For Your Talent

Ted looked at the number written on the paper, and his eyes grew large.

Twenty thousand was more money than he'd ever seen in one place, and this guy was offering it to him for…

"So, you want to pay me for...what, exactly?"

The man in the black suit stared at him, hollowly, from behind his mirrored glasses. He sat, nonchalantly, across the table at the small coffee shop Ted had written in for the last four years. He had approached him out of the blue, introducing himself as Mr. P Sereph, and the longer the man sat there, the more Ted wished he had approached someone else instead.

"It's very straightforward," he said, his voice and cadence reminding Ted of Agent Smith in The Matrix movies, "we want to pay you for your Talent." Then he smiled, his lips sliding away from his perfectly artificial teeth, and Ted cringed all over.

It was like a dog who's been taught to smile, unsettling, and a little alarming.

"Let me think about it." Ted hedged, and Sereph's smile slid mechanically from his face.

When he slipped a large black book onto the table, Ted felt his eyes drawn to its oily black cover and wondered where it had come from. Ted had read stories about magic books, grimoires, and codex full of dark magic, and he imagined that this was what they must look like. Grim tombs full of black words, held by smiling warlocks looking for the blood of the unsuspecting and the naive.

Still, Ted was very curious.

Ted had been writing in some form or another for his whole life.

When he was a child, he drew pictures and created games for his friends to play. Ted's pictures, his mother swore, always told a story, and his games were never the haphazard mess that his friends often concocted. People who weren't even part of Ted's friend circle often came to join his games, as they were both fun and engaging in a way that was hard for a child to explain. His teachers praised his creativity and expected they would see great things from him someday.

As Ted grew, so grew his stories, and it was a no-brainer for him to study writing after high school. He had soared through what is normally a very trying time for teens by channeling his churning emotions into his medium. Ted had gotten more than one scholarship for his writing, and as college loomed, he put all his efforts into his work. Ted spent the next four years working on a BA in English and Literature, and in the end, he felt he had the expected tools to begin plying his craft professionally.

Now, Ted was trying to figure out how to turn that talent into a paycheck so that he could pay his bills. Magazines liked his work but wanted writers with more experience. There were people online who would pay for stories, but not enough to live off of. Agents were interested, but they didn't want to take a chance on someone so young. Ted's writing was always well received, but there was always the ever-present But hanging at the end of all that praise. A few "Interested Publishers" had approached him, but it was always the sort that buried the line of price amidst all that talk. Ted was twenty-six, four years out of college, self-published, untried, and no one was willing to take a chance on him.

Everyone, except Libras Talent that is.

"Mr. Dreff, if I may be frank, we know that your writing has been stagnant these past few years."

Ted blinked, "Excuse me."

"Oh, don't get me wrong, you have plenty of talent, but no one wants to take a chance on talent. They want a name, they want experience, and you just don't have it. Am I far off?"

Ted wanted to deny it, but he couldn't. Lately, he had often felt that this gift was a burden, a burden he wished he was shut of. The stores didn't so much inspire him as assault him, bombarding him with ideas he couldn't bring himself to do anything with. He was drowning in ideas as well as debt with no respite in sight.

"I can take them away. I can make the voices stop. All you have to do is give us your Talent and all your problems with disappear. Doesn't that sound wonderful?"

Ted nodded; it did sound wonderful.

"What do you want me to do?" Ted asked, his voice dreamy.

"Just take up the pen; it will know what to do from there." Mr. Sereph said, still grinning that troubling smile.

A pen appeared in his hand, and he pressed it and a check into Ted's numb fingers. The book was open before him, and it seemed that Ted could see tendrils of something wafting from its. The pages breathed in a pregnant breath, begging him to sign as it waited for him to touch pen to paper and bring about its moment of climax.

The pen came down on the paper, its tip blotting the surface as though through magnetism. Suddenly, Ted was writing. He was writing words, crafting stories, spilling ideas as the paper drank them down before his eyes. He spilled days, weeks, years' worth of stories onto the pape as he wrote. His hand cramped, and his wrist ached, but still, the merciless pen took his words. The paper drank greedily, swelling as he worked. Ted looked around at the patrons of the coffee shop, thinking someone must be seeing this, but they all went about their day as though there wasn't a man in a corner booth with a book swelling to fill the table before him.

As the book began to ooze, spilling ink onto the laminate floor, Ted became certain that they could all drown without realizing their peril.

When the liquid filled his mouth and eyes, he finally passed out and felt the bliss of silence.

Ted woke up in his bed, still gasping for air. His arm throbbed, the fingers and hand feeling like rubber, but when he tried to move it, he found it asleep. He shook at it, thinking about the weird dream he had just woken up from. He felt something prickly in his pocket, and he pulled it out to find the crumpled check nestled near the bottom.

This amount of money could be life-changing.

This amount of money could be an excellent thing for him.

He kept right on thinking that for the next seven days too.

When Ted found Sereph again, the oddity in the suit did not seem at all surprised.

He had been staking out the coffee shop for three weeks. He'd spent a week googling Libra Talent, looking for information, but they didn't exist. No address, no phone number, and no mention anywhere of Mr. Sereph. So, Ted had to drop back to the last place he had seen him; the coffee shop. The place was always packed, and if Sereph was looking for other writers, he might come back here. He had brought his laptop the first few times but had stopped after the first week. He was too distracted to write these days.

All he could think of was how he had been robbed.

When he read how his latest project was suddenly being published by some no-name in Soho, the same name and everything, he had been furious. He had started trying to compile evidence to build a case immediately, and that's when he had discovered the depths of their treachery. Apparently, buying his "Talent" had involved hacking into his Google doc and taking all his files. No problem, he had documents on his laptop and paper copies in his filing cabinet. Except they were gone too. It was as though his story had never existed, at least to him, and after finding out his life's work had been stolen, all he thought about was getting it back. If anyone had information he could use, it would be Sereph. He had spent the last three weeks drinking coffee and keeping his eyes peeled. He was the first customer in the morning and the last to shuffle out at closing time.

After three weeks of waiting, he found his man.

"What we're looking for is your Talent."

Ted swung his head around sharply. The man was at an adjoining table, talking to a blond girl that Ted had seen hanging around lately. She was working on a screenplay, it seemed, and she had gained the interest of Libras Talent. She looked over the business card and told him she'd think about it before leaving in a hurry. She didn't seem to care for his smile either.

Sereph sat for a moment, watching her leave, before speaking to Ted.

"Mr. Dreft, I hear you've been looking for me."

Ted jumped, not expecting to be recognized. Mr. Sereph came sauntering over to his table and sat in the empty seat. His too wide smile still made Ted cringe, but he tried to hide it manfully. Sereph took a sip of the cold cup of coffee Ted had left there and seemed to wait for Ted to begin. Ted still wasn't sure how to start this encounter, though. In his head, Ted had always been indignant, angry, but now, as he stared into that strange smile, he felt unsure of what he was doing.

"I assume that you're here to talk about your Talent. I must say, when it hit the bestseller list, I was shocked. I suppose we could reassess your price if you're looking for more money."

That lit the fire in Ted again.

"I want to know exactly what the hell you think you're doing? You break into my apartment, steal my work, clean out my hard drive, and just think you can bribe me with more…"

"I did no such thing." Mr. Sereph said with a roll of his eyes, "We paid you for your Talent. Your Talent was writing, you signed a contract, and were compensated accordingly."

"Wait...you mean you paid me for my story?"

Sereph scoffed, "Stories? Mr. Dreff, have you tried to write since you awoke in your bed?"

Ted thought about it. Had he written anything for the past month? Felt compelled to write anything? He had signed his name to a few things, maybe written a text message or two, but other than that, he hadn't written so much as a sentence creatively. He had been so busy trying to track down Sereph that he hadn't had time to do much else. How had he not noticed? Writing was what Ted did. Without it, his life was…

"That's right. You sold us your Talent, rather cheaply too. But, your kind usually does. You cut your goose open too quickly and find nothing as valuable as what you had."

"So, what is Libres Talent? You sell ideas to other writers?"

Sereph scoffed again, "You're still thinking too small. Do you think that Talent is something that just lasts forever? Talent is a finite resource. It flows and ebbs. Some people are lucky enough to have a large tidal pool, but some have to buy Talent to supplement their own. Libres Talent finds those in need of Talent, literary, athletic, political, what have you, and we get Talent for them."

Ted's blood ran cold.

"So I'll never write again?"

Mr. Sereph looked a little sad, "Sorry, kiddo, it looks like you'll just have to live like all these other talentless shlubs. But, hey, if you ever decide you want to buy some talent, do keep in touch."

He left a business card on the table and made his way out.

Ted just sat there, hearing the click of the keyboard and the creation of raw ideas, and put his head in his hands.

He had sold his soul, and now he'd just have to live in hell.