by J. M. Frey
The scars could not be hurting her—they are long ago healed and Pip is religious in her regime of stretching the skin gently, treating it with creams and oils to keep them supple. It is less vanity and more a desire to ensure that they do not pain or cripple her later in life. So perhaps it is something muscular, something gained from her increased hours at the gym these last few weeks.
I decide that, later tonight, I will give her a massage with some of her skin oil. That ought to take care of both potential reasons for her discomfort. And it will very likely lead to other things that will help her take her mind off it.
Finally, Pip finds her words. “Elgar thought that . . . maybe totems were disappearing again,” she confesses. “I told him it was all done, but now I can’t stop . . . I mean, it’s stuck in my head, you know?”
“I see,” I say, reaching out to take the wine from her hands so I may fold them between my own and kiss the tips. “And now you have thought your way into a small panic.”
“Just a small one,” Pip allows. “But I . . . I dunno. He’s concerned that it might not be over, and . . . to be honest? I’m not certain that it is.”
Ah, and here is the root of the problem. I draw my wife against me, resting her head against my heartbeat, and kiss her crown. It seems to soothe her, when she’s been thinking too long or too much about my origins, to have this reminder that I live, I breathe; that I am here.
“But I could also be spinning fantasies,” Pip admits quietly. She swirls her fingertip through my extremely sparse chest hair. “I don’t want to get anyone worked up if I can help it. But I thought I should at least mention it.”
“Just to see if I’ve noticed anything else . . . hinky?” I ask.
Pip grins up at me, that lovely, blinding smile of sheer girlish delight that she gifts to me whenever I master the phrasing of some new idiom or jargon from her world. “Yeah.”
“Nothing hinky,” I vow. “All has been quiet.”
Pip winces. “That’s nearly inviting hinkiness.” She reaches out and brushes a tender thumb over the thin white scar on my left cheek, the last signature that Bootknife ever left on someone’s flesh.
“Oh?” I tease, leaning down for a kiss, which she willingly offers up. When I move back, my wife curls her fingernails against my nape and fails to let me go.
“Mmm,” she says into our next kiss. “Almost as bad as ‘what’s the worst that could happen’? Or ‘I’ll be right back.’”
“Ghastly,” I agree, sipping at her lips. “But no worries. My story is not a horror thriller.”
“But it is a fantasy,” Pip says, and lets me go to sit up. Her expression, when I finally have the chance to study it, is the sort of blank calm she employs when she is trying to keep others from seeing her inner turmoil. I would resent that she is even now not telling me all that is worrying her, if it wasn’t for the fact that I can parse the language of her inward-rolled lips and the tightness of the lines around her eyes so well.
“And what does that mean, dearest?” I ask, sitting up as well. “What trope am I missing?”
Pip reaches across me to retrieve her wine glass. She takes a sip and, as she swallows, seems to come to a decision. “I . . . I think we might be in the eye of the storm here.”
“The eye of the storm?”
“The calm in the middle of the hurricane.”
I raise my own glass to her. “I know what this idiom means. I just don’t understand how—ah. Yes.” I sip, too, for now I have thoughts of my own to consider, to chew on.
Pip winds her hand around mine, threading my fingers with her own, squeezing as if, any moment, the proverbial hurricane will descend upon our house and rip us apart.
“You believe that there is some adventure yet to be had, some danger left to ford?” I ask softly, squeezing back.
“The thing is, bao bei,” Pip whispers. “Fantasy novels usually come in trilogies.”
CHAPTER 2
ELGAR
The next week is a flurry of video-calls with LA, apologetic cat-cuddles with Linux, catch-up meetings with Juan, and daily chats with his agent, Kim. With the press and the fans both dying to see what’s next from the “fantastic imagination” of Elgar Reed, the danger that news of the TV series might leak is high.
The principal casting calls have started to go out, but the production company wants to keep a lid on the series for as long as possible. It’s unconventional, but the idea is to release all the news all at once, in a big sort of social media info-bomb that will, they hope, make the series the main topic of conversation for a few entertainment news cycles. Honestly, it’s all just a bit too modern and busy for Elgar, so he just does as he’s asked and keeps mum about the whole thing. After all, Elgar is a firm believer that spoilers, well, spoil things.
True to point, things were nearly ruined at the beginning of the week, when a casting agent’s assistant—a dumb millennial with a celebrity ladyboner—posted a photo of the call for Bootknife on her social media. It was caught quickly and yanked before any of the major outlets seemed to get ahold of it, but Elgar didn’t have one ounce of sympathy when he’d heard that she’d been fired the next day—confidentiality contracts exist for a reason.
The assistant’s flub means they have to consider throwing nosy fans and media types a bone in terms of Shuttleborn, though. So, to the already busy week, Elgar adds a back-and-forth with the publisher, who wants to keep a tightly clamped lid on the text of the book, and has no stake in whether or not Flageolet’s secret is spilled.
It takes three calls, and a “please, please?” wine basket sent to the whole marketing team, but the publisher is eventually persuaded to post the first chapter on a social reading site to kick off the marketing drive and keep fan attention on Shuttleborn. Hopefully, that will satisfy anyone poking around Elgar and draw them away from digging further. It sort of feels like he’s thrown Shuttleborn’s Tristan and Vana to the wolves to keep Kintyre and Bevel safe, and he tries not to think too hard about what it might mean that he’s now imagining the afterlives of characters he hasn’t yet met in person.
And so, once again, Elgar doesn’t spend any of his week actually writing. He barely has time to think, and spends more time eating sandwiches over his keyboard than Juan is really happy about. It isn’t until he gets another call from the Smithsonian curator to explain that they’d found a similar model of typewriter online that he even remembers the weird chill her first phone call gave him.
“Do we have your permission to put the replica up and note it as such?” the curator asks, being annoyingly thorough with whatever checklist she’s clearly got on her end.
“What will you tell people about the one I donated?” Elgar asks back.
He can’t exactly hear her shrug, but it’s clear in her voice when she replies: “Well, you know, artifacts have to be taken out of displays all the time, to be cleaned, or repaired, or repatriated.”
“I’m not a nation asking for my plundered antiques back,” Elgar hisses, a strange frisson of fear at the memory of the machine’s disappearance crawling up his spine.
“Honestly, no one will kick up a fuss that it’s not the original,” the curator soothes. “Until we find it, this is the best we’ve got. Is it okay?”
“Yeah,” Elgar agrees. “Right. Yeah.” Because what else can he really add?
He almost tells her not to waste their resources looking for an artifact they’ll never recover, but decides against it. What can he say, anyway? “Oh, I spoke with one of my fictional characters via email, and he told me that the Viceroy’s weather witch mother sucked it into the novels I wrote and destroyed it in a twisted plot for vengeance.”
No.
Fantasy writers are given leeway to be eccentric, but there’s a line. And talking about your characters as if they’re real people in the real world is where it’s drawn. Even if you are talking to your characters because they’re real people in the real world.
Instead, he gives the museum’s scheme
his blessing, promises not to talk about the theft publicly (but also not to deny it if the truth comes out), and then spends the rest of the afternoon dutifully scritching Linux as he backs up all his work by emailing the digital proofs to his own address. True, it puts them one step closer to letting hackers at the manuscripts, but one step further away from losing everything forever in case of . . .
Well, just in case.
Maybe Elgar only notices the man in black because he’s already unsettled and jumping at shadows. Maybe it’s all the paranoia over the loss of his typewriter. Maybe it’s the fear of the Deal-Maker magic that has proven—twice—that it can reach into this world and snatch out anything, or anyone, it wants. Or maybe it’s just because he’s seen the man in black out of the corner of his eye enough times that it now constitutes a pattern, and Elgar’s brain has finally started paying attention to it.
But when he leaves the house to fetch some groceries for dinner, he realizes he’s being watched. And as that revelation trickles down into his brain, it’s followed with the grains of another: that someone’s been watching him for weeks now.
Elgar doesn’t have much reason to leave his house. He’s rarely there on weekends because he usually ends up at conventions then, leaving Thursdays and coming home Mondays. And the weekends that aren’t spent surrounded by the glory of nerds who love his work and hotties in skimpy cosplay, he tends to fly up to visit his new family. It’s only a forty-minute direct flight, and, adding the commute to the airport on this end, and the commute to the Piper household in Victoria on the other, he can go from his front door to Forsyth’s in roughly two hours.
Juan takes care of the house when Elgar’s away—feeding Linux, sorting the mail, even mowing the lawn and taking care of the minimal landscaping—and often has groceries and ready-made meals carefully labeled in the fridge when Elgar gets back. Elgar’s pre-diabetic, and Juan takes it very seriously that his boss eat right.
He also gets a bit histrionic in that flaming, limp-wristed way that twinks like him get when Elgar doesn’t get up and go for a walk at least once a day. He’s started to threaten a treadmill-desk, which would make Linux spectacularly unhappy, so Elgar is trying to do better. He’s even asked Juan to make him fewer meals so he’ll have the excuse of walking to the grocery store six blocks away.
And it’s taken him about five visits now to realize that every time he does, a man dressed all in black is sitting on the bench outside the shop.
It could be a coincidence. In fact, it probably is a coincidence.
There are lots of people who have reasons to be in the same place at roughly the same time every day. The homeless guy who opens the doors for him at the monorail station, for example. Or the same three baristas he sees at the SeaTac airport every time he flies. There are also an equal number of reasons for people to dress all in black—a lot of retail shops ask employees to dress in monochrome, and one of Elgar’s writing buddies only wears black because he says it’s easier to make sure his wardrobe never clashes.
Maybe this particular man in black is waiting for his wife to finish work in the grocery store at this time every afternoon. Maybe he’s a businessman on a break, enjoying the outdoor air. Maybe, like Elgar, he works from home, and he comes to this bench to people-watch for an hour.
Except now that Elgar’s noticed the man, it feels like his eyes are burning brands into the back of his neck. It feels like he’s . . . not staring. It’s more than staring. It’s harder, somehow, more intrusive. Pervasive. Intense. Gimlet.
It’s possible that this man is a fan of The Tales of Kintyre Turn, and he recognizes Elgar. Maybe. But shouldn’t the stare feel less like a blow to the back of the head, then? Maybe he’s a reporter looking to trap Elgar into giving him a scoop about the show?
No, now he’s just being a dumbass.
The paranoia about the TV show leaking is starting to get to him. Elgar shakes his head, and tries to push the man in black out of his mind. But the curiosity follows him as he walks up and down the aisles. He makes a decision. He’s going to talk to the man, find out once and for all if he’s really here for Elgar.
Congratulating himself for choosing a pre-made salad and a steak to fry up instead of the frozen pizza that was calling his name, Elgar is quick to get back out of the store, the desire to talk to the man in black itching at the back of his skull.
He fully intends to do it, too. Until he looks up and meets the man’s gaze across the sidewalk.
Elgar has written the phrase “the hate in his eyes” more times than he can count over the last twenty years and eleven plus novels. But he’s never really been able to envision how that kind of visible, tangible hate would actually look.
Now, he knows.
It smacks into him, as if the stranger has launched a crossbow bolt at his heart, making his lungs constrict with terror and his whole body sway and jerk. His fists clench, sweat gathers behind his whiskers, and his knees go wobbly.
Clutching his groceries close, he clamps down on the ridiculous urge to apologize to the man—for what?—and makes the most dignified escape he can, considering his inability to run at a pace that is anything more than a mortifying wobble. He only looks back over his shoulder twice.
When he gets back home, he dumps the bags in the kitchen, double-checks every lock on every door and window, and spends an hour in his en suite bathroom searching “panic attacks” on his phone and the methods used to control one.
It’s past sunset when he manages to get his breathing back to a normal level, and by then, he’s exhausted by the adrenaline his body’s been dumping into his system, forcing his heart and lungs to work so hard he might as well have been running a marathon. He’s too tired to be hungry now, so he shuffles his way to the kitchen to put the steak in the freezer for another day, and the salad in the crisper for tomorrow.
What he finds on the kitchen counter makes him scream.
The plastic salad bowl has burst open. All across the granite countertop, a writhing, bilious wave of maggots wriggles its way to the edge, falling in fat plops against the tiled floor. Some of them burst like pustules, yellow-white, splattering into the grout.
The salad is heaving like a creature trying to escape the pile of leaves and sliced vegetables.
And Linux sits beside it, one paw raised to strike, ears back and teeth bared, whiskers and expression intent and tight. Elgar doesn’t know how he knows it, but he knows that if Linux strikes whatever it is that’s trying to escape the salad, his cat won’t survive.
He swoops around the revolting, stinking pile of maggots and scoops Linux up around his middle. The cat snarls and yowls, but Elgar holds him tightly, accepting the scratches this time instead of flinching away. He doesn’t let go of Linux until they’re both back in the en suite. Elgar locks the door and jams a towel against the gap at the bottom. Linux prowls back and forth in front of it, hissing and snarling at whatever is on the other side.
Elgar’s hands shake and bleed so badly that it takes him four tries to call Juan.
“There’s—” he’s able to get out, and then has to swallow hard against his own rising gorge. “There’s bugs!”
“Bugs, boss?” Juan asks from the other end of the line. It sounds like his assistant is in a bar. Elgar hates to pull him away from his own social time, but he can’t . . . he can’t face the kitchen alone.
“Maggots!” he says, coughing and then biting his tongue hard. He will not puke. He will not. “All over! It’s . . . I can’t . . .”
“’S okay, boss,” Juan says quickly. “Maybe the cleaner forgot to do the garbage disposal this week. We’ll get it sorted.”
“Juan, I can’t . . .” Elgar tries again, and the lump of bile pressing against the hollow of his throat becomes a hot ball of shame and fear. “I don’t . . .” The sob that bites off the rest of that sentence startles them both, if Juan’s soft gasp on the other end of the line is anything to go by.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes, boss. Okay? Te
n minutes.” And then, faintly, as he clearly holds the phone away from his face: “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll be back. Yeah, part of the job, you know? It’s cool. Gimmie an hour, okay? Have another drink. Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Elgar whispers when Juan comes back on the line, narrating his journey from the bar to his car, and then switching the phone to his Bluetooth speaker as he drives.
“I’m nearly there, boss. Breathe. Deep breaths, okay?”
“Okay. Deep breaths. I’m sorry.”
“For what, boss?”
“Screwing up your date.”
“Nah, it’s cool. He was a weirdo, anyway.”
“Weirdo how?”
“Doesn’t read. I ask you, what kind of a man doesn’t like reading? A loser, that’s what. I don’t sleep with men who don’t own books, boss.”
Elgar tries to laugh, but it comes out bubbly and choked.
“Hey, boss, hey. Keep breathing. I’m nearly there.”
“Juan . . .”
“What’s that I hear in the background?”
“Linux. He’s . . . I locked us in the bathroom. He’s not happy.”
The cat punctuates that statement with a long, low yowl, hunching down and ripping at the towel jammed under the door with his teeth, trying to get at whatever’s on the other side. Elgar jumps up from the side of the tub and pushes the towel back with his toe, grateful that he’s still wearing his street shoes when Linux, put out, attacks his foot instead.
“You . . . you’re in the bathroom?” Juan asks, a note of worry creeping into his voice.
“Yeah, I . . . Juan, I was . . . it was awful.”