The Grin of the Dark

TWENTY-SIX - RETORTS

Oh dear, Mr Testy is losing his temper and using toillet language. That's what happenns when you get caught out for lying and can't own up like a man. I forgot, we're supposed to call him Simon Lester even if he's calling himself Colin. Has everyboddy noticed how simmillar the names are? C is half of S and L is next to M, and if you switch the vowwels around you've got Simon, except I don't think anyboddy would want him. Someone ought to tell him not to bother making names up. Everyboddy can see he can't spell cinneaste whichever name he calls himself.

Colin's there before I am.

No, we can't spell cinneaste because that isn't how it's spelled, you pathetic clown. We'd need to have extra letters spilling out of our arseholes to compete with you. Just in case anyone beside this tiresome turd is interested, my name is Colin Vernon. Let's see him make something of that.

Smilemime does.

So Tiresome S. L. still wants to play games with names, does he? He shouldn't have challennged a master. Vernon is just letters out of Simon Lester except for V, and that's l + e + e. He must be trying to tell us he's pubblishing himself. Is he paying himself a fortune, do we think? Watch out, I'll bet more bad words are on the way.

This time I reach the keyboard first.

I'm afraid it's you who are turning language bad. Can we ask you to keep a few of your consonants to yourself? Forgive me if I don't waste time attempting to convince you that my publisher and editor exist, if you honestly need convincing and don't just post anything you think may provoke a reaction. If you're as passionate about film as you give the impression you are, I should spend more time studying them and less in pursuing meaningless arguments.

I should have reread that more closely before posting it, because it gives Smilemime an opening.

Well, I must be doing something right, mustn't I? I've made Simon Testy be honnest for once. He's acctually addmitting he should studdy films instead of telling lies about them. Now he should addmit that if he's published annything about them or he's going to that'll all be lies as well. If he owns up I prommise not to mention him again.

I'm not letting this lie.

Please be aware that what you're saying isn't just untrue, it's libellous. I may not be able to trace you, but I'm sure the university will if you carry on like this. I imagine they might want to prosecute anyone who tries to discredit their publications in this way.

Colin's there almost at once.

You bet your bollocks we can track you down, Slimemime or whatever we're going to find out your name is. You're out of your league, so take the hint and stop bothering the big boys. And by the way, Simon wasn't saying he needs to study films, he meant you do. That should keep you quiet with any luck, and if something doesn't we will.

I should have liked his response to be somewhat more official.

So now my ennemy's trying to say I can't read, is he? That's a joke from someboddy who can't even get my name right. He can't lose an argument gracefully either, so he has to ressort to more words out of the toillet and try and frighten me with his gang. Ooh, I'm terriffied, look what I've done on my chair. Before he starts threatenning me he'd better remmember he's already libbelled me. He said I'd made up a Tubby Thackeray film on the IMDb. That's blackenning my repputation and my lawyer says I can sue him.

I could call his bluff by involving Charley Tracy, but I don't want to bring any further harassment on him. I'm certain Smilemime is trying to spread confusion in the hope that I'll panic, which I'm not about to do. I really don't need Colin to reply for me.

Bring it on then, Mileslime. Sue him and see what you get. I'd love to see you explain to a judge how your rep can be undermined when you won't even say who you are. And since it'll be the first time anyone beyond a few Internet nerds have heard of you, you'll have to convince him you've got a rep at all. I'll be in the front row and selling tickets to the most hilarious comedy in town.

While I agree with most of this, I suggest in a private email to Colin that he might be a little less ready to invite people – even Smilemime – to sue me.

Don't let him rattle you, Simon. It's all coming out of his arse. Anyway, you were quick enough to say the uni would chase him, weren't you? Not that I'm saying we won't if we have to. You know how I love skewering bastards. Let me see if I can get a fix on him.

Meanwhile Smilemime has responded to his posting.

No, you're the one that's putting on a show for everyboddy, but you're not impressing annyone. Collin's your stage name, is it? The one you use for alternattive commedy, which is a lot of fillthy language with no laughs. And whatever you call yourself you can't get my name right. Don't worry, I've got yours. Easy to remmember when you're acting like your name spells. I hope everyboddy knows what the annagram of Simon Lester is.

It isn't Tiresome S. L. That omits the n, which could signify an indefinite number or an unknown name. I don't point any of this out, and I do my best not to be compelled to speculate, but Colin isn't so restrained.

Timely Snores, is it? They're appropriate where you're concerned. It doesn't quite spell that, but it's better than your pissy little feeble attempt. Time, Señores? That's what they shout in a Mexican bar when everyone's finished eating their worms. I know, he spells Silent Mores, in other words quiet manners, the kind Simon has and you need to learn.

This amuses me, but not for long.

Oh yes, he's being very quiet while he's pretennding to be someboddy else, isn't he? Maybe he really bellieves he is if he's been eating those worms. He certainnly sounds like he's on drugs. I expect his brain's too beffuddled to work things out, so I'll put him out of his missery and tell him his secret. Simon Lester = Monster Lies.

I've typed my reply almost before I know it.

No, I'm not on any drugs. If I were I'd be more likely to write your kind of steaming crap. Carry on if it keeps you happy, but do us all a favour and when you've finished producing it, just pull the chain.

How long has this been going on? I feel as if Smilemime's monomania has invaded my skull, wakening whenever I do and goading me to compose more retorts while the threat of Colin's intervention urges me to head him off, although does it matter which of us responds? At least when I post a reply it appears on every newsgroup that's involved, even if this gives me the impression that the Internet is swarming with my attempts to force Smilemime to make some kind of sense. I only wish I could revoke my last answer, however satisfying it felt until Smilemime posted his.

Aw, did someboddy upset him? Did the nassty man say something bad and hurt his ickle feewings? It must have been true or he wouldn't have forgotten who he was suppossed to be. He isn't meant to use toillet words when he's calling himself Monster Lies, I mean Simon Lester. Maybe he doesn't reallize that tells us there's just one of him, because it spells Misster Lone as well. And maybe he'd like to explain why he keeps reading what I write if he thinks it's excremment. Could he be jeallous because people read what I write and noboddy's ever heard of him?

It doesn't spell Misster unless you can't spell. For some reason this is the riposte that has been clamouring for expression ever since I read his latest rant at Heathrow. I would have posted it and much more if they hadn't been calling my name at the departure gate. I kept regretting the missed opportunity all the way to Chicago, where I planned to use another Internet terminal while waiting for my onward flight. In fact the two-hour stopover barely gave me time to collect my suitcase and clear security. I still feel as if I'm shuffling forward in a sluggish endless queue, my legs wavering from lack of sleep and the effects of the gale-wracked descent the plane made. Instead I'm in Los Angeles and waiting for my luggage to appear.

Is that mine? A man standing guard beside the end of the carousel grabs the suitcase as his mobile trills. He's discussing a film deal by the time he wheels the case past me, and I see that it's only similar to mine, like half a dozen others in the slow procession. Several items, including a parcelled ski in search of its twin, have made the rounds more than once. Most of the passengers from my flight have been reunited with their luggage. Here comes the next parade, and my case is the fifth to trundle into view, or rather a woman's identical case is. I rest my overworked eyes, and when I open them my case has stolen past me and is heading for the exit from the baggage hall. I almost sprawl on the conveyor belt in my haste to capture it, and then I haul it to the Customs desk.

The concourse beyond it is so crowded with people and amplified voices, and my senses are so raw with wakefulness, that I feel worse than stranded until I see my name. Apparently Willie Hart has sent a driver to pick me up. Her T-shirt, which bears a logo for SEXXXY SITES, and shorts display her lithe golden limbs and hug her curves with great affection, and I wonder if she's one of Hart's performers. Even her hair, so blonde it's nearly white, is cropped close as if to bare more of her. The generous features of her oval face produce a more specific smile as I point at the name on her clipboard. 'That's me.'

'Welcome to California,' she says and holds out a slim hand. Her handshake is warm and firm, but her skin isn't quite so young and smooth as it appeared from a distance. Eventually she lets go and says 'Pull your bags?'

A black traveller flashes me the whitest grin I've ever seen. 'Take the offer, man.'

'I've just got the one. I'll be fine.'

Both women look secretly amused. My driver shrugs and leads the way out. It's close to midnight, though not inside my head, but beyond the automatic doors December feels like summer. Taxis raise a primitive fanfare to hail my guide. She holds a lift open while my suitcase and I stumble in. 'Feel like coming home?' she says.

I strive to grasp what she's asking. 'Should it?'

'For a lot of movie people it does. This is where it all began.'

That's an excessively simplified view of film history, but I mightn't argue even if I weren't so tired. 'I don't make films, I write about them.'

The lift halts two floors up the car park, and she ushers me to a red Lexus. 'Even our kind?' she seems eager to know.

'If it helps with my research, why not?'

I dump my suitcase in the boot, and she slams the lid. I don't know if my answer prompts her to say 'Sit up front with me.'

I don't want to nod off against her. As I strap myself in, having slung my jacket onto the back seat, I say 'Please don't be offended if I drift off.'

While she eases the car down a ramp she rests a hand on my thigh. 'Need any drugs? There's plenty at the house.'

'I should think I'll be away as soon as I fall into bed. It's not worth losing my sleep.'

She glances at me as she halts at a pay booth. 'What isn't?'

I struggle to reach the wad of dollars in my jacket, but she has already paid the attendant. When the Lexus moves into the traffic she turns her head to me again until I answer. 'Just some rubbish on the Internet,' I say wearily. 'Someone trying to destroy my reputation that won't even give their name.'

'They're out there.'

This jerks my eyes open. I thought I closed them only for a moment, but we were passing a horde of dormant airliners, whereas now we're far along a wide street of houses that crouch behind palm trees. The pavements are broad enough to accommodate a platoon on the march and utterly deserted. 'Who are?' I blurt.

'Monsters from the depths, we call them.' I'm resisting an impression that the trees have increased their resemblance to undersea growths, especially in the way their leaves appear to undulate, by the time she adds 'It's like the net dredges them up. We've had your kind of trouble with them.'

'I'm sorry to hear it.'

'They were saying some of our performers are under age. You'll know how much time you have to pee away dealing with them.'

I wouldn't have said the film company's troubles were too similar to mine, but her fingertips on my inner thigh seem to be suggesting the reverse. Then they're gone, and we're speeding past illuminated signs that dwarf palm trees scaly with neon. 'Do you know who they are?' I ask mostly in an attempt to stay awake.

'Could be somebody who can't stand sex or maybe a rival. Me, though, I think it's someone crazier.'

'Someone like my problem, then.'

'They're all connected, these fools. It's the Internet,' my driver says and laughs. 'I don't mean they're in touch, not all of them. I mean it turns them into monsters.'

'You don't think they already are.'

'Some of them, sure. But most of them, because they can say anything they like and they're not afraid anyone will find out who they are, it's like they're speaking direct from their subconscious. It lets them be everything they'd want to hide from people, maybe even from themselves.'

'You sound as if you'd be in favour of censorship.'

'I'm not,' she says and looks insulted. 'It never works. You can't suppress stuff. It only comes back worse.'

I rest my eyes and my brain for a moment, until a shiver restores me to consciousness. The air-conditioning has overwhelmed me, but I could imagine that the cold is reaching out of the dark that surrounds the car. The headlamp beams are drawing a portion of the blackness towards us, and it takes me an effort to realise it's the surface of the road. 'Where are we?' I gasp.

'Not much further.'

I assume that means we're almost at our destination, not barely on our way. From the dashboard clock I gather we've been driving for more than an hour. The edges of the beams catch rocks and dusty cacti beside the unfenced road. The uniform hum of the wheels and the monotonous unrolling of the road are more effective than any number of sleeping pills, but do I glimpse an illuminated tent across the desert? It could have been a kind of church, even if dancers inside it were casting gigantic spindly shadows on the canvas. I'm trying to decide whether it was a dream, unless I dream that too, when my driver says 'Here we are.'

She withdraws her hand before I can be absolutely certain that she laid her fingers on my crotch. The car is turning left at a sizeable rock carved with the word LIMESTONES. In a moment I see why: at the end of a concrete driveway fenced with spiky cacti as tall as guards, an elongated single-storey house is built of the material. The headlamp beams glare out of a long window curtained by a white blind as the car veers into an open space that could hold about a dozen vehicles. The house raises the door of a garage and closes it behind us with no sound I can hear. As I climb none too steadily out of the car I feel as if I'm still travelling. 'Ready for bed?' says my driver.

'Ready to get my head down,' I say, which seems less than ideally phrased.

She retrieves my case and wheels it to a door into the rest of the house. A corridor shaggily plastered in white and paved with large grey stone tiles leads past four doors to an extensive lobby. My escort opens the first door on the left and turns up the concealed lighting to an intimate glow. 'Everything you need should be in here,' she says and leaves the case at the foot of the lightly clothed double bed. 'Sleep as long as you like.'

'I shouldn't say hello to Mr Hart, should I? I expect he'll be asleep.'

She halts in the doorway with her back to me. 'Mr Hart.'

The sudden flatness of her voice makes me feel as if I'm asking for the late Orville. 'Willie Hart,' I say. 'The film director.'

She turns her head and then the whole of her front view towards me. 'I thought you were a movie researcher.'

'I am. What do you mean?'

'Where did you get your information?'

'From the online database. He's the grandson of Orville Hart.' When she gazes at me I insist 'He is. I've had emails from him.'

'You didn't read it right.'

'What?' It doesn't help that she has decided to be amused. 'I'm not surprised, the way he writes.'

'Not the emails.' Her amusement wavers and returns, if more wryly. 'I'm sorry if you don't like my style,' she says.

I feel as if the room has quivered like an image on a monitor, but it must be my stance that has. 'You're...'

She gazes at me to be sure I've finished, and then she plants a hand on her left breast. 'Wilhelmina,' she admits. 'I never liked the name.'