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AFTERWORD
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This is harder than I thought it was going to be, but then everything about this book has been harder than I thought it was going to be—on an emotional and practical level. It’s three years to the day that he died, which makes that connection all the more potent on this night of all nights.
First and foremost, Terry was a friend, so there’s that weight on each and every word. He was also a hell of a writer with a unique voice and sensibility, and the absolutely last thing I’d ever want to do is put something out there with my friend’s name on that wasn’t worthy of his singular talent.
I’ve got thousands of emails from Terry archived on my computer, some filled with the sadness that came with realizing our mad plan to publish a unified TM Wright library, re-releasing all of his old paperbacks as nice limited edition hardcovers limited to one hundred copies, with beautiful art from Robert Sammelin who did the covers of A Spider on My Tongue (Nyx Books) and I am the Bird (PS Publishing) wasn’t viable because despite the masive success of the ’80s the world had moved on and we couldn’t interest enough people in it to make it happen, through to the other side of the emotional scale with the excitement when Richard Chizmar commissioned Bone Soup and Eyes of the Carp and Peter Crowther bought Blue Canoe and I am the Bird. I’ve got emails where we batted around ideas for Otto’s Conundrum—which is being printed for the first time in PS Publishing’s Best of TM Wright that’s releasing simultaneously with Mallam Cross—and loads of fragments from stories-in-progress charting the last few years of Terry’s career.
Reading back through them for this damn near killed me.
I’m not being melodramatic when I say that it feels like I’ve been living with a ghost for the last couple of years, but we’ll get to that. The fact is, these mails are the only reason this book exists.
Terry had an idea for something massive, a huge tv series he wanted to pitch to SyFy Network about a city where everyone was a ghost, inverting the whole ghost story trope by having a hero who was essentially the only living boy in New York.
I loved that idea.
I mean seriously loved it.
The notion of a single house in a city of hauntings which is the only place that isn’t home to its own ghosts? It’s the ultimate distillation of what Terry’s work was about if you think about it. He’d being moving towards this for probably twenty years or so, ever since he brought Abner Cray into the world of the dead that first time in A Manhattan Ghost Story.
I’m going to talk about Abner for a second, because he helped me solve the riddle of Mallam Cross.
Now, back in 2006, I’m in Nashville and I’m chatting to Terry about Abner and the fact I’d really love to know what was up with him these days, which, let’s be honest, post-The Waiting Room was always going to be an odd conversation, but it planted a seed in his head. I got an email back the next morning full of Terry’s usual enthusiasm about how he’d been dreaming about Abner in the land of the dead and his old friend couldn’t focus on who he was with his sense of self dissolving.
I remember saying I loved it. I loved how a character he hadn’t touched for twenty years was back talking to him. We traded maybe ten emails that day, the last one being a note from Terry telling me he had a title: A Spider on my Tongue. He didn’t know if it would be a novel, a short story or a novella, because that wasn’t how he worked, but Abner was speaking to him again after all these years.
The following day I woke up to the first five thousand words of A Spider on My Tongue’s first draft. And sure, it was rough, he’d hammered it out in one of those fugue states certain writers can drop into, and it was hallucinatory, Terry insisting Abner was talking to him from the other side. It was absolutely quintessential Terry, and unmistakably Abner. It was the story of a man losing the sense of who he had been before he died, an immortal torment of the dead forgetting themselves.
That was the true horror of the story, and it was horribly prophetic, too. I mean, in all honesty I can’t imagine a crueler twist of fate than a man who spent years imagining for his characters that existential dread of losing themselves to suffer dementia in his last few years and lose himself along the way. Who says the universe doesn’t have a sick sense of humour?
In the months before his death Terry tried to bring that city of ghosts to life. Too sick to write, blind now, he dictated the ideas as they came to him, spitballing a big grand confusing city and its inhabitants and histories, but with no real connective tissue. He created a cast of if not hundreds, probably close to a hundred, with snatches of thoughts and bits of backstory, but it was all very disparate. Roxane, Terry’s wife, transcribed all of it. Around 50,000 words of these little histories. But it was a race against time he was never going to win, and as his own grasp of reality slipped deeper into the dementia consuming it, it became harder and harder for him to connect with his creation and, full of frustration and anger at his inability to get the words out and shape the ideas as he saw them in his mind, he gave up working on this and realized he’d never get to tell the stories of these last imaginary people living inside him.
The population of Mallam Cross was consigned to a hard drive on a computer that even then was close to six years old, and now would be closer to twenty, which presented problems all of its own in terms of rescuing this stuff.
Five days after Terry’s death Roxane sent me the file and asked me if I thought it could be turned into something.
I read the file three times.
It was a mess, but it was wonderful at the same time, because I was getting a glimpse at what had been going on inside my friend’s head when we were no longer able to talk, and realizing that even as he struggled with his own slow decline he was still trying to create a last gift to the world. But as wonderful as it was, it was more of a mess. The mind behind it was broken. It wasn’t just that names would change or people simply cease to be, half-remembered snatches of other stuff would suddenly occur and you’d find Beatles lyrics dropping in randomly and suddenly a big Walmart style hypermarket would materialize in a town that had been an 1850s kinda place the day before. There were simply too many people, too much undeveloped story, but there were still these nuggets of pure Terry in there, beautiful lucid moments where the writer he had been shone through.
So how did I answer Roxane? Could this stuff be edited into one last book?
I said yes without really understanding what I was saying yes to, because, like that last Abner Cray story, I desperately wanted it to happen because Terry weas my friend, and I wanted to do this for him like I could somehow make him live again, if only for a few hours in the minds of the readers who had loved his stuff for thirty years.
It was a noble promise, sure, but there was no little madness involved in making it. It wasn’t until I was maybe six months into the edit (working on it in between my own books and dealing with the trauma of losing my father), and struggling to find that thread, the red line that ought to have run through all of the stuff if it was going to connect it into an actual honest to God story, that I realised it wasn’t there. I just didn’t have the stuff to make it work without turning it into ‘Steve’s version of Terry’s last book’ which was the last thing I wanted to do. That would have been a bigger betrayal than letting the file die on that old computer.
But I’m a stubborn son of a bitch, frankly, and refused to admit defeat. So, I lied mercilessly to Peter Crowther, who as a huge fan of Terry’s work had championed Mallam Cross (seriously this book wouldn’t exist without Pete, who is a true gent in every respect and I just can’t thank him enough, or his wife Nicky, or David Gentry who has worked wonders on the cover) and told him I’d get there. I’d crack it, but it would take time. I just fudged how much time was involved because I really didn’t want to let Terry down, or Roxane, or Pete. But I was dreading the fact the answers weren’t in the files Roxane had sent over.
I’ll be honest, I was close to giving up when late one night (last Halloween, actually, on the second anniversary of Terry’s death) I found myself up alone at 3 am, and sifting through those email exchanges and feeling sorry for myself when I came across a line in there about how when he was creating a character for Sally Pinup he’d looked up and seen Ryerson Biergarten, one of his other characters, in the room watching him and shaking his head, a mocking smile on his face.
It had inspired him to do a self portrait where the smoke billowing around his head contained the wraith-like ghosts of his characters looking down at him.
Then I found an answer he’d sent me from an interview he was doing, which he thought was playfully amusing, and again it talked about how his characters were so real to him he could see them in the room with him when he worked.
And I knew that my old mate was paying one last visit to help me work out how to fix Mallam Cross, it was right there in his own words.
There might never be a tv show based on his haunted city, but thanks to those old emails—conversations ranging from 2005 through to 2012—the book would happen because he’d given me a way in. That way in was the reason why that one house in the town wasn’t haunted: it was the writer’s house, and all of those ghosts were his creations.
But it would have been wrong to simply take his old books and characters and replace what he’d done in those dying days with my own versions, so I spent a few months revisiting all of Terry’s old books. Now you’ll meet characters with half-familiar names, little nods to the characters as they first appeared in The Playground, Strange Seed, Nursery Tale, and all the others, little lines of dialogue and description have been lifted from them and given new purpose in Mallam Cross.
If I’ve done my job well, you won’t see the joins.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Because if I was bringing Terry into his last book, making him the inhabitant of that last house on the boundary and giving him that chance to live among his ghosts, then I was going to be using his own words.
That’s where the thousands of emails came in, and the fact we’d discussed everything from life to the craft and back again, meant that when I had to pick up the story where he’d left it and weave it all together I could do it with his own words in a lot of places, or taking his ideas and conversations and try to interpret them in my own.
So, in so many ways this really is a ghost story.
There are parts of the old emails, fragments of interviews, lines from his old books all woven seamlessly in with those new, last, creations of Terry’s, though I will admit that I fused more than a few together into single characters to bring them into sharper focus, and I couldn’t be prouder of the book you’re holding in your hands because of that. Because these really are Terry’s last words.
I’m not going to tell you about his other books or how he wrote one of the books that made me want to be a writer, or how ridiculous it felt when he wrote a huge, thrilling, brilliant introduction to a small press book of mine. Instead, I’m going to share one last personal thing, which sums up TM Wright and his ghosts: In 1997 I emigrated, moving from Newcastle in the north of England, to Stockholm, Sweden, in the least planned emigration, ever. I quite literally decided not to get back on the plane the morning I was meant to. Now, to finance that original three-month trip that became my emigration I sold my entire book collection (two thousand hardcovers, five thousand paperbacks) to a small bookshop called Robinson’s in the Grainger Market. A few years back I went home to bury my father. A bit lost, I returned to that bookshop, looking for something to read. Browsing I found a lovely clean copy of Terry’s Goodlow’s Ghosts, the Gollancz hardback, for a pound.
I bought it, and went back to Mum’s thinking well, at least I can read something familiar tonight.
I was maybe forty or fifty pages in when I turned onto the next page and found a slip of paper with my own handwriting on it. It took me a second to realize what I was looking at, but then I remembered I hadn’t finished reading the book first time around. I’d put that slip of paper in the book nearly twenty years earlier, to mark my page when there was nothing else to hand. On it I’d scribbled a short note to myself, there were a couple of groceries my then girlfriend had asked me to pick up on the way home, a telephone number long since disconnected, and an idea. That idea was the basis for the first short story I ever sold. So even as I was saying goodbye to my father my old friend had managed to find a way to return to me the scrap of paper where, for me at least, it all began.
It’s stuff like that that convinces me there really is magic in the world, and having spent the last year with Terry’s ghost in the corner watching me and shaking his head just as Ryerson used to watch him, I know he loves the idea that he gets to live on in his last words and those fragments of email conversations past, and gets to reach out to his friends one last time like this, even as he gets to walk off into the sunset with Galway, the old pug that he loved so very, very much.
Steven Savile
October 31st 2018