Mr. Stitch

“Well, have you eaten, Karine? I’d like to get started, but we’re not in any hurry, just yet.”

“Oh, yes, miss. I am ready whenever you are.”

“Good. How well do you take dictation?”

There was a peculiar sound then, a mechanical tapping sound, and then the turn of a dial. Skinner had never heard anything quite like it before. “Yes,” Karine said. “I have been working for my cousin, who is a broker for airshipping. I have learned to use this…the Feathersmith machine.” She did something with her hands, and a machine clacked and rattled alarmingly. “It is like a tiny printing-press.”

“Well, then I suppose we had better get started,” Skinner said, gamely, as she sat down and prepared to work. It did not take her more than a few minutes of silence to realize that she had absolutely no idea how to begin. The silence hung awkwardly between them.

The work on The Bone-Collector’s Daughter had been different-the product of an inspiration that had seized her while she had been wholly occupied with something entirely unrelated. When it had blossomed in her mind, she found that the play had practically written itself; Skinner was herself taking dictation, listening to the play speak in her head and then just repeating it to Sitwell in one of their aggravatingly-long sessions. And, for as successfully as she’d been with The Bone-Collector’s Daughter, she’d really never written anything else before, and was altogether unsure as to how to go about it.

“Miss?”

“All right,” Skinner said. “Let’s just…start. With…something.” It’s better, it must be better, to just right it down, whether it’s good or not. If it’s bad, we can always change it later. “With Theocles. We’ll start with the poem. Do you know it?”

“No.”

Merciful relief, as Skinner found she could spend a good hour reciting the epic story to Karine-working easily from memory, not striving to build something new. She told her assistant the whole story, but had her just write down the main thrust of each of the sixteen books. When they’d finished, Skinner was strongly of a mind to break for the day, enjoy a well-cooked meal, drink some of the liquors that the movers had helpfully pointed out to her the night before. She resisted the impulse, out of an old habit that she’d learned from Beckett: whatever you didn’t solve today was what would bite you in the ass tomorrow. Of course, writing a play hardly had the same urgency or stakes about it that tracking down renegade necrologists did, but the principle could correctly be said to be the same.

“So,” said Skinner, as Karine’s clattering typing ground to a halt. “So, what is this about?”

“It’s about Theocles.”

“Yes,” Skinner agreed. “Wait. No. No, Theocles is who it’s about. What is it about, though?”

“He…takes over the empire.”

“That’s what happens. What is it about?” Skinner asked again, and Karine said nothing. “All right, I know what this is about. It’s about a man who is thirsty for power. He wants more power, he thinks he deserves more power…no. No, he thinks he can do a better job. He thinks he can do a better job, and so he starts doing bad things in order to get the power.”

“That’s not in the poem. The poem just says he’s jealous of Agon Diethes.”

“Well, we’re changing it. We’re allowed to, there’s no rule. It’s more interesting if Theocles thinks he can do a better job. Or maybe both. Maybe he secretly thinks he can do a better job, but then something happens…that makes him sure of it.” What…how could you make that happen? It needs something weird. Something creepy.

“He fights that troll in the second book. In Daeagea, before my people made a kingdom for themselves, there were all just tribal hetmen. And if a man went out and killed one of the kriegbats or lannershrikes, it was seen as a sign of his destiny.”

“Yes. The troll.” No, wait. The Loogaroo. “Wait, all right, I’ve got it. First scene. First scene is Theocles and his friend in the forest. After…after a battle. It’s a stormy night. Are you writing this down?”

What followed was a rough cut of a scene in which two tired, bloody, dirty old soldiers encountered a compelling oddity in the woods. Theocles, still at this point content to be a humble servant of the Emperor, did not fight a troll, but instead came upon two bogeys, behaving in the strange and off-putting way that bogeys do.

“Steeplechase,” Skinner said, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “And Mumbletypeg are their names.”

They spoke mostly gibberish; Skinner borrowed liberally from the weird monologues that she’d heard dream- poisoned men spout off, or the terrifically peculiar rants of a man deeply lost on veneine. But in the middle of those weird speeches, they spoke directly to Theocles. They hailed Theocles as a general, and a king, and told him of an impossible future.

No grown adult in Trowth would admit to believing in bogeys-not anymore, anyway. And few of them would confess, except in their darkest and most private moments, to believing in the Loogaroo. Only on quiet, lonely nights, on desolate windswept roads, when that solitude transmuted into an unbearable feeling of presence, when men and women picked up their paces and hurried back to well-lit parlors and warm fires, would a person acknowledge that there were times when they still feared a fairy-tale like the Loogaroo.

The Loogaroo was the king of the bogeymen, the Nightmare Prince. It was a dark shadow of a thing, a wicked dissonance in the nature of the Word. The Goetic Church still insisted that the Loogaroo existed, and was present as the black cruelty in the heart of every man-an actual, living entity that, in some small way, possessed a portion of each and every human being’s soul. It was an evil, but a necessary evil, meant to give dimension to the Word. Good, the Goetic Church said, is meaningless without a corresponding wickedness. The Church’s position is why a play suggesting that a doctor of theology might secretly be a servant of the Loogaroo-a play like The Bone-Collector’s Daughter-would have been condemned as heresy in Canth.

The Church Royal, on the other hand, maintained the official policy that the Loogaroo was simply a metaphor for mankind’s native tendency towards wickedness. The various bogeymen named as its subjects-often given allegorical names like “Lust,” or “Greed,”-were simply poetic personifications of natural phenomena. It was real, but not really what it seemed to be.

Skinner liked the bogeys in the first scene; there was still enough of a sense of mystery, a willingness to indulge in fantasy, among the Trowthi people that their monstrous prophecies could be true, but a history of painting the creatures as conniving, scheming demons meant that Steeplechase and Mumbletypeg could just as easily be liars.

As though rediscovering the Loogaroo had burst some levy in her imagination, scenes and incidents and speeches began to pour out of her. Theocles making a pact with the Loogaroo. The bogeymen summoning the Loogaroo. The Loogaroo haunting the coronation ceremony, finding a place for itself at the celebratory banquet. Just write it all, Skinner thought to herself, as they worked through dinner and late into the night. Just keep writing it, we can always cut it out later. By nightfall, they had produced no fewer than seven full scenes, and a dozen more speeches and snippets of dialogue that Skinner liked, but wasn’t sure what to do with.

When they had finished, Skinner slumped in her chair and absently scratched at the edge of the silver plate across her fate. She had been snacking on a small piece of roast that the maid had brought, but now found herself ravenously hungry.

“Why do you think,” Karine asked, her chair creaking as she leaned away from the Feathersmith machine, “that Miss Vie-Gorgon wanted this play?”

“Oh, who can say with the Families? They’re always up to something obscure and confrontational. The Wyndham-Crabtrees and the Crabtree-Daiors own the Public Theater, don’t they? Maybe just a way to draw the audiences off from there.”

“It sounds…Theocles sounds like, a little bit like what the Emperor is like. Now, I mean.” She coughed lightly, then added, “Word preserve him.”

“Yes, it does sound like that.”

“Do you suppose he’ll be mad about it?”

Skinner was quiet for a long moment, apprehension and pride warring over her face, vying for the chance to change it to a frown or smile. “If I were quite honest with you,” she said, smiling as her apprehension about what