“Could you tell me why? I know about the library books. Some of them might scare people, and some are—”
“Some of my books might scare you too, Tim. I’ll tell you a little about abnormal psychology if you like, one of these days, and then I think you’ll see that until you’re actually trained to deal with such cases, you’d be better off not knowing too much about them.”
“I don’t want to be morbid,” agreed Tim. “All right. I’ll read only what you give me. And from now on I’ll tell you things. There was more than the newspaper, you know.”
“I thought as much. Do you want to go on with your tale?”
“It started when I first wrote a letter to a newspaper—of course, under a pen name. They printed it. For a while I had a high old time of it—a letter almost every day, using all sorts of pen names. Then I branched out to magazines, letters to the editor again. And stories—I tried stories.”
He looked a little doubtfully at Welles, who said only: “How old were you when you sold the first story?”
“Eight,” said Timothy. “And when the check came, with my name on it, ‘T. Paul,’ I didn’t know what in the world to do.”
“That’s a thought. What did you do?”
“There was a sign in the window of the bank. I always read signs, and that one came back to my mind. ‘Banking By Mail.’ You can see I was pretty desperate. So I got the name of a bank across the Bay and I wrote them—on my typewriter—and said I wanted to start an account, and here was a check to start it with. Oh, I was scared stiff, and had to keep saying to myself that, after all, nobody could do much to me. It was my own money. But you don’t know what it’s like to be only a small boy! They sent the check back to me and I died ten deaths when I saw it. But the letter explained. I hadn’t endorsed it. They sent me a blank to fill out about myself. I didn’t know how many lies I dared to tell. But it was my money and I had to get it. If I could get it into the bank, then some day I could get it out. I gave my business as ‘author’ and I gave my age as twenty-four. I thought that was awfully old.”
“I’d like to see the story. Do you have a copy of the magazine around?”