The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant Read Online Free PDF

Mortenson, the famous neo-Freudian fundamentalist critic. “Le Mort,” as he was known by those who feared him in the academic world, immediately took a sabbatical from his teaching duties in order to begin poring over the unusual find.
    During that year off, the critic became estranged from his wife of twenty years. Lilian Mortenson was said to have told her friends that the book was the cause of all their problems. She confided that he had become obsessed with it, not just the story, but the actual letters of the words, the ink that formed them, and the paper they were written on, as if some grandiose secret lurked just below the surface of the physical object.
    During the divorce proceedings, she stated for the official record that Mortenson had begun to consult ancient texts of magic and could be seen in his study hopping on one foot and reciting things backwards. “The day he drew a big circle on the Persian carpet with chicken grease and sat at its center for eight hours, playing some viciously annoying little instrument, was the last straw,” she said. “After that I packed my bag and went to my sister’s place.” All Mortenson could say in his defense at the deposition was, “Time is of the essence,” and with this he lost the Mercedes and house to his wife.
    The following year, when Mortenson returned to teaching at Preston University, his colleagues found him a changed man. Whereas Le Mort had always cut a trim, daggerlike figure, as seemingly deadly as his reputation for slashing the works of those who disagreed with his protosexual sublimation theory, he was now grossly overweight and perpetually reeking of tobacco. “His eyes were like the openings to deep dark pits,” said his department head, Joshua Hyde-Summers. “He was always clutching his briefcase to his chest and darting looks over his shoulder. I found him in the hallway that runs beneath the Fine Arts building one night well after the last class had let out, lying on the floor in an alcove, staring blankly at the ceiling. On another occasion, he nervously confided to me that he was being stalked.”
    In late October of that year the body of a female student was discovered in that very alcove, lying in a pool of blood. The autopsy confirmed that she had her throat slit by a sharp instrument, most likely a razor. Students reported having seen a tall, thin figure, either with a very large head or wearing a huge hat, lurking in the shadows of the campus at night. This was the center of the investigation for a short time before Mortenson’s colleague came forward with new information. Because of the location of the body, Hyde-Summers notified police as to Mortenson’s strange behavior. “I went with the officers to find him,” said the department head. “I knew he would be heading for his night class just then. We caught up with him as he entered the alley between the Chemistry and Physics towers. The policemen called to him and he ran. They gave chase, but never found him. It was as if he disappeared somewhere between those two structures.”
    To this day, no one knows for certain what fate befell the enigmatic J. T. Mortenson, but a year after his disappearance, when the university was having his office cleared out, a young scholar by the name of Ned Dyson found photocopies of ten entries from the Tooms diary. Without telling anyone, he removed them from the archive box and took them to his own office and then home after work. That night, he read them to his wife as they got progressively drunk on merlot.
    It was Mrs. Dyson’s idea to burn the pages one by one over the sink. “Think of it,” she had said, and he stood by and laughed, watching Elijah Tooms’s words ripple into brown and disappear. The next morning he awoke with a terrible hangover and a recollection of ashes in the sink. He groaned, but his wife told him, “Don’t worry, I have it all inside