The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by Jeffrey Ford 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, window-like 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. I was told by him at the interview that he wanted someone who would not think, but merely 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 society was desperate to inculcate me into. 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. 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, cliche ridden, hack work. 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 the 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 a part of that 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 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 the thing that 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 save 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 some day 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 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 parent's house, I had metaphorical visions of Ashmolean as a an abandon 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' "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 licence. 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 doppelganger 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 practise I had always associated with writers of a different calibre 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 door stopper, 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, they would send the black bird, Kreekaw, to him at night. The bird would snatch his nightmares from him as he dreamed them and then fly with them to the Astral Grotto where they would be incinerated by Mank, the celestial blacksmith, 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 black bird leaves Glandar's window with a beak full of nightmares, he shoots at it and 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 horse's rumps set side by side. This horror begins to roam the countryside spreading its ill will. Glandar avoids a confrontation with it 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. " I knew what he was asking, but still I shook my head. "Yes," he said. "You must. There is no one else who knows the saga as well as you. I chose you for this. I have slowly been losing my vision of Kreegenvale for the last two books. I hired you because I knew you were bright. I could see you were a dreamer, a loner. What kind of girl as pretty as you would apply for a stupid job like this? I knew the day would come when I would go completely blind to the story." "You want me to write the end of the book?" I asked. "You don't have to write it," he said. "Just tell me what you see. Tell me in as much detail as possible what Glandar does in his final battle with the Malfeasance. Not just how he slays it, but how he moves the sword, how he dodges the monster's acid belches, what kind of oaths he showers upon it." "How?" I asked. "Close your eyes," he said. I did. "See it here," he said, and I felt his finger touch my forehead between my eyes. "Go back to the adventure. See it step by step. What did they look like? How did they sound? What was the exact shade of green of Heretica's flesh? When you fall into the story, when you are there, follow what they do. Speak it to me, and I will write it down." "I'll try," I said. At first it was hard to get to the story, because all I could think about was his telling me he knew all along I was bright and why would a pretty girl like me want such a stupid job. "One must retain a zest for the battle," I heard him whisper, more, it seemed, to himself than to me. Like a shard of glass this phrase made a small tear in my thoughts of me, and the light from Kreegenvale shown through. With great concentration, I widened the hole in the fabric and eventually struggled free into the realm of Glandar. The beginning of the story played itself out before my eyes like a video on fast forward. I was everywhere I had to be, like an actual subject of the realm, in order to see the key moments of the story speed by. I watched Stribble Flap fire his arrow, saw the dwarf's head roll onto the ground with a gush of blood, and turned away as Heretica reached toward Glandar's loin cloth at the end of their lengthy dialogue. When I looked back, I was standing beside the hero himself. The wind was blowing fiercely, the sky was, of course, cirulean blue, and we were very near the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean. Glandar held his sword, the mighty Eliminator, in his left hand. In his right, he clutched the octagonal shield, Providence, given to him by his dying father. Sweat glistened on his tan, muscled body. His long black hair was tied back with a vine of Heretica's hair; all that was left of her. Fifty feet away, near the very edge of the cliff stood the Malfeasance, its towering blob of a body birthing faces here and there that called insults to the king of Kreegenvale. The head of the monster was like an enormous clod of earth come to life. It's yellow mane hung down in a tangled greasy mess, stained with blood and spleen. It's mouth opened wide enough to swallow a cow, displaying numerous rows of jagged teeth. "Smell my bile, the perfume of your own night terrors," it bellowed, licking its lack of lips with a boil ridden whale tongue. The Malfeasance released a ball of gas, a miniature violet sun, that sailed on the breeze toward Glandar. He lifted his shield and held it up to block the bomb of acid breath. I watched as the noxious blast bubbled the paint that had been the heraldic design of Kreegenvale. Glandar, grunted and fell to his knees. "I think that burnt the hair in my nose," he whispered from where he knelt on the ground. Then he looked up and right at me. I saw a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as if he was actually seeing me standing there. He smiled at me and slowly stood up. "Hold up, Mal," he called to the monster. "She's here." As the hero walked toward me, I saw other characters from Kreegenvale come out of hiding from behind the rocks and trees that were about fifty yards behind us. "Somebody give me a drink," called the monster, "I've got to get this taste out of my mouth." "Everybody take a break," called Glandar over his shoulder. He shoved his sword into the ground and dropped his shield. "What's happening?" I asked. "Mary, right?" he asked. I nodded. "We've been waiting for you." The others, all of whom I recognized from other stories, gathered around him. The Malfeasance was now leaning over us, swaying in the wind. "Hello, darling," the monster said to me, reaching down with an arm that grew from its side for a wine skin from Stribble Flap. "Mary," said Glandar, "there's not much time. I'll explain. We had Heretica put a spell on Ashmolean a few books back so that he would eventually lose touch with our world. It took a while to work, because he's so powerful. I mean, he's god, if you know what I mean. At first we thought he might just give up on us, but then, when he hired you, we realized what his plan was." "You mean, to finish the book?" I asked. "Right," said a woman to my left. I turned and saw the beautiful green face of Heretica Florita. "I thought you had been devoured?" I said. The Malfeasance laughed. "We made up a woman out of grass and sticks and such and I ate that in her place. How could I really eat her?" he asked. "Don't ask," said Glandar. The assembled characters started laughing and Heretica leaned over to punch the hero in the arm. "Why are you telling me this?" I asked. Glandar waved the others away. "Let us have a moment, here," he said. They all took a few steps back, and sat down on the ground. In seconds, what appeared to be flagons of wine and mead were making the rounds. The Malfeasance was sipping from its wine skin and letting the children use its back as a slide. Every time one of the little ones laughed, so did the creature with a wheezing cough. Glandar led me away toward the edge of the cliff. When we were out of earshot of the others, he turned to me and said, "It's got to be over, Mary. I can't take any more of this." "You miss Ashmolean?" I asked. "No, not at all. I thought you would understand. What I'm telling you is I can't go on. If I have to kill one more thing, I don't care if it's a mosquito, I'm going to lose my mind." "You are unhappy with Ashmolean," I said. "Some of the others call him Ash-holean. I have more respect for him than that, but I've been with him from the first page. There were times in the beginning where it was all very exhilarating, but now, man, life in Kreegenvale is a tedious thing. There's nothing new here. I know, when every adventure begins, that I'm going to be killing. Imagine waking up every day and knowing you are going to have to kill something or someone, maybe a whole army of men you have no quarrel with." "But there are other aspects to Kreegenvale than the killing," I reminded him. "I'm not a drinker. Every time Ashmolean has me quaff flagons, I'm sick as a dog for the next fifty pages. All that wenching too -- sickening. You'd think the guy never saw a woman with normal size breasts. All I ever wanted was a few minutes of love, but that's more exotic to the big man than the three faced cat boy of Ghost City." "Do you want me to make him write love into the plot?" I asked. "It's too late for that. I just want to help free the others now. I want an end to it, so that they can go back to the lives they had before I happened to them." "I used to feel the same way about Kreegenvale when I first started reading about you," I said. "But now, I don't think I've ever read anything that has been so alive to me." "Ashmolean would be a sham if not for one thing. He truly feels it. That's a miraculous thing. I'm doing this because I want to help him out as much as the others." "You want me to sacrifice you to the Malfeasance, don't you?" I asked. He nodded and I could see tears in his eyes. "That's what heros are for," he said. "I don't know if I can do that. He probably won't let me," I said. "He will," said Glandar. "He can't prevent it. You're too powerful." "Too powerful?" I said. "Please," said Glandar and his voice went through an odd transformation into Ashmolean's. "Do you see it?" asked my fantasy writer. I looked to my left and there he was, fingers poised above the keyboard, ready to start hammering. I turned back to my right and saw Glandar and the Malfeasance in their battle positions by the edge of the cliff. I could feel that power that Glandar had mentioned welling up inside of me. "OK," I said, "get ready." My words came forth with an energy of their own, flowing straight up from my solar plexus, colored with vivid description, crackling with metaphor and simile. I spoke without hesitation the battle of Glandar and the Malfeasance, monster, born of the hero's own ill thoughts. The Eliminator flashed in the sunlight, and there was rolling and running and gasping for air. Wounds blossomed, blood ran, bones shattered. Great chunks of the monster's aemeobic body flew on the ocean wind. And the invective was brilliant: "May you burn in Manck's essential furnace until the scimitar moon sews your soul to eternity." Acid breath and biting steel, the two fought on and on -- now one getting the upper hand, now the other. To my left, Ashmolean was white hot, typing faster than the computer could announce the words that jumped from me to his fingers. "Death to the unbeliever," he murmured under his labored breath. In the end, Glandar, so brutally wounded that he was beyond recovery, gave one final suicide charge forward, burying himself in the viscous flesh of the monster, forcing both of them over the edge of the cliff. Ashmolean cried out, "It can't be," as I described them falling, yet his fingers continued typing. "No," he moaned as they hit the rocks hundreds of feet below, but the action on the keyboard never slowed. He wept as the ocean waves washed over them. After he hit the final period, he turned away from me to cover his face again with his hands. With that last dot, Kreegenvale went out like a light in my own mind. I pushed back the lawn chair and stood up. Ashmolean's body was heaving, but all of his grief was silent now. Saying nothing, I left the room, left the house, and never went back. As devastating as the death of Glandar might have been for Ashmolean, it left me with a sense of determination about my own life that even the sword wielder had never exhibited. When thinking what to do next, I remembered Leonard Finch putting his finger on my forehead and saying, "See it here." In rapid succession, I took the job at Burgerama and registered to begin taking classes at the local college. I often thought about what I had done to my fantasy writer, but reconciled it by telling myself it was the best for everyone. Still, memories of Kreegenvale would sometimes blow through my mind, especially when I sat in the literature lectures and the profs would fall into theoretical obscurity. Then I prayed Glandar would kick in the door and start wielding. For the most part, though, I loved learning again. I took a lot of English courses, but I knew I didn't want to teach. As for the job, it was greasy and hot for little pay, and when I'd slide those horse fat sandwiches across the counter to the eager customers, I'd whisper, "Death to the unbeliever." For all the Gwatan Tarn horrors of Burgerama, it was fun getting to know the other workers that were my age. Things were going very well, and my parents were pleased with my progress, but for me, there was something missing. I realized one night that what I wanted was to be a writer. Even to be back in Ashmolean's study, where words breathed life into the impossible, would have sufficed. I bought a notebook and began trying to tell a story, but from some lack of courage or an overabundance of self-criticism, I never got further than the first few lines. "If only Kreekaw would come," I thought, "and snatch this frustration from my troubled sleep." I was into my second semester of college and succeeding in the time honored tradition, when one day a package for me was delivered UPS to my parent's house. My mother called me, and I came downstairs, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I had been up late reading Swift's Battle of the Books for an exam. She handed me the brown parcel, planted a dry kiss on my cheek, and then left for work. Opening the mailer, I slipped out the contents -- a brand new, fat, hardcover book. A thrill ran through me when I saw that it was a copy of The Butcher of Malfeasance. Of course, I dropped the mailer and paged frantically to the end of the novel, to the part I had been responsible for. Five pages from the end, I picked up the narrative where Glandar faces off against the monster by the edge of the cliff. Reading it was an experience I will never forget, for Ashmolean had used my exact words. I ran my fingers over the print on the page and when it didn't brush away, I thought to myself, "I created this." I saw the battle take place before my eyes just as I had seen it in Ashmolean's office the day I dictated it to him. The oaths and all were there, perfectly rendered. But when I read to where the ocean came and washed the fallen bodies out to sea, there was another whole page of writing. Puzzled, I continued to find that Glandar returns that night to Kreegenvale. Soaking wet, with urchins in his hair and seaweed wrapped around his neck, he steps into a room of mourners. They rejoice, the flagons are passed, and he tells how the elastic body of the Malfeasance saved him from the fall. Although he almost drowned, he managed to fight the current and come ashore three miles down the coast. Then the novel ends on a high note, promising more drinking, wenching and wielding to come. "What the hell is this?" I said aloud. A few minutes later, after reinspecting the mailer, I found my answer. In my rush to see my words in print, I had missed the letter from Ashmolean that was addressed to me. Dear Mary: I'm sorry, but I had to change your ending a little. Think of all the future royalties I would have lost had I let Glandar die. I'm not ready to kill him off just yet -- everyone needs a fantasy. He sends his best and apologizes for his part in the fiction I created for you. I knew from the day I met you that you were smart and that you loved books and ideas. I would have realized that even if I hadn't made a phone call to your school before you even came to the interview. They told me about your place on the edge of the field. I know that place. There are other places you need to go as well. Sometimes an act of destruction can be an act of creation. I felt you needed that to begin your journey. I believe that as your obsessed, blinded, fantasy writer, I was the best character I ever created. What good is the illusion of fiction if it can not show us a way to become the people we need to be. Glandar says, "Be courageous, squeeze every ounce out of life, and live with honor." Simple but still not a bad message to sometimes remember in this complex world. I did this because I knew someday you might become a writer, but that you needed a little help. Glad to be of assistance. Ashmolean At first I was confused, but I read the letter again and laughed like a believer. I never took my test on Swift that day, but instead went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Then, I returned to my room and over the course of two days, my mother and father calling to me from the other side of the locked door, I wrote this story.