“We believe in you, too,” Velman said. “That’s why we’ve come to you. You have to listen to us. You have to hear us.”
“I have heard you,” I said. “But I still can’t help you. You don’t belong here. You don’t belong anywhere.”
“So you are forsaking us, even having heard our pleas?” Velman asked. Lise didn’t say anything. She looked to the dwarf to confirm what was going on inside my mind. He nodded. They were doomed. That was my judgment. They had come looking for a trial, not appreciating the irony that once I came into my power they would once again be helpless before me. That is what it meant to be a creator.
I shaped things.
“And you will not be swayed?” Lise asked. For the first time she sounded unsure of herself. There was a sweetness to her voice. I mistook that change in her tone for defeat. I should have known better, after all, I created her, didn’t I?
“I need to eat,” I said, as though that explained everything. “I need to pay the bills. I need to write the characters and stories people want to read. I have a duty to them to do that. I make a conscious choice.”
“And that choice betrays your talent, and us,” Lise argued.
“I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. I can’t write everything I dream up. Some stuff isn’t worth writing. It’s derivative. Some stuff is only half-formed,” I offered, aware of the irony as I said it. “And sometimes it’s just plain stupid. I’m not ineffable. I fuck up. Sometimes I just can’t see an actual story in the idea, or just can’t get beyond the germ of the idea to get at it. It happens. Every time I sit down it is a battle with the empty page. Ideas struggle to be heard inside my head, and some just shout louder than others.” I started to think how I might be able to talk my way out of this yet, only to realise the moment that I began imagining it, whatever it is, it has the power to come into being somewhere, somehow, in this hell of my own making. The thought was more frightening than it was liberating.
“Show him,” she yelled at Crohak. “Tear your chest apart and show him all of the worlds he almost created! Show him the millions of lives he almost fashioned out of the stuff of his mind. Show him the countless histories engraved on your bones. Show him everything that’s been lost. Remind him of his responsibilities.” It was a scene out of Laughing Boy where Crohak had shown Declan his place in the world. It had been one of the more surreal moments in a quite surreal book.
“No,” Crohak said. It was the simplest of refusals. The Birdman lowered his head. “He has no duty to The Unwritten. You must accept that as your fate, Lise. You will remain forever unwritten. That is as it should be.”
“No,” Lise raged, whipping around to confront what remained of the Birdman. “I refuse to believe I am any less worthy of life than you!”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Crohak said quite reasonably, “Only what he believes. And he does not believe in you.”
“No!” Lise lashed out, her first crashing into the Birdman’s beakish jaw. His head snapped back as he spat small black feathers. She set about him then, her body blurring into every tool of torture I could imagine. I had no way of knowing if I were feeding her fury or if it came from somewhere inside her, but even as weapons, curved oriental blades, meat hooks, barbed metal stars, even considerably more British methods of battery, pool balls in a sock, a Stanley knife, a crowbar, to more fantastical blades, and then more perverse ones as machines became her hands, and as each of them crossed my mind, she slashed out with them leaving the Birdman to flail away helplessly as she tore the feathers out of him.
And then he was gone.
There was nothing left.
He had claimed he couldn’t die, and perhaps that was true. Perhaps he would be reborn somewhere else in the mind of a kid picking up Laughing Boy’s Shadow for the first time, but until then he was gone.
Lise stood, triumphant, amid the bed of feathers.
She marched across to where I was huddled, grabbed me by the throat and hauled me up to my feet, kicking but not screaming. “Now, you are going to do what I tell you.” She pushed me toward the desk and the old typewriter I liked to work on, grabbing a sheet of paper from the stack of A4s and feeding it into the machine. “Write.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t try and feed me any bullshit about needing your muse to work. I am your muse. We all are. Velman, Montel, me, and all the others out there. We’re your inspiration. Now draw on us. Bring us to life. Write.”
She stood over me, demanding words.
“I’ve already written you,” I said.
“No you haven’t.”
“I have. Just not as you. I gave your scar to another woman. I gave the tramlines of your stomach to a girl I’d not-so secretly been in love with since I was 14. I gave your eyes to Stacia Kanic, the SIS operative that joined the team in Gold. I cannibalised you, Lise. Everything good about you I stole for someone else. You’re already out there.”
Lise said nothing.
I rushed on, trying to explain myself. “I never throw anything out. Not really. It’s all grist to the mill. Some ideas might not make it out as they’re first conceived, but nothing is ever wasted.”
“You are not a very good liar,” she said. “You contradict yourself when you are frightened. First you say some ideas just aren’t good enough to write. You ‘fuck-up.’ Then you say you never discard anything. You can’t have it both ways, Steve. Now, write my story for me. Bring me to life. I want what’s mine.” She looked at the scattered sheaf of pages that represented my new manuscript. The threat was implicit. She couldn’t know that I’d already delivered it and my reading copy was merely symbolic.
I looked down at the mother-of-pearl keys and tried to imagine an opening sentence but my mind was blank.
“I can’t do it,” I said, defeated by the blank page. “I don’t have anything left in me. I’m done.”
She shook her head again, then leaned in close, so close that I could feel the prickle of her breath on my neck and taste the sourness of her musk in the back of my throat. “I’m giving you once chance, Steve. Just the one. Don’t be stupid. Don’t fuck it up. Write me.”
And then the glimmerings of an idea poked into my mind. I didn’t question it, and tried my damnedest not to think about it. I didn’t want it to come alive before it absolutely had to, or it’d never work. I started to type.
She had no place in this world. She had no place in any world. She existed only in my mind. I knew what she was, even if she didn’t. She was my grief personified. An embodiment of the fear I had felt ever since the diagnosis. Her name was Lise. It was an anagram of lies. That was deliberate. I was telling myself the biggest lie of all, that my life as I knew it wasn’t over. The thought of losing my mind scared the crap out of me. It always had. I had never been frightened of the dark or being buried alive or monsters under the bed or any of those other childhood fears. But I’d always been absolutely terrified of losing my mind—or more accurately, being locked up inside it, unable to express myself.
O O O
I looked up at Lise, grinning as I typed. She had no idea what was in my mind.
“I can’t work with you hovering there like a vulture.” I said.
She moved away unquestioningly.
My grandmother suffered eleven strokes before she finally died. The third one stole her ability to communicate beyond frustrated grunts, the fifth robbed her of the ability to move any of the muscles on her left side so she could no longer sign.
When they told me it was a stroke, I saw my entire future written out for me. I knew what was coming. How could I not? I’d been living in fear of it all of my life. It was a fate worse than death. I had one thought. Finish the manuscript. It had to be the very best thing I ever did, because it would be the last. Soon enough my traitorous flesh would rob me of the ability to form my thoughts.
It was then, as I wrote my favourite words of all ‘The End’ on the manuscript, that Lise manifested.
I k
new what she wanted and I knew why she could never have it. I didn’t have the time left to write another book. I was finished. The medicine the doctors had me on was poisoning my mind. My grip on what was real and what wasn’t was already loosening. I couldn’t focus on the blank page for more than a few minutes and I didn’t have it in me to imagine anymore. I wanted to live. That change had become more important than ever in the weeks after the stroke. I was an old man now. Writing my way into immortality didn’t matter anymore. I was what I was. History would forget me. I was happy with that. Lise was just that last part of me refusing to give up. She was the lies my mind insisted on believing. That this could end any other way. And that was all she would ever be, a footnote in a confession of my weakness.
O O O
It just poured out of me, but before I could type another line Lise ripped the paper out of the typewriter. She screwed it up into a ball and hurled it into the fire then turned on me. “Lies, lies, lies,” she spat. I don’t know how she knew what I’d written, she hadn’t read it. My eyes flicked across to the dwarf who was shaking his head sadly, as though he’d expected better of me and I’d just disappointed him bitterly. “And I won’t dignify them by reading them, Steve. Because to read them would be to make them real, wouldn’t it? You haven’t had a stroke. You aren’t losing your mind. You aren’t dying. You won’t trick me like that. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“You weren’t born at all,” I said, every bit as bitterly.
Velman abandoned the window and came to stand over me. He didn’t say anything, simply changed the arrangement of the lenses on his peculiar spectacles and then, when he was finally satisfied with this new tint, grunted.
“This is a most unfortunate turn of events,” the dwarf offered. He was the only one who hadn’t moved.
“Indeed it is,” the lens man agreed. “We had such high hopes—”
“—But such low expectations,” the dwarf finished for him.
“My diminutive friend is of course correct. We didn’t expect anything more from you. Why should we when you have ignored us for years? Why should it change now just because we petitioned you directly?”
“Not because you are a decent man, Steve. We know that isn’t true. We know everything you’ve ever done and everything you never did, because we are you. Little pieces of you. That’s what you call us, and that’s what we are.”
“And now the little pieces of you want a big piece of you, metaphorically speaking.”
Lise remained silent during this little exchange.
The dwarf began to gather up the scattered pages of my manuscript. “What makes this worthwhile, I wonder,” he said. But he didn’t read the pages. He crumpled the title page up into a small ball and stuffed it into his mouth. Montel chewed slowly and swallowed. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t to see the title of my manuscript scroll like tickertape from his lips, up his cheek and across his deformed forehead before descending the other side of his face and disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. My name followed the same path, then my agent’s name and the submission address. He crumpled up the first page of the story and fed on it. More of my words, the opening line, the opening paragraph, the opening scene, filled his face, covering the bones of his cheeks and filling out the bumps and crevices of his deformed skull before disappearing beneath his collar. And again with the second page and the third. I stared, horrified, as his flesh was transformed into my words. Then, as the last lines of that opening chapter scrolled down his throat, I realised that it wasn’t so much a transformation as a return to form—to words returned.
The dwarf chewed and swallowed faster and faster, gorging himself on my masterpiece. I recognised the lines poking out from his shirt cuffs and writhing across his gnarled hands. I recognised the lines coiling around his throat and over his Adam’s Apple. Mouthful by mouthful, he was transformed into the living embodiment of my story. The words kept coming, crushing themselves ever smaller until his entire face and every inch of exposed skin appeared to be a solid mass of black as almost two hundred thousand words crammed themselves onto every inch of him. And then the dwarf started spouting them back to me, making a mockery of them in the process.
Lise shook her head sadly, as though the dwarf’s mangled delivery proved every point she had been trying to make. “Enough!” she barked, silencing the dwarf. “You waste your time on this crap and leave us untouched? I am better than this but you’re never going to realise that are you?” It was a rhetorical question, I knew. She didn’t need me to answer it for her. “I should kill you now and take us all with you. The grand gesture, one last time into the breach and we all go over the top together into No Man’s Land. But I could no more kill you than you could kill yourself. You’re just not the suicidal type, are you, Steve?”
My grin verged on being wry. I’d worked that much out about this little nightmare of my own making. It was down to me to make it end, and if death was the way out, then I’d never leave, because like Lise said, I just wasn’t a pills and whiskey kind of guy. I wasn’t a razorblades in the bath kind of guy either. And there was zero appeal when it came to jumping in front of trains or from bridges or any other form of ending it all that involved pain, no matter how instantaneous it was supposed to be. I was a coward and I really didn’t like pain. These were my creations. The only way they could kill me was if I did it to myself and that wasn’t going to happen.
“Luckily for us we’ve got no intention of killing you. After all, you’re no good to us dead. No, we’ve got a much more apt punishment in mind. We think you’ll enjoy it, don’t we, boys?” The dwarf and the lens man nodded. “But first we should assemble everyone. After all this is as much for them as it is for us. Velman, tear down the walls, let them all come in.”
The lens man nodded, extending his baton and moved mechanically over to the shattered window. The sudden explosion of violence was terrifying and any certainty I’d managed to harbour that I might come out of this unscathed was demolished right along with the wooden exterior wall of the cabin. Within a minute, no more, surely, there was a huge raw wound where the front of the cabin had been, and through it I could see all form and manner of monsters and miracles. Things I could surely never have imagined, and things I must. This was my own Noah’s Ark of creation, though my monsters came in one by one, not two by two. And there really were all manner of things out there; everything from normal men and women to a giant grotesque stick insect-man hybrid that clacked and clicked its way towards the hole, and the bone-birds, great pterodactyl-like predators that swooped across the bruise purple night sky without a strip of skin or cord of muscle on them.
These were all little pieces of me?
I knew they were, but didn’t want to think what that meant about me. They crowded in around the hole in the cabin’s façade hungry to hear the verdict Lise was about to hand down.
“Just remember we gave you every chance to avoid this,” she said, her words gentle even as she tangled her fist in my shirt collar and hauled me bodily out of the chair. I kicked out as the material began to choke me, my hands flapping stupidly around her iron grip. I clawed at her wrists with my nails, but I’d been biting them for years and couldn’t sink them in. My efforts didn’t distract Lise as she dragged me toward my creations—my unmade creations. What had she called them? The Unwritten—and dumped me on the floor. Montel, alive with my words, the ink on his skin in constant flux, came to stand on my right, Velman, with his lenses all withdrawn so that for once he saw the world exactly as it was, on my left. Lise stood behind me, poised like my executioner ready to deliver the telling blow.
“Steven Savile, you have been reviewed and found wanting. You have failed in your duty to The Unwritten. You have purposely turned your back on the gifts of your imagination in favour of the safe path. You have neglected the core principle of creation, to be more like yourself, to be true unto your ideas, and instead have chased the money. With this and through countless other disappointments
you have consistently failed to create a single thing of lasting worth. You will be forgotten. That is the crime of your life, because you had it in you to be remembered. You had it within your own mind to carve out a unique niche in the realm of the fantastic and chose instead to plough a mundane furrow in the shallow fields of thrillers and modern terrors, offering nothing new. That little ritual you had every time you boarded a plane, saying a prayer and promising in return for a safe landing to use your talent to entertain people and just once to write something worthwhile, something important? You never even tried. You were too frightened—not just of failure but of success, too. So now, in judgment, we take back your gift.”
I twisted, trying to look up at Lise. I didn’t know what she meant by that: take back my gift? How could they do that? How could these things half-born in my imagination—stillborn in my mind—do that?
I should have known.
Beside me, Montel began to retch. He doubled up, clutching his stomach as the gag reflex took over, and as the shudder seemed to run from his stubby cock to his stretched-wide gob, he brought up one partially digested blank page after another. Lise wrapped her left hand around my forehead and yanked my head back, and used her right to force my mouth open. Velman gathered the mucus soaked sheets of paper, and one by one touched them to the dwarf’s brow. I expected a miracle. Why not? Everything else about this last hour had been miraculous. But the sheets didn’t reclaim the words. The ink was forever tattooed onto the dwarf. Velman’s actions duplicated them so that the same story—my story—was written on both dwarf and paper.
And then I was forced to eat my own words, page after page.
I felt the words coming alive within me even as I tried to purge the first page from my gut. Lise had my heard forced back so far I could only see the ceiling, but, for a moment between racing heartbeats a snake of black smeared my vision—my name scrolling across the insides of my eyelids as I blinked and gagged. I closed my eyes as Lise forced another page down my throat, and another, the ink of my words swelling inside me. I heard a note. A single note. It started in my chest. I felt the vibrations of it intensifying, and then, all at once the dam that had been holding them back burst and I could hear them all swimming inside me. I could hear each line and all of the characters voices clamouring to be heard. And it was torture.
Time's Mistress Page 24
