Intermusings

by David Niall Wilson

  "Fix it!" He was pleading now, hands trembling on the napkin. "Adrian, please, write it again."

  She looked up, with those eyes so shallow and grey and dead. She looked up and said very softly, "I can’t."

  The second line was smeared beyond recognition. The third had the words every and promise. The fourth . . . "Fuck!" he growled. "It’s just a poem. Just a poem. I can write this. I can write this stupid poem." He stared at the napkin, reached frantically to his pocket, then to another. No pen.

  He rose, clutching the soggy paper in his fist and lurching toward the bar. He slammed through dancers and servers alike, coming within inches of smacking his face into the back of one man’s head. He needed a pen, pencil. . .marker. Anything. He moved toward the bar, stopped on the edge of the dance floor, wheeling and snatching the pen from a waitress’ tray and lurching back toward the table.

  Which table? His eyes scanned the shadowed bar, but he could not make out Adrian’s face. He crossed the dance floor again, the waitress’ high pitched whine boring through his thoughts–ignored, but even as he drew closer to where they’d sat, where he knew. . .thought. . .they’d sat, he did not see her.

  "Fuck. . ." his words trailed off as huge, ham-like hands, fueled by his own chemicals, gripped his shoulder and yanked. He saw angry faces, heard the waitress’ whine grow louder and more petulant, managed a soft curse before he was propelled across the floor, head smacking painfully into the wall. His sight didn’t clear until he was stumbling down the stairs to the street, falling in a heap. His hand still clutched the pen, and the wadded, crumpled napkin. He stared at both numbly. The paper was a dingy shade of grey in the dim lamplight.

  Dante stared at the endless rows of characters and codes on his computer screen, squinting to keep them in focus through the chemical fuzz that had kept him upright for so many days . . . so many lifetimes. He was typing with just two fingers, the fragments of Adrian’s napkin clutched in either hand. The digital clock in the upper corner of the screen ticked away, winding down, endless spirals, ending. His fingers moved mechanically. He knew the programming languages, the subroutines, the codes that could save a world if only he were Legion — if only he remembered why it mattered. His fingers tapped away rhythmically, and the beat of the music returned to him . . . the sight of her moving through the crowd at the Weeping Violet . . . the empty, vacant hole that ate away at his insides now that she was gone. He knew he could track her down, could find her again – thought he could. That last glimpse, colorless eyes and expressionless face. He could not face what he might find.

  Her words were so much ink, pulped, faded into the palm of his hands. A single word remained, indelible, despite his mangling of the rest. Grey. That, and nothing more. His fingers flew. His thoughts melted slowly to shades without color or form.

  Behind him, coming from an unknown leak in the plumbing of the apartment above his, water flowed down the surface of the wall where her black lipstick reflected absolutely nothing. The letters began to run, to mingle, to blacken his carpet at the base of the wall, leaving vague shadow-images of her words to stain the white wall.

  The words on the computer screen blurred. His fingers slowed. The clock ticked:

  Ending.

  The Purloined Prose

  By Patricia Lee Macomber & David Niall Wilson

  The Swan. To most the name conjured images of pristine white feathers, a graceful neck, motion so fluid it mocked the very water in which the bird itself swam. To Edgar, it was an oasis, a hideout, and his temple. He sat at the worn oak and brass altar, folded over a chalice so fogged from age that the light barely penetrated it. His thoughts were turned inward, though his ears were trained on the conversation four stools down. He had no idea he was sitting at the bar with a dead man.

  Flickering gaslights dueled with the shadows, chased them across timeworn and tattered walls until they threatened not to exist at all, and then retreated as long dark fingers reached toward the tenuous threads of illumination and threatened to choke the life from them. Edgar's hand trembled, poised over a scrap of paper on which he scribbled hasty words, some of them his own, some gleaned from the hushed conversation that floated to him from the others. The barman drew near, though he regarded Edgar not at all, and Edgar, the scribbler of stolen words, turned on his stool and put his shoulder and arm between the barman and the paper.

  "It has to be a heart, don't you see." The words were slurred and punctuated with spittle but the small, ferret-like man was adamant.

  His friend, a large, hulking fellow in a dark coat, his hat slumped in a shapeless mass on the bar at his side, shrugged and downed the rest of his drink in one great gulp. "You are the wordsmith, not I. But I'll tell you this: You'd have a much better time of it if you actually wrote down some of your grand ideas instead of hammering me with them night after night."

  "Ah, but I have!" the smaller man said with a wink, patting his jacket with one hand. Something crinkled beneath the pressure of his hand. He finished his drink and set the glass down with a clunk. "Every last one. And you'll be laughing out the other side of your face when you see them published, my friend." He slapped the big man on the back and withdrew from the stool, letting his body settle carefully onto his legs and drawing in a large breath to steel himself against the effects of gravity.

  "Yes, yes! So you keep saying," the big man retorted, eyeing his tottering companion with a mixture of amusement and concern. "Only if you are more adept at writing than you are at walking, though. Now, let’s be on our way."

  The smaller man nodded. "And while we walk, I shall finish the tale of the heart."

  Edgar watched as they made their way to the door, weaving among tables and chairs, dodging other drunken patrons and tilting inward until their shoulders nearly touched. He watched their backs as the door opened, and then slid his eyes around to the barman's pockmarked face. He pressed his hand to the bar for a moment, and then slid it into his pocket, the paper tucked neatly into his fist. He pushed the paper to the bottom and a wrinkled bill was neatly substituted. It was more than the drink had cost; a tidy tip left for the barman's keen inattention.

  Edgar’s mind whirled in a bourbon fog, but the small man’s words had imbedded themselves deeply in his mind, and they helped him to focus. Written down – all the stories—written down.

  Edgar glanced down the bar and stared at the empty stools the two had vacated, then turned to follow them out of the bar. The words he’d collected rubbed against one another on the crumpled paper in his pocket. Edgar could almost hear their soft scraping, trying to get free and not quite managing it.

  The man had talked about the beating of a heart – loudly, like a clock, like a drumbeat pounding behind plaster walls. Edgar never sat too close to the two men, so he never got entire stories—only the words. Stolen words. Now darkness had seeped in that threatened to blot those out as well. If they were written down, he was too late. If the words had been captured and structured, what was left for him?

  The sun was long gone from the sky, and without The Swan’s dim light to do battle with them, the shadows closed in tight. It was chilly. Edgar pulled his jacket up, turning the collar so that it wrapped about his neck and broke the wind. He kept his eyes to the ground, watching for potholes in the street, and he walked as quickly as the bourbon would allow. As he walked, his footsteps on the cobbled street found the rhythm of his heart. His pulse grew louder, rushing in his ears, and he stopped, closed his eyes, and tried to gather his thoughts.

  He needed to get home. He still had enough oil left in his lamp to write for a few hours, until his bleary eyes could no longer sustain their own weight and the darkness claimed him. His head pounded with the deep resonance of a phantom heart. Edgar turned down an alley that cut off from the shadows of the street into even deeper darkness, and staggered toward his rooms .

  Halfway down the alley’s length, he caught sight of something lying in his path. It was too far from the walls to be garbage, unless some children
had come by and toppled it as a prank. Edgar slowed warily, swinging his gaze to either side as he approached. Then he stopped and stood still as a stone, and the pounding that had threatened to blank his mind grew louder still, pressing up into his throat and, thankfully, choking off a scream.

  It was a body, and, as he stepped closer in fascination, he saw that it was a familiar body. The small, ferret-like man lay face down in the dirt. His arms were flung out to the side, not as if to catch himself when he fell, but in reaction to something. That something glittered in the dim light, and Edgar saw that it was the blade of a very long, very thin dagger. The hilt stood out from the man’s back like a planted cross, and blood ran down the sides of the body to pool on the alley floor.

  Then Edgar saw the manuscript, and he forgot the body. The words whispered softly to him, and a stray breeze caught the top corner of one page and threatened to spirit it away. The man’s head rested on a pillow of words. Blood had splattered on the paper, and the pool beneath the body seeped upward, encroaching on the white, word-speckled pages.

  Edgar took a last glance around and saw no one. He leaned down, lifted the man's head by its greasy hair, and yanked the pages free. He released his grip and watched as the head fell back with a soft, wet thud. A low, wet moan bubbled over the man's thin lips and Edgar drew in a quick gulp of air. It was the last sound Edgar heard as his heartbeat sped and roared. He ran off down the alley, tucking the papers beneath his jacket and fighting to clear the image of that knife, stark and final, pinning the small man’s jacket to his spine.

  Back in his rooms, Edgar slammed the door behind him and collapsed against its worn wooden surface with a groan. He clutched his coat, and the sheaf of papers, tightly to his chest. The room was sparsely furnished with no more than a bed, a chair, and a small desk upon which rested a stack of clean paper, his ink well and a quill. Edgar made his way across the darkened room, banging his shin smartly on the foot of the bed and crying out softly. He knew better than to make too much noise and risk awakening the other tenants of the building. Grouchy old men flanked him, and down the hall was an old woman with hearing so keen she would sometimes complain that the scratching of his quill on the paper was too loud.

  He’d filed away her words. He’d filed away the images, as well. He could see her, lying awake, late into the night, her eyes wide open and glaring at the wall that separated them, flinching at each stroke of ink on his paper and dreaming of ways to make him stop.

  Edgar flipped the thumb switch on the gas lamp and urged the flame higher, chasing the shadows back into their corners and illuminating the surface of the desk. There was enough fuel for a few hour's work and no more. He couldn't afford to waste a single minute.

  He pulled the papers out of his coat and dropped into the chair, smoothing the top sheet out with the palms of his hands. He bent over the page and read, his head cocked to one side and resting on the heel of his hand. The fingers of that hand tugged at his hair as he read, his face trapped between amazement and revulsion.

  The tales were wondrous, but the words were lacking. Edgar himself could never have concocted such frightening images from his own limited experience, but the man who’d written these pages had an equal inability to distill the images into words.

  Now, Edgar reflected, he lacked even the ability to sit on his barstool and speak the words for another’s benefit. Pity.

  Edgar fingered his quill and scowled at the pages. Some of them were spattered with the man's blood, entire words obscured by the thickening goo. Edgar shuddered and tried to read more quickly.

  When he had read every word, he sat back in his chair and stared off through the one window in his apartment distractedly. Edgar knew he could do better. He could bring these tales to life. He could bring them to the world.

  He glanced at the lamp and saw that the reading had cost him nearly half of his oil. He turned the wick down just a touch, hoping to preserve a few extra minutes of light. Edgar carefully stacked the dead man’s pages and glanced around the room. The lack of furnishings also provided a decided lack of good places to hide things. His impatience got the better of him, and he rose, lifted the corner of his mattress, and slipped the manuscript beneath it. He knew he’d have to find a better place eventually, on the off chance they traced his steps from the alley, but for now this would have to do.

  He returned to the desk and slid a fresh sheet of paper into the pool of flickering light. He unstoppered his ink, poured a small amount into the well, and tapped the tip of a battered quill against the surface of the desk to clear it.

  The dead man’s words whirled through his mind. So many images beckoned to him that it was difficult to sort them, or his thoughts, coherently. He decided to go with what was clearest in his mind, and that would be the events of the evening, what he’d heard in the bar. He dismissed the image of the dagger-hilt cross and the small man’s back and he began to write.

  "The Tale of the Heart."

  Edgar stared at the words he’d written, and then frowned. With a quick flourish he dragged the quill through the title and wrote another beside it.

  "The Tell-tale Heart." He smiled at the subtle re-arrangement and wished, just for a moment, that he could grab the small man from the past, drag him to the desk and show him. It wasn’t just the words – it was the way they were used – the art was in their arrangement.

  As the flame guttered, threatening to blow out every time he moved, Edgar dipped his quill again, and continued to write.

  Morning found him sprawled across the desk, his head resting on the paper and the quill still in his hand. The ink had dried on the tip and the lamp had gone out. As he righted himself, his stiff back crying out in protest, he recalled just when that lamp had betrayed him.

  One story done, the next begun. The lamp had given up its last before he'd had a chance to finish. Edgar had plowed ahead, willing his brain to fight through the sleepless fog and finish that second story in the dark. His hand rested on the desk still, awaiting further orders.

  No, he could recall no more than a bird, a man and a chair. His brain spun its wheels, trying to wrap itself around that fragmented memory. The lone window admitted a small square of sunlight, which fell upon the paper, taking the place of the lamplight. Edgar smiled a smile that was not his own and chuckled. He cleared the detritus from the pen and began to write. His smile widened with each word.

  He wrote through breakfast and lunch, ignoring all but one cry for his body to relieve itself of the day's doings. He wrote straight up until two, when he slammed down the quill and gathered together the pages, which now comprised four stories.

  He had to eat. He knew he had to rest, and he had other work to do. He stared at the pages grasped tightly in his hands, and frowned.

  It wasn’t odd for him to drop by the offices of the printer late, and he considered whether, along with the criticism that lay half complete on the desk, buried under the pages, and the blood, he should submit one of the stories. He itched to see them printed, to see the typeset words on better paper than the poor stuff he scribbled on, but.

  There was the other man. The stories were changed; there was no doubt of that. The words were Edgar’s. Still – there was the matter of the heart. There were the images, the blood-soaked, too-vivid images, not the least of which was the recurring visage of the small man, gesticulating wildly at his friend and spouting his ideas like a madman. What if that friend read the papers? What if that friend, even though he’d never so much as turned in Edgar’s direction, knew who he was, and had seen him scribbling the stolen words, night after night. If that man were looking for his friend’s killer – or, worse yet, if that man was his friend’s killer – what would he do when he read that story?

  Edgar’s brow broke out in a cold sweat, and he brushed his sleeve across it. He gathered together the sheaf of bloodstained papers and ordered them as neatly as he could, then glanced around the room. There was so little furniture that, under close scrutiny, he saw the close res
emblance to a cell. He moved to the bed, lifted the hard mattress, and tucked the papers carefully beneath it. Then, with the stories tucked neatly under his jacket, he headed out of his room and down the stairs.

  The sunlight assaulted him, brighter somehow when unhampered by glass. Nevertheless, he lowered his head, squinted shut his eyes, and trudged up the street toward the printers, trying to pry his mind from thoughts of the stories brushing up against him through the linen of his shirt, or the soft moan the man had uttered when his head struck the alley floor.

  That night, Edgar dreamed.

  He dreamed of New York City. He sat in a chair, facing an older man – an editor. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he did.

  Edgar sat nervously in his chair. He fussed with the pleats of his pants and slicked back his hair, watching the broad-shouldered man in the expensive suit read his stories. They were his stories now and no other's. The only man who could say otherwise was cold and stiff. Besides, while the ideas had not been born in Edgar’s imagination, the words certainly had. That made the stories his and thus the fame would be his, as well.

  The man read on, eyes widening at one word and narrowing at another. Edgar found it impossible to gauge the man's true response – his vision was oddly vague. Sounds were louder than he could ever remember. As he read, he put each finished page down on the desk face up, in order. Edgar thought of how this stack would mount up, of how he would have to re-order the pages when the man was done. He wondered which story the man was reading, and why his eyebrows went up and down – why his lips pursed, then frowned, and then went back to a fine hard slit. Edgar fidgeted with his shoe and frowned.

  And then he saw it.

  The top page on the stack, the one the editor had just set down, had a small red mark on the upper left corner. It was not a fingerprint, for surely he had seen the man grasp the page by the top right corner. Edgar frowned and looked more closely.