The fork in the road offered two choices, the avenue of the righteous and the sinister path.

Indicating left, Hoke Berglund took the sinister path.

The streetlights bathed the road with sickly yellow light that made the pedestrians look more like shuffling plague victims than the young upwardly mobile types they in all probability were. Briefcases and umbrellas and folded financial papers clutched to their sides, the creases of their designer suits falling just so, their eyes staring straight ahead, seeing no one as they marched to the beat of the city's concrete heart. He amended his simile - his fellow citizens were not victims of some unknown plague. They were zombies. He was surrounded on all sides by the shambling undead answering the call of the great god Money.

Hoke had always enjoyed the fact that the word sinister, a word almost everyone took to mean the presence of something wicked, had such unexpectedly mundane origins. Things related to the left were unlucky or inherently evil while the right was, well, simply right. He checked his watch. It was almost nine. His appointment wasn't until ten-thirty and although the publishing house lay on the sinister path the events the day promised were far from unlucky.

A battered leather document wallet lay on the passenger seat. It contained the manuscript for what he hoped would be his second book, The Forgetting Wood. Ten years of work in one story. While on one hand it felt like a lifetime, on the other it could have been the blink of an eye. The right hand and the left. The only truth was that it wasn't the kind of productivity that made you an overnight success. A man went through a lot of changes in ten years, from the caterpillar of the boy he was into the moth of a man he had become. The story charted it all in one way or another. The birth of his daughter Kirsten, the loss of his wife Isabella a few hours later, before even the chance for joy, and the subsequent loss of self that had seen him institutionalised for twenty three months, his baby girl suddenly motherless and fatherless. Hoke had put a lot of himself into the new story. It was no mere fairy tale.

Hoke parked the car across the street from the publisher's building. The huge plate glass windows of the foyer still had posters of Princess Scapegoat on display, with the many and varied covers that had dressed it up to look more and more fantastic, nine years after its release. His debut was maturing like a fine wine, enchanting a whole new generation of children. It was a beloved book. Mothers still came up to him in the supermarket checkout queue to say how much their daughters and sons loved his story, though more and more it was the children, now grown into young adults who wanted to shake his hand and thank him for the gift of magic he had bestowed upon them, and they all asked about that second book.

He didn't want to get out of the car. Getting out of the car meant going into the building. Going into the building meant walking into the meeting with Cornelia Isenstein. Walking into the meeting with Cornelia Isenstein meant delivering the manuscript. Delivering the manuscript meant, inevitably, bearing his soul up for dissection, having his life judged unworthy and hearing the words: “Well… it isn't Princess Scapegoat, is it, Hoke?”

So instead he sat in the car and watched the flotsam and jetsam of life wash by on all sides. For a moment he let himself imagine that he could hear what they were thinking, the secret dark desires, the petty betrayals and pettier triumphs that marked their everyday, and knew his imagination was incapable of plumping the depths of humanity and its suffering, even this small fragment framed in the car windows. He might imagine hells but the shuffling zombies lived in them.

“I need a cigarette,” he said to himself. Smoking gave him something to do but instead of the calming effect he had hoped for, the sight of his trembling hand holding the slowly burning cigarette only made him more anxious. He stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, reached over for the document wallet and opened the door. The air didn't smell like air, it smelled like exhaust fumes.

He had an odd feeling of déjà vu as he crossed the street and saw an old man looking at the covers of Princess Scapegoat in the window. The old man turned and smiled as Hoke got closer - it was a good smile, a kind smile, so when the old man held out his hand to be shaken, Hoke took it and smiled back. “I love this book,” the old man said. “Changed my life.”

“Mine too,” Hoke agreed. He wasn't sure though if he loved the book or loathed it. It was difficult to come to terms with the changes it had enforced upon his life. Writers usually wear a cloak of invisibility when it comes to popular culture recognition, the kind of thing that haunts movie stars and musicians. There are not so many writers who find themselves on the list of false idols worshipped by the masses but for a while there Hoke Berglund had been one of them, doing the rounds of breakfast television, serious late night review and cultural shows, chat shows and for a while soaking up the fifteen minutes of fame Princess Scapegoat had offered. Some were calling him the next Dr. Seuss and he wasn't arguing. Others compared him with the darker moments of Roald Dahl's viciously warped genius and he took it as a compliment. To some he was Kipling, to others he promised to be Lewis Carroll returned. With the cult of celebrity that rapidly built up around him Hoke found the pressure to deliver increasingly difficult to bear and in the end not delivering that second manuscript became easier than offering himself up to be deemed a failure, a one book wonder, and eventually he stopped even pretending to write it. When asked he would just shrug and say: “One day. I'm working on it.”

The old man looked at the battered document wallet Hoke was clutching.

“A new book?” he asked.