The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œOh, my God,” I heard him whisper.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œNo, 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