Wangaia, Gayle P. Nastasi [read 50 shades of grey TXT] 📗

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IV

Impossible. She flipped through the pages, whose edges were ragged and torn. There among the printer ink, were pen-scrawled changes, crossouts, additions, all in an unfamiliar hand. A tin of black ink and a quill pen lay on the shelf beside the manuscript. She turned quickly to the section about the door beneath the ivy, and sure enough, someone had scribbled in the part about Gareth and Casey (Casey! How did they know about her?!” being met by the guards. Back a few pages, to the scene at the tent . . . and there before it was a handwritten scene of Gareth discovering the woman’s unconscious form beside the stream. She looked back at the title page, and saw that her own name was circled in ink, the date on the manuscript circled as well.

“Brrrt.” Zimmer scrambled from his place in Gareth’s arms to the shelf, and rubbed his lips against the well of ink, and then head-butted Casey in the arm.

“What is it?” Gareth asked, hoarse-voiced and apprehensive.

She showed the stack of papers to him. “See? My story.”

“Story.” His face turned ghost white and he swallowed loudly. “Yes, your story.”

“I don’t know how he got it, I don’t know how....” She stared at the manuscript again, pointed to the inked in changes. “This is how he’s done it, though, all the things that have gone wrong. See, he’s rewriting the story.”

He shook his head. “I do not understand.”

“I know, neither do I. It’s totally impossible.”

Faint shouts from below, and the clanging of an alarm bell startled Casey out of her shock. She grabbed up the pages, the closed tin of ink, and the pen. “Let’s get out of here!” She started for the door.

“No, wait!” Gareth headed her off and pulled the door shut. He locked it from the inside and tucked the keys back into his girdle. “This way.” In a far corner of the room, he pulled back the tapestries and revealed another recessed panel. A similar latch to the one Casey had used opened a hatch at floor level, just large enough for them to crawl through. Zimmer darted through the opening ahead of them, Gareth shoved Casey before him, and after he was through he closed the hangings and hatch behind them.

Casey stumbled through total darkness down a steep flight of stone steps. She had known the escape route was there--Gareth had used it in the first novel to escape raiding invaders from the Northlands. She struggled to remember if she’d written it into this story at all--did Annur Rath know about it?

“Gareth, wait. I need some light.” She stopped short, and he stumbled into the back of her. His quick arms around her were the only thing that kept her from plummeting down the stairs.

“Light? Why?”

“I have a feeling we wouldn’t be going down these stairs unless Rath had written it into the story himself.”

Silence descended. Then the sound of hands on stone, as Gareth searched the walls for a torch sconce.

“Here, wait one moment.” The spark of flint flashed in the blackness and a moment later the dark gave way to yellow, flickering firelight.

Casey sat on the steps.

“We haven’t much time.”

“I know,” she said as she flipped frantically through the pages. “Here, I was right.” There on the page were crossed out paragraphs, and a scene written in ink that had Casey and Gareth doing precisely what they were doing. And at the end of the scene, Rath was once again waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Casey read a few choice segments aloud.

“So we’ve fallen into his trap again.” Gareth stared in anger at the cluttered pages.

“Not necessarily.”

Casey uncovered the ink and dipped the pen. With broad strokes she scratched out the words at the bottom of the scene. Then she wrote:

Annur and his men stood, waiting, at the base of the secret stairwell. Suddenly, from above, came the sound of shouting guards.

“Here! They are back here!”

“Damn!” Rath swore. He’d been tricked! Dôn and the girl hadn’t taken the hidden escape route after all! “Don’t just stand here, you fools!” he screeched at the guards and gave the man behind him a shove. “Back down the corridor! They are making for the rear exit!”

In a confused clamour of clattering weapons, Rath and his party raced up the corridor.

Soon, there was silence at the bottom of the secret stairs. A moment later, the escapees appeared in the opening, and raced swiftly through the shadows behind the great hall, across the courtyard, and through the hidden doorway into the safety of the forest.

* * *

“Oh, God, I hate revisions!” Casey stared at the mess Rath had made of her manuscript. He’d written chapters, including pages of agonizing detail describing Gareth’s grisly death at his hands. She’d been scribbling and scratching out with the ink pen, and had managed to rewrite them to the point that they were again in Gareth’s tent on the mountainside overlooking Caer Dôn. But there was too much, much too much. The nib of the pen scraped the bottom of the ink well. “Nearly empty, damn! I’ll never get all this fixed!”

“You had best hurry, Casey.”

She glared at Gareth. “It took six months to get this far on this book. How can I undo chapters of Rath’s writing--which is atrocious, by the way!--in a matter of--”

“He’s coming.”

“What?”

On the slope below them, torches glowed. Casey rushed to the opening of the tent, and the faint tinkle of harness drifted up the hill to her, accompanied by the distant, muffled shouts of men.

“Oh, great! How did he--?” She went back to the manuscript, flipped ahead a page and found it. The men on the way to the tent--in Rath’s version, it had been to search for damning evidence, so that he could justify the torture and death of Gareth Dôn to anyone who questioned it. Thanks to Casey’s alterations, he would find them in the tent instead. Why hadn’t she continued with the scene she’d altered? Why hadn’t she written Rath into some sort of inescapable trap?

Back to the opening. They were definitely coming closer. The torches glared brighter, the voices louder. The jingle of the harness now rant out a Clang-clang-Clang-clang two-beat rhythm of trotting hooves.

“Hurry!” Gareth, his blue eyes blazing with fear and anger, nudged her back toward the manuscript. “I do not know how you did this, witch. Nor do I like the sorcery you employ. But it is obviously the only way to save our hides at this point!”

“There’s not enough time!” She frantically scraped at the ink well, drawing up just a drop into the nib of the quill. “Or enough ink!”

“You’re out of ink!?” Gareth grabbed the well and stared into it.

“I’m sorry, I should have put in an order for more!” She snapped. “You wouldn’t have any laying around here, would you?”

“I am afraid that ink was not one of the supplies I thought to pack when I was fleeing Caer Dôn for my life!”

The harness noises grew louder by the moment, and the drone of voices could clearly be heard.

“Casey, what will we do?” Gareth moved to the tent opening again.

“Someone’s there!” The shout came from below. “I saw a shadow in the tent door!”

The lantern light had given them away. The sounds came faster now, cries of attack and clanging weapons.

“Casey! Please!”

She stared at the nearly empty pen. “I don’t have enough! I can get maybe one sentence--”

One sentence. One sentence with a pen, anyway.

“They’re coming closer! I might be able to hold them off for a moment, but I will surely die in the process!”

“It’s taken care of,” Casey said almost calmly, and began to write:

And then, the magic of the universe came to their aid. In the tent with a flash of light appeared Casey’s computer, fully powered by the starlight!

“Aaaagh!” Gareth shouted and rushed toward the object that had flashed into being, his sword raised high.

“No!” She darted between her hero and his savior. “I did that--stop!”

He stared at her. “What is it?”

“God.”

Casey knelt before the monitor. It was there, just as she’d expected--her altered manuscript. She backtracked to a point before Rath had begun the changes, which showed in strike-out and red letters. Where, where? There! She placed the cursor at the point in the manuscript just before where Gareth would have gone to see Vatas. Holding down the Shift key, she paged all the way to the end of the text. Over two chapters were highlighted.

The sound of horse’s hooves and shouting soldiers was nearly on top of them.

Casey jumped to her feet, threw her arms around Gareth’s neck, and kissed him soundly on the mouth.

“What--?”

“Brace yourself, handsome. You’re about to go into reverse. But I promise you, this story will have a happy ending -- if it’s the last thing I do.”

Reluctantly, she peeled away from him and returned to the keyboard. “And it just might be.”

She hit Delete

.


IV

Casey glanced at the brand new grandfather clock, with it’s sun and moon face and gold trim, as the phone rang. A quarter to ten. Couldn’t be Mom. She picked up the beeping electronic handset and said a cheerful, “Hello?”

“Hi, Casey, it’s Angela!”

Her agent.

“Hi, Ange. To what do I owe the honor this early on a Monday morning?”

“Did you read the Times yesterday?”

“No, you know me. My only link to the outside world is the Internet.”

“Well, listen to the book review.” Angela’s voice took on a practiced over-the-phone-promotion-expert tone as she read.

“'Casey Reese’s Wangaia: Takeover, sequel to her best-selling Wangaia, wears well the badge of quality borne by its predecessor. Reese has the uncanny, almost magical, ability to take characters and make them leap off the pages, taking on a life of their own, in a way that few writers can accomplish. She draws you into the story from the first page onward, until you almost believe you’re standing on the hillside overlooking Caer Dôn with Gareth, breathless with fear as he battles his enemy Annur Rath, and melting in his arms when he finally wraps them around the sorceress Vatas in the book’s highly satisfying conclusion. Kudos to Ms. Reese: her readers wait with bated breath for book three!'

“Talk about your glowing reviews! Case, I don’t know what possessed you to revamp Wangaia

and ask me to send out the rewrite instead of the original, but you certainly called it. ”

Casey