The windows in the shop’s paneled front wall raked narrow strips of light across the floor. Like the bare bulbs dotting the ceiling, they did little to illuminate the boxes stacked, dark and dust-free, on the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves.

              Albion Cole had been unsure about coming here. The business card listed no name for either the shop or the person he was supposed to ask for. Just an address in the older part of town, printed in a script so unique it looked handwritten, yet so regular he knew it wasn’t.

              “If anyone can get you writing again,” his agent had assured him, pressing the card into Albion’s hand and pushing him out the office door, “it’s this guy.”

              Now Albion showed the card to the gray-haired man sitting behind what should have been a counter but was instead a leather-topped Gillows desk. The man ignored the card. Selecting a box from a shelf behind him, he motioned for Albion to follow and led him to an alcove cordoned off by display cases. A child’s school desk filled the space, the kind where the writing surface was welded to the chair. Albion resisted the urge to raise the desk’s top and peek inside.

              The shop’s proprietor placed the carved mahogany box next to a stack of paper on the desk. Opening it, he took out a fountain pen as black as ebony and handed it to Albion. “Write,” he directed.

              Albion had described the block to his agent as the words running away, giggling and taunting, as soon as he picked up a pen. Like the popular kids on a grade school playground.

              It was no different here.

              The proprietor jabbed a rawboned finger at the page. “Write!”

              With a sigh, Albion posted the cap on the end of the pen’s barrel – it snapped into place with a metallic click – and pulled the paper toward him.

              Impatient, the proprietor grabbed Albion’s hand and forced the nib onto the page. As a ragged streak of black marred the paper, images flooded into Albion’s mind. Clumps of snow melting to a dirty brown on empty sidewalks, drifting against brick buildings stained gray from soot and car exhaust.  Wrought iron streetlights with bulbs that buzzed and flickered and burned out with a tungsten-singed flash. A girl in a long, sable coat carrying a caged jackdaw in one hand and running out a spindle of twine with the other.

              Albion knew exactly who she was, and what she wanted, and why she couldn’t have it.

              Lost in getting the words on the page, he didn’t notice the proprietor slip out of the alcove or the dim light in the shop grow fainter as hours ticked into night.

 

#

 

              “How much?”

              The proprietor looked up, blinking at Albion over half-moon reading glasses. The neon sign from the bar across the street reflected blue and red in the lenses. “I’m sorry?”

              Albion held up the box, the pen nestled inside. “I’d like to buy the pen, but I couldn’t find a price on it.”

              “Ah.” The sound was well-worn, fluid, like the way the proprietor closed the ledger that covered most of his desk, slipped the glasses from his nose to his vest pocket, and leaned back. His chair creaked, the sound of dovetail joins and old wood glue. “It’s not for sale.”

              “Not for sale?”

              “No.”

              “Do you have another one?”

              The proprietor shook his head. He didn’t say a word, didn’t try to stand or even shift in his chair, yet Albion could feel him reaching for the pen. Albion tightened his grip on the box, the edges biting into his palms despite layers of varnish that made them appear rounded and smooth.

              “It can’t leave the shop,” the proprietor explained. “I’m sorry.”

              Albion took a step back. The story still echoed in his head, and his hand still felt warm from the pen.

              The bell on the shop’s door jangled, but when Albion looked over his shoulder no one was there. Turning back to the proprietor, he set the box on the desk, fingertips pressed flat and white against the wood, and slid it into the empty spot between the antique brass receipt spike and the nameplate that read simply, “Proprietor.”

 

#

 

              “I have to close now.”

              Pages were stacked around Albion, on the desk, on the shelves, the words blurred to unsteady lines in his rush to get them down. “Just a little longer,” he begged. “Let me finish this scene.”

              “I’m sorry.” The proprietor pulled the pen from Albion’s hand, capped it, and placed it in the box. “You can come back tomorrow and work some more.”

              “If you’d just sell me the pen—“

              The look on the proprietor’s face cut Albion short more than his words. “I’m sorry, but –”

              “I know, I know! It’s not for sale.” Snatching the pages from the desk and shelves, Albion stuffed them into his messenger bag and followed the proprietor to the front of the shop. The older man didn’t follow him into the street, but waited only until Albion was on the other side of the door, and then shut and locked it behind him.

 

#

 

              Albion fought the bookcase into position beside his desk, first see-sawing it across the apartment, then bracing his back against the side and pushing with his legs. Its shelves were empty, the books that had filled them stacked in twos and threes on the living room floor or dumped in a pile on the couch. But the bookcase was big – taller than Albion and made of oak – and balked when he tried to slide it across the carpet.

              Finally, though, he shoved it into place where he wanted it. With the others already there, it formed a wall of shelves around the desk not unlike that at the proprietor’s shop. It even blocked the overhead light, draping the newly formed alcove in a half-light that made it harder to see but easier to write. With a satisfied sigh, Albion dropped into the chair.

              He’d faced the bookcases inward and filled the shelves with reams of Beckett Cambric. Thumbing the first few sheets from the nearest one, he angled the pages to the left, plucked a vintage Parker from the pen stand at the top of the desk, and re-wrote the last paragraph he’d gotten down before the proprietor had forced him to go home.

              The words felt good going on the page, the nib smooth and flexing on the downstroke. Albion relaxed his mind, let the bookcases around him fade into the gated walls of Kitai-gorod, thick and tall but truncated decades ago by a wrecking ball’s swing.

              The words stopped when he reached the end of that paragraph. Not petering out, not drifting away. Just not there.

              Albion set that page to the side, breathed deep and slow, and wrote the paragraph again. Rewrote the last line a second time, a third, a dozen. Filled another page. Tacked a new sentence, clumsy and out of place, at the end, marked through it and tried another. Wrote a paragraph that went nowhere, scratched it out, tried again, and again, and again until the nib ripped through the page.

              All around him, the stone walls of Kitai-gorod dissolved into bookcases, the alcove that a moment before had mimicked the proprietor’s shop now nothing more than a corner in his apartment between the eat-in kitchen and the bedroom door.

 

#

 

              Albion had learned to tell the proprietor’s footsteps when the man was coming to chase him out for the day from the ones where he was simply threading the maze-like stacks on some unknown errand. The ones he heard now, muffled from sharp to shuffling as the proprietor went from tile to carpet, were the latter.

              Albion had finished the scene from the day before, the one he’d been unable to write in his own apartment, and several more besides. Nearly a whole chapter. As soon as he’d picked up the proprietor’s pen, the words and images had come back as clear as if he’d never forgotten them. The book was half done now, but that still left half to write.

              And the shop’s hours were beginning to chafe.

              Albion waited until the proprietor’s footsteps faded to a whisper, then tucked the pen case into his inner pocket. The one where, in times past, men would have carried a wallet, but where they now kept sunglasses or a cell phone. On the desk he left a note apologizing and a check that, when cashed, would empty his bank account.

              Making his way to the front of the shop, he inched the door open, muffling the bell with his hand until he was on the other side.

              Stepping out from behind a display case, the proprietor watched him go, but didn’t chase him or call the police or yell for Albion to come back. Made no move to stop him at all.

 

#

 

              The box looked different in Albion’s apartment. The harsher light exposed the uneven stain on its top and sides, picked out the edges where the veneer had curled back and chipped.

              Albion didn’t care.

              He opened the box, smiling at the pen inside.

              And, yet, it seemed different, too.

              At the proprietor’s shop, the pen had swallowed the light, its cap and barrel a black slash against the pale silk lining the box. Here, in Albion’s apartment, it seemed fainter, more gray than black, the rhodium-plated clip dull and unreflective.

              And when he picked it up, it seemed… not so much lighter as less substantial. Less solid. If he concentrated, he could see the box behind it, and the maker’s mark silkscreened onto the cloth.

              A trick of the light, he thought. His imagination.

              He pulled at the cap, but his fingers slipped off it.

              No, Albion thought. Not off it. Through it.

              And, yet, he still held the pen in his hand. It was real. It was there.

              It was his imagination.

              Gripping the cap in his fist, Albion tugged it free.

              It fell to the desktop, and the pen with it. Ink splattered onto the page from the nib, dime-sized drops that seeped through the fibers like a poorly made Rorschach test.

              Rust scraped from the iron grate as the girl pulled it wide.

              The line slipped into Albion’s mind as soon as the ink hit the page. He reached for the pen, but his fingers passed through it as if it wasn’t even there.

              On the ground beside her, the jackdaw paced in its cage, flapping its wings and pecking her fingers when she tried to drag it into the tunnel.

              Albion grabbed a Sheaffer from the pen stand and yanked the cap off, desperate to get the words down before they were gone.

              “Let me help you with that.” Calloused fingers took the cage from her and set it just inside the tunnel – .

              Door? No, not door. Opening. Entrance? He raked his fingers through his hair, trying to remember how the line had gone.

              Rough fingers? Blistered? No, something that started with a C. Coarse?

              “Damn it!” Albion threw the Sheaffer across the alcove. It hit the edge of a bookcase, sixty-year-old celluloid shattering against wood. “Damn it!”

              On the desk, the proprietor’s pen grew fainter, like a movie projected on dust motes in the air. As it faded, it took the story with it, erasing the words and images of a girl wearing a sable coat as she wandered the deserted streets of Moscow.

 

#

 

              The proprietor’s desk had long been uneven, its legs worn to different lengths by years of moving it from one storefront to another. As a result, the desktop slanted. Not unpleasantly, but enough that when the pen came back, it rolled until it hit the ledger, curling the edge of Albion’s check that stuck out, uncashed, from between the pages. The proprietor already had a new box waiting for the pen. Marble this time, from Tuscany. He’d lined it, as always, with cotton batting and silk. Placing the pen inside, he set the box on the shelf behind him, in the brass-edged slot marked “Franklin-Christoph Model 40.”

 

THE END

 

 

Andi Newton is a freelance writer, editor, and 3D graphic artist from Greensboro, NC. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Storyteller and Tales of the Talisman. You can visit her website at www.andinewton.com.