Denton hadn’t started out to be a horror writer — if that’s what he was, and he didn’t see it — or in fact to be a writer at all. All he’d managed to become after the war was a failing young farmer who didn’t know he was failing, able to keep going by not adding up his debts. Then, after he failed completely and everything was gone, his wife dead and his sons sent off to his sister because he had failed as a father, too, he had gone farther west and rattled about, done his marshalling, gone on to California. Then he’d begun writing because his head was so stuffed with sorrow he thought it would burst, and he had had to get it out. He had written half of a novel called William Read before he realized it was self-pitying claptrap — more failure. Then, disciplining the self-pity by realizing that it was not the same thing as sorrow, he had begun to set down experiences as if he were writing instructions on how to harness a team to a plough, and the result was The Demon of the Plains. That first novel ended with the farmer-hero hanging himself in the barn he had built with his own hands, and his body being wrapped in a horse blanket, already frozen, and stacked with the cordwood until the ground might thaw enough to bury him. Denton had found his method: a plain, unfeeling style that embodied appalling events.
The Demon of the Plains had given him a reputation beyond America. The French had made comparisons to Poe (whom he despised), the English to Le Fanu (whom he didn’t know). In fact, he saw no horror in The Demon of the Plains except the horror of solitude and unending labour and failure, and the hero’s sense that a force, a demon or perhaps a ghost of the Indians who had lived there, persecuted him. Denton thought he had made it clear that the demon was only in the character’s mind, a way of making the untractable and the appalling comprehensible, but the word ‘demon’ set people going. When his second book, At Battle’s End, proved to have ghosts in it (who were not ghosts to him but fantasies of the war-maddened hero’s collapse), the word ‘horror’ was everywhere in the reviews. At Lang’s urging (at that time not yet met in the attenuated flesh, expressed as a letter to his American publisher), his third book was titled Jonas Sniden’s Horrors, and it was compared favourably to the Stevenson of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Diapason Lang, when they finally met in the late nineties, had told him he was the best horror writer in the English language.
It had made Denton squirm.
Now Lang bent forward over his desk. ‘We English love horrors. It comes from hiding everything from us as children; we have dreadful nightmares. Unaskable questions answered out of our imaginations. Do you know my picture of the nightmare?’
Lang had spoken of it before, so of course he knew it; Lang in fact had a print on the wall, was pointing at it with a bony finger without turning his eyes towards it. Elihu Vedder. Denton nodded. ‘I suppose it refers to something sexual,’ Denton said. It showed a hideous figure — demonic but certainly male — crouching over a nude woman in a bed. He thought of Janet Striker’s idea of men and women.
Lang looked pained. ‘Americans are so much more outspoken than we are.’ Now he glanced at the painting. ‘Perhaps — perhaps. You think she’s having a nightmare about the sex act itself?’ His voice was high, a bit cracked. ‘Fearing it? All women do, you know.’
‘Not knowing what it is, more likely. But possessed by it.’
‘It isn’t titled “Desire”, my boy. I’ve never asked a woman what she thought the painting meant. Nor would I, of course.’ He tittered. Lang’s sexual preferences were matters of speculation but no evidence.
Denton smiled. ‘I don’t think it’s just children you English keep things from.’
‘There are some things one doesn’t mention. To women, I mean.’
Denton thought that Lang travelled in the wrong circles. Among Emma Gosden’s friends, anything could be said; the same was true among the artists who clustered at the Café Royal. Denton looked again at the painting. And, he suspected, anything could be said to Janet Striker. ‘I had a man tell me recently that he’d been watching another man cut a woman’s throat while coupled with her. Maybe that’s what the nightmare is.’
Lang blinked. ‘Ah. Mmm.’ He grew cheerful. ‘Might be a book in that.’
‘The sex act itself a kind of murder,’ Denton said, still looking at the picture. Like his wedding night. The blood, of course. He shook the idea off. ‘I wanted to see you, Lang.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, and I wanted to see you! I have an idea — a horrible idea!’ He cackled. ‘But routine business first — how’s the new book coming?’
There it was. Denton looked into his eyes, pursed his lips, said, ‘I’ve thrown it into the trash.’
Lang tried blankness, then a titter — it must be an American joke, he seemed to imply — then severity. ‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m afraid I am.’ He tried to explain the revelation he’d had while he’d talked with Janet Striker — the woman not a real woman, the marriage all wrong, the book sick at its very heart.
‘I’ve always thought your women quite good,’ Lang moaned. Denton didn’t say that this might say more about Lang than about Denton’s women, or that perhaps Hench-Rose had been right when he’d said Denton knew nothing about women. He brushed residual drops of rain from his hat, which was on his lap; the warren of publishing offices had no place for visitors’ clothes — hardly room for visitors, in fact. ‘But you can’t have thrown it out,’ Lang said. ‘You can’t!’
‘I did.’
‘It’s what first novelists do. It’s what young men do.’
‘I have a better idea. A new book.’
‘Pull it out of the trash, Denton, we can salvage it. I can salvage it.’
Denton waved a hand. ‘I’ve got a better idea, I told you.’ Lang looked sick, then profoundly annoyed, then, with an effort, attentive — that smiling, wide-eyed look that women learn to put on when men talk. ‘It’s called The Machine,’ Denton said.
‘The Machine. A little too H. G. Wells?’
Denton sketched it for him: a young husband and wife who build together the machine that destroys them, their marriage.
‘But a machine? I’d think something organic would be more likely, something that they nurture-’
‘I see it as a machine.’
‘Well — of course, it’s your idea-’ Lang sounded dubious. ‘Rather fashionable, perhaps — machines, I mean. Fear of the clang and bang of modern life, the dark Satanic mills, all that. Motor cars.’ He raised his eyebrows and waved a hand. ‘But a machine as the embodiment of horror, Denton-’
‘Oh, forget your damned horror!’
‘Oh, dear, oh, no-’
‘Lang, the horror is something you’ve all read into the books. I write about people, about suffering, about-’
Lang waved his fingers again. ‘Writers don’t know what they write about. It’s horror, take my word for it. But a machine, oh dear-’ He tittered. ‘Perhaps a runaway motor car with an evil engine? Something that goes about murdering people at crossings? You’re not amused, I see.’
Denton put his hands on the desk and spoke slowly and with great emphasis. ‘Lang, I need money!’
‘Ah. Oh, it’s that way.’