up from the racing form. "All sales are final. Can't you read the sign?"

  Off balance from his burden, Eric cocked his head in disbelief. "You still remember me?"

  "You bet I do. I can't forget that piece of trash. I told you I don't take returns."

  "But that's not why I'm here."

  "Then why'd you bring that damn thing back? Good God, it's ugly. I can't stand to look at it."

  "It's broken."

  "Yeah, it figures."

  "I can't get it fixed. The serviceman won't touch it. He's afraid he'll break it even more."

  "So throw it in the garbage. Sell it as scrap metal. It weighs enough. You'll maybe get a couple dollars."

  "But I like it!"

  "Have you always had bad taste?"

  "The serviceman suggested the guy who built it might know how to fix it."

  "And if cows had wings — "

  "Look, tell me where you got it!"

  "How much is the information worth to you?"

  "A hundred bucks!"

  The old man looked suspicious. "I won't take a check."

  "In cash! For God's sake, hurry!"

  "Where's the money?"

  The old man took several hours. Eric paced and smoked and sweated. Finally the old man came groaning up from his basement with some scribbles on a scrap of paper.

  "An estate. Out on Long Island. Some guy died. He drowned, I think. Let's see." The old man struggled to decipher what he'd scrawled on the scrap of paper. "Yeah, his name was
Winston Davis."

  Eric clutched the battered desk; his stomach fluttered; his heart skipped several beats. "No, that can't be."

  "You mean you know this guy? This Winston Davis."

  Eric tasted dust. "I've heard of him. He was a novelist." His voice was hoarse.

  "I hope he didn't try to write his novels on that thing. It's like I told you when you bought it. I tried every way I knew to make them keep it. But the owners sold the dead guy's stuff in one big lump. They wouldn't split the package. Everything or nothing."

  "On Long Island?"

  "The address is on this paper."

  Eric grabbed it, frantically picked up the heavy typewriter, and stumbled toward the door.

  "Say, don't I know your face?" the old man asked. "Weren't you on the Carson show last night?"

  ***

  The sun had almost set as Eric found his destination. All the way across Long Island, he'd trembled fearfully. He realized now why so many readers had compared his work with that of Winston Davis. Davis had once owned this same machine. He'd typed his novels on it. The machine had done the actual composing. That's why Eric's work and Davis's were similar. Their novels had the same creator. Just as Eric kept the secret, so had Davis, evidently never telling even his close friends or his family. When Davis died, the family had assumed that this old typewriter was nothing more than junk, and they'd sold it with some other junk around the house. If they'd known about the secret, surely they'd have kept this golden goose, this gold mine.

  But it wasn't any gold mine now. It was a hunk of junk, a broken hulk of bolts and levers.

  "Here's the mansion, sir," the totally-confused chauffeur told Eric.

  Frightened, Eric studied the big open gates, the wide smooth lawn, the huge black road that curved up to the massive house. It's like a castle, Eric thought. Apprehensively he told the driver, "Go up to the front."

  Suppose there's no one home, he thought. Suppose they don't remember. What if someone else is living there?

  He left his burden in the car. At once both hesitant and frantic, he walked up the marble front steps toward the large oak door. His fingers shook. He pressed a button, heard the echo of a bell inside, and was surprised when someone opened the door.

  A gray-haired woman in her sixties. Kindly, well dressed, pleasant looking.

  Smiling, with a feeble voice, she asked how she could help him.

  Eric stammered, but the woman's gentle gaze encouraged him, and soon he spoke to her with ease, explaining that he knew her husband's work and admired it.

  "How good of you to remember," she said.

  "I was in the neighborhood. I hoped you wouldn't mind if I stopped by. To tell you how I felt about his novels."

  "Wouldn't mind? No, I'm delighted. So few readers take the time to care. Won't you come in?"

  The mansion seemed to Eric like a mausoleum — cold and echoing.

  "Would you like to see my husband's study? Where he worked?" the aging woman asked.

  They went along a chilly marble hall. The old woman opened an ornate door and gestured toward the sacristy, the sanctum.

  It was wonderful. A high wide spacious room with priceless paintings on the walls — and bookshelves, thick soft carpeting, big windows that faced the white-capped ocean where three sunset-tinted sailboats scudded in the evening breeze.

  But the attraction of the room was in its middle — a large gleaming teakwood desk, and like a chalice on its center, an old Smith-Corona from the fifties.

  "This is where my husband wrote his books," the old woman told him proudly. "Every morning — eight until noon. Then we'd have lunch, and we'd go shopping for our dinner, or we'd swim or use the sailboat. In the winter, we took long walks by the water. Winston loved the ocean in the winter. He… I'm babbling. Please, forgive me."

  "No, it's quite all right. I understand the way you feel. He used this Smith-Corona?"

  "Every day."

  "I ask, because I bought a clunky typewriter the other day. It looked so strange it appealed to me. The man who sold it told me your husband used to own it."

  "No, I…"

  Eric's chest cramped. His heart sank in despair.

  "Wait, I remember now," the gray-haired woman said, and Eric held his breath.

  "That awful ugly one," she said.

  "Yes, that describes it."

  "Winston kept it in a closet. I kept telling him to throw it out, but Winston said his friend would never forgive him."

  "Friend?" The word stuck like a fishbone in Eric's throat.

  "Yes, Stuart Donovan. They often sailed together. One day Winston brought that strange machine home. 'It's antique,' he said. 'A present. Stuart gave it to me.' Well, it looked like junk to me. But friends are friends, and Winston kept it. When he died, though…" The old woman's voice changed pitch, sank deeper, seemed to crack. "Well, anyway, I sold it with some other things I didn't need."

  ***

  Eric left the car. The sun had set. The dusk loomed thickly around him. He smelled salty sea air in this quaint Long Island coastal village. He stared at the sign above the shop's door: DONOVAN'S TYPEWRITERS — NEW AND USED — REBUILT, RESTORED. His plan had been to find the shop and come back in the morning when it opened. But amazingly a light glowed faintly through the drawn blind of the window. Although a card on the door said CLOSED, a shadow moved behind the shielded window.

  Eric knocked. A figure shuffled close. An ancient gentlemen pulled up the blind and squinted out toward Eric.

  "Closed," the old man told him faintly through the window.

  "No, I have to see you. It's important."

  "Closed," the man repeated.

  "Winston Davis."

  Although the shadow had begun to turn, it stopped. Again pulling the blind, the ancient gentleman peered out.

  "Did you say Winston Davis?"

  "Please, I have to talk to you about him."

  Eric heard the lock snick open. The door swung slowly inward. The old man frowned at him.

  "Is your name Stuart Donovan?"

  The old man nodded. "Winston? We were friends for many years."

  "That's why I have to see you."

  "Then come in," the old man told him, puzzled. Short and frail, he leaned on a wooden cane. He wore a double-breasted suit, a thin silk tie. The collar of his shirt was too large for his shrunken neck. He smelled of peppermint.

  "I have to show you something," Eric said. Hurrying back from the limousine, he lugged his ugly typewriter toward the shop.

  "Why, that's…" The old man's eyes widened in surprise.

  "I know. It was your gift to Winston."

  "Where…"

  "I bought it in a junk shop."

  Wearied by his grief, the old man groaned.

  "It's broken," Eric said. "I've brought it here for you to fix."

  "Then you know about…"

  "Its secret. Absolutely. Look, I need it. I'm in trouble if it isn't fixed."

  "You sound like Winston." The old man's eyes blurred with memories of long ago. "A few times, when it broke, he came to me in total panic. 'Contracts. Royalties. I'm ruined if you can't repair it,' he'd say to me. I always fixed it, though." The old man chuckled nostalgically.

  "And will you do the same for me? I'll pay you anything."

  "Oh, no, my rate's the same for everyone. I was about to leave. My wife has supper waiting. But this model was my masterpiece. I'll look at it. For Winston. Bring it over to the counter."

  Eric set it down and rubbed his aching arms. "What I don't understand is why you didn't keep this thing. It's worth a fortune."

  "I had others."

  Eric stiffened with surprise.

  "Then too," the old man said, "I've always had sufficient money. Rich folks have too many worries. Winston, for example. Toward the end, he was a nervous wreck, afraid that this typewriter would break beyond repair. It ruined him. I wish I hadn't given it to him. But he was good to me. He always gave me ten percent of everything he earned."r />
  "I'll do the same for you. Please, fix it. Help me."

  "I'll see what the problem is."

  The old man tinkered, hummed, hawed, and poked. He took off bolts and tested levers.

  Eric bit his lips. He chewed his fingernails.

  "I know what's wrong," the old man said.

  "That brace is cracked."

  "Oh, that's a minor problem. I have other braces. I can easily replace it."

  Eric sighed with relief. "Then if you wouldn't mind…"

  "The keys are stuck because the brace is cracked," the old man said. "Before the keys stuck, though, this model wasn't typing what you wanted. It wasn't composing."

  Eric feared he'd throw up. He nodded palely.

  "See, the trouble is," the old man said, "this typewriter ran out of words. It used up every word it had inside it."

  Eric fought the urge to scream. This can't be happening, he told himself. "Then put more words inside it."

  "Don't I wish I could. But once the words are gone, I can't put new ones in. I don't know why that happens, but I've tried repeatedly, and every time I've failed. I have to build a brand new model."

  "Do it then. I'll pay you anything."

  "I'm sorry, but I can't. I've lost the knack. I made five successful models. The sixth and seventh failed. The eighth was a complete disaster. I stopped trying."

  "Try again."

  "I can't. You don't know how it weakens me. The effort. Afterward, my brain feels empty. I need every word I've got."

  "God dammit, try!"

  The old man shook his head. "You have my sympathy."

  Beyond the old man, past the counter, in the workshop, Eric saw another model. Knobs and levers, bolts.

  "I'll pay a million dollars for that other one."

  The old man slowly turned to look. "Oh, that one. No, I'm sorry. That's my own. I built it for my children. Now they're married. They have children of their own, and when they visit, my grandchildren like to play with it."

  "I'll double what I offered."

  Eric thought about his mansion on the Hudson, his estates in Bimini and Malibu, his yacht, his jet, his European trips, and his Ferrari.