The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  The sculpture Tooms referred to is still in existence to this day. It stands alongside the old boardwalk at precisely the halfway point to the springs. The cow skull is tilted back slightly as if it watches the movement of the clouds, and its left hand is thrust out, palm up, proffering payment. The workmen who replaced some of the timbers and planks back in ’45 testified to being haunted for many years by the statue’s diabolical grin. Some members of the ’68 commune recall that the thing was known as “Thief,” because occasionally they would wake in the morning and find it draped with their jewelry and holding in its right hand the straight razor that the men passed around for shaving.

  Thilliada was so impressed, she threw her arms around Elijah and kissed him. When she touched me, he wrote, I could hear the canyon groan and the lizards leaping out of the water pail next to the well. She led him back to the house and, as he put it: We had a feverish assignation on the kitchen floor. Later, in the parlor, she showed me something new. They eventually fell asleep and Tooms had a nightmare of Ogatai creeping through the darkened house.

  She was still sleeping soundly when Tooms woke late in the night. He got up and immediately dressed. The moon was in the open window, he wrote. If was so cold there was frost. He went downstairs and got his rifle from over the fireplace. As quietly as possible, he slipped out the front door and headed for the canyon.

  I trembled, and though it was cold, the sweat ran into my eyes and poured down my back. My very heart was chilled.

  I came across him exactly where I had been told he would be, standing in the dried-out streambed a hundred feet south of Fat Rock. He was clutching a leather satchel of some kind and wearing a brown suit that shone sickly in the moonlight. A heavy man, not likeable at first glance.

  Upon seeing Tooms, the man called out, “Where are we?”

  “The canyon,” Tooms told him.

  The man spluttered nervously, telling Tooms, “I know this much—it has something to do with the intersection of Fate and Desire.”

  “Stop talking nonsense,” said Tooms as he brought the rifle up to aim.

  I hesitated, watching him hold his satchel up to protect his head. He called out for his mother. Then I heard one note, the twang of the jaw harp, and with this I fired a bullet into his heart.

  The stranger died immediately. Tooms went to inspect the body, but …

  Before I could lean over to check the wound, Ogatai was there in a starry whirl, holding the corpse over his shoulder. I carried the satchel and we headed for the springs. The osteomorphete creaked horridly along behind me, and I could hear it breathing.

  Tooms and his weird companion deposited the dead man’s clothing, his satchel and the book it contained into the springs. Enormous bubbles rose as if the waters were belching. Then they proceeded down into the caves, to the chamber that had held the ancient man’s bones. They carefully laid the body out and covered him with the leatherized petals of prehistory. Out on the desert sand, I watched Ogatai dance in the moonlight, writes Elijah. When the morning came, I was alone in bed.

  Thilliada Bass left the canyon a week later on the evening stage. Tooms never recorded his feelings about the departure. All he wrote was, She left behind for me her book of castaways, and I read it ragged as if it was the Bible. Two months later, he received a letter from her in which she stated that her mother had forced her into an arranged marriage with a young banker named Reginald Mortenson and that she was due to have a child before the year was out.

  This was all I got out of Mrs. Dyson before she again reverted to complete gibberish. I thought I had taxed the poor woman enough for one day, so I called for the attendant to come and take her back to her room. When the young man arrived with a wheelchair, Mrs. Dyson became suddenly lucid again and asked me, “Why do you want to know all of this?”

  I told her I was writing an article for a newspaper.

  She started to laugh, and said, “If you’re smart, when you are done writing it, you’ll burn it. Don’t give it a chance to keep growing.”

  I assured her I would consider her suggestion.

  “No you won’t,” she said, and the attendant wheeled her away.

  There is one final article of evidence pertaining to this story that might help you decide what it all means. Near the end of his life, after nailing the last plank onto the boardwalk, Tooms stopped writing in his diary because, as he told Thilliada (by then the widow Mortenson) in a letter, the book was stolen. That missive had apparently been folded once by the old woman and hidden away in a copy of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. A few years ago the edition of Poe and the letter were discovered among the volumes of her grandson’s, J. T. Mortenson’s, library when his ex-wife sold the entire collection to the archives of Preston University for a tidy sum. The following is an exact transcription of Tooms’s only remaining words:

  Dear Thilliada:

  Not a day has gone by that I have not thought of you. Although I resolved long ago not to interfere with your life, things have changed now that death is close at hand. I was awakened from a dream of you and me the other night by the sound of something moving in my house. At first, because of my dream, I hoped it might be you, returning. Then, as I came fully awake, I thought it must be a strong wind blowing out of the canyon. As I listened more intently, though, I heard a distinctive creaking like a great wheel of bones endlessly turning and the labored breathing of a creature trapped by Time. The next morning I discovered that my diary had vanished and in its place I found my old jaw harp. Back in the days when your youthful beauty graced the waters of the spring, I gave away everything to love you for a few brief hours. Now I know that what I agreed to set in motion will never end. So, I send these words to you from out of the spiraling canyon, and beg that you protect them from the flames.

  Elijah

  A story that devours itself about an ancient curse that perpetuates itself in a spiral through time. I always wanted to create osteomorphetes, but here, in suburban South Jersey, the skeletons are insubstantial and usually remain hidden away in closets. My only western story, and as yet, unpublished.

  To protect yourself from the curse after reading this piece, make a circle with chicken fat on your best carpet, stand in the middle on one foot and repeatedly chant the first word that comes into your mind until your spouse, significant other, child, or close friend calls the shrink.

  The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

  What would you expect a fantasy writer to look like? In your mind you see a man with a white Merlin beard and long lithe fingers that spark magic against the keyboard, or perhaps a plump woman with generous breasts and hair so long it spreads about the room, entwining everything like the many-tentacled spell of a witch.

  Picture instead Ashmolean, my fantasy writer, the one whose employ I was in for more than a year. Whatever power of enchantment he possessed was buried behind his eyes, because his description lent itself more to thoughts of other genres. Like one of Moreau’s creatures, he appeared the result of a genetic experiment run amok—a giant sloth whose DNA had been snipped, tortured together with that of a man’s, and then taped and stapled. His stomach was huge; his arms short and hairy; his rear end, in missing the counter weight of the tail, had improvised with a prodigious growth in width. The head was a flesh pumpkin carved with a frown. Vacant, windowlike eyes were rimmed by shadows, and the scalp was as devoid of hair as was Usher’s roof of shingles. Even his personality was a conundrum that might have driven Holmes to forsake his beloved cocaine for the crack pipe. The only “fantasy” I noticed was when he sat at his computer. Then he pounded the keys like he was hammering nails into a wooden cross and gazed at the monitor as would the Evil Queen about to utter, “Who is the fairest of them all?”

  I came to Ashmolean through an ad in the local newspaper. It said: Wanted—clerical assistant devoid of interest in literature or ideas. He told me at the interview that he wanted someone who would not think, but merely to do research. Well, I fit neither
of the criteria, but being seventeen and without a college degree, I thought it might be more interesting than selling hamburgers, so I lied and acted as blank as possible. He stopped typing for a moment, which he had been doing continuously through all of his questions, turned, and looked me up and down once. “Welcome to Kreegenvale,” he said.

  Contrary to my job description, I had been a reader and a thinker. Even back in the lower grades, when the other children in my school would go out to the playground with their balls and bats and field-hockey sticks, I would take a book and sit beneath the oak tree at the far boundary of the field where sounds from the adjacent woods would cancel that riot of competition in which society was desperate to inculcate me. In high school, I suppose I could have been popular. There were boys who wanted me for my long hair and slim figure, but the only climaxes I was interested in were those offered by Cervantes and Dickens. I had a few dates, but the goings-on in bowling alleys and the back seats of cars always seemed inelegant narratives, the endings of which could be predicted from the very first page.

  Perhaps things couldn’t have gone any differently for me, seeing as I grew up, an only child, in a house where success was measured by the majority vote of the world at large. Both of my parents had been driven to achieve in school, at work, and in their personal tastes. My father, a well-respected contract lawyer, never discussed anything, but when speaking to me always closed his eyes, pulled on his left ear lobe, and held forth on some time-honored strategy for defeating whatever problem I might bring to him. My mother, on the other hand, though a busy CPA, had always professed a desire to be a writer. Her favorite author could have been none other than Nabokov. In the beginning, I read to please them, and then somewhere along the way, I found I couldn’t stop.

  I read the greats, the near greats, the stylists, the structuralists, and then I read Ashmolean. His works filled and spilled from the bookcases that lined his study. He had written short stories, long stories, novels, and even a poem or two. All of it, every word he had birthed from electrons on that computer screen, had gone toward advancing the career of Glandar, the Sword Wielder of Kreegenvale. Those thousands of pages contained more sword wielding than you could fit in a stadium.

  That rugged thug of mountainous muscles, sinews of chain link, and spirit that was the thundering of eight and a half wild horses, had slain dragons, witches, elves, giants, talking apes, and legions of inept, one-dimensional warriors whose purpose of creation was to be mown down like so much summer hay. When Glandar wasn’t wielding he was wenching, and occasionally he wenched and then wielded. He was always outnumbered, yet always victorious. No one in the realm rode or drank or satisfied the alluring Sirens of Gwaten Tarn like Glandar, and no one so completely bored me to the brink of narcolepsy.

  In comparison with the fiction I was used to reading, my fantasy writer’s writing seemed like redundant, cliché-ridden hackwork. Say what you will of Glandar, though, his wielding pleased Ashmolean’s readers no end. My fantasy writer was richer than the Pirate King of Ravdish. After his fourth novel, he could have lived comfortably for the rest of his days, existing extravagantly off the interest that Glandar’s early adventures had generated. Ashmolean continued on, even though, as one unusually insightful article told, his wife had left him long ago and his children never visited. His house was falling down around him, but still he worked incessantly, pounding on the keys with an urgent necessity as if he were instead administering CPR. It was not like anything new ever happened at Kreegenvale. Sooner or later it was a certainty there would be generous portions of wielding and then Glandar would end the affair with a phrase of warrior wisdom. “One must retain a zest for the battle” was my favorite.

  The critics raved about Glandar. “Thank God Ashmolean is alive today,” one had said. About The Ghost Snatcher of Kreegenvale, the famous reviewer Hutton Myers wrote, “Ashmolean blurs the line separating literature and genre in a tour de force performance that leaves the reader sundered in two with the implications of a world struggling between Good and Evil.” His fellow authors blurbed him with vigor, each trying to outdo the other with snippets of praise. I believe it was writer P. N. Smenth who wrote: “I love Glandar more than my own mother.”

  My part in all of this was to keep Ashmolean from committing inconsistencies in his fantasy world. There was nothing he hated more than to go to a conference and have someone ask him, “How could Stribble Flap the Lewd impregnate the snapping Crone of Deffleton Marsh, in Glandar Groans for Death, when Glandar had lopped off the surly gnome’s member in The Unholy Battle of Holiness?”

  Ashmolean would never turn around from his computer, but shout his orders to me over his shoulder. “Mary,” he would say, “find out if the horse with no mane has ever been to the Land of Fog.” Then I would scramble from the lawn chair in which I sat, book in hand, boning up on the past adventures, and search the shelves for the appropriate volumes that might hold this information. The horse with no mane had been to the Land of Fog on two separate occasions—once while accompanying Glandar’s idiot first cousin, Blandar, and the second instance as part of the cavalry of the famous skeleton warrior, Bone Eye.

  This process was rather tortuous at first, as I struggled to learn the world of Kreegenvale the way a new cabbie learns the layout of a foreign city. After a time, though, by taking books home to peruse at night and with the speed I had accrued as a well-practiced reader, I had been over almost every inch of the mythical realm and probably knew better than Ashmolean where to get the best roasted shank of yellow flarion in the kingdom or the going price of a shrinking potion.

  The one thing I didn’t know at all, even after so much time had passed, was Ashmolean himself. He was always brusque with his demands and would offer not so much as a thank you no matter how obscure the tidbit I dredged up for him. When he would rise from his throne at the computer to go to the bathroom (he drank coffee one cup after another), he would pass by me without even a nod. On payday, the second and fourth Monday of every month, my money would be sitting for me in an envelope on the seat of the lawn chair at the back of his office. It was a paltry sum, but when I would try to broach the subject of a raise, he would call out, “Silence, Kreegenvale hangs in the balance.” The surreal nature of my employment was what kept me returning, Monday through Saturday, for such a long stretch of time.

  When I would leave in the afternoon, I often wondered what Ashmolean did when he wasn’t writing. There was no television in his house as far as I could see, and no one except his agent ever called him. He hid from his fans for the most part save when there was a conference, and then I had read that he would not sign books and would not hold conversations once he had stepped down from the podium.

  It was a puzzle as to when he shopped or did his laundry or any of the other mundanities that the rest of us take for granted. He seemed somewhat less than human, merely an instrument through which Glandar could let this world know of his exploits. The one clue that he was actually alive in the physical sense was when he would break wind. After each of these long, flabby explosions, which prompted me to begin thinking again of the merits of selling hamburgers, he would stop typing for only a moment to murmur Glandar’s famous battle cry, “Death to the unbeliever.”

  You couldn’t find two greater unbelievers than my parents during this time. They wondered why I hadn’t raced off to college, what with my excellent grades. “How about a boyfriend?” my mother kept asking me. “It’s time, you know,” she would say. My father insisted I was wasting my life, and I needed a real job, something with benefits. All I could tell them was what I felt. I wasn’t quite ready to do any of that, although I was sure someday it would happen. Working for my fantasy writer was the closest I could get to that feeling of sitting at the boundary of the field by myself, away from the riot, and still pretend to be doing something useful.

  Then one day, a year and a half into my employment, Ashmolean was hammering the keys in service of his latest work, Glandar, the Butcher of Malfeasanc
e, and I was in my lawn chair skimming through a novella entitled, “Dream Fountain of Kreegenvale,” which had appeared in the March 1994 issue of Startling Realms of Illusion, when the typing abruptly stopped. That sudden silence drew my attention more completely than if he had taken a revolver from his file drawer and fired it at the ceiling. I looked up to see Ashmolean’s hands covering his face.

  “Oh, my God,” I heard him whisper.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He spun his chair around and, still wearing that finger mask, said, “I’m blind.”

  Out of habit, I moved toward the bookshelves, initially thinking some scrap of research would ameliorate his problem. Then the weight of his words struck me, and I could feel myself begin to panic. “Should I call an ambulance?” I asked, taking a step toward him.

  “No, no,” he said, removing his hands from his face. “I’m blind to Kreegenvale. I can’t see what Glandar will do next. The entire world has been obliterated.” He stared at me, directly into my eyes for the first time. Through that look I could feel the weight of his fear. All at once, I remembered that I had read that his real name was, of course, not Ashmolean but Leonard Finch.

  “Maybe you just need to rest,” I said.

  He nodded, hunched over in his chair, looking like a lost child in a shopping mall.

  “Go home,” he said.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

  He waved his hands at me as if my words worsened his condition. I wanted to ask him if I would still be paid for the rest of the day, but I didn’t have the courage to disturb him.

  On the four-block walk back to my parents’ house, I had metaphorical visions of Ashmolean as an abandoned mine, a tapped-out beer keg, a coin-operated drivel dispenser long since dropped from the supplier’s route. He had plumbed the depths of vapid writing and actually found the mythical bottom. As the day wore on into evening, though, I had a change of heart. I don’t know why, but after dinner as I was sitting alone in my room, making poor progress with Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus,” I suddenly had a vision of the defeated Leonard Finch still sitting in his office with his hands covering his face. I threw down the weight of Camus and went to tell my mother I was going for a ride.