by Jeffrey Ford
I went everywhere on my bike, hoping people would think me a health nut instead of realizing the embarrassing fact that I had not yet tested for my driver’s license. It was early autumn and the night was cool with a Kreegenvale moon—like the blade of a scimitar—as Ashmolean would have it time and again. I covered the four blocks to his house in minutes, and, as I pulled into his driveway, I noticed that all the lights were out. For the longest time I sat there, trying to decide if I should knock on the door. I think what finally made me get off my bike and go up the steps was that same desire that always drove me onward with any story I was reading. I wanted to find out how it ended.
For all my innate curiosity, I knocked very softly and took a step backward in case, for some reason, I had to run. I waited a few minutes and was about to leave when a light suddenly went on inside. The door slowly pulled back halfway and then Ashmolean’s head appeared from behind it.
“Mary,” he said and actually smiled. He pulled the door open wider. “Come in.”
I was more than a little taken aback by his good humor, unable to remember ever having seen him smile before. Also, in that moment, I realized there was something very different about him. All of that frustrated energy that released itself daily in his punishment of the keyboard now seemed to have vanished, leaving behind a meek doppelgänger of my fantasy writer. I was reminded of his novella “Soul Eaters of the Ocean Cave,” and momentarily hesitated before stepping inside.
“One second,” he said and left me there in the foyer. I wondered what he had been doing in the dark. He soon returned with a manuscript box in his hands.
“Take two days and read this. On the third day, come to work. I will pay you for the time,” he said.
I took the box from him and just stood there not knowing if I was to leave or not. He looked to me as if he needed someone to talk to, but I was mistaken. That vacuous demeanor that had put me off on my arrival now crumbled before my eyes. The redness returned to his face, the arch to his eyebrows. He stooped forward and, with true Ashmolean fury, blurted out, “Go.”
I did, quickly. By the time I was on my bike, the lights had again been extinguished inside the house. There was no question in my mind that he was a maniac; what bothered me more was his obsession for creative honesty. He truly could not continue unless he saw for sure in his mind what would happen next in Kreegenvale. This was a practice I had always associated with writers of a different caliber than my fantasy writer. It was with this in mind that I began that night to read The Butcher of Malfeasance, and, for the first time, I found I cared about Glandar.
When Ashmolean wrote a novel, it was always a doorstopper, and Malfeasance was no exception. It was different in one respect, though. For the first time in any of Glandar’s adventures, the hero had begun to show his age. There was a particular passage early on, following the beheading of an onerous dwarf, where he even complained of back pain. Also, while lying with the beautiful Heretica Florita, green woman of the whispering wood, he opted for long conversation before vegetable love. Moments of contemplation, little corkscrew worms of uncertainty, had burrowed into the perfect fruit of wielding and wenching that had been Kreegenvale.
I thought perhaps these changes had come because of the nature of the story. In this adventure, Glandar’s enemy was a product of himself. It had been well established way back in A Flaming Sword in the Nether Region that the Gods of Good smiled upon Glandar for his heroic deeds. To keep him healthy and able to work their positive will against the forces of evil in the world of men, the Gods would send the blackbird, Kreekaw, to him at night. The bird would snatch Glandar’s nightmares from him as he dreamed them, and then fly them to the Astral Grotto where Mank, the celestial blacksmith, would incinerate them in his essential furnace.
In the new novel, Stribble Flap the Lewd seeks revenge for having had his member lopped off in an earlier book. Taking his bow, he waits outside the palace at Kreegenvale one night and, as the blackbird leaves Glandar’s window with a beak full of nightmares, slays it with an arrow to its heart. The bird plummets into Deffleton Marsh, releasing the nightmares, which coalesce in the rancorous bottom mud and form, through a whirling, swirling, glimmering, and shimmering mumbo-jumbo reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, the monster Malfeasance, a twelve-foot giant with an amorphous rippling body and a shaggy head the size of seven horses’ rumps set side by side. This horror begins to roam the countryside spreading its ill will. Glandar avoids a confrontation with the giant until he learns that it has killed Heretica Florita and sloppily devoured her green heart.
On the third day I returned to Ashmolean. He was waiting for me in his office, looking again rather pale and meek. I was surprised to find my lawn chair had been moved up next to his writer’s throne. He greeted me by name again, and motioned for me to sit beside him.
As I handed him the manuscript box, he asked me if I had read it.
I told him I had.
I thought he would ask me what I thought of it, but I should have known better. Instead, he said, “Did you see it? In your mind, like a movie? Were you there?”
I told him I was there, and I had been. Although the writing was Ashmolean’s usual halting, obvious subject/verb, subject/verb style, the whole adventure, right up to the end where the final battle was about to take place, had truly been more vivid than life.
“Please,” he said, and then paused for a moment.
Please? I said to myself.
“Just as you would find on the shelves those instances from the history of Kreegenvale I required, now I need you to find something for me in the future of the realm.”
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 m
ighty 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 t
he 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.