The Playing Gods
The great arrogance of the artist is the presumption that they alone are to play God in the world of their creation.
~*~
There was a balance, Grey decided, in the depth of one’s soul when they sat before a blank, open anything. The paper before her gleamed white in the dull lighting of her bedroom; it felt soft and pliant beneath her fingertips. She smoothed out it slowly, enjoying the pages silky texture and marveling at how cool it felt to the touch. This, she knew, was a type of magic.
All of her pieces began like this, sitting cross legged on her bedroom floor before several pristine reams of paper, a decrepit notebook at her side filled to bursting with her innumerable characters. A variety of pens, pencils and markers sat in neat rows beside the new paper, arranged by color, blacks to one side, silvers bordering the other and a rainbow of color exploding across the distance between the two extremes.
The familiarity of setting centered Grey, balanced her and freed her to let her mind wander. Sometimes she felt as though she barely controlled her own hands as they wandered to and fro over a page, covering its pale expanses with words, hundreds of thousands of words that somehow, together created a story.
This story, the living, breathing tale sheltered within her mind held promise as she’s never seen before. She knew, from some well of wisdom deep within her, that this would be the tale that changed her life.
Savoring that thought, she stretched out onto her stomach and began to write. First came the character’s profiles, copied painstakingly out of her notebook and filed away within the pristine safety of her alphabetized binder. Next, she organized the chapters by content and gave each one a working title, somehow representative of it’s purpose, to remind her as she wrote.
Finally, she pulled a clean, white piece of paper to her and wrote, in her most artistic cursive, Faith to the Blind: The Children of Sinners, the title of her book to be. Beneath it, she printed her own name, her real, full name, Margaret Grey Archer, and left a space suitable for another name beneath it before filling in the rest of the title page. She had no idea who her characters would be, what plot she would use; but she had set the groundwork, seen her duties through to their end. Grinning, she set the page aside and reached for her phone.
~*~
Virgil named them. He came immediately, already at her door before she finished dialing his number, as though some preternatural force called him and ascended the stairs to her room with a fervor that bordered on dementia.
Grey welcomed the anomaly of his presence. She expected it. And there were times, like today, that she depended on it.
When Grey wrote, she brought her characters to life. She animated them, clothed them and set them about everyday tasks for no better reason than to understand them more completely.
But her abilities, stunning though there were in scope, ended there. No matter how compelling, how complete and well rounded, she struggled to lift her faceless creations from the page. For years she struggled in silence, desperate to free the voices within her head.
Then came Virgil. Now her fried on nearly seven years and compatriot in more than twice as many novels, Virgil walked into her life in their freshman year of high school, a stringy, nerdy kid and perfect fodder for every insult known to teenagers.
Grey smiled at the memories as she watched him rifle through the papers on her bedroom floor, disturbing her quiet sanctuary as only he could. In the early days she recalled her scant tolerance for his antics and nuances, her brusque words and cold behavior. Little by little, though, his personality, deceptively powerful for so small a boy, won her over.
Their creative collaborations both published and not, spanned nearly a decade, beginning just after he finally cracked her frigid defensive shell and revealed his knack for naming characters. Suddenly this eccentric boy opened hundreds of hidden doorways locked away within her innumerable character notebooks. The creations she struggled to maneuver came to life, and her creative talent ran away with her.
Between the two of them, books came and went like birds, shifting with the seasons, their uncanny abilities lending themselves to different areas of the creative process.
And Gray knew, in her heart of hearts, that she would never have it any other way.
Still smiling, she crossed the room to sit beside him and see who he stared so intently at.
Oh yes, she thought, her. Nameless and without a history, the girl on the page stared back at her, a portrait of words and symbols, her dreaded short hand and a clumsy sketch. Brown haired and dignified, with a strong nose and powerful cheekbones and hollow, pained eyes, she knew this woman to be her protagonist. Something about the profile, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the downturned lines of her mouth, told Grey that this story needed to be told.
“Ismene,” Virgil suddenly announced. “You should call her Ismene. Don’t you think she looks like an Ismene?”
Quite frankly, Grey could see no clues in the woman’s brief profile that indicated any name, one way or another, but years of listening to Virgil’s council taught her to nod, smile and hold her peace.
“And him,” the boy beside her continued, “He could be your Creon.”
She began to see where he was taking this. “Oedipus Rex?” she asked, incredulous. “Hasn’t that been done by, y’know, the master?”
“This is different,” he insisted. “Tell Antigone from Ismene’s perspective; continue it after the end of the play and tell the story of a Thebes at war with itself,” he turned to her expectantly, an eager smile splitting his face.
She smiled back, unsure of what else she could do. “Yes,” she replied, pushing away the uncertainty that gnawed at the back of her mind. “Yes that will do marvelously.”
~*~
Three weeks later, Grey dreamed for the first time since beginning her new novel. The dream itself caught her off guard, like a long forgotten friend whose calls she perennially failed to return, mostly because Grey never remembered her dreams. She knew when they came, and when the particularly droll or unusual ones passed through, but she never recalled their exact content from night to night. Each morning she awoke, often disoriented, with the feeling that she wore a fine gauze veil over her face.
Tonight, however, she knew quite clearly that this dream was new. Her surroundings fairly glowed with clarity and she knew, somehow, that none of her other dreams felt so real. She reached out in awe to run her hand along the masonry beside her, wondering at the detailed carvings inscribed within the stone. Heroes armed with swords, spears and shields charged terrible monsters on fields already wet with their comrade’s blood.
The mural continued the length of the hall, and she followed it to the end, until her eyes found slanting lights filtering through the columns of the open garden before her. Like the wall, the garden shone with a baffling radiance, as though the flowers were lit from within. Directly in front of her, at the center of a circle of hedges, a figure sat, hunched over itself as though in pain and rocking back and forth, sobbing desolately.
Realization hit Grey like a physical blow. The familiarity of the scene and the clarity of her dream made sense, now. The panorama before her came straight out of her most recent writings, the lines she fell asleep while writing. Her familiarity with the subject matter must have lent clarity to her dream.
Relieved, she stepped fully into the light to bask in her creation. She had taken no more than two steps, however, before the hunched figure on the bench straightened quickly and whipped around.
Grey froze, her suspicions confirmed in the brief glance. She saw the detailed profiles, the straight, sensible nose, high cheek bones and will minded hair of exactly the character she predicted. Ismene. Mourning the death’s of her entire family alone, even as her uncle wept bitterly within the palace walls.
This was her scene. Exactly as she imagined it, exactly as she wrote it. Perfect as though a painter applied her very thoughts to canvass.
So taken was she by the sight of the garden, she almost forgot Ismene’s presence- until, of course, she turned around.
The Ismene in her dream turned slowly, her red, irritated eyes scouring the promenade. When they found Grey, however, her expression shifted from confusion, to anger, to comprehension and finally to a bone chilling emptiness that left Gray thinking of that first night, with Virgil, when they first named this girl.
She stared, as though unsure of what to make of Grey. “You’re the Strange One.”
Grey blinked in surprise and opened her mouth to defend her obvious normality to this dream creature, only to find her voice utterly gone, replaced with a nothingness that moved air uselessly through her throat.
“You brought this on yourself,” this Ismene declared, rising. A little of the color trickled back into her hollow cheeks and she glared at Grey with a halfhearted vehemence that struck the young author as the terrible loneliness of losing an entire family.
She rose to her feet with a single jerking leap and turned on her heel, coffee colored ringlets bouncing frantically behind her as she made her way hastily out of the garden.
Grey had time only to step forward in an attempt to catch up before the ground bucked beneath her feet and sent her sprawling into a pitch dark pit, from which she woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed.
Breathing heavily, Grey thought back to her dream. She focused for a moment and the memory came rushing back to her, as she had known it would.
She shuddered and rolled off the couch, checking the clock on the mantle. It read 2:15 in cheerful blue numbers. She rolled her shoulders restlessly and listened for sounds of moment throughout the house. Silence told her that her family still slept, undisturbed by her dream. That was good, Grey thought. She needed to write undisturbed.
~*~
The next day found Grey cranky and sore, up all night after her strange dream. Even stranger, she recalled every moment with uncanny clarity, more vividly event than her waking memories.
She spent her frustration by weaving each recollection into her story, finally winding up with a scene that took her breath away with its clarity. Yet despite her triumph, she felt uneasy, as though the dream represented only a fraction of her story’s oddity. Earlier that morning, at what she had deemed the earliest reasonable hour, she had e-mail Virgil the details of her dream. He replied that she should do as she did, and weave the details into her story, but even to her ears he sounded skeptical.
Irritated with her own skittishness, Gray stood, shaking sleep from limbs that had curled in front of her laptop’s screen since early that morning. Still stretching slowly, she made her way to the kitchen.
The hall clocked chimed eight o’clock with the cheerful diligence of a household appliance as she walked past.
Grey turned the corner to enter her kitchen and screamed.
Hanging not four feet from where she stood was the body of a girl – a stranger- clothed in a dress better suited to the gods on Olympus than anyone living in 21st century America. Her face, long since purpled by asphyxiation, twisted into a horrible grimace frozen into place by death. She slowly rotated above the dining room table until she faced Gray, looking down at her with empty, bulging eyes that moved with a sudden, wrenching effort to focus on the girl and blinked as the mouth turned up into a horrible caricature of a smile.
Grey ran shrieking from the room and stumbled down the hall, crashing into walls as she went. Her brother came first, woken by her ruckus. Her mother and sisters followed suit, flooding out of their rooms to check on her, frantic concern written onto their features.
She collapsed into a corner, gibbering and pointing until her father, finally roused by the pandemonium, lumbered out of his room and into the kitchen to investigate. He returned moments later to tell her that she was obviously sleepwalking, or having some horrible walking nightmare, because the kitchen was quite empty and perfectly clean, and he was going back to bed thank-you-very-much.
Grey stayed where she was, ignoring her brother and sister’s well intentioned comments and her mother’s soothing touch on her forehead. Finally she stood and walked carefully back towards the kitchen, her mother following. Gingerly she peeked around the corner and saw – nothing. The kitchen remained as empty and obstinately clean as it had the night before, resolutely empty of dead bodies.
She studiously ignored her mother’s continuous questions after her well being and strode back down the hall to her room, where she pulled her worn copy of the works of Sophocles from the shelf and thumbed through them until she found the girl’s name: Antigone. The sister of her doomed protagonist; the woman who hanged herself in defiance to her uncle’s cruel edict.
“I told you that you brought this upon yourself,” a thin voice sighed behind her.
Slowly Grey closed the book and turned around, dreading what she would find. Sure enough, there sat Ismene, dressed exactly as she had been in the dream.
“Why do I keep seeing you,” Grey asked in a cracking voice, more of herself than of her character.
“Some stories should never be told,” Ismene replied, standing up and walking towards the door, a wan smile painted on her pale, unsympathetic face. “Leave us be.”
With that she was gone, around the door frame and down the hallway, or wherever else she came from before Grey made it to the door.
Thoroughly shaken, she reached for her phone and dialed Virgil’s cell. Her called rolled to voicemail and she hung up without leaving a message and called his house with hands that shook. His mother answered the phone and told her that Virgil was in class at the time and would probably go hiking later, but could she take a message?
No, Grey told her, she new the place and would just find him there. With that she hung up and stuffed the phone back into her bag, desperate to get out of her house and away from the hallucinations.
She slung her satchel over one shoulder and left her house at a rapid trot, constantly looking over her shoulder.
In fact, she spent so much time looking behind her that she almost tripped over the vagrant who had set up shop outside of her house. She tossed a hurried apology back to him as she hurried to her car and for one awful, horrifying moment as she slid behind the wheel, Grey fancied that she saw blood seeping down from behind the man’s dark glasses. With a shudder she turned the key and her car hummed to life.
The long, winding drive to Runnersgate Trail did nothing to calm Grey’s racing nerves, certain as she was that any minute Ismene would stick her pale face into her rearview mirror and frighten her to death. She stopped for lunch at her favorite bistro on the way, only to discover that everything felt like dust in her mouth, heavy and inedible in the face of her anxiety.
Even once she safely exited her car vision free she looked behind her at each step, constantly questioning the dark haired woman and men with dark glasses.
Constant vigilance aside, she only saw them as she neared the trailhead. Two women, unmistakably sisters, stood shoulder to shoulder by the entrance, staring at her with unreadable dark eyes. One’s neck still bore the ligature marks from the kitchen that morning, the other looked to be in a constant state of misery, her face still tear-stained.
A figure moved behind them, cloaked in dark colors and receding into the forest. The strangled girl smiled at Grey, eerie and empty, before turning away and melting into the woods.
Ismene approached her alone.
“They don’t think I should help you,” she began, “so I won’t tell you much. You need to stop the story. Delete it, burn it, get rid of it. Then we stop.”
Grey watched as she shook her head sadly and followed her sister into the forest. She looked down at her satchel, carrying all of her notes and her laptop. It would be so easy, she reflected, so simple to get rid of it all. The very thought hurt, that she could every throw away her work, unfinished and unrealized.
Shouldering the bag, she set off to find Virgil. His class would be out by now, and he would be here.
~*~
Her search led her through the heavily populated areas first, the places Virgil hated and passed through as a matter of necessity alone. She felt the uncanny sensation that someone was following her and battled with urge to look over her shoulder. She pressed on through the dappled shadow cast by the forest canopy, looking resolutely ahead.
Thirty or forty minutes into her walk, she reached the bridge. Halfway across she stopped and looked down at the water running, smooth and undisturbed, beneath her feet. Her legs began to shake as she sat down and watched the liquid beneath her, and her shoulders followed suit as she added water of her own to the mix, tears pouring down her cheeks.
She remembered now, or thought that she did, with that keen edged memory of terror, the faces of people recurring in her memory, men with dark glasses and women in scarves and hats, always watching. She felt as though the last few hours were merely a bad dream or a hideous joke. It seemed that they stretched on for days, and she hoped that Virgil would-
“Grey?”
She could have cried with relief, hearing his voice. She stood and looked at him, smiling through her veil of tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, obviously alarmed.
She told him, in one long, sobbing, gasping tale, the horror of the last 12 hours. In the end he watched her with huge, shocked eyes and she saw the chord of terror vibrating within him.
“You need to finish it,” he stated flatly, stepping towards her.
“What?” Grey asked, sliding away from him. “Ignore the homicidal dream warning.”
“They aren’t real, Gray,” Virgil explained with eerie patience, as though to a small child. “It’s obviously a stress dream. You just need to finish it and forget about the project.”
“I think,” she replied shakily, “that I need to get rid of this.” She slung her satchel off of her shoulder and held it aloft above the water.
“No!” he screamed, leaping towards her outstretched arm.
Grey slipped backwards, sliding on the indiscriminate metal of the bridge.
Don’t.
Grey turned to the sound and saw the vagrant from outside of her house. His glasses were tucked neatly into the breast pocket of his tattered gray shirt and the empty, weeping pits where his eyes once sat stared her down, unflinching. Oedipus’ voice held an ethereal quality absent in his daughter’s, a sense of command she assumed came with being king.
She flinched away from his outstretched hand, and then back towards it as Virgil’s skimmed her arm.
She wavered for a moment between the two men, each moving slowly towards her, before turning her pained eyes to Virgil.
“I need you,” he explained softly. “You tell my stories. I felt for years that I would explode without someone to alleviate the pressure. You do that for me. Would you take that away?” His eyes beseeched her to listen to him and to come back to him.
She turned once again back to Oedipus, as though to hear his rebuttal.
Some stories should never be told. Some bones need never be disturbed.
Suddenly then, there was Virgil, reaching angrily towards her and there, on her other side was the blind, mad king, groping his way forward to find her. Grey backed away, slid along the bridge until her feet found nothing but air. Then came water, then rocks, then the blanket of black.
~*~
They called it suicide, but Virgil knew better. He had known better when he called emergency services to tell them his friend had a fall on her way to see him and he knew better when he lied to her family, assured them it must have been an accident.
He cried at her funeral, more for propriety than anything else, and then he left.
Some stories need to be told, and he needed a new author to tell Grey’s story. After all, he only provided the names.