Hybrid
Copyright © Shaun Hutson 2002
LIVING DEATH
The fly was caught in the web. He watched it writhe helplessly, tangling itself even more surely in the sticky strands that ensnared it.
The web had been spun across one of the windows of his office and it was the frantic buzzing and struggling of the fly that had first alerted him to its plight.
Now he sat back in his chair and watched.
And waited.
The spider emerged slowly from its hiding place. A bloated, corpulent specimen that barely seemed able to haul itself along the gossamer snare towards its victim.
But it came with lethal intent.
He watched as it stretched out one leg and placed it on the struggling fly.
Then, with surprising speed, it hugged its swollen body to the insect, drew it close and injected venom from its fangs. Clung on tightly as its victim was immobilised.
As living death took over.
Finally it began to weave a silken cocoon around the fly before hauling itself back to its hiding place.
It would feed later. On the still-living fly.
Christopher Ward watched for a moment longer then looked back at his desk.
The screen of his computer was blank. It had been for the last two hours. He hadn’t managed one single, solitary word since he’d wandered out of the house at ten that morning.
The cup of coffee he’d drunk at eleven hadn’t sparked any thoughts. Neither had wandering backwards and forwards in the office.
It was like that some days. Most days.
He stared at the screen. He placed his fingers on the keys and he waited.
And nothing happened. No outpouring of creativity. No flood of story-telling genius.
Just a blank screen. And a blank mind.
It wasn’t writer’s block. He knew how that felt. This was something new. More painful.
This was living death.
He glanced at the fly still suspended in the web. It twitched helplessly every now and then. He wondered if it was aware of its impending doom. He doubted it. Man was alone in being able to contemplate his own end. The only species able to appreciate the finality and inevitability of death.
Christopher Ward was caught in a web of his own.
LIVING IN THE PAST
Ward was in his early forties. Some people told him he looked younger. That on a good day he could pass for thirty-eight or thirty-nine.
But good days had been in short supply for the last two or three months.
Most mornings when he looked in the bathroom mirror the face that looked back at him was tired and pale. There were dark rings beneath his blue-grey eyes.
Hair that had once reached his shoulders had recently been cut to just above his collar. And now there was a little too much grey in those once-lustrous locks.
Twelve years ago it had all been so different. He’d greeted each day with optimism. Life was worth living then. So much happening. So much to look forward to.
And now what? Every day was a battle. It was a struggle to get out of bed. A battle to work. To force himself into his office for each day of a life that had changed so drastically.
Twelve years ago he had known only success. There had been more money than he knew what to do with. Exotic holidays. Parties. Expensive lunches.
Exorbitantly priced dinners.
And women. Lots of them. All eager. Wanting him.
He had seen no end to it. Why should there be an end?
But that end was looming. Waiting over the horizon.
Waiting like a bloated, hungry spider ready to devour him. To suck the life from him. The life he had loved so much. The life he had never really stopped to appreciate.
He’d read that life is like a tram journey and the trouble with most people is that they rarely get off the train to enjoy the sights.
Ward had been one of those people. And he regretted that now.
Regretted it because he knew that those days were gone for ever.
And he knew why. From deep inside he felt a twinge of a welcome and long absent emotion.
Anger. Anger at what he was about to lose. From anger grew hatred. From hatred rose fury.
He would use these feelings.
He glanced at the blank screen of the computer once more.
Ward pressed his finger down on one of the keys and held it there.
At least, he mused, there was something on the screen at last.
He got to his feet and wandered over to the top of the stairs. His office was a converted garage about ten yards from his house. A white door led into the side of the building, and fourteen steps led up to the place where he had worked for the last twelve years. The room was about twenty feet long, half that across.
Within these confines Ward had positioned two black ash desks, one supporting an old manual typewriter and the larger one a computer, several bookcases, a small stereo system and a sofa bed. A second door led to a toilet and shower.
He had a sink in one corner. A kettle stood beside it with tea bags, coffee and a jug of milk. He was self-sufficient inside his little kingdom.
He walked out of the house at ten in the morning and he walked back in at four in the afternoon. Same routine every day.
It was all he knew. All he had ever known. No matter where he had lived.The one-bedroom flat over a billiard hall at the beginning. The two-bedroom terraced-house he’d bought after the success of his first half a dozen novels.
The four-bedroom house with the tiny paved area at the back, sandwiched between a bakery and an old woman who he had known only as Mrs B.
And what he had now. What he’d had for the last twelve years. Financed with his success that seemed a hundred years in the past.
All that mattered now was the present and the future.
If he had one.
MARKET FORCES
Ward opened the back door and walked in. The house was silent.
He crossed to the sink, filled the kettle then plugged it in and waited for it to boil.
Ward wandered into the hall and saw that there was mail lying on the mat.
Bills. Junk mail. The usual.
Instead of returning to the kitchen he took a detour into the study. A huge bookcase lined one wall and in the centre section were his own books. Twenty titles under his name and the same number again under the various pseudonyms he had used over the years.
He looked at them blankly. They all counted for nothing now.
It was these books that had made him his money. Given him the lifestyle so many others could only envy. And it was these books that he still wanted to write but which no one wanted.
No publisher. No agent. They had told him that sales had not been good.
Markets had changed. Same old shit.
Well, fuck them. Fuck them all.
Something different was needed, apparently. Something original but easily pigeon-holed.
Books by celebrities were very popular. Models, second-rate comedians, has-been soap stars (those that weren’t trying to make it in the music business), even footballers were writing books. Any talentless
cunt with enough money to pay a ghost-writer and a good editor was capable of churning out a book and earning shit-loads of cash for it.
And then there were the household names who milked their own brand of repetitious bullshit while fawning publishers knelt at their feet to push ever-larger cheques into their grasping hands.
Add to these the comfortable middle-class writers who lectured on real life from the security of knowing it was a world they would never have to inhabit.
People with millions in the bank who crowed that money wasn’t everything, who complained about invasion of privacy during their six-page interviews, who were proud of how they’d been single mothers or record-shop employees or advertising men before they’d made it big. And who whined about how hard they’d had to work to get published when all it took was a generous publisher and an even more generous publicity department.