Thieving Fear

Thurstaston Mound. His reputation seems to have been why

the local people made no attempt to rescue him from . . .

Rory fumbled with the mouse, and the list was replaced by a site. The title appeared first, at the top of an empty window. A Battle of Magicians: Arthur Pendemon versus Peter Grace.

That sounded like background for Ellen, and he grew nervously impatient as the page failed to load. Once he'd set the computer refreshing the page he gazed past it at the unrewardingly eventless sky. The sentence and the fragment he'd already read took grudging form at the foot of an otherwise empty screen, and he had to assume they were waiting for some image to occupy the space. When the indicator at the bottom of the page showed that about half the document was loaded, he scrolled upwards, to find nothing but emptiness all the way to the top. Should the document be full of pictures? His inability to imagine them felt too close to losing all his creativeness. He scrolled down in the hope that something had arrived above the words, but now the page was absolutely blank.

'Try again,' Rory snarled and jabbed the refresh button. It took him a while to be convinced that this had an effect, and longer to identify it. The screen had turned yet more featureless. Even the title had disappeared from the upper margin of the document. He raised his aching gaze to rest it on the sky, and the blank came with him.

It felt pasted to his eyes. The floor and ceiling and the walls on either side of him were blurred presences that he could hardly claim to be seeing. When he tried to look at any of them, the blank did away with them. Worse still was being unable to see his hands unless he held them out to either side of him, where they appeared as undefined lumps whose colour he had to remember more than discern. He felt disembodied and yet shut up in his body, the worst of both worlds. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists on the desk while he did his best to live with however many minutes the blankness took to dissipate. At last he risked slitting his eyes. Even when he stretched them so wide that they stung he might as well not have opened them.

It must be a migraine. The condition had affected more than one of his classmates at college like this. Rory had suspected them of finding an excuse to miss lectures, but he wouldn't have scoffed at them now. He groped at the vague colourless bulk of the computer tower to switch it off – he couldn't see to shut the programmes down first – and then he clutched at the desk to help himself up. By shuffling with his feet almost together, and by making contact with several items of furniture that his blindness scarcely let him feel, he managed to reach the door. He slid his hand along the wall to guide him to his bedroom, where his shins bumped into the mattress and let him crawl onto the bed.

As he lay on his back he had the unpleasant notion that the blankness was a slab laid over his eyes. He was hoping to sleep off his state, but he was still trying to sink into unawareness when he seemed to feel a large insect struggling in his hip pocket. It was the vibration of his mobile, which he must have inadvertently silenced at some point. He fumbled it out and pressed it to his ear. However many times he said 'Hello?' he couldn't distinguish a response; even his own voice was sounding mostly in his skull. Had losing one sense infected another? 'I can't hear you,' he said desperately. 'I'll call you back later.' As he moved the phone away from his face he thought he heard a voice, but it sounded far away under the blankness. It didn't speak again as he killed the call and scrabbled at his pocket with the mobile before attempting to grow calm. Perhaps the voice that had seemed to speak his name was deep in him.

TWELVE

As Charlotte made to send the longest email she'd ever had to write, Glen came back from lunch with an author. 'Might be good news,' he said.

'I'm glad,' she felt required to say, though she had no idea for whom.

'How have you been spending this sunny afternoon?'

His breath betrayed how he'd spent much of his. She didn't need reminding how she was buried away from the sun. 'Just being an editor,' she said.

'Hey, me too,' he said and squinted at her email to Sextus Sexta Sexagesima, lead singer with Ban This and now author of Praying is the Piss, in which a rock group called Shag the Pigs used magic to become the most successful band of all time. 'Did you send this?'

'I'm about to.'

He reached around her shoulders and scrolled with the mouse, a gesture she found more presumptuously intimate than touching her might have been. 'OK, don't,' he said soon enough.

'Is he another author we've had second thoughts about?'

'I was talking to the big man upstairs and he thinks you shouldn't edit this at all. Some books need to breathe, he said. If you try to fit them into how you think all books are meant to be you could end up suffocating them.' He continued to expose her email as he said 'I guess some of the spelling may need fixing if it's not intentional. Maybe some of the punctuation, though I don't believe they changed a comma of John Lennon's books. Leave all the words he's made up, but the title could use work.'

'I won't argue with that.'

'One word should do it.'

'Praying is the Pits, you mean? It might still offend some people.'

'We're going to offend plenty. Let's use it, not pretend we can avoid it. I'm saying we should call it Praying is Piss.'

Charlotte might have laughed, if only to discover how amused she was. 'Have I heard the good news?' she wondered instead.

'Maybe you can make this work for your cousin. Don't tell me you weren't hoping it might be about her.'

Charlotte was recalling that he'd also drunk a good deal the last time he'd been enthusiastic about Ellen. 'I won't,' she said, 'but how?'

'Hey, where did your imagination go? While they're sold on magic upstairs you ought to make your move. How are her books looking?'

'I thought she was supposed to be working on the first one.'

'Better make it both. Right now they're saying they like two-book contracts for first-timers or they don't think it's worth the risk. She should give you a pitch you can wow them with, then as long as her new chapters shape up I'd say she's sold. They're hot for her upstairs.'

'You mean you've been talking about her?'

'Don't worry, I said she was your author and I didn't say she was your cousin. Maybe we should keep that between us for a while.'

He'd leaned closer to say so, and Charlotte felt oppressed – by his nearness, by the partitions around them, perhaps most of all by his inconsistency. 'Why don't you ask her how she feels about working on both books,' he said.

'I don't think many authors work on more than one at once.'

'A great reason for new ones to learn to, I'd say. The more ways they can compete in today's market the better it'll be for all of us. It's not like she's on her own, is it? She'll have her cousin if she needs help.' He straightened up with a comical wobble that might have been intentional. 'I'll leave you to call her,' he said but lingered to frown at the screen. 'Don't send that by mistake.'

'I'll see if I need to say any of it.'

While it seemed disagreeably likely that she wouldn't, the delay gave her the illusion of control. As Glen gave up playing overseer she freed the desk phone and typed Ellen's number. He was rearranging papers in his cubicle by the time Ellen said 'Hello?'

'Me.'

'Charlotte. I know you're waiting for my chapters. They're coming soon, I promise.'

'Do you think you might be able to let me have a synopsis of your next book as well?'

Ellen hesitated and then sounded oddly wary. 'Can I do a bit of research first?'

'Certainly you can, only how long do you think it'll take?'