Time's Mistress (27 page)

And last there was Lise herself, the woman I had called generic, branded a cliché not worthy of my time, but she wasn’t about to give herself back to me. She had never wanted to be a part of me. She had only ever wanted one thing: to separate. She wasn’t about to make me swallow her down and reduce herself to the role of just another voice inside the madness of my head. She was always going to be
more
than that. Instead she knelt beside me and looked me in the eye. I could barely focus and couldn’t hear a word she said. She could have been damning me or mocking me or apologising, I had no way of knowing. I couldn’t read her lips.

No, that wasn’t true. I knew because Montel knew. All I had to do was focus on the barrage of voices for his, and untangle her words from within all of those others that made up the dwarf.

But before I could, she leaned in and kissed me.

It was almost tender.

But not quite.

She whispered something inside of me. One word. Her name. I didn’t hear it. I felt it resonate through my bones. It was the longest single note I had ever experienced, the sibilant causing my entire body to quiver, until, gradually every muscle and tendon and streak of fat and shard of bone transformed into sounds and those sounds transformed into voices.

That was all it took.

Something inside me snapped.

And they came.

My flesh screaming to be heard. The Unwritten refused to be silenced. All of these little pieces of me returned whence they came. As their stories spilled out through my muscles and onto my skin, my body was unable to contain them. I died then. A metaphorical and metaphysical death. I ceased to be me, reduced to the sum of the lives and stories I had invented. All evidence of the writer, God in this universe of story, was eradicated. And even as my flesh succumbed to the agonies of Lise’s unwritten justice, the stories taking their toll, the transformation began to take hold one word at a time. Slowly, by one word and then another, by one page and then another, by one verse and then another, I became the one thing I had always held as most precious: a book.

A book of flesh and blood, but a book just the same.

That was Lise’s punishment, and there could never have been a more fitting one for a man who had lived by the word than to grant him the one thing he had always craved, immortality by the word.

And now, finally, I can slip from the confines of the page and find new life inside your head. That is where the true immortality of the writer lies, after all. Not in the ink that stains the paper but in the imagination of the reader.

In you I am born again.

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