For the next hour, Bob twerked, did Tai Chi, and pretended to play table tennis while Joanne watched from the doorway. The whole time, she regarded him like something she’d discovered on the bottom of one of her new shoes and was now desperate to scrape off.

That look made Bob face reality. Once he finished the book, he would lose all value to her. Even Derrick would no longer care about the person who had written all those words. Bob would be nothing but a liability. What incentive would they have to let him go?

So what if they had a video of him agreeing to their plans? It wasn’t like the three of them had signed a legally binding contract. It had been a drunken conversation on his part, nothing more. What were the chances the video would hold up in court, especially once he testified that he’d begged to be released?

Finishing the book might just get him killed.

So obviously Bob couldn’t finish. Instead, he might need to be like Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. In that ancient tale, when an Arabian king found out his first wife had been unfaithful to him, he put her to death. He decided that he would start each day by beheading the previous day’s wife and then marrying a new young woman. That way, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to cheat.

But when Scheherazade became the new wife, she spent the night telling an exciting tale. As dawn broke, she stopped in the middle. The king spared her life for another day. The following night, Scheherazade finished the story and then began a second, even more thrilling story. At dawn, she again stopped halfway through. Again, the king spared her life for one more day so she could finish.

And so the king kept Scheherazade alive day by day.

In the fable, at the end of a thousand and one nights and a thousand stories, Scheherazade told the king that she had no more tales. But during those nights, the king had fallen in love with her. He spared her life and made her his queen.

Bob had always found the ending a touch questionable. Who would want to marry a man who had killed dozens of other women before you?

But maybe Scheherazade had just been making the best of a bad situation, the way Bob was going to have to.

BOB

Time to Call a Halt

Since realizing his life depended on never finishing Eyes of the Forest, Bob had added two fresh characters and a whole new subplot to Derrick’s version of the book. But the more he thought about it, the more he knew that he was only stalling the inevitable. Eventually, somebody was going to tire of things. Readers. Derrick. Joanne. Or maybe all three.