Time's Mistress (25 page)

I knew he was outside now. There was no way him and Konstantin would miss out on the fight of their lives.

In fact, thinking about it, it was their fault this entire thing was happening, surely? Lise wanted to know why she’d never been ‘born’ and the truth was because Noah, Koni, and the guys had taken over. They’d demanded more stories. They’d snuffed out the magic, my interest in fairy tales and grand fantasies replaced by a much more pragmatic battle of good versus evil played out across the theatre of Europe.

But how could I tell Lise that? I could lie, I could try to convince her that she was too good for this world, or that I couldn’t conjure a landscape worthy of her, but she’d know I was lying, wouldn’t she? I’m not particularly skilled at lies, despite telling them for a living. There are lots of things in this miserable life of mine I am not particularly skilled at. I can’t play a woman like some precious violin. I have things inside I can imagine. Perversions, I guess. Things I dream and fantasise about but they have no place in the mundanity of my life. That’s probably where Lise came from in the first place. Some deep-seated desire that needed to be fulfilled, but when it came down to it I couldn’t write it, just like, when it comes down to it, the editing pen cuts out all of the really brutal language, the fucks, cunts, shits, the sadomasochistic imagery, the straining cocks and the dripping cum. It’s all inside my head, but like Lise, it never gets to
live
. Instead, I write these safe things, fantasies in which people exist in this sexless safety of love, where romance burns, because I am never true to my heart. My dark heart. I never write out the images of lips parting, of slipping fingers and tongue inside, of tasting the very core of the women I desire. What’s the harm in fantasy? I barely dare imagine the brutal dildos and beautiful agonies that accompany them. I even use those kinds of words … beautiful agonies? I can’t get coarse enough. I can’t give in to my nature. Or at least I couldn’t. The Drondak was the only sexually driven beast I’d ever written. Now, suddenly, I was forced to confront the fact that just imagining this stuff gives life to the acts somewhere out there beyond the cabin’s four walls. There was no safety in just imagining it. Out there, now, trapped in the same limbo that Lise and her companions have escaped from. What manner of perversions existed there? All of them, that’s the only answer, isn’t it? Every damned thing I have ever thought up. Every act I’ve imagined, perpetrated.

On a more basic level, how could I look Velman in the eye and say he wasn’t worthwhile? How could I tell Montel that there wasn’t a single world magical enough for me to write around him because I just didn’t believe in any kind of magic anymore?

“Let us live before we die,” the dwarf said, as though reading my mind.

Of course he was.

That was part of the mentalism act he had done with his stage magician host body.

He had heard everything I had thought since they burst into the cabin. Everything that had crossed my mind.

I tried to imagine how I would finish this scene if I were writing it, but I couldn’t.

All I knew was that if I were, it wouldn’t end well.

I didn’t write happy endings.

As though I’d cursed myself with the thought, I saw a creature loom up in the window only for Velman to beat it back with his baton. The sight of it though, and the realisation that something so sick, so twisted, had been born from inside my own skull, ripped away any certainty that I could survive this nightmare. I looked from the window to the Birdman to Lise, realising that the only thing—the only person—that needed me alive was the woman I was most scared of. I barked out a short, bitter laugh. I really could have written that twist myself.

More
things
passed across the broken windows. They weren’t people. I am not sure what they were, only that they came from inside me.

They were all still waiting for me to talk, I realised. To explain myself. “This is my world, isn’t it?” I said, feeling out the sound of it. Is this what it was to be God? “All of this. All of you. I made it so. I wove it in words. And now it lives on outside of me instead of inside. That’s what this is, isn’t it? This is my kingdom. You are here because of me.”

The four other people in the room looked at me as I slowly put the pieces together. I had read somewhere that god was an end state—when all of the pieces of the universe, all the lives, came to an end, their energies coming together, so that all of those separate experiences and emotions fused together into the sum of all things. That’s what I was, wasn’t I? In this world of mine, in this state of imagining, I was the sum of all things. There was nothing I couldn’t—hadn’t—imagined. I was the end-state of all of these stories. I was the sum of all these energies. And yet, more than that, I was the coming together these others, of beings that hadn’t burned brightly enough to live themselves.

“He understands his burden,” the dwarf said.

“But does he understand his debt?” Velman asked, changing the array of his lenses again.

“To us? No.” Montel said, shaking his lopsided head.

“To all things there is a season,” Lise said. “We want what is our due, Steve. We want the most basic right of all things. We want to live. And you have denied us that right.”

“Hence this trial, and our judgment,” the lens man said as another monstrosity from my mind loomed large in the window. He beat it back with his baton.

“But I don’t write that sort of thing anymore,” I protested lamely. “I am not a horror writer. I am not a fantasy writer. I haven’t done anything like that for years. I write thrillers. Crime stories. I write about real people. Real things now.”

“Now you don’t. You write about imagined things, just as you always have,” Lise said, stubbornly. “It is just the things that you allow to flourish inside you are more banal than they ever were. Even now I can feel something being born from your fear. Not a person. A place. A Garden.” She breathed in deeply. I didn’t understand what was happening with her, but she closed her eyes as though connecting with something. “A haven for misfits,” she proclaimed, a smile touching her lips. But then it turned to a frown. “You crushed it. Just like that. It is gone. Why did you do that? Why are you frightened to let the miraculous things grow now? What happened to you?”

I wanted to yell, “I grew up!” but I bit my tongue. Lashing out like that wouldn’t help me.

“So, king of this place, cat got your tongue?” Lise pushed.

“I stopped believing,” I said. It was the closest I would come to ever confessing. “I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in me.”

“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.