Smoke and Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page A

prose style. I suspect it had something to do with lack of sleep.
    These days John Jarrold is a respectable editor and a bastion of the British publishing industry. Some of the middle bits of this story began life in that bar, with John and I doing Pete and Dud as creatures out of H. P. Lovecraft. Mike Ashley was the editor who cajoled me into making them a story.
Virus
    This was written for David Barrett’s Digital Dreams, a computer fiction anthology. I don’t play many computer games anymore. When I did, I noticed they tended to take up areas of my head. Blocks fell or little men ran and jumped behind my eyelids as I went to sleep. Mostly I’d lose, even when playing with my mind. This came from that.
Looking for the Girl
    This story was commissioned by Penthouse for their twentieth-anniversary issue, January 1985. For the previous couple of years I’d been surviving as a young journalist on the streets of London by interviewing celebrities for Penthouse and Knave, two English “skin” magazines—tamer by far than their American equivalents; it was an education, all things considered.
    I asked a model once if she felt she was being exploited. “Me?” she said. Her name was Marie. “I’m getting well paid for it, love. And it beats working the night shift in a Bradford biscuit factory. But I’ll tell you who’s being exploited. All those blokes who buy it. Wanking over me every month. They’re being exploited.” I think this story began with that conversation.
    I was satisfied with this story when I wrote it: It was the first fiction I had written that sounded in any way like me and that didn’t read like me doing someone else. I was edging toward a style. To research the story, I sat in the Penthouse U.K. Docklands offices and thumbed through twenty years’ worth of bound magazines. In the first Penthouse was my friend Dean Smith. Dean did makeup for Knave, and, it turned out, she’d been the very first Penthouse Pet of the Year in 1965. I stole the 1965 Charlotte blurb directly from Dean’s blurb, “Resurgent individualist” and all. The last I heard, Penthouse was hunting for Dean for their twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations. She’d dropped out of sight. It was in all the newspapers.
    It occurred to me, while I was looking at two decades of Penthouses, that Penthouse and magazines like it had absolutely nothing to do with women and absolutely everything to do with photographs of women. And that was the other place the story began.
Only the End of the World Again
    Steve Jones and I have been friends for fifteen years. We even edited a book of nasty poems for kids together. This means that he gets to ring me up and say things like “I’m doing an anthology of stories set in H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional town of Innsmouth. Do me a story.”
    This story came from a number of things coming together (that’s where we writers Get Our Ideas, in case you were wondering). One of them was the late Roger Zelazny’s book A Night in the Lonesome October, which has tremendous fun with the various stock characters of horror and fantasy: Roger had given me a copy of his book a few months before I came to write this story, and I’d enjoyed it enormously. At about the same time, I was reading an account of a French werewolf trial held 300 years ago. I realized while reading the testimony of one witness that the account of this trial had been an inspiration for Saki’s wonderful story “Gabriel-Ernest” and also for James Branch Cabell’s short novel The White Robe, but that both Saki and Cabell had been too well brought up to use the throwing-up of the fingers motif, a key piece of evidence in the trial. Which meant that it was now all up to me.
    Larry Talbot was the name of the original Wolfman, the one who met Abbott and Costello.
Bay Wolf
    And there was that man Steve Jones again. “I want you to write one of your story poems for me. It needs to be a detective story, set in the near future. Maybe you