“I thought it was lovely,” she said indignantly. “Just because you’re not willing to go around and cry doom like Camus or Salinger or John Updike—”
“Do you remember when those hoods shot John Stennis in Washington, D.C.?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, puzzled by the abrupt change in direction.
“They held him up outside his house and after he handed over his wallet and watch, one of them said, ‘We’re going to shoot you anyway.’ Then they did it. That’s always haunted me. Or Capote’s book, In Cold Blood. I was nineteen when I read it, and the image of Perry Smith going around and blowing the Clutters’ heads off is as clear now as it was then. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be lying on the floor with your hands tied behind you and to see a man coming toward you with a shotgun, and knowing what he was going to do?”
“Ben, you’re giving me the creeps.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is hardly the place, is it?” He gestured at the dark around them.
“Go ahead,” she said. “It’s very important to me.”
“Why?”
“Because it is to you.”
He looked over to the right, and there was the Marsten House. The shutters had been pulled back—they were closed all day, every day—and the light shone out of the downstairs windows in rectangles.
“Those are kerosene lamps, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Yes…I think so.”
“Do you ever wonder who is up there?” he asked.
“Everyone in town wonders.”
He laughed. “I suppose they do. I wonder if Mabel Werts has got the straight dope yet?”
She chuckled throatily. “If she did, my mother would have it, too. You can bet Mabel’s bending every effort, though.”
“The book is set in a town like Momson,” he said, “and the people are like Momson people. There is a series of sex murders and mutilations. I’m going to describe one of the crimes in progress, from beginning to end, in minute detail. I’m going to rub the reader’s nose in it. I was outlining that part when Ralphie Glick disappeared. That’s why…well, it gave me a nasty turn.”
“I can understand that. Ben, is it necessary to be so…so clinical about violence?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It does to me, in this book.”
“Suppose you encourage somebody to commit a similar crime?”
“Do you mean like the kid who saw Psychoand then ran out and killed his grandmother?”
“Yes, something like that.”
“I’d like to think he would have killed her anyway,” he said. “That’s brutal, I suppose. What I mean is I wish she hadn’t been killed at all, but since she was, I hope Hitchcock isn’t an accessory after the fact. You know, people used to argue that drugstore pornography, stuff like Beach Blanket Gang-Bang, encouraged sex crimes. Then the government did a study and said that was full of shit. Most sex criminals are Eagle scout types with severe repression problems—like the old inquisitors who used to stretch teenage blondes on the rack and run their hands all over their bodies, searching for witch’s tits and marks of the devil—then reaming out their vaginas with red-hot pokers. The kid who masturbates in the bathroom over a skin magazine doesn’t want to run out and rape a six-year-old and then cut her up. A shy, retiring bank clerk who has no sex outlets at all and who broods in his room night after night may.”
“In other words, if a man is going to do it, he’ll do it regardless.”
“I distrust generalizations like that,” he said. “If The Night Creatureis published and six months later a series of crimes with the same M.O. crops up, I’d lose a lot of sleep. A writer who won’t take moral responsibility may be a good writer, but he’s a shitty human being in my book. And I think there are some writers who have made mistakes in judgment. In Airport, Arthur Hailey tells you how to make a suitcase bomb. There’s a lovely description of how to hot-wire a car in Texas Whirlwind, by Norman Sullivan. There are others, too.”
They had arrived at her house, and stood by the mailbox. The lights downstairs were on, shining out on the lawn, and looking in the front bay window, Ben could see Ann Norton rocking and knitting something.
“What’s the rest of it?” she asked.
“Well, the house. The guy who lives there is a recluse, has been for years. People start to suspect he’s the killer. They go up there and find out he’s hung himself in the upstairs bedroom. A note is found. I’m sorry, the note says. God forgive me for what I’ve done.
“The killings stop…for a while. Then they begin again. The town sheriff begins to think, you know, that the real murderer killed the old man and wrote the note to throw the scent. He gets a court order and the body is exhumed. But it’s gone.”
“It’s awful, all right,” she said.
“People begin to suspect something supernatural…even the sheriff can’t get the idea out of his mind. The book’s hero is a kid named Jamie Atwood. He goes up to the house because he wants to join the big kid’s club—”
“The hero is Ben Mears,” she said.
He bowed. “Every author makes a guest appearance in every book, Susan. There, that’s three generalizations about writers, and I told you that first day I’d only make one. That’s breach of promise.”
“Never mind that. What happens?”
“The old man is up there, awful and rotted, a real horror. Rope still dangling from his neck. It turns out in the end that the real murderer—the town librarian—killed the old man just as the sheriff thought, and then went one step further. Dug up the body, cut off the head, and—”
“Yes,” she said. “Ben, you’re like a stranger to me. Do you know that? I’m scared of you.”
“We’d all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other’s minds,” he said. “Do you know what made Poe great? And Machen and Lovecraft? A direct pipeline to the old subconscious. To the fears and twisted needs that swim around down there like phosphorescent fish. That’s what I’m after. And I’m getting it.”
“Does Jamie live?” she asked.
“No,” he said softly. “He’s the mad librarian’s last victim.”
“Well I think that’s awful,” she said, sounding upset. “Where’s the redeeming social merit in all that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Where’s the redeeming social merit in Psycho?”
“We’re not talking about Psycho,” she said stiffly.
“True,” he said. “I don’t know about social merit—I’ve always thought that was a crock. Morality is the only way to judge art. Art that trades on what happens to be socially acceptable is only pop art, and who wants to spend their life painting pictures of soup cans, even if you can sell them for a thousand bucks a crack? I think The Night Creatureis going to be an extremely moral book, at least by my own code. The portrait of the killer is drawn in blood. He’s the most detestable human being imaginable…he makes me a little sick just to write about him. But that isn’t the worth of the book. That’s not what I’m writing about.”
“Then what is?”
“The town,” he said, and his eyes gleamed. “The town and the madness that spreads over it and poisons it. I’m writing about mindless evil—the worst kind of all, because there’s no escape from it. No begging, no pleading, no logic will get you out of it. I’m writing about those hoods saying we’re going to shoot you anyway. About Perry Smith walking from room to room and shooting human beings as if they were chickens. About Charles Starkwether and Charles Manson and Charles Witman. I’m writing about the mindless violence that wants to rip all of our lives to pieces. Have you ever seen Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera?”
“Yes; at B.U. It gave me nightmares.”
“Then you know the scene where the girl creeps up behind him while he’s playing that great organ and pulls the mask off and she sees what a monster he is…I want to do that. I want to rip the mask off and show people that the Grand Guiginol lives on the corner of your own street…and in your own house.”