In Laymon's Terms

Like The Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s tale—Mara Benton had an abnormally potent way of letting Camelot know it was going to fall...When he’d gone to discuss the body with Harry, the coroner had only looked down at his shoes.

“I can’t let you see it. Body’s been sealed off to everyone without an FBI badge,” he said, looking at Nick with a pale face.

“What did she do?” Harry finally asked.

“What do you mean?” Nick said.

“They skinned her before they brought her in. That’s what I mean. The whole front side of her. They had me leave that part of it out of the report.” Harry was fascinated by it.

“I figured as much,” Nick said.

“They left the upside down flags on her back, though—it was an interesting tattoo. Might be because of where the blood from the original shooting had settled, and needing that for the forged record. That Gun kid still saying he didn’t do it?”

“Yep.”

“Such a shame. Not like he didn’t deserve to go to jail. I’ve seen plenty of his handiwork, but a trigger guy like him just wasn’t smart enough to pull off these murders, if you ask me.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

When he’d gotten back to his office, Nick was still worrying over the clues Mara had left, wondering what her culmination of it all had been. He knew the conspiracy theory was pointing the finger at Congress now—but was Mara Benton just some radical obsessed with the War, or did she have a point? And why hadn’t she left a Wild Card in her grand finale? Maybe because she’d done the cutting, fish-hooking, and sewing.

The mail was waiting for him when he sat down. He thumbed through it, pausing at a small white envelope addressed in neat but angry upstrokes, flourished with bubbly cursive mixed in with print. It had been mailed from Maryland. He opened that envelope first, and in it was a single playing card with a leering jester’s grin, his heart carved out to leave a little hole, and as he held it up to the light, he read the message that had been drawn in with permanent marker. It read: 911.

Nick sat back in his chair, wondering how the piece of mail had slipped through the eyes and ears of the FBI. He turned over the envelope again and looked at the date of the postmark—exactly the date the last set of bodies had been found. The Feds had their killer, all right. Skinned and on a cold slab in a sealed morgue drawer. What Nick had was anger...Was it the truth? He didn’t know.

He only knew that Mara Benton had something to say, and she said it with her life, and felt the lives of others were less important than the message. There was a War going on, that he felt was entirely senseless. A wild goose chase that led all public perception far away from what Mara implicated: that Congress was ultimately responsible for all the lives lost on 9-11, that perhaps they’d allowed it to happen knowing it would ignite a fire. Setting something into motion that went all the way back to the first Bush regime.

For the first time in his life, he truly felt like a puppet and a terrorist all at once. He didn’t need a fishhook through the heart for the pain of thousands of lives lost to sink in. He dug Mara’s photo out of a file in a pile on his desk. It’s a shame, he thought. She was so smart, and so pretty. So very alive and dead, all at once in his heart.

John Pelan

RITING A FEW words about Dick Laymon and what he meant to this genre is a fairly easy proposition. There’s a huge shelf of books, most of which have been perpetually in print in the United Kingdom and are now being issued in the US. There’s a whole shelf of Laymon novels and collections to look at. It’s a monument to being true to yourself and writing what you want to write.

Back in the late eighties as the bottom fell out of the horror market and a lot of folks either stopped writing horror or stopped writing altogether, Dick bucked the trend and kept turning out good books that weren’t hidden behind the labels of “suspense” or “thriller” or some other euphemism. The books were unabashedly horror novels and they pulled no punches. Dick proved that as a writer you could write what you want and be successful at it.

Writing about what Dick Laymon meant to HWA is still relatively easy to assess. Dick brought his experience from MWA and a strong set of principles to the table and set about moving the organization forward and trying to provide tangible benefits to all of our members. These efforts are already starting to pay dividends for all of us and will continue into the foreseeable future.