<This story was originally published in the anthology A Legacy of Whispers.  https://thefinaltwist.wordpress.com/2025/02/28/a-legacy-of-whispers/

The Great Unknown

I must not fail.

The four words were uttered and heard by himself alone. For the first time in his career he was declaiming where no one else could hear. 

Hot bricks had been set against his feet. They blistered his skin but failed to warm him. Bones covered in useless flesh refused to accept the fire from the stones, and he felt the cold’s bite and a relentless, burning pain.

I retain within me a covey of unwritten novels, he thought, works to be realized, ideas in abundance. My unborn characters yearn for the light. They see it from afar, reach out with hands transparent, but they will never arrive. These children, these adult children, will be sucked down into the nether realm with me. I am to be the cause of their demise.

I must not fail.

The smell of cigar lingered on him, the one he had taken in the conservatory before lying down. That fire had not warmed him either, only exacerbated the swelling in his left hand. It had not quelled the singing in his ears that was no kind of music, only a high-pitched hum. “You are the cause of their demise,” it sung back at him.

Voices came to him from across the darkness. My children, he thought. 

“Well, I hope he doesn’t wake up,” one of them was saying.

“How can you say any such thing!” came a woman’s voice.

“If only to spare him the agony of partings! He dislikes them so much.”

No answer came, save his own: He’s right, you know. But the words did not emerge from his lips, no more than that cigar smoke which even now nestled in his lungs like a dragon’s caress.

I must resist. I must not surrender to this pain, to the ice in my feet. If I am to finish my work, I will need to rally myself to the great task set before me.

Should he fail, the woman, the owner of the first voice — his daughter Katey — would be the only one to receive a farewell. She had stayed up with him the previous night. He had unburdened himself.

“But why do you make the effort,” she had asked him, “when you are so weak?  Yet you go to the theater…”

“I cannot resist,” he said. “The people of the theater are of a rare vintage. One lives a thousand lives with them. Indeed, I relish the experience of having my hair stand on end.”

“Father, you are no longer making any kind of sense.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Would you have liked to have been an actor?”

“That is not one of my regrets. I have dabbled enough in the theater to have tasted both its zest and its brine. Rather, were I to be given another chance, I would…”  His voice fell.

“Go on!” she urged.

But even so, he paused. The words were heavy in him and had to be lifted bodily to find passage through his slackening jaw. “I would be a better man,” he said. And then, a harder confession. “A much better father and—-” He faltered again. The words were painful, revealing too much of his failings. He leaned forward and spoke almost in a sob. “—a better…a better man…”

“None of that, now!”  She held his hand, pressed it several times, patted it. “You are the best sort of man: Well-beloved!”

She had not said that. 

Even now, he was fabricating. Turning his daughter into a character from one of his books. 

They were not real anymore, his actual children. He barely saw them. He only had eyes for his mystery.

That was what his current novel was meant to be: a mystery. Only, he did not know how it ended. Charles Dickens, the master of the serial, plot and characters sprouting like Athena from Zeus’s head, new installments shooting up each month from the dark unaccounted regions of his imagination, was at a loss for words. 

He had always known the ending of every story, never afraid of the question, “What next?” The answers had come of their own accord:  What each character would say, the troubles they faced, how they would manage them, either rising above, or being swallowed by them. Like dictation, the grey voice spoke to him from the other side of the light, and he obeyed.

It was assumed by everyone, therefore, that he knew the resolution to his mystery. He had entered into that compact with his new book in the same way as the others, committing to a series of chapters that had been published monthly in the newspaper. And he had kept every deadline.

Now the story was two-thirds of the way done. But he would not finish it. He was failing.

I am failing.

He might have blamed his frailty, explaining that he could not complete the novel because of his vulnerability, his mortality. But this would be a shabby deception.

The truth was that when he had undertaken this new book, he had for the first time dared to begin something whose ending he could not foresee. And now he had written himself into a corner. The corner, his surrender to the wall to which his back was now pressed, would be his first true failing. 

Oh yes, there had been other missteps. But of a lesser kind. A plot which hadn’t been magnificent after all, a character who was more caricature than anything. These kinds of shortcomings could be borne. They were the mark of any writer moving through the sea of his time.

But a half-conceived book, with no ending?  This could not be endured!  Death was now robbing him of the opportunity to escape this most perilous trap. 

Or perhaps it was providing the escape.

Which could he honestly claim?

Had he sensed, even as he had begun, that he was nearing his end?  Hadn’t he had thrown himself into this final manuscript as though it were a sepulcher in which he would be buried? But then, it had not occurred to him that the burial would be so literal!

Would the edifice be completed before his demise?  Could it reach the level of perfection he required? There had been but one way to make the attempt, the usual way:  Total immersion in his work, to the exclusion of all else.

That was no difficulty. He had always found his stories superior places in which to hide. He had even tried to confess this to the last audience that had ever heard him speak. “I already begin to feel like that Spanish monk who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved, and that all the moving life he saw or had ever seen was a shadow and a dream.” 

“If you don’t want anything more, sir, I shall be off now.”

The voice. Where was it coming from?

Someone was staring at him. Speaking to him. A figure, attractive, that resembled himself as a youth.

But he was in the middle of composing a sentence which described a man walking down a long corridor. The corridor was real, solid. The man must reach the end of it. His journey down that corridor must be so substantial that the reader himself would feel confined by it, would discover their own need to reach the end of that passage.

“Sir?  If you don’t want anything more, I shall be off.”

At last he looked up. Yes, his eyes were upon the young speaker. But he did not see who it was. His vision was internal, a corridor, a man dressed all in black who walks along it. There was no one in front of him.

And so his son had gone.

They had all departed, his friends, the ones who went before him. He had seen them off. Mark had passed. And walking with John, he had decried the cruelty of such a soul being taken in its prime. “It does no good to talk of such matters,” John had admonished him.

We shall not think of it the less.

His characters were departing too, now, one by one, taking their final bow. Rats leaving a sinking ship, each one with a dignified ratty bow, a sweep of the cane. And he was the ship, a prow dipping below the waves.

How far down?

“I am tired. I want rest — rest.”

No, that was an excuse, and a painful, pitiful one at that. It wasn’t rest he wanted. It was escape.

Escape into the black absence of remorse. Such relief!  Perhaps that was why he had accepted the commission. But the pressure he felt about this new mystery had come as a shock.

He should never have begun in this way, with expectations at such intensity from the very start. True, he was well-accustomed to the stress of a regular publishing schedule, week to week, month to month. Details of a chapter might elude him, but at no time would he ever have had any doubts as to how the whole thing was to conclude. 

This was different.

This time he had forced his hand. Or death had forced it. The impending premonition that he might not survive, even to begin, had driven him to undue haste. He had launched that bark with no farther shore in sight, no reason to believe a far landing was possible. 

A cloudy sky, wind increasing, no north star to guide him. 

It was the most intolerable of positions. He had started without knowing how he would end. The relentless ebb and flow of the water took him not towards a farther shore but a greater abyss.

My whole life I have been gifted a guiding light, a solid understanding of the attributes of my characters, their desires. Yes, they have surprised me, but in small ways. A turn of phrase I had not have expected from them. A show of emotion even I did not know they possessed. 

None have ever proved rogue, taken a forbidden way, hijacked my story. They have all been obedient to the end and followed the trail where I led them. They have taken their trials, their disappointments, even their deaths, stoically. They trusted in me, and I have stewarded them all to a successful, if not always a kind, completion.

But this story, this mystery of mine. What could I have been thinking?  I step into a lake and find my head immediately under the surface. 

How does this mystery end?  Who is the murderer?  What is the motive?

The answers elude me even now. And so I am either wretched because I will not be able to finish, or I am dying in order to circumvent my shame.

To his horror, the book had become popular!  His friends wished to discuss it with him. They hoped to tease out the ending.

I am walking with William. I am discussing the book.

“But surely he is a character different from your previous villains,” William says.

“That is so. For their actions have all been apparent. We saw their iniquity from the outset, leaving only the consequences to further ravel them. By contrast, this villain’s actions are in doubt. We are not certain…”

I am not certain

“…whether or not he is the perpetrator, whether a crime has actually occurred. And in this way, the possibilities lie open for further development. Further…obfuscation, perhaps.”

“You cannot obscure forever.”

“But I can…perhaps I must…delay the revelation for the sake of the reader’s pleasure. That may require many vacillations before the end.”

“Well, however much you vacillate,” William said, “you, or we, are approaching the mystery.”

At these words, a sudden blackness enveloped his head. He could no longer see the road upon which they were walking, nor think to utter a reply. The comment had so vexed him that it rendered his senses useless. He found himself trapped in a delirium of endless possibilities, calculations for an end that did not exist, that perhaps could never manifest itself.

If the villain has done the deed, then there is nothing to discover. The motives are commonplace and obvious. Such a plot would hardly even serve as a worthwhile character study.

Yet if the villain has not done the deed, then the question of the poor young man’s death must be resolved some other way, one which met the standard he had maintained over the course of his life as a writer. That solution must not be fanciful. Nor could it be commonplace.

Did I truly profess to know the answer when I offered to tell it to the Queen, standing before me in a regal gown, giving all her attention to me for five terrifying minutes?

“We are most interested in your newest work.”

“Your majesty, shall I tell you the answer to the mystery?”

She smiled and with a dismissive wave replied, “No, we do not wish to spoil the ending.”  He laughed and nodded. The interview was soon over, and he felt a mixture of relief and dread.

Had he hoped to spur himself on with such a brag, force himself into such a space that he would have no choice but to determine an answer?  What had he felt upon the Queen’s refusal?  Relief?  A dread at the familiar weight coming upon him again, the pain in his hand, his heart?

These new characters, they come with brooms to sweep the older characters away, to throw darts at their feet. These upstarts are wicked and remorseless. My family is driven out.

How can I blame them?  I have wronged them. I never should have begun.

This menagerie of mere characterizations, these facsimiles of people who surround me day and night, who recount their stories to me, beg me, “tell them about us.”  I fail them. I have failed, and in their place comes this black creature who is neither villain nor anti-hero, whose footfalls fade to a whisper as he moves down the corridor…

He had been so grateful for the distraction of Katey’s visit. They spoke that evening, and in the morning she took her leave of him. He was in his chalet, working on the book, and she came to bid him goodbye.

He nodded at her briefly. She left without making a sound. He continued in his work.

Then, a rush back into the chalet, noisy, flustered, as if possessed by a premonition. His daughter returned to him. “Father, father!”

He had taken her into his arms, as he must not have done since she was a child. He welcomed her into the intimate circle of his embrace, knowing that it must be the last time. “God bless you, Katey!” he cried, and her face warmed his.

She is here now, standing by the bed. But like Charlie, she is invisible to me. Insubstantial. 

Or perhaps I am the one without substance. Surely when they have read my torso, they will know. True enough that the work of my life has been a façade, a sham. I am neither masterful nor profound. I ride on the backs of my characters as they take me through worlds of superlatives.

I would rather lie down on the ground. My faults will become apparent now. It is a blessing that I have not lived to see myself fall short at the end.

A character appears in the mist. He is walking towards me. He is dressed in an ordinary grey suit, a genial look upon his face. His is the visage of a young man made old before his time. 

He approaches close enough to offer his hand. I hesitate. Should I offer mine?

“Sir,” he says.

“Have you come to take me off?”

He smiles, as if I had asked the wrong question.

“Do you not recognize me?”

I squint at him.

“It cannot be.”

His smile grows stronger.

“Young man!  I have wronged you!”

“No, no,” he protests with an outstretched palm. “You have done me a great honor.”

“I have killed you!” I protest. “And in the prime of your life.”

“Is that a certainty?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow.

I hesitate. “No,” I admit. “The book is not completed.”

“So I am indeterminate,” he replies. “My fate is not sealed. Possibilities remain to me…because you have not finished.”

“You mock me,” I say. “You know that it was my intention to complete your mystery.”

“The mystery of Edwin Drood.”

“Yes.”

“So you have.”

“No!” I protest. “There is not enough information in the manuscript!  What has happened to you, how it happened, cannot be determined. It will never be determined!”

“And so?” he asks, upturning his palm.

“And so I expose myself as the charlatan, the imposter, that I am. My world is torn open for everyone to see. My chicanery at last reveals itself, because I can no longer cover it up.”

“On the contrary, sir,” he says. “You have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams!”

“How so?”

“No one will ever know the truth about me?”

“No one.”

“Then,” he says, “that…will be the mystery!”

The figure fades away before him, still smiling, leaving only the mist.

Astonished, he stands now, the pain in his foot quite forgotten, the mist growing thicker.

He is looking up at a light which comes from nowhere. Voices seem to be calling out to him. Some seem to be raised in alarm, but those are fading.

He reaches up to touch the light. His outstretched hand reaches closer as the rest of his body remains behind. There is a world beyond the cloud. 

Then something in him fails, and it is very, very bright.