The Scrimshaw Muse

Jacob Willis examined the goods laid out on the hastily erected table set in the parlor of the rundown apartment. Various household goods were arranged neatly, each with a pre-printed price sticker affixed. Jacob cast about for any items that looked decently interesting, but nothing caught his eye. One of Jacob’s favorite authors had recently died and he was here to get a glimpse into the man’s life, if only through his belongings. Alex Keyes was an author who produced some fascinating works of fiction in his day. Sadly, it looked like Jacob’s literary idol had lived a life of dreariness.

Keyes wrote dozens of short stories in his early days, but few were ever purchased or published. But after some time, he’d honed his craft and produced his magnum opus, The Fall of the Betrayed. It was a darkly suspenseful story about greed and lust and had an overall supernatural bent to it. Keyes developed exceptional characters that inhabited a magical world.

Jacob’s writing career tracked very closely to Keyes’ early days. His published short stories gained him enough notoriety that he had established a small fan base. He had yet to produce anything of any great import. Try as he might, he could not put the story to the page. He had the ideas, but they forever remained in his imagination. Jacob hoped he could find something in Keyes’ meager belongings that would give him some inspiration.

Jacob couldn’t help but feel a distinct sense of disheartenment as he perused the shabby apartment. The walls were coated in a greasy patina of cigarette smoke residue and shafts of light from the torn blinds speared the floating dust. What furniture that was left was battered torn and stained from years of use. Jacob saw that his idol had indeed come to hard times. He did not realize until now just how badly those times had broken him. It looked to Jacob that Keyes’ had given up. That he was merely existing, and no longer living a life.

Jacob could understand his idol's downturn in life. Keyes’ young wife and daughter were slaughtered in this very home. While Keyes was away on a book tour, a murderer assaulted the wife before slitting her throat. The police suspected that the daughter was slain to keep her from identifying the killer.

The police, and pundits, considered Keyes to be the prime suspect in the killings. Neighbors reported the couple fought bitterly and loudly. Keyes stormed out of the home and kept away for days at a time. The prime reason they suspected Keyes was the latest story had too many similarities to the events surrounding the murders. Critics held that Keyes’ wrote the story as a blueprint for the murders. Keyes’ only defense was that he was states away on a book tour. His movements were accounted for and the police were forced to look elsewhere for a suspect. They eventually fingered a vagrant who had been hanging around the neighborhood and claimed he’d been watching the young wife and knew that the husband was not at home. After that, it seemed as if the wind was knocked out of the writer. Time went by and he was forgotten. Fans assumed he had died.

But he hadn’t died. Not until now. The story goes that he had died in this very flat, sprawled in his easy chair. He was found by his landlord, looking for the late rent. Jacob had heard the stories and with a macabre sense of awe had hoped to find the chair amongst the furnishings being sold. To his chagrin, it was not among the items in the flat.

Kitchen items were laid out on the kitchen counter. Bedroom items were laid out on tables in the bedroom. The office items were laid out on the expansive writing desk. Jacob had no interest in the mundane flotsam and jetsam and he left that to the other rummage sale folks. His disappointment in the lack of interesting items was profound as he perused the offerings. Ordinary items littered the desk. An ancient Smith Corona in fair condition took up residence on the center of the desk, among the various mundane office supplies. He rifled through desk drawers searching for valuable wares, but none were found.

In one drawer, he found a key. It was amongst a mass of rubber bands in the top drawer. The key looked old and of the type to lock a case. Could it fit the typewriter case? He checked it and found that it didn’t fit. He looked around the room and noticed that there was a small wing chair in the corner. Next to it was a table draped with a stained cloth. Jacob lifted the cloth and found an old steamer trunk with a locked clasp. He fit the key into the lock and it turned.

Inside the chest, he found numerous boxes the size and shape of a ream of typewriter paper, and manila envelopes, all neatly arranged within the trunk. There must have been a dozen boxes in there and even more manilla envelopes. He removed the top boxes and read the neatly printed labels. The titles of the works were familiar to Jacob. He knew of them and had read most of them. But there were several that he had never heard of. He was astonished to find a box labeled with the title of the book that was attributed to his family’s murder. Jacob felt a sudden elation. This must be the manuscript of that book. He lifted the box out of the chest, and it rattled a bit. When he opened it, he found a black-cased pen atop the pages of the manuscript. Jacob was enthralled. He was an aficionado of fountain pens and had several of his own. This was a fountain pen that was from one of his favorite authors. He shuffled through some of the pages of the manuscript in which the pen was found and examined the pen itself.

At first glance, the pen appeared to be ancient. The shaft and matching cap were turned from what seemed to be bone with etched designs that reminded him of scrimshaw. He pulled the cap off to inspect the tip. It was thin like a whip blade, but well formed. Jacob lightly shook the pen and heard a subtle sloshing noise indicating that the ink was still liquid. He’d assumed that the ink had dried as there was no leakage onto the manuscripts.

Tentatively, he tested the pen against a page of the manuscript. He turned to the blank back of the first page and scribbled a sentence. He then compared his scribble to that found on the manuscript and to his admittedly untrained eye, that the two matched in thickness and density. This was the pen that the writer used to author his works.

This was an astounding find. He must have it.

He was in the process of placing the paper back into the box when he caught sight of a curious thing. The scribble that Jacob used to test the pen wasn’t a scribble. It was a full sentence. A sentence that he had not thought he had written.

The sentence read, in neat orderly cursive letters, Hello Jacob Jacob, it seems like it’s been an eternity, but I have finally found you.

Jacobs’ heart skipped a beat and he let out a little yelp. He hadn’t written that he was certain. Or maybe he had. He wasn’t so certain of it. The sentence was more than a little daunting and it cut through his initial elation. Now he wasn’t so sure that he didn’t want to drop everything and run from the building. With considerable effort, he took a deep breath and calmed himself down.

“Ayeeee,” the clerk exclaimed as he threw the pen down. “I think it bit me,” he added, clearly startled. He looked at his fingertip, then placed it in his mouth and sucked. The clerk had been handling each of Jacob’s purchases as he itemized them for the sale.

Jacob caught sight of the pen as it landed in the box. A bright bit of color darkened the pale scrimshaw of the pen barrel. A crimson blot stained the barrel near the nib end. As he watched, the stain faded, and appeared to soak into the course material. The clerk was too engrossed in his finger to notice the happenings of the pen.

“The thing cut me,” he accused. “It sliced my finger wide open,” he said as he proffered his finger for Jacob’s inspection. “Those splinters are sharp. You don’t want that, do you?” he asked again.

“I’m sorry for your injury, but that is not the fault of the pen,” Jacob replied. “See, there are no splinters or hard edges. It’s as smooth as a marble,” he said as he displayed it in his gloved hand for the clerk to see.

The pen was in fact smooth and clean. The barrel and its matching cap now appeared to be made of a heavily lacquered bone. The nib gleamed like newly polished brass.

The clerk examined the pen. “The thing cut me,” he said petulantly as he completed the sale.

***

Jacob did not like writing his stories on the computer like every other author in the world. He found that when he wrote that way, he spent too much effort self-editing and correcting as he typed and it took him out of the story and out of his head. He preferred to use a pen on paper and just write. He liked to write in shorthand and let the story flow to the page. Any errors were later corrected in editing. But for the initial draft, it was pen and paper for him.

Jacob performed a full examination of Keyes’s fountain pen, cleaning the tool, and was surprised to find he did not need to refill the bladder, as it was full of purplish-colored ink. He was a little hesitant when he pulled a blank page from Keyes’ trunk stash of paper. He knew he was reluctant to use this particular pen once again. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for any new startling revelations.

He felt an odd sense of satisfaction with using the pen and the paper from his one-time favorite author and acknowledged its “rightness”. He placed the tip of the pen to the paper and waited for inspiration. And he waited some more. Suddenly, the pen twitched in his hand of its own volition.

“At last!” he wrote. Except he did not write that. His hand held the pen and the pen tip pressed to the paper, but he did not move the pen.

“What the,” Jacob began.

The pen moved once again. Jacob was startled but managed to keep a grip on the item as it writhed in his grasp. The sensation was uncanny.

“Hello Jacob,” the pen scratched out on the paper.

Jacob fought the urge to send the pen flying across the room.

He examined the pen with renewed intensity, searching for any anomaly that he missed on his first examination. He unscrewed the barrel and slipped out the contents. There was nothing there but the bladder. He had expected to find some sort of mechanism to account for the movement. Maybe it was a novelty tech gadget that was built to do just that. Some sort of magician’s pen trick.

“This must be some sort of joke,” Jacob said aloud.

The pen vibrated in his hand. Quickly he reassembled the thing and touched the tip to the paper.

“Ah, that’s better,” the pen scribbled.

“What are you?” Jacob asked aloud.

“I’m your cure for writer’s block.”

“What?”

“You have a great story inside you. You just have to let it out. You are blocked, emotionally, because you do not believe in your talents. Your mind is your own worst enemy. You do not believe that what you have to say is any good, and you do not believe that you can tell the story that is any good,” the pen scratched furiously and produced a string of jittery symbols. The writing was in shorthand.

“I don’t believe it,” Jacob admitted.

The pen wiggled in his hand once again. “You will, in time. All you have to do is hold me and put my tip on the page and I’ll do the rest.”

“Can you write my stories for me?”

“No, not at all. As I said, I merely remove your emotional blocks. What you write when you hold me is all from you, just like any other pen. The difference is that you believe I can do this for you.”

“So it’s all psychosomatic? I believe therefore I achieve?”

“If that’s what you like, then yes.”

Then a thought struck Jacob. “Were you Keyes’ muse?”

The pen seemed to hesitate a moment before coming to life. “I know only what you know, Jacob. I have no memory of my own. I can feel your mind and see what you imagine, and I bring it out of your subconscious. At least that’s what I think I do, because that’s what you think I do.”

“Of course,” Jacob mused to himself. “That’s why Keyes rose to such great fame. He didn’t produce his greatest works until he found you.”

“That sounds like a great story. Tell me all about it,” the pen scratched.

***

Jacob wrote for hours at a time. At first, he felt an elation as the story unfolded through his pen. The narrative flowed naturally, the characters were robust, and the images were vivid. Jacob was so entranced with the visions that he felt like a spectator watching a movie in an empty theater. He caught every image on paper and described the action vividly.

Jacob preferred action and adventure and far-reaching space sagas. He’d eschewed horror and dark thrillers, both in novels and movies. Such stories evoked emotions he did not enjoy. After a while, Jacob noticed that the images in his mind became darker and profoundly sinister. The more he wrote, the more his thoughts drifted to the darkness.

Writing itself became trancelike. When he was in the thrall of writing, images came unbidden and like many a bad dream, he had to struggle to throw off the pall. More than once he startled from the trance and found himself in a cold sweat and panting heavily. Hours had passed and he had no recollection of events other than the visions. His hand cramped painfully and his hands were stained from the ruddy ink as it smeared on the page.

There were days when Jacob couldn’t bear to take up the pen. The very act of writing evoked strong revulsion.

For a time, Jacob tried using a different pen. He had a large collection and chose one at random. He held it expectantly, tip to paper, and waited. Eventually, inspiration came and he began to write. He waited for the trance to come, but it never came. Under the trance, the words flowed effortlessly. Without the trance, the words came out haltingly and laboriously. The sentences were incomplete, the imagery was muddled, the characters were flat and the plot went nowhere. Jacob threw the replacement pen away with disgust and picked up Keyes’ pen one more time.

***

“I can’t accept this,” Larry Saxon said, tossing the manuscript on the desk before Jacob. “It’s too bland. Too cliche. Your fans will hate you for it. And frankly, nobody will buy it.”

Jacob nodded morosely. “Well, I tried,” he muttered to himself. Then he continued. “Science Fiction has been in my bones since I was a kid. I could scarcely dream of anything else. I ate up all the stuff that the great authors could produce. It is the manna that I eat. It’s the ambrosia that I drink. I aspired to produce stories to equal the greats. I had them in me, I could feel it.”

“You were great, once upon a time,” Saxon agreed. “But not that great. You were good enough to sell a few books though. You should be proud of that.”

“Are you conducive to a change of genre? Do you think you can sell Horror?” he asked.

“What have you got?” Saxon asked suspiciously as Jacob produced a second manuscript from his satchel.

***

“This is great stuff,” Larry Saxon proclaimed. “You haven’t written anything this good in years.”

“You’ll publish it?” Jacob asked with trepidation.

“It’ll be the pride of our catalog,” Saxon crowed.

Jacob smiled weakly.

“You don’t look so well. Are you all right?” Saxon asked.

Jacob was startled. “Yes, I’m fine. I’ve just been working a lot.”

“This new book, it’s very dark,” Saxon said. “It’s darker than anything you’ve done before.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. What are you getting at?” Jacob replied, with some heat.

Saxon backed off. “It’s just that it may have taken a toll on you.”

“You’re my publisher, not my therapist,” Jacob bit back.