Let"s All Kill Constance

LET'S ALL KILL CONSTANCE

RAY BRADBURY

This book is dedicated

with love

to my daughter

ALEXANDRA,

without whose help

the Third Millennium

might never have arrived.

and again

with gratitude and love

to SID STEBEL

CHAPTER ONE

IT was a dark and stormy night.

Is that one way to catch your reader?

Well, then, it was a stormy night with dark rain pouring in drenches on Venice, California, the sky shattered by lightning at midnight. It had rained from sunset going headlong toward dawn. No creature stirred in that downfall. The shades in the bungalows were drawn on faint blue glimmers where night owls deathwatched bad news or worse. The only thing that moved in all that flood ten miles south and ten miles north was Death. And someone running fast ahead of Death.

To bang on my paper-thin oceanfront bungalow door.

Shocking me, hunched at my typewriter, digging graves, my cure for insomnia. I was trapped in a tomb when the hammering hit my door, midstorm.

I flung the door wide to find: Constance Rattigan.

Or, as she was widely known, The Rattigan.

A series of flicker-flash lightning bolts cracked the sky and photographed, dark, light, light, dark, a dozen times: Rattigan.

Forty years of triumphs and disasters crammed in one brown surf-seal body. Golden tan, five feet two inches tall, here she comes, there she goes, swimming far out at sunset, bodysurfing back, they said, at dawn, to be beached at all hours, barking with the sea beasts half a mile out, or idling in her oceanside pool, a martini in each hand, stark naked to the sun. Or whiplashing down into her basement projection room to watch herself run, timeless, on the pale ceiling with Eric Von Stroheim, Jack Gilbert, or Rod La Rocque's ghosts, then abandoning her silent laughter on the cellar walls, vanishing in the surf again, a quick target that Time and Death could never catch.

Constance.

The Rattigan.

"My God, what are you doing here?" she cried, rain, or tears, on her wild suntanned face.

"My God," I said. "What are you?"

"Answer my question!"

"Maggie's east at a teachers' conference. I'm trying to finish my new novel. Our house, inland, is deserted. My old landlord said, your beach apartment's empty, come write, swim. And here I am. My God, Constance, get inside. You'll drown!"

"I already have. Stand back!"

But Constance did not move. For a long moment she stood shivering in the light of great sheets of lightning and the following sound of thunder. One moment I thought I saw the woman that I had known for years, larger than life, leaping into and jumping out of the sea, whose image I had witnessed on the ceiling and walls of her basement's projection room, backstroking through the lives of Von Stroheim and other silent ghosts.

Then, that changed. She stood in the doorway, diminished by light and sound. She shrank to a child, clutching a black bag to her chest, holding herself from the cold, eyes shut with some unguessed dread. It was hard for me to believe that Rattigan, the eternal film star, had come to visit in the midst of thunders.

I finally said again, "Come in, come in."

She repeated her whisper, "Stand back!"

She swarmed on me, and with one vacuum-suction kiss, harassed my tongue like saltwater taffy, and fled. Halfway across the room she thought to come back and buss my cheek lightly.

"Jeez, that's some flavor," she said. "But wait, I'm scared!"

Hugging her elbows, she sogged down to dampen my sofa. I brought a huge towel, pulled off her dress, and wrapped her.

"You do this to all your women?" she said, teeth chattering.

"Only on dark and stormy nights."

"I won't tell Maggie."

"Hold still, Rattigan, for God's sake."

"Men have said that all my life. Then they drive a stake through my heart."

"Are your teeth gritting because you're half-drowned or scared?"

"Let's see." She sank back, exhausted. "I ran all the way from my place. I knew you weren't here, it's been years since you left, but Christ, how great to find you! Save me!"

"From what, for God's sake?"

"Death."

"No one gets saved from that, Constance."

"Don't say that! I didn't come to die. I'm here, Christ, to live forever!"

"That's just a prayer, Constance, not reality."

"You're going to live forever. Your books!"

"Forty years, maybe."

"Don't knock forty years. I could use a few."

"You could use a drink. Sit still."

I brought out a half bottle of Cold Duck.

"Jesus! What's that?"

"I hate scotch and this is el cheapo writer's stuff. Drink."

"It's hemlock." She drank and grimaced. "Quick! Something else!"

In our midget bathroom I found a small flask of vodka, kept for nights when dawn was far off. Constance seized it.

"Come to Mama!"

She chugalugged.

"Easy, Constance."

"You don't have my death cramps."

She finished three more shots and handed me the flask, eyes shut.

"God is good."

She fell back on the pillows.

"You wanna hear about that damn thing that chased me down the shore?"

"Wait." I put the bottle of Cold Duck to my lips and drank. "Shoot."

"Well," she said. "Death."

CHAPTER TWO

I WAS beginning to wish there was more in that empty vodka flask. Shivering, I turned on the small gas heater in the hall, searched the kitchen, found a bottle of Ripple.

"Hell!" Rattigan cried. "That's hair tonic!" She drank and shivered. "Where was I?"

"Running fast."

"Yeah, but whatever I ran away from came with."

The front door knocked with wind.

I grabbed her hand until the knocking stopped.

Then she picked up her big black purse and handed over a small book, trembling.

"Here."

I read: Los Angeles Telephone Directory, 1900. "Oh, Lord," I whispered. "Tell me why I brought that?" she said.

I turned from the As on down through the Gs and Hs and on through M and TV and O to the end, the names, the names, from a lost year, the names, oh my God, the names.

"Let it sink in," said Constance.

I started up front. A for Alexander, Albert, and William. B for Burroughs. C for…

"Good grief," I whispered. "1900. This is I960." I looked at Constance, pale under her eternal summer tan. "These people. Only a few are still alive." I stared at the names. "No use calling most of these numbers. This is-"

"What?"

"A Book of the Dead."

"Bull's— eye."

"A Book of the Dead," I said. "Egyptian. Fresh from the tomb."

"Fresh out." Constance waited.

"Someone sent this to you?" I said. "Was there a note?"

"There doesn't have to be a note, does there?"

I turned more pages. "No. Since practically everyone here is gone, the implication is-“

"I'll soon be silent."

"You'd be the last name in these pages of the dead?"

"Yep," said Constance.

I went to turn the heat up and shivered.

"What an awful thing to do."

"Awful."

"Telephone books," I murmured. "Maggie says I cry at them, but it all depends on what telephone books, when."

"All depends. Now…"

From her purse she pulled out a second small black book.

"Open that."

I opened it and read, "Constance Rattigan" and her address on the beach, and turned to the first page. It was all As.

"Abrams, Alexander, Alsop, Allen."

I went on.

"Baldwin, Bradley, Benson, Burton, Buss…"

And felt a coldness take my fingers.

"These are all friends of yours? I know those names."

"And…?"

"Not all, but most of them, buried out at Forest Lawn. But dug up tonight. A graveyard book," I said.

"And worse than the one from 1900."

"Why?"

"I gave this one away years ago. To the Hollywood Helpers. I didn't have the heart to erase the names. The dead accumulated. A few live ones remained. But I gave the book away. Now it's back. Found it when I came in tonight from the surf."

"Jesus, you swim in this weather?"

"Rain or shine. And tonight I came back to find this lying like a tombstone in my yard."

“No note?”

"By saying nothing, it says everything."

"Christ." I took the old directory in one hand, Rattigan's small names and numbers book in the other.

"Two almost-Books of the Dead," I said.

"Almost, yes," said Constance. "Look here, and here, and also here."

She showed me three names on three pages, each with a red ink circle around it and a crucifix.

"These names?" I said. "Special?"

"Special, yes. AW dead. Or so I think. But they're marked, aren't they? With a cross by each, which means what?"

"Marked to die? Next up?"

"Yes, no, I don't know, except it scares me. Look."

Her name, up front, had a red ink circle around it, plus the crucifix.

"Book of the Dead, plus a list of the soon possibly dead?"

"Holding it, how does that book feel to you?"

"Cold," I said. "Awfully cold."

The rain beat on the roof.

"Who would do a thing like this to you, Constance? Name a few."

"Hell, ten thousand." She paused to add sums. "Would you believe nine hundred? Give or take a dozen."

"My God, that's too many suspects."

"Spread over thirty years? Sparse."

"Sparse!" I cried.

"They stood in lines on the beach."

"You didn't have to ask them in!"

"When they all shouted Rattigan!?"

"You didn't have to listen."

"What is this, a Baptist revival?"

“Sorry.”

"Well." She took the last swig in the bottle and winced. "Will you help find this son of a bitch, or two sons of bitches, if the Books of the Dead were sent by separate creeps?"

"I'm no detective, Constance."

"How come I remember you half-drowned in the canal with that psycho Shrank?"

"Well…"

"How come I saw you up on Notre Dame at Fenix Studios with the Hunchback? Please help Mama."

"Let me sleep on it."

"No sleep tonight. Hug these old bones. Now …"

She stood up with the two Books of the Dead and walked across the room to open the door on black rain and the surf eating the shore, and aimed the books. "Wait!" I cried. "If I'm going to help, I'll need those!"

"Atta boy." She shut the door. "Bed and hugs? But no phys ed."

"I wasn't planning, Constance," I said.

CHAPTER THREE

at two forty-five in the middle of the dark storm, a terrific lightning bolt rammed the earth behind my bungalow. Thunder erupted. Mice died in the walls.

Rattigan leaped upright in bed.

"Save me!" she yelled.

"Constance." I stared through the dark. "You talking to yourself, God, or me?"

"Whoever's listening!"

"We all are."

She lay in my arms.

The telephone rang at three A.M., the hour when all souls die if they need to die.

I lifted the receiver.

'"Who's in bed with you?" Maggie asked from some country with no rains and no storms.

I searched Constance's suntanned face, with the white skull lost under her summer flesh.

"No one," I said.

And it was almost true.

CHAPTER FOUR

at six in the morning dawn was out there somewhere, but you couldn't see it for the rain. Lightning still flashed and took pictures of the tide slamming the shore.

An incredibly big lightning bolt struck out in the street and I knew if I reached across the bed, the other side would be empty.

"Constance!"

The front door stood wide like a stage exit, with rain drumming the carpet, and the two phone books, large and small, dropped for me to find.

"Constance," I said in dismay, and looked around.

At least she put on her dress, I thought.

I telephoned her number. Silence.

I shrugged on my raincoat and trudged up the shoreline, blinded by rain, and stood in front of her Arabian-fortress house, which was brightly lit inside and out.

But no shadows moved anywhere.

"Constance!" I yelled.

The lights stayed on and the silence with it.

A monstrous wave slammed the shore.

I looked for her footprints going out to the tide.

None.

Thank God, I thought. But then, the rain would have erased them.

"All right for you!" I yelled.

And went away.

CHAPTER FIVE

LATER I moved along the dusty path through the jungle trees and the wild azalea bushes carrying two six-packs. I knocked on Crumley's carved African front door and waited. I knocked again. Silence. I set one six-pack of beer against the door and backed off.

After eight or nine long breaths, the door opened just enough to let a nicotine-stained hand grab the beer and pull it in. The door shut.

"Crumley," I yelled. I ran up to the door.

"Go away," said a voice from inside.

"Crumley, it's the Crazy. Let me in!"

"No way," said Crumley's voice, liquid now, for he had opened the first beer. "Your wife called."

"Damn!" I whispered.

Crumley swallowed. "She said that every time she leaves town, you fall off the pier in deep guano, or karate-chop a team of lesbian midgets."

"She didn't say that!"

"Look, Willie"-for Shakespeare-"I'm an old man and can't take those graveyard carousels and crocodile men snor-keling the canals at midnight. Drop that other six-pack. Thank God for your wife."

"Damn," I murmured.

"She said she'll come home early if you don't cease and desist."

"She would, too," I muttered.

"Nothing like a wife coming home early to spoil the chaos. Wait." He took a swallow. "You're okay, William, but no thanks."

I set the other six-pack down and put the 1900 telephone book and Rattigan's private phone book on top, and backed off.

After a long while that hand emerged again, touched Braille-wise over the books, knocked them off, and grabbed the beer. I waited. Finally the door reopened. The hand, curious, fumbled the books and snatched them in.

"Good!" I cried.

Good! I thought. In one hour, by God… he'll call!

CHAPTER SIX

in one hour, Crumley called.

But didn't call me William.

He said, "Crud, crap, crapola. You really know how to hook a guy. What is it with these goddamn Books of the Dead?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Hell, I was born in a mortuary, raised in a graveyard, matriculated in the Valley of the Kings outside Karnak in upper, or was it lower, Egypt? Some nights I dream I'm wrapped in creosote. Who wouldn't know a book that's dead when it's served with his beer?"

"Same old Crumley," I said.

"I wish it wasn't. When I hang up I'm calling your wife!"

"Don't!"

"Why not?"

"Because— " I stopped, gasped, and then blurted out, "I need you!"

"Crud."

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard," he muttered. "Christ."

And at last, "Meet you down by Rattigan's. Around sunset. When things come out of the surf to get you."

"Rattigan's."

He hung up before I could.

CHAPTER SEVEN

EVERYTHING by night, that's the ticket. Nothing at noon; the sun is too bright, the shadows wait. The sky burns so nothing dares move. There is no fun in sunlit exposure. Midnight brings fun when the shadows under trees lift their skirts and glide. Wind arrives. Leaves fall. Footsteps echo. Beams and floorboards creak. Dust sifts from tombstone angel wings. Shadows soar like ravens. Before dawn, the streetlights die, the town goes briefly blind.

It is then that all good mysteries start, all adventures linger. Dawn never was. Everyone holds their breath to bind the darkness, save the terror, nail the shadows.

So it was only proper that as dark waves were striking a darker shore, I met Crumley on the sand, out front of her big white Arabian-fortress beach house. We walked up and looked in.

All the doors still stood wide, bright lights burned inside while Gershwin punched holes in a player-piano roll in 1928 to be played again and again, triple time, with no one listening except me and Crumley walking through lots of music, but no Constance.

I opened my mouth to apologize for calling Crumley.

"Drink your gin and shut up." Crumley thrust a beer at me.

"Now," he went on, "what the hell does all this mean?" He thumbed the pages of Rattigan's personal Book of the Dead. "Here, here, and over here."

There were red ink marks circling a half-dozen names, with deeply indented crucifixes freshly inscribed.

"Constance guessed, and so did I, that those marks meant the owners of those names were still alive, but maybe not for long. What do you think?"

"I don't," said Crumley. "This is your picnic. I was all set to head for Yosemite this weekend, and you show up like a film producer who improves the flavor of screenplays by peeing on every other scene. I'd better run for Yosemite right now; you got that look of a wild rabbit with intuitions."

"Hold on." For he was starting to move. "Don't you want to prove or disprove which of these names are still kicking or which dropped dead?"

I grabbed the book, then tossed it back so he had to catch. It fell open at one page with a more-than-enormous crucifix by an almost-circus-banner name. Crumley scowled. I read the name upside down: Califia. Queen Califia. Bunker Hill. No address. But there was a phone number.

Crumley could not take his eyes off it, scowling.

"Know where that is?" I said.

"Bunker Hill, hell, I know, I know. I was born a few blocks north of there. A real free-for-all stewpot of Mexicans, Gypsies, stovepipe-out-the-window Irish, white trash and black. Used to go by there to look in at Callahan and Ortega, Funeral Directors. Hoped to see real bodies. My God, Callahan and Ortega, what names, right there in the middle of Juarez II, Guadalajara bums, dead flowers from Rosarita Beach, Dublin whores. Crud!" Crumley suddenly yelled, furious at listening to his own travel talk, half selling himself on my next expedition. "Did you hear me? Did you listen? God!"

"I heard," I said. "So why don't we just call one of those red circle numbers to see what's aboveground or below?"

And before he could protest, I seized the book and ran up the dune to Rattigan's outdoor pool, brightly lit, with an extension phone on a glass-top patio table, waiting. I didn't dare look at Crumley, who had not moved as I dialed.

A voice answered from long miles away. That number was no longer in service. Damn, I thought, and then, Wait!

I dialed information swiftly, got a number, dialed it, and held the phone out so Crumley could hear the voice:

"Callahan and Ortega, good evening," the voice said, a full rich ripe brogue from center stage of Abbey Theatre. I smiled wildly. I saw Crumley, below, twitch.

Callahan and Ortega," the voice repeated, louder now, its temper roused. A long pause. I stayed mum. "Who the hell is this?"

I hung up before Crumley reached me.

"Son of a bitch," he said, hooked.

"Two blocks, maybe three, from where you were born?"

"Four, you conniving bastard."

"Well?" I said.

Crumley grabbed Rattigan's book.

"Almost but not quite a Book of the Dead?" he said.

"Want to try another number?" I opened the book, turned, and stopped under the Rs. "Here's one, oh Lord yes, even better than Queen Califia."

Crumley squinted. "Rattigan, Mount Lowe. What kind of Rattigan lives up on Mount Lowe? That's where the big red trolley that's been dead half my lifetime used to take thousands up for picnics."

Memory shadowed Crumley's face.

I touched another name.

"Rattigan. St. Vibiana's Cathedral."

"What kind of Rattigan, holy jumping Jesus, hides out in St. Vibiana's Cathedral?"

"Spoken like a born-again Catholic." I studied Crumley's now-permanent scowl. "Want to know? I'm on my way."

I took three false steps before Crumley swore. "How the hell you going to get there with no license and no car?"

I kept my back turned. "You're going to take me."

There was a long brooding silence.

"Right?" I prompted.

"You know how in hell to find where the Mount Lowe trolley once ran?"

"I was carried up by my folks when I was eighteen months old."

"That means you can show the way?"

"Total recall."

"Shut up," said Crumley as he tossed a half-dozen bottles of beer into the jalopy. "Get in the car."

We got in, left Gershwin to punch piano-roll holes in Paris, and drove away.

"Don't say anything," said Crumley. "Just nod your head left, right, or straight ahead."

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I'LL be damned if I know why in hell I'm doing this," Crumley muttered, almost driving on the wrong side of the street. "I said, I'll be damned if I know why in hell-"

"I heard you," I said, watching the mountains and the foothills coming closer.

"You know who you remind me of?" Crumley snorted. "My first and only wife, who knew how to flimflam me with her shapes and sizes and big smiles."

"Do I flimflam you?"

"Say you don't and I'll throw you out of the car. When you see me coming, you sit and pretend to be working a crossword puzzle. You're maybe four words into it before I grab your pencil and shove you outta the way."

"Did I ever do that, Crumley?"

"Don't get me mad. You watching the street signs? Do so.

Now. Tell me, why are you heading this damn-fool expedition?"

I looked at the Rattigan phone book in my lap. "She was running away, she said. From Death, from one of die names in this book. Maybe one of them sent it to her as a spoiled gift. Or maybe she was running toward them, like we're doing, heading for one to see if he's the sinner who dared to send tombstone dictionaries to impressionable child actresses."

"Rattigan's no child," Crumley groused.

"She is. She wouldn't've been so great up on the screen if she hadn't kept one heckuva lot of her Meglin Kiddie self locked up in all those sexual acrobatics. It's not the old Rattigan who's scared here; it's the schoolgirl in panic running through the dark forest, Hollywood, full of monsters."

"You whipping up another of your Christmas fruitcakes full of nuts?"

"Does it sound like it?"

"No comment. Why would one of these red-lined friends send her two books full of lousy memories?"

"Why not? Constance loved a lot of people in her time. So, years later, one way or another, a lot of people hate her. They got rejected, left behind, forgotten. She got famous. They were found with the trash by the side of the road. Or maybe they're real old now and dying, and before they go they want to spoil things."

"You're beginning to sound like me," Crumley said.

"God help me, I hope not. I mean-"

"It's okay. You'll never be Crumley, just like I'll never be Jules Verne Junior. Where in hell are we?"

I glanced up quickly.

"Hey!" I said. "This is it. Mount Lowe! Where the great old red trolley train fell down dead, a long time ago.

"Professor Lowe," I said, reading some offhand memory from the dark side of my eyelids, "was the man who invented balloon photography during the Civil War."

"Where did that come from?" Crumley exclaimed.

"It just came," I said, unsettled.

"You're full of useless information."

"Oh, I don't know," I said, offended. "We're here at Mount Lowe, right? And it's named for Professor Lowe and his Toonerville Trolley scaling its heights, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure," Crumley said.

"Well then, Professor Lowe invented hot-air balloon photography that helped catch enemy images in the great war of the states. Balloons, and a new invention, trains, won for the North."

"Okay, okay," Crumley grumbled. "I'm outta the car and ready to climb."

I leaned out the car window and looked at the long weed-choked path that went up and up a long incline in evening's gathering shadows.

I shut my eyes and recited. "It's three miles to the top. You really want to walk?"

Crumley glared at the foothill.

"Hell, no." He got back in the car and banged the door shut. "Is there any chance we could run off the edge of that damn narrow path? We'd be goners."

"Always the chance. Onward!"

Crumley edged our jalopy to the foot of the mostly blind path, cut the engine, got out, walked over, kicked some dirt, and pulled some weeds.

"Hallelujah!" he exclaimed. "Iron, steel! The old rail track, didn't bother to yank it out, just buried it!"

"See?!" I said.

His face crimson, Crumley plunged back in, almost submerging the car.

"Okay, smart-ass! Damn car won't start!"

"Put your foot on the starter!"

"Damn!" Crumley stomped the floorboard. The car shimmied.

"Double— damn smart-ass kids!"

We ascended.

CHAPTER NINE

the way up the mountain was a double wilderness. The dry season had come early and burned the wild grass to sere crispness. In the rapidly fading light the whole hillside up to the peak was the color of wheat, fried by the sun. As we rode, it crackled. Two weeks before, someone had tossed a match and the whole foothill had exploded in flame. It was headlined in the papers and lit the television news, the flames were so pretty. But now the fire was gone and the chars and dryness with it. There was a dead-fire smell as Crumley and I threaded the lost path winding up Mount Lowe.

On the way, Crumley said, "It's good you can't see over my side. A thousand-foot drop."

I clutched my knees.

Crumley noticed. "Well, maybe only a five-hundred-foot drop."

I shut my eyes and recited off my clenched eyelids.

"The Mount Lowe railway was part electric, part cable car."

Crumley, made curious, said, "And?"

I unclenched my knees.

"The railway opened July Fourth, 1893, with free cake and ice cream and thousands of riders. The Pasadena City Brass Band rode the first car playing 'Hail, Columbia.' But considering their passage into the clouds, they had shifted to 'Nearer My God to Thee,' which made at least ten thousand people along the way cry. Later in the ascension they decided to do 'Upward, Always Upward' as they reached the heights. They were followed in three cable cars by the Los Angeles Symphony; the violins in one car, the brass in a second, and the timpani and woodwinds in the third car. In the confusion, the conductor was left behind with his baton. Later in the day the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle Choir ascended, also in three cars; sopranos in one, the baritones in another, and the bass in the third. They sang 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' which seemed very appropriate as they vanished in the mist. It was reported that ten thousand miles of red, white, and blue bunting covered all of the trolleys and the trains and the cable cars. When the day was finally over, one semihysterical woman who admired Professor Lowe for what he had done to bring about the creation of the Mount Lowe railway and its taverns and hotels was quoted as saying, 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow and also praise Professor Lowe,' which made everyone cry again," I babbled on.

Crumley said, "I'll be damned."

I added, "The Pacific Electric Railway ran to Mount Lowe, the Pasadena Ostrich Farm, Seleg Lion Zoo, San Gabriel Mission, Monrovia, Baldwin's Ranch, and Whittier."

Crumley mumbled under his breath and drove on in silence.

Taking that as a hint, I said, "Are we there yet?"

"Cowardly custard," said Crumley. "Open your eyes."

I opened my eyes.

"I think we're there."

And we were. For there stood the ruins of the old rail station, and beyond that, a few charred struts of the burned pavilion.

I got out slowly and stood with Crumley surveying miles of land that went forever to the sea.

"Cortes never saw better," said Crumley. "View's great. Makes you wonder why they didn't rebuild."

"Politics."

"Always is. Now, where in hell do we find someone named Rattigan in a place like this?"

"There!"

Some eighty feet away, behind a huge spread of pepper trees, was a small cottage half-sunk in the earth. Fire hadn't touched it, but rain had worn its paint and battered its roof.

"There's got to be a body in there," Crumley said as we walked toward it.

"Isn't there always a body, or else why come see?"

"Go check. I'll stand here hating myself for not bringing more booze."

"Some detective." I ambled over to the cottage and had one helluva time yanking its door wide. When it finally whined and gave way, I lurched back, afraid, and peered in.

"Crumley," I said at last.

"Yeah?" he said, sixty feet away.

"Come see."

"A body?" he said.

"Even better" I said in awe.

CHAPTER TEN

we entered a labyrinth of newsprint. A labyrinth; hell, a catacomb with narrow passages between stacks of old newspapers-the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle News, the Detroit Free Press. Five feet on the left, six on the right, and a pathway between which you might jockey through, fearful of avalanches that could crush and kill.