The Drama Society

By Dobie Holloway

Historian Matt Robichaux is delighted when Hayden Lodge asks him to come to his home in the town of Bancroft to fact-check Lodge's latest novel. The invitation to spend time with the novelist in the town he owns is a prize awarded to very few.

 

Matt finds, however, that the town that owes its very existence to the most successful horror writer of all time may not be quite what it seems. The people Lodge has surrounded himself with are a peculiar group, to say the least—and those are just the ordinary inhabitants. Matt also encounters a seductive ghost lurking in a bookstore's dusty back rooms, a time-traveling apple orchard and its rambunctious keepers, a pair of randy woodworkers who may not actually exist, and a mysterious nature spirit haunting a quiet forest pool.

 

By the time Matt leaves Bancroft, he will have spent a week that was memorable, enjoyable, and totally impossible to explain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dobie Holloway
• Release date: Jul 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223631798

Dobie Holloway

A former farm boy who ran away to the big city to seek fun and adventure -- but mostly fun -- Dobie Holloway's life experiences are the fuel for his writing.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Hayden Lodge's fifteenth novel entered the world in much the same way as his first, fifth, sixth, and ninth books had. Critics shied from dismissing it outright, fearing accusations of snobbery since these were works of horror fiction (never a particularly gentrified genre) rather than literature, but settled instead for damning it with faint praise. The public, meanwhile, cheerfully ignored the critics and devoured the book, buying a hundred and thirty thousand copies in the first ten weeks.

Lodge celebrated by buying a town.

Twenty years—and nine more novels—later, he invited me to visit.

·

I’m hurt that you never told me about this, Jamie groused, shaking chili sauce all over his food.

You knew we had collaborated on the book.

"But I didn’t know you slept with him, for cryin' out loud! He's a celebrity! And hot, too, in a kind of young Obama way, you know, all legs and ears. I would have loved to have heard all the details. Is he hung?"

I made a shooing motion with my hand. It was just that one weekend and that was three years ago.

Wait. Was that the trip to Austin? The panel discussion thing? I remember you coming back from that with a smug look.

Oh, bullshit. You remember no such thing. You and I were just roommates then. You weren’t paying attention to my smug looks.

Jamie wrestled with a chunk of chicken for a minute (What kind of civilization eats with sticks anyway, dammit?), then gave up and speared it with a plastic fork.

I don’t think this is real chicken, I said, holding up a beige cube, showing off my expert chopstick technique. I think it’s one of those mushroom-based substitutes.

Don’t try to change the subject, Jamie said. "I have always paid attention to your smug looks. I do remember that trip because you told me you had met Lodge. You used the word ‘met’ more than once. You made it sound like he shook your hand in a receiving line. You never said ‘boinked’ a single time. Did he do you from behind or missionary?"

Would you stop that? I never say 'boinked.' I'm sorry I never mentioned it then, and I'm even sorrier I mentioned it now.

Jamie held up a thumb and index finger a hair’s-width apart. "This close to hanging out with a celebrity author—a well-hung celebrity author, right? Am I right? He’s got that self-satisfied look that says bigness—and we missed it."

"You missed it. I’m going to stay at his house for a week while you’re off saving the world. My name will be on the ‘acknowledgments’ page for the second book in a row. I’m practically a celebrity myself. I’m slumming just hanging out with you."

Jamie took a swig of his beer, gazing at me with what he liked to believe was a soulful, tragic expression. Do I look wounded? Because I am.

You look like a guy who makes my knees go all watery every time he turns those beady blue eyes on me.

Jamie laughed and, abandoning the chopsticks, picked up a fork. You win. Will you be all alone with him?

No, there's a kind of assistant/secretary person, a cook/housekeeper, and probably a gardener or two. For all I know, he has serfs tilling the fields and shearing the sheep. I would imagine that he lives in pretty high style.

Buy some new shirts. Your wardrobe is definitely not up to high style. People will think you’re there to read the water meter. Lodge owns the whole town—what’s it called? Bankston?

Bancroft. He only owns half, the older half.

"So you’ll be the guest of the lord of the manor. Are you entitled to droit du seigneur while you’re there?"

Do you even know what that means? Besides, it’s just a myth.

Of course I know what it means. It means when you're the king, you're entitled to boink anyone you want. And even if it is a myth, that doesn't mean you can't give it a try. Just living in the big house ought to give you some considerable cachet with the locals.

I’m not quite as good at attracting talent as you are.

You attracted me.

I laughed. "I am pretty proud of that."

I wish I could go with you.

I do, too. Maybe if I behave myself and don't throw up on the carpet or set anything on fire, he'll invite me back sometime when you aren't in Tel Aviv or Helsinki or wherever.

Jamie pushed his plate aside and reached across the table to take my hand.

I hope so. It sounds like fun. Are you going to have fun?

I suppose so.

Wrong answer. Didn’t we go through this last summer? I harangued you into expecting good things, and what happened? You had a blast. And you and I finally did the wild thang.

I do have fond memories of that experience. Sometimes they’re in the form of trauma flashbacks, but still.

Jamie laughed. "Have fun on this trip. Let me repeat that for the slow learners: Have fun on this trip. When I get back from Beirut, we'll go somewhere and do something together for your birthday. Something wildly scandalous."

I’ll look forward to that.

Jamie flagged down the waitress and paid the check. Finish your beer, and we'll go home and do something only moderately scandalous. I'm dead on my feet.

·

As these events are taking place, James Robert Colquhoun (he pronounces it ka-HOON, like a sneeze) is forty-two. His father has been an accountant all his working life and, now retired, still lives in his hometown of Philadelphia. Jamie's mother died only a year before I met him. Jamie works for a bank, but it is a bank only in the sense that Buckingham Palace is a house. His job has something to do with investment banking in other countries, and when he talks about his work, he speaks a language that is entirely foreign to me.

Physically, Jamie is quite a bit over six feet tall, with long legs with knobby knees (but nice thighs), a long torso, big shoulders and chest (he was a champion swimmer in high school and college), very fair skin, reddish-blond hair. He has rather squinty dark blue eyes, a beaky nose that is always sunburned, no lips to speak of, and big ears that stand out like flamingo-pink dessert plates. He's just about the most beautiful man I know.

Jamie was born and raised in Philadelphia and goes back to visit his father two or three times a year. They aren't close, but they get along well enough, and Jamie will be sad when his father dies. Occasionally, Jamie will say things that make no sense at all, and then he'll just shrug and say: My dad always says that. Philly. Go figure.

Me? My name is Matt Robichaux, and I'm a history writer. I started out as an honest-to-God historian, but I'm too timid to beg for funding and have too many problems with impulse control to interact every day with college students, so I've settled into a very comfortable life working with real historians and others, collaborating on articles and books. I write well (as I hope you'll see for yourself), and I have a knack for putting meat on the bones of other people's data in appealing ways, so I'm in demand as a ghostwriter. I've written three books of my own, of which the less said, the better. A few of the people I work with are novelists who need background for historical fiction. That's how I got to be so chummy with Hayden Lodge.

Physically, I'm nothing to write home about. Just average pretty much everywhere. Five-ten if I stand up straight. A bit skinny. Medium-length medium-brown hair, muddy green eyes, fair skin that tans well in the summer. (I seldom get sunburned, which annoys Jamie.) I wish my arms and chest were bigger, but at least my belly is still flat. Jamie says my butt looks like a cantaloupe with a slice taken out of the middle, which I interpret as a compliment. Unlike Jamie, I'm a bit furry in spots: my chest and belly, my legs, and my butt are all covered with sandy-brown fuzz, not cave-man, just average. If I walked into a room naked, you might not look twice, but you maybe wouldn't turn away in disgust. Average.

I was born and raised in Tennessee. My parents are both dead, and I never go back to my hometown. Enough said about that, too, I think.

People have told me I'm far too immature and impulsive for a responsible adult my age. I dispute this, although I admit I tend to rush in where angels would fear to tread. I don't say no very often. If ever. Frankly, I have no idea what a responsible adult is, exactly. If it means I'm expected to be as dull as the type of person who uses that phrase, then I'll have to pass.

Jamie and I have been friends for nine years, roommates for five, and we've been having sex for ten months, three weeks, and four days (as of the dates of the events I'll be telling you about here). We're not lovers, not in the you complete me kind of way, but we're more than roommates. We love each other like brothers, except with lots of sex. I'm sure a psychologist would have something to say about that, but that's their wheelhouse, not mine. Jamie, who has zero patience for self-analysis, just refers to us as best fuckbuddies and moves on to the next subject. Sex for us is fun, the most fun we know how to have, so we have it as much as possible, with as many people as possible, but mostly with each other.

Roll that up in your cigar and smoke it, Dr. Freud.

·

I hope I haven't bored you with all that, but I felt it was important to get this stuff out of the way so I don't keep referring to things later without having given you any idea what I'm talking about. That always results in a lot of coy, smirking allusions, which I find incredibly pretentious and irritating when other people do it. But take heart, we're done now. You know as much about me as you need to unless you want to buy me a shirt, in which case I'll tell you that I'm a fifteen-and-a-half neck and thirty-two in the sleeves.

I: SUNDAY

Travel into Bancroft from just about anywhere is complicated. The nearest airport is a regional airfield in Ellerby, about twenty-five miles from your destination. You fly to the state capital (two hundred miles from Ellerby) from wherever you are, then you crawl into a King Air 350 turboprop or something similar (I love airplanes, hate flying) for a hop to Ellerby Executive Airport. In Ellerby, you either rent one of the four or five cars the local Budget office has available, or you arrange for somebody to come get you, at which point you follow a lonely two-lane highway for an hour through woods and swamps until you see the signs.

·

Hayden has been delayed for a day in Miami and has asked me to make you welcome in his absence.

Max Yuldashev, Hayden Lodge's factotum, greeted me at the airport with the air of someone who sees that your pants are unzipped but is too polite to mention it. We piled into a neat little green Subaru, and Max took us out of the parking lot, down a half-mile access road, and onto the narrow two-lane highway.

I appreciate that. It’s very generous of him to bring me out here and put me up while we’re working. We could have done this online.

Not at all. He was very pleased with the results of your collaboration on the first book, and he wanted to bring you in for the next installment. Having you as a guest both facilitates the work and provides him with a way to thank you.

I’m glad the project is being well received. I enjoyed the work very much. Not to mention the generous fee.

Max half-smiled and nodded.

Lodge's man Friday was a pip. He was maybe an inch shorter than me, dark, and what we writers like to describe as sturdy: muscular but not ripped, chunky but not fat. All his physical contours were rounded, as though he had started out as a much larger and more angular person but had been left lying in a creek somewhere until erosion smoothed away all the edges. He was dark, somewhat exotic-looking. He might have been Turkish, he might have been Arab, he might have been Cuban. His short-sleeved white silk shirt and chocolate-brown shorts were spotless, perfectly pressed, and his loafers and belt probably cost more than my car.

The landscape outside was flat, covered by woods that varied from open, park-like stretches to stands of trees and underbrush so dense they would have stymied a tank. Even this early in the summer, there was a feeling of suspension in the drape of the foliage and the stillness of the humid air. We were driving with the windows down, and periodically, the rattling buzz of cicadas would doppler past us.

Aside from the road itself, there was not a single sign of human activity.

I'm afraid I don't know anything about Bancroft other than the fact that Mr Lodge owns a chunk of it and lives there most of the time.

Not surprising. Very few people do. The place has been a dying backwater for much of its existence.

Do you know any of the history?

Of course, Max replied with another Mona Lisa half-smile. Would you like to hear my prepared overview? Hayden and I are very proud of it.

Very much, thank you.

Here you go then: 'Bancroft Then and Now.' He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath.

"Prior to the Civil War, little is known. The Cherokee and their allies inhabited the region until the whites arrived, but they were removed around 1830. After that, the region came to be heavily farmed by white smallholders. Cotton, mostly. Bancroft was founded in 1849—on top of the smoldering ruins of a village of dispossessed Muskogee Seminoles and escaped slaves—as a rail depot to gin and bale the cotton and then ship it to bigger transport centers in other states. By the time of the Civil War, the thin soil was failing, but the town straggled on, mustering enough energy in 1864 to become the site of a mass lynching of Union soldiers who got separated from their unit and fell into the hands of Bancroft's informal militia. The area experienced a brief renaissance during the First World War as cotton prices soared, but by the 1920s, crop yields were so pathetic that the railway depot shut down, never to reopen. Freight trains pass through Bancroft to this day, but they don't stop.

"In the fifties and sixties, various economic models rose and fell: Cattle ranching, an artists' colony, a nudist cult, an ashram. A follower of Wilhelm Reich worked to establish what he called the New Organon; a group