by J. M. Frey
THE SILENCED TALE
J.M. FREY
CONTENTS
Convention Map
Title Page
Book by J.M. Frey
Praise for the Series
Hashtag
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
COPYRIGHT
The Silenced Tale Copyright 2017 by J.M. Frey. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design by Ashley Ruggirello
Cover art from Aramisdream/mercurycode/smashmethod on DeviantArt.com
Book design by Ashley Ruggirello
Map by Christopher Winkelaar
Edited by Kisa Whipkey
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-942111-50-4
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-942111-49-8
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals is entirely coincidental.
REUTS Publications
www.REUTS.com
Created with Vellum
OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
The Untold Tale, book one of the Accidental Turn Series
Ghosts, an Accidental Novella
The Forgotten Tale, book two of the Accidental Turn Series
Arrivals, an Accidental Novella
The Silenced Tale, book three of the Accidental Turn Series
The Accidental Collection
ALSO BY J.M. FREY
The Dark Lord and the Seamstress, a coloring storybook
“The Moral of the Story” in Wrestling With Gods: Tesseracts 18
“Zmeu” in Gods, Memes, and Monsters
“The Promise” in Valor 2
Hero Is A Four Letter Word
“Whose Doctor?” in Doctor Who In Time And Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963–2012
“How Fanfiction Made Me Gay”, in The Secret Loves of Geek Girls
“Time to Move”, in The Secret Loves of Geek Girls Redux
“Bloodsuckers” and “Toronto the Rude” in The Toronto Comic Anthology vol 2
City By Night
“TTC Gothic” in The Toronto Comic Anthology vol 5
Triptych
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES
“Being a part of a family, however unconventional, is an integral theme of Frey’s clever, adventurous, and endearing second Turn novels. [...] The thought-provoking story discusses the stereotypical role of women in fantasy novels, but more focus is placed on the characters’ struggles with their familial roles and relationships, creating depth and commonality.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“I started reading and was captivated. This superb novel grabbed me from the opening sentence, and never let go. [...] The whole tale is several clever twists on the oh-so-familiar fantasies we’ve read before. I want more. Books more”.
—Ed Greenwood, Forgotten Realms
“Let me start by saying [...] that I think that J.M. Frey's The Untold Tale is the most important work of fantasy written in 2015. It may be the most important work of fantasy written this decade, but I'll have to get back to you on that in 2020.
—Dr. Mike Perschon, The Steampunk Scholar
“INSANELYAMAZING! The Untold Tale tears apart the tropes of heroic fantasy and gives back what we need: true heroes, true love, and the astonishing realization that yes, real people are magical.”
—Julie Czerneda,the Night’s Edge and Trade Pact series
“This story is nothing short of fun, unexpected, and a little bit queer. If you’re interested in a Science Fiction/Fantasy undertaking with all of the ingredients of a queer anthology, The Untold Tale is for you.”
—Dallas Barnes, Pink Play Mags
“It’s easily the strongest I’ve read in the last year. [...] The fictional world = real world trope isn’t the only one Frey twists, however. She also plays with the ideas of the hero and heroic adventure, feminism, gender roles, and the role of the narrative itself, in innovative – and occasionally cheeky – ways. This novel has the potential to appeal to a great many readers, across genres.
—Violette Malan, PhD, Dhulyn Parno Series
“If I could mark this as 10/5 stars, I would, but that's impossible, so 5/5 it is, with much hearts and swoons. [...]The Untold Tale is delicious, each word meant to be savoured, breathed in, nibbled at, full of hidden delight and wonder. Frey has a beautiful writing style - all at once slightly old-fashioned and delectable, whilst also being modern and quick-paced. It's tongue-in-cheek and it's serious. It's like an epic fantasy and a modern YA all in one. It is a book for every bookworm or geek [...] But most of all, it is a book for writers - and Frey delivers.”
—Ana Tan, A Tsp Blog
“John Scalzi did Redshirts. He poked fun at a beloved symbol of geekdom, and we loved it. Frey has done the same for the sacred fantasy tropes and it’s fantastic. An empowered woman of color, thrown into the chauvinistic world of the epic fantasy today’s geeks were weaned on, serves as the perfect narrator for a critical and wonderful look at fantasy in the modern world.”
—Leah Petersen, The Physics of Falling series
For Stephanie Lalonde, my first convention-buddy and my greatest, and truest friend.
You have been such a rock, and such a wonderful source of fun.
I love being a fan with you.
Let’s never stop.
#ConClusion3
#CannotWait
#SoEXCITED
#ToKTReveal
#BlackOut
#TheatricsOrReal
#OHEMGEE
#BinkyLives
#WereYouThere
#WhatWasInTheWater
#ElgarReedIsOurKing
#EpicCosplayOfEpicness
#GotABitTooEpic
#RememberTheFallen
#ISurvivedConClusion3
#GeekArmy
#WeAreOurOwnHeroes
CHAPTER 1
ELGAR
The phone call from the Smithsonian Museum is the first indication that something’s off. There’s a little dancing red star beside his calls icon, indicating a voice mail waits for him, when he gets off the plane from Victoria. He listens to it in the cab ride home, frowns, blinks a little, then listens to it three more times. The content doesn’t change, though he imagines the curator’s voice gets more and more hysterical with each replay. The upshot is this: his typewriter, the old race-car red Olympia De Luxe his aunty gave him, has been stolen.
It’s a bummer, but he’d donated the typewriter because he didn’t need it anymore. And frankly, as far as he’s concerned, they can make up a fake to put on display. Nobody will ever know the difference if they don’t publicize it. Why they told him it had been stolen at all is the bigger mystery. It’s not like he has a spare for them to borrow, or any leads on where the lost one is. No one’s tried to
ransom it back to him.
“We’re very sorry,” the curator says again when he calls her back, juggling his carry-on, his house keys as he unlocks his front door, and his wheelie suitcase. “We just have no idea what happened.”
Elgar jams his cell phone between his ear and shoulder as he sheds his dripping coat and muddy boots. He leaves his suitcase and carry-on by the front door, only half-listening to the curator bumble her way through more apologies as he sifts through the mail that’s waiting on the table in his front hall. His assistant, Juan, has been in to feed Linux and drop off the correspondence needing his attention. In pride of place on the top of the pile is the latest in what feels like an unending, torturous series of contracts to read and sign back to Flageolet Entertainment. Elgar sets it back down in disgust.
Outside, the mushy gray of a late Seattle winter drizzles on. Elgar paces over to the window as the curator works her way up, verbally, to whatever it is she wants to add to “your typewriter’s been stolen.” That information should have been the climax of the scene, and he can’t think of what might be more important than theft. Poor narrative structure. If the curator was one of his MFA students, he would dock marks for rambling. Being circuitous. Wordy. Loquacious. Palaverous.
He stares out the window at the slush-flakes falling onto the quiet muddy mess of his backyard as he muses on synonyms. The curator keeps talking. Elgar blinks and frowns. “Wait, back up. What did you just say?” he asks, checking back in to the conversation.
“It disappeared,” the curator mutters, clearly ashamed to have to say it out loud a second time.
Weird things are just a part of Elgar’s life now. And while a theft like this might be par for the course for an internationally best-selling author, what she’d said is . . . well, new. No, not new. It’s . . . neoteric.
Any other time, Elgar might have assumed it was just an overzealous fan. That happened sometimes. Quite a lot, actually. Elgar’s old apartment in the co-op housing complex he’d been living in with his aunty when he began writing The Tales of Kintyre Turn in the late seventies had been broken into enough that the landlord of the unit had put bars across the windows and doors. He uses the place as storage now, instead of renting it out.
But this is really neoteric.
“It just disappeared,” the curator repeats a third time, distraught and desperate to fill the empty air when Elgar remains silent.
Right. There are crazy fans, and then there’s . . . this.
This right here is a completely different brand of crazy. The new kind of crazy he’s still trying to get his head around, a year after he’d been introduced to it in a hotel bar in Toronto. This is the kind of crazy he thought he’d just left behind in Victoria after a week-long visit with the Piper family—his family, in a way that goes much deeper than blood.
“We reviewed the security camera logs,” the curator promises. “But there was no indication of who committed the crime. Or . . . or how, actually. It just sort of . . . vanished?” she finishes. “Kinda just blinked out of existence on the footage, really.”
“Poof kind of vanished?”
“No, no poof. No explosion. Just . . . blink. In one frame of the footage, not in the next. The police think it might have been a fancy digital splice-job.”
“Huh,” Elgar says, a strange sort of displacing numbness settling in his fingers and toes, crawling up his limbs. “And, uh, when did this happen?”
The curator makes a distressed sound. “December twenty-ninth,” she admits, and it sounds like she’s saying it through her teeth. “We only waited so long to tell you because we thought . . . well, we thought we would have figured it out by now. I mean, about how it happened.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Elgar says, trying to sound warm and soothing when every short hair he possesses is standing upright with a frightful chill. “I understand. Is there, uh, is there anything you need from me?”
“Not at this time, Mr. Reed. I just, ah, I just felt that it was about time you knew.” She sounds shamed and small. “And I apologize, again.”
“Okay. Thanks for calling,” Elgar says, and then stares in blank horror at his smartphone as she disconnects. He sets it down on the windowsill and rubs his arms through his thick sweater. A brush against his leg, sudden and unexpected, makes him yelp and step back. An indignant feline howl replies. Elgar catches sight of an angry marmalade blur as it streaks out of the living room and into the kitchen.
“Linux!” he calls after the cat, guilt instantly surging up to squeeze his still-frantic heart. “Aw, sorry, buddy! You scared the crap out of me.”
Linux meows angrily. Elgar finds him sitting primly on the counter, where he knows he isn’t allowed to be, licking his tail.
“Did I step on you, buddy? Sorry, I’m a dick.”
He reaches out, grabs Linux carefully by his scruff to keep the cat from bolting, and runs his fingers across the cat’s tail, checking for swelling or breaks. Linux protests with hisses, laid-back ears, and a harsh rake of claws against Elgar’s inner wrist.
“Right, I know, I deserved that,” Elgar says with a wince. “But I’m a big guy, Linux. There’s an awful lot of me to come down on you. Let me just check, okay—ow! Shit! Ungrateful little asshole!”
He lets Linux go, satisfied that the cat is whole, if supremely pissed off at him, and washes out his new battle wounds. Linux yowls at him again and speeds away toward Elgar’s office. Probably to sit on his laptop and glare.
Elgar had bought one of those kitty-friendly desks, where the underside is a wooden maze of tunnels for the cat to sit in, with a comfy, pillow-lined basket beside the keyboard. It was meant to keep kitty feeling entertained and comfortable while you were working, rather than neglected. Linux uses the tunnels and the basket sometimes, but whenever Elgar leaves the room for a cup of coffee or to answer the call of nature, he inevitably comes back to find the cat spread out over his laptop, eyes slits of contentment as he rubs his fur in between the keys and soaks in the machine’s heat.
Whether or not the laptop is on doesn’t matter. Linux is envious of how much time the machine gets and tries to get his body between the keys as often as possible.
A sudden thought grips Elgar’s lungs in terror. His chest freezes up, breath punched out of him. What if my laptop has vanished, too? He rushes to his office, clutching his sluggishly bleeding hand, and stops in the doorway. His lungs burn as he sucks in a breath to shout.
“Linux, move!”
The cat raises his head and grumbles unhappily. Elgar crosses his office and shoves his hand under the furry creature, who hisses and snarls, but refuses to be budged. Underneath him, Elgar’s fingers skim the cool metal casing of his computer. He sags, bending down to press his forehead against Linux’s fuzzy belly, overcome with relief.
Linux bats at his hair, but with claws sheathed this time. Elgar rubs his nose against the cat’s tum, and Linux gives up his anger, sprawls back, and enjoys the bizarre petting. After a moment, Elgar’s joints feel sturdy enough for him to straighten.
He keeps backups—both paper and digital—in a fireproof safe in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, and he checks this, too. Everything is where it should be. The correct number of CDs and memory keys still sit atop the early-draft manuscripts filed neatly under them. He locks the safe, and then the filing cabinet, and runs his hands through his puff of white hair, relieved and annoyed at himself in equal measure.
If it really was actual, real magic that stole his old typewriter, then it hadn’t reached here. And really, he chides himself, if there was some sort of magic intent on stealing his work, or his tools, then everything would have vanished months ago, the same time as the typewriter.
The same time that everyone else’s books were disappearing.
Still . . .
He doesn’t want to worry Forsyth unnecessarily; Forsyth would drop everything and come to Seattle for him. Maybe he’d even get on a plane, though he despises the things. No, better to go to the mor
e prosaic of the pair first. He glances at the clock on the wall. Lucy will be at work by now, so he goes back out to the living room, grabs his phone, and calls her office.
“Professor Piper, UVic,” she answers on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hey, Lucy, it’s me,” he says.
There’s a slight pause on the other end of the line, a hesitation that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been listening for it. It’s taken Elgar a few visits to Victoria to work out why it is that Lucy always seems uncomfortable around him, why she never totally welcomes his presence in their lives. It’s not that Lucy Piper doesn’t like her husband’s creator. It’s the fact that Elgar Reed is the living reminder that, at some base level, the man she loves and the child they have created together are not real. They live, they breathe, they can touch and be touched, they have preferences, they laugh and cry and bleed. But they are not, at their most base, of her world.
And there is always the terrifying possibility that something might happen—in the world of the books, or to Forsyth and Alis, or to Elgar himself—that will make everyone she holds most dear blink out of existence. They’ve had more than one wine-fueled evening of sniffles and honesty since the Pipers returned from Hain. And Lucy’s chiefest fear is that, when Elgar dies, as he eventually must, her husband and daughter might go with him.
