Dennis bolted the front door and proceeded to check the other doors in his house. It had been half an hour since he kissed Audrey on the cheek and said good night. Knowing she was there in the house with him made some of the tension ease.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy.
The day had evaporated since they came back from the cemetery. Audrey had spent the afternoon shopping. During that time Ryan had tried to talk to the neighbors about the garbage. The deputy told him nobody was home, but he would check back with them later.
Now, in the silence of the house, life almost seemed normal.
Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched.
Is it you?
If ghosts existed, why couldn’t angels exist as well?
He wanted to believe. He wanted to tear down the walls and find peace, but he was afraid that after ripping them down he’d find nothing but emptiness.
Can you see these thoughts swirling in my mind, Lucy?
He needed to know. He needed to see, to touch, to really, truly know she was there.
I’d give anything to see you again.
Turning off the light, he walked upstairs, wondering what lurked outside in the darkness.
Wondering if he could keep the ghosts out. For just one more night.
12:05 Halloween Morning
The glass is twisted, deformed, wavering. The rain creates ugly, scowling faces on it. In the dark room, Bob looks through the window across the yard and driveway to the house next door.
He stands and stares, watching the lights from the white sports car shut off as it coasts into the driveway.
He is still dirty, his boots muddy, his jeans stained, his hands crusted over.
The sheet and the bed behind him remain covered in blood. His parents’ blood. He tells himself he needs to throw the sheets away just like he threw his parents away.
Lightning exposes everything for a brief second. He sees the girl with long hair and long legs scampering down the driveway and getting into the car. Then the car backs quietly down the driveway, its lights still off.
He eyes the sledgehammer in his hand.
He thinks about walking downstairs and through the door and across the lawn and pounding in the door and then pounding whatever he finds next. The thought of lifting this heavy hammer over his head and wailing away gives him a searing, stretching sensation.
But he wants something else.
He wants her.
And nobody and no voice can stop him. Not now.
Too Late
1.
The bedroom door swung open and pounded against the wall as light blitzed the bedroom. Dennis jerked up and saw the shadowy outline through foggy eyes.
It was Cillian. And he looked angry.
Dennis pointed the .38 at him.
“You fool,” Cillian told him.
“What?”
“You stupid, stupid fool.”
“Get out of my house.”
“Go ahead. Shoot me. Don’t you get it, Dennis? I’m dead.”
Dennis heard the steady rain outside. It was 2:30 a.m.
“What are you doing here?” Dennis said in a low voice, not wanting to awaken Audrey.
“Don’t worry, she’s not here.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she snuck out. And now. Now it’s all over. It’s done. Just like in Sorrow.”
“What’s done?” Dennis bolted out of bed and faced Cillian. “Is this another game?”
“It doesn’t do me any good if she dies. Because then she’ll be in a better place.”
Dennis called out Audrey’s name, but Cillian remained immobile in front of him, glaring at him. Dennis grabbed him by the throat.
“Don’t you get it? It’s too late,” Cillian choked out. “Too late for her. Even spirits don’t have total control. You want to control everything—the whole world—but you can’t. You can’t control life and death and you can’t control the afterlife and even when your own daughter is right under your nose, you let her slip away. Into this evil, atrocious world.”
Cillian started laughing, even as Dennis dropped him and tore through the open door, running down the hallway to her room.
But just as he feared—just as Cillian had said—she was gone.
No.
He sprinted downstairs, almost falling on the last two steps, calling out her name, wanting this to be a dream, a nightmare he would wake up from.
“Audrey!”
But she wasn’t anywhere.
And when Dennis went back upstairs, he couldn’t find Cillian anywhere either.
What had he done to her?
Dennis opened the back door and went outside in the rain.
Dear God no.
“Audrey!” he yelled into the darkness.
But she was gone. Just like Cillian.
“Now it’s all over. It’s done. Just like in Sorrow.”
Dennis suddenly understood.
He knew.
Calling the cops wouldn’t help. They’d think he was crazy.
This was exactly how things happened in the story.
Dennis raced to find a copy of Sorrow. He found a hardcover in his office, shaking uncontrollably as he leafed through the book.
2.
He wasn’t sure what page it was. But it was somewhere late in the story. On a night just like this. In a setting very much like this. Rain fell, a cliché in a clichéd story, except this wasn’t a cliché. It was real. The rain was real and the killer was real and his daughter was really missing.
The killer was following her.
And the killer was right there.
Right next door.
1:12 a.m. Halloween
The white Mustang is parked in front of a single family house. A light is on in the main room.
He peers into a window and sees the two of them talking in earnest. The boy and the girl. He doesn’t see anybody else, nor does he see any other cars.
His hand grips the pipe wrench as he tries the door handle.
They are stupid to leave the door unlocked. Of course he could deal with it if the lock was secure. This just makes it easier.
He opens the door and startles them. The guy stands up and moves toward him.
“I’ve been looking for you two…”
“Look, man, you can’t just—”
But that is all the guy can say before the pipe wrench ends the conversation and sends him crashing backward into a table and a lamp.
She screams. He goes over and makes sure the guy won’t say anything, won’t harm him. And then he glances at the girl, smiling. The screams are louder now, her body running into another room.
He follows.
Part Four
All You Create All You Destroy
Control
1.
Writing Breathe brought little Abby back to life, at least temporarily, at least long enough to allow him to say what he needed to say to her, to tell her good-bye.
Writing Echoes helped make sense of what they experienced in that haunted house, of the nightmares Lucy and he had, of the loss of faith his wife dealt with afterward.
Writing Marooned helped him deal with how isolated and remote he felt after becoming a bestselling author just as his wife was going through her battles with faith issues.
And writing Sorrow helped him try to make sense of the evil in this world, of why bad things happen to good people, and finally allowed him to decide once and for all that God did not exist and never had.
He tried to control life as best he could. But he realized that in doing so—in trying to control as much as possible—he’d lost control over everything. Those first books—they had taken so much that ever since then he’d written stories just to scare and entertain. But they weren’t written for himself, weren’t written out of curiosity and fear and failure. They were written with a formula. And that was all.
What he had never told Audrey was this. That his wife had left him. For a sh
ort time in 2003. And she had given him an ultimatum.
She wanted him back. She wanted his heart and soul. He’d given too much of it to his stories so there was nothing left.
And now, in the empty kitchen with the phone in his hand, Dennis thought of this. As the phone rang and his mind reeled and his body shook, he thought of this.
You’ve tried to control it all, haven’t you, Dennis? And even when she died, you tried to control that. You tried to suppress your grief and be everything to Audrey. And you tried to manage your writing by stealing something that wasn’t yours. And even now, even up to this point, you still had to be the man in charge, the guy in control. You needed to keep things from Audrey and CONTROL them. And look what that got you.
He had tried Audrey’s cell but had only gotten voice mail. He spoke with someone at the police station, reporting Audrey’s disappearance. They told him to give it at least twenty-four hours. They told him more, but he didn’t have time to listen. He left a message for Ryan. And now he was leaving a message for Hank.
Where is everybody?
Scattered throughout the kitchen were pages. Torn pages from Sorrow. Torn pages that told a story he didn’t want to continue living out.
It ended in death.
But even after everything that had happened, Dennis believed he could change the ending.
He could rewrite it.
He knew what had to be done.
You can’t control fate and destiny, Dennis. You can’t raise the dead. And you can’t win.
Dennis gritted his teeth and felt sick, helpless. He couldn’t do anything right now.
I don’t know where she is. I’ve tried her cell, and it’s not working. She left with her purse but without saying anything else.
He had looked for any contact information for Mitch. But there was nothing.
Go next door. That’s where the killer is.
But maybe that was crazy.
What’s crazy and what’s not?
The story pages he had read—skimmed over in hysteria— had told him enough. He needed to go to the next-door neighbors’ house.
He didn’t bother trying to find the handgun. He would grab the hatchet on the way over there.
The story he had read had him dying, so what was the point?
If Audrey dies, then I don’t care. My life is not worth living. Life is as empty as I’ve thought it to be.
He opened the door and headed out through the garage.
If he were a praying man, this would be one of those moments.
And if he believed in such things, he would ask God to watch over him.
But Cillian was right on one thing: God had abandoned this family long ago, leaving nothing in his place.
Nothing at all.
2.
Walking through the darkness, under trees that prevented the steady rain from dousing him, Dennis closed his eyes and was transported back in time.
It was one of those Saturday mornings with Dennis at his computer working on a spreadsheet of the family financials, before writing had even entered his life.
But it came, not with a strong breeze but with the gentle laughter of a mother and her child.
It was an April morning, and Dennis was looking outside at the thick pine trees in the backyard of their town house. For a second, he heard cackling. He turned off his stereo to hear Lucy laughing with Audrey, who was only fourteen months old.
In his home office, a thirty-one-year-old Dennis Shore who nobody had ever heard of or read or interviewed or reviewed sat in his office smiling, with tears coming to his eyes.
And it was there at that moment that an idea hit him, that would be the start of the first novel he would ever write.
It wasn’t because he wanted his name in lights or because he wanted to make a lot of money.
It was because he was moved. And because he wanted to document it. He wanted to remember it. He wanted to experience it again.
Sometimes it’s that simple. Sometimes you don’t need a literary streak of lightning or a voice from the artistic heavens. Sometimes you just need a moment like that, when the world moves you.
Dennis remembered that as he walked over to the neighbors’ house this fall day twenty years later. That was why he wrote. That was what motivated him. Without memories like those, there would be no reason to write. Without emotions like those, there would be no story to tell. Without experiencing love, there would be no way to share it.
Life is a breath, a blink.
He was afraid. Not of what he would find in the house, what monster might await him, but he was afraid that Audrey was gone just like her mother.
And if so, the canvas would remain eternally white, a sea of a thousand questions unanswered.
And it would be my fault. All of this. Every bit of it is my fault.
Dennis took a breath and approached the door.
“Words have power,” Lucy once told him. “You have an amazing gift, Dennis. An amazing opportunity to do something with that gift. You can create magic.”
All the magic and words in the world couldn’t bring her back.
So the magic and the words stopped.
It was that simple.
Are you there? Can you see me down here?
He reached the door.
If you are, help me. Help me, Lucy.
3.
He rang the doorbell a third time, not hearing anything and unsure if it even worked. No light or sound or movement could be noticed.
Dennis held the hatchet in his hand, his shoulders and hair soaked from the rain. He pushed the button again.
Nobody’s home.
But of course they weren’t. That’s what the story said.
Right, Dennis? You read it all, didn’t you? Or at least the good parts.
He tried one more time to ring the doorbell, then he knocked on the door.
And as he did, the old wooden door inched open.
Just like the book said it would.
A gust of wind blew it open farther.
Nobody stood at the entrance. A wave of stench hit him.
“Hello?” Dennis called.
But nobody was there.
He glanced behind him, then ahead into the living room area that faced him.
Gripping the hatchet, Dennis stepped into the house.
He wondered if evil would really be there, like it had been on those pages he’d left strewn about his kitchen.
The pages that said he was going to die if he entered this house.
2:47 a.m. Halloween
He glances at his hands and sees the chewed-off stubs of his fingertips, the gash on his thumb, the cut on his forearm, the remnants of the scar around his wrist. He grips the steering wheel as he drives through the black hole of night.
The scene he’s driving away from is too messy, too revealing. And he knows it’s time to leave.
It’s time to make one last trip to the coffin of a home in Geneva and then leave for good. Leave and get far away. He’s gone unnoticed for this long, but he’s been too hungry, too anxious.
His pants are bloody, his cheek gashed from her fingernails. She fought him for a few moments. She had fight in her. But in the end it wasn’t enough.
It never is.
The wiper blades hum as the wind blows his white hair.
He pulls into the driveway and passes by the familiar trees, sees the familiar house.
Then he notices the front door slightly open.
And he knows that the killing is not over yet on this night.
Sorrow
1.
Dennis breathed through his mouth.
The smell almost made him throw up. He didn’t know if this was another one of Cillian’s plans—luring him into this putrid place. All Dennis knew was that something—or someone—had died in this house. And even though everything in him knew he should get out of here, he needed to see if this house had anything to do with her disappearance. He needed to find Audrey.
He
turned on a dull light. The hallway from the front door was littered with debris. Old magazines and newspapers.… He couldn’t tell if the floor was carpeted or wooden. A crumpled shirt lay on the ground. Black stains (coffee, maybe, he hoped) speckled the aged, orange wallpaper. He saw an old dress shoe, dusty and curled. A fire pick. A baseball bat. A set of gloves. More paper. A plastic ball of—something.
Everything about the house seemed dark, the hall light casting a cold glow into the room. There wasn’t any noise—nothing seemed alive in here.
You need to get out now.
But Dennis was afraid someone was in here. He thought of the messages he had left for Ryan.
What if he came in here? What would he find? What if…
He reached the end of the hallway and stopped at the dark doorway.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
Even with the hatchet in his hand, he didn’t feel secure.
Because there are other forces at work, and they’ve already been killed. You can’t kill them again.
“Anybody home?” he called out.
Dennis stepped into a gray, still room and felt for a light switch on the wall. Instead he bumped into something on the ground, some type of furniture. He could see outlines of furniture in this room, faint light spilling from behind him.
His hand eventually found a lamp. He tried it, but it didn’t work.
“Hello?” he called, but his voice sounded weak and unsure.
He tried another lamp, and this one worked. The bulb poured flickering light into what appeared to be a living room.
A dusty brown couch faced him, a pillow coated with dark stains.
That’s blood, Dennis. Get out of here.
He looked around, making sure no one was going to sneak up on him. The hatchet remained firm in his hand.
There were muddy tracks on the carpet and even on the couch. Another chair contained a torn arm, fabric spewing out and scattered all over the floor.
There were no pictures or decorations on the drab walls.
A television set sat on a small tray table. The TV had wobbly antennas. There was uneaten food still on paper plates, boxes with strange writing on them, old milk cartons, a brown sweater wrapped around something circular.
Ghostwriter Page 24
