The first novel had been a success. An amazing work of fiction, written with the sort of fire and brilliant energy that only youth can properly express upon the written page. Critics had hailed it as being a bit of genius and promise, had praised him as being one of the best new writer’s of the decade. Writing it had been an act of creation and of joy, it had been infused with a life of its own; and when he had finished it he had felt drained and exhausted from the effort.

The second novel had been equally exhausting, but for all of the wrong reasons. As much as the first one had flown from his fingertips, almost faster then he could conceive what would happen next, the second one had been an act of forced creation. Like any forced act of conception it had been fraught with pain and frustration. Where praise had rained down upon his first novel, the second suffered under a hail of harsh criticism. Called infantile and immature, a feeble second effort after the brilliance of his first.

Now his editor was pestering him for the third, weeks overdue. He hadn’t even begun it yet. Too many distractions had kept him from getting any work done. Fans, and critics, and his editor calling day after day with demands for the manuscript of the third book. He needed to get away, to get somewhere far away, both to clear his head and to get the writing done.

He had seen the inn once before, sitting on a hill in the distance, while he rode as a passenger between cities during a signing tour for his first book. It had haunted him, an image that had never quite left his mind. The way it had seemed to rest on the divide between earth and sky, tranquil and untouched by time and the passage of life around it. He had learned its name from the gas station attendant in the next town they stopped at, the old man shaking his head the entire time as he answered questions about it.

It was to that inn he was returning now, his old beat-up Land Rover eating up the miles as he drove his way across the country to there. He had left his cel phone behind, his answering service had a message saying he had left on a retreat to write, and his editor in New York was screaming in anger at the fax reading only “Gone for a while. The book will be done when I am finished writing it.”

The final length of road up to the inn was muddy, and bore the ruts of having had many vehicles pass along its way over the years. He slowed as he approached, leaning over the steering wheel to get a better view of the building. No other vehicles were in sight, and so he pulled his land rover along the front of the building, and parked it on the barren bit of dirt there.

The inn itself didn’t look old as much as it looked ageless. It wasn’t built in any particular building style, rather it had the ramshackle appearance of having been added on to many times, and looked as if it a connection of structures built in different eras and styles that had been walled together, rather then one discrete building in and of itself.

As he turned his keys in the ignition it struck him, the silence. So used to city life, to the constant noise and sounds of the mass of humanity all around him, the quiet now of being out in the country was an almost physically palpable sensation as it descended to fill the void left behind as the engine noise died slowly away.

The silence leant an added gravity to all of the sounds he made, the seatbelt unfastening, the clack of the doors latch, and the sounds of his boots squelching into the muddy soil. The report of his car’s door shutting closed behind him seemed to echo in quiet, causing the vehicles sheer presence and its capacity to make noise somehow otherworldly in this place.

The inn’s door swings open silently as well, but with its passage through the air comes sound one again. The tinny sound of music coming across an old transistor radio, and the sound of a pen scratching upon paper from the front desk, seemed to add life and reality back to the scene. The woman at the desk, seeming too old to be called a girl and too young to be a lady, looked up briefly as he came inside before glancing back down at what she was writing.

The front room of the hotel itself seemed decorated in a style that could only be called ‘antique’. None of the furnishings matched, they seemed to be from a mixture of periods and styles, but they all had a sense of age to them. If the decorator had gone by any guidelines at all in arranging the room it would have to have been that the older the furniture looked the better.

Clearing his throat as he crossed to the front desk, finding the sound as loud and abrupt as his footsteps seemed over the music, “I would like a room. That is, if there are any that are available?”

The woman at the desk put her pen down then, an old-style fountain pen that needed to be dipped in the inkwell she kept at the ledgers side, and looked him over slowly, “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

“No. I saw the place from the road, and I was hoping to be able to get a room for a while,” his shoulders sagging a little at the expected rejection to come.

Chewing her lower-lip, her eyebrows formed a ‘v’ upon her brow as she looked more intently at his face, “You aren’t in any sort of trouble, are you sir?”

He rocked back on his heels at her question, his jaw dropping a little and eyes blinking twice before he could find the words to reply, “No... No! I just need to get away from it all for a while. Just some quiet and some time to think.”

Letting her lip go and breathing a quiet sigh, “Sorry sir, just a little curious whenever we get unexpected guests. We do have a few rooms vacant at the moment. If you would like to sign the ledger, I’ll see about finding a room key for you.” She pushed the ledger across the desk top, turning it around to face him, before turning back herself to reach for a key from the rack of them hanging on the wall behind the desk.

He fumbled a moment with the fountain pen, having to turn it in his hand to sign his name, “Thank you. I do appreciate this. I just need some time and some quiet to write in. I couldn’t seem to focus at all while I was in the city.”

She paused at his words, a key half-lifted off a hook before she let it drop and moved her hand to remove a different one from its resting place, “A writer you say? We haven’t had one of those stay here for a while. Here you go sir, the key to your room. I hope you find it, and its view, pleasing.”

The key fell from her fingertips to his palm, a slight spark as it touched his skin, a static discharge from crossing the rug on the room’s floor.

The room was a single long chamber, with a bed at one end and a fireplace at the other. All along the outside wall was a series of heavily draped windows, the glass having sagged a little in the frames, the age of room showing in another small way. Between the two ends of the room was a sitting area, with a sofa and small table, and a desk pushed against the wall with a chair before it.

He had brought with him a few weeks change of clothes, a typewriter and a box of printer paper to type upon. It was upon the desk that he placed his typewriter. His editor hated that machine but he had never overcome a sense of dislike for computers that had been instilled in him by his father, and so he wrote everything in the old-fashioned way.

The next morning, with the drapes open wide and the room flooded with daylight, he sat at the desk and began to type.

By evening the room was well lit and kept rather warm from the crumpled up balls of paper that had been thrown into the fireplace and lit afire.

Three days later he was sitting in the downstairs parlor, unshaven and with his head resting upon his arms, crossed on the tabletop. He had smoked his last cigarette the day before and was lamenting the fact that while he had brought plenty of extra paper with him, he hadn’t thought to pack anything extra to smoke. The writing had been going poorly.

The sound of wood striking wood and a vibration through the table caused him to lift his head from his arms. An old man with a chessboard had sat down across from him and was looking rather intently at him, “You would be the one in the room upstairs that has been frantically pounding away at that typewriter of yours, I take it?”

He lowered his head back to his arms, muttering a quietly frustrated, “Yes.”

There was the sound of a metal clasp being undone, the quiet sound of old hinges being opened, and then the sound of wood upon wood again as the old man set the chess pieces up upon the board.

Lifting his head again, he looked at the chessboard that had been setup with the pieces to either side so the middle of the board was between the two of them and fixed a scowl upon his face as he addressed the old man, “I am sorry, but did you want something?”

The old man lifted the last two pieces from the case they had been in, holding one in each hand and placing them almost reverently upon the board. The queens made a solid sound as they touched down, both intricately carved in comparison to the almost plain appearance of the rest of the pieces. Shutting the case and then looking up to meet his eyes, “Yes. I want you to play a game of chess with me.”

They stared at each other a moment before he broke the gaze, pushing his chair back and getting up to leave, “Sorry, too busy right now to play a game with you.”

The old mans grip on his arm was like a vise, leaning over the table to pull him back down into his chair, “Too busy doing what? Feeling sorry for yourself? Heating the inn with your writing? Sit. Relax. Play a game of chess and clear your head. You won’t get any writing done in the mood you are in.”

Sitting back down in the hair, he wanted to be angry; he wanted to but found that it wasn’t there. The old man was right; he wouldn’t be able to write anything worth keeping in this mood. Letting out a slow sight, “Alright, just one game though.”

The old man nodded and let go of his arm, resting back down in the chair and gesturing over the board, “Do you know how to play then? I can teach you the rules, if you would like.”

He shook his head, looking down at the board, “No, my roommate back in college taught me to play. It has been years, but I think I remember them all.”

The old man showed a small smile, gleaming white teeth, “Well then, a beginner still. I won’t try to talk you into betting on a game just yet then.”

A rooster crowed the morning’s greeting to the sun somewhere in the distance. The room was being lit slowly with the dawns early light. His mouth felt like something had crawled into and then died, but his head felt clear. Remarkably clear actually, cleared then it had since he had arrived at the inn.

The night before had gone from one game of chess, to a second, and then several. He didn’t remember all the talk during the night, other guests had came by and said hello to the old man, a bottle of brandy and a pair of snifters had shown up sometime during the evening and muddled his memories even further. He remembered talk later in the night again about a bet, but couldn’t remember what the wager had been.

Rising from bed he went naked to the window, the room just slightly chilly from the cold night. Pulling the curtains open and looking at the countryside covered in mist. In the distance was a clustering of trees, long rows of them that looked too orderly to be natural and thus must be an orchard of some kind.

The mist seemed to flow between the trees, tendril-like in the soft morning breeze. Like grasping fingers reaching for something hidden in the orchard, exploring and caressing the wooden monoliths as it tried to find what it sought.

Another shape could be seen in the trees, white like the mist but more substantial. A person, a woman in a white dress, walking among the trees in the first light of the day.

He stood a while at the window, watching entranced as the sun rose higher above the horizon and the mornings mist burned away in the light of the day. He tried to keep track of her movements among the trees; she seemed to be dancing beneath them. Or at least so he thought seeing her from the distance, but she didn’t seem to be following any real path among them, more wandering through the orchard. He lost track of her after a while, staying at the window in hopes of another glimpse, before finally turning away and pulling his bath robe on.

Sitting upon the sofa, staring at the ceiling with an apple in hand from the fruit bowl the maid staff kept refilling in the room.

There was a soft knock at the door, and after a moment it opened and the upstairs maid came in, bearing clean linens for the bed. He watched the maid pull the blankets down, folding them and setting them aside as she stripped the sheets from the bed and replaced them quickly with new, cleaner, sheets. The maid’s every move had a sense of trained precision, as if she had gone through years of training to be able to get into a guests room, make his bed, and be gone again as swiftly as could be.

The maid finished the job and as she turned to go he blurted out, “What are those trees over there? I can see an orchard of some sort from the window and there was someone wandering around in it earlier.”

The maid paused in the doorway, putting the dirty sheets into a sack upon the rolling cart that had been left in the hall. Without looking back at him she got the cart readied to move on down the hall as she answered, “That is Lily’s orchard. She used to tend it with her husband, but he ran off on her with her half-wit younger sister Evelynn. Silly girl, used to go on about being made for him and their being perfect together. Honestly, not sure which was the more foolish of the two, her for saying it or him for listening? I have to finish my rounds now sir, getting late in the day and still beds to be made.”

He sat on the sofa a moment after the maid shut the door and went on her way, taking a bite from the fruit he had been holding. A small slow smile crossed his face, he held the fruit up to examine it in the noontime light now coming in through the windows and then he rose himself and went to the desk. Setting the apple on its wooden surface, rolling a new sheet of paper into the typewriter and he began.

“The apple orchard had been in her family for years…”

The old man moved the white king-side bishop across the board, neatly knocking one of his black pawns over and replacing it with his own piece, “The writing is going better now then? And that is check.”

He let out a small laugh as he sat back in his chair, gesturing in the air with the black rook he had been about to move, “It is going amazing. The story… The story is more then I had ever hoped to write. The levels of depth to it… On the surface, a tale of a woman fighting her ex-husband and the mayor of the town to keep ownership of property that is rightfully hers, a sister that betrayed her and a strange man who shows up suddenly in her life to both help her and woo her. But beneath that… There is allegory and metaphor; it is a parable about greed and a cautionary tale about love and the bonds of family. It is strange though…” He paused what he was saying, looking back at the board and moving his rook to block the bishops attack.

The old man reached back to the board, quietly just moving a pawn a space forward, waiting for him to continue.

“It is strange. I realized today, as I was typing, that I know so much about these characters, all the little details of their lives and their likes and dislikes, but I can’t even seem to remember my editor’s first name. I was wondering if I should write him, let him know the book is going well, except I couldn’t remember his name. Or how long I had been here,” he moved a knight forward, hoping over the pawn in its way to place it closer to the opposing king, looking thoughtful as his eyes scanned the board.

The old man smiled, moving the wonderfully detailed white queen across the board, before sitting back in his chair again, “That is rather strange. And that is checkmate.”

The maid wasn’t sure if she should be sad or relieved.

He had shut himself in his room four days ago, hanging a sign from his doorknob the he had made by tearing a hole in a sheet of paper and typing out his message upon it, ‘Do Not Disturb’. Since then the typing had gone on day and night, and the other guests had grown a bit disturbed by this.

She had overheard one of them complaining to the front desk only to be told that, “It would all be over soon, do not worry.”

Still, it has frustrated her as it was her job to see that the bed’s all got clean sheets upon them each day and he had been keeping her from doing her job. How he had seen at night to type she didn’t know, the room hadn’t had enough wood stocked to keep the fire burning all night for four nights, and she hadn’t thought he had enough paper to spare to keep it lit that way.

Soon, however, seemed to have finally arrived.

She had been wheeling her cart of clean linens past his door when she heard the typing slow. The frantic pace of the keystrokes slowing down, deliberate now as if he knew the end was in sight and didn’t want to risk any chance of mistype on these final few words.

She paused her carts progress, knowing the wheels squeaked when they rolled and not wanting to disturb him, she knew as much as anyone about the importance of endings, and waited by the door, listening as the typing grew slower and she could tell the lines of the story grew shorter as the typewriter’s bell dinged every time the paper advanced.

She held her breath a moment as several lines advanced in a row with no typing in between, and then seven final keystrokes. The time between them seemed to stretch out, until after the final stroke she head the typewriter’s bell ring one final time.

Still confused about how she felt, tears standing on her cheeks, she pulled the sign off of his doorknob, folding it solemnly to place in one of her apron’s pockets and wheeled her cart on down the hall.

Later she would tell the front desk that the room was vacant once more, but for now there were still beds that needed to be made.

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• Any Sort of Trouble
• An Old Man with a Chessboard
• The Apple Orchard

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- Hythian

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