Nordgren phoned him up at 2 in the morning, coked out of his skull, and razzed him about it mercilessly. He was just coming out of a messy paternity suit involving a minor he’d shacked up with at some convention, so Damon gave him an hour of his patience. Since Tallyssa’s Quest had gone into a third printing in its first month, Harrington was not to be baited.
When The Dwelling premiered as a television miniseries, Nordgren was a guest on The Tonight Show. He was obviously wired and kept breaking up the audience with his off-the-wall responses to the standard where-do-you-get-your-ideas sort of questions. Trevor had taken to smoking a pipe, perhaps to keep his hands from shaking, and the designer sunglasses were de rigueur Damon was startled to see how much weight he’d lost. Nordgren managed to get in enough plugs for his new opus, The Coming, to have qualified as a paid political announcement. Harrington had skimmed an advance copy of the thing — it appeared to be a 300,000-word rewrite of Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”—and had pondered the dangers of mixing cocaine and word processors.
There was a major problem with crowd control at the World Science Fiction Convention in Minneapolis, so that they were forced to abandon their tradition of signing books together. The con committee had had to set a special room aside just for Trevor Nordgren. At one point a news reporter counted over 750 fans standing in line to enter the signing room, many with shopping bags filled with Trevor Nordgren books and magazine appearances. Con committee members tried in vain to enforce the one-person-one-autograph rule, and a near riot broke out when uniformed hotel security guards finally escorted Nordgren to his suite after two and a half hours of signing books. Nordgren placated them by promising to set up a second autographing session the next day.
Something that looked like an ex-linebacker in a three-piece suit greeted Harrington when he knocked on the door of Nordgren’s suite. After all the Hammett and Chandler he’d read, Damon felt cheated that he couldn’t see the bulge of a roscoe beneath the polyester, but he surmised one was there.
“Damon Harrington to see Mr Nordgren,” he said to the stony face, feeling very much like a character in a Chandler novel. He wished he had a fedora to doff.
“That’s okay, John. He’s a lodge brother.”
Evidently Nordgren was unscarred by last year’s lawsuit, since neither of the girls who were cutting lines on the glass-topped table were as old as Trevor if they could have combined both their ages. Nordgren had lately taken to wearing his hair slicked and combed straight back, and he reminded Harrington of a dissolute Helmut Berger posing for a men’s fashion spread in Esquire.
“After meeting your bodyguard there, I fully expected to find you seated in a wheelchair, wearing a silk dressing robe, and smoking Russian cigarettes through a long amber holder.”
“Melody Heather. Meet my esteemed friend and drinking buddy, Damon Harrington. Damon, join us.”
“Weren’t you in Apocalypse Now?” one of them asked brightly.
“Quite right,” Nordgren assured her. “And turn a deaf ear when he promises to get you a role in his next film.”
They were almost certain Nordgren was kidding them, but not quite, and kept a speculative watch on Damon.
“The big party isn’t until later tonight,” Nordgren said, handing him the tooter, “but I felt I must unwind after sustaining terminal writer’s cramp from all those autographs. Why not get a good buzz with us now, then rejoin the party after ten?”
“Can’t see how you can go through all that.”
“All that psychic energy, baby.”
“All that money, you mean.”
“A little PR never hurt anyone. Speaking of which, Damon — I noticed quite a number of little darlings decked out in flowing bedsheets and pointed ears and carrying about boxed sets of The Fall of the Golden Isles in ardent quest of your signature. Is rumor true that Columbine has just sprung for a second trilogy in the series?”
“Helen has just about got them to agree to our terms.”
“Christ, Damon! We’re better than this shit!” Nordgren banged his fist on the table and sent half a gram onto the carpet. One of the girls started to go after it, but Trevor shook his head and muttered that he bought it by the kilo.
“You don’t look particularly ready to go back to the good old days of 3¢ a word on publication,” Damon suggested.
“And paying the bills with those wonderful $1,000 checks from Bee Line for 60,000 words worth of wet dreams. Did I tell you that a kid came up to me with a copy of Stud Road to sign, and he’d paid some huckster $150 for the thing!”
Damon almost choked on his line. “Remind me to put my copy of Time’s Wanton in a safe deposit box. Christ, Trevor — you’ve got enough money from all this to write anything you damn well please.”
“But we somehow write what the public wants from us instead. Or do you get off by being followed about by teenage fans in farcical medieval drag with plastic pointy ears begging to know whether Wyndlunne the Fey is going to be rescued from Grimdoom’s Black Tower in Book Four of The Trilogy of Trilogies’?”
“We both have our fans,” Damon said pointedly. “And what dire horrors lie in wait for some small suburban community in your next mega-word chart-buster?”
“Elves,” said Nordgren.
The last time that Damon Harrington saw Trevor Nordgren was at the World Fantasy Convention in Miami. Because of crowd problems, Nordgren had stopped going to cons, but a Guest of Honor invitation lured him forth from his castle on the Hudson. He had avoided such public appearances for over a year, and there were lurid rumors of nervous breakdown, alcoholism, drug addiction, or possibly AIDS.
The Changeling, Nordgren’s latest and biggest, concerned an evil race of elves who lurked in hidden dens beneath a small suburban community, and who were systematically exchanging elfin babies for the town’s human infants. The Changeling was dedicated to Damon Harrington—“in remembrance of Styrofoam boaters.” The novel dominated the bestseller lists for six months, before finally being nudged from first place by The Return of Tallyssa: Book Six of the Fall of the Golden Isles.
Harrington squeezed onto an elevator already packed with fans. A chubby teenager in a Spock Lives! t-shirt was complaining in an uncouth New York accent: “So I ran up to him when the limo pulled up, and I said to him ‘Mr Nordgren, would you please sign my copy of The Changeling?’ and he said ‘I’d love to, sweetheart, but I don’t have the time,’ and I said ‘But it’s just this one book,’ and he said ‘If I stop for you, there are twenty invisible fans lined up behind you right now with their books,’ and I thought ‘You conceited turkey, and after I’ve read every one of your books!’” The elevator door opened on her floor, and she and most of her sympathetic audience got off. As the door closed, Harrington caught an exclamation: “Hey, wasn’t that…”