The Silenced Tale

by J. M. Frey

  ELGAR

  Elgar sleeps poorly, his stomach empty and his ears open for any creaks or thumps that don’t belong in the normal nighttime symphony of his house. When he finally drifts off, Linux wakes him almost immediately with a pitiful request for the breakfast Elgar doesn’t usually feed him for another few hours. The cat is so insistent that Elgar gives up and gets out of bed. He feels silly for fearing his own cupboards and appliances, but fear them he does. So he creeps into the kitchen slowly, eyes wide, watching every shadow and corner for motion.

  The only living creatures seem to be him and his cat, though. So Linux gets his breakfast, but Elgar can’t bring himself to open his fridge. Breakfast out it will be, then. He hasn’t been to the diner up the street in months, and it’s about time he popped back in for those incredible eggs Benny, anyway. On his way past his office, he grabs a notepad and pen, just in case he’s struck with an idea to . . .

  Oh. No.

  He places them back on the desk slowly, carefully.

  No. No writing. He isn’t . . . it isn’t a good idea. Not . . . yet. Not now.

  It’s drizzling when he steps outside, the sort of cold, gray stuff that isn’t completely snow, but isn’t completely rain, either. He scrunches into his coat, chin buried in his beard to ward against the chill. The grocery store is between his house and the diner, and it isn’t until he’s just passing the empty bench outside the entrance that he vividly recalls the stranger in black. The man’s glare could have rivaled a basilisk.

  And yet, beyond that, Elgar can barely remember what he looks like.

  Elgar’s head whips around as he searches the sparse early-morning commuter crowd shuffling for the bus stop, his heart hammering suddenly against the back of his ribs. But the man in black is nowhere in sight.

  Elgar swallows hard, feeling like a big fat fool, and shuffles along with the rest of the sleep-deprived zombies to the diner. He scopes the place out from the entryway, trying to be as casual about it as possible. Clear. He takes a seat at a table that gives him a good view of both the room and the door. It isn’t his usual booth—he prefers the one nearest the warmth and genial noise of the kitchen, with the outlet under the table—but he feels safer here, less exposed.

  Maddie, the morning waitress, gives him a funny look, but bustles over with a fresh cup and the pot of coffee all the same.

  “You’re up early,” she says, pouring out the liquid heaven. Elgar flashes her his most winning, most flirtatious smile, the one that all the young readers like Maddie love, and the corners of her lips tighten back in response. “No laptop today?”

  “No,” he says, taking a gulp of the steaming coffee to keep from having to say more.

  He’s lucky that he has Lucy and Forsyth, because now he has someone to discuss his news with who isn’t just Juan. He isn’t as tempted to drop as many hints to Maddie as he used to, when she was the only other person who saw him writing.

  He wonders if she misses those hints. Obviously, she’s read his books—he’s never met anyone who hasn’t—and perhaps she even has one of those websites where she shares everything he’s said to her. Another author told him about that; that there were fans who would eavesdrop and try to recreate conversations from their favorite authors on message boards so they could get the scoop on new projects or leak spoilers. It’s both weirdly stalkery and, at the same time, actually kind of flattering.

  “Same order?” Maddie asks, already half-turned away.

  Elgar just nods, his mouth scorched from the coffee. He swallows again to try to get some saliva running over the burns.

  Maddie leaves him to his solitude, and he realizes he hasn’t brought a magazine, or a book, or newspaper, or anything with him. Usually, he has either his laptop or his notepad, but now, with nothing to read, all he can do, all he is doing, is think.

  And possibly, just maybe, that’s a bad thing.

  Although, it’s also possible that it could be a good thing.

  Because . . . because maybe Juan was right.

  Maybe Elgar isn’t getting enough sleep. Maybe he’s stressed out. Maybe he’s feeling really guilty for not writing anything new. Maybe he’s feeling bad about freaking out his agent. Maybe he’s too involved and worried about the TV show. Maybe he’s focusing too much on being on his best behavior around Forsyth and Lucy. Maybe he’s . . . maybe it was all in his head.

  He’s a creator. He has a powerful imagination.

  So . . . so maybe his powerful imagination had gotten away from him?

  It’s possible.

  The man in black could be anybody. His glare of hatred didn’t have to be aimed at Elgar. It could have been for someone behind Elgar. It could have been resting bitch-face. And a story is just a story in his head.

  Except when it isn’t.

  Elgar scrubs his face and sighs, trying to get his brain to quiet the hell down. He takes his last gulp of coffee. The caffeine isn’t helping his out-of-control brain, but the soothing warmth is something. Maddie is right there again with the pot, and he sends her another smile, this one more genuine, and perhaps just a bit watery.

  “I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” she says, slipping onto the bench opposite him, “but you kinda look like hell.”

  Elgar snorts. “I kinda feel like it.”

  “How’s the writing coming?” she asks, folding her arms over the table. She’s in her mid-twenties, and Elgar can’t remember if she’d told him she was studying psychology or physiotherapy, but with the way she’s encouraging him to talk, he’s starting to think it’s the head-shrinking.

  “Ah, all done,” he says, not really in the mood to have this conversation again so soon. “Just some line edits left, I think. But I, you know . . . it’s not that.”

  “It’s just that you don’t have your laptop. Or your notebook.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, where are they?”

  Elgar sits back, eyes narrowed, a nibble of worry starting to make itself known. “Why do you want to know . . . ?”

  Maddie blinks, shakes her head, and blinks again. Her grin gets wider, more natural, which startles him into realizing that her earlier smiles had been tight, and false, her gaze a bit unfocused and faraway. “Oh, no reason. They just seem to make you happy, is all. And you look miserable.”

  “I think they’d just make me more miserable right now, to be honest,” Elgar says.

  “Fair enough,” Maddie replies, chipper. She takes a breath to say more, clearly intends to do so, but the chime of the bell on the kitchen windowsill cuts her off. She grimaces and straightens. She’s the only waitress right now. “Be right back.”

  She has his eggs Benedict in front of him in a jiffy, refills his coffee for the third time, and is then called into the back by the line cook. Just before she goes through the double doors, she looks back at him over her shoulder.

  Maybe it’s his overactive imagination again, or maybe it’s the crappy lighting, but for a split second, it looks like Maddie’s normally blue eyes are bright green.

  Forsyth

  That night, I roll over and ask, into the quiet darkness of our bedroom: “Pip? Do you sleep?”

  “’M awake,” she mumbles, and it is not entirely convincing. She turns her face into the pillow, an endearing trait that she doesn’t know she has. It means that she is just asleep enough that she wants to remain that way, and is pretending that she does not hear me.

  Good. I want her to be asleep.

  She shuffles and shifts until her arms are beneath the pillows, and she is fully belly down, head craned to the side in a way that she assures me is actually quite comfortable. She looks, in short, as vulnerable as she had been when I first met her, laid out like this in my mother’s bed in Turn Hall.

  A wave of tenderness stirs and sweeps across me. I love this woman fiercely. I am so happy to be able to call her mine, and to have a daughter that is proof of our love for one another, moreover. I should like to keep them. Forever.

  And I shal
l do whatever it takes.

  Slowly, gently, I slide my hand underneath the t-shirt Pip has worn to bed. My fingers skim over the now familiar network of thin, raised scars on her back. The original circumstances of the injury is now slightly more than three years past, and Pip is not unaware of the exotic attractiveness of the artistically swirling pattern that was carved into her flesh, though she does not flaunt it, either. She has ceased to wear tank tops in public, and has purchased a high-backed swimsuit, but is comfortable wearing low-backed dresses when they show the raised ivy to good effect. Many people mistake the scars for an elaborate tattoo. Pip does not correct them.

  Under my hand, her flesh is sleep-warm, but not hot to the touch, or feverish. I slide her shirt up, ducking under the covers so that the cool air of our room will not wake her. Beneath the duvet, everything is dark. The scars do not glow green as they do in the presence of the Viceroy’s malicious influence, nor are they moving and shifting. All looks normal.

  Normal. Frustratingly, infuriatingly normal.

  I speak a Word of Light, but nothing sparks against my lips. The room stays dark, and quiet, and cool. Nothing happens.

  I cannot tell if my annoyance is rooted in the fact that nothing is out of order. Would I have been more relieved or more scared if the vines were glowing, if Wordlight had filled the room? It would have at least been a clue.

  Pip would not tell me what she felt during her fit on the sidewalk, save for repeating that she was fine and that it was something different from a seizure. I looked up symptoms for exhaustion and hypertension, and while some of Pip’s experience fits, it is not perfect.

  Pip fears, and so she prepares. But for what? Does she keep something from me? No, she wouldn’t do so without good reason. We do not have secrets, not of those sort. So then, what is it?

  Huffing a frustrated sigh, I wriggle back up the bed, smooth Pip’s t-shirt back down, and cuddle up behind my wife. Pip turns onto her side in her sleep, shifting back into my embrace. The tension lines around her eyes smooth out, and she takes a deep breath, releases it, takes another. Whatever ill dreams had begun, hopefully my touch has banished them.

  “Sweet dreams,” I murmur into her hair, and it is more of a wish than usual. I kiss the leaf-shaped scar on the nape of her neck, and close my eyes, hoping for sweet dreams of my own.

  I will not bet on them, however.

  I am a character Written to be physically uncomfortable and mentally troubled until I have all the answers, and right now, I have none. There is literally no worse feeling in the world for me, emotionally, intellectually, physically, than being useless.

  Alis has a better morning than the ones previous. Two of her three new teeth have finally erupted, and while the third still hurts, the degree of the pain is clearly tolerable enough that she is merely sitting listlessly in her highchair, frowning powerfully at her da as he struggles with the coffee maker in his pre-caffeinated state. She has a foil pouch of fruit mush, and her expression makes it clear that she is accepting this as breakfast on sufferance.

  I try not to stare at the carafe with the single-minded hunger of a troll lusting after goat flesh. It’s a challenge. For reasons that I don’t understand, Fridays are always the hardest on me. Perhaps it is because I have already had five days of being unable to sleep in, and am looking forward to the weekend. We did not have work-weeks and weekends in Hain, and even after two years here, I am unused to this sleep- and work-schedule. The fluctuation always flummoxes me.

  Upstairs, I hear my wife shut the bedroom door, and make her way to the stairs. Her briefcase is already hanging by its strap off the hook on the back of our front door. She has gotten into the habit of repacking it every night before bed and placing it there so that, in her own pre-caffeinated state, she does not forget to take it with her when she leaves. Which has happened. More than once.

  When she comes down, however, her gym bag is slung over her shoulder. Pip doesn’t work out on Fridays. She never has. And yet, there is the bag. Worry creeps up my skin, resting like an itch I cannot scratch between my shoulder blades. She drops her gym bag by the door and joins us.

  “Mmmm, nectar of the gods,” Pip whispers into my ear and cranes up to kiss my neck as she wraps her arms around my waist from behind. “Morning, Freckles.”

  Because I love Lucy Turn Piper, I pour the first mug of coffee and hand it to her. But only because I love her. I resume watching the carafe hungrily, waiting for enough coffee to drip into it to justify taking another cup as she pads away to sit beside Alis.

  “Morning, baby girl,” Pip says.

  “Ma,” Alis says, holding out her foil packet to demonstrate just how dissatisfied she is with this morning’s offering.

  “Tragic,” Pip agrees, and sips her coffee again.

  When I have coffee of my own, I sit at the other chair, on the other side of Alis. Pip reaches across the tabletop and squeezes my arm gently.

  “I’m going to be home a bit later than usual tonight,” she says.

  “I see that,” I reply, unsure what sort of opening this gives me. Do I ask her why? Do I try to allay her fears? Do I tell her that her paranoia is starting to affect me, as well? “You look as if you got some real sleep last night,” I say instead. Coward.

  “I do feel better than yesterday,” Pip admits. “With the party tonight, I’m glad I got some real rest. I should.”

  Ah, right, yes. Tonight is the celebration that Martin, Mei Fan, and wai po are holding to celebrate Alis’s first birthday. In my morning fog, I had forgotten. “We should leave for their house no later than four,” I remind Pip. “Will that give you enough time to work out?”

  “My last class is at noon. I’m good.” She kisses me on the cheek, pulls an apple from the basket on the counter, and puts her empty cup in the sink. She kisses Alis’s forehead on her way to the door, and leaves, walking as if she’s in a trance.

  “Ma?” Alis asks, watching the door close behind Pip. Her brow is furrowed, fruit mush on her cheek that Pip didn’t even try to wipe away.

  “I agree, sweeting,” I tell Alis. “I don’t like it, either.”

  Several hours later finds both of us in my office. Alis has long since gotten bored of sitting on her da’s lap banging away at her own toy keyboard and has fallen asleep in the playpen in the corner. How blessed are morning naps. They allow me to focus.

  Today, I am focusing on my coding. Like Mandarin, the language of hacking and instructing computers is new to me. “Scarily clever sponge” though I may be, as my wife insists, even I must pay attention when I am working in a language that is new to me. Well, new-ish.

  I’m not entirely certain what I’m looking for yet. I create a program that will scan through the millions of news stories and social media posts on the Internet and flag anything that seems, well, magical. Or unexplainable. Or miraculous. Or just downright weird. I set the starting date for the day that Elgar’s typewriter vanished—which aligns with the date, a week after Sosticetide, when Pip, Alis, and I were sucked back into the world of The Tales of Kintyre Turn, and then spat back out again eight Overrealm hours later. I make a point of flagging yesterday evening as a potential time to compare triggers, highlighting the moment of Pip’s not-a-seizure.

  From there, I should be able to scan the returned stories and see if there is any sort of pattern, any sort of . . . well, anything. I hate being passive and waiting for the information to come to me when I itch so for the truth. But I am well practiced in it. It always took weeks for my Shadow’s Men to return information to me. This program, at least, will do so in a matter of hours.

  As I set it into motion, I wonder if I should give it a clever name, the way they do in the movies. Perhaps Finnar, who was my chief leg-work man when I still wore the mask.

  Apt, I muse.

  With Finnar running all over the web, I push back from my desk. The squeak of my chair wheels wakes Alis, who snuffles and pulls herself upright by the side of the playpen. Though she is advanced in the re
alm of communication for one her age—her handful of words tops out at about twelve now, in both English and Mandarin—she has yet to master “hungry.” Instead, she scowls miserably at me, red-cheeked and flushed, and sucks at the air with her pursed lips.

  “Yes, of course, sweeting,” I say, and fetch her up. She rolls her forehead against my shoulder and heaves a put-upon sigh. “What do you think? Hard-boiled eggs, perhaps some of that purple applesauce?”

  “Nǎi,” Alis says.

  “Niúnǎi,” I correct. “Yes, you can have some milk, too, if you like.”

  We have just reached the kitchen when my pocket begins to vibrate.

  Alis knows what it means when my smartphone plays a fife-and-fiddle tune. It is a piece that Elgar Reed sent to me. He told me that I was not allowed to share it with anyone, asked my opinion of the arrangement and how accurate it was to the songs I knew from my youth, and then promptly made it my ringtone for his number the next time we got together.

  So much for secrecy. Ridiculous man, I had thought at the time. But I do appreciate knowing it is him before I answer the phone. Though this time, Elgar’s call worries me. Perhaps it is disingenuous of me to pretend that all is right, and that his fears are for naught, but until I know more, I do not see the point in inciting a panic in my creator. More than once, I’ve wished I had a surveillance camera installed inside his home.

  Alis, overjoyed by the sound of the phone, shouts, “Gar Gar!”

  “Hello?” I answer.

  Elgar

  His stomach aches from bolting his breakfast, so he nearly doesn’t see the stranger in black until he’s practically standing beside him. The sinkhole of unmoving shadow registers in the corner of his eye at the last second, and Elgar feels the sidewalk drop away as soon as the man is fully in his sight line. The sun has come out, working hard at evaporating the last of the slushy rain on the pavement, but somehow, the man seems to suck even that light up, like a black hole.

  Elgar debates stopping, or turning on his heel and going home another way, or maybe even crossing the street to avoid this sinkhole of shadow. In the end, he tucks his chin under his scarf, pulls his cap down on his forehead, and stares at the ground as he scuttles by like a nervous crab. The intense feeling of being watched, of being stared through, surges up. With his eyes down, he notices, somewhat distantly and with no little bit of hysteria, that the stranger in black is wearing women’s boots. They’re knee-high, leather, with a low wedge heel and a lot of Gothy hardware and zippers. It’s an incongruent detail. It almost makes him freeze and stare.