Chapter Four:  The Final Chapter

Localad finishes the book, titles it Purradise, and prints a single physical copy.

Localad finished Purradise on a Tuesday at eleven-fourteen in the evening, although for years afterward he would remember it better as midnight, purely because midnight is when important things are supposed to happen and eleven-fourteen just sounds like a delayed bus.

The harbour was quiet with the shop closed up below him and the kettle had already boiled dry twice.

Jasmine stood before the Wound, her sister’s sword in her hand and the ghost of her sister standing behind her.

For twenty years Localad had believed the choice was between the sword and the sister. He had been wrong. The sword was not grief. The sword was what grief had taught her to carry. Her sister did not ask her to put it down. The dead, Localad finally understood, do not always demand that the living remain ruined in their honour. That is usually just the living speaking on their behalf.

Jasmine kept the sword.

She released the debt.

Localad wrote the final sentence:

The Wound did not close. It simply ceased to be the only thing in the sky.

Then there were no more words required.

He sat very still.

Finishing did not feel like the huge triumph it was meant to be. Trumpets did not appear. No committee arrived with a certificate. It felt like putting down a heavy box and discovering that his arms had been shaking for years.

He counted the pages because for Localad, counting was a safe activity. Four hundred and thirty-one. And his handwriting had changed across them all. Early pages leaned inward, apologetic and cramped. Later pages stretched. And by the end, the words appeared to trust the paper.

At eleven-thirty that night, he telephoned Marjory.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Someone had better be dead!”

“I FINISHED IT!”

Silence. Then: “Completely?”

“Yes.”

“No secret missing chapter? No seven-page note saying ‘insert emotional resolution here’?”

“No.”

“Read me the last line.”

He did.

Marjory was quiet again, but this silence was different. It had a definite warmth in it.

“Damn, that’s really good,” she said.

Localad closed his eyes. Marjory did not say things were good merely to keep them alive. Flowers, people and municipal Christmas decorations all received her honest assessment.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Type it up!”

The shop’s only computer had been purchased as a tax write off when computers were beige, specifically slow, practically enormous and faintly disapproving of their owners. It literally wheezed into action when asked to open two programs at once and displayed error messages with the grave confidence of scripture.

It took Localad just under nine days to type it all up. Along the way, he corrected some spellings, removed three obsolete speeches and discovered that one of his fallen knights had changed names halfway through chapter twenty-six, which the knight had apparently accepted without any formal complaint.

When the manuscript was finished, he sent it off to a printer two towns inland and ordered only a single hardback copy for himself.

“Only the one?” the printer asked to double-check the order.

“Just one.”

“An Author Proof, is it?”

“Something like that.”

The book arrived at the shop ten days later wrapped in brown paper.

Localad waited until closing. Harbour Page seemed to watch as he opened it. The shelves settled. The pipes quietened. Even the cracked bell, briefly relieved of responsibility, said nothing.

The cover was matte black.

PURRADISE.

And beneath it, his name.

Localad touched the letters with one finger. A name on a book is a very small monument, but people have crossed deserts for less.

He opened it up to the first page and read. For the first whole minute he allowed himself to believe it was good. Then the till drawer stuck, the rear light flickered and an unpaid invoice slid from beneath the register like a guilty thought.

Morning remained under contract; there was work to be done. Localad placed the book behind the counter beside his father’s photograph, his grandmother’s coffee mug and a lighthouse paperweight nobody ever remembered buying.

He locked up the shop. This was to be the last uncomplicated night of his life for some time. For the universe, which is generally a patient kind of guy with ordinarily shy people, but not indefinitely so I must add, had already arranged him a broken-down car for the morning.

Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning.