Chapter Three:  The Ink Wells Dry

In the bloodless, faintly apologetic prose that banks usually reserve for informing you of your own upcoming extinction: the shop’s line of credit would be called in unless the overdue repayment balance was resolved within sixty days.

Localad read it behind the counter, then folded it back into its envelope as if that might undo it, and put it in the drawer with the register tape and the spare keys, where he could pretend, for a few hours at a time, that it wasn't ever there.

Harbour & Page had just sixty days to resolve the outstanding balance on its current line of credit. “Resolve” was a magnificent word. It suggests a calm discussion around a table, with cups of tea and perhaps a mediator. What it really meant though, was: produce the money now, or become an instant memory.

Localad read the letter twice.

Then he folded it into the smallest possible rectangle, placed it back beneath the spare keys, and spent the next six hours being exceptionally useful to everyone except himself.

He fixed Mrs. Alvarez’s toaster.

He found a first edition for a retired teacher.

He repaired a shelf in the History section which had been collapsing under the ever-increasing quantities of scholar recorded calendar entries of times gone by.

Sixty days. He did the math the way he had always done the math lately, badly, and with his eyes half closed. And every time, he arrived nowhere good. The summer tourist season had been thinner than the one before it, which had been thinner than the one before that. A big chain bookstore had opened forty minutes up the coast with an inbuilt café, piped music along with a wall of new releases and prices Harbour Page couldn't even hope to begin to match, in the same way that a rowboat cannot begin to compete with a cruise ship, even in matters of buoyancy.

Loyal customers still came in though — Mrs. Alvarez, Mr. Okafor, a retired schoolteacher who bought large-print mysteries by the armful, as though stockpiling for a siege. But there simply weren't enough of them, and hadn't been for a long time, and Localad had been running the shop for the last two years the way a man bails out a boat he already knows is going down. Not because he thinks it will ever stay afloat, but because stopping doing so, feels like agreeing to drown.

At lunch, he stood at the window eating a sandwich and watched two cars fighting over a single parking spot with the moral seriousness of nations disputing oil.

The town simply continued on.

This seemed rude.

Meridian Cove had developed elaborate methods of surviving decline without ever acknowledging it. The old disused cinema quickly became a discount furniture warehouse but retained the word PALACE above its doors. The post office opened only three afternoons a week, depending on staffing, weather and whether Norman the postmaster had found his keys that day. The council also installed a heritage plaque on a park bench because actually repairing the dilapidated old relic would have cost more.

Harbour & Page was simply the latest institution to become historic while still technically alive.

He didn't tell Marjory about the letter for a week. When he finally did, over a coffee at her kitchen table while her shop's delivery van idled outside with the anxious wheeze of an elderly accordion. She didn't say anything for a while, just turned her mug slowly in her hands.

"You could sell," she said eventually. "The building alone—"

"It was my grandfather's."

"I know."

"And my father's."

"I know that too, I attended both men’s funerals, Localad. I have retained the broad plot.”

He looked away.

Marjory reached across the table and put her hand over his, which she did rarely enough that it always caught him off guard. Not because she lacked warmth, but because she simply distrusted such gestures that announced themselves.

"I'm not telling you to sell it,” she said. “I'm telling you the building is not your father. The shop is not your grandfather. And failing to save every last object they ever touched is not the same as failing them.”

“It feels like it.”

“Yes. Feelings can be very persuasive like that. But so are real-estate agents. Neither is automatically right though.”

He smiled despite himself.

“It's allowed to be hard, and you're allowed to not have an answer yet."

“Sixty days,” he said.

“Then we have sixty days.”

“We?”

“Don’t be irritating.”

He didn't have an answer. What he had, instead, was Purradise. He returned to the manuscript that night because Purradise did not have banks. It had curses, blood oaths and several predatory moons, but nothing so needlessly frightening as compound interest. Purradise did not care about interest rates or sixty-day notices, and so, he retreated into it with a hunger that frightened him a little when he was honest with himself. Writing had always been an escape for him. Now it felt like the only room in the house that wasn't on fire.

And then, for two straight weeks in early spring, he couldn't write at all.

The words had stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped.

It happened without warning, the way these things often do. He sat down one night at the kitchen table, opened to the page where Jasmine stood at the base of the Wound in the sky with her sister's sword in her hand, and found that he had nothing. The sky waited. The page waited. Localad’s pen waited with the professional patience of an executioner.

Nothing came.

For two weeks he tried everything.

He changed pens.

He changed chairs.

It wasn’t writer's block in the small, ordinary sense; not a missing word, a stuck scene, but a total, flooding silence where the story used to be. He tried writing in the shop, the apartment, at the harbour café and once in Marjory’s stockroom between two crates of lilies, where he discovered that despair smells strongly of damp earth and flower food.

He stared at the page until the letters became blurred. He tried starting the scene in five different ways. He tried skipping ahead. He tried going back and re-reading everything he'd written, hoping it would prime the well, and instead found himself hating half of it, suddenly certain that none of it was good, that he had spent twenty years building a world that existed only because he was too much of a coward to build a real life for himself instead.

This is one of the special powers of terror: it can convert a once beloved manuscript into damning piece of evidence for the prosecution.

He knew, distantly, that the timing wasn't a coincidence either. The bank letter sat in the drawer. The shop's numbers didn't improve. His body, apparently, had already decided that there wasn't room for two kinds of dread at once, and it had chosen the wrong one to keep.

He went to the shop each day and did his job with a kind of hollow competence, smiling at customers, restocking shelves, making small talk about the weather, and came home each night to a blank note book that felt, increasingly, like an accusation. Internally, a small committee had assembled to discuss whether he had ever possessed talent at all.

"OK, talk to me," Marjory said, the third time she found him staring at nothing over dinner.

"I don't know what's wrong with me."

“You’re frightened.”

“Of the bank?”

"Of finishing.”

"Of finding out it isn't enough." She said it gently, but she said it plainly, the way she said most things, and he sat with it for a long moment because it was, infuriatingly, exactly right. If he finished the book and it was good, that would mean something. If he finished it and it wasn't, that would mean something else, something he wasn't sure he could survive believing about himself. That the one thing he'd protected for twenty years, the one proof he had that there was more in him than a man who inherited a failing bookstore and kept its lights on out of guilt, was nothing after all.

“I need to finish.”

“Yes. That’s why you’re frightened.”

He stared at the dark shelves.

Marjory sat beside him, arranging her skirt with practical annoyance.

“What happens if the book is bad?” she asked.

“Then I wasted twenty years.”

“No. You spent twenty years making a book that turned out bad. Those are different tragedies.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It isn’t meant to help. It’s meant to be true.”

She leaned her head back against a shelf of heroic quests.

“You think the book has to prove your life wasn’t small,” she said. “That is far too much work for one book. Particularly a book with singing mountains ruled by cats.”

“They’re important to the cosmology.”

“I’m sure they have a union.”

He laughed. The sound surprised him.

"So, what do I do?"

"You finish it anyway," she said. "Not because you're not scared. Because you're scared and you do it anyway. That's the only version of brave that actually exists. You write the bad version."

“I don’t want a bad version.”

“Nobody does. And that’s why it’s available.”

He didn't write that night. But two nights later, he opened the note book again, and instead of trying to write the perfect version of Jasmine's scene at the Wound, he wrote the worst possible ending, deliberately, freely, telling himself he could throw it away in the morning.

Jasmine delivered an unnecessary speech. The Wound shimmered vaguely. A knight said, “At last, it is over,” although it plainly was not.

It was dreadful.

It was also finished.

Localad read it, winced, and began correcting it.

He didn't throw it away in the morning. It wasn't perfect. But it moved, and after two weeks of silence, movement felt like a small, ugly miracle, the kind you don't dare examine too closely in case it evaporates.

The well had not been empty after all.

It had merely been waiting for him to stop demanding bottled perfection before it would provide water.

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