Time's Mistress (26 page)

When they told me it was a stroke, I saw my entire future written out for me. I knew what was coming. How could I not? I’d been living in fear of it all of my life. It was a fate worse than death. I had one thought. Finish the manuscript. It had to be the very best thing I ever did, because it would be the last. Soon enough my traitorous flesh would rob me of the ability to form my thoughts.

It was then, as I wrote my favourite words of all ‘The End’ on the manuscript, that Lise manifested.

I knew what she wanted and I knew why she could never have it. I didn’t have the time left to write another book. I was finished. The medicine the doctors had me on was poisoning my mind. My grip on what was real and what wasn’t was already loosening. I couldn’t focus on the blank page for more than a few minutes and I didn’t have it in me to imagine anymore. I wanted to live. That change had become more important than ever in the weeks after the stroke. I was an old man now. Writing my way into immortality didn’t matter anymore. I was what I was. History would forget me. I was happy with that. Lise was just that last part of me refusing to give up. She was the lies my mind insisted on believing. That this could end any other way. And that was all she would ever be, a footnote in a confession of my weakness.

O O O

It just poured out of me, but before I could type another line Lise ripped the paper out of the typewriter. She screwed it up into a ball and hurled it into the fire then turned on me. “Lies, lies, lies,” she spat. I don’t know how she knew what I’d written, she hadn’t read it. My eyes flicked across to the dwarf who was shaking his head sadly, as though he’d expected better of me and I’d just disappointed him bitterly. “And I won’t dignify them by reading them, Steve. Because to read them would be to make them real, wouldn’t it? You haven’t had a stroke. You aren’t losing your mind. You aren’t dying. You won’t trick me like that. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“You weren’t born at all,” I said, every bit as bitterly.

Velman abandoned the window and came to stand over me. He didn’t say anything, simply changed the arrangement of the lenses on his peculiar spectacles and then, when he was finally satisfied with this new tint, grunted.

“This is a most unfortunate turn of events,” the dwarf offered. He was the only one who hadn’t moved.

“Indeed it is,” the lens man agreed. “We had such high hopes—”

“—But such low expectations,” the dwarf finished for him.

“My diminutive friend is of course correct. We didn’t expect anything more from you. Why should we when you have ignored us for years? Why should it change now just because we petitioned you directly?”

“Not because you are a decent man, Steve. We know that isn’t true. We know everything you’ve ever done and everything you never did, because we are you. Little pieces of you. That’s what you call us, and that’s what we are.”

“And now the little pieces of you want a big piece of you, metaphorically speaking.”

Lise remained silent during this little exchange.

The dwarf began to gather up the scattered pages of my manuscript. “What makes this worthwhile, I wonder,” he said. But he didn’t read the pages. He crumpled the title page up into a small ball and stuffed it into his mouth. Montel chewed slowly and swallowed. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t to see the title of my manuscript scroll like tickertape from his lips, up his cheek and across his deformed forehead before descending the other side of his face and disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. My name followed the same path, then my agent’s name and the submission address. He crumpled up the first page of the story and fed on it. More of my words, the opening line, the opening paragraph, the opening scene, filled his face, covering the bones of his cheeks and filling out the bumps and crevices of his deformed skull before disappearing beneath his collar. And again with the second page and the third. I stared, horrified, as his flesh was transformed into my words. Then, as the last lines of that opening chapter scrolled down his throat, I realised that it wasn’t so much a transformation as a return to form—to words returned.

The dwarf chewed and swallowed faster and faster, gorging himself on my masterpiece. I recognised the lines poking out from his shirt cuffs and writhing across his gnarled hands. I recognised the lines coiling around his throat and over his Adam’s Apple. Mouthful by mouthful, he was transformed into the living embodiment of my story. The words kept coming, crushing themselves ever smaller until his entire face and every inch of exposed skin appeared to be a solid mass of black as almost two hundred thousand words crammed themselves onto every inch of him. And then the dwarf started spouting them back to me, making a mockery of them in the process.

Lise shook her head sadly, as though the dwarf’s mangled delivery proved every point she had been trying to make. “Enough!” she barked, silencing the dwarf. “You waste your time on this crap and leave us untouched? I am better than this but you’re never going to realise that are you?” It was a rhetorical question, I knew. She didn’t need me to answer it for her. “I should kill you now and take us all with you. The grand gesture, one last time into the breach and we all go over the top together into No Man’s Land. But I could no more kill you than you could kill yourself. You’re just not the suicidal type, are you, Steve?”

My grin verged on being wry. I’d worked that much out about this little nightmare of my own making. It was down to me to make it end, and if death was the way out, then I’d never leave, because like Lise said, I just wasn’t a pills and whiskey kind of guy. I wasn’t a razorblades in the bath kind of guy either. And there was zero appeal when it came to jumping in front of trains or from bridges or any other form of ending it all that involved pain, no matter how instantaneous it was supposed to be. I was a coward and I really didn’t like pain. These were my creations. The only way they could kill me was if I did it to myself and that wasn’t going to happen.

“Luckily for us we’ve got no intention of killing you. After all, you’re no good to us dead. No, we’ve got a much more apt punishment in mind. We think you’ll enjoy it, don’t we, boys?” The dwarf and the lens man nodded. “But first we should assemble everyone. After all this is as much for them as it is for us. Velman, tear down the walls, let them
all
come in.”

The lens man nodded, extending his baton and moved mechanically over to the shattered window. The sudden explosion of violence was terrifying and any certainty I’d managed to harbour that I might come out of this unscathed was demolished right along with the wooden exterior wall of the cabin. Within a minute, no more, surely, there was a huge raw wound where the front of the cabin had been, and through it I could see all form and manner of monsters and miracles. Things I could surely never have imagined, and things I must. This was my own Noah’s Ark of creation, though my monsters came in one by one, not two by two. And there really were all manner of things out there; everything from normal men and women to a giant grotesque stick insect-man hybrid that clacked and clicked its way towards the hole, and the bone-birds, great pterodactyl-like predators that swooped across the bruise purple night sky without a strip of skin or cord of muscle on them.

These were all little pieces of me?

I knew they were, but didn’t want to think what that meant about me. They crowded in around the hole in the cabin’s façade hungry to hear the verdict Lise was about to hand down.

“Just remember we gave you every chance to avoid this,” she said, her words gentle even as she tangled her fist in my shirt collar and hauled me bodily out of the chair. I kicked out as the material began to choke me, my hands flapping stupidly around her iron grip. I clawed at her wrists with my nails, but I’d been biting them for years and couldn’t sink them in. My efforts didn’t distract Lise as she dragged me toward my creations—my unmade creations. What had she called them? The Unwritten—and dumped me on the floor. Montel, alive with my words, the ink on his skin in constant flux, came to stand on my right, Velman, with his lenses all withdrawn so that for once he saw the world exactly as it was, on my left. Lise stood behind me, poised like my executioner ready to deliver the telling blow.

“Steven Savile, you have been reviewed and found wanting. You have failed in your duty to The Unwritten. You have purposely turned your back on the gifts of your imagination in favour of the safe path. You have neglected the core principle of creation, to be more like yourself, to be true unto your ideas, and instead have chased the money. With this and through countless other disappointments you have consistently failed to create a single thing of lasting worth. You will be forgotten. That is the crime of your life, because you had it in you to be remembered. You had it within your own mind to carve out a unique niche in the realm of the fantastic and chose instead to plough a mundane furrow in the shallow fields of thrillers and modern terrors, offering nothing new. That little ritual you had every time you boarded a plane, saying a prayer and promising in return for a safe landing to use your talent to entertain people
and
just once to write something worthwhile, something important? You never even tried. You were too frightened—not just of failure but of success, too. So now, in judgment, we take back your gift.”

I twisted, trying to look up at Lise. I didn’t know what she meant by that: take back my gift? How could they do that? How could these things half-born in my imagination—stillborn in my mind—do that?

I should have known.

Beside me, Montel began to retch. He doubled up, clutching his stomach as the gag reflex took over, and as the shudder seemed to run from his stubby cock to his stretched-wide gob, he brought up one partially digested blank page after another. Lise wrapped her left hand around my forehead and yanked my head back, and used her right to force my mouth open. Velman gathered the mucus soaked sheets of paper, and one by one touched them to the dwarf’s brow. I expected a miracle. Why not? Everything else about this last hour had been miraculous. But the sheets didn’t reclaim the words. The ink was forever tattooed onto the dwarf. Velman’s actions duplicated them so that the same story—my story—was written on both dwarf and paper.

And then I was forced to eat my own words, page after page.

I felt the words coming alive within me even as I tried to purge the first page from my gut. Lise had my heard forced back so far I could only see the ceiling, but, for a moment between racing heartbeats a snake of black smeared my vision—my name scrolling across the insides of my eyelids as I blinked and gagged. I closed my eyes as Lise forced another page down my throat, and another, the ink of my words swelling inside me. I heard a note. A single note. It started in my chest. I felt the vibrations of it intensifying, and then, all at once the dam that had been holding them back burst and I could hear them all swimming inside me. I could hear each line and all of the characters voices clamouring to be heard. And it was torture.

Even before Lise had finished force-feeding me the manuscript she was calling the first of The Unwritten forward. “Tell Steve your story. Make him live it.” She ordered, and the curious stick insect hybrid’s mandibles started clicking and clacking and snicking and snacking and somehow all of those sounds made sense. She—it was a she—told me her story, filling my head with the tragedies I had imagined for her. Her grief was overwhelming. Not writing her, I realised even as Lise shoved another mouthful of manuscript down my throat, was a blessing. Or it would have been if it hadn’t meant she was trapped forever in this limbo of half-existence. As she fed me, she began to deteriorate, losing her grip on her form. Her edges seemed to blur, or perhaps it was just the tears streaming down my cheeks that did it? As the dissolution set in she began to crumble. And even as the second of The Unwritten stepped forward to take her place, it stood in her dust. Again and again The Unwritten stepped forward, willingly feeding themselves to me, and for every one of them I absorbed, another voice joined the madness inside my head. There were thousands of them out there. Hundreds of thousands. I tried to shake loose of Lise’s grasp but it was iron-firm.

Velman forced sheet after sheet of paper down my throat, forcing his fingers invasively deep as I started to choke on them.

By the time a dozen of The Unwritten had given themselves back to me I couldn’t hear myself think.

As the fiftieth and fifty-first did together, the luckiest and unluckiest pair who fed parasitically off each other, I was out of my mind.

I bucked and thrashed trying to be free but more and more of them came back to me, feeding me with the madness of my imagination. I’d always thought that if I hadn’t been a writer the voices inside my head would have driven me mad. I had evidence aplenty of that now.

And still they came.

And they came.

The only mercy was that their clamouring was so loud I couldn’t conjure up any more of them.

Malformed, malnourished, malignant, they came. Disfigured, freakish, vile, they came. It seemed that my by-blows were all hellish creations. And their stories were no prettier. They filled my skull to bursting with grotesqueries, taking every dark thought I had ever had and magnifying it. I screamed. I know I did, but I couldn’t hear it for the madness yammering inside my brain. Nothing could exist beyond the very final sound, that incredibly long, impossibly low note that vibrated at the frequency of my soul.

Velman came to me then, and in absorbing him I finally understood the purposes of his lenses. He was blind. He always had been. The lenses offered a focal point for his ruined optic nerves. Without them all he ever saw was a patina of blood that washed the world around him red. He lived forever in a landscape of blood. It was enough to drive anyone mad. And then Montel, the dwarf, the second to last of The Unwritten to return to me. In some ways his torment was the worst. It was all inside him, everything that had been, everything that would be, all of the infinite possibilities, all of the infinite woes, the triumphs and the heartbreaks, the suffering and the shame. Every vile act and every saintly one. All he had to do was delve into that grossly deformed skull of his and the memory was there. It wasn’t that he read minds, it was that he was connected to them all, one core consciousness in the web of all things. His mind was the centre of all things. And that was, by any definition of the word, Hell.