Wonder Boys Read Online Free Page A

disease, I suspected—but was I?
    Hitherto I’d always felt certain of my own ability, but as the weeks passed, and we were burdened with all the inescapable shibboleths and bugbears of the trade of writing—knowing what was “at stake” in a story, where the mystical fairy-fire of epiphany ought to be set dancing above a character’s head, the importance of what our teacher liked to call “spiritual danger” to good characterization—the inevitable overshadowing of my own effort by cool Crabtree’s made it impossible for me to finish anything. I stayed up all night long at the typewriter for the week before my story was due, drinking bourbon and trying to untangle the terrible symbolical mess I had made out of a simple story my grandmother once told me about a mean black rooster that had killed her dog when she was a little girl.
    At six o’clock on the last morning I gave up, and decided to do an unconscionable thing. My mind had been wandering for the last hour through the rooms in which my grandmother had passed her life (a year before this I’d telephoned home from some booth in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, and learned that the woman who raised me had died of pneumonia that very morning), and all at once, with the burnt-sugar flavor of bourbon in my mouth, I found myself thinking about Albert Vetch and the hundreds of forgotten stories into which he had poured all the bitterness of his cosmic insomnia. There was one story I remembered fairly well—it was one of his best—called “Sister of Darkness.” It was about an amateur archaeologist, naturally, who lived with his invalid spinster sister in a turreted old house, and who, in the course of poking around the ruins of a local Indian burial mound, stumbled upon a queer, non-Indian sarcophagus, empty, bearing the faded image of a woman with a sinister grin, which he carted home in the dead of night and with which he became obsessed. In the course of restoring the object he cut his hand on a razor blade, and at the splash of his blood upon it the sarcophagus at once grew warm and emitted an odd radiance; his hand was healed, and at the same time he felt himself suffused with a feeling of intense well-being. After a couple of tests on hapless household pets, which he injured and then restored, our man persuaded his crippled little sister to lie in the sarcophagus and thus heal her poliomyelitic legs, whereupon she was transformed, somewhat inexplicably as I recalled, into an incarnation of Yshtaxta, a succubus from a distant galaxy who forced the hero to lie with her—Van Zorn’s genre permitted a certain raciness, as long as the treatment was grotesque and euphemistic—and then, having drained the life force from the unlucky hero, set out to take on the rest of the town, or so I had always imagined, half hoping that a luminous ten-foot woman with fangs and immortal cravings might appear sometime at my own window in the most lonely hour of the Pennsylvanian night.
    I set to work reassembling the story as well as I could. I toned down the occult elements by turning the whole nameless-Thing-from-beyond-Time component into a weird psychosis on the part of my first-person narrator, played up the theme of incest, and added more sex. I wrote in a fever and it took about six hours to do. When I was finished I had to run all the way to class and I walked into the room five minutes late. The teacher was already reading Crabtree’s story aloud, which was his favored way of having us “experience” a story, and it didn’t take me long to recognize that I was hearing, not a garbled and badly Faulknerized rehash of an obscure gothic horror story by an unknown writer, but the original “Sister of Darkness,” the clear, lean, unexcitable prose of August Van Zorn himself. The shock I felt at having been caught, beaten, and most of all preceded at my own game was equaled only by my surprise on learning that I wasn’t the only person in the world who’d ever read