It had been coming for some time, years probably, but ever since that horrifying evening at Carl’s Diner, it had been too close, too finely detailed to ignore. It was the sheer stupidity of everything – him chewing through his lip, Chuff having died and no one noticing, then Binkle fainting and Finefinger getting punched out by the waitress on account of his unfortunate Bell’s palsy sneer. In fairness, this last incident had a redeeming upside: Jo, the waitress, had been mortified to learn of Finefinger’s affliction, so had sent him flowers as an apology, and since then they’d been dating. This was nice, but measured up against the horrors of the comics business, it was coughing at Katrina.

  Then, only a few days after he’d been bleeding, panicking, and trying to push his colleague’s lifeless body out on to the gleaming diner floor, there had been … Dan still couldn’t bring himself to think about that awful night at Brandon’s place, with Moskowitz and Porlock. What they saw, and what they did, and all those breasts and assholes and vaginas burning. Theoretically, that was still something Dan could go to actual fucking prison for if anyone found out, the next cell down from Arvo Cake. While this was an unbearable source of anxiety for somebody like Dan, who’d never had a library fine, it paled to insignificance beside the rustling, soul-flensing dread he’d known in Chuff’s apartment. Just the fact of its unbearable existence and the way it made him picture Brandon’s inner world. Those little labels with the dates in tiny writing, the balled-up commemorations of what Chuff had evidently thought to be his finest moments, masturbating through a stupefying shift between millennia. That sudden re-evaluation of a human life, surrounded by ten thousand watchful orifices – that, and not the arson, had been what had broken something crucial in Dan Wheems.

  He hadn’t really been right since. This was his sole excuse, his only explanation for the ghastly exhibition he’d made of himself at Brandon’s funeral, an eerie replay of the fatal diner incident that was, if anything, more terrible than the original. The problem was, no one had been expecting Crosby Bunsen. Nobody had known that Crosby Bunsen was a thing.

  The funeral had been two weeks back, at the end of August. Dan’s nerves had been in a state of near collapse since he’d been a participant at the bonfire of the obscenities. He hadn’t been in any fit condition to attend, he saw that now, but in the end had made himself, convinced his absence would somehow expose him as the firebug. This, in retrospect, had been a hideous miscalculation.

  Given that there didn’t seem to be any of Brandon’s family in attendance, it was thought appropriate his colleagues take up the front row of seats. There had been Ralph Roth, Worsley Porlock, Jerry Binkle, Milton Finefinger and David Moskowitz – who, weirdly, looked a little shorter than he had only a week or so before, and must have just been wearing lower heels. This line-up had left room for Dan Wheems at the end, with a sole empty space between him and the aisle. Right from the start, when they’d been sitting waiting for the service to begin, there’d been an atmosphere of violin-shrill tension, or at least that’s how it had appeared to Dan. Him, Moskowitz and Porlock were apparently unable to prevent themselves from constantly exchanging guilty glances, and Dan caught himself nervously nibbling at the stitches they’d put in his lip after the travesty at Carl’s. So, he was obviously in a delicate condition before Brandon Chuff walked in and took the end seat next to him.

  Although he’d read and written scores of horror stories, Dan had always taken the position that the characters’ reactions to the supernatural were too stagey and melodramatic – all the sudden drops in temperature, the paralysing fear and so on. Now, though, with his inner narrative swerved disconcertingly from Philip Roth to M. R. James, he’d felt as if reality were caving in, as if his bones were made from smouldering dry ice, absolute zero, so cold that the atoms would cease their vibration and then he, the bench that he was sitting on, and all New York would be collapsed into a dense, translucent nuclear jelly known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. It’s fair to say that Dan had hastily revised his previous opinions on how it might feel to have a dead man sitting next to him, then.

  Because it was definitely Brandon Chuff. It just was. Brandon Chuff when he’d been in his early twenties, which implied an afterlife where people were forever at their prime. The apparition had the curly, mousy hair; the minimalist fringe of beard; the wire-rimmed spectacles. Unlike the other mourners, Brandon’s spectre wore blue ectoplasmic denim and a pair of ghostly sneakers. When Dan had gambled his sanity upon a sideways glance, the sight of Brandon’s trademark pendant dangling around the spirit’s neck – the one Brandon had worn at all those early seventies conventions – had spiked Dan from bowel to brain like an annihilating icicle. The revenant was even smiling enigmatically at a fixed point in the mid-distance, just as Brandon had done on that fatal evening.

  Nailed down to his seat with dread, Dan’s fraying mind had sorted frantically through ghost-Chuff’s various potential motives for this visitation. Could it be benevolent, intended to grant Dan some closure after all that porn at the apartment, to remind him of the vital human being Brandon had once been, before the comic books and self-pollution ruined him? A final nod from the departing editor-in-chief, so that Dan could at last forget the tags, the boxes, the rosettes of tissue, forget everything? That this communication was meant for Dan Wheems alone was clear from the stark fact that Brandon was apparently invisible to everybody else. (Although he’d realise some days later that this was because he’d blocked the view of everyone in the front row, and no one else attending had the first idea what Brandon Chuff had looked like in his early twenties.)

  After a full minute had elapsed without the wraith evaporating into mist, Dan’s sanity was near its breaking point, and he was gnawing on those stitches now. If this had been a fond farewell, a reassurance from beyond, then Chuff would have already faded to a twinkle, leaving nothing but that irritating smile. It had occurred to Dan around then that the only other likely reason for this posthumous appearance was infernal retribution, like something from Tower of Frightening. The glaring truth unveiled itself, hitting him like a ton of frozen bricks: this was about the fire.

  Oh God. Of course. It had been Dan that Brandon had entrusted with the key, Dan who had blundered in on the dried sperm necropolis, Dan who had panicked and manhandled Brandon’s still warm corpse back in the diner. It was all a classic SP comics set-up, that would surely end with Wheems cremated in Chuff’s place, while at the final panel’s bottom right, the Necro-Filing Clerk would cackle and say, ‘Heh, heh, heh! Looks like Dan’s working up a SWEAT over those HOT books that SPARKED poor Brandon’s BURNING DESIRE! I guess it’s STREW you later, CONFLAGRATOR! Heh, heh, heh!’ Sitting beside the deceased writer-editor and shuddering like a washer-dryer on its spin cycle, he registered the thrilling taste of copper in his mouth before Dan realised what he must have done.

  What had next happened had seemed quite without volition, as if some neurological imperative had suddenly remembered what it had done last time Dan was in this kind of situation, unable to speak and spraying blood, penned in his seat by the unbudging bulk of Brandon Chuff. Acting according to some fear-imprinted muscle memory, he’d voiced an inarticulate squeal in a gout of crimson and initiated an attempt to push Chuff from his seat, thereby effecting his escape. Which, since this occasion was without a diner manager applying equal force from Brandon’s other side, was more of a success, if you could call it that: the startled young man had said, ‘What the fuck?’, and tumbled noisily into the aisle. Somebody who turned out to be Ralph Roth had grabbed Dan from behind and shouted, ‘Dan! That isn’t Brandon!’, but by then the whole place was in uproar, so that Jerry Binkle fainted, Milton Finefinger stood up and shouted, ‘I’m not laughing! It’s Bell’s palsy,’ and blah blah attending officers blah blah official caution blah blah blah.

  Actually, when the cops showed up, Dan had been so unhinged that he’d confessed to burning down Brandon’s apartment, although, luckily, no one had understood his blood-flecked gibberish. When Ralph Roth volunteered to drive Dan to the hospital, the police had just seemed relieved, like everybody else, and most especially like Crosby Bunsen, who’d been as relieved as hell.

  Ralph had given him the Bunsen story over coffee up at Dan’s place, after they were back from getting his lip restitched at the hospital. Roth had expressed his gratitude to Dan for giving him an excuse to leave Brandon’s funeral, and had been sympathetic about his hysterical and bloody-mouthed attack on the young man who’d looked so much like Brandon Chuff. The only reason Roth had realised who the guy must be, he had explained, had been Chuff’s drunk confession a few years before, up one night after a convention.

  Linda Bunsen had been an aspiring colourist back in the early 1990s who’d made the acquaintanceship of Brandon Chuff. As she would later tell her offspring, he, her son, was how she’d got her shitty colourist’s job on Omnipotent Pre-Teen Militia at American. And lost it, pretty much as soon as she’d begun to show. Chuff, raised on superheroes with unflagging moral standards, had, characteristically, denied paternity despite the almost comically exact resemblance between him and Crosby Bunsen, as the curly-haired child had been named. Of course, it had eventually all been sorted out with blood tests, but by then, Brandon’s initial failure to acknowledge Crosby as his son had made its mark on the resentful youth’s developing psychology. Already near identical to his dissembling progenitor, the boy had gone out of his way to underline and strengthen the disputed similarity. He’d dressed and worn his hair the way that Chuff had in old photographs the kid had seen, and had been ghoulishly delighted when he’d found the pendant that his mom had, for some reason, kept, forgotten in a drawer for more than twenty years. According to the guys who’d stayed on at the funeral after Ralph and Dan had gone, when Crosby had recovered from Dan’s bloody, unintelligible onslaught, he’d stood up to read a eulogy that had begun, ‘Dad was a selfish prick who never did a fucking thing for me or for my mother. No, I’m kidding.’ Everybody had agreed that he was very like his father.

  Roth had stayed at Dan’s place for an hour or two, just to make sure he was OK. With Dan’s mouth how it was, they didn’t really have a conversation, although the intelligence that passed between them had proved something of a turning point for Wheems, in terms of subsequent career decisions. Ralph had asked him what his underlying problem was, and after he’d repeated ‘If buff comiff’ several times and they’d finally established he was saying, ‘It’s just comics,’ Ralph had gone on to commiserate at length regarding the deficiencies of their profession:

  ‘Huh! Tell me about it. It’s like every story, every anecdote somebody starts to tell you in this industry, you know it’s going to end up somewhere horrible. It’s always “Zoom Wilson’s creator drove his car into a wall but wanted to take someone with him”, or else, “Sam Blatz used to sit up on a filing cabinet and drop the artists’ pay cheques on the floor so that they had to bow before him when they stooped to pick them up”. Or it’s “And then he killed himself”; “And then he had to sleep up at the company offices to meet his deadline and he had a heart attack”; “And then he chopped his girlfriend up”. It’s either tragic, or it’s dreadful, or it’s both.

  ‘I mean, OK, I’ve worked in other industries and, yeah, I know that they’re all pretty much like this. I know shit like this happens everywhere, but with the comics business it seems fifty times worse, and do you know why? It’s the absurdity. I worked it out. It’s the huge disconnect between these dopey fucking children’s characters and the appalling lives of the guys writing them and drawing them. And publishing them. It’s like, on the one hand, you’ve got Silly-Putty Pete transforming himself into a hot-air balloon so he can fly to Mars, and on other, you’ve got Sam Earl blowing out his brains after an indiscretion at the Playhorse Mansion, where they’d got him drunk, he’d fucked one of the Fillies, and felt he’d betrayed the wife he loved. It’s the absurdity, the bathos, which is right next door to the grotesque and the unspeakably horrendous. That’s the comics business.

  ‘Or at least, that’s what I used to think was the whole explanation, but the longer I work at American, the more I think that something else is going on as well. Some of the things I’ve heard about the upstairs people at American, some of the things I’ve seen …’

  At this point, Dan Wheems had said, ‘Futchuff?’, and then had to say it eight or nine more times before Roth understood that he meant ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, such as Sol Stickman. Back a year or two ago, I saw a feature in one of the Sunday magazines about an archaeological discovery near the Black Sea, in what were once the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire. They’d unearthed this old mosaic from the first century that they believed was a depiction of the writer Lucian, who’d written the first journey to the moon. They showed a photograph of this thing, and there standing next to Lucian in the mosaic there’s this old bald guy in a business suit and glasses; he’s got one hand on Lucian’s shoulder and the other hand is giving a thumbs up. I’m telling you, Dan, it was really fucking eerie. Or what about David Moskowitz? Has nobody but me noticed he’s getting smaller? When I met him in the seventies, he had to have been six foot, six foot one. See, you weren’t working at American for very long before you had your falling-out with Hector Bass and went to write for Massive, so you haven’t seen the worst of it. I mean, there was the stuff with Mimi Drucker after her big therapeutic breakthrough, as they called it.’

  Here, Dan made the interjection, ‘Wobabowber?’, and it was thus a minute or two before Ralph Roth had been able to continue with his monologue.

  ‘Dan, seriously, you can’t say anything about this, right? But, look, when you were at American, before the thing with Bass, you must have got called into Mimi’s office at least once, right? There’s no need to speak, OK? Just nod or shake your head.’

  Briefly closing his eyes, he’d nodded. Yes, Dan Wheems had been in Mimi Drucker’s office.

  ‘Yeah. So you recall its centrepiece, the thing she couldn’t help but talk about?’

  Once again, Wheems had nodded, swallowing warm spit and cringing from the memory.

  ‘Buh pip-puh.’

  Roth, becoming gradually accustomed to his fellow writer’s bubbling diction, nodded grimly.

  ‘Right. The picture. The big-ass framed photograph up on the wall, taken by Avedon or somebody, with Mimi’s dad, the senator, out playing golf with General Pinochet. Good, then. You’ve seen it. And when you were in there, did she do the thing she always did?’

  Dan’s nod this time was fast, mechanical and difficult to stop. Yes, Mimi had done the thing. The thing was a compulsive indecent exposure, where it almost – almost – seemed like the vice president was unaware that she was doing it. And she was always doing it, knees opening and closing, opening and closing, back and forth, hypnotic like a set of windscreen wipers. Or she’d sometimes sit with one leg over each arm of her swivel chair, depending on her mood. She’d do this anywhere. She’d done it to her editors, her writers, and her artists, irrespective of their gender or their age. She’d done it for a hall of slack-jawed thirteen-year-old boy scouts at a Thunderman-themed presentation, and she’d once come very close to doing it on air with David Letterman. It wasn’t even sexual. In fact, the obsessive, broken-clockwork quality was genuinely frightening. Roth sighed.

  ‘OK. You know all that as well. Mimi’s behaviour back then – the basketball team, and the screwing talent on her desk below the ventilator so that everyone could hear her, or the story Porlock always tells about the elevator on his first day at American – well, who knows what was up with her? My best guess at the time was that having a little power in the comics industry made people crazy, so they thought they could do anything they wanted to, like it was all a dream. But Mimi Drucker, after she’d had her supposed breakthrough, it made all that other stuff look normal, healthy even.

  ‘What it was – and this is, like, five years ago, in 2010, sometime around then – I’m up at American and Mimi Drucker suddenly emerges from the moiré, does a double air-kiss and says she’s got something that she wants to show me in her office. Straight away I’m thinking, “Please don’t let it be her cervix,” but there’s something in the way she’s acting that seems different. Even her subsonic growl has got a kind of girlish and excited lilt. So, then we’re in her office, and she’s sitting on her desk, and she holds out her hand to ask me what I think. There, on her finger, she’s wearing a diamond wedding ring that must have cost more than my house and is about the size of Mimi’s head. I look surprised and ask when she got married, and she sort of smiles and gestures to this little picture that she’s got framed on her desk. I have to lean in closer so that I can make it out.

  ‘It’s … it’s a wedding photograph. There’s Mimi on the right in this incredible white wedding dress, and how she’s smiling in the shot, she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her, like she’s just lit up with joy. Then, over on the left, you’ve got the groom.’

  Here, Ralph had broken off. His hands, Dan had observed, were shaking.

  ‘Dan, I’m not making this up. The groom, there in this picture she’s got on her desk, Dan, it’s the photograph. The other photograph, the one from off her office wall, her dad and Pinochet. It’s standing there beside her in its gilt surround, about as tall as she is, and up at the frame’s top centre someone’s sticky-taped a yarmulke. I’m staring at it for maybe a minute and a half before I even start to figure what it means, before I understand that Mimi Drucker is now married, legally, to an inanimate black and white photograph of her own dad, the senator, and a notoriously evil Chilean dictator, playing golf. And worse, she’s showing me this picture of her special day, expecting me to come up with some celebratory compliment. All I can manage is, “Gee, Mimi, I’m so happy for you. You both look so … glossy.” And she gives a little rumble of delight and tells me that she knows.