Bryn Fortey
It is not easy to be a writer. It is also not easy to understand just what that statement means, unless you have participated in some of the agony yourself. Bryn Fortey’s story introduces, among other delicacies, the extravagant and intoxicating notion of Black Art, the Stealer of Dreams. If, among the plethora of problems a writer faces, he must now take into consideration the problem of his own versions of Black Art, the agony must inevitably increase exponentially. No wonder that Tiller Presavorrat, wordsmith, decided to wear no face.
* * * *
Nobody wrote. Not anymore. A subject, rendered unconscious and with induced mental irritation, was crowned with a net of micronic impulse absorbers. Deep-down, root-level brain activity was picked up, driven along plastic coated wires and punched onto coded reels of tape. These were automatically transcribed into sheets of typewritten words.
That’s the modern publishing game.
That’s why only insane subjects provide best sellers.
Piller Presavorrat knew this but dodged all obvious conclusions with complete determination. He produced words, all dragged with blood and sweat from his own mind - through his own effort. Piller was a writer, and that was the end of the news.
Piller Presavorrat: Writer (unpublished).
He submitted manuscripts, pestered publishers, wrote bitchy letters to the press, and achieved nothing but sweet zero. Most publishers hated him and very few would even read his submissions before rejecting. He was a throwback, fifty years out of date and seemingly unaware of modern trends.
The dinosaur is best extinct.
It hurt, this constant failure, of course it did. All that creativity down the pan and flushed away with only a gurgle in the pipework to show it had ever existed at all. But wasn’t that the way of things, and hadn’t it always been, in spite of early hope and ambition?
The party had been a wasted effort as far as furthering his nonexistent career was concerned; but the free booze had been one consolation, and a surplus of available women had been another. Especially one who had found this strange wordsmith an attractive proposition.
‘I write of love and hate,’ Piller had told her. His hand cupped her breast, thumb flicking the nipple. ‘I paint word pictures of stark truth and beauty. The printed page is my canvas.’ He had blown into her ear, nipping the lobe between his teeth and nuzzling gently against her hair. ‘One day my talent will reinstate the creative art of the written word.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ she had agreed, not understanding a single word, but fascinated by his fanaticism.
Presavorrat yearned to write in an age when the art had become redundant. No publisher was without a highly paid consultant psychiatrist, and readers wanted only to bask in the deep dredged thought processes of the mad.
Slopping drink over himself and the floor, Piller had staggered across to where a high priest had held court. ‘Art is dead!’ he’d cried, nailed to the cross of his own futility. ‘You have killed it, and are killing me.’
The publisher had raised a nonchalant eyebrow.
‘You are dirty, homosexual, philistine bums. No, I retract that. Some of you are, or might be, but not all. I mustn’t generalize, but you do all sacrifice your everything upon the altar of fame and gain. Surely you could take one single chance for the sake of genuine human endeavour!’
Bored, the publisher had turned away.
Heavy time tonight, thought the girl who intended going home with him. Piller seemed the sort who got randy when drunk.
And she had been right!
‘I will be published one day,’ he muttered between grunts.
‘No, Piller, please. Don’t talk about writing when we’re making love!’
He had wanted to tell her about how he hated all publishers, but he held back. She was right, of course, and he knew it.
Real love and genuine hate, opposite ends of the same spectrum, were areas that deserved total dedication. Neither warranted mindless intrusion, and were too close for one to overlap into the other. His love for her should be kept separate from all other considerations. Free from the frustrations of his life style. Untouched by all other relationships. A pocket of safety. A sanctuary from a world that misunderstood and misused him.
‘I love only you!’ he said, harshly, their sweat drenched bodies slipping and sliding in a riot of movement. And I hate all the others, he thought with a stark simplicity that turned his act of love into a moment of mere lust, and left him feeling dirty about it all.
In that instant he knew sin and blanked his mind with a death rattle whisper like the tearing of ancient silk. His head seemed to explode, gushing globulets of brain all along a gutter.
Why is it that childhood hopes have to grow into adult reality? he wondered; but sleep claimed before an answer could even be considered. A sleep that brought no peace, only scenes that jumped and jerked before bloodshot eyes as the wordsmith grovelled in his own excreta. An idea lay dead, crushed by thoughts wrenched hard from lunatic fantasies.
* * * *
Blank, loveless eyes proclaim yet another victim of the self destructive process. There is something here that causes fear.
Presavorrat stood upon a dusty plain. Beyond him a mountain grew up to the sky. Somewhere, up high, a wise man waited, but the terrain was too difficult for him to master.
Presavorrat wept, his hot tears irrigating the arid landscape. He stood in an area of disembodied failure, denying the sense of belonging that tried to fit so snugly around his drooping shoulders.
‘The system can be broken,’ he grated through clenched teeth, and a flower emerged from the tear stained sand.
The treadmills keep turning, but Piller still dreams of the day when written words will once again replace extracted thoughts.
Presavorrat awoke, retinas hurting in the pale morning light. Her arm lay across his bare chest.
Today I will start a new novel, he decided, and this woman will be my inspiration.
‘Jay Morast,’ he murmured aloud, bringing to mind the twelve month old affair of the man with no face. Yesterday’s headlines now, but what a story could be made of the case.
The old excitement ran through him.
It was a gallop that cleansed. A glorious jaunt across fields of heather to a land of sparkling waterfalls. Hope was the means of transport and belief the power that drove.
Golden highways popped in his mindseye.
The woman having been versed in the silent, non-stop supply of coffee, Piller prepared himself for a new onslaught on greatness. A pile of blank white sheets lay to the right of his machine. A virgin space to the left awaited the filled pages.
Presavorrat inserted a blank sheet. ‘THE MAN WITH NO FACE’, he typed, ‘by Piller Presavorrat’. Fingers poised above the keyboard, he concentrated his total self towards the act of creation upon which he was about to embark. At the appointed moment, his fingers flashed downwards. He was writing. A wordsmith, concocting letters to his own patterns and designs. An archaic pastime, but one that nevertheless provided the only substance that could keep the threads of his life from fraying completely.
* * * *
Presavorrat typed on.
‘ “No right to survive such an operation.”
“He had no business surviving an explosion like that in the first place.”
“It’s always a miracle when someone lives through an accident in space.”
“Accident? I wonder.”
Nearing the surface at fleeting moments, the patient in the private ward picked up vaguely heard phrases and blurred impressions before lapsing back into the state of complete unknowing the hospital tried to keep him in.
“It might have been kinder if we’d let him die!”
Jay Morast was a man without a face. Instead of it the surgeons had provided a blank frame upon which he could fit features, as in a jigsaw.
“Not many people who can genuinely change their face to fit their moods,” joked the pretty little night nurse.
Morast selected a look of love, and welcomed her into his bed.
What a sucker he had been: universal fall guy, number one. Smuggling, they’d told him. Looks a clapped out wreck; but that is just a cover to fool the law. Goes like a bomb really. Sure enough, it did too. Blew up just like a bomb.
Out there in space, hall-way between Earth and Mars. An ask-no-questions, out-of-work, spaceline pilot conned into a nonexistent smuggling job which turned out to be an insurance caper.
And the bastards had meant him to die!
It was this thought alone that made him welcome his survival during the long, long months of recuperation that followed the surgery. Jay Morast was a man without a face, and someone was going to have to pay for it.
“It’s like being made love to by a different man every night,” said the pretty little night nurse. “As you change your face, so your performance varies to match the newly selected features.”
She hoped his recuperation would last for years.
“What can I expect tonight?” she asked, then screamed as he revealed his face of death.
The doctors were worried in case seeing someone die from a heart attack might affect his recovery. The new night nurse was worried in case she might share her predecessor’s misfortune.
Both sets of fears were soon calmed. Much to the doctors’ surprise, he showed an even keener rate of improvement than before. As for the new nurse, well, her concern soon disappeared along with her inhibitions and uniform. In Morast’s bed, seemingly in the arms of a different man each night, she came alive for the first time in her life. A short life that stretched from death to death. From the heart attack of the previous nurse until the time when she herself leapt from the window of the tenth floor private ward. Before anyone could reach his room, lay Morast had replaced his look of terror with one of repose.
He was ready now, and knew it. Ready to revenge himself upon those who had sent him into space to die. Not even Black Art, who came in dreams and sneeringly offered his face to replace the one Morast had left in space, could spoil the gleeful anticipation of his vendetta.
Black Art, an intended character in a novel left unwritten. Denied even the fictional reality of his original conception, he roamed the dark alleys of night. A stealer of dreams, with abuse and hate his only weapons.
“Where’s your face then, Morast? We both know it, a facial cripple is all, man. You dig? A facial cripple.
“I should have organized the bang that got you. Dead then, and better off for being so.
“Want to borrow a face, Morast? My face? A big, black face? A big black real face? I’d rather wander dreams than have your blank frame and false features.” ‘
* * * *
Presavorrat stopped typing, fingers twitching to a halt as his mind caught up with what he had written. It had all been flowing so well, as planned, until the unbidden appearance of Black Art.
What the hell had made him bring in that character?
Getting up from his stool, Presavorrat paced the room. It had been years since he had invented Black Art, a Negro private eye who smashed crime syndicates throughout the whole system. It was, he remembered, after the National Film Library had run a series of illustrated lectures on the social significance of the bygone Shaft films. He had shelved the idea before typing even one word, realizing that he was doing no more than update the old Shaft character. And he hadn’t brought Black Art to mind from that day to this.
It was strange, and yet the idea had merit. An unwritten character whose only recourse was to invade dreams in a forlorn search for the reality forever denied him. A pseudo-being, held fast by the suction of night.
An excitement shook him to the very root of his ego. This could be his breakthrough. This could be the concept with which he could rival the extracted gibberings of the insane. This would be the novel to herald back the redundant art of the wordsmith!
The woman entered then, with coffee that was soon forgotten as Presavorrat danced her around the room. He babbled words which left her bemused, but his joy was infectious and she was happy because he was. She understood little of the motivating factors that drove him so remorselessly, but knew well the personal contribution that was demanded of her.
‘Dream trips go no way towards providing true form and reality,’ said Presavorrat as he broke into a tango that headed straight for the bedroom door.
‘I believe you, Piller,’ she replied with a laugh. Life with a wordsmith was anything but dull.
Later, as train whistles screeched, screamed, and all tracks led to a tunnel in the rock-face, Presavorrat slept. A restless slumber of twisted sheets and lumpy pillows, full of dark alley whimpers and whispered obscenities.
‘Poor Piller,’ murmured the woman as he tossed and turned, little realizing that out of the formless night patterns Black Art was making his dream presence felt.
* * * *
Big and strong, dark as the night that claimed him, Black Art came to Presavorrat while he slept. ‘Look at me, man,’ he ordered. ‘Powerful, cruel, a winner all the way. A creation destined for fictional greatness, but you shelved the idea and booked me passage on the oblivion express. Hell, baby, I would have had it made!’
Sleeping, Presavorrat suffered the blast of raw power until it seemed he would drown in his own mattress. Art towered over him, ferocious in his anger. ‘I would have been great!’ he thundered.
‘But publishers don’t want written words,’ Presavorrat managed to whisper through his fear. ‘They’ll accept nothing but extracted thoughts.’
‘If you were good enough you’d make it. Just a hack. No talent, no courage, no nothing. You’ll never break the stranglehold of the extracters, not without a character like me to make life leap and tingle through your pages.’
Denied even the fictional reality of his original conception, Black Art loomed malignantly over his dream trapped creator. ‘Write me, you bastard!’ he demanded. ‘Give me that much or by all that’s unholy I swear to sever the chains that bind me and enfold your existence to replace the one you dangled so tantalisingly then withdrew.’
Presavorrat could only scream as big black hands reached out towards him. Red tinged screams that seemed to pour from a gash, a second mouth in the throat of humanity.
Black blood spurted like demented rain, producing a rich cancer that would melt in daylight. Green sparks fusing brains that plunged towards the pit.
Presavorrat wept and the hands that reached out made fists that shook with threatened violence. ‘You owe me!’ shrieked Black Art with impotent rage as he faded into nocturnal mists.
The woman held him tightly, cradling him to her breast. ‘There, there,’ she cooed gently, ‘everything will be all right.’ But two hours later Piller still wept and muttered. ‘Black as the abyss,’ he said between tears. ‘After my life.’
The woman could make no sense from any of it. Not from his non-stop crying nor his insane ramblings. ‘Hell spawned, from the depths of my mind,’ he muttered as he sobbed. The realization finally came home to her that she was powerless in every way.
The doctor she sent for decided he was also unable to help, apart for arranging for hospitalization and expert opinion.
Poor Piller, thought the woman, closing the door on yet another episode. Insane, they said. Completely, utterly, and with little hope of a cure. For her he was now relegated to the past, but for others he was very much the present.
The psychiatrist in charge of his case telephoned the publisher who paid him an annual retainer. ‘Got a sure-fire smash for you this time,’ he claimed with supreme confidence. ‘A real dilly, as you will agree after reading the case notes I’m sending.’
The publisher did agree, and wasted no time setting up a thought extraction session. This one really did have best selling potential.
It wasn’t the way he had planned, and he no longer knew anything about it, but his life-long ambition was soon to be realized. Piller Presavorrat, wordsmith, was heading for publication.
* * * *