The Silenced Tale, стр. 8
“Do we have your permission to put the replica up and note it as such?” the curator asks, being annoyingly thorough with whatever checklist she’s clearly got on her end.
“What will you tell people about the one I donated?” Elgar asks back.
He can’t exactly hear her shrug, but it’s clear in her voice when she replies: “Well, you know, artifacts have to be taken out of displays all the time, to be cleaned, or repaired, or repatriated.”
“I’m not a nation asking for my plundered antiques back,” Elgar hisses, a strange frisson of fear at the memory of the machine’s disappearance crawling up his spine.
“Honestly, no one will kick up a fuss that it’s not the original,” the curator soothes. “Until we find it, this is the best we’ve got. Is it okay?”
“Yeah,” Elgar agrees. “Right. Yeah.” Because what else can he really add?
He almost tells her not to waste their resources looking for an artifact they’ll never recover, but decides against it. What can he say, anyway? “Oh, I spoke with one of my fictional characters via email, and he told me that the Viceroy’s weather witch mother sucked it into the novels I wrote and destroyed it in a twisted plot for vengeance.”
No.
Fantasy writers are given leeway to be eccentric, but there’s a line. And talking about your characters as if they’re real people in the real world is where it’s drawn. Even if you are talking to your characters because they’re real people in the real world.
Instead, he gives the museum’s scheme his blessing, promises not to talk about the theft publicly (but also not to deny it if the truth comes out), and then spends the rest of the afternoon dutifully scritching Linux as he backs up all his work by emailing the digital proofs to his own address. True, it puts them one step closer to letting hackers at the manuscripts, but one step further away from losing everything forever in case of . . .
Well, just in case.
Maybe Elgar only notices the man in black because he’s already unsettled and jumping at shadows. Maybe it’s all the paranoia over the loss of his typewriter. Maybe it’s the fear of the Deal-Maker magic that has proven—twice—that it can reach into this world and snatch out anything, or anyone, it wants. Or maybe it’s just because he’s seen the man in black out of the corner of his eye enough times that it now constitutes a pattern, and Elgar’s brain has finally started paying attention to it.
But when he leaves the house to fetch some groceries for dinner, he realizes he’s being watched. And as that revelation trickles down into his brain, it’s followed with the grains of another: that someone’s been watching him for weeks now.
Elgar doesn’t have much reason to leave his house. He’s rarely there on weekends because he usually ends up at conventions then, leaving Thursdays and coming home Mondays. And the weekends that aren’t spent surrounded by the glory of nerds who love his work and hotties in skimpy cosplay, he tends to fly up to visit his new family. It’s only a forty-minute direct flight, and, adding the commute to the airport on this end, and the commute to the Piper household in Victoria on the other, he can go from his front door to Forsyth’s in roughly two hours.
Juan takes care of the house when Elgar’s away—feeding Linux, sorting the mail, even mowing the lawn and taking care of the minimal landscaping—and often has groceries and ready-made meals carefully labeled in the fridge when Elgar gets back. Elgar’s pre-diabetic, and Juan takes it very seriously that his boss eat right.
He also gets a bit histrionic in that flaming, limp-wristed way that twinks like him get when Elgar doesn’t get up and go for a walk at least once a day. He’s started to threaten a treadmill-desk, which would make Linux spectacularly unhappy, so Elgar is trying to do better. He’s even asked Juan to make him fewer meals so he’ll have the excuse of walking to the grocery store six blocks away.
And it’s taken him about five visits now to realize that every time he does, a man dressed all in black is sitting on the bench outside the shop.
It could be a coincidence. In fact, it probably is a coincidence.
There are lots of people who have reasons to be in the same place at roughly the same time every day. The homeless guy who opens the doors for him at the monorail station, for example. Or the same three baristas he sees at the SeaTac airport every time he flies. There are also an equal number of reasons for people to dress all in black—a lot of retail shops ask employees to dress in monochrome, and one of Elgar’s writing buddies only wears black because he says it’s easier to make sure his wardrobe never clashes.
Maybe this particular man in black is waiting for his wife to finish work in the grocery store at this time every afternoon. Maybe he’s a businessman on a break, enjoying the outdoor air. Maybe, like Elgar, he works from home, and he comes to this bench to people-watch for an hour.
Except now that Elgar’s noticed the man, it feels like his eyes are burning brands into the back of his neck. It feels like he’s . . . not staring. It’s more than staring. It’s harder, somehow, more intrusive. Pervasive. Intense. Gimlet.
It’s possible that this man is a fan of The Tales of Kintyre Turn, and he recognizes Elgar. Maybe. But shouldn’t the stare feel less like a blow to the back of the head, then? Maybe he’s a reporter looking to trap Elgar into giving him a scoop about the show?
No, now he’s just being a