The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (5 page)

In the privacy of a small shack that stood a hundred yards behind the house, Tooms assembled the ancient man's bones, giving him a cow skull and the shins of an ass. He lacquered and drilled and pounded for hours at a time, and Thilliada wanted to know what he was making. “When it's finished,” Tooms told her. He confessed in his writings that he must lower his gaze in her company now. After dinner one night, as he was about to take his plate to the sink, he found a note beneath it, on the place mat.
I saw you looking
, it said. He shoved the note in his pocket and left the kitchen.

As the days passed, she never mentioned the note nor gave any sign that there was some secret between them. Instead she spoke at great length about the current theories of a lost continent populated by exotic flying people at the center of the Earth and that the entrance to this land was at the North Pole. “I don't see it,” Tooms admitted to her, and she laughed at him for his lack of sophistication. Every day her excitement about seeing his latest sculpture grew, and he admitted how this fired his desire for completion.

Then came the torrential rains. Both Tooms and Thilliada stayed inside for two days for fear of flash floods and mudslides. She read a book about famous castaways, and he sat by the fireplace playing his jaw harp. He recorded on the second night, as lightning and thunder ripped through the canyon, how it was the first time he noticed that Thilliada's scalp had begun to sprout a dark fuzz. The next morning the rains had vanished and so, mysteriously, had his jaw harp.

On the following day, as much as he attested to wanting to spend time working on his pile of bones, he left the house early and went exploring for mushrooms up on the rim of the canyon. It was a quarter of a day's journey, but before he left, he saw Thilliada to the spring.
The harder the rain, the more magnificent the crop
, he wrote. He knew he had to eat the hallucinogen right on the spot or its properties would diminish, so he searched long and hard for the most succulent disk.

He reported that at noon he found a most pleasing specimen and sat down with his back against a boulder to nibble on it.
Its meat is soft and sweet like chewy confection
, he said of the mushroom. When he was finished, he swallowed half the contents of his canteen and, immediately, brilliant colors shot across the sky. A crow on the other side of the canyon called to him something about the ancient man's bones. Then, from out of thin air, ten feet past the rim, a figure with horns approached him.
It came out of a cloud, playing my jaw harp. The rest was vague, but I remember the creature whispering in my ear, and it sounded like wind in the canyon. Then I nodded in agreement
. With this the entry ended.

Tooms again picked up his pen three days later in order to record the afternoon on which he revealed the sculpture to Thilliada.

We stood out behind my work shack beneath an overcast sky. The weather was exceptionally cool for the canyon at that time of day. She wore a loose-blowing dress with a colorful pattern of daisies, and her green eyes appeared lit from within with excitement. The work stood before us draped in an old sheet, and I told Miss Thilliada, “I call it Ogatai—a name the vultures screamed to me when I journeyed along the rim.” She clapped her hands like a child
.

The sculpture Tooms referred to is still in existence to this day. It stands alongside the old boardwalk at precisely the halfway point to the springs. The cow skull is tilted back slightly as if it watches the movement of the clouds, and its left hand is thrust out, palm up, proffering payment. The workmen who replaced some of the timbers and planks back in '45 testified to being haunted for many years by the statue's diabolical grin. Some members of the '68 commune recall that the thing was known as “Thief,” because occasionally they would wake in the morning and find it draped with their jewelry and holding in its right hand the straight razor that the men passed around for shaving.

Thilliada was so impressed, she threw her arms around Elijah and kissed him.
When she touched me
, he wrote,
I could hear the canyon groan and the lizards leaping out of the water pail next to the well
. She led him back to the house and, as he put it:
We had a feverish assignation on the kitchen floor. Later, in the parlor, she showed me something new
. They eventually fell asleep and Tooms had a nightmare of Ogatai creeping through the darkened house.

She was still sleeping soundly when Tooms woke late in the night. He got up and immediately dressed.
The moon was in the open window
, he wrote. If
was so cold there was frost
. He went downstairs and got his rifle from over the fireplace. As quietly as possible, he slipped out the front door and headed for the canyon.

I trembled, and though it was cold, the sweat ran into my eyes and poured down my back. My very heart was chilled
.

I came across him exactly where I had been told he would be, standing in the dried-out streambed a hundred feet south of Fat Rock. He was clutching a leather satchel of some kind and wearing a brown suit that shone sickly in the moonlight. A heavy man, not likeable at first glance
.

Upon seeing Tooms, the man called out, “Where are we?”

“The canyon,” Tooms told him.

The man spluttered nervously, telling Tooms, “I know this much—it has something to do with the intersection of Fate and Desire.”

“Stop talking nonsense,” said Tooms as he brought the rifle up to aim.

I hesitated, watching him hold his satchel up to protect his head. He called out for his mother. Then I heard one note, the twang of the jaw harp, and with this I fired a bullet into his heart
.

The stranger died immediately. Tooms went to inspect the body, but …

Before I could lean over to check the wound, Ogatai was there in a starry whirl, holding the corpse over his shoulder. I carried the satchel and we headed for the springs. The osteomorphete creaked horridly along behind me, and I could hear it breathing
.

Tooms and his weird companion deposited the dead man's clothing, his satchel and the book it contained into the springs. Enormous bubbles rose as if the waters were belching. Then they proceeded down into the caves, to the chamber that had held the ancient man's bones. They carefully laid the body out and covered him with the leatherized petals of prehistory.
Out on the desert sand, I watched Ogatai dance in the moonlight
, writes Elijah.
When the morning came, I was alone in bed
.

Thilliada Bass left the canyon a week later on the evening stage. Tooms never recorded his feelings about the departure. All he wrote was,
She left behind for me her book of castaways, and I read it ragged as if it was the Bible
. Two months later, he received a letter from her in which she stated that her mother had forced her into an arranged marriage with a young banker named Reginald Mortenson and that she was due to have a child before the year was out.

This was all I got out of Mrs. Dyson before she again reverted to complete gibberish. I thought I had taxed the poor woman enough for one day, so I called for the attendant to come and take her back to her room. When the young man arrived with a wheelchair, Mrs. Dyson became suddenly lucid again and asked me, “Why do you want to know all of this?”

I told her I was writing an article for a newspaper.

She started to laugh, and said, “If you're smart, when you are done writing it, you'll burn it. Don't give it a chance to keep growing.”

I assured her I would consider her suggestion.

“No you won't,” she said, and the attendant wheeled her away.

There is one final article of evidence pertaining to this story that might help you decide what it all means. Near the end of his life, after nailing the last plank onto the boardwalk, Tooms stopped writing in his diary because, as he told Thilliada (by then the widow Mortenson) in a letter, the book was stolen. That missive had apparently been folded once by the old woman and hidden away in a copy of Poe's
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
. A few years ago the edition of Poe and the letter were discovered among the volumes of her grandson's, J. T. Mortenson's, library when his ex-wife sold the entire collection to the archives of Preston University for a tidy sum. The following is an exact transcription of Tooms's only remaining words:

Dear Thilliada:

Not a day has gone by that I have not thought of you. Although I resolved long ago not to interfere with your life, things have changed now that death is close at hand. I was awakened from a dream of you and me the other night by the sound of something moving in my house. At first, because of my dream, I hoped it might be you, returning. Then, as I came fully awake, I thought it must be a strong wind blowing out of the canyon. As I listened more intently, though, I heard a distinctive creaking like a great wheel of bones endlessly turning and the labored breathing of a creature trapped by Time. The next morning I discovered that my diary had vanished and in its place I found my old jaw harp. Back in the days when your youthful beauty graced the waters of the spring, I gave away everything to love you for a few brief hours. Now I know that what I agreed to set in motion will never end. So, I send these words to you from out of the spiraling canyon, and beg that you protect them from the flames
.

Elijah

A story that devours itself about an ancient curse that perpetuates itself in a spiral through time. I always wanted to create osteomorphetes, but here, in suburban South Jersey, the skeletons are insubstantial and usually remain hidden away in closets. My only western story, and as yet, unpublished.

To protect yourself from the curse after reading this piece, make a circle with chicken fat on your best carpet, stand in the middle on one foot and repeatedly chant the first word that comes into your mind until your spouse, significant other, child, or close friend calls the shrink.

The Fantasy Writer's Assistant

What would you expect a fantasy writer to look like? In your mind you see a man with a white Merlin beard and long lithe fingers that spark magic against the keyboard, or perhaps a plump woman with generous breasts and hair so long it spreads about the room, entwining everything like the many-tentacled spell of a witch.

Picture instead Ashmolean, my fantasy writer, the one whose employ I was in for more than a year. Whatever power of enchantment he possessed was buried behind his eyes, because his description lent itself more to thoughts of other genres. Like one of Moreau's creatures, he appeared the result of a genetic experiment run amok—a giant sloth whose DNA had been snipped, tortured together with that of a man's, and then taped and stapled. His stomach was huge; his arms short and hairy; his rear end, in missing the counter weight of the tail, had improvised with a prodigious growth in width. The head was a flesh pumpkin carved with a frown. Vacant, windowlike eyes were rimmed by shadows, and the scalp was as devoid of hair as was Usher's roof of shingles. Even his personality was a conundrum that might have driven Holmes to forsake his beloved cocaine for the crack pipe. The only “fantasy” I noticed was when he sat at his computer. Then he pounded the keys like he was hammering nails into a wooden cross and gazed at the monitor as would the Evil Queen about to utter, “Who is the fairest of them all?”

I came to Ashmolean through an ad in the local newspaper. It said:
Wanted—clerical assistant devoid of interest in literature or ideas
. He told me at the interview that he wanted someone who would not think, but merely to do research. Well, I fit neither of the criteria, but being seventeen and without a college degree, I thought it might be more interesting than selling hamburgers, so I lied and acted as blank as possible. He stopped typing for a moment, which he had been doing continuously through all of his questions, turned, and looked me up and down once. “Welcome to Kreegenvale,” he said.

Contrary to my job description, I had been a reader and a thinker. Even back in the lower grades, when the other children in my school would go out to the playground with their balls and bats and field-hockey sticks, I would take a book and sit beneath the oak tree at the far boundary of the field where sounds from the adjacent woods would cancel that riot of competition in which society was desperate to inculcate me. In high school, I suppose I could have been popular. There were boys who wanted me for my long hair and slim figure, but the only climaxes I was interested in were those offered by Cervantes and Dickens. I had a few dates, but the goings-on in bowling alleys and the back seats of cars always seemed inelegant narratives, the endings of which could be predicted from the very first page.

Perhaps things couldn't have gone any differently for me, seeing as I grew up, an only child, in a house where success was measured by the majority vote of the world at large. Both of my parents had been driven to achieve in school, at work, and in their personal tastes. My father, a well-respected contract lawyer, never discussed anything, but when speaking to me always closed his eyes, pulled on his left ear lobe, and held forth on some time-honored strategy for defeating whatever problem I might bring to him. My mother, on the other hand, though a busy CPA, had always professed a desire to be a writer. Her favorite author could have been none other than Nabokov. In the beginning, I read to please them, and then somewhere along the way, I found I couldn't stop.

I read the greats, the near greats, the stylists, the structuralists, and then I read Ashmolean. His works filled and spilled from the bookcases that lined his study. He had written short stories, long stories, novels, and even a poem or two. All of it, every word he had birthed from electrons on that computer screen, had gone toward advancing the career of Glandar, the Sword Wielder of Kreegenvale. Those thousands of pages contained more sword wielding than you could fit in a stadium.