“Do you know how much fun it is to know you can have someone killed just because you want it to happen? And when I've done it, they vanish and I still get invited to all of the department's parties. I only wish it was possible to drop it into conversation. ‘How was my day? Well, I did a couple of hours at the office, then I had a pair of tourists stabbed to death, then I did lunch. How was yours?' Too bad it doesn't work that way.”
The line went quiet, although I could hear her breathing. When she spoke again, her tone was lighter, almost playful. “You’ll never bring her back. You know that, don't you? You can’t get back what I took from you.”
I hung up. Tried to forget her words, the truth of them, the bitterness left in me. I went to collect Gemma's shattered necklace, a reminder both of the woman I’d loved and the woman responsible for taking her away, and faced the drive south knowing that Fiona Saric was well and truly beyond my reach.
39.
Back in Burlington, I kept my word and took Elijah and Neal out for a steak dinner, even though there was nothing I could give them story-wise that wouldn’t have seen me arrested. But Elijah had helped with so much, and I’d promised. I didn’t talk a great deal, but it was an OK evening, all things considered. I wondered if he’d figure some of it out when the lab examined the pipe Flint had beaten Carita Jenner to death with. I wondered how long it would be before Flint’s car was found, and if anyone would realize what had happened to him. After we were done eating, I called the Owl’s Head and asked to speak to Ed. I told him everything was finished, and that Steph could rest easy now. I didn’t want to go into detail over the phone, and he didn’t ask me to. He just said, real simple, “Thank you, Alex.”
After another night in the E-Z Rest I left Vermont for good, but I didn’t head for Boston. I took US-2 east all the way to Bangor, Maine. The cemetery there was covered in a fresh coat of thick snow and more fell in slow, heavy clumps from the charcoal-grey sky above. From the top of the low hill where Gemma lay buried, I could no longer see my car, the wall that lined the cemetery, nothing but snow falling against the blanket of white beyond, cutting this place off from the world outside. I looked down at the new, clean, stone marker, cold tears studding the corners of my eyes like shards of glass.
Then I thought back and remembered her face, the way she moved, the warmth of her body. Her eyes, shining. Her voice, her laugh. I felt her moving against me, her hand brushing against my cheek, her hair on my shoulder. The air smelled, one last time, of spruce bark and tall summer grass. A pair of butterflies danced through the snow above me until they were lost against the clouds as I stood there with my eyes shut, holding Gemma long and tightly for the last time, the touch of ghosts upon my skin.
Afterword
If you've made it this far into the book, I can only assume you either enjoyed it enough to finish, are one of those people who absolutely has to finish a book no matter how bad it is, or else have skipped ahead to find out what on earth possessed anyone to write this drivel. Obviously I hope it's the first of those. If not, well, sorry.
Why a "writer's cut", and why now? (Obviously I know writers don't produce "cuts" of their work and that that's a film-only term, but "writer's redraft" or "writer's edit" both sound very, very silly so I've stuck with a technically incorrect but popularly understood term rather than get finicky.)
I wrote the first draft of The Touch Of Ghosts in 2002, finishing almost exactly ten years, in fact, to the day that I'm writing this afterword. The third and final draft was cleared and sent on to copy-editing in early 2003, but the book had changed greatly from what I'd originally envisaged by that point, and the changes -- while necessary to fit with what my editor wanted -- were always a bit of a stretch.
Now, I should say that I had no issue with what my editor came back with or the alterations she suggested at the time. I was a mere squirt of 25, this was my second published book, and frankly I didn't have the skill or the life experience to pull off what I'd originally thought of as the story: the different ways people handle loss and grief, and one man's obsessive desire to scrabble around in the dark and find out what happened to the woman he loved before he went slowly mad.
(You might now be thinking I still don't have the skill to do that, in which case rest assured that I am, even now, shaking my fist in impotent rage at you.)
"What it needs," my editor said, "is more of a mystery around her death. There need to be false leads, mistakes, things to leave the reader guessing who was behind it. Right now it's too direct, too A to B."
Which was fair enough in its way, but meant I had to turn the story into more of a whodunnit, and the nature of the set-up I'd left myself with was that the only people capable of locating "suspects" would be the police. This meant a whole lot of Alex hanging out with cops, being very chummy all together, while they worked the case, and while the nature of Flint and Saric as damaged and bent officers meant it was sort of blaggable, it was very much a push. If real cops did the things those in the published version of the book did, they'd be fired. And probably prosecuted.
(On Amazon UK, as I recall, there's a reader review criticising this very thing, and they are entirely correct.)
And even with all that, in the end the explanation for what had happened still boiled down to Alex's meeting with Randy. All the nonsensical puff of riding around with the police didn't actually add anything to the story's resolution. All it did was make the whole thing less believable and less focused. The points when it hit the right notes were further apart, and I think the tension within it suffered from watering-down.
The rights to the books reverted to me a couple of months ago, and I decided I wanted to hack them into shape and make them the way they should've been if (a) I'd been a better writer back then and (b) I'd been less inclined to play safe and do exactly what my editor said. (And (c) not have to worry about word count because a physical book on a real shelf in a real store was not the aim. This is a real consideration for print works which has no relevance at all in the digital realm.)
It's been a surprising amount of work (not least because I'd managed to lose my original documents and had to scan everything page-by-page using my phone, then correct all the errors by hand; never, ever lose the files on your computer, kids). The end result is much more what I'd been aiming for. It's greatly stripped down - about 30% shorter than the Penguin edition - and loses the cruft. I rewrote some sections from scratch either by necessity or by taste, and gave the text a thorough polishing. I'm happy with the result, and it's a shame I couldn't make it this way in the first place.
As I write this, I'm now working on a similar, though less arduous, polish job for the writer's cut of the next book, The Darkness Inside, before I move on to the third, and then new tales in the series beyond.
You might, if you knew the Penguin editions, also be wondering what the other Penguin/St Martins Minotaur Alex Rourke story you can see on Amazon is, this "Winter's End" thing, why, if that book was the earliest of them, I'm now referring to this one right here as the first of the new series, and whether or not it still fits in somehow. The answer is that you might think of it as the pilot episode for a TV series, with the actual series itself beginning here. Reading it won't do any harm, though I don't rate the book much, but is also completely unnecessary; character establishment and all the rest is done in this story.
I don't, as it happens, have the rights to WE. I wondered once if I did, what material I'd keep when putting together a new cut of it. And the answer was: almost nothing. People seem to like it well enough, but it's very first-booky, the second half of the plot is 99% cheese, I can't stand the finale, and the bulk of the talking-to-the-villain stuff in the first half of it reads, as much as I was deliberately trying to avoid it at the time, like a Silence Of The Lambs knock-off. I'm a far, far better writer now than I was then, so it's a touch on the ropy side to say the least. By all means look at it — there's no awkward retconning of the background between the old editions and these ones —
but I'd rate it as a curio, no more.
Re-examining and refreshing a long-ago novel like this has been an interesting experience and something that I think has probably only been possible since the rise of digital publishing. While texts have changed between print editions in the past, it's largely been the case that the changes are small or that the editions are short-run collectors' items. Reissuing a book in a vastly changed re-edited form for mass consumption is not something I think I've seen before.
I don't recommend hand-scanning an 85,000-word novel using a phone, though. Ever. Anything but that.
Whether you like the book or hate it, you can find me on Twitter as @Nameless_Horror or online at http://namelesshorror.com, where I'm quite happy to be showered with abuse, or praise, or pictures of cats.
- John R., November 2012.
Copyright & Credits
Copyright John Rickards 2012.
Cover image: ‘Shandra Stephenson’ by Sylvia McFadden, used under a cc-by license.
Also By The Author
Writing as John Rickards:
The Darkness Inside: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)
Burial Ground: Writer’s Cut (coming soon)
The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned (coming soon)
Writing as Sean Cregan:
The Levels
The Razor Gate
Murder Park
All You Leave Behind
Hardboiled Jesus (short story)
Wishes (short stories)
The Unpublishable (short stories)
The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) Page 18
