The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (6 page)

That rugged thug of mountainous muscles, sinews of chain link, and spirit that was the thundering of eight and a half wild horses, had slain dragons, witches, elves, giants, talking apes, and legions of inept, one-dimensional warriors whose purpose of creation was to be mown down like so much summer hay. When Glandar wasn't wielding he was wenching, and occasionally he wenched and then wielded. He was always outnumbered, yet always victorious. No one in the realm rode or drank or satisfied the alluring Sirens of Gwaten Tarn like Glandar, and no one so completely bored me to the brink of narcolepsy.

In comparison with the fiction I was used to reading, my fantasy writer's writing seemed like redundant, cliché-ridden hackwork. Say what you will of Glandar, though, his wielding pleased Ashmolean's readers no end. My fantasy writer was richer than the Pirate King of Ravdish. After his fourth novel, he could have lived comfortably for the rest of his days, existing extravagantly off the interest that Glandar's early adventures had generated. Ashmolean continued on, even though, as one unusually insightful article told, his wife had left him long ago and his children never visited. His house was falling down around him, but still he worked incessantly, pounding on the keys with an urgent necessity as if he were instead administering CPR. It was not like anything new ever happened at Kreegenvale. Sooner or later it was a certainty there would be generous portions of wielding and then Glandar would end the affair with a phrase of warrior wisdom. “One must retain a zest for the battle” was my favorite.

The critics raved about Glandar. “Thank God Ashmolean is alive today,” one had said. About
The Ghost Snatcher of Kreegenvale
, the famous reviewer Hutton Myers wrote, “Ashmolean blurs the line separating literature and genre in a tour de force performance that leaves the reader sundered in two with the implications of a world struggling between Good and Evil.” His fellow authors blurbed him with vigor, each trying to outdo the other with snippets of praise. I believe it was writer P. N. Smenth who wrote: “I love Glandar more than my own mother.”

My part in all of this was to keep Ashmolean from committing inconsistencies in his fantasy world. There was nothing he hated more than to go to a conference and have someone ask him, “How could Stribble Flap the Lewd impregnate the snapping Crone of Deffleton Marsh, in
Glandar Groans for Death
, when Glandar had lopped off the surly gnome's member in
The Unholy Battle of Holiness
?”

Ashmolean would never turn around from his computer, but shout his orders to me over his shoulder. “Mary,” he would say, “find out if the horse with no mane has ever been to the Land of Fog.” Then I would scramble from the lawn chair in which I sat, book in hand, boning up on the past adventures, and search the shelves for the appropriate volumes that might hold this information. The horse with no mane had been to the Land of Fog on two separate occasions—once while accompanying Glandar's idiot first cousin, Blandar, and the second instance as part of the cavalry of the famous skeleton warrior, Bone Eye.

This process was rather tortuous at first, as I struggled to learn the world of Kreegenvale the way a new cabbie learns the layout of a foreign city. After a time, though, by taking books home to peruse at night and with the speed I had accrued as a well-practiced reader, I had been over almost every inch of the mythical realm and probably knew better than Ashmolean where to get the best roasted shank of yellow flarion in the kingdom or the going price of a shrinking potion.

The one thing I didn't know at all, even after so much time had passed, was Ashmolean himself. He was always brusque with his demands and would offer not so much as a thank you no matter how obscure the tidbit I dredged up for him. When he would rise from his throne at the computer to go to the bathroom (he drank coffee one cup after another), he would pass by me without even a nod. On payday, the second and fourth Monday of every month, my money would be sitting for me in an envelope on the seat of the lawn chair at the back of his office. It was a paltry sum, but when I would try to broach the subject of a raise, he would call out, “Silence, Kreegenvale hangs in the balance.” The surreal nature of my employment was what kept me returning, Monday through Saturday, for such a long stretch of time.

When I would leave in the afternoon, I often wondered what Ashmolean did when he wasn't writing. There was no television in his house as far as I could see, and no one except his agent ever called him. He hid from his fans for the most part save when there was a conference, and then I had read that he would not sign books and would not hold conversations once he had stepped down from the podium.

It was a puzzle as to when he shopped or did his laundry or any of the other mundanities that the rest of us take for granted. He seemed somewhat less than human, merely an instrument through which Glandar could let this world know of his exploits. The one clue that he was actually alive in the physical sense was when he would break wind. After each of these long, flabby explosions, which prompted me to begin thinking again of the merits of selling hamburgers, he would stop typing for only a moment to murmur Glandar's famous battle cry, “Death to the unbeliever.”

You couldn't find two greater unbelievers than my parents during this time. They wondered why I hadn't raced off to college, what with my excellent grades. “How about a boyfriend?” my mother kept asking me. “It's time, you know,” she would say. My father insisted I was wasting my life, and I needed a
real
job, something with benefits. All I could tell them was what I felt. I wasn't quite ready to do any of that, although I was sure someday it would happen. Working for my fantasy writer was the closest I could get to that feeling of sitting at the boundary of the field by myself, away from the riot, and still pretend to be doing something useful.

Then one day, a year and a half into my employment, Ashmolean was hammering the keys in service of his latest work,
Glandar, the Butcher of Malfeasance
, and I was in my lawn chair skimming through a novella entitled, “Dream Fountain of Kreegenvale,” which had appeared in the March 1994 issue of
Startling Realms of Illusion
, when the typing abruptly stopped. That sudden silence drew my attention more completely than if he had taken a revolver from his file drawer and fired it at the ceiling. I looked up to see Ashmolean's hands covering his face.

“Oh, my God,” I heard him whisper.

“What is it?” I asked.

He spun his chair around and, still wearing that finger mask, said, “I'm blind.”

Out of habit, I moved toward the bookshelves, initially thinking some scrap of research would ameliorate his problem. Then the weight of his words struck me, and I could feel myself begin to panic. “Should I call an ambulance?” I asked, taking a step toward him.

“No, no,” he said, removing his hands from his face. “I'm blind to Kreegenvale. I can't see what Glandar will do next. The entire world has been obliterated.” He stared at me, directly into my eyes for the first time. Through that look I could feel the weight of his fear. All at once, I remembered that I had read that his real name was, of course, not Ashmolean but Leonard Finch.

“Maybe you just need to rest,” I said.

He nodded, hunched over in his chair, looking like a lost child in a shopping mall.

“Go home,” he said.

“I'll be back tomorrow,” I said.

He waved his hands at me as if my words worsened his condition. I wanted to ask him if I would still be paid for the rest of the day, but I didn't have the courage to disturb him.

On the four-block walk back to my parents' house, I had metaphorical visions of Ashmolean as an abandoned mine, a tapped-out beer keg, a coin-operated drivel dispenser long since dropped from the supplier's route. He had plumbed the depths of vapid writing and actually found the mythical bottom. As the day wore on into evening, though, I had a change of heart. I don't know why, but after dinner as I was sitting alone in my room, making poor progress with Camus's “Myth of Sisyphus,” I suddenly had a vision of the defeated Leonard Finch still sitting in his office with his hands covering his face. I threw down the weight of Camus and went to tell my mother I was going for a ride.

I went everywhere on my bike, hoping people would think me a health nut instead of realizing the embarrassing fact that I had not yet tested for my driver's license. It was early autumn and the night was cool with a Kreegenvale moon—like the blade of a scimitar—as Ashmolean would have it time and again. I covered the four blocks to his house in minutes, and, as I pulled into his driveway, I noticed that all the lights were out. For the longest time I sat there, trying to decide if I should knock on the door. I think what finally made me get off my bike and go up the steps was that same desire that always drove me onward with any story I was reading. I wanted to find out how it ended.

For all my innate curiosity, I knocked very softly and took a step backward in case, for some reason, I had to run. I waited a few minutes and was about to leave when a light suddenly went on inside. The door slowly pulled back halfway and then Ashmolean's head appeared from behind it.

“Mary,” he said and actually smiled. He pulled the door open wider. “Come in.”

I was more than a little taken aback by his good humor, unable to remember ever having seen him smile before. Also, in that moment, I realized there was something very different about him. All of that frustrated energy that released itself daily in his punishment of the keyboard now seemed to have vanished, leaving behind a meek doppelgänger of my fantasy writer. I was reminded of his novella “Soul Eaters of the Ocean Cave,” and momentarily hesitated before stepping inside.

“One second,” he said and left me there in the foyer. I wondered what he had been doing in the dark. He soon returned with a manuscript box in his hands.

“Take two days and read this. On the third day, come to work. I will pay you for the time,” he said.

I took the box from him and just stood there not knowing if I was to leave or not. He looked to me as if he needed someone to talk to, but I was mistaken. That vacuous demeanor that had put me off on my arrival now crumbled before my eyes. The redness returned to his face, the arch to his eyebrows. He stooped forward and, with true Ashmolean fury, blurted out, “Go.”

I did, quickly. By the time I was on my bike, the lights had again been extinguished inside the house. There was no question in my mind that he was a maniac; what bothered me more was his obsession for creative honesty. He truly could not continue unless he saw for sure in his mind what would happen next in Kreegenvale. This was a practice I had always associated with writers of a different caliber than my fantasy writer. It was with this in mind that I began that night to read
The Butcher of Malfeasance
, and, for the first time, I found I cared about Glandar.

When Ashmolean wrote a novel, it was always a doorstopper, and
Malfeasance
was no exception. It was different in one respect, though. For the first time in any of Glandar's adventures, the hero had begun to show his age. There was a particular passage early on, following the beheading of an onerous dwarf, where he even complained of back pain. Also, while lying with the beautiful Heretica Florita, green woman of the whispering wood, he opted for long conversation before vegetable love. Moments of contemplation, little corkscrew worms of uncertainty, had burrowed into the perfect fruit of wielding and wenching that had been Kreegenvale.

I thought perhaps these changes had come because of the nature of the story. In this adventure, Glandar's enemy was a product of himself. It had been well established way back in
A Flaming Sword in the Nether Region
that the Gods of Good smiled upon Glandar for his heroic deeds. To keep him healthy and able to work their positive will against the forces of evil in the world of men, the Gods would send the blackbird, Kreekaw, to him at night. The bird would snatch Glandar's nightmares from him as he dreamed them, and then fly them to the Astral Grotto where Mank, the celestial blacksmith, would incinerate them in his essential furnace.

In the new novel, Stribble Flap the Lewd seeks revenge for having had his member lopped off in an earlier book. Taking his bow, he waits outside the palace at Kreegenvale one night and, as the blackbird leaves Glandar's window with a beak full of nightmares, slays it with an arrow to its heart. The bird plummets into Deffleton Marsh, releasing the nightmares, which coalesce in the rancorous bottom mud and form, through a whirling, swirling, glimmering, and shimmering mumbo-jumbo reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, the monster Malfeasance, a twelve-foot giant with an amorphous rippling body and a shaggy head the size of seven horses' rumps set side by side. This horror begins to roam the countryside spreading its ill will. Glandar avoids a confrontation with the giant until he learns that it has killed Heretica Florita and sloppily devoured her green heart.

On the third day I returned to Ashmolean. He was waiting for me in his office, looking again rather pale and meek. I was surprised to find my lawn chair had been moved up next to his writer's throne. He greeted me by name again, and motioned for me to sit beside him.

As I handed him the manuscript box, he asked me if I had read it.

I told him I had.

I thought he would ask me what I thought of it, but I should have known better. Instead, he said, “Did you see it? In your mind, like a movie? Were you there?”

I told him I was there, and I had been. Although the writing was Ashmolean's usual halting, obvious subject/verb, subject/verb style, the whole adventure, right up to the end where the final battle was about to take place, had truly been more vivid than life.

“Please,” he said, and then paused for a moment.

Please?
I said to myself.

“Just as you would find on the shelves those instances from the history of Kreegenvale I required, now I need you to find something for me in the future of the realm.”