The dwarf chewed and swallowed faster and faster, gorging himself on my masterpiece. I recognised the lines poking out from his shirt cuffs and writhing across his gnarled hands. I recognised the lines coiling around his throat and over his Adam’s Apple. Mouthful by mouthful, he was transformed into the living embodiment of my story. The words kept coming, crushing themselves ever smaller until his entire face and every inch of exposed skin appeared to be a solid mass of black as almost two hundred thousand words crammed themselves onto every inch of him. And then the dwarf started spouting them back to me, making a mockery of them in the process.
Lise shook her head sadly, as though the dwarf’s mangled delivery proved every point she had been trying to make. “Enough!” she barked, silencing the dwarf. “You waste your time on this crap and leave us untouched? I am better than this but you’re never going to realise that are you?” It was a rhetorical question, I knew. She didn’t need me to answer it for her. “I should kill you now and take us all with you. The grand gesture, one last time into the breach and we all go over the top together into No Man’s Land. But I could no more kill you than you could kill yourself. You’re just not the suicidal type, are you, Steve?”
My grin verged on being wry. I’d worked that much out about this little nightmare of my own making. It was down to me to make it end, and if death was the way out, then I’d never leave, because like Lise said, I just wasn’t a pills and whiskey kind of guy. I wasn’t a razorblades in the bath kind of guy either. And there was zero appeal when it came to jumping in front of trains or from bridges or any other form of ending it all that involved pain, no matter how instantaneous it was supposed to be. I was a coward and I really didn’t like pain. These were my creations. The only way they could kill me was if I did it to myself and that wasn’t going to happen.
“Luckily for us we’ve got no intention of killing you. After all, you’re no good to us dead. No, we’ve got a much more apt punishment in mind. We think you’ll enjoy it, don’t we, boys?” The dwarf and the lens man nodded. “But first we should assemble everyone. After all this is as much for them as it is for us. Velman, tear down the walls, let them all come in.”
The lens man nodded, extending his baton and moved mechanically over to the shattered window. The sudden explosion of violence was terrifying and any certainty I’d managed to harbour that I might come out of this unscathed was demolished right along with the wooden exterior wall of the cabin. Within a minute, no more, surely, there was a huge raw wound where the front of the cabin had been, and through it I could see all form and manner of monsters and miracles. Things I could surely never have imagined, and things I must. This was my own Noah’s Ark of creation, though my monsters came in one by one, not two by two. And there really were all manner of things out there; everything from normal men and women to a giant grotesque stick insect-man hybrid that clacked and clicked its way towards the hole, and the bone-birds, great pterodactyl-like predators that swooped across the bruise purple night sky without a strip of skin or cord of muscle on them.
These were all little pieces of me?
I knew they were, but didn’t want to think what that meant about me. They crowded in around the hole in the cabin’s façade hungry to hear the verdict Lise was about to hand down.
“Just remember we gave you every chance to avoid this,” she said, her words gentle even as she tangled her fist in my shirt collar and hauled me bodily out of the chair. I kicked out as the material began to choke me, my hands flapping stupidly around her iron grip. I clawed at her wrists with my nails, but I’d been biting them for years and couldn’t sink them in. My efforts didn’t distract Lise as she dragged me toward my creations – my unmade creations. What had she called them? The Unwritten – and dumped me on the floor. Montel, alive with my words, the ink on his skin in constant flux, came to stand on my right, Velman, with his lenses all withdrawn so that for once he saw the world exactly as it was, on my left. Lise stood behind me, poised like my executioner ready to deliver the telling blow.
“Steven Savile, you have been reviewed and found wanting. You have failed in your duty to The Unwritten. You have purposely turned your back on the gifts of your imagination in favour of the safe path. You have neglected the core principle of creation, to be more like yourself, to be true unto your ideas, and instead have chased the money. With this and through countless other disappointments you have consistently failed to create a single thing of lasting worth. You will be forgotten. That is the crime of your life, because you had it in you to be remembered. You had it within your own mind to carve out a unique niche in the realm of the fantastic and chose instead to plough a mundane furrow in the shallow fields of thrillers and modern terrors, offering nothing new. That little ritual you had every time you boarded a plane, saying a prayer and promising in return for a safe landing to use your talent to entertain people and just once to write something worthwhile, something important? You never even tried. You were too frightened – not just of failure but of success, too. So now, in judgment, we take back your gift.”
I twisted, trying to look up at Lise. I didn’t know what she meant by that: take back my gift? How could they do that? How could these things half-born in my imagination – stillborn in my mind – do that?
I should have known.
Beside me, Montel began to retch. He doubled up, clutching his stomach as the gag reflex took over, and as the shudder seemed to run from his stubby cock to his stretched-wide gob, he brought up one partially digested blank page after another. Lise wrapped her left hand around my forehead and yanked my head back, and used her right to force my mouth open. Velman gathered the mucus soaked sheets of paper, and one by one touched them to the dwarf’s brow. I expected a miracle. Why not? Everything else about this last hour had been miraculous. But the sheets didn’t reclaim the words. The ink was forever tattooed onto the dwarf. Velman’s actions duplicated them so that the same story – my story – was written on both dwarf and paper.
And then I was forced to eat my own words, page after page.
I felt the words coming alive within me even as I tried to purge the first page from my gut. Lise had my heard forced back so far I could only see the ceiling, but, for a moment between racing heartbeats a snake of black smeared my vision – my name scrolling across the insides of my eyelids as I blinked and gagged. I closed my eyes as Lise forced another page down my throat, and another, the ink of my words swelling inside me. I heard a note. A single note. It started in my chest. I felt the vibrations of it intensifying, and then, all at once the dam that had been holding them back burst and I could hear them all swimming inside me. I could hear each line and all of the characters’ voices clamouring to be heard. And it was torture.
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 c
hoke on them.
By the time a dozen of The Unwritten had given themselves back to my mind 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 practically insane.
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. Instead 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.
KITTY WANTS A HITTY
by
WAYNE SIMMONS
1957.
Vegas, the most happening bar in Lark City.
Tonight the joint was dead...
Ravenous zombies moved across its floor, overturning tables and stools in their wake.
A dark haired young woman stood on the stage. Her name was Dolly Bird. She was tonight’s entertainment. With her appetising mix of song and burlesque, Dolly would usually go down a storm. But tonight she stood in fear, her white blouse stained red, her black skirt ripped. A single high-heeled shoe lay broken on the stage. Her shapely nylon legs weren’t dancing, instead backing away from the closing throng. She screamed as one of the dead managed to curl its fingers around her ankle.
Geordie Mac watched from the other end of the bar. His revolver was smoking. Several cadavers lay wasted at his polished black shoes. He aimed the revolver once more, but it clicked on empty.
“Damn!” he muttered.
“Jesus Christ!” Dolly called to him. “Do something!”
Geordie checked the pockets of his plaid jacket for more ammo. He was fresh out. He swore loudly. He ran one hand through his hair, frantically looking around the room.
Dolly had grabbed the broken heel and was swinging it valiantly at the approaching dead. There were more of the bastards pouring through the doors. She hadn’t a chance against them. Geordie needed to act fast.
He spotted the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, just between the stage and the bar’s front window. He took a deep breath, threw the spent gun at the crowd of dead pouring in from the doors. He loosened his tie, climbed up onto the bar then jumped, hands reaching for the thin metal frame of the chandelier. The chandelier held, swinging Geordie towards the stage. He grabbed Dolly, scooping her up with his free arm as they were hurled towards the window.
And then_
The doorbell.
THE FUCKING DOORBELL!
A menu kicked in, asking Geordie if he wanted to ignore the distraction and continue. But he pulled the wiretap from his head altogether, snapping out of the VR and back to his bedroom. He threw the wiretap down angrily on the bed next to his cell. He stood up, snatched the towel dressing gown from its peg by the door. He pulled it on then grabbed his cell from the bed.
Geordie left the bedroom, syncing the lights with his cell. His eyes narrowed, adjusting to the florescent beam spilling across the apartment. He entered the living area, finding his slippers parked on the fur carpet, next to the sofa. The Box played in the corner. It was ten thirty. Some rubber-faced crone was reading the news on Channel 3.
Geordie set his cell on the coffee table. The bell rang again and he bellowed, “Alright, alright I hear you!”
He reached for the snub on the door, opening it on the safety. His heart sank. “Oh for Christ’s sake… it’s you.” He closed the door, sighed, undid the safety, then opened it again. He allowed the door to swing behind him as he retreated back into the apartment. He fell into the black leather sofa, stared petulantly at the Box.
A young girl pushed through, coming into the living area. She was a mess. Peroxide dreads sprouted from her head. Spindly, tattooed arms dangled from the sleeves of an old NEW YAWK DOLLS tee. She wore vinyl drains that made a sound as she walked. Her name was Kitty McBride.
“I need a fix, Geordie. I_”
But Geordie’s hand was raised. “Kitty…” he began, his voice gentle, fingers rubbing his temples, “I’ve told you before, sweetheart. You’re on rations…”
“But I-I haven’t had any this week. I-I_”
Geordie cut in again, “Babe, I called by your place six days ago! I gave you the usual, and you’re telling me you haven’t had any?!” He threw his arms into the air, laughed. “Come on, doll, I ain’t stupid! I know every single ounce I sell. Every fucking ounce. And you got your dues on Saturday. At ten thirty. Six days ago almost,” and here he raised his finger, “to the fucking hour.”
“Yeah, but I lost all that. Tried to quit, jacked it down the can...”
Geordie shook his head. “Tomorrow, Kitty. Ten thirty. Not a second before. ”
But Kitty was persistent, moving towards him, her whole body begging. “Come on, Geordie! I just need a little to take the edge off, see me through…”
“No.”
“I can get the cash, sync it to you_”
“It’s not about the money!” His tone was incredulous. “Look, Kitty, I’ll be honest with you. Your pop is Paul Mc Bride, yeah? He’s the biggest gangster in this whole fucking city. If he finds out you’re here talking this shit with me, it’ll be my balls on the line. Don’t you get it? He wants you cuttin’ down, girl, and what Daddykins wants, he gets. Right?!”
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