Alice got him settled down with a cup of coffee on the couch in her office. She took the chair.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Smithton?”
“Oh, you can give me a book contract with an advance in six figures and one hundred percent of subsidiary rights.” He grinned.
She grinned back. “We’d love to see a proposal from you, Mr. Smithton. I’m sure you still have many fans out there who’d buy a book with your name on it. After all, you’re one of the veteran writers in the field.”
“I’d be surprised if any of my old fans were still alive. I haven’t had anything in print for years and years.”
“Yes, I know. We put out reissues of backlist titles every month. Your name has come up several times during our weekly editorial meetings. Uh … I’m sorry to say we haven’t actually done anything about it yet, but —”
“Quite all right, Ms. Sussman. You couldn’t have, anyway. The rights have long since reverted to me, and I was out of contact for so long. I’m not complaining. I’ve been out of the country for years. I just recently came back to New York to look into some financial affairs of mine. Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out the way I’d expected, and, frankly … to use the modern idiom, I’m having cash-flow problems.”
Alice sat back and crossed her legs. “I see. Well, we’d certainly like to do all we can to help. But of course —”
“I certainly don’t expect a contract and a check today. A few days would be fine.”
Alice chuckled. “That’s asking a lot of the machinery around here. Generally it takes a few weeks to produce a contract, and another few weeks to grind out a check. Minimum.”
“I understand. Of course, I wouldn’t expect special treatment just walking in here after thirty years —”
“Well, we’d like to do anything we can. We’ll certainly look into reprinting some of your books, Mr. Smithton. I’m afraid I can’t promise you anything at the moment, but —”
“You’re very kind. What titles do you think would go these days?”
She teethed her lower lip. “Well … ”
“Fortress Planet, perhaps?”
“A classic, and one of my favorites,” she lied whitely.
“You flatter me. Blood Beast of the Demon Moon?”
“Is that a horror number?”
“On the cusp. How about my fantasy,Castle Ramthonodox? Then, of course, there’s my story collection,Bright Comets and Other Obfuscations. ”
“Your work has been somewhat … neglected.”
“I’m a has-been, you mean. Forgotten.”
“Hardly,” she said.
“Oh, it’s true. And I never was prolific —”
“Unfortunately, quantity does count, as well as quality.”
“— but it seems to me that I never did receive the last few royalty statements that were due.”
Alice sat up. “Oh.”
“I realize that thirty years is a long time, and your records … ”
“Well, as a matter of fact, we do have a number of open files. Authors whose estates or heirs we can’t locate. It may very well be —” She got up. “Won’t you please wait here while I check with our accounting and legal departments?”
He cashed the check at a local bank and walked down Madison Avenue, heading for a little curio shop he used to know in the Lower East Side.
It had been tough persuading Alice Sussman — and the people in accounting — to cut him a royalty check this very day. The domination spell he had cast over the entire office had barely worked. Back home, everyone in the Bishop Publishing Galaxy would have been his willing slave. They all would have leaped out a ten-story window for him, single file. Here — forget it. The spell had only oiled the machinery a little bit. But it had worked. Done the job.
Well, there’d been a little give-and-take. Allie (at lunch she told him to call her that) had just about insisted that he submit an outline and sample chapters of a new book. Instead, over chicken lo mein, he spun out the plot of a sequel to Fortress Planet, quite off the top of his head, and she loved it. Well, the spell helped there a little, he had to admit. He hadn’t written a word of fiction in years, and it must have been dreadful bilge he spilled out. Anyway, she’d offered a $14,000 advance, and he couldn’t bring himself to refuse … Besides, he was stranded here and needed the money.
All in all, New York hadn’t changed as much as he’d expected. Numerous landmarks had disappeared, replaced by austere modern structures (he rather disliked the ubiquitous Bauhaus influence), but plenty of familiar sights were still left. He remembered this part of town well.
He began to notice that there were more distressed people milling about than he recalled seeing during the Great Depression. He passed a slovenly middle-aged woman who carried two great bags stuffed with debris. She was followed by an emaciated man in a filthy overcoat who seemed to have difficulty controlling his tongue. These and other unfortunates made up a good percentage of the sidewalk population.
Wetting a mental finger and putting it up into the psychic wind, he got a subtle but overriding sense of decay, of desuetude, of things coming apart. Pity. It was a good town, but it had once been a great town.
The curio shop was just where he remembered it to be. The shops around it had been long since boarded up. A derelict lay unconscious on the sidewalk a few doors away. In the other direction, a nervous-looking youth regarded him from the doorway of an abandoned storefront.
He entered to the soft tinkling of a bell. The place was stuffed to the ceiling with an amazing collection of miscellaneous junk, and he was astonished to recognize some pieces from years before. Obviously business had not been brisk. The place smelled of must, dust, and stale cigar smoke.
There was a sallow young man behind the counter. He did not smile when he asked, “Can I help you?”
“Is Mr. Trent in?”
“Why … yes, he is. Who shall I say is calling?”
“Carney. John Carney.”
“One moment.”
The young man slipped through a tattered curtain into a back room. There was a murmuring of voices. Then the young man returned.
“Mr. Trent will see you. This way.”
He followed the young man into the back room. There, seated at an ancient rolltop desk, was a man in his early sixties wearing a gray suit of fashionable cut, along with a burgundy tie, a tailored shirt with a crisply starched collar, and oxblood loafers burnished to a mirror shine. Even in the dim light he cut an imposing figure. His hair was blond-white, his face thin. His eyes were ethereal blue disks over a thin blade of a nose. The mouth was small and precise. He regarded his visitor, eyes narrowing, straining for recognition. At length and with some astonishment, he said, “It is you.”
“Hello, Trent.”
Trent rose and offered his hand, nodding to the young man, who retreated through the curtain.
“Incarnadine,” Trent said.
“Greetings, my long-lost brother,” Incarnadine said in Haplan, the ancient tongue of the even more ancient tribe of the Haplodites. “How dost thee fare?”
“Thou art a sight for longing eyes,” Trent answered. “Let’s stick to English,” he added, “or Alvin will start to wonder.”
“Alvin looks okay. I’ll bet he’s heard many a strange thing back here.”
“You’re right. Have a seat.” Trent dragged up a battered hardback chair.
Incarnadine sat. “It’s been a long time.”
“How did you ever manage to get here?” Trent said.
“Well, I’ve been meaning to crack the problem of the lost gateway for the longest time. Just recently it occurred to me that it could be one of the orbiting variety, the kind that don’t necessarily stay inside the castle. So, I whipped up a flyer, searched the sky over the castle — and sure enough, there it was. Had a devil of a time chasing it down, though.”