Tight Spot

Titus hovered over his laptop as he tried to find the words he was looking for. He'd been at a standstill for weeks, and he needed to get it finished so he could...What exactly? So he could send it in and receive his latest rejection letter? He'd been writing for years, and after he'd been laid off thanks to the Pandemic, he'd written twice as much as he usually did. All it ever seemed to net him, though, was rejection. His wife was being patient about it, but as the bills racked up and the money coming in barely fed the family, he could tell that his joblessness was getting to her.

If he could just get his hands on some money, everything would be better.

If he could just finish this book, he knew it would get his life back on track. The idea had been brewing for years, but it was finally starting to come together. Forests of Ellonmore had all the earmarks of a great fantasy story. There was action, intrigue, forbidden love, warring nations, a believable magic system, and it was so different from the dreck that was currently on the market. He knew it would be a best-seller if only he could finish it.

His computer chimed, drawing his attention from his passion project. He saw that he had a new email, and Titus sighed. Probably another late notice or a message about his account being overdrawn. The sender was unfamiliar, though, a company named Libras Talent who had a Special Offer for Titus. Titus started to delete it, but something stopped him. Something nagged at him to open it. Maybe it was just the life-changing offer he'd been waiting for. He opened it, wanting to see what sort of ridiculous "offer" they had for him, thinking it was probably a sales pitch for a magazine subscription.

As Titus read, though, he felt his eyebrows go up.

This was a little more than a magazine subscription.

"Dear Mr. Harrow. We at Libras Talent have been following your recent hardships with great interest. We understand that times are hard just now, and we'd like to reach out a helping hand to struggling writers like yourself. We would like to extend to you a chance to sell your Talent to Libras Talent. We pay top dollar to talented individuals, and we would love to add your Talent to our company's ever-growing pool. We look forward to your visit, see you soon.

Mr. P Sereph

There was a phone number at the bottom of the email, along with an address for Libras Talent. Titus looked at it for a moment, re-reading the email, before closing it and starting his story again. As he'd thought, some scam company trying to take advantage of people in the current climate. Titus started writing again, erasing more than he kept, but he found himself coming back to the email again and again. What sort of Talent were they looking for? Were they offering work? Were they looking to represent him? The more he thought about it, the more intrigued he became. He could use the money, and if he didn't like what they had to say, he could always refuse.

Titus reopened the email and, after googling the address, he closed his laptop and left.

The sooner he talked to them, the sooner he could get back to work.

The address led him not to a rundown strip mall, as he had suspected it would, but to an elegant office building. It was clean, the grounds well maintained, with a large sign over the door declaring it to be Libras Talent. This place looked more like a law firm than a fly-by-night operation, and Titus rechecked the address to make sure he'd entered it correctly. Sure he was in the right place, Titus stepped inside and was welcomed inside by a deep chime overhead. He was suddenly overcome with a strange sense of vertigo as he entered the lobby and grabbed the door frame to steady himself. The starkness of the room shocked him at first glance, and the walls had a strange sort of depth to them that seemed bottomless. It hurt his head to look at them for too long, so he turned to focus on the rest of the room. There were no chairs, though, no love seats to mar the illusion, only a reception desk with a smiling woman manning it. Her smile was a trifle unsettling. Titus became worried that it might extend all the way back and slice the top of her head off just over the ears.

"Greeting, Mr. Harrow. Go ahead, Mr. Sereph has been expecting you," she said, pointing to a door beside the desk.

Titus was suddenly hesitant, "How did you know who I was?"

"We've been expecting you." she said, still flashing that brilliantly unsettling grin, "Go ahead, sir. It's not good to keep Mr. Sereph waiting."

Titus wanted to question her further about this mysterious Mr. Sereph but felt it might be safer to just do as she said. She had turned that smile away from him, returning to her work, and he was left with no other option but to proceed or leave. He walked into a hallway lined with identical white doors that bore little name plaques. The hallway seemed to go on much farther than the outside of the building had led him to believe, and Titus wondered if it were an illusion or something. As he walked, he thought he could hear strange sounds from behind some of the doors, but it made him feel uncomfortable to linger outside them for too long. He walked until he found Mr. Sereph's door and knocked.

He was invited into an office as stark as the lobby.

Mr. Sereph was a minimalist, it seemed, and his office contained a desk, two chairs, and a black book with a handsome silver pen sitting beside it in a holder. It had none of the photos or clutter common to a working man's desk, and Titus found this as odd as the office itself. Mr. Sereph was a well-kept man who looked about thirty, his blond hair curtaining his face in a European style as meticulous as his white suit. When he smiled, Titus suddenly felt the urge to run. His too wide grin reminded Titus of the Cheshire Cat, and too-big eyes reminded him of the big bad wolf. Titus was suddenly very afraid of being gobbled up, bones and all.

If Mr. Sereph noticed his discomfort, it bothered him little.

"Mr. Harrow! Thank you for coming. Please have a seat."

Titus sat without really meaning to. The man's voice compelled him with its dulcet tones, and it had made him forget about his unease for the millisecond it took him to plant his rump. This also put him on eye level with the strange book, and Titus felt his eyes drawn to it as it hunkered on the desk. Titus almost imaged he could see it breathing, watching him, liking him so close so that it might suddenly leap out and…

"I trust you found the office easily? It wasn't like to be what you were expecting, I would wager."

"How....how did you know I'd come?" Titus stammered, dragging his eyes off the strange book.

"Oh, we've been assessing your talent for quite some time. We feel it could use a more ambitious hand, someone likely to make better use of it. We would like to utilize your Talent, as we do with many unambitious individuals. You will be compensated, of course. Times are hard, and a man with no job has to feed his family somehow. What do you say? Do we have a deal?" he purred, setting the bait like a talented angler.

Titus, however, was warry. This smiling man seemed to know all about him, but Titus knew nothing about who he was or what he expected. Who the hell was this guy? He was certain he'd never seen anyone like him before, but somehow he knew all about Titus? How long had he been watching him, and why was he so interested in his "Talent".

"How is it that you know so much about me, but I've never seen you before in my life?"

"Oh, we know a lot about you, Mr. Harrow. We know you've been out of work for almost a year. We know that your wife has become the sole breadwinner for the household and is barely getting by. We know you are in a great amount of debt. We also know that debt is likely to get deeper without a miracle or the untimely accessing of your life insurance."

Titus started to become indignant, but Mr. Sereph put up a hand.

"But that is behind you now. With the money we intend to pay you for your considerable Talent, you can live the life of a free man once again. Take back what's been stolen from, clean the slate and start fresh. What do you say?"

Suddenly there was a check in Mr. Sereph's left hand and a pen in his right. Titus could see twenty thousand dollars scrolled on the value line and felt his anger disappearing. With that kind of money, he could settle his debts, and could survive until this Pandemic if he was careful. He could get out from under this funk he'd been squashed beneath and see the sun again. The black book was open between them, when had that happened, and it seemed to be waiting, greedily longing for his signature.

For his Talent.

Titus took up the pen without hesitation, a sweaty hand taking the check and stuffing it into his pocket, and signed his name on the rough top sheet. As his name lay across the page, he tried to pull his hand back, but it was outside his control now. It moved furiously, and words spilled from the pen across the page. Pages become sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and finally, whole novels, and Titus could only watch in horror. The pages riffled, turning, accepting his ink, accepting his Talent, and Titus screamed and begged for it to stop. His hand, however, gave away all he had and more. The pages swallowed it all, swelling to a monstrous size as he wrote. Titus hadn't known he had this much in him, and soon the ink began to trickle from the pages like an oozing wound. It pooled around him, rising like a tide, and he saw Mr. Sereph's smiling face disappeared beneath the liquid tar before his vision was covered in murk.

Even as he descended into blackness, he wrote.

He awoke on the couch, breathing heavily, the evening news just finishing up.

"In entertainment news, it looks like fans of Mark Daniels will have something to celebrate soon. He tweeted today that he's begun a new novel, Tribes of Ellomoore. Fans of his talented writing can't wait."

Titus shuttered; that was his book! Not anymore though. It was gone now, and as he sat on the couch and tried to remember, he couldn't even think of what it had been about. It had been a fantasy story, set in...somewhere...there had been...elves? It was gone though, it was all gone. Titus remembered the pages upon pages in the black book and wondered if it was the only thing that was gone?

He felt something in his pocket and reached in to find the crumpled check.

Pay to Titus Harrow, twenty thousand dollars.

Memo: For Your Talent.

Titus now suspected that his transaction had been more Faustian than he had believed. As the check said, they had purchased more than a book; they had purchased his Talent. He felt tears slide down his face as he came to realize what he had sold. In the end, it might have been less painful to sell his soul than his Talent.