The Silenced Tale

by J. M. Frey

  “No,” I reassure her, opening my arms again, inviting her to decide whether she wants this comfort right now or not. She wraps her arms around my waist. I kiss the back of her neck, thread my hands through her hair, massage what little unblemished skin she has on her shoulders. “No, he shall never get back inside your head. You cast him out, once and for all.”

  “But he is here. Admit that.”

  “I admit it,” I say, reluctantly. “I suppose I hoped that if I did not say it aloud, it would not be true. Could not be true. Is that not how fairy tales sometimes work? To summon a thing, you must name it?”

  “This isn’t a fairy tale,” Pip says. “If this is a story at all, it’s definitely not a fairy tale.”

  “Fucking trilogies?” I venture, and Pip huffs a laugh against my skin.

  I try the Words again, but nothing happens.

  “Why didn’t it work this time?” Pip asks.

  “We have, I think, exhausted what little excess magic lingered here. It will probably work again if more magic accumulates. Or if he is close by. Is he near? Can you tell?” I ask. I assume that the Viceroy is still in Seattle, but his mother had means to travel swiftly by cloud. It is possible that he has modes of transportation, both magical and mundane, that I know nothing about.

  “No,” Pip says immediately, strongly. “No. No, he’s not close. He’s far away. But he did something. The spell was strong and . . . I felt it. The malice. The power. It’s taking him time to . . . get it all together. The pain was . . . sympathy pain.”

  The way she says it makes something click in my head. The last puzzle piece slots into place in the back of my mind, and I cannot help but snap my fingers.

  “That’s it! When strong magics are performed, they need ley lines to siphon off the excess and the blowbacks. In a magical world, the magic dissipates into the air.”

  “But this isn’t a magical world,” Pip whispers.

  “So it just flows, I suppose,” I say slowly. “Flows until something else magical can suck it up and disperse it.”

  “Lucky me,” Pip growls, but she does so quietly. Exhaustion pools in her eyes, and she blinks hard, obviously working to stay awake. The ominous premonition in her snide reply daggers into my bones and leaves a chill there. “This is my fault. I messed up. I fucked it all up.”

  “No, Pip.”

  “It is. I should have chosen my words better. I could have . . . I could have killed him. I should have.”

  “After not allowing Wyndam to do the same?” I pet her head gently, soothingly.

  “I should have said it better.”

  “You were rushed,” I say, trying to keep Pip from too much self-recrimination.

  “I’ve been trying to remember. I think I said, ‘you won’t have access to the magic in your blood.’ But I didn’t say anything about anyone else’s blood. What if he found another Deal-Maker? What if she had another phial around? There’s hundreds of kinds of magic in Hain. He could have used any of it to get his own back. I should have . . . I should have—I don’t remember exactly what I said, and I wish I—”

  I bow forward over my wife, kiss her cap of dark hair, and rock her in my arms.

  “Shhhh, shhhh,” I say softly. “You could not have known.”

  “But I should have,” Pip mutters darkly. “That’s the point. I’m the Reader. I should have known better.”

  “You did what you thought was best at the time.”

  Pip thumps her forehead into my sternum in self-recrimination.

  “Ouch,” I murmur, but it is not a real reproach. I cradle the back of her head in my palm and scratch lightly at her scalp, soothing.

  “Do you think it was really Linux?” Pip whispers after a long moment.

  I flex my bare toes against the chill tile floor, and debate how to answer.

  “Your silence means you agree,” Pip says.

  “I will find out,” I reply. “In the meantime, back into bed with you.”

  “No,” Pip says. “There’s no way I can go back to sleep now. I’ll be . . . I’ll go put on the coffee. If we have any left. We’ve been drinking a lot lately.”

  “We have,” I murmur, and let her change the subject as she shuffles away.

  I emerge from my office about twenty minutes later, filled with chilling horror and regret that Pip’s guess was correct.

  A black cloud of self-recrimination and shame coalesces in my chest, weighting each of my pathetic, shallow breaths. I should not have watched . . . I should have fast-forwarded the video, or looked away, or . . . I should not have watched . . . that poor cat. I knew the Viceroy could be cruel, but to torture a small, defenseless animal, to flay it alive and literally paint the walls with its blood. To rip its head off . . . while it still breathed . . .

  Oh, foolish, over-confident, Forsyth. When will you ever learn?

  Pip has Alis with her in the kitchen, gnawing on her frozen stuffie, looking puffy-eyed and as miserable as I feel. Apparently, the Great Writer is determined that none of us are to have any sleep tonight.

  “You were right,” is all I can say to Pip’s questioning look.

  Elgar

  Elgar and Juan are down at the concierge desk, working out how much longer he can stay in his suite. He’s preparing to spend another week in LA in order to write the script, but there seems to be someone else booked into his rooms for the weekend, and apparently this person is important enough that the hotel is reluctant to shift their reservation.

  Juan gets phone calls all the time, so Elgar doesn’t really pay attention when he steps away from the desk and fishes his phone out of his pocket. It’s his job, after all. The concierge keeps clicking through the computer, and Elgar tries not to tap his fingers impatiently. Then, over the sound of Juan’s ringtone, Elgar hears him gasp. He turns just in time to see Juan blanch and nearly drop the thing as he fumbles to answer it.

  “Boss, it’s the cops,” he says, heading for an alcove where he can take the call in private. Elgar’s heart shoots into his throat.

  “Sir, did you and your, ahem, partner think you could stand to share a single—?”

  Elgar holds up his palm, silencing the concierge, who makes an annoyed sound in the back of her throat and clicks her keyboard in a way that Elgar would have worried meant they wouldn’t be getting a room at all if he’d been paying enough attention.

  Juan paces up one side of the lobby and back again, shoulders hunched in, hand over first his stomach, then his mouth. The concierge tries to speak to Elgar again, and he interrupts with:

  “Wait. Just a second.” When she makes another annoyed sound, he adds: “Please.” He scrunches his fist in the bottom of his cardigan and waits. Whatever news Juan’s getting, it doesn’t look good.

  Please not Forsyth, Elgar thinks suddenly. Oh god, please don’t be the Victoria police. Please not . . . please not that.

  Juan comes back a few minutes later, face white.

  “Juan?”

  “Cancel the reservation,” Juan says to the concierge. “And arrange for a car to the airport. Boss, we’re going upstairs to pack.”

  “Why?” Elgar asks, dread filling his gut and curdling whatever is already in there.

  “We gotta go home,” Juan says softly. “Someone . . . they think your stalker . . . it’s . . .” He takes a deep breath and rubs his eyes, frowning hard, hands shaking. “That asshole . . . he killed your cat.”

  The police sent crime scene photos to Juan, who hesitates to show him, but . . . Elgar wants to see it. He wants to know. If—how—his beloved little buddy suffered. Knowing is better than imagining. Especially since his imagination has already proven to be the source of all his misery.

  The photos are shockingly red and white, especially on the small screen of Juan’s phone. He’s barely able to parse the splash of gore on the otherwise sterile, white tile wall of the kitty hotel. Four little paws are lined up neatly under the bursting splash like shoes in a hallway. But severed. No legs. The little head disp
laying Linux’s last expression of utter terror—pulled back lips and exposed fangs—sits beside them, a white ribbon of spine curled around it all like revolting gift wrap. Tufts of ginger fur stick to the drying blood between the tiles.

  Elgar makes a strangled sound and runs for the lobby washroom. Somehow, he makes it in time to hurl up what feels like every meal he’s had since he accepted the fragile little marmalade kitten from a neighbor’s litter.

  The final choking groan gives way to sobs pulled from the depths of his gut. He spits, flushes, wipes his face and beard with toilet paper, and then curls up on the tile between the toilet and the wall. He cries. Cries in a way he hasn’t since his Aunty Lilah died. Presses his forehead to his knees and curses himself for ever sitting down to that race-car red typewriter in the first place.

  Elgar has been accused of lazy writing before. Usually, he lets the criticism roll right off his back, especially when it comes to the way he chose to portray his archvillain. He’s tortured innocent boys, raped maidens, and flayed horses just to prove how dastardly his bad guys are, to cause the sort of emotional pain required to push the hero into action. And he got letter after letter from people complaining about those scenes, about how unfair to women he was being, about the animal cruelty, about how sensational gore for the sake of sensational gore isn’t a substitute for plot. And he’s ignored all of it.

  Which makes this, in a less roundabout way than he really wants to admit, completely his fault. If he hadn’t created a villain who did . . . those sorts of things, then Linux might still be alive.

  “Boss?” Juan asks, and he’s standing in the open door of the washroom because Elgar hadn’t even had the time to lock it. There are tears on his cheeks, too, because he’d loved that wretched little menace just as much as Elgar. “Boss, shhh. C’mon. We should go.”

  “I—uh—I can’t . . .” Elgar says, and is sick again. He can’t stop sniveling.

  And then somehow Gil is there, and Elgar can’t really remember how long he’s been clinging to the toilet, shaking. But Gil is standing in the hall of the cubicle, handing them both paper towels to clean up with, gum, and a small bottle of mouthwash. He’s talking on his own phone, voice soft in the ringing echoes of the washroom, barely audible under Elgar’s gross, heaving wretches and sobs.

  “—change Mr. Reed’s flight, please,” Gil is saying. “And can you go to their suite and get them all packed? Yes, as soon as possible. They’ll be leaving immediately.”

  “Boss, get up. We’ll go. Gil’s brought his car; it’ll be faster. We’re going straight to the airport.”

  And then somehow they’re in a town car, and then the airport, and then the plane, and Elgar is feeling weak, and shaky, and his stomach is roiling. He doesn’t want the water Juan keeps pushing at him, and if one more person asks him if he’s okay, he’s going to scream.

  “Boss,” Juan says, as the captain announces their descent into SeaTac. “Are you—?”

  “I am terrified!” Elgar hisses. “I am furious. I feel so guilty. And I despise that I am terrified, because I don’t even know what I’m terrified of! It feels like my heart is going to burst right out of my chest! I can’t swallow.”

  “Breathe, boss,” Juan says, rubbing his back.

  The plane tilts toward the earth and Elgar swallows, and swallows, and swallows, and feels like he’ll never get the lump out of his throat. He barely remembers disembarking. He follows after Juan like a supertanker being towed in the bobbing wake of a determined, self-bronzed, grim-faced tugboat.

  A local vet clinic is holding what little remains there are, and Juan explains that he’s going to drive Elgar straight there, so they can decide what to do. The owner of the kitty hotel, devastated and so apologetic, has offered to pay for any burial or cremation costs. In the meantime, Juan says, the police think they have a lead on their suspect. Someone has called in a tip.

  Elgar’s supposed to meet the cops at the precinct first thing tomorrow morning, after he’s had a chance to go home and rest, and . . . and . . .

  Oh, god, Linux isn’t going to be there.

  Elgar is going home, and his cat isn’t going to be there to chirp indignantly, to try to trip him as soon as he comes in the door. No fuzzy orange menace to scratch the back of his hand, or meow indignantly at the cupboard door, or to sit on his face first thing in the morning and demand breakfast when his bowl is already full.

  Elgar sucks down hard on the sobs that want to crawl out of his throat, pulling his cap down so no one can see his face, trusting his PA to guide him through the airport to the parking garage.

  “Here, boss,” Juan says, and Elgar folds himself into the passenger seat of his car while the porters heft their bags into the trunk. Elgar does up his seat belt, then hunches down, unwilling to look at or deal with the world.

  A few minutes later, Juan jumps in. “Okay, boss. Vet clinic. Here we go.”

  They roll out of the parking garage, the traffic light for this time of early afternoon, and Juan eases the car onto the ramp that will merge them into highway traffic and take them back to Elgar’s neighborhood. There’s a stop light at the bottom of the ramp, but instead of slowing on the approach, Juan starts going faster.

  Elgar yanks his head up, startled, as Juan jerks in his seat and slams his foot down hard on the brakes. He lays on the horn.

  “Shit!” he yelps, jamming the brakes again. “Shit, shit! Boss, cover your face. I can’t get it to stop. We’re going to—”

  Forsyth

  Several hours later, Finnar pings again, and I pop upstairs to check what the program has found, dread yanking at my heart. It takes a long time for me to come back down again. Each step down into the warm domesticity of my home seems as if bringing this news into it will soil what Pip and I have worked so hard to build.

  “I’ve made a horrific mistake,” I say, joining Pip in the living room, where she and Alis are trying, unsuccessfully, to nap. Pip has called in sick to work for the rest of the week, which I feel is wise. Neither of us want her to have a magical fit in front of her class. “I must go to Seattle directly.”

  “Oh god,” Pip breathes. “Why?”

  “Elgar is in the hospital.”

  “What?” Pip screeches.

  Alis jerks at the sudden loud sound. “Da!” she says, indignant, as if inviting me to share in her recrimination of her mother for being so uncivilized.

  “Sorry, baby,” Pip says, and tugs gently on Alis’s foot in apology.

  “It all happened so fast, I have barely had time to follow the connections. My creator is a pincushion. That was surgery, Pip. Surgery. On his skull.”

  “Okay, first, how about you take some deep breaths for me,” Pip says. I realize I need them, and do as she suggests. “Right. Okay. Surgery. On his skull.”

  “To alleviate the swelling.”

  “From the . . . okay, start at the beginning here, spymaster. You’re losing me.”

  Alis squirms to be let down, and goes immediately to her little reading armchair, busying herself with a picture book about the life cycle of penguins. Who tap dance, apparently. As best as I am able, I fill Pip in on what I’ve found. It fills me with shame to have to admit, aloud, that I have failed him so spectacularly.

  “Oh, but I am a terrible spymaster,” I confess, miserable, and Pip pulls me down against her chest so that I may listen to her heartbeat, may revel in the close, warm scent of my wife. “This is all my fault. I hesitated when I should not have. I should have warned him, or—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Pip says softly, kissing the very center of my ever-widening bald spot. I grumble at her for reminding me that it exists. “You don’t actually have powers of prognostication, you know.”

  “But I should have—”

  “No.”

  “Pip—”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  I sit up, meeting my wife’s kind gaze, and she cups my cheeks, keeping my head still as she forces me to meet her eyes. “How could you possibly love such
a silly, stupid, useless man as me?”

  Pip’s brow wrinkles, her eyebrows arching up in the middle, her mouth pulling down. “Bao bei,” she says softly. “You’re not silly, or stupid, or useless.”

  “My creator is being stalked and threatened. His cat is dead. All because I have been unable to definitively track the movements of the singular, most powerful archvillain of his series. This is because of me.”

  “Say that again,” Pip says gently.

  “This is all because of me?” I echo, aghast that she wishes me to repeat it.

  “No, the bit before that.”

  “I have been unable to definitively track the movements of the singular, most powerful archvillain of his series?”

  “Yeah.” Pip leans forward and kisses me again—once on the lips, once on the tip of my overlarge nose. “Even Kintyre Turn couldn’t defeat the Viceroy.”

  “But I should have been able to—”

  “Forsyth,” Pip interrupts, and there is steel in her voice now. She will not be crossed. “Stop wallowing. Elgar is alive. He’s recovering. You said so yourself.”

  I nod miserably, and remain silent. For some reason, my wife chooses to reward me for this with another slow, lingering kiss.

  “Okay, so, you’re going to Seattle,” she says, and it sounds less like she’s repeating the facts I told her, and more like she’s trying to convince herself it’s a good idea.

  We both of us look over to the trio of armchairs around the fireplace and bookshelves. Alis is content, flipping through the book and narrating the pages in rapid babble to Library.

  “I can’t come,” Pip says, and it’s both a confession and a complaint. “Alis—” she begins, even as I say:

  “The magic.”

  “The magic?”

  “We are aware that you are acting as the Viceroy’s pressure valve. But is he? And if you move closer to him, may he not feel it? You know he is far from you. What if he feels you getting closer?”