Trollheart

Extract from "Publish and Be Damned" (approx. 2,700 words)

Cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, Murray smiled and sat back. His arms, exposed under the rolled-up sleeves of his sweat-stained shirt, fat and hairy, locked behind his bald head, lent him the aspect of someone relaxing, though in fact nothing could be further from the truth. This was what he called the “yeah but” stance; the one where he would purse his lips, frown and consider the proposal before him, advise that it had merit but that one thing, or indeed even a number of them had to be changed if it was to have any sort of a chance of succeeding. Many of his clients were familiar with the pose Murray now adopted, and knew what to expect. The four guys who sat in front of him in his office, however, were new – potential clients, not yet taken on – and so could easily misinterpret that look, and that stance, and to be fair, what Murray said next didn't do anything to disabuse them of the notion that things were going well.

“I like it.” Murray shook his head, kind of contradicting what he had said, in their eyes at least. Then he added the rider. “It's got... potential. But a lot of it has to go. And you need a different ending.”

“A different ending?” The suggestion seemed to not only surprise all four of the men, not only the one who had spoken, but to confuse them. “But... but it's all true! The ending can't be changed! You can't change the truth!” Looking at his three companions for confirmation, the young man – Murray was not sure of the name, all four looked the same to him, and what did it matter anyway? - spread his hands as if Murray were some stone idol he was appealing to for better rains. Murray nodded slowly.

“The truth?” His tone of voice clearly indicated that he did not place much credence in this. “The truth, you say?” he repeated, shaking his head, and heaving a sigh. As if he were a large balloon drifting in the sky and releasing his breath had deflated the balloon, he sat forward, brought his arms down like twin cutting blades until they rested on the desk in front of him, where he interlocked his fingers together. “Let me tell you something, boys,” he advised them, with the air of a man who is about to impart a great secret, or give the unworthy the benefit of his vast experience. “I been in this business a long time, and my father before me, and his father before him. Family business, you might say, though of course things were a lot different in my grandfather's day.” For a moment he stopped, looking off into the middle distance, as if perhaps communing with the ghost of his ancestor.

“One thing I learned about this racket,” he told them, his eyes refocusing, hard now, hard like stone. “People don't want to read the truth. They want the truth, they can see it all around them, and it ain't pretty. We live in an occupied state, my friends, as I'm sure you all know. Truth ain't no friend to the likes of us. No.” He unlocked his fingers, placed the palms thus released flat on the desk, and then picked up the manuscript. “People want to be entertained.” The hard look left his eye, replaced by a twinkle that always showed there when he foresaw the possibility of making money. “And there's no doubt this thing is entertaining. I mean.” He grinned, the sharp eyes behind the thick spectacles darting left to right as he flicked through the manuscript. “Angry gods? Cities being destroyed? Floods, pestilence, wars, exiles? This guy here, turned into... ha ha! Brilliant! You know, you could almost say this thing has it all.”

He suddenly threw the carefully-bound pages down on the desk. The light in his eyes flicked out as if someone had thrown a switch. “Almost,” he repeated, like a warning bad news was about to follow. “But they're the good points. As for the bad, well.” The lips pursed again, and Murray leaned back, resuming his former posture. “That's where I come in. You guys have probably read through what you've written and thought, yeah, this is great, this is just what we want to say. And that's fine.” He shrugged his massive shoulders, his eyes looking past them now, not at the possible presence of the ghost of Grandfather Stein, but out across the flat expanse of the trackless desert that could be seen through the large window, a pale yellow sea stretching away, it seemed, to infinity.

“But that's not what you should be thinking.”

One of the other dudes (or it could have been the same one who had spoken; as Murray had noted, it was hard to tell them apart) piped up “It isn't?” Murray looked at him with a mixture of disdain and pity.

“Of course not!” He almost snapped the words. “Who cares what you want to say? It's what they want to hear that's important!” He gestured vaguely at the window, indicating with his bullet head, they supposed, the general public to which they hoped to sell their manuscript. “The average man in the street isn't interested in your philosophy, or your views, or your politics, or your beliefs, or whatever the damn hell you're trying to crowbar in here.” He had had to have this kind of talk with prospective clients before; Murray Stein knew how to deal with this.

“People don't read to learn, they read to escape their horrible lives, to read about, to be another person, in another place, even if just for a short while. They want a good story. And this, my friends, is, or could be, a great story. It could even,” he paused for effect, his eyes still hard but shining now too, a sure indication that he was hearing the ***** of money falling in his mind, a endless cascade of coins, a rain of fortune that could make him the richest... he dragged his attention back to his somewhat dumbstruck (remove the struck part, he thought, perhaps unkindly) clients. “It could even be,” he leaned forward to afford his words the greatest import and emphasis he could, “the greatest story ever told.”

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018