Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

Ned saw a cluster of chairs arranged in a circle in the back of the dusty old used bookstore. This must be it, he thought as he approached the chairs. Nobody else was there. According to his watch there were only five minutes remaining before the workshop would begin. He nearly took a seat but worry was nibbling at him aggressively. What if I’m in the wrong place? he wondered, looking around nervously.

To his relief someone else approached. He was much shorter than Ned, and wider as well. He wore glasses and casually pulled a chair out, entered the circle, and pulled the chair back under his wide backside.

“You’re here for the writing workshop?” Ned asked tentatively.

The man acted surprised. “Oh,” he said, startled. “Yes.” He smiled and his voice shook with giddiness. “I have so many questions!”

“Where’s everybody else?” Ned asked, sliding between two chairs and sitting nearly opposite the wide, relaxed man.

He shrugged. “Their loss,” he began, but then a woman approached.

“Is this the creative writing workshop?” she asked with a high strung tone and an upturned nose.

“Yes,” said the round man, patting the seat by his side. The woman sat as far from him as she could while still leaving a space between her and Ned.

With only minutes to spare the chairs began to find occupants and a steady drone of chatter rose all around Ned. He began to wonder if he should give his seat up for someone else. People were crowded all around him, standing attendees piling in several rows deep. Still, he tried to quiet his mind and go over the questions he wanted answered. Months ago he’d started a book that he was, so far, quite proud of, but he had accidentally backed his protagonist into a bit of a stale plot. He wanted desperately to salvage it after investing so much time writing the nearly eighty thousand word manuscript, but with the protagonist in such a stalemate with his own life, he felt as though the whole story was in danger of fizzling out.

With a sudden hush the group went quiet and a small, quiet woman squeezed through, stumbling into the center of the circle hopping on one foot and nearly tumbling to the floor. Someone in the crowd began to clap, launching the entire room into a loud applause while the woman, thoroughly embarrassed, quickly urged everyone to stop so they could begin.

“Some of you may know me,” she said, eliciting a hearty laugh from most of the crowd. “But for the rest of you, my name is Jenny Skye. I won’t bore you with my credentials for giving this creative writing class. If you have any doubts, just google my name and I think you’ll find that I am qualified to show you at least a few of the ropes.” More chuckles rippled around the donut of sardines.

“Let’s begin with your questions,” she announced. “What are your personal goals for this workshop? Go on, raise your hands and let’s get a discussion going.”

The rotund man across from Ned launched his hand into the air nearly knocking out the guy next to him. A few other hands went up as well, but Jenny immediately pointed at the man directly across from Ned. “Yes?” she said encouragingly. “What are you hoping to get from this workshop?”

“Well,” he began, and immediately Ned felt as though a group of psychopaths was holding a fingernail race on a nearby chalkboard. “I’ve been working on my novel for several months now and I feel as though things have gone stagnant. My antagonist almost seems to have lost the will to live. I don’t know what I should do to keep the novel going while keeping it interesting and rewarding for the reader. Nobody likes a bad guy who just rolls over and gives up.”

Several people chuckled but Ned’s pulse was spiking and a strange shiver gathered up the skin at the back of his neck.

“Oh that’s a good one,” Jenny remarked. “Anyone else have troubles with stagnating plots?”

Several hands went up.

“Why don’t you give us a few details,” she suggested to the man. “Keep it brief, but let’s explore this a bit.”

“Well,” he began. “Things started out interesting, but recently I feel like the plot unraveled a bit. You see, there’s a man with a key, and nobody knows what the key is for but it’s obviously important. Of course as the author I know what the key is for, but in the story only one man knows and he’s not the guy with the key, and then there’s this other guy who is trying to get the key, like pretty much everybody else and he’s got all these problems at home and…”

Jenny cleared her throat. “Eh hem,” she said. “I said let’s keep it brief.”

“Oh, sorry, right..” he said. “Well, I’m not sure there is a brief version…”

But Ned knew better. His heart was rocketing against his ribcage while a cold sweat broke out everywhere he had pores. His stomach knotted up and twisted into a pretzel. This… entirely unpleasant man was exactly describing Ned’s book, except that he was referring to Ned’s protagonist as the antagonist. Ned’s mind raced and the room suddenly felt like a vacuum devoid of air yet stifling and heavy. He completely lost track of the discussion, unable to focus on anything but this anomaly, this… this.. thief? Was it possible that the man had somehow been spying on him? If so, wouldn’t he have noticed Ned and recognized him? Was that why he’d ignored him at first?

A tsunami of questions bombarded his mind until he was at his breaking point. Sweat was now pouring down his sides under a loose, thin shirt that should have provided ample ventilation. He felt sick, but an overwhelming sense of curiosity had seized his mind with such force that he had a headache. He felt as though his own gray matter was being squished through the fingers of a disembodied hand’s powerful grip, like his mind was a balloon on the verge of popping.

He grew impatient as the workshop dragged on. Jenny was lively and engaging and he was sure she was giving an invaluable workshop, imparting precious tips and secrets that would no-doubt be helpful to him, but he was not at the workshop. He was in the war room planning his assault on a round, obnoxious man who wore glasses and sat just on the other side of the circle of chairs.

Something was happening. He shook his head and tried to dispel the tunnel vision that was zeroed in on the wide man. Jenny was gone and people were milling about. Was it over? He thought back to the email he’d received and remembered that there would be a quick break in the middle. He stood up and began to bolt over to his target but quickly found himself pacing instead. What would he really say to the man? Hi, you stole my story. Can I have it back please? Or perhaps, Hello, who are you and why are you copying me? It was ridiculous. He paced like a nervous prowling predator, periodically eying his prey but waiting for the right moment to pounce. The man was smiling, craning his neck to talk to someone standing just behind him and off to the side. They were laughing and telling stories about who knows what and all the while Ned watched the clock tick down the seconds until the workshop would resume.

It’s now or never, he told himself, stepping toward the man again.

“Excuse me,” he said as he approached.

The man looked around through his coke bottle glasses.

“Yes, hello?” Ned said, stopping a few feet from the man. “Hi.”

“Hello,” the man said, thoroughly put off. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, the story you described, how long did you say you’ve been writing it for?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Who are you?”

“The key,” Ned said, watching the man’s chubby face contort from confusion to bewilderment. “It opens a box hidden under a tile in the chapel.”

The man’s face turned to molasses, his jaw agape and dropping in slow motion. He said nothing, staring at Ned with eyes that could have belonged to a doomed rabbit staring down a hungry hawk. Jenny squeezed into the center of the circle again, stumbling into Ned with clumsiness pulled straight out of a romcom, laughing nervously as she looked up at him. But Ned was silently screaming for this stupid, annoying man to just say something.

“Oh,” Jenny chuckled, fixing her hair. “Thank you for catching me. Let’s all take our seats and get started again.”

The man’s eyes remained fixed on Ned for the remainder of the workshop while Ned fidgeted and shifted around in his seat feeling trapped by the thronging group of writing enthusiasts. The likely lovely workshop was taking far too long and the questions in Ned’s mind were multiplying by the second threatening to burst his mind from the inside out.

At long last the crowd erupted into rounds of applause, a beaming Jenny taking several bows and smiling while people worked their way into the center of the circle to shake her hand and talk with her. She tried to squirm her way out of the circle, making her way toward a table pilled high with her latest book, “Three Twigs Short of a Hillbilly,” where she would be doing book signings for the next hour, if Ned remembered correctly. But his memory wasn’t getting enough oxygen because all the blood in his brain was rushing to the panic center. The round man was gone!

Ned shoved his way through the crowd and out into the still packed bookstore, frantically searching for the man. Ned’s height advantage was substantial, yet he still stood on his tiptoes peering over and through the masses. The bell over the front door of the shop chimed and Ned looked just in time to see the little wide man fleeing onto the sidewalk.

He took off, nearly tripping over several people before crashing out onto the sidewalk and skidding around the corner in the direction he’d seen the man go. “Hey!” he called, bounding down the street. “I just want to talk!”

It didn’t take long to catch up to the man with the stubby legs. Ned’s long legs brought him five steps closer with each step he took but both of them were gasping by the time Ned put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“I just… want… to talk…” Ned wheezed.

“You’re… stealing… my… story…” the man gasped, far worse off than Ned.

Ned opened his mouth to speak again but just shook his head and put his hands on his knees, taking deep, gasping breaths. “I don’t think we’re stealing from each other, but I want to understand what’s happening. Can we, I don’t know, get a coffee and talk about this?”

The man shook his head vigorously. “No…” he breathed, “This isn’t… normal… No good… can come… of it…”

“Well what the heck is going on?” Ned cried, his chest still heaving. “You’re absolutely right that this isn’t normal, but we need to figure out what’s going on!”

“I already told… you…” the man panted. “You’re stealing my… story.”

“I am not!” Ned protested. “I’ve never met you in my life!”

He shook his head again, slower this time. “You’re not… understanding…” he said, his voice raspy but slowly stabilizing. He reached into his pocket and began to pull something out when a man bumped into Ned with enough force to nearly knock him to the ground. As he stumbled back he heard something metal clang to the sidewalk.

Ned looked down at the ground just in time to see an ornate key clattering to a stop on the hard concrete. His eyes went wide and he looked up at the round man, who was also staring wide-eyed at the key. Then he looked up at the man who’d dropped it, who took off running.

“The key,” Ned and the round man both gasped.

“Oh…” the round man said. “It’s worse than I feared.”

Ned was feeling as though his entire reality was shattered. “What do you mean?” he exclaimed, feeling his grip on sanity slipping.

The man reached back into his pocket and pulled out a pocket watch. He flicked it open and stared at it for a long while. “Oh my…” he whispered.

“What!” Ned wailed. “What is going on?!?”

“There isn’t much time,” he said, looking up at Ned. He took a moment, looking him over from head to toe. “Do you have a pen on you?”

“A pen?” Ned pleaded desperately. “A pen? That’s what you’re worried about right now?”

The man stepped over the key and grabbed Ned’s arm. “Do you have a pen,” he asked sternly. “You’re going to need one and I don’t have any to spare.”

Ned stared at him, searching the man’s eyes for anything helpful. “Sure,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s just a Bic…” In an instant Ned’s vision imploded, all of the light around him warping and bending, dancing and shimmering. Another scene with trees and a cottage stretched in, seemingly from the other side of an inverted liquid mirror that had turned itself inside out. His mind slipped and stumbled, struggling to work out how it made so much sense while defying everything that had ever been real to him before.

The little man put his pocket watch back in his pocket and marched toward the cabin. “Come on,” he said. He waltzed right into the cabin, throwing the door open and stopping abruptly. He tapped his foot and stared to the side into the room. Ned slowly followed, peaking his head in through the doorway to see who the man was glaring at.

It was him. Or, it would have been Ned if Ned wasn’t the one beholding this other Ned.

“Oh hi,” said Other Ned.

“We need to talk,” the little man said. “You’re stealing my story.”

Other Ned winced and grinned sheepishly. “I wouldn’t call it stealing. That’s so… harsh.”

The little man folded his arms angrily and continued to tap his foot, staring expectantly at Other Ned.

“Well,” said Other Ned. “I don’t know what the problem is.”

“Ned,” the little man said, looking up at Ned. “Pull out your pen.”

“Pen?” Other Ned repeated nervously.

Ned stared at the little man, then back at the spitting image of himself, and back down at the short, stocky man.

“Come on,” the man said. “Pull it out.”

Ned pulled out the pen.

“Now go to the desk there and write something on the paper. Make it something… innocuous, like ‘and then it started raining.’ Harmless, see?”

Ned stepped toward the desk, eying his doppelganger with distrust. He found a paper sitting on the desk with nothing written on it and wrote: “And then it began to rain.” The moment he put the dot at the end of the sentence he heard the first drops of rain begin to fall outside.

“See?” Said the little man as though to both of them.

Ned did not see, but he was growing more and more concerned.

Other Ned did seem to see. “Oh…” he said.

“The key found its way onto the other side,” the stocky man said. “You need to fix this.”

Other Ned shook his head solemnly.

Ned himself wanted to lose his mind. He felt as though he was very nearly there. “What is going on?!” he cried.

Other Ned and the stocky man stared at each other, looked at Ned, and stared at each other some more. Finally, Other Ned chuckled nervously and swiftly brought his fist down on the back of Ned’s head.

---

Ned woke up at home with a headache feeling as though he’d had the strangest dream. He sat up in bed and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling a bruise on his skull. He rolled out of bed groaning and went to his computer hoping to get some writing in. However, rather than opening the document he’d been working on for the past several months, he had a sudden burst of inspiration. He opened a blank document and began to write. “Allister was a man of simple means. He always carried a pen in his pocket and a smile on his face. Little did he know that his pen would one day change the course of history…”

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