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    The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures
    The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures
    The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures
    Ebook207 pages2 hours

    The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures

    By Angus Brownfield

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    In The Scrivener’s Tale, sequel to Angus Brownfield’s Pool of Tears, the Worst Case Scenario has been visited on Dorothy Mustt, smartest of the Talkers. Held prisoner by warped scientist Jason Ramback, she refuses to divulge the whereabouts of her kith and kin. Jason hires novelist Gavin MacDonald to help Dorothy write her memoir, hoping in the process she will reveal her secret. Gavin and Dorothy form a bond and he spirits her away from her prison, hoping to reunite with her the other Talkers. He’s aided by two women, one a former lover and still best friend, the other a new love. Three humans and a mouse outthink Jason and his CIA sponsors who wanted Dorothy to escape so that they can track her to the hideout of the other Talkers. The problem is, she doesn’t know their whereabouts and wouldn’t lead even trusted humans there. Has Gavin’s messing with national security been in vain? Tune in.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAngus Brownfield
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781465814630
    The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures
    Author

    Angus Brownfield

    Write what you know. I know me and I'm talking to you, reader, in the first person, not the anonymous third person, because when I write I write about me and the world that thrives around me. I wrote decent poetry in college, I couldn’t get the hang of short stories. I finished my first novel so many years ago writers were still sending their works to publishers instead of agents. My first novel was rejected by everyone I sent it to. The most useful rejection, by a Miss Kelly at Little, Brown, said something like this: “You write beautifully, but you don’t know how to tell a story.” Since then I've concentrated on learning to tell a good story. The writing isn’t quite so beautiful but it will do. Life intervened. Like the typical Berkeley graduate, I went through five careers and three marriages. Since the last I've been writing like there’s no tomorrow. I have turned out twelve novels, a smattering of short stories and a little poetry. My latest novel is the third in a series about a man who is not my alter ego, he’s pure fiction, but everyone he interacts with, including the women, are me. My title for this trilogy is The Libertine. Writers who have influenced me include Thomas Mann, Elmore Leonard, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and Willa Cather. I don’t write like any of them, but I wish I did. I'm currently gearing up to pay attention to marketing. Archery isn’t complete if there’s no target. I've neglected readers because I've been compulsive about putting words down on paper. Today the balance shifts.

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      The Scrivener's Tale, Book II of the Mustt Adventures - Angus Brownfield

      Context.

      Associations.

      Connections.

      The simple part of this tale is what forms the story line—how I came to shepherd Dorothy Mustt’s words onto the printed page. The harder part is trying to make sense of a world that, since the day before yesterday, isn’t the world we’re used to. The old world—absurd in part, complex as hell—was still coherent and yes, in its high-tech way, even ordinary. Through publication of Pool of Tears, the world has come to know a very unusual soul, Yeats’s rough beast if you will. Miniaturized and limping rather than slouching, Dorothy is still a soul so startling that our world’s congruity has fled and the ordinary become extraordinary.

      We are not alone, the tag line of the movie, Contact, has become true in quite an unforeseen way. There are no aliens out there, light years removed. There are creatures in our midst who still must be classified in the order Rodentia, and even the genus, Mus, but are no longer the noisome species mus musculus. They are, rather, mus sapiens.

      That taxon, sapiens, joins humans to Dorothy Mustt and her kin more closely than to chimpanzees and gorillas.

      How I came to understand this rough beast, and gain her trust isn’t the main story: I’m merely a medium, a channeler, a scribe. Dorothy’s the story. I’m reporting a change in our world more telling than the recent discovery of Stone Age Hobbits in Indonesia. The hardest part—the reader’s part—requires looking into your own soul and deciding to set aside prejudices and become as utterly rational as our bankers, industrialists and generals have demonstrated we humans can be.

      In approaching this new species, we—you and I—must search for a context beyond history and religion, beyond constitutional protections, beyond biology. As your guide, I Must make connections among the pieces of the story that give insight into the players and how they could be any of us—or nearly any.

      You may have read Pool of Tears as fairy tale, and that’s how those who sought so long to block its publication would like you to take it. In fact, since failing to block publication of Pool of Tears, they now try to use ridicule as a means to trivialize its message. Meanwhile, they haven’t given up on trying to use these sapient mice as instruments of war. They’re still out there, looking.

      You may laugh along with the mockers but, I assure you, the last laugh is enjoyed by a bunch of mice sitting around their hearths in terra incognita, sharing a reminiscence of the heroic Dorothy Mustt and her journey to enlightenment.

      chapter 2: A prophetic dream

      When, some months back, my agent, David Rohatyn, called me early one morning and said, Gavin, are you up to the world’s most un-fucking-imaginable writing gig? I was assuming, of course, he was hyperbolizing.

      You mean, after I finish ‘So Long, Sleep Tight,’ aka my fourth Daric Concannon crime novel?

      He hesitated. Uh . . . this moves to the head of the line.

      Only if it comes with a seven figure advance, Davy.

      He snickered an ‘in your dreams’ sort of laugh and said, Maybe if your name was Danielle Steel.

      Then what’s the point, Davy? Why bother to ask?

      He replied, "I assure you I meant what I said: this assignment is absolutely, positively unique: a bigger opportunity than Stanley’s when the Herald sent him off to find Livingstone in deepest darkest Africa—I kid you not."

      There was more than a hint of earnestness in his voice, which was not characteristic of the man. If there are degrees of cynicism, Davy is a grade A cynic.

      Before I say, ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ may I ask if it involves any travel? Davy knew I didn’t fly since my third near-catastrophe at a major airport last year.

      You can get there by car. And the subject’s highly transportable—if her handlers can be persuaded to let her out.

      "Her? Davy, this isn’t another stripper, is it?"

      "Hey, the Miss Boope thing wasn’t an absolutely unique assignment, but you did get valuable material for Polonaise Boogie, didn’t you?"

      Polonaise Boogie was my second and hopefully least memorable Daric Concannon novel. Prior to my writing it, a stripper, stage name Betti Boope, was looking for someone to ghost write Memoir Of A Pole Dancer. She had married, since retiring from the pole, two filthy rich men, one who died prematurely and one whom she divorced, so, according to the tabloids, she was over the ninetieth percentile of showgirls who’d struck it rich. She was a savvy rich showgirl as well: she didn’t care to shell out money before a deal was struck, and Davy hadn’t managed to hook her up with a publisher. His idea was that I could learn enough—on spec—to write a nifty proposal, and then we’d pitch the publishers. The sweetener in the deal was, I could move into her Malibu beachfront and get fed and sheltered for the duration—allowing me to quit my day job. There was a hint—from the lady herself, during our one and only interview—of compensation of the horizontal variety as well.

      Now Miss Boope was fifty, looked forty (without benefit of cosmetic surgery, she insisted) and had a body many women half her age would envy. But my instincts told me to stay as far away from her as I would a three hundred pound anaconda, and, based on the career-sabotaging fate of the writer who did take her gig, I was so, so right. As indirect compensation for my trouble, though, in my two days at her Malibu digs she’d taught me enough about her profession to weave a well-preserved pole dancer into Polonaise Boogie.

      Recalling this provident near miss I said, Look, Davy, cut to the chase.

      The end of the chase is, I cannot and will not reveal anything about the subject unless you agree to certain conditions. But I assure you, if you say no you’ll be kicking yourself for as long as my Uncle Gordon did when he passed up five building sites in Topanga Canyon at five hundred bucks per, back in the days of the Great Depression.

      Again, there was that earnestness in his response I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to be shut of Daric Concannon, who was only meant to be a career-launcher, not a staple. I wanted to write novels of social import. Was he offering me that chance? I said, When do you need an answer?

      Yesterday.

      No, no, no. I need a day to get honest with myself about where I stand with Daric. He is my bread and butter at this juncture.

      Call me tomorrow at this time?

      Right, I said, and hung up. After the call I stared at the computer screen for many minutes. In mid-screen a sentence stared back that started, Meanwhile, in the depths of despair . . . I had no idea how I’d intended to end it. I stared some more, wondering if Davy had found another wooden nickel or whether he’d found the key to a prosperous and envied career as the best of the mid-list mystery writers.

      That night, after a bedtime consult with that mellow Tennessean, George Dickel, I had a dream. In the dream an angel tiptoed down a moonbeam to my bedside. He had a gait like a male Betti Boope, but otherwise looked much the superhero, complete with a Batman-like mask and cape. He wrapped me in a Portuguese shepherd’s cape and carried me in his arms, like a baby, flying to the middle of the Gobi Desert. Upon alighting, he sat me on a large and dignified Bactrian camel, warning me (in agent Davy’s voice) to hang on and trust the shaggy beast’s unerring instincts as it ambled across the dunes. Just as my butt started to go numb, the camel deposited me at the tent of a nomad named Abraham.

      Abraham greeted me in English, despite his Mongol visage and the smell of burning camel dung hanging in his tent. I asked him, seated by his fire and drinking his tea, why I’d been brought to him. He smiled an enigmatic smile and said, It is not the destination that is the why, it is the bringer.

      The angel?

      Abraham laughed much like my agent, a braying sort of laugh, and said, Heavens no—the camel. His name is Gilgamesh and he is an absolutely unique camel.

      How so?

      Abraham called out, Gilgamesh, and the camel stuck his head through the tent opening.

      Yes, Abraham? the camel said.

      I was going to ask Abraham how he’d done that—make it seem as if the camel were talking—when the momentousness of this meeting sunk in, and I fainted dead away.

      When I awoke next morning I recalled the dream in such vivid detail I looked around my bedroom for a tangible clue to what happened to me in my sleep. A forgotten reprise of my encounter with Mr. Dickel? But no, the whiskey bottle was back in its cubby, with no evidence of further nips.

      I leapt to the phone in my birthday suit and called Davy. I told him my dream. What in the hell does it mean, Davy?

      He said, Jesus, kiddo: am I Jung, am I Freud? The scale’s all wrong, but the gist of the dream is prophetic. It means you take this gig, even if we have to beg for an extension on delivering Daric IV.

      What part of the dream do you mean is prophetic: Superhero? Wilderness? Odd means of transportation—what?

      Talking camel, he said. Abraham was correct: the truth is in the bringer, but I cannot say more. If you come with me on a little trip to Camp Pendleton this afternoon, I’ll open your eyes. But only if you promise you’re going to take this engagement. —Promise?

      Will I get to work on Daric at the same time?

      If you have the willpower and stamina.

      This better be good, Davy; this really better be good, or I’ll chain you to a dungeon wall and tell you the camel herder joke till you go crazy. (The camel herder joke has nothing to do with the camel in my dream; it is the world’s shaggiest shaggy dog story.)

      *****

      Thus did I meet Dorothy M. Mustt, at the end of a cop-defying ride in Davy’s amethyst Porsche Cayenne down I-405 from my bachelor pad in Santa Monica. But first I met many US Marines, for Dorothy was then housed (imprisoned was her blunter assessment) in the Domestic Animal Control Center of Camp Pendleton, the base known in Marine talk as The School of Infantry, Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, California.

      I was processed first through the Visitor’s Center, which is just to the left of the Main Gate, behind bomb-blast barriers. It is off Pacific Coast Highway, in San Diego County. With a visitor’s badge hung around my neck, I was escorted by a young lance corporal named Mary Portale to the Public Affairs Office, where a Public Affairs Officer, First Lieutenant O’Reilly, briefed me on my visit:

      —I would take no pictures.

      —Any notes I might take were subject to examination by said lieutenant and seizure if they contained information deemed detrimental to the mission of The School of Infantry, the Marines, or the United States Government.

      —I was to be accompanied at all times I was in the presence of the subject, that is, Miss Mustt, by a civilian, a professor from the eminent university down the road, named Jason Ramback.

      The lieutenant gave me an affidavit to sign saying that my notes were to be the

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