The story comes back from the instructor with an F slashed into the tide page. Two words are scrawled beneath, in capital letters. PULP, screams one. CRAP, screams the other.
Bill takes the fifteen-page sheaf of manuscript over to the wood-stove and opens the door. He is within a bare inch of tossing it in when the absurdity of what he is doing strikes him. He sits down in his rocking chair, looks at a Grateful Dead poster, and starts to laugh. Pulp? Fine! Let it be pulp! The woods were full of it!
'Let them fucking trees fall!' Bill exclaims, and laughs until tears spurt from his eyes and roll down his face.
He retypes the title page, the one with the instructor's judgment on it, and sends it off to a men's magazine named White Tie (although from what Bill can see, it really should be titled Naked Girls Who Look Like Drug Users'). Yet his battered Writer's Market says they buy horror stories, and the two issues he has bought down at the local mom-and-pop store have indeed contained four horror stories sandwiched between the naked girls a nd the ads for dirty movies and potency pills. One of them, by a man named Dennis Etchison, is actually quite good.
He sends 'The Dark' off with no real hopes — he has submitted a good many stories to magazines before with nothing to show for it but rejection slips — and is flabbergasted and delighted when the fiction editor of White Tie buys it for two hundred dollars, payment on publication. The assistant editor adds a short note which calls it 'the best damned horror story since Ray Bradbury's "The Jar."' He adds, 'Too bad only about seventy people coast to coast will read it,' but Bill Denbrough does not care. Two hundred dollars!
He goes to his advisor with a drop card for Eh-141. His advisor initials it. Bill Denbrough staples the drop card to th e assistant fiction editor's congratulatory note and tacks both to the bulletin board on the creative-writing instructor's door. In the corner of the bulletin board he sees an anti-war cartoon. And suddenly, as if moving of its own accord, his fingers pluck his pen from his breast pocket and across the cartoon he writes this: If fiction and politics everreally do become interchangeable, I'm going to kill myself, because I won't know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do. He pauses, and then, feeling a bit small (but unable to help himself), he adds: I suggest you have a lot to learn.
His drop card comes back to him in the campus mail three days later. The instructor has initialed it. On the space marked GRADE AT TIME OF DROP , the instructor has not given him an incomplete or the low C to which his run of grades at that time would have entitled him; instead, another F is slashed angrily across the grade line. Below it the instructor has written: Do you think money proves anything about anything, Denbrough?
'Well, actually, yes,' Bill Denbrough says to his empty apartment, and once more begins to laugh crazily.
In his senior year of college he dares to write a novel because he has no idea what he's getting into. He escapes the experience scratched and frightened . . . but alive, and with a manuscript nearly five hundred pages long. He sends it out to The Viking Press, knowing that it will be the first of many stops for his book, which is about ghosts . . . but he likes Viking's ship logo, and that makes it as good a place to start as any. As it turns out, the first stop is also the last stop. Viking purchases the book . . . and for Bill Denbrough the fairytale begins. The man who was once known as Stuttering Bill has become a success at the age of twenty-three. Three years later and three thousand miles from northern New England, he attains a queer kind of celebrity by marrying a woman who is a movie-star and five years his senior at Hollywood's Church in the Pines.
The gossip columnists give it seven months. The only bet, they say, is whether the end will come in a divorce or an annulment. Friends (and enemies) on both sides of the match feel
about the same. The age difference apart, the disparities are startling. He is tall, already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat. He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate. Audra, on the other hand, is auburn-haired, statuesque, and gorgeous — she is less like an earthly woman than a creature from some semi-divine superrace.
He has been hired to do the screenplay of his second novel, The Black Rapids (mostly because the right to do at least the first draft of the screenplay was an immutable condition of sale, in spite of his agent's moans that he was insane), and his draft has actually turned out pretty well. He has been invited out to Universal City for further rewrites and production meetings.
His agent is a small woman named Susan Browne. She is exactly five feet tall. She is violently energetic and even more violently emphatic. 'Don't do it, Billy,' she tells him. 'Kiss it off. They've got a lot of money tied up in it and they'll get someone good to do the screenplay. Maybe even Goldman.'
'Who?'
'William Goldman. The only good writer who ever went out there and did both.'
'What are you talking about, Suze?'
'He stayed there and he stayed good,' she said. 'The odds on both are like the odds on beating lung cancer — it can be done, but who wants to try? You'll burn out on sex and booze. Or some of the nifty new drugs. ' Susan's crazily fascinating brown eyes sparkle vehemently up at him. 'And if it turns out to be some meatball who gets the assignment instead of someone like Goldman, so what? The book's on the shelf there. They can't change a word.'
'Susan — '
'Listen to me, Billy! Take the money and run. You're young and strong. That's what they like. You go out there and they will first separate you from your self– respect and then from your ability to write a straight line from point A to point B. Last but not least, they will take your testes. You write like a grownup, but you're just a kid with a very high forehead.'
'I have to go.'
'Did someone just fart in here?' she returns. 'Must have, because something sure stinks.'
'But I do. I have to.'
'Jesus!'
'I have to get away from New England.' He is afraid to say what comes next — it's like mouthing a curse — but he owes it to her. 'I have to get away from Maine.'
'Why, for God's sake?'
'I don't know. I just do.'
'Are you telling me something real, Billy, or just talking like a writer?'
'It's real.'
They are in bed together during this conversation. Her breasts are small like peaches, sweet like peaches. He loves her a lot, although not the way they both know would be a really good way to love. She sits up with a pool of sheet in her lap and lights a cigarette. She's crying, but he doubts if she knows he knows. It's just this shine in her eyes. It would be tactful not to mention it, so he doesn't. He doesn't love her in that really good way, but he cares a mountain for her.
'Go on then,' she says in a dry businesslike voice as she turns back to him. 'Give me a call when you're ready, and if you still have the strength. I'll come an d pick up the pieces. If there are any left.'
The film version of The Black Rapids is called Pit of the Black Demon, and Audra Phillips is cast as the lead. The title is horrible, but the movie turns out to be quite good. And the only part of him he loses in Hollywood is his heart.
'Bill,' Audra said again, bringing him out of these memories. He saw she had snapped off the TV. He glanced out the window and saw fog nuzzling against the panes.
'I'll explain as much as I can,' he said. 'You deserve that. But first do two things for me.'