The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part III

As a few of you know, as part of an Order of Protection I took out against the publishing industry 19 years ago, they agreed to stop harassing me with politely-worded rejection letters and to stay 50 feet away from me at all times, while I agreed to never sell anything I wrote again.

I thought that was the end of it -- that we had parted firmly and finally -- but recently things have changed.

You see [insert Very Expensive Flashback Effects here] two decades ago the publishing industry was a very different beast than it is today...

Back then, there used to be sky-scraping pyramids made of diamonds and cocaine called "publishing house" that would produce things called "magazines" and "books" which, as was the custom of the day, were use as delivery systems to transmit the "work" of "writers" -- even very bad writers -- to the "reading public".

In exchange for their labors, writers were often paid in "money" so that they would not "starve" like "lab rats in some abandoned government bio-weapon research facility in the Utah desert".

Mind you, I missed the heyday of this Golden Age of Not Starving To Death by the same, crucial few years/miles that have separated many of us from many Vital Boomer Nostalgia Moments, but compared to the industry of today (hollow-eyed, overcaffinated children living in empty remaindered "Going Rogue" book bins, fighting over abandoned government bio-weapon research facility rat-jerky with Blackberries honed to a razor's edge) publishers 19 years ago were practically crisscrossing this great nation in fleets of C-5 Galaxy aircraft large enough to blot out the Sun.

Each crammed with bales of "money" that they more-or-less randomly heaved out the back -- a strategy which would be used years later to try to carpet-bomb American democracy into the sands of Iraq.

No surprise, then, that while many of us have moved on to going broke in many other professions altogether, the publishing industry has instead slowly retreated into the kind of fetid, paranoid, hallucinogenic cul-de-sac rarely seen outside of fetid, paranoid, hallucinogenic movies about Vietnam...


Which I think explains the following very disturbing voice mail I found on my answering machine this morning:

“Good morning Driftglass, it’s the publishing industry. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with our business model.

"So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did.

"O.K., have a good day.”

I have tried to lead a quiet life away from the madness of the 1990s, publishing industry, but now you have gone too far. And so, as a part of my week-long fundraiser...

...in addition to whatever regular posts I do between now and 10.30.10, I will also be carving up the rest of my award-ready Poe story like yummy-yummy abandoned government bio-weapon research facility lab rat cutlets and serving one a day every day until I run out of story.

Part I and Part II are already up.

Here is Part III

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part III

...
It came again, louder, more insistent. I called out, ‘Who is there? Give your name!’ to no answer.

Workmen had left a small pile of steel re-bar in the corner when they reinforced the floor beneath the time machine. I grabbed up a piece from the pile and made my way to the door.

‘Who is there!’ I demanded again. ‘What do you want!’

And again there was no answer but the ghostly whistle of the icy wind through the cracks.

I opened the door slightly and a gust blew it out of my hand. I shrieked in terror and flung myself back as a huge, bony fist hurled itself down at me. I flailed at it with my steel cudgel, screaming to drown out the wind, until I recovered myself enough to see that it was no specter at all. The sleet had heavily glazed the trees up and down the boulevard, and the weight of the ice plus the wind had been too much for the old willow that stood by the door.

A large branch had snapped almost entirely free. It was the slapping of the branch against the door and not some dark visitor that had created the hideous pounding sound, multiplied I now realized, by the silence of the building and my acute concentration on the time.

Laughing now as loudly as I had been screeching a moment before, I clubbed at the small strip of brittle bark that was all that kept the broken limb bound to the tree. Within moments the bark gave way, and I tossed the branch behind the evergreen hedges that formed a line beneath the windows of the building.

When I returned to the lab, the clock stood at 1:15. I laughed again and began my work.

My first journey was to be a test. I had chosen a moment in the past long before he began his career, but after the death of his mother and after he had been taken in by the Allan family. The biographies all put him in a certain place, alone and at an age when he would be unlikely to remember any detail of importance.

I set the machine accordingly. I then took up the small aluminum rod that controlled the return phase of the journey, set it for five minutes, and stepped through the pale door. In retrospect, it was an almost insanely foolish risk. I should have pointed the device at almost any other location. I should have stepped out in the dead of night in New York, stolen a newspaper to verify the machine’s accuracy with dates and locations, and slipped back to my own time unnoticed by any but the drunkard or the prostitute.

But I had to, don’t you see?
...