The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (7 page)

I knew what he was asking, but still I shook my head.

“Yes,” he said. “You must. There is no one else who knows the saga as well as you. I chose you for this. I have slowly been losing my vision of Kreegenvale for the last two books. I hired you because I knew you were bright. I could see you were a dreamer, a loner. What kind of girl as pretty as you would apply for a stupid job like this? I knew the day would come when I would go completely blind to the story.”

“You want me to write the end of the book?” I asked.

“You don't have to write it,” he said. “Just tell me what you see. Tell me in as much detail as possible what Glandar does in his final battle with the Malfeasance. Not just how he slays it, but how he moves the sword, how he dodges the monster's acid belches, what kind of oaths he showers upon it.”

“How?” I asked.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

I did.

“See it here,” he said, and I felt his finger touch my forehead between my eyes. “Go back to the adventure. See it step by step. What did they look like? How did they sound? What was the exact shade of green of Heretica's flesh? When you fall into the story, when you are there, follow what they do. Speak it to me, and I will write it down.”

“I'll try,” I said. At first it was hard to get to the story, because all I could think about was his telling me he knew all along I was bright and why would a pretty girl like me want such a stupid job.

“One must retain a zest for the battle,” I heard him whisper, more, it seemed, to himself than to me. Like a shard of glass this phrase made a small tear in my thoughts of me, and the light from Kreegenvale shown through. With great concentration, I widened the hole in the fabric and eventually struggled free into the realm of Glandar.

The beginning of the story played itself out before my eyes like a video on fast forward. I was everywhere I had to be, like an actual subject of the realm, in order to see the key moments of the story speed by. I watched Stribble Flap fire his arrow, saw the dwarf's head roll onto the ground with a gush of blood, and turned away as Heretica reached toward Glandar's loin cloth at the end of their lengthy dialogue. When I looked back, I was standing beside the hero himself. The wind was blowing fiercely, the sky was, of course, cerulean, and we were very near the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean.

Glandar held his sword, the mighty Eliminator, in his left hand. In his right, he clutched the octagonal shield, Providence, given to him by his dying father. Sweat glistened on his tan, muscled body. His long black hair was tied back with a vine of Heretica's hair—all that was left of her. Fifty feet away, near the very edge of the cliff stood the Malfeasance, its towering blob of a body birthing faces here and there that called insults to the king of Kreegenvale. The head of the monster was like an enormous clod of earth come to life. Its yellow mane hung down in a tangled greasy mess, stained with blood and spleen. Its mouth opened wide enough to swallow a cow, displaying numerous rows of jagged teeth.

“Smell my bile, the perfume of your own night terrors,” it bellowed, licking its lack of lips with a boil-ridden whale tongue.

The Malfeasance released a ball of gas, a miniature violet sun that sailed on the breeze toward Glandar. He lifted his shield and held it up to block the bomb of acid breath. I watched as the noxious blast bubbled the paint that had been the heraldic design of Kreegenvale. Glandar grunted, and fell to his knees.

“I think that burnt the hair in my nose,” he whispered from where he knelt on the ground. Then he looked right at me. I saw a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as if he was actually seeing me standing there. He smiled at me and slowly stood up.

“Hold up, Mal,” he called to the monster. “She's here.”

As the hero walked toward me, I saw other characters from Kreegenvale come out of hiding from behind the rocks and trees that were about fifty yards behind us.

“Somebody give me a drink,” called the monster, “I've got to get this taste out of my mouth.”

“Everybody take a break,” called Glandar over his shoulder.

He shoved his sword into the ground and dropped his shield.

“What's happening?” I asked.

“Mary, right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“We've been waiting for you.”

The others, all of whom I recognized from other stories, gathered around him. The Malfeasance was now leaning over us, swaying in the wind.

“Hello, darling,” the monster said to me, reaching down with an arm that grew from its side for a wineskin from Stribble Flap.

“Mary,” said Glandar, “there's not much time. I'll explain. We had Heretica put a spell on Ashmolean a few books back so that he would eventually lose touch with our world. It took a while to work, because he's so powerful. I mean, he's God, if you know what I mean. At first we thought he might just give up on us, but then, when he hired you, we realized what his plan was.”

“You mean, to finish the book?” I asked.

“Right,” said a woman to my left. I turned and saw the beautiful green face of Heretica Florita.

“I thought you had been devoured?” I said.

The Malfeasance laughed. “We made up a woman out of grass and sticks and such and I ate that in her place. How could I really eat her?” he asked.

“Don't ask,” said Glandar. The assembled characters started laughing and Heretica leaned over to punch the hero in the arm.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

Glandar waved the others away. “Let us have a moment, here,” he said. They all took a few steps back, and sat down on the ground. In seconds, what appeared to be flagons of wine and mead were making the rounds. The Malfeasance sipped from its wineskin and let the children use its back as a slide. Every time one of the little ones laughed, so did the creature with a wheezing cough.

Glandar led me away toward the edge of the cliff. When we were out of earshot of the others, he turned to me and said, “It's got to be over, Mary. I can't take any more of this.”

“You miss Ashmolean?” I asked.

“No, not at all. I thought you would understand. What I'm telling you is
I
can't go on. If I have to kill one more thing, I don't care if it's a mosquito, I'm going to lose my mind.”

“You are unhappy with Ashmolean,” I said.

“Some of the others call him Ash-holean. I have more respect for him than that, but I've been with him from the first page. There were times in the beginning where it was all very exhilarating, but now, man, life in Kreegenvale is a tedious thing. There's nothing new here. I know, when every adventure begins, that I'm going to be killing. Imagine waking up every day and knowing you are going to have to kill something or someone, maybe a whole army of men you have no quarrel with.”

“But there are other aspects to Kreegenvale than the killing,” I reminded him.

“I'm not a drinker. Every time Ashmolean has me quaff flagons, I'm sick as a dog for the next fifty pages. All that wenching too—sickening. You'd think the guy never saw a woman with normal size breasts. All I ever wanted was a few minutes of love, but that's more exotic to the big man than the three-faced cat boy of Ghost City.”

“Do you want me to make him write love into the plot?” I asked.

“It's too late for that. I just want to help free the others now. I want an end to it, so that they can go back to the lives they had before I happened to them.”

“I used to feel the same way about Kreegenvale when I first started reading about you,” I said. “But now, I don't think I've ever read anything that has been so alive to me.”

“Ashmolean would be a sham if not for one thing. He truly feels it. That's a miraculous thing. I'm doing this because I want to help him out as much as the others.”

“You want me to sacrifice you to the Malfeasance, don't you?” I asked.

He nodded and I could see tears in his eyes. “That's what heroes are for,” he said.

“I don't know if I can do that. He probably won't let me,” I said.

“He will,” said Glandar. “He can't prevent it. You're too powerful.”

“Too powerful?” I said.

“Please,” said Glandar, and his voice shifted through an odd transformation into Ashmolean's. “Do you see it?” asked my fantasy writer.

I looked to my left and there he sat, fingers poised above the keyboard, ready to start hammering. I turned back to my right and saw Glandar and the Malfeasance in their battle positions by the edge of the cliff.

I could feel the power that Glandar had mentioned welling up inside of me. “Okay,” I said, “get ready.” My words came forth with an energy of their own, flowing straight up from my solar plexus, colored with vivid description, crackling with metaphor and simile. I spoke without hesitation the battle of Glandar and the Malfeasance, monster born of the hero's own ill thoughts.

The Eliminator flashed in the sunlight, and there was rolling and running and gasping for air. Wounds blossomed, blood ran, bones shattered. Great chunks of the monster's amoebic body flew on the ocean wind. And the invective was brilliant: “May you burn in Mank's essential furnace until the scimitar moon sews your soul to eternity.” Acid breath and biting steel, the two fought on and on—now one getting the upper hand, now the other.

To my left, Ashmolean was white hot, typing faster than the computer could announce the words that jumped from me to his fingers. “Death to the unbeliever,” he murmured under his labored breath.

In the end, Glandar, so brutally wounded that he was beyond recovery, gave one final suicide charge forward, burying himself in the viscous flesh of the monster, forcing both of them over the edge of the cliff.

Ashmolean cried out, “It can't be!” as I described them falling, yet his fingers continued typing.

“No,” he moaned as they hit the rocks hundreds of feet below, but the action on the keyboard never slowed.

He wept as the ocean waves washed over them. After he typed the final period, he turned away from me to cover his face again with his hands. With that last dot, Kreegenvale went out like a light in my own mind. I pushed back the lawn chair and stood up. Ashmolean's body was heaving, but all of his grief was silent now. Saying nothing, I left the room, left the house, and never went back.

As devastating as the death of Glandar might have been for Ashmolean, it left me with a sense of determination about my own life that even the sword wielder had never exhibited. When thinking what to do next, I remembered Leonard Finch putting his finger on my forehead and saying, “See it here.” In rapid succession, I took the job at Burgerama and registered for classes at the local college. I often thought about what I had done to my fantasy writer, but reconciled it by telling myself it was the best for everyone.

Still, memories of Kreegenvale would sometimes blow through my mind, especially when I sat in the literature lectures and the profs would fall into theoretical obscurity. Then I prayed Glandar would kick in the door and start wielding. For the most part, though, I loved learning again. I took a lot of English courses, but I knew I didn't want to teach. As for the job, it was greasy and hot for little pay, and when I'd slide those horse-fat sandwiches across the counter to the eager customers, I'd whisper, “Death to the unbeliever.” For all the Gwaten Tarn horrors of Burgerama, I enjoyed getting to know the other workers that were my age.

Things were going very well, and my parents were pleased with my progress, but for me, something was missing. I realized one night that what I wanted was to be a writer. Even to be back in Ashmolean's study, where words breathed life into the impossible, would have sufficed. I bought a notebook and began trying to tell a story, but from some lack of courage or an overabundance of self-criticism, I never got further than the first few lines. “If only Kreekaw would come,” I thought, “and snatch this frustration from my troubled sleep.”

I was into my second semester of college and succeeding in the time-honored tradition, when one day UPS delivered a package for me at my parents' house. My mother called me, and I came downstairs, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I had been up late reading Swift's “Battle of the Books” for an exam. She handed me the brown parcel, planted a dry kiss on my cheek, and then left for work.

Opening the mailer, I slipped out the contents—a brand new, fat, hardcover book. A thrill ran through me when I saw that it was a copy of
The Butcher of Malfeasance
. Of course, I dropped the mailer and paged frantically to the end of the novel, to the part I had been responsible for. Five pages from the end, I picked up the narrative where Glandar faces off against the monster by the edge of the cliff. Reading it was an experience I will never forget, for Ashmolean had used my exact words. I ran my fingers over the print on the page and when it didn't brush away, I thought to myself,
I created this
.

I saw the battle take place before my eyes just as I had seen it in Ashmolean's office the day I dictated it to him. The oaths and all were there, perfectly rendered. But when I read to where the ocean washed the fallen bodies out to sea, there was another whole page of writing.

Puzzled, I continued to find that Glandar returns that night to Kreegenvale. Soaking wet, with urchins in his hair and seaweed wrapped around his neck, he steps into a room of mourners. They rejoice, the flagons are passed, and he tells how the elastic body of the Malfeasance saved him from the fall. Although he almost drowned, he managed to fight the current and come ashore three miles down the coast. Then the novel ends on a high note, promising more drinking, wenching, and wielding to come.

“What the hell is this?” I said aloud. A few minutes later, after reinspecting the mailer, I found my answer. In my rush to see my words in print, I had missed the letter from Ashmolean that was addressed to me: