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Erasmus Fry slammed shut his door, and Rick looked awkwardly at the woman.
There two things everyone said about Fry—first, that he was a genius, second, that he was mad, absolutely mad. Rick had known the former since he’d first skimmed the prologue of ‘Here Comes a Candle’ at the age of 12. He could have happily not confirmed the latter, though he ought to have suspected it when Fry demanded a bezoar in return for his help.
He’d met Fry at the writing conference in Dublin last week. Rick had been presenting, of course, and directing an afternoon long workshop. The same night, he went to the bar and got smashing drunk and griped about his writers’ block to the bartender, who, bless the illiterate numpty, had no idea of who he was. The barman listened to him with the same attentive indifference as he’d any other maudlin sod. When he awoke the next day in a panic, with no memory of what he’d said, he’d wasted a couple hours scanning the social media for any sign he might have slipped up to a reporter. A week, then two passed, and he’d relaxed as much as anyone could while facing a deadline and possible bankruptcy, before the phone rang.
Fry had been in the bar, had heard him, and offered his help.
By help, Rick understood something like a personal writers’ workshop. Talking over ideas. Having the man read whatever sentences he could eke out. Collaboration, even, that would have been swell—he’d done it in English classes. Writing with a partner came easy to him as a friendly conversation. Writing alone?
He’d only written Cabaret out of desperate unhappiness. His father’s death had followed closely on Niamh deserting him for his best mate. He’d been laid off and had more to grieve than any therapist could conscionably recommend. He’d written Cabaret because he needed to speak his misery, and a story could hold it where no simple statement would. He couldn’t write another Cabaret, even now, with this different desperation. Cabaret was a eulogy for the lost and irreplaceable.
But Fry hadn’t offered none of those things, and now, Rick found himself with a woman who had to be some kind of trafficked sex slave.
She looked ready to say a word, before she could, Rick hustled himself into his car. She entered the passenger side. He rolled onto the road.
“So, Muse, huh?”
“Please,” she pleaded, in a thick accent he couldn’t place. Greek, he supposed. “You must free me. Speak the words. Calliope, you are free.”
The Muse of Epic Poetry. He knew callgirls usually had a business name, but didn’t those tend to be along the lines of cars or flowers?
“How did you end up with him?”
“He stole my scroll and bound me to him.”
Right. “Do you have anywhere to go?” If not, there was the women’s shelter up the road. He’d never let a stranger stay in his house before, but he thought he’d let her. Even if she ended up stealing his things, that would just be so much less for the bank to repossess when he filed for bankruptcy.
“Yes, if you will say the words.”
He stared out on the road, and wondered for a moment if maybe, maybe, Fry might have been telling him the truth—but was he actually going to violate a woman on such a ridiculous possibility?
There was only way to know for certain, and that was to either do as Fry said, or she did. He thought of his bills and his sister in the care home and the fact he was already in breach of contract, and before he could think of it more, he said, in a rush, “Calliope, you are free.”
There was a soft glow to his left, but when he looked, it was only the fluorescent sign of the gas station as they were passing. Calliope was smiling though now, and if she’d been lovely even in her misery, she was radiant in her happiness.
She didn’t disappear like some Greek goddess, as Fry had warned, and Rick cringed internally at the near-miss: had he really been ready to hurt her, for nothing? She rejected his suggestion to go to the police about Fry, no matter how hard he pressed her, but accepted his offer to drive her to the woman’s shelter. Rick stopped at the end of the shelter’s driveway. She got out, paused, turned to the open window.
“If would see me again—”
“We could meet for coffee,” he offered. He guessed that a woman who’d been through whatever she’d been might not want to be alone with a man for awhile.
“Sure,” she said, and then smiled again, eyes dark and liquid. He could see himself reflected there, and the street behind him, and something he couldn’t make out, like the shadow of a wood. “I’d love to look at your next book—do you think,” she ventured shyly, “do you think you might put me in it?”
He’d been asked that question a thousand times and a thousand times, had said no; ‘This book is entirely fictional and any resemblance to persons living or deceased is coincidental’ was copyplate for books as famous as Cabaret.
This time though, he surprised himself.
“You know, I think I will.”
She smiled at him again, the way his sister used to smile before her accident and the way Niamh had smiled after a long, satisfying lovemaking, and the way the Madonna smiled down on the Child.
She walked up the walk to the door, and after a quick word with the matron and a last backwards glance, she was gone.
Rick drove home, opened his laptop, and began to write about the girl from nowhere.
Four years later
She made the mistake of reading his manuscript while drinking, she spat out a laugh and half her latte all over it and him.
“Oh, my—”
“You liked my characterizations?” he asked eagerly.
“Melpomene as an agony aunt?” she chortled. “Polyhymnia as a NUN?” Tears rang from her eyes. Oh, the rest of the professions he’d handed out to her sisters had been surprisingly accurate—Urania was indeed a tenured astonomy professor at Oxford even, and Calliope had taken Rick to see Thalia do stand-up comedy on more than one occasion. But Mel took herself as seriously as Polly took sex, and she could just imagine the former’s indignation when ‘Musings’ hit the shelves.
She resolved never to actually tell her about it. Mel usually ignored anything other than the ‘first among genres’ as ‘too simplistic for my bother, loves,’ but she liked people poking fun at her as much as Hera ever had. There had been an incident after a reference to her in a bawdy song back in the 1st century, when she’d muttered something to the effect of ‘Tragedy? I’ll show him a tragedy’ and disappeared. Thalia’s author had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, joined a holy order, and spent the rest of his life writing dirges. The pranks Thalia had played on her, and the more serious reprisals Mel took for those pranks, had been epic enough to inspire any of Calliope’s stories. So too, had been the irritation of the other six sisters caught in the crossfire.
After that, they’d all agreed. Ignorance in general may not be bliss, but Mel’s was for the rest of them.
“I like it,” she smiled widely, flicking through the pages. “I like it a lot. You’re dedicating this one to Nora’s Dad?”
Rick was in love with her, of course. He was a writer, asking him not to love a Muse when she appeared before him in the flesh was impossible. He’d asked her circuitously, after the first year, if she thought she might ever go out with a man again. The answer was yes, yes, in a thousand years perhaps, when the house where Fry had kept her crumbled and all the stories he had prised from her faded to rumours and dust. Yes, but not before her followers had written and rewritten the feel of Fry’s hands on her into a thousand terrible stories to ease the remembrance. Yes, but not until Richard Madoc had been long buried.
So she inspired Richard to see what he could not. Somehow, his acute sensitivity of human nature ended at deft character portrayals and gave him no notion that Dr. Nora Chakraborty was in love with him. Nora’s entire family had accepted him with enthusiasm, particularly her father, who while pleased with his four daughters, had dearly wanted a son. Three years later, they were engaged.
“Hey, love,” the woman in question said, sliding into the booth beside Rick and handing him another coffee before kissing him on the cheek. Rick sipped it and made a face.
“Decaf?”
“It’s six in the evening, sweetie. I know you don’t think you need to sleep, but you’ve been awful twitchy lately.”
“Oh, I know, but I’m so busy, I can hardly stop thinking long enough to unwind.”
“Right. ‘Cause Mr. Sandman doesn’t care for caffeine,” she told him as the fourth member of their party drew up, brows raising at the comment. Calliope, who could guess he liked his coffee ‘black as the void’ or something similarly dour, despite not having spoken with him since long before its discovery, looked at him delightedly.
He smiled in response. He’d always smiled like that, adorably awkward, like he’d never learnt to smile, or forgotten how.
She watched as the humans looked confused for a moment, their subconscious trying to settle on how Oneiros should appear to them. Even for the gods, the faces of the Endless were as manifold as their kingdoms, and as mutable as mankind. Their faces cleared, and then, he turned from her to Richard Madoc, still smiling.
“I think you’ll sleep well tonight,” he decided.