And the only thing left for him to write would be his obituary.
Away from the house he could worry less. A deli on Third served an amazing egg salad sandwich that Lucy turned him on to years ago. Today he enjoyed the sandwich even though he was still shaken from thinking he’d seen her earlier.
His mind was getting away from him.
He just didn’t know who to talk to or where to go.
Everything else going on in his life paled in comparison to the feeling of being alone.
2.
The phone rang as he drove to the bookstore.
“How was the sandwich, Dennis?”
He was being watched. Somewhere Cillian was spying on him.
“Don’t you have a life?”
“As much as you do.”
“Where are you?”
“Answer me something, Dennis. Where do you get your inspiration?”
It wasn’t just a simple question. It was a taunt, a jab.
“Where do you get yours?”
A low, seething laugh answered him.
“What’s so funny?”
“You answer me first, Dennis. Where do you get your inspiration?”
“Lots of places.”
“Lots of places? Like the loving arms of a beautiful wife? Or the angelic eyes of an adorable daughter? Places like that?”
“Don’t go there,” Dennis threatened.
“I know what inspired Breathe. But what about your next few books? The ones that were still written with passion?”
Dennis shook his head. “They all have passion.”
“Really, Dennis? Do you really believe that? Come on. Hard work does not necessarily mean the book has a soul. Words on the page does not necessarily mean they have a heart.”
“Your story is as soulless as they come.”
“Maybe. But you’re still reading it, aren’t you? Did you have some sweet little dreams last night?”
“I swear on my life—”
“Why did you write Echoes?”
The question surprised Dennis.
It surprised him because he knew exactly why he wrote that book.
How can this guy know? How can he keep pushing the right buttons?
“What are you trying to do?”
“Something you can’t. To bring something you can no longer bring.”
“You’re insane.”
“And you’re sane? Really, Dennis? Isn’t it awful trying to create something out of nothing?”
Dennis didn’t answer.
“You have to live life in order to write about it. You can’t just turn everything off and expect to be able to create.”
He remained silent.
“You lost it several books ago, didn’t you? But you didn’t tell anybody and you still have the name, and those poor schleps still buy your books, but you lost it some time ago, didn’t you?”
“Leave me alone.”
“You brought this on yourself, Dennis Shore. You brought this on your house and your family. You invited me into your life without asking if I even wanted to be there anymore. You had a chance, but that chance died and so will everything else in your precious, deliberate life. I am never going to leave you alone.”
3.
It was 1995 and since the owners wanted the house sold quickly, they were willing to sell it far below the listed price. It needed some work, sure, but Dennis was willing to put in the time. To buy something like this in the upscale town of Glen Ellyn for this price was amazing. But this was back when the housing market was booming. Dennis was still working at the advertising firm in Chicago, taking the train back and forth to the city. This house was a short walk from the train station.
Everything was ideal. The only thing the owners neglected to tell them was that the house was haunted.
He hadn’t thought about it for some time. Lucy once told him if there was a contest for being able to box up and misplace memories, Dennis would win it. And even to this day, after everything that went on in that place, Dennis wouldn’t admit the house was haunted.
Why did you write Echoes?
Cillian’s question still resonated in his head that evening even after running into an old colleague at the coffee shop in Geneva. He hadn’t seen Kevin Ward since Lucy passed away. Everyone simply called him Ward. They used to work at the ad firm together, and while Dennis ended up leaving to try to make it as a writer, Ward started his own design firm and was still going strong.
Seeing Ward reminded Dennis of the house and all the strange occurrences that happened in it.
He didn’t write Echoes to document that period. Just to try to make sense of it. But that didn’t happen, even after the book became a national bestseller, avoiding the sophomore slump some predicted after the blockbuster success of Breathe.
Not once during all the interviews did he ever tell anybody that Echoes was about the house he lived in. But even though Lucy didn’t read all of it, she skimmed enough of the novel to know it was about the two of them.
“So you did believe me,” she once told him.
“I never said I didn’t believe you.”
“You said there’s no such thing as spirits and things that go bump in the night.”
“Lots of things go bump in the night,” he said. “But those things can be explained.”
“You can’t explain what happened.”
“I tried.”
“So what’s the verdict?”
“You’re really not going to read it?”
“I have enough memories from living twelve months in that house to last a lifetime, thank you very much. I don’t need anything else to give me nightmares.”
“There is no verdict.”
“But you admit that those things happened?”
“Yeah, I saw what you saw.”
“The handwriting on the walls. Audrey’s room rearranged. All the stuff that went missing.”
“All of those could be explained.”
“By whom?”
“Someone could have done all that.”
“See—you still don’t believe what happened.”
“It’s the other stuff,” Dennis said.
“What?”
“The—the smells. The sounds. The other things you said you saw.”
“The things I saw? And you didn’t?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Or you just chose to forget because you couldn’t make sense of them, because you couldn’t control them.”
“Lucy—”
“When will you ever learn that life is not about control? That you never have any?”
“I have control in the pages of my books.”
“But that’s not real, Den. What we experienced and lived through—that’s real.”
“Sometimes I don’t know,” he told her. “Sometimes real life makes less sense than fantasy and science fiction.”
He waited for her to say truth is stranger than fiction, but she didn’t.
“I just wrote it as a way to try to understand.”
“And do you understand?”
Dennis shook his head. “No. The guy in Echoes ends up in a mental institution. I guess I should be thankful I’m not in one.”
“We were in one for a year. Thank God we’re out.”
4.
He pulled into the driveway and got out of his car, scanning the house to see if any lights were on.
He’s getting to me. That psychotic kid is finally getting to me.
It took him a long time to go to sleep that night.
5.
The next morning the music was so loud in his office that he almost missed the phone call.
“Is there a rock concert going on in the house?”
“Yep. I’ve turned the house into a club. You need to come around sometime.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“This is an early call for you. It’s only eight o’clock your time.”
“I have a class at nine,” Audrey said. “And
some of us do have to get up on time.”
“Are you saying I don’t?”
“You could sleep until eleven and still get your work done.” He chuckled. “What’s up?”
“I wanted your advice.”
“No.”
“No? I haven’t even asked you anything.”
“If it has anything to do with a guy, the answer is no.”
Audrey laughed. “You act like I’m going to get engaged to the first idiot I see.”
“No. But maybe the second. Or the third.”
“Don’t worry. It’s about my Literature class. The professor in there.”
And for the next twenty minutes, Audrey detailed her experiences with a know-it-all female professor. After telling Dennis all about her first few classes and about the attitude and tension between her and the teacher, Audrey asked him what she should do.
“She’s jealous,” he told her. “I bet that’s it.”
“Jealous? What do you mean?”
“Because you’re smart and you actually questioned a few of her theories and some of the ways she does things. I bet she feels a little threatened.”
“What? No. It’s not like I’m being disrespectful.”
As Dennis offered ideas and suggestions on handling the teacher—one of them to dial it down and be more laid-back, responses he knew would be difficult for Audrey—he found himself thinking this was a conversation she should be having with her mother. This was the sort of thing mothers were for—when their daughters were having issues with other women. Guys could be competitive pricks, but women could be far more cruel and conniving. Lucy would have been good at navigating these waters with Audrey.
“What is it?” Audrey asked him.
“I was just thinking—about your mother.”
“Yeah. I’ve thought a lot about her lately.”
What was there to say now? Something trite like, At least she’s looking down at us from heaven? He wasn’t going to feed his daughter any of that bull. He didn’t say anything since there wasn’t anything to say. She missed her mom, he missed his wife, life sometimes sucked, the end.
Now there’s a story for the publishers. Package that sucker up and send it off.
“How’s the writing coming along?”
She just had to ask.
It was a normal question that everybody asked. And he’d never once said it was going badly or that it wasn’t going at all. Perhaps all his joking during the years about having writer’s block was coming back to bite him in the butt.
“Can I get your advice?”
“Yeah, sure.” It was the most animated Audrey had sounded yet.
“It seems like your father has a bad case of writer’s block.”
“That’s funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“What?” She sounded genuinely surprised.
“Yeah. Can you believe it?”
“Has that ever happened?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know why it’s happening now?”
“No.”
“I don’t know how to help. You know me—I have trouble writing anything.”
“You’re a great writer when you apply yourself.”
“But I’d rather be outside, be in the ocean, hang out with friends.”
“Like most people,” Dennis said.
“Is it the story you’re writing?”
“Maybe, though I don’t have any other stories waiting to be told.”
“How far are you on the book?”
“Not far at all.”
Audrey laughed. “Get somebody to help you write it.”
That’s not funny. Not in the least.
He sat for a moment, looking out the window, wondering what she would say if she knew. Wondering what she would say when she found out.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it? What’d I say?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you remember when I’d get stuck on a term paper or on my homework? Do you remember what you and Mom would do?”
“We used to do a lot.”
“Take some of your own advice. You’ve got the house to yourself. Turn up the music. Get outside.”
“You heard how loud the music was.”
“So go outside. Get out. Live life.”
He thought of running into Ward, of the dinner invitation he still had to reply to, of how isolated he felt being all alone in the house.
Audrey continued. “Do some of those exercises. ‘This is what writers do, Audrey.’ Come on. You’re Dennis Shore!”
He laughed. Sometimes that’s a name that’s hard to live up to.
Audrey said she had to go. She thanked him for his advice and told him she loved him. The words never got old, however many times he heard Audrey say them.
6.
Ever since the Home Depot “episode” Dennis avoided running errands. But he was coming back from the grocery store when an unknown caller ID lit up his phone.
“Yeah,” he said into the phone.
“I just read your list. And I have to say, it’s quite surprising.”
“What now?”
“Let me read it to you. ‘The Scariest Movies I’ve Ever Seen’ by Dennis Shore. GQ, huh? When did you write this?”
“A while ago.”
“It’s quite an interesting list.”
Dennis thought back to the list he had created six months ago. He couldn’t even remember every movie he’d included.
“Of course, it’s nothing too surprising. The Thing. Alien.Silence of the Lambs. Nothing too original. Did you simply Google the top ten scary movies and average out everybody’s lists?”
“Sorry I didn’t add anything twisted enough to make your top ten.”
“Oh, but you did. I like this list. In fact, in many ways this could be the list of stories from which Dennis Shore stole in order to build his writing career. Let’s see. The Sixth Sense would be your first novel. The Shining would be Echoes. Alien is very much like Marooned. Need I continue?”
“And you think you’re original? Your story is just a twisted version of Silence of the Lambs.”
“Oh, I was hoping you’d say your number one scary movie. Se7en.”
“You couldn’t even get close to writing something that brilliant.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“What do you want?”
“I just thought I’d share that I left another small present at your door, celebrating the fact that you had something published. Something that was yours, unless, of course, you stole this top ten list from someone else.”
Dennis cursed into the phone.
“Now now now. That’s not very nice.”
But as Dennis was about to say more, Cillian hung up.
He discovered the gift Cillian had left for him in a cardboard box on his doorstep. And after Dennis opened it, dropping it in surprise and horror, the first thing he did was call Deputy Cummings.
He was going to do something about his young, demented, and seriously stupid harasser.
Enough was enough. This time he had gone way too far.
2006
She looked pretty. And untouched.
A photo out of an Abercrombie catalog, a face out of an MTV show. Long, curly, highlighted brown hair, long legs, a long-lasting smile, and a long life ahead for her.
Cillan had seen her yesterday and today, making sure she didn’t see him, making sure he knew who she was with.
And finally, on this stifling and bloated summer day, with the crowd in Grant Park swarming the stages during this ridiculous way to suck people’s money, he had found her alone.
And that’s when he went up to her.
“You look hot,” he told her.
“Excuse me?”
“Warm. Sweaty. Thirsty.”
“I’m fine.”
“I have an extra.” Cillian offered the beer to her.
“No thanks.”
“Really, it’
s okay.”
The girl wiped her forehead and looked around. She laughed and took the beer. “I could be arrested for this, you know,” she said, taking a sip.
“You’d have to do a lot more than that to get arrested. Enjoying the show?”
She stared at him for a minute, suspicious and amused. “Sure.”
“What was your favorite performance?”
“What was yours?”
“It’s somewhat boring to me, these festivals. There are lots of other ways to have fun.”
“Look, buddy, I’m with a group of friends, okay? So just— don’t get any ideas.”
He smiled. She was feisty.
He liked that.
“How old are you?” Cillian asked her.
“How old do you think I am?”
“Old enough.”
She sipped the beer and looked around. “My friends are coming back any minute now.”
“Good.”
“Yes, that’s good.” But her face showed that it wasn’t really, that she wasn’t sure when her friends were coming back, that she wasn’t sure whether she should be sipping this beer and talking to this stranger.
“You from around here?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Sure. You?”
“You’re not very specific, are you?”
“You don’t take hints, do you?”
I don’t need hints, not where I’m going, not where I can take you.
“Oh, there they are. They’re coming.”
“Good.”
A voice hollered over the crowd, calling her name.
“Audrey! We got you a T-shirt.”
Cillian smiled and raised his eyebrows. “A T-shirt. You’ll remember Lollapalooza for the rest of your life.”
Audrey Shore just looked at him with eyes that mocked, that patronized.
I can wipe that silly little snotty look off your face.
“Enjoy the shows, Audrey,” he said as he walked away, losing himself in the crowd. But Cillian never lost track of the teenager surrounded by friends.
She wouldn’t always have them around.
Marooned
1.
“I can’t do anything about it.”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“There’s no address on the box, no letter or note or anything inside.”
Ghostwriter Page 13
