The World Ends at Five & Other Stories

by Langlinais, M Pepper

  And the queen agreed, so the lad took the reigns of her horse and began to lead her up the road until they came to a palace more magnificent than the queen’s own. And the queen thought to herself, “This can only be my sister’s court. How comes it that she has such a grand palace when we were given the kingdom equally? And these beautiful servants as well?” For they were met by a stable boy equally beautiful as the youth, who led the horse away, then by a beautiful maiden who led them into the great hall of the palace.

  “This is the court of Naptethis, Queen of the Faerie,” said the youth, and the queen then knew she had made a terrible mistake.

  “Why do you bring this mortal to my court?” asked Naptethis.

  “She asked me to bring her to my queen, for she wished me to be her king and I refused.”

  “You do not wish to be her king?” Naptethis asked the youth, and he again refused. “I am happy with the queen I serve,” he said.

  “It is strange that a queen would look outside her realm for a king,” said Naptethis. “Do none of your own people please you? Would you have a king from elsewhere, someone who does not serve you?”

  The queen then admitted that she had searched her kingdom for a suitable husband but had not succeeded in finding one. Then Naptethis said, “Then I will give you a willing member of my kingdom. But you must ride out ahead of him and not turn to look at him until you have reached your own castle and the marriage rites have been performed.”

  To this the queen agreed, for she saw that everyone in the court was as beautiful as the youth who had led her there. And so that very evening, she was mounted on her horse and led again by the beautiful youth, and behind her came the sounds of a second horse, which she supposed held the man who was to become her husband.

  But the queen’s curiosity was great, and she could not resist attempting to look. Each time she began to turn, the youth leading the horse would say, “Do not turn around.” But finally, even as they reached her own palace, the queen turned for a look at her betrothed and found that no one was there.

  Then the youth leading her horse began to weep, saying, “Why did you not wait? For I had agreed to become your king. But you showed no restraint or faith in my mistress, and now I must return to her.” And he melted away into darkness.

  Then the queen went and took a husband from her own kingdom and nevermore ventured from her realm.

  Immanent

  The girl flung herself onto the wooden chair next to him with a heavy sigh, and he paused to look at her, the black fountain pen ready to drip onto the book open in front of him. It was his favorite pen, but a rather old one that tended toward leaky when unsupervised. She raised her eyebrows at him and darted her green-blue eyes pointedly at the lanky young man standing in front of the table, and the young man politely cleared his throat to remind the author he was there.

  “Sorry,” the author murmured, turning his attention back to the book and trying not to look himself in the eye as he signed the page that sported his picture. Although, he admitted silently to himself, he sometimes did look hard at the About the Author pages and at the dust jacket photos, and wondered whether he really looked like that. But no. To most people, if they were observant at all, he would surely look like a tired mess by the time they made it through the line, dark circles under his eyes and his curly hair springing at odd angles after having been pulled at repeatedly by his own cramped and nervous hands. He liked people, he really did. How could he not, when they were the source of so much inspiration? But he hated book signings.

  The lanky youth said something, probably some form of “thank you,” took his book and walked away. The author felt bad. He couldn’t remember whether he’d managed to smile. His manager Terri was always telling him to smile. Otherwise, she said, he’d “come off like an asshole.”

  He glanced at the girl again, wondering why she was there and whether the bookstore manager might come remove her. He found her distracting.

  She smiled when she noticed he was looking, but then quickly turned her attention to the next person coming up the line.

  The punked-out goth girl who approached the table flashed the author a smile calculated not to crack her heavy makeup.

  The author sighed. And then remembered to smile, as he took the book and flipped it open to the title page.

  “Oh, um . . .”

  Smile, the author thought again and again, his mind echoing the word as he looked up. “Yes?”

  “Could you maybe sign your picture? In the back?”

  The girl next to him snorted, but he pretended not to notice. “Certainly,” he said as he flipped the book over and found the familiar page. Why always the picture? he wondered as he scrawled his name above it. He hoped he spelled it correctly; when he was tired he sometimes didn’t.

  “Oh, and, uh . . .” said Punk-Goth Girl when he handed the book back. He felt his smile freeze onto his face, making his ears hurt, as the girl produced a disposable camera.

  “Of course!” he said, trying desperately to sound chipper. The boy next in line took the camera as Punk-Goth Girl rounded the table. She half squatted and put an arm around him so that her hand touched his far shoulder. The author suppressed a grimace. It hadn’t made it into any magazine articles yet that he disliked being touched. “Personal space issues” his therapist said.

  “One, two . . .” the boy counted and there was a blinding flash.

  Punk-Goth Girl planted a kiss on the author’s cheek. It was sticky from the thick layers of dark red lipstick, but he kept himself from reaching up and wiping the sensation away.

  “I have a mirror,” the girl sitting next to him said suddenly. “If you want to make sure she didn’t leave lipstick on you.”

  The author looked at her, harder this time than before. She had red hair that fell just past her shoulders, straight. A dark green v-neck sweater and a black box-pleated skirt. Black tights and big black boots that zipped up the sides and came halfway up her calves.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The girl only raised her eyebrows.

  “Uh . . .” The boy who had taken the picture of the author and Punk-Goth Girl was still waiting, timidly nudging his copy of the author’s latest book forward on the table. “I’m Robert?”

  “What? Oh, okay,” the author said, remembering to smile as he pulled the book towards him. “Spelled like, you know, regular old Robert?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  A few more people went by in line, and the author forgot about the girl. Until a fantastic smell from beside him made his stomach growl. He turned. The girl now had a big burrito; it was half wrapped in aluminum foil and sat on wax paper in one of those plastic basket-like things. He wondered where she’d gotten it; he hadn’t noticed her leave, but then he had been trying to ignore her.

  “Best burritos in town,” the girl told him after swallowing a big bite. “Just down on the corner.”

  “What, of the strip mall?” the author asked her. The bookstore was the centerpiece of a long line of stores.

  “Mm—hm,” the girl nodded. “Want to try a bite?”

  Terri came running up the line at that moment. She was wearing a lavender suit that the author thought was ugly, and she was giving him one of her most serious looks, the same kind as when he violated any of the rules on her list of how a famous author should act and speak. “Do you need a break?” Her tone more or less told him that he would take one, whether he needed it or not.

  The girl was still waggling the burrito at him. “You want a bite or not?”

  He did, he really did. But Terri was going to be furious. Well, she already was. “Can’t you just bring me one of my own?” he asked.

  “Okay.” And the girl was gone. Vanished. The author wasn’t surprised. He’d known all along she wasn’t really there.

  But Terri was leaning over him, her face very near his. No doubt she was real. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  The author sighed. “There’s this girl . . .”


  “What girl?”

  “She’s bringing me a burrito.”

  “A burrito.”

  “Yeah. She had one, and it smelled good, and she offered me a bite, but then I asked her to just go get me one.”

  “Dan,” Terri said, startling the author by using his name, “there is no girl and no burrito.”

  “She got it from the place on the corner,” the author said, a weak defense at best, but the only one he had.

  Terri made a sound rather like an angry cat, stood up straight and waved across the room to the bookstore manager. When he had waddled (he was a short and round sort of man) to within hearing, she said, “Is there a place that sells burritos around here?”

  “On the corner,” the manager said. “The best—”

  “Burritos in town,” the author said with him. “Do I have lipstick on my face?” he asked Terri. “A fan planted me one.”

  Terri leaned far to her left, as if taking a step would have involved too much effort. “No, you’re clean.”

  Clean and crazy, the author knew. But he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to alarm Terri; she was easily alarmed. He pushed his hands through his hair, making it stick up some more, and listened as Terri patiently explained to the girl who was at the head of the line that the author was just going to take a small break.

  A few minutes later young man wearing the bookstore’s signature polo shirt came hurrying over with a burrito, complete with basket.

  The people in line were getting restless. Some had sat down in the aisles. There was a low, grumbling murmur rolling through the fans like oncoming thunder at the head of a storm. The smell of the food was only making things worse. The author finished his meal in record time and, after Terri brought him a bottle of water and checked his teeth as if he were some kind of show pony, he waved the next reader forward. Terri insisted they preferred to be called readers rather than fans. But judging from the mail he got, they called themselves fans more often than not, usually his “number one” or “biggest” fan, although sometimes they were just “huge.”

  As he scribbled his name above his picture once more, he noticed a tapping noise. The girl was back, and she was tapping her foot. The author glanced down. The floor was carpet, but the tapping was pronounced, like the click of dress shoes on hardwood.

  “Will you cut that out?” he hissed.

  The reader in front of him drew back; she’d been reaching for the book he’d just signed.

  “Oh no, sorry, not you,” the author told her, offering up the book with a forced show of teeth that was meant to be friendly. The girl snatched it quickly, seemingly afraid of any actual contact. The author swallowed hard. He was really fucking things up.

  Or she was. He looked over again. She was blowing a gigantic pink bubble of gum. And still tapping.

  “Can’t you go away?” he asked her.

  The girl pulled the bubble from her mouth and held it by the gummy end that sealed it into a balloon. “You already know I’m not really here.”

  The author jabbed a finger at the bubble, but the girl pulled it away before he could pop it.

  “I thought you were bringing me a burrito,” he told her.

  “Yeah, but you already had one.”

  “But you should have been back here before the bookstore clerk.”

  “Um . . . Are you on another break?” the man standing in front of the table asked.

  The author turned. “No, not at all. Sorry, I . . . I sometimes get these dialogues in my head . . . Part of writing, you know.”

  “Yeah,” the man replied, although he didn’t sound like he knew at all.

  The author managed to focus on the book signing for another twenty minutes. But the girl started swinging her legs—he could see them out of the corner of his eye, rising and falling, back and forth. “Excuse me,” he said to the next people in line, a young couple. He turned to the girl. “Why are you hanging around here? What do you want?”

  She stopped in mid-swing, legs stuck out straight before her, ankles touching the lip of the table so that her feet were under the tabletop. “Look, you made me up, and you’re the one who keeps imagining me here. So what do you want?”

  “To be left alone!”

  “Then leave me alone,” said the girl.

  “Fine.” The author turned his head in the opposite direction so that he couldn’t see her. After timing a minute on his watch, he turned back.

  “You’re not going away,” he said.

  “Hello! Are you thick?” The girl reached over and rapped her knuckles on the author’s temple, hard. “I can’t go away! I’m not really here! Except that you won’t stop thinking I am!”

  “Okay,” the author said, and again, “okay. I’ll just focus on what I’m doing and forget about you. Then you’ll be gone, right?” Without waiting for an answer, and remembering to smile, he waved forward the couple. They walked up slowly, as if into the mouth of a dark cave.

  He made it the rest of the way through the line without further incident. But when he finished, the girl was still there. She rode with the author in the car to the hotel. And, so far as he knew, she stayed the whole night in the easy chair by the hotel room window.

  “There are stories,” the interviewer said, “about you, the storyteller, that are in a lot of ways very much like the fantastic fiction you write.”

  The author cringed inwardly. Two years had passed since the infamous book signing, and if he wrote in any other genre except fantasy/horror, the rumors might have dealt his career a detrimental blow. But as it stood, the notion that he was crazy had boosted his sales. His publisher loved him, even if Terri didn’t.

  “Is she here, right now?” the interviewer asked.

  The author sighed and thought about lying. But he really was tired of pretending to be normal. “Yes,” he finally admitted.

  “Where?”

  He pointed to the chair next to him. “She tends to be on my left.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “This really has nothing to do with my new novel,” the author countered.

  “But isn’t she your muse?”

  “No, she’s just a girl.”

  “Is she young?” asked the interviewer.

  The author turned to look at his companion. If she could be called that. He’d never asked, never really thought about her age. “How old are you?”

  The girl shrugged. “Fourteen maybe?” she suggested.

  “She thinks maybe she’s fourteen,” the author related.

  “Is she a ghost?” The interviewer was now squinting at the space in the chair next to the author, as if she might be able to see the girl through sheer will.

  “You can ask her directly,” said the author, “she’s not deaf. But I thought you were here to interview me.”

  “But is it true your manager dropped you after—I’m sorry, what’s her name?”

  He looked at the girl again. “She doesn’t really have one.”

  “She’s always with you?”

  “She’s never with me. She doesn’t really exist. But if you’re asking whether I see her all the time, then the answer is no. Just most of the time.”

  “Mr. Duphiney, do you think you’re crazy?”

  The author only stared, as if waiting for another question.

  “Have you seen someone? You know, a . . . a doctor?”

  The author stood; he heard the rustle as the girl also rose from her seat. “I’m done here.”

  “Do you have a name?” he asked the girl as he headed off to the kitchen. His assistant was showing the interviewer the door; he could hear the intermittent squawking punctuated by his assistant’s smooth replies.

  “What do you care? Why not just let me go?”

  The girl had been increasingly sullen about the whole thing. But what was he supposed to do about it exactly? “I don’t suppose an exorcism would work,” he said, pulling open the fridge in search of soda.

  “You can’t exorcise so
mething that isn’t there,” said the girl.

  “You know, you keep saying you’re not here, but then . . . if you weren’t here, where would you be?” asked the author as he extracted a 2-liter and pulled a glass from the cabinet. “I mean, is there somewhere you want to get back to?” When the girl didn’t answer, he asked, “Well, where were you before this?”

  “Nowhere,” she said. “My name is Melinda by the way.”

  Melinda didn’t remember anything before the book signing.

  “But where did you come from?” the author persisted as he walked through the old Victorian, back towards his office that overlooked the garden. “I don’t know any Melinda. I couldn’t have just dreamed you up in the middle of a book signing!”

  Melinda trailed in his wake, as if dragged along unwillingly like a cat on a leash. “All I know is that you’re the reason I’m here, and you’re the only one who can make it so I’m not.”

  “Aha! So you admit to being here!”

  Melinda grunted in exasperation. “Look, let’s not split hairs.”

  “But your nature makes a difference. You seem to be able to sit in chairs and lean against things, and yet you don’t carry anything solid.” Before hiring a part-time assistant to handle his fan mail, the author had attempted to put Melinda to use. But they’d discovered she couldn’t pick up, hold, or carry anything.

  “It’s your fault,” Melinda said again.

  “How?” demanded the author. “How is it my fault?”

  “Because it’s your imagination! Of course you can picture me leaning against things, sitting places! But you can’t make something imaginary interact with what’s real!”

  She had a point, but he wasn’t going to admit it.

  He didn’t give interviews any more, and he didn’t do book signings, and he hadn’t written more than a few short stories in the passing months. Melinda continued to hover somewhere just outside his vision as he sat at his desk, staring at the computer screen.

  “Why couldn’t you be my muse?” he muttered. “Make yourself useful.”