The Editor
(Meta note: If I were publishing anywhere but here, I would probably do something like this.)
The Editor
Harold Rayos decided that getting a very particular phone call was the highlight of his day.
"Yes, Maraget?" he asked of his boss, Director of Publishing at Creepy Crawly Books.
"You'll never guess who I booked," she purred.
"Who?" asked the wolf in mild excitement, knowing that the voice was reserved for very good news.
"Victor Kahn."
He drew a red bar down the side of a manuscript he was reviewing, as he decided to give Victor Kahn this poor author's slot.
"Really?" he asked suspiciously, "what does he want? I'm worried we're going to give it to him."
"I'm afraid we will have to give him control of his content."
Being the Editor, Harold knew that meant he would either be ignored, or sidestepped completely.
"So do I get any input?" he asked coldly, channeling his anger into enjoyment of a poor fox on the page get his left arm sliced off by a savage long-dead human.
"Of course you get input," she tried to reassure, "it's just he doesn't have to take it."
"Which means he won't," sighed Harold, having known too many authors to believe otherwise. "Did you at least give me any loopholes, like length requirements?"
"Just that one book must be between 52,000 and 110,000 words; but if he wants to make it multiple books, he can."
Harold felt the anger of the villian's lecture, and breathed it in. "I'd better talk to him," he growled.
"I'll see what Syr can do to set it up," she replied professionally.
"Thank you. Is that all?"
"Yes, Harold. Goodbye."
He cut the line, and felt all his anger leave him as the villian was disembowled from behind. The description of the life draining out of him was just how Harold felt; his responsibility was being given to -- in his experience -- the least capable hands. Hands which, he had demonstrated, thought of the printed page as nothing but a container for the words.
He did the author here at least the justice of finishing the story, lining more paragraphs' margins with red as he thought them too wordy or loose-ended. While the story was somewhat repetitive in theme -- an imagined past of furs living with brutish humans -- the plot was intricate enough he had thought it worth a look.
He spent the rest of his afternoon writing the apologetic letter to the author, but appending an ernest suggestion that he ought apply some changes and submit it again. His "deep regret" at having to reject was only partially true; he was generally very empathetic, but his normal feelings were blocked at this moment by dread of Victor Kahn.
On his way out, Syr -- the sharp, bobcat secratary of Margaret -- told him that he had scheduled an appointment with Mr. Kahn at his house. "He insisted that he will not eat dinner anywhere else," Syr added with a rather confused look.
But Harold just smiled. "Any writer who can see the things he does must live in another world," he reassured.
He got his coat on, to protect him from the autumn gusts which seemed to sweep through the city, and walked out the door. Kahn, Syr had told him, lived a mile out of town, on the outermost ring of the city. The train got him there fairly quickly, to one of the few locations that seemed to have more grass than steel.
Before long, he found himself walking on a narrow path along a large, unkempt plot of land toward a house in the middle of human ruins. Seeming to be out of place, the three story house was built more like a rocket ship of fiction han an abode. All three, square engine stages, all of which were a fading pure-white, were built one upon another with right siding, each several feet narrower than the one below. The first floor seemed reasonably large, the second two thirds its size, and the third only a single room.
He walked rather nervously up to the door, but it opened before he could touch the brass ring to knock. A rather short racoon, only five and a half feet tall, appeared with a gentle, but wearing look in his eyes.
"Mr. Kahn?" asked Harold instinctively, looking down from his own grey, five-foot-ten frame. Compared to the far more relaxed attire of a rather ornate purple robe the racoon wore, Harold's collared shirt and suit-pants made him feel over-dressed.
"Ah yes," he replied with a rather thin voice, "the editor, come in." He backed up enough for Harold to enter the door, and then shut it behind him; the heavy clank made the wolf jump.
"I'm afraid," he continued somewhat lyrically, "that I do not, have much for dinner."
"That's alright," Harold replied, "because mainly I wished to talk about your next book."
"In that case, we shall talk, before we eat," he advised.
Harold followed Victor up a flight of stairs, and entered what appeared to be a well-adorned library. There was a lumpy couch and two ornate wooden chairs encircling a small wooden table -- both covered with paper. The walls, painted a bronzy-gold, were barely visible; bookshelves covered the south wall, and with the exception of a small personal computer embedded in a tall shelf, the north wall was covered with pin-board, which itself was covered in paper fragments.
"Please, sit," said Victor as he pulled open the shades of the window -- which was the entire west wall -- and turned on a rather dim overhead light off on the opposite wall by the doorway.
Harold sat down, and wished immediately he had broguht his briefcase. "Uh, do you have something I could take notes with?" he asked rather sheepishly. He could see paper everywhere, but none of it was blank; all had ink printed on it, and there was not a pen in sight.
"I'm afraid, I don't," apologized the racoon, "but I, can record it, if you wish." He streched his entire body up to Harold's full height, and to his surprise, managed to reach a small tape recorder from the top shelf.
"Thank you," replied Harold, quite pleased with the idea of capturing every single word. Victor set the machine down on the table, ignoring the pile of paper's perecarious slide toward the edge as he did so, and then depressed record until it clicked and locked on.
Harold tried to organize his thoughts, finding himself surprisingly flat footed, and asked the obvious question. "So, you would like us to publish your new book. Even though you will retain control of the material, as editor, I would like to have some idea of what it's going to be about."
Victor folded his hands, raised his blue eyes looked toward the ceiling, and began in his gentle, poetic voice. "Well now, let's see. A very long story, this is going to be. Truely of epic proportions, a story of generations. A trilogy, I imagine. A tragedy in the first act, a tragedy of genetic engineering. The creation of a perfect one is tried, and the creation of a great monster results.
"But it is cared for too much, so that it becomes dangerous later. It kills its master unwittingly, but discovers a great ability: time travel. It disappears then, and is forgotten. Generations later, his son, whom he, long before, raised up, comes forth. He discovers the works of his father, but one appears to be missing. He tries to recreate, but to no avail.
"He discovers how it was, that the creature could travel. He goes back to his father, finds him hard at work, and tries to ask about it. And this time, the monster made, flees without killing. That generation, the second one, continues on. The second generations, now twice duplicated, makes a third. But it does so, not at that time, but another generation later. The second generation, of first period, grew up normally, now with a father.
"His son, third generation, goes back. But he himself, unlike his father, or his grandfather, seeks the monster. Why did he run, is what obsesses him. Through time, and difficulty, and pain, and turmoil, he runs. He sees the path, the monster leaves, through history. He catches up, at long last, and finds out: the monster, only wants, to love. No one will, give him that. He gives up, and the grandson, kills him mercifully."
When the strange sernade of prose ended, Harold had to shake himself from a trance. The imagery which came to him was a mixture of so many other stories he had read, that he wondered about its quality. But this was the great Victor Kahn, he remembered; it would surely be good.
Externally, however, he was much more cautious. "It sounds wonderful, but as you know," he cautioned, "the devil is in the details. How much of it do you have completed?"
The racon's eyes seemed to return to earth as well, and he sat up in the chair opposite Harold. "The first book," he replied, "each generation is, its own story."
"And how long is this first book?"
"Sixty, thousand, words."
Harold silently grit his teeth; his only loophole for editing had been met. "May I see it?" he asked.
"If you wish, to read it, all at once, then you may," he remarked, his muzzle twisting up a smirk.
"I would be willing to read it tomorrow," he replied.
"The pages, cannot leave, this room," Victor suddenly insisted. Harold was more perplexed than offended.
"Then how can I read it all?" he asked, feeling more like humoring his new author than sharing a mutual interest.
Victor stopped the tape recorder, and another smile came across his face, and his eyes reflected something very different. "Stay here, over night, with me," he answered.
Harold was not sure how to react to this. His first impluse, driven by the look in those eyes -- indications that more than reading would be involved -- was to say no. But he was quite important, and Harold fortunately was quite ameanable to his own kind, so he nodded. Besides, he told himself, there was a possibility he could get in a few editing suggestions this way.
Victor assembled the pages from the table, going through the entire stack, and laying them out on the floor, without page numbers. Several he threw toward a small pile of paper near the window, which Harold didn't question. When he had assembled about 75 finely-typed pages, most of them covering the table, he gave them to Harold. "Start with this," he instructed, "and read it."
He read, faster than average he was told, but the first page took him twice as long, and getting a third of the way through the stack he had been handed took him -- he later estimated -- over an hour. The problem was that the racoon seemed to be minimizing his paper usage: the page margins were far wider than usual, and the font size almost gave Harold a headache.
The one-third mark was significant to the story, too. The ideas and intentions of the scientist were well explained (too well, thought Harold the editor), and the creature had just been born: an adult, male species hybrid of enormous size, most resembling a platypus.
But here, to Harold's surprise, the story turned a different form of graphic: "The oviparious oddity made his first overture. Fluid still coating his thick fur, he extended his maker was not his slime-coated, clawed hand, but his smooth, fist-sized phallus."
Harold recoiled. He was used to blood and violence but not this. The monster, to his disgust, was then taught the pleasure of the nervous system, which as Victor outlined it, would probably be the source of murder and exile.
But Harold could read no further. "What is this?" he demanded calmly in his editor's voice.
"What?" asked the racoon as he gathered more pages from the printer.
"We don't publish anything with sex in it," he coldly stated.
Victor gasped in shock, and he dropped the stack of paper he held on his chair. Frantically, he dug through the pile of rejects he had thrown earlier by the window.
"Wrong page," he snapped, and shoved another in front of Harold's nose, "the other, should not, be printed."
The page Harold read was identical to the last one -- except the creature extended his his clawed finger, and tried to draw some blood from his creator to taste. Finding the parallelism too striking too ignore, Harold made a giant mental red mark, and finished the rest of the story.
The remaining two hours, more or less, was spent taking paper from the racoon, one or two pages at a time. It brought him quality and descriptive content on par with the best of his publisher's material. Sex did not reappear.
"Almost no changes," he remarked, "were I in charge."
Victor smiled in appreciation. "Thank you," he replied.
"But there is one thing," he asked, heart accelerating as the words approached his mouth, "what was that 'wrong page' earlier?"
"It's nothing important," he reassured, "would you like dinner?"
The question did not seem to follow logically, but Harold let the matter drop. "It depends on what you offer," Harold replied coyly.
"I'm afraid, only vegeatables," he replied, "but I can, make anything almost, using them."
Harold found it ironic that someone capable of such bloodshed as this author would not touch meat. "Surprise me," he decided pleasantly, and Victor him alone in the room -- not without some suspicion.
Harold waited until he saw the short shadow get down the stairs, and heard him walking around below. Only then did he creep, quietly except for a single loose floorboard, over to the window, and looked at the pages, his stomach tying up in a knot.
He found what he expected, but on a scale grander than he had considered: every single page was so heavily coated with lust, that his fingers almost felt sticky. The story he could make out of them, in their scrambled order, was one of far worse quality. Scene for scene, blood turned into a much different liquid, and and in so doing, took a compelling plot and melted it into a pool of mindless dribble.
When he read what he guessed was the end of the first book, he put down the pile and tried to wipe the images from his mind. He knew every writer has their own sources for creativity, and organizing their thoughts, but this was unlike any he had ever seen. He looked at the snippets of paper pegged to the posterboards on the wall, but it didn't help much.
The board was covered with tiny paper fragements, seeming to be the descriptive parts of both versions of his book. They were simple, but powerful, phrases, such as: "stepped with a slick splatter"; "cracked like limestone, and then crumbled like sandstone"; "green, gooey gore"; and dozens more. These, apparently, were the fragments of his texts, Harold thought. Too many of them reminded him of the second version rather than he first.
"Dinner is ready," Victor suddenly announged, magically appearing at the stairs, and giving Harold a start.
"Oh, thank you," was what Harold said as he followed Victor.
Harold found upon the dining table -- directly adjacent to the fairly large kitchen -- an orange soup. He wasn't sure what to make of it, but the first spoonful contained at least a dozen flavors. He complimented the skill of the chef, but said nothing else. He looked into his soup, like a wishing well, wishing he didn't feel like he had read the racoon's private diary.
After their silent supper had come to an end, the sun having set while Harold read, the wolf dared ask gently, "can we -- talk about your writing method?"
"If you do not, fear what you see, and still wish to, publish it for me," Victor nervously replied.
"Certainly," Harold sighed, smile spreading over his face, and his hand sliding reflexively toward Victor.
The racoon took Harold's gray hand with his own black, and his blue eyes met Harold's brown. "I can show, you more of, my work upstairs," he replied, poetic voice speeding up as his eyes focused intently on Harold. Harold also saw his hand extend.
Harold accepted it without thinking, let Victor lead him up the flight of stairs. They returned to the room covered in paper, but rather than letting him read, the racoon sid two piles off of a couch, sat them down, and just started talking.
"You just, remind me, how lonely, I am, many times," he sighed. "My computer keyboard, is the only, friend I have. What do you think, I would write about?"
Harold guessed he looked rather guilty, for he still felt bad, but said nothing.
"Oh what I think of, my imagination is aflutter," Victor continued quietly, Harold letting himself fall into another soft, serenade. "It is always busy; while I am awake, and while I sleep, in the dreams granted, for my viewing pleasure. And what do you suppose, it so often thinks of?"
Harold just nodded, and added his left hand to the grip of his right.
"And not just anything, but very powerful things, creatures of great stature, males of great power. My tastes some call sickness, I prefer to call it, mere diversity of imagination. But blood is my anathema; I cannot even eat meat. I find anger, from lonliness mostly, and then write, volumes of pain. Pain, surely, all, have, somewhere."
This statement made Harold even more sympathetic. "Perhaps I could ease some of your pain tonight" he whispered gently.
The racoon just smiled. "If you stayed with me, I might never write again," he replied nervously.
Harold, eyes locked upon those of victor, moved their heads slowly together until their muzzle's met. He felt Victor's arms wrap around his body, and start pulling them together. And then, seeming pretty desperate for this, Victor reached for Harold's trousers.
The wolf let himself be undressed, and then much to his excitement, Victor drew out Harold's erect penis, and started kissing it. Just kissing the shealth was something Harold felt was wonderful; it was exciting enough to make hair stand on end, and so familiar and loving he wanted more.
When he reached down to press the racoon's head into himself more, Victor oblidged, pulling back his furry, grey sheath to reveal his pink. The moment Victor slid it into his muzzle, Harold groaned. His heart and breathing took off right away, as he could feel his loin muscles gearing up for a sensation he could only describe as ecsatcy.
Victor was gentle and persistent, working the magic of his tongue in a way Harold had so seldom felt that he was already starting to ooze precum after only a minute. Getting there so fast, it wasn't long before the wolf whined in pleasure and started pumping out his seed. His nervous system lit up, making him feel tense and relaxed at the same time, his mind overwhelmed by the powerful, wonderful, indescribable rush for which there was no substitute.
Within moments, as he felt himself being cleaned up, his general affection for Victor suddenly solidified into a solid form of devotion. He let the raccoon release his flesh, and without a word, immediately pulled open Victor's robe. He grabbed the slightly smaller cock, and began returning the favor with his own tongue.
Victor seemed far noisier, grunting and groaning and mumbling acknowledgements and admiration. Harold could feel the pulse of the racoon speeding up in the gentle throbbing of his dick, his tongue seemingly able to feel every tiny capliary on the head as it stroked him.
Harold was careful to lick thoroughly several times in one spot, and then to slide it in and out of his muzzle once for a fuller effect of pleasure. It did the trick; Victor too was now starting to move precum out of his tip within minutes as his breathing turned into panting.
A few careful strokes of the tongue later, to clean up the slick precum which was trying to coat the head Harold was attending, Victor gave a long, cat-like hiss as his cock began to spew the seed Harold had been waiting for. Harold had done this enough to avoid choking, and carefully just drew it through the cock in squirts, allowing him to swallow it half a mouthful at a time without his teeth biting down on the sensitive flesh.
When he finally let go, Victor whispered, "stay, please?"
Harold wanted to, but he knew he was already too involved with a prospective author. "I'd love to," he answered slowly, "but I can't."
He didn't say anything else, but Victor seemed quite content with what he had. "I understand, thank you," was all he mumbled, already on his way toward sleep.
Harold showed himself out, feeling more relaxed than he had in a long time. In the end, Victor gave him permission to edit the manuscript anyway, a sign of respect and affection Harold greatly appreciated -- and Syr was surprised by. "How'd you talk him into that?" he asked Harold the next day.
Harold didn't answer. All he needed anyone else no know was that the next book published by Victor Kahn would be a good one.
The End.
(version 1.0)