Time's Mistress
Page 25
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.
And last there was Lise herself, the woman I had called generic, branded a cliché not worthy of my time, but she wasn’t about to give herself back to me. She had never wanted to be a part of me. She had only ever wanted one thing: to separate. She wasn’t about to make me swallow her down and reduce herself to the role of just another voice inside the madness of my head. She was always going to be more than that. Instead she knelt beside me and looked me in the eye. I could barely focus and couldn’t hear a word she said. She could have been damning me or mocking me or apologising, I had no way of knowing. I couldn’t read her lips.
No, that wasn’t true. I knew because Montel knew. All I had to do was focus on the barrage of voices for his, and untangle her words from within all of those others that made up the dwarf.
But before I could, she leaned in and kissed me.
It was almost tender.
But not quite.
She whispered something inside of me. One word. Her name. I didn’t hear it. I felt it resonate through my bones. It was the longest single note I had ever experienced, the sibilant causing my entire body to quiver, until, gradually every muscle and tendon and streak of fat and shard of bone transformed into sounds and those sounds transformed into voices.
That was all it took.
Something inside me snapped.
And they came.
My flesh screaming to be heard. The Unwritten refused to be silenced. All of these little pieces of me returned whence they came. As their stories spilled out through my muscles and onto my skin, my body was unable to contain them. I died then. A metaphorical and metaphysical death. I ceased to be me, reduced to the sum of the lives and stories I had invented. All evidence of the writer, God in this universe of story, was eradicated. And even as my flesh succumbed to the agonies of Lise’s unwritten justice, the stories taking their toll, the transformation began to take hold one word at a time. Slowly, by one word and then another, by one page and then another, by one verse and then another, I became the one thing I had always held as most precious: a book.
A book of flesh and blood, but a book just the same.
That was Lise’s punishment, and there could never have been a more fitting one for a man who had lived by the word than to grant him the one thing he had always craved, immortality by the word.
And now, finally, I can slip from the confines of the page and find new life inside your head. That is where the true immortality of the writer lies, after all. Not in the ink that stains the paper but in the imagination of the reader.
In you I am born again.
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About the Author
Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Risen, and other popular game and comic worlds.
His novels have been published in eight languages to date, including the Italian bestseller L'eridita.
He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers Scribe Award for his Primeval novel, SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR, published by Titan, in 2010, and The inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for TAU CETI (co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson).
SILVER, his debut thriller reached #2 in the Amazon UK charts in the summer of 2011 and with over 50,000 copies sold at the time was among the UK's top 30 bestselling novels of 2011.
His latest books include HNIC (along with the legendary Hip Hop artist Prodigy, of Mobb Deep) which was Library Journal's Pick of the Month, and the follow-up RITUAL, forthcoming from Akashic Books in the US, and has recently started writing the popular Rogue Angel novels as Alex Archer, including Grendel’s Curse, Celtic Fire and Death Mask.
Steve also writes young adult science fiction as Matt Langley. Matt’s debut novel Black Flag is published by Cambridge University Press in September 2014 and is their first original novel in the 700 year history of the press since it was given the Royal Charter by Henry VIII.
He has lived in Sweden for the last 17 years.
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Additional Copyright Information
Time’s Mistress
Copyright Data
Entire contents copyright © 2014 Steven Savile.
The Last Believer
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection
Mechanisms of Grief
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection
Ashes
Copyright © 2013 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Shadows of the New Sun
The Hollow Earth
Copyright © 2007 by Steven Savile
First appeared in The Hollo
w Earth
The God of Forgotten Things
Copyright © 2004 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Angel Road
London on the Brink of Never
Copyright © 2009 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Spells and the City
Last Kisses
Copyright © 2012 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Animism: The Book of Emissaries
The Angel with the Sad Eyes
Copyright © 2005 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Eulogies
Absence of Divinity
Copyright © 2003 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Vivisections
Loose Change
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection
Remember Me Yesterday
Copyright © 1999 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Icarus Descending
Time’s Mistress
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection
METAmorphosis
Copyright © 2011 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Vivisepulture
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