The Crimson Inkwell

by Kenneth A Baldwin

  “How dare you, Mr. Livingston,” I managed to say. “Are you truly exploiting our business arrangement to produce effects in our romantic relationship?”

  “I did not intend—”

  “How could I ever trust a man who would stoop to such a level?”

  “Is this your reply then? Why won’t you answer me?”

  “I will not because it is insulting to the core.”

  “Do you mean to leave me then?”

  “I do not relieve you of your promises to me,” I said. My rigid jawline dripped with righteous indignation. I gathered my things and strode out the door before he had time to reply.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Bound by Fire

  I GOT TO the fairgrounds right as its queer electric lights reached out into the darkness. I nodded to the girl in the ticket booth-Sherry I think her name was-who waved me on through. A few weeks and I was already a regular. I wondered what the festival performers and workers thought of me. Bram’s girl, perhaps. It hadn’t bothered me until tonight. It was exciting before.

  I still seethed from my encounter at Langley’s. Byron’s pitiful face burned in my memory like a hot coal. The evening air held a crisp chill, but between my elevated pulse and my brisk pace from Langley’s door to the fair, I welcomed the cold breeze on my perspiration.

  Bram had hinted to me that soon the fair would be closing, moving on. They usually packed up at the first snowfall. When I inquired what came next, he had just smiled vaguely. That memory infuriated me all the more now that his gimmick had made me the laughing stock of the writing world. I whizzed by the beginning of the night’s crowds, all eager to see the oddities and illusions the macabre festival promised. They were eager to believe the world they lived in was a farce. These were my readers. I looked around and saw shallow expressions gaping stupidly at performers in costumes.

  It only had taken weeks for the performers to educate me on the tricks of their trade. Where others saw magic, I saw only cheap sleights. Where some saw exotic monsters, I saw birds and house pets with dyed feathers and attached prosthetics. Only Bram knew real magic, and he used it for nothing.

  Why had I not considered it before? What did it say about Bram’s character that he stood alone with the keys to real magic only to pilfer it like a schoolboy? Where had he truly uncovered the pen? He had always evaded my questions about that. I only knew that a dangerous expedition had cost several men their lives. How did he plan such an expedition? Where did he find the men? The volunteers? Had there been other expeditions?

  “Oiy, Luella!” Gerald, the giant buffoon in a permanent bowler cap shouted to me. He had a big, goofy grin on his face, carrying two large acrobat hoops. Many of the fair goers around him turned their heads toward me in response. I ignored them and pushed on to the familiar clearing where the hypnotists were hard at work bewitching their planted helpers in the audience.

  Bram stood with a dark expression on his face, leaning against a tent pole, watching the performance. Though the audience around him burst into scattered applause and laughter, a storm cloud loomed over him. He saw me from afar and watched me cross the crowd toward him without interruption. Finally, we stood face to face, looking for words, I angry at him for no distinct reason, he playing aloof in the way he did when he felt wounded.

  “We need to talk,” I began.

  “I waited for you all day. I’m a little busy watching my friend, Mona. She’s hypnotized this man to believe the woman there cares about him.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.” I grabbed him by the wrist and swept into the tent.

  “Please, stop, I need to see what happens to him,” he complained in a monotone voice.

  Inside, I whirled him into a chair to face me. He didn’t seem alarmed the way I had expected. He didn’t seem frightened of me, either. Why would he? What did I have to hold over him? Did I have a single measure of power in our relationship? In any relationship? No. He had held all of that for himself. Instead, I mustered up the strength to do the most Mrs. Crow-like thing I’d ever done. I whacked him with my purse. Then I hit him again and again, dropping the purse and turning to my balled-up fists instead.

  “Violence now, is it?” he said, faintly trying to defend himself.

  “This is all your fault!” I shouted. “You’ve ruined me! You’ve ruined every part of me!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied. What a thing for a man to say! How many men have said that over the history of time?

  “You—you—you lured me in here like a—like a fish!”

  “Like a fish? Your words are failing you. What is it?”

  “Yes, like a fish in a trap! There I was, swimming along happily, when you came along and just scooped me up like a big bucket of water.”

  The metaphor was breaking down, but then so was my life. He was stunned into silence all the same.

  “I had everything!” I cried. “I had an engagement with a man who adored me and a budding career as an author and a loving relationship with a dear sister! But you don’t care about any of that. You just wanted me in your web, like a nasty little spider.”

  He held up his hands in a display of surrender. Cyrus groaned from a blanket near the bed. “Something has clearly made you upset,” Bram said.

  “The hell it has! What else is in that chest?” I pointed directly at the locked chest on the side of his tent. It was the box from which he had first produced that ruddy pen, the same box he pretended didn’t exist whenever I asked.

  “I’m not telling you anything until you explain what happened.” He calmly sat, studying me. A curious look spread over his features. “You seemed fine the other day. I should be cross with you. After all, you were supposed to come by earlier today, and you stiffed me. Do you want to know how I spent the day? Watching Gerald shave his own back with an axe. Yes. It was weird, but I had no excuse to turn him down.”

  “Do you think this is funny?” I asked, squinting at him in disbelief. “We can’t continue this way. It always happens like this. I ask something or need a favor, and you set the terms.”

  “Do you think I’ve ever withheld anything from you?”

  “It doesn’t matter! It’s the dynamic of power. I’ve spent my entire life avoiding this type of relationship with a man, and it took a magical trinket to lure me into one. Well, not anymore.”

  He stood and slowly crossed to the chest, weighing something in his mind.

  “I was hoping to show you what was in this chest later this week,” he said. I folded my arms.

  “A likely story.”

  “Now, it appears I cannot.” He shrugged and looked at me. I caught myself gaping.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a box of trinkets,” he said. “Perhaps the least of which is the instrument of which you are so fond.” He rolled his eyes on the word ‘fond.’

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “How do you expect me to show you new magic when you’ve gone completely into crisis over something as petty as that pen and ink?”

  New magic? I had guessed as much but did not dare to think I may have been right. Like Edward’s Fog Man, I pushed it off. So, what if there were more magic out there? What did it have to do with me? The pen alone had to do with me.

  “I don’t care what’s in the box,” I said. “But, the fact that you won’t show me communicates volumes on what type of man you are.”

  “And you know so much, do you? I’m trying to protect you. If you knew what you were asking—just look at the effect your first magic experiment has had on you!”

  My eyes swept the room, looking for the instrument he spoke of. It was lying on a fresh stack of paper near his bed. I crossed to it.

  “Luella.”

  “Don’t you dare say my name!”

  I sensed him closing in on me, so I lunged for the pen. As I reached the bed stand, a heavy force from behind conclusively pinned me down on my back. I lay on the bed, the pen clenched in my fist, look
ing up directly into Bram’s excited expression. My wrists were pinned to the mattress at the level of my eyes. My pulse sounded like a timpani drum.

  “Unhand me!”

  “You are not yourself.”

  “Says the man forcing his way on a woman. You brute! I’ll scream!” Why did everyone keep saying that to me? I struggled against him, beating him with my fists as hard as I was able. Inside, I felt the dark door open again. I was tired of fighting my temper. I was tired of letting things happen to me.

  “More than you have already?” He released me but wrestled the pen from my grasp. I clutched at it, scratching at his arms, beating my fists at his torso.

  “You can’t keep lording that thing over me!” I shouted. He grabbed a sheet of paper and ran to his writing table. I stood. “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t respond. He just scribbled frantically on the sheet before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it into the coals at the center of his tent. The flames belched a small fireball in response.

  “What did you write?” I demanded, but even as the words left my mouth, I felt the fury drain from me like rain from a rooftop. My legs suddenly grew weak, and I did not have the strength to stand. “Bram? What have you done?”

  I collapsed heavily on his bed, landing on it askew.

  “I can’t move. What’s happening to me?” I said. It was barely a whisper, and the world turned black.

  When I woke, Bram sat next to the bed, holding my hand tenderly. “You’ll be alright,” he said. I felt like someone had knocked me out with a smart punch to the face. The room slowly stopped spinning, but I felt no power to move. Every part of me rested heavily, motionless, like it was made of lead.

  “This is my fault,” Bram said. “I should have known it would behave unpredictably.”

  “What would behave unpredictably?” My voice grew stronger now, but the fury that fueled me before had vacated my person. A strange calm came over me, accompanied only by an unconscious dread that it wouldn’t last long.

  “The pen. I’ve read that this has happened before but never this quickly or with such casual use. How do you feel?”

  “Lighter,” I said, “like a bay after a storm. What has happened before, Bram?”

  “In the paltry records I’ve been able to gather that describe others’ experiences with the pen—well, there are some stories of aggression.”

  I struggled to sit up. “You mean the pen is controlling the way I feel?” Fear rose in my bosom.

  “Not exactly,” he replied. “I’m not sure how it works.” I withdrew my hand from him.

  “You knew this could happen?”

  “No. I just knew what I know about all magic. There are side effects if you get too involved. I tried to avoid this. I wrote every other story, for example. I insisted we didn’t write as often as we could have.”

  “But, you knew something could have happened to me.” My voice caught in my throat. So, this was the great answer. I had wondered why Bram took such interest in me. I was vain enough to think it was a typical man’s interest. Instead, what was it? A scholarly fascination? A mystical hypothesis? I thought about my twitching fingers, my desire to use the pen again and again, and all the unnatural feelings I had experienced lately. My jealousy, annoyance, even my fury toward Byron yesterday. Brutus’ review hadn’t been his fault. What had I done? I blinked back tears.

  “So, I’m just your experiment?” I asked, hoping for a reprieve. I studied his face, looking for any reason to believe I was wrong.

  “Don’t speak nonsense. It isn’t like that.”

  “Then explain it to me,” I insisted. “What am I to you?” It came tumbling out, edged with enough womanly emotion to make me despise myself. I had avoided asking and answering the same question since we’d met.

  “I’m your friend,” he said, himself emotional. I’d never seen him this way. He looked tired and wounded. I found no trace of the usual slyness adorning the corners of his mouth. His eyes saw past me to something, perhaps someone else, much the way Rebecca had done at Doug’s ago. I felt invisible and couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t know this man. “A friend with whom I wanted to explore magic. I wanted to write with you.”

  A friend. He had ruined me just to see what might happen with his magical artifact.

  “Write with me? Have you read the reviews?”

  “Oh, don’t listen to them. Reviewers can’t write. That’s why they review.”

  “They were right. You’ve lured me into drafting rubbish. Nothing we’ve created together is of any real worth. What do I have to show for it? My engagement is in pieces, and now I learn that I have some type of magical relationship with an inanimate object.”

  “What rubbish.”

  “I’ve done nothing but write sensational stories that don’t mean anything. They’re like sugar humbugs! And, even those stories are fake. None of the events I’ve been writing would have even happened if I hadn’t written about them first.”

  Bram stood and tinkered with an old telescope from a nearby table.

  “I think you’re looking at it wrong,” he said. “You think you’re reporting on non-truths that happen because you make them.”

  “I can’t see it another way.”

  “But you must see it another way. I believe you’re reporting on events that will inevitably happen; it just so happens that the pen tells you first. I really do. The pen doesn’t make anything happen. The pen is just a window.”

  “We’ve been over this, and I can’t subscribe to it. I can’t believe that a respectable member of society clad in full armor would have robbed a bank independent of my story. It’s ridiculous!”

  I stood, a little wobbly at first, and crossed the room to him.

  “Magic is in the everyday,” he said with a soft smile. “It just takes smoke and sparks to make people see it.”

  “It’s all beside the point anyway. Even if you’re right. They’re still silly stories that don’t make any difference.” To think I had hoped to carve my way to the Golden Inkwell with this…

  “Don’t make any difference?” His voice was full and incredulous. “Can you be so blind?” He made a circuit of the tent, looking fixedly at different points, this way and that, like he could see hidden vistas and portraits, hanging invisible in the air. “What cause could be nobler than helping a city wake up and recognize what’s in front of them? You’ve been breaking them out of their trances. You’ve been opening their eyes! There’s something happening. I can feel it, and you’re helping the world stand up and notice! The work we’ve done here. . .”

  “The work we’ve done? So, this is your big crusade? You enlisted me without even asking. Am I a prisoner or a solider then?”

  My hands were shaking now as the realization set in. I had acted so foolishly. I had fiddled with powers beyond God’s natural laws. Flashbacks from my recent emotional outburst at Bram, Byron, even Mrs. Crow raced by my mind with horror. It was beyond the lengths of my character to talk to another human being in such a way. How could I have lashed out so viciously. I had spoken cruel words to a man who had only ever meant the best for me, and I had done it on purpose. And Bram had to pin me down and pull, well, whatever he did with that paper, to calm me down.

  Great heavens! What demon had possessed my faculties? In some part, it was a welcome relief to know that my behavior could find blame outside my natural person. The relief was short-lived, though. I was sick. The anger. The dark door. It was all a part of me now.

  I looked at Bram in terror. This man had tricked me into an enchantment, not against my will, but certainly without my informed consent. I didn’t know which would have been worse: the deceit and this feeling of self-loathing or overwhelming force and its lasting echo of vulnerability.

  The chest, which had inspired in me such curiosity these past weeks, now shot waves of dread through me. Who knew what other evils lurked beneath its lid? How could I have become so friendly with the monster who kept them?

>   “Bram, please.” My voice shook as I reached a trembling hand out to him in supplication. “Release me from this. You can’t hold me captive like this.”

  “You can’t blame me, Luella. I didn’t know. I tried to protect you.”

  “Please, I have to go back to my life. I have to erase these past weeks.”

  “You can’t give up now! You’re just learning the extent of the magic. The pen trusts you. It speaks to you so freely. The bizarre nature of these events stand witness that this encounter was destined to happen.”

  It was too much. I fell to my knees.

  “I never asked for this.”

  “You wanted to be an extraordinary writer, did you not? Did you think you could achieve great things without great sacrifice?” He knelt down next to me. “There are ways to combat the effects you’re experiencing. I can figure out how to help you.”

  “Oh, Bram,” I said. I couldn’t take this constant fluctuation. One moment, I was convinced Bram was a devil; the next, I thought he was my savior.

  “This isn’t about me. This is about you and your writing,” Bram said. “You have to believe in this.” He extended the pen toward me, inviting me to take it. “Your writing can change these people’s lives. Your writing could wake them up. Show them that magic is right in front of them.”

  “It’s not even my writing. If what you’re saying is true, and if I can just intuit the future, I’m not writing. I’m just a slave to that instrument.”

  “Then what if your theory is true? What if your writing creates the future?”

  “How could I live with that responsibility?”

  “Writing is creating. You were born for that responsibility. Write the future. It’s only for you.”

  I heard my father in his words, his belief in me. He had sacrificed so much for my education, more than I allowed myself to remember, especially toward the end of his life. I remembered overhearing his conversation with my mother. Her pleas for him to cover his doctor’s bills. His insistence they could do nothing for him, and the money would be better spent elsewhere. Elsewhere.