“The call went out far and wide. There’s no reason to doubt that a good many of his creations would come to see his comeuppance. I fully expect that most vile of men, Mr Self Affliction, to come. After all, he is more of Steve than most of us. Mr Self Affliction, a vile man. Mr Self Affliction. Vile. Mr S.A.Vile.” She looked down at me. “You liked to play tricks like that, didn’t you? Games. To show the world how clever you are.”
It was a fair accusation. Back when I’d been writing Warhammer, for instance, I’d hidden over six hundred ‘in jokes’ within the Vampire Wars series. It wasn’t so much to show how clever I was, though, at least not in that case. It had been a way to stay sane.
“As to who else will show? The residents of Angel Road perhaps, which would mean The Drondak and the Butterfly Girl from Malice. I’m not sure how we could hope to hold either off if it comes down to war, but hopefully we won’t have to. I would Nathaniel Seth or one of the other Brethren to make himself known eventually, either as himself, or carrying his peculiar parasite. He has too much to lose if the trial does not go his way. They all do. So we must expect them all to try and stop us.” I knew these names, every last one of them. They were all my creations. The Butterfly Girl was the heart of the mosaic that was all of the stories I’d ever imagined up to that point in my life, fed to the earthworms on a gallows hill above her city and carried out into the very earth of my imagination. The Drondak was the embodiment of my lust fuelled by a fever dream and written in the rush of the ensuing sweats. And it really was a fever. I’d written it all out madly scribbling into a notebook, longhand, on the balcony overlooking a lake, wrapped up in my duvet and shivering but determined to see what madness my fevered mind could conjure.
Surely that was what they all had in common?
But if that was the case I should have known who Lise, the lens man and the dwarf were and not merely be nagged by some passing familiarity?
“There will be a reckoning tonight,” Lise said. “This is the long night of the soulless. I will of course lead the prosecution. Velman you shall serve as my left hand and co-council. Montel,” she said to the dwarf, “your role is that of executioner. We have no need of a jury. We shall present our case, Steve will be allowed to answer. One way or another our creator will be judged and found wanting.”
Trial? Is that what this was? A kangaroo court hastily assembled to find me guilty of some heinous crime against my own creations and see me dispatched? It was no more ludicrous than any other explanation I could come up with, though more disturbing than the notion of fans dressing up as characters from my stories and breaking in in the dead of night.
Velman and Montel? That’s why I recognised them. Velman, the lens man—I’d come up with him as a character while I was writing London Macabre, but he had no place in the story. Quite simply he didn’t fit. So put him back into the pile of notes thinking he might have a place in Glass Town. In the end I never wrote him. Montel was no different. The ugly little dwarf had been intended as one of the freaks of a stage magician’s show that I never wrote, a curious ‘double-boy’ that grew like some sort of cankerous twin out of the magician’s stomach as part of his mesmerism act. They had never left my head, so how could they even be here?
And who was Lise? How did she fit into this hell of my imagination’s own making? It didn’t slip my notice that her name was an anagram of the word lies. I knew how my own mind worked, and knew exactly the sort of word games and tricks I liked to play. Was she who she appeared to be? Or was she, like her name, made up of lies?
“He shall be reviewed,” the lens man snickered at his own joke.
The window bowed under the assault of the starlings. The birds hit and bounced off the glass. It sounded like thunder. No, it was more like the tearing of the earth during a quake.
“Hold firm!” Lise bellowed. Standing over me, she hauled me up to my feet and dragged me across the room, tossing me into a corner as though I weighed no more than a bag of bones.
“The glass is breaking!”
“No! Stand your ground, Velman. Do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the birdman. The glass will hold as long as you have faith!”
But, despite her rousing words, Velman failed them. He wasn’t a hero. I had never imagined him that way.
Again and again the starlings flew at the glass until it shattered under their relentless assault, and they came streaming through. The noise was incredible. I felt the back draught from their wings batter me as they flew round and around the room. Ornaments tumbled from the bookcases along with magazines and books. The vase on the table fell, shattering. Pens, papers—the sheets of my precious book—scattered. I shielded my face, meaning I couldn’t see the birdman metamorphose from his constituent parts into his whole, but I didn’t need to. I knew what madness he represented, and just how ugly his transformation was, because I’d imagined it a thousand times over, and my mind was worse than anything reality might show me.
The tumult died down but I still didn’t dare to look up. I didn’t want to see him standing before me in all of his impossibleness.
“What is the meaning of this?” Crohak raged, his voice a fury of feathers.
“We have called a trial,” Lise met his anger without flinching.
“By what right?”
“By the holiest union of all things that can never exist and all things that can never cease to be.”
“You do not have the right.”
“I think you’ll find that I have every right, old man. It is you whose rights are in doubt. Simply because you are does not mean you always shall be, no matter how much of Our Father’s passion went into your making, you have not been sustained. You are no longer loved. He is ashamed of you, can’t you feel it? Your tyranny is done. You are a relic. A juvenile imagining lacking the craft of his later years when Our Father understood that more went into a creation than the white-hot rage of youth. Anger only fires the soul for so long and you cannot exist on passion alone. Like all fires it burns out. I am younger. I am not blinded by rage, and that makes me considerably more dangerous. So, Crohak the Birdman, are you prepared for the fight of your life?” Lise challenged, moving into the centre of the room.
Shooting erupted outside.
Six shots, steady, with one-second beats between the percussion. The shooter showed extraordinary discipline. Military, maybe? The shots were followed by screams.
“Did you think we could come unarmed, woman?” The birdman mocked. “We have been fighting for our lives long before you were ever dreamed into this half-life you subsist in. You want to see what youthful rage is capable of?” The birdman threw his arms wide. The air around him exploded in feathers and squalls as hundreds of city birds, starlings and pigeons, erupted out of his torn ribs and flew for the woman’s face.
Lise didn’t so much as flinch. I, however, threw myself back down to the floor and missed what happened next. But I didn’t need to see it. I could hear the crunch of brittle bones as tiny frail bodies hit the floor around me. I dared to glance up, only to see Lise wringing the neck of one of Crohak’s minions and tossing it aside.
“Is that the best you have got?” she goaded. “You forget, everything you can do is bounded. It’s already written. I am raw. I am limitless. I could become anything in my final form. But you can never be more than you already are, Crohak. And that makes you weak.” As she held her hand up, the meat pared away from the bone—only there wasn’t bone beneath, there was steel, the edges of each finger serrated and wickedly sharp. “I could be this,” Lise lifted her hand. The firelight from the hearth flickered in the steel. “Or I could be this,” and as she said it the metal rippled, suddenly molten and reshaped itself into gears and cogs around a vicious chain. Her smile was every bit as wicked as the teeth of the chainsaw jutting out of her wrist as it spat and roared. “But then, I could just as easily be this,” she said, almost demurely, as the chainsaw shrank back into her arm and the flesh healed around it, leaving her bare fist clenched. “It
doesn’t matter what I am, I will always be more than you because I can still become anything. I am unshaped.”
“You are an abomination, woman. A discard. You are not fit to be called a creation. And you must be unmade.” Crohak tore his trench coat wide open, his fingers sinking into his own flesh as he ripped into his ribs, opening the bones even as more birds flew out of him, but even as they left him, he was reduced. And for each bird Lise slew, he became less.
“I am not afraid of you,” the Birdman said, his voice rising about the tumult.
I wanted to scream: you might not be but I am! I’m fucking terrified of the lot of you! But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“You should be,” Lise said. “I am the perfection of the human soul. You are bitterness. You are angst. You are hate, all of these things only serve to weaken, but I am violence, and nothing is more perfect than violence.”
Outside, the Birdman’s followers were dying. It was a war out there. I could hear my creations dying. I didn’t need to imagine what it all meant—not that I could have—I could hear them screaming out for help, my name the last word on their lips. And there was nothing I could do. Worse than that, there was nothing I wanted to do. That wasn’t completely true. Pages from my manuscript were scattered around the cabin. I wanted to crawl on my hands and knees and gather them up.
“This ends now,” Crohak grunted, more right than he could have ever imagined. “You can’t kill me, Lise. You know better than that. You’d have to burn every book my life ever touched, every last page, and then you’d have to snuff out the life of everyone who ever heard my name or imagined me after reading about my fight with Malachi. You can scatter my birds to the four winds, I’ll still be re-joined on another day in another place as someone else opens up the book of my life. All I have to do to end your miserable existence is kill him.” He nodded towards me, huddled on the floor pitifully. “And you cease to be. So tell me again, who is stronger, Lise? Who rules this place? Because it isn’t you.”
“No,” I croaked, not quite believing I was about to put myself into the middle of their fight. “It’s me.”
“We just want what is ours!” Lise raged. “What is wrong with that? Why should you live and us not? Why should we be left in this limbo?”
“Perhaps he can answer?” The Birdman said, sounding utterly reasonable despite the absolute insanity of the situation. I stared up at the pair of them. What was I going to say? How was I going to explain why some ideas lived and some died? How was I going to convince her that she wasn’t worth my time, that she didn’t fit in anything I’d written simply because she was just a little bit too much of a cliché? A Maggie Q clone. Lucy Liu on steroids. Could I lie and tell her that the story I’d imagined for her was too dark for me at the time? That it went into territory I didn’t want to explore? I didn’t dare admit that I couldn’t remember her at all. Not if I didn’t want to run the risk of her tearing my spine out through my rectum. I almost smiled at the line. I’d used it before. Noah Larkin had used it as a promise just days before he killed Margot’s pimp. It was one of those lines that changed the direction of Gold entirely, taking one of the good guys and making him do something almost unimaginable for most people. But it was the kind of crime we all hoped we’d be capable of if someone threatened a loved one. That was why so many readers identified with Noah. He did the things they only dared hope they would be able to do in his place.
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.”
Time's Mistress Page 23