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I once wrote a story similar to that about a pen that got clogged just as the governor was trying to stop an execution at the very last minute. As a result, the life-saving signature was…no spoilers in case you read it or listen to it on my best-selling CD of fountain-pen stories. But it was fiction. And I have a half-written story in which ink that includes the blood of many hanged and beheaded murderers causes zombies to rise from a torn-up parking lot. I really must get that one done.But—your original question, before you changed it for some reason, was about whether using a bad person's fountain pen could make you a bad person, so that's the one I'm answering. I don't think there is any scientific proof one way or the other, but what a wonderful idea for a story. If you come up with a name for the story and an overall plot, we can write it together in Google docs or just using suggested edits in Quora. You can private message me if you want to try. Can you tell I really like to write stories about fountain pens? Here is my unfinished story about the ink and the zombies:Fountain Pens and ZombiesThe following is a work of fiction, inspired by the eminently fun Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.June 8, 2010Raleigh, North CarolinaNo point in mincing words. The Raleigh Fountain Pen Show would have been, at best, lackluster, no matter what. The lousy economy, the lousy weather, the BP oil spill, the apparent sewer-line break at the hotel...any one of these would have been bad enough to discourage people from coming, and to discourage those who did come from staying, and to distract those who actually stayed from buying.But add to this toxic cocktail the invasion of 23 of Raleigh's ravenous undead (at least that's the head-count so far, based on actual heads recovered), and it's made for a pen show that no one who was here is likely to forget, no matter how desperate they are to do so. It was a show, if that's what it can be called, of such indelible horror that many of us are going to shudder, even to cry out, at the mere sight of an ink bottle, for a very long time. It will be longer still before we would ever consider attending another pen show, no matter how insignificant the risk, no matter how impossible it might seem that such a thing could ever happen again. Or could have happened at all.Wait. As too often happens, I'm jumping ahead of myself. Permit me to start over, because I need to report this to you as I experienced it. And am still experiencing it. And report it I must. I'm not kidding myself that what has happened in Raleigh is any sort of precedent for other pen shows, or foreshadows any sort of trend, or wave, nor that what we accomplished here will prevent similar episodes elsewhere. Nor do I flatter myself that, having perhaps been briefly intrigued by the title of this account, you will have persevered even this far, much less venture into the frightening narrative that follows. Nor will I say that I am writing this "so that we can all move on beyond this tragedy." Some stories just need to be told. Whether this one needs to be read...well, that is your call. I just hope I'm around to get your feedback.BG-----Embassy Suites Hotel, Cary, North Carolina10 AM, Friday, June 4 2010I arrive at the hotel. Even as I walk from the parking lot to the reception area, it is obvious that something is wrong. First, the guest parking lot is fuller than usual because the employee lot is, for no apparent reason, being dug up by a man on a back-hoe. Moreover, people in the parking lot and lobby are behaving strangely, even for a pen show. I should explain.Friday morning at a pen show is set-up time for vendors, some of whom may have checked into the hotel on Thursday. No members of the general public are allowed in till noon. It's when all the tables are being laid out with pens, of course, and other merchandise like ink bottles, wells, and all sorts of collectibles and repair parts. Usually, it's a bit frenetic, chaotic even, but that's because it is also intensely social. Old friends, fellow collectors, spouses of collectors, bumping into one another both figuratively and literally. Handshakes, hugs, jokes, "Have you seen...?" "Could I borrow...?"But not this time. People move quietly, almost reluctantly, in and out of the exhibit hall. Small groups of people who should have been laying out pens for sale huddle and talk, hushed, amid glances, some furtive, some angry, some worried, over shoulders. At least three people hold handkerchiefs to their faces. It is my first pen show since the outbreak of the H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic so you can imagine what I'm thinking. As I stand in line for my name-badge I remark to the person behind me that I half-expect to see the Red Death stride into the room any second. She barely smiles. I put it down to differing literary tastes.Registration takes even longer than usual. The line crawls. Lots of whispered back-and-forth between the vendors who are signing in and the show's managers, who are greeting them.I scan the exhibit hall for Deb Kinney, a dear friend and fellow penophile. I've promised Deb I'd help with her table, because her partner was going to be busy that day and Deb prefers not to have to watch her table, covered with an instantly pocketable inventory worth thousands, by herself. Deb's attention is generally devoted to grinding those miraculous nibs for which she has become so famous; so someone needs, literally, to mind the store. I feel honored to have been asked.Once I've paid my fee and slapped my sticky-back badge onto my shirt, there is no time to dwell on what might be wrong. I find Deb already at her table and together we make several trips to her car and back, loaded with boxes of pens and inks and Deb's grinding equipment. During our third excursion I wonder aloud what all the hushed conversation is about."You don't smell it?" Deb was incredulous."I don't have much of a smeller anymore, Deb. One of the curses and blessings of entering my Medicare years, I suppose.""Bernard, this whole place stinks! Literally. And not just outside. It's inside the hotel, too. No one knows what's wrong, but it sure smells like a broken sewer line to me.""That won't help sales.""It's going to ruin attendance, if the wind doesn't shift."Funny thing about Deb, although not surprising once you get to know her: No sooner has she said something about the wind shifting...than it does. Just like that. Abruptly and emphatically. A car door blows shut on someone's skirt. A bunch of brochures skitter across the parking lot with one of the vendors in hot pursuit, yelling for them to stop. For June, it is a very cold wind. And it brings a few drops of even colder rain.Deb and I grab more boxes and hurry back inside. As we set our loads down, she says "We're really late getting started, and I'm going to be slow setting up the ink display. I'm never the one who sets up the ink. There's just one more batch to bring in, BG. Would you mind getting it while I set up the equipment and start on the ink? There's bound to be some items I won't need, but if you're in any doubt, just bring it. We'll sort it out later."In the few minutes I've been inside, the rain and the wind have picked up dramatically. I run back through what, given the time of year and my short-sleeved shirt, feels like an icy blast, across the lot to Deb's PT Cruiser, where I fill my arms with everything that looks remotely relevant to a pen show and a few things I'm not so sure about. The least likely item is a long tripod (I assume) in a black velvet tube. But I bring it anyway. I'm in no hurry to make any more trips till the wind eases off.Out of breath and back at the table, I put down my load and hear Deb laugh, genuinely laugh, for the first time that morning. She points to the "tripod." "Um, Bernard, you brought in my Samurai sword. Even if someone tries to steal a pen, promise me you won't use it. Deal?""Deal," I smile back, wondering if just unsheathing the thing might make would-be thieves a bit more reluctant.An hour or so later, we have everything in place. Pyramids of Noodlers and Diamine ink. Cubes filled with pen-sets in their original boxes, and some wonderful pens, some of them mint, from the 30s, 40s and 50s. What I keep staring at, though, is a small tray of astonishingly beautiful brand-new Viscontis. Everywhere there are pen cozies knitted (crocheted?) by Deb's mom. Like most of the others, our table is finished just in time. The doors will be opening to the public any minute, and it is clear that the mood of the whole room has picked up along with the wind, and despite the rain. "How's the smell, Deb? Any better?""A lot. A whole lot. If it just stays like this and the rain doesn't get much worse, we may have a pen show after all."And it is at that very moment, during that palpable lightening of mood, that I hear the first scream. Not so much a scream as a shout, actually. The screams came later."You sold it! What do you mean you sold it! You knew that ink bottle wasn't for sale! Dammit! Dammit! Where's the man you sold it to? I ought to make you find him and buy it back with your own money!" The rest of the exhibit hall falls silent. All eyes are on a fellow with a display of ink-wells, blotters, antique ink-bottles and the like, in a far corner of the room, who is every bit as small as his voice and his anger are huge. I recognize him vaguely from previous shows. Every year he goes around and fills the little bottles of ink the various dealers use for testing pens for customers. But this year, a much younger man had been going table to table, dispensing ink. A security guard makes his way to the older guy's side. The guard's words are indistinct from where I am standing, but in my imagination he's intoning the security-guard mantra, the first-responder's first response: "Is everything all right here?"Whatever the guard says, I have no trouble hearing the reply. "My idiot nephew here just half emptied, and then sold a ceramic ink bottle that once belonged to Mary Shelley. She used that ink to sign her Frankenstein manuscript, you fool! (This to the nephew, not the guard.) But that's not the end of it! It was given to Edgar Allan Poe by one of his wealthiest fans. Bram Stoker bought it from the Poe estate..." Check chronology -Bernard Glassman 7/2/09 9:36 AM By this time, the guy is almost snarling with fury. His voice is quieter, though. I just make out "H.P. Lovecraft."Two other uniformed guards run up to the table, along with someone in a suit I am sure is also security. The suit asks the nephew, who must be in his late 20's, to point out the buyer of the ink. The nephew, doubtless humiliated at being singled out in front of the entire room, replies that the man is "not here anymore! He left right after I sold him the ink! Look, I didn't know it was some kind of sacred ink! I thought it was the stuff you wanted me to fill everyone's inkwells with!" The older guy squeals with rage.A polite question from the suit, too quiet to hear.The nephew: "Hey, the guy was wearing work clothes, like a construction worker or a maintenance man. He must have been here to work on the sewer pipes, because right after he left, that's when the smell started.""Yeah, right," Deb mutters beside me. "This guy, his name is Farley, is some kind of charlatan, BG. I'm pretty sure he uses these incidents to attract attention to his table. Last year someone "stole" "Thomas Jefferson's actual blotter" just before Farley had a chance to display it to the public. He made a big to-do over that, threatening to demand that security search everyone. People flocked to his table to commiserate, and they paid too much for his stuff, mostly out of pity. This year he seems to have gotten his nephew in on it, if that's really his nephew."Something's not right about Deb's suggestion that this is just a put-on. If Farley is really trying to create a phony incident to garner attention and sympathy, why do it when the public still hasn't been admitted? I pose the question to Deb."It's a fair question, but keep in mind that this precious, mysterious ink just got poured into all of our pen testing bottles. Talk about your viral marketing."Just then the doors open, and the public, not very numerous, and damp, but happy, begin to filter through the hall. And immediately get distracted by the knot of security people around Farley's table. A group of them heads that way, just to hear what was going on. And seeing that crowd, more people head for Farley's table, where Farley is only too ready to explain his current misfortune. And sell paraphernalia. While Deb just looks at me. If you know Deb, you know the look.Embassy Suites Hotel, Cary, North CarolinaLater on Friday, June 04, 2010It isn't long before a substantial number of people have clustered around Deb's table, too. People like to watch a pen's nib being custom-ground, and they especially like to watch their own. Deb is just barely touching the tip of a tool that looks and sounds uncomfortably like a dentist's drill to the pen's nib, then dipping it in ink and handing it to the owner to try, then making another tiny modification, back and forth until the customer walks away beaming with satisfaction and ready to apply their pen to an important legal document, or maybe a diary. Deb can take a medium or broad pen-nib and carefully change its factory-rounded end so that its line is thin horizontally and thick on the down-stroke. So that the new shape of the nib takes into account the angle at which the pen is held and whether the user is right- or left-handed. Then, with some effort, the fountain-pen user can write like everyone seems to have written in the old days. People rarely go back to a standard nib once they've had one custom ground to their special writing style. So, without making a scene like Farley's we have a nice little crowd of our own, and I'm selling pre-ground pens, as well as regular pens and inks, while Deb customizes nibs and manages to talk at the same time. She's greeting old friends, doing a little education with people who haven't seen a fountain pen "since parochial school, if you can believe it," turning them over to me if it is something I can help with...we have a nice little rhythm going.At about 2, though, the crowd, even at our table, starts to thin. Not surprising on a rainy Friday, and very welcome when you've been greeting and selling and modifying nibs steadily. So I tell Deb that if she wants to grab some lunch in the hotel cafe, I'd be glad to stay and watch things. She seems more than happy with that offer, and begins making her way out of the exhibit hall. Not an easy task, what with the other collectors calling out to her or stopping to gossip. All in all, things seem to have returned to normal, even though volume is down.That's when I see Farley. He's obviously still steamed about his ink bottle being sold, and I'm just the sort of person who can't tell a talkative, steamed ink enthusiast to go away. Nor can I leave my post. And, to tell the truth, I'm more than a little curious. Farley leans hard on the table."Where's Deb Kinney? More to the point, where's her buddy, Sara-Jane? She's a cop, right? I need a real cop. I need a cop who cares about pens and inks. These security idiots are...idiots.""You're Mr. Farley, right? Your nephew sold an ink bottle he wasn't supposed to sell? And he wasn't supposed to give some of the ink away to us? Look, I can open a new bottle right now and give you our sample bottle. At least you'll have some of it back.""Thanks. I'd actually like to take you up on that. As for my so-called nephew...My ex-nephew, you mean. You have no idea what that kid just virtually gave away! Listen!..."At his volume, listening is just about all i can do. I signal him to quiet down."Listen, that ink bottle and the ink that's in it, was in it, isn't just any bottle and any ink. First of all, I've had that bottle for more than 20 years. Second of all, the bottle itself is at least 300 years old. It was used at Old Bailey, you know, the court in London?" I nod that I know. "OK, but here's what you don't know. There was also a special court where they conducted secret trials. Now some of those trials were for very high-up members of the aristocracy who had done things that the Royal Family could not tolerate being made public. You can pretty well imagine the sort of things. But for a while, a period of maybe 60 years or so as far as I can tell, there was a whole other set of trials and executions that were also kept completely secret. I need an approximate year for this to begin, and a reason for it to have been that year. Obviously, if there actually were a series of hideous murders at some point, it would be a big help. -Bernard Glassman 11/14/10 7:41 AM No crowds, only certain judges could hear them, only certain prosecutors, that sort of thing. Even a special squad of men from Scotland Yard was assigned to these crimes. That period of trials would never have been known except that one judge went crazy, was locked up in Bedlam, and before he hanged himself in his cell, he talked to one of the doctors, who kept a diary.""I saw that diary," Farley continues. "It's still in the library of King's College in London. Damn good handwriting for a doctor. Copied a few of the pages with my cell phone camera. The doctor, William Battie by name, said that the judge, whose name he never uses, just calls him 'C', described crimes and acts that even he, a doctor who had listened to the ravings of lunatics for decades, could not ever have imagined, nor could his patients have invented such unthinkable fantasies, as he called them." Here Farley pulls a piece of paper, apparently a photocopy, from his jacket pocket, and reads from it. "'Nothing in my years of practise has prepared me for this. Not my visits to Bedlam, nor my years at St. Luke's. Each story C tells is more horrible than the one that preceded it. They are different from one another in almost every respect but one--each tale is of an otherwise unremarkable person, some of high birth, others of low, male and female, child and adult, who, over a period of no more than an hour, and often much less, transformed from his ordinary self into a ravening beast, tearing at every person who came within his reach, biting at them, ripping their flesh from their bones, their viscera from their abdomens, and, most horribly, their brains from their very skulls. When C began telling me of a young governess who became transformed while alone with her three young charges, one a mere infant, I felt I would go mad myself.'"Farley is, by this point, in pretty good narrative form. He continues, "Now, we all know that beheading was reserved for royalty and aristocrats. Yet for some reason, this court ordered these monsters beheaded as well, however high-born or low-born they were. But when these really sick killers were beheaded...get this!...they'd add some of his or her blood to their ink bottle! They called the inkwell The Executioner's Well. (And, no, I don't know where that well went. Just the bottle. They called the ink The Black Ink. And here is the even weirder part. It's the same ink the executioner's physician used to sign those secret certificates of death."It strikes me that I'm looking at Farley as if I don't believe him. Which isn't entirely true. The basic parts of the story don't seem all that improbable. In fact, it stands to reason that there would have been an ink well and a pen at the site of the beheadings, and that beheadings of the aristocracy would have been carried out in private. (I recall that the earliest public hangings in London were at a place called Tower Hill, with big crowds, vendors of all sorts of food, drink and souvenirs, and that only later were the hangings moved to the Old Bailey. So they must have been using the Old Bailey for beheadings all along.) But I can't forget what Deb has told me about Farley's habit of exaggerating. Although why he would be telling me this story, I cannot begin to imagine.Clearly, Farley is waiting for me to absorb it all. Equally clearly, that's not the end of the story. “There's more, isn't there, Mr. Farley? Didn't I hear you mention Mary Shelley and some others?”“Yeah, there's a lot more. And, yeah, I mentioned Mary Shelley. And she's not even the half of it. You know, I have a lot of ink parafernalia with some pretty interesting stories. And there are people around here, your friend, Deb, included, who think those stories are made up. And I'd be the first to admit that sometimes I just repeat the stories that the people who sell me those items tell me. But not this one. Not the Executioner's Ink. I researched the heck out of this one and it is what it is supposed to be. But here's the thing, when I was researching this bottle I discovered that it had passed through the hands of Edgar Allan Poe. I really wasn't all that surprised, because I found the bottle in Baltimore. But when I did some digging, I found out Poe was only one of the owners after it left Old Bailey. In fact, it was only in Baltimore because some Poe fanatic had collected it and brought it back from England. Before it got picked up by the Poe collector, it had belonged to, among others, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Ambrose Bierce, and Bram Stoker. In other words, a whole bunch of horror and crime writers. In some cases, they even passed it back and forth among them, when two or more of them happened to be alive and writing at the same time. It was a kind of private club for these people. Moreover, they did everything they could to preserve the blood in that ink bottle. They'd only use it to sign their manuscripts, and add a little water and some ink powder as time went by.”“You seem to have put in an inordinate amount of time researching one ink bottle, Mr. Farley.” I hear myself sounding every bit as incredulous as I feel. And I realize that I don't especially care. Deb's description of Farley's tendency to over-dramatize for the sake of a sale is front and center. “It's really not my place to evaluate your claims here. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why you're telling me all this. The ink bottle is gone, I was never in the market for it in the first place, and as interesting as I find your story, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it.”“What you're supposed to do with it is remember it and tell Deb's partner, the cop, that someone walked out of the show with an invaluable historic artifact. What you're supposed to do is you're part of helping me get the thing back!”Embassy Suites Hotel, Cary, North CarolinaFriday Evening, June 04, 2009The customers have all been shooed out of the exhibit hall for the night, and a lot of the tables are covered with cloths to protect their contents from idle hands. About half the pen dealers have left, most for the hotel bar. The rest are talking in small groups or covering their own tables. Deb returned long ago from lunch, and Sara Jane showed up at around 4:30. The two of them are discussing plans for Saturday and they're putting away the most valuable pens and covering the rest. The exhibit-hall lights have been reduced to the minimum, and I'm wandering the room, looking for familiar faces, trying to decide whether to go for a drink or go home. I can't help thinking that this room full of sheet-covered tables looks a lot like the human anatomy lab where I spent a fair amount of one summer in college. I was having some kind of thing with a physiology major who was assigned to one of several teams to cut up hapless indigents whose bodies had been donated, without their consent, to science. One team and one cadaver per table, maybe 20 tables in all. There were med students using the same facility, along with PT majors and even a few nurses. But if we stayed late, especially on a Friday, my physiology-major girlfriend and I would have the lab all to ourselves. If I tell you that to this day the smell of formalin is a kind of turn-on, I hope you won't think I'm a sicko. It's just that we were young, and there was privacy, and none of the shapes under the sheets or the skeleton on the stand next to the blackboard was going to say a word. Anyway, there wasn't much of anywhere else for us to go in those days. Once you got used to it, well, you just let youthful instinct take over and you forgot completely about being surrounded by the dead. Not to mention that there was a lot to be learned from a physiology major.So I'm walking among the sheet-draped tables in the exhibit hall, realizing there is absolutely nobody I can reminisce with about my nights in the anatomy lab, when I hear shouting from the entrance. "I'm sorry, sir. Sir! You can't go in there! You're not a pen dealer, sir! Sir!"My first assumption is that he is drunk. He shuffles in with a seriously unsteady gait, and seems without direction. He doesn't appear to be looking for anyone, or anything, in particular, so that his movement among the tables seems almost random. In the dim light, it takes me a moment to realize that he is the same man I had seen operating the back-hoe. The same man Farley's nephew claimed he had sold the Black Ink to. BG, make sure this last bit makes sense in terms of the narrative so far. -Bernard Glassman 11/13/10 10:40 PMThe man stops. He totters, but he doesn't take another step. From the doorway I see one of the security guys running across the room, misjudging the aisles in the darkened room, running to the end of an aisle and back up the next, until he is maybe 3 feet from the back-hoe operator. And he winds up facing the back-hoe operator's backside. Which does not move, except to sway slightly.That's when the incredible stench hits me. Whatever I may have said about my nose not working is just plain wrong. I can smell this guy from across the room, and I'm telling you, it's not sewage. It's the anatomy lab the summer day the airconditioning failed, when not even the formalin could cover the decay. It's that odor of death that connects with our most primordial receptors, that tells us: This is where we are going to end up, and that tells us: Run, all at the same time. And one by one, and then as a mass, the clusters of pen vendors who had stayed behind rush for the exits. I can hear retching. I see one or two stumble, then gather themselves, and hurry out the door. All except: Deb and Sara Jane, who are whispering to each other urgently; Farley, who is approaching the back-hoe guy, yelling; and yours truly. Oh, and for another few seconds the security guard. I say for another few seconds, because the back-hoe operator swings around, pivoting wildly, one arm outstretched, and hits the guard on the side of the head so hard I can hear his neck crack. The guard goes down, taking a table and its pens with him. And yours truly, true to form, immediately focuses on the pens, and how to keep them from being crushed by this madman in coveralls. I go down on my knees to pick them up. It's dumb, but it's what I do.I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I know, at last, what it means when someone says their blood ran cold. The fear is simply paralyzing. But I hear Deb's voice, amazingly calm, beside me. "Stand up and back away. Do not take your eyes off that man. And thank you for bringing in the tripod." In her hand is the Samurai sword I thought was a tripod, and even in the low light, it gleams. Deb walks toward the back-hoe operator, and she doesn't say a word. From the other end of the aisle, Sara Jane shouts, "Hey! You!" and the guy pivots toward her, staggering worse than ever. Deb moves faster than I have ever seen her move, and I swear I saw her feet leave the ground. They must have. Because she's at least a foot shorter than Back-hoe, and, with a single swipe of her blade, she takes his head off. It crashes into a display case, bouncing off a table on its way down. The pens fly everywhere, but most of them are arrayed around the head. The man's body collapses on top of the head, the pens, and piece of the case. This time, I do not try to pick up the pens. I'm just grateful that the guy's torso has covered his own staring eyes.Without pausing to examine the two corpses, Sara Jane walks to the doors and swings them closed. There's a deadbolt on each door, and she closes them and fastens the locks. For half a minute, I'm so fixated on what has happened that locking us in doesn't seem particularly strange. Until I realize that she has just locked us into a dimly lit room with two corpses, one of them headless, the other with his head at a right angle to his body."If I'm not mistaken," Sara Jane says, "there will be more. And they will try to come in here. And eventually they will succeed. Now, Mr. Farley, tell us the whole truth about this ink of yours."