beausnewnovel

Author's Note: New Chapters

2010-03-04T23:17:00.001-08:00

I just completed chapters 53 and 54. They are entitled The Request and The Schemes. If you wish to read them, you should definitely email me. I am maintaining my chapter a day pace and the ending is within reach. I'm not quite sure how many more chapters there are, but not a lot.

Chapter Fifty-Two: The Pages

2010-03-03T14:20:00.001-08:00

August 3

Jeff made a half-assed bed for himself in front of Stuart's door by laying down some of the seat cushions from the couch. He watched Stuart take two pills in the bathroom and something about the man's reflection in the bathroom mirror made him look even more drawn and sickly than he did face to face.

Stuart entered his bedroom, closed the door behind him, and then Jeff pulled the blinds. The dining room light remained on, but you couldn't tell with all the daylight burning through the curtains. As last time, there were plenty of reasons why he might not be able to sleep, but he was sure he'd have no trouble this time.
Jeff's body simply shut down. It asked no questions of him, just pulled the plug on everything that wasn't essential and he slept for seven straight hours, waking up around dinner time. He awoke to the sound of sobbing.

After Jeff had been asleep for only two hours, the door to Stuart's bedroom opened. The writer might have slept, his clothes were possibly more rumpled than before, but he moved with a purpose he hadn't shown in days. He moved directly to the childrens' bedroom, retrieved the laptop from between the mattress and the box spring and returned to the dining room table. He was aware that the typing might wake the kid, but it wasn't his concern.

He sat at his usual place, poured himself a bourbon, opened the laptop. His eyes were focused and emotionless, but a thin smile of what might have been satisfaction played over his lips. It fell when the computer woke up. He rebooted it, grunted, rebooted it again.

It was a testament to Jeff's exhaustion that he did not wake up as Stuart grew more and more frustrated, animal sounds escaping him, but the younger man slept on. Eventually Stuart grew silent again, the only sounds those of crumpling paper and glass on glass as he poured himself more liquor.

Jeff blinked woozily when he woke up, feeling that hot, drained feeling that comes with sleeping at odd hours. It took a moment for the sound to penetrate and then he sat up. Someone was crying, so it must be Stuart, but it barely sounded human, let alone like a man. It sounded like a terrified child or, with a flash of a war movie he'd seen when he was far too young, it sounded like a man undergoing surgery without anesthesia.
Stuart sat at the table, the light in the room now more orange than the yellow it had been when Jeff went to sleep. Before him was a table covered in what looked like trash, shreds of paper, stacks of sheets, receipts, a pizza box...and they were all covered in words.

Stuart had a pen grasped clumsily in one hand and he was laboriously trying to write on a paper towel. The pen kept tearing through the paper. Jeff could see that he had written on the pizza box, what looked like all the paper from the printer in Stuart's room, on the backs of receipts that were stained from time in the garbage under the sink. He had written on a few sheets of red and blue construction paper, too, their bursts of color somehow unsettling. In the dusky light of the dining room, the red construction paper looked like dried blood.
Stuart was weeping. That was the only word for it. Runnels of spit and snot hung from his nose and mouth, his face was red and his eyes were barely visible for how collapsed his face was in anguish. As Jeff watched, he sobbed and hiccuped, throwing the paper towel to one side, casting about for something else to write on. He looked up and his eyes opened wider.

“You,” he said, in that unpleasant voice that came from the throat, “This is all your fucking fault.”

“What are you talking about?”

Stuart slammed his hands on the table and rose, knocking his chair over. “It can't read you mind, smartass. Oh, it can watch you, it certainly sees what you did, but it CAN'T READ YOUR MIND!” Spittle flew at this last, and Stuart swept a pile of papers off the table, showing the laptop to the younger man.

Jeff stared at the computer and realized what Stuart had said. The house, no, the post, could watch him, but it could not read his mind. That's why it hadn't seen where he put the computer the first time. He looked up and saw that Stuart was still staring at him with blazing eyes.

“I did what you wanted me to do.”

“NO!” he screamed, his throat raw.

“Yes, I did. You wanted me to hide the computer so you could get some sleep. So you could rest. I did what you wanted. Maybe I didn't do what you asked when I put a password on your computer, but I did what you wanted me to.”

“NO!”

“You, goddammit, you, Vic, not this fucking...” Jeff pointed at the floor beneath them. “I did what you wanted.”

Stuart's shoulders heaved up and down and Jeff couldn't tell if he were trying to break free or if he was bracing himself to attack.

“And you were writing while your mind was away again, weren't you? Because if you'd have been present when you ran out of paper you'd have remembered there's at least another ream in a drawer under the printer. Instead of fucking around with all...this,” Jeff said, sweeping a hand at the table. He saw that every scrap, every receipt, every piece of construction paper, had a large, obvious number in one corner. Even when he was out of his mind, the book was still the highest priority. “It's not as smart as it thinks it is.”

Stuart tried to sit back into his chair, forgetting it was lying on its side now. He stumbled back and fell onto the floor. At any other time it would have been a pratfall worth of any sitcom. Instead it was perhaps the most pathetic thing Jeff had seen so far. He moved to the other side of the table, his concern temporarily negating his justifiable paranoia that Stuart might hurt him.

He locked wrists with Stuart and put the other hand under his shoulder, helping him to his feet. Stuart clutched at him, pulling him closer and when they were on their feet, he would not let go. Fear began to surge into Jeff's mind, now he was going to do something crazy and—

“Help me, Jeff.” His voice trembled to match the sudden shiver that wracked Stuart's body. “You have to help me.”

“That's why I'm here, man. That was the whole reason I came out here, remember? I'm just not helping you the way I thought I would. I guess I'm not helping you as much as I thought I might be able to yesterday, either.”

“No.” It was unclear what he was denying. “No, it's too late for that. I'm done, Jeff. I'm done. You have to help me end it. I won't be strong enough. I have to—You have to kill me.”

Dun duh DUH!

ATTENTION READERS: There are maybe five or six chapters remaining in The Author. I know how the book will end and I promise you, NONE of you do. Well, maybe one of you. I will continue to write chapters at the rate you are used to, but if you want to read the conclusion you will have to contact me at beau.prichard at gmail or via my personal email. The price for the book is $5. If you want a permanent copy, I would be happy to send you a pdf of the entire thing when it is finished. If you want to continue to read a chapter a day to continue the suspense, I will be happy to send you an email a day until the end. I have a great surprise coming up for you soon and I've been thrilled to share this story with you. I look forward to your support and finding out just how many of you are actually out there!

Chapter Fifty-One: The Plan

2010-03-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

August 3

Jeff couldn't help but remember when the writer had pulled a gun on him. He wondered if it were nearby, if that would be the next idea Stuart would have if Jeff said no.

“I'll get it,” he said. “But you have to go somewhere else. I won't let you see where I put it. Because you don't know, do you?” Stuart had his own set of Rover keys, so if the post could see the laptop or tell Stuart where it was, this wouldn't be happening. He would simply have woken to the sound of typing and seen Stuart, awake or not, working at the computer.

Stuart's shoulders sagged from where he had bunched them up in aggression. “Where,” he asked, and his voice was once again full of grief. “Where do I go?” Jeff knew he was only partly talking about where he would go at this moment.

“Go back in the bathroom,” Jeff said. “Take a shower,” he added, with sudden inspiration.

“Okay,” Stuart said. He turned to go to the bathroom and then looked back. “I'm sorry,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Was it your idea to keep writing?” Jeff asked.

“Fuck no! I think I'd be happy to never fucking write again.”

“Then you don't have to apologize.”

After Jeff heard the water start running, he returned to the kitchen. It occurred to him that Stuart could be running the water, only to poke his head out to discover Jeff's hiding place. That didn't seem beyond the author's cunning but Jeff didn't think his mind was running in that direction. And if it was, more power to him and he was welcome to his goddamn laptop.

The MacBook was back on the table and plugged in when Stuart emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist. He immediately made for the table, a peculiar look on his face.

“Get dressed first,” Jeff said, feeling like a parent.

Stuart stopped and considered, then pivoted and returned to the room. A moment later he emerged, wearing, Jeff was sure, the nearest clothes he could find.

The writer took his place across from Jeff, opened the laptop, and poured himself a bourbon. His hands were already gravitating to the keyboard, but he restrained them a moment longer.

“Now what?”

“You ready to keep writing?”

“Yes.”

“Sleeping pill didn't work?”

Stuart shook his head and began to futz with his laptop.

“So, I guess we'll sit here and you write until you're ready to collapse and then we'll call it a day.”
Stuart didn't look up. “Can you stay up that long?”

“I'll manage,” Jeff said.

It took more out of him that he imagined. Stuart wrote for five more hours, until almost ten that morning, and considering how tired Jeff had been before his “nap”, he was jittering from too much caffeine by the time Stuart was ready to call it a day.

Jeff drank Coke and watched movies through the early hours. Twice he poured a cold lump of chili over a biscuit for the writer and once he poured a large glass of water and left it within Stuart's reach. He never drank it. Jeff contented himself with a large bowl of cold cereal around six and some pretzels around nine.
He was beginning to nod in front of the some talking heads on a morning news show when the author spoke for the first time since he had started typing.

“Jeff.” The voice was quiet, but Jeff had been listening for it. He hoped that now, even though it was light outside, they could finally get some sleep.

Jeff shoved himself out of the couch and approached the dining room table.

“Are you done?” he asked.

“I'm struggling not to just let it do its thing,” the writer replied. “I need to stop.”

“Can you?”

“Well, I'll need you to take the laptop again. I'm so tired now I think I can get a bit of sleep, anyway. I'll take two pills this time.”

“Okay, let's give it a shot.”

Stuart slowly and deliberately took his hands away from the keyboard and moved them down to his sides. It looked as though he were resisting a weight when he did it. He made fists and sat there for a moment.

“I need your help,” he said, finally.

“What is it?” Jeff asked.

“You're going to have to take the laptop.”

“Yeah, that's fine, I'll hide it like I did before.”

“No, I mean if you don't take it away from me, I won't be able to stop. I'm barely able to keep from typing right now.”

Jeff moved around to the head of the table, facing Stuart over the corner. He gently unplugged the computer, holding his breath, waiting for the bolt of lightning. There was nothing.

Stuart nodded encouragingly, his eyes starting to bulge with panic. Jeff pushed the laptop closed. Stuart nodded harder, a muscle beneath his left eye twitching.

Jeff put his hands on both sides of the very thin laptop and then the lightning struck. Stars burst behind his left eye, his left ear rang, and a searing pain tore at his left cheek. His hands fumbled with the laptop and it slid the length of the table, knocking over a glass and clattering to the floor.

Jeff took an instinctive step back and then reached up to touch his face. Stuart was looking at his right hand as if it had been replaced with someone else's.

“It was going to hit you,” he said. “Punch you. I forced the fingers apart, I was going to slap you, but instead...”

Jeff took his fingers away from his cheek and saw that they were bleeding. Stuart's nails, of course woefully under-manicured along with the rest of his lack of hygiene, were long and ragged. He could feel three separate burning marks where the nails had dug into his flesh.

Stuart was staring at him now and Jeff was again struck by the comparison he'd thought of before: Stuart as a Nazi, on trial, saying he was just taking orders, it wasn't his fault. Only now, there was sympathy there as well. Maybe some people really didn't have a choice when it came to taking orders. “Sorry,” the man said in a whisper.

Jeff swallowed. “You fought it.” It was not a question.

Stuart nodded, looking like nothing more than a child in trouble.

“Keep doing that, then, okay?”

“You should put it away,” Stuart said, gesturing to the other end of the table with his head.

“Can you close your eyes?”

Stuart did so and Jeff went to pick up the laptop. Jeff took it into the children's room and had a brain wave. He opened the computer, made a small adjustment, and then slid it between the box spring and the mattress on the pink bed. He returned to the table.

“Okay,” he said and Stuart stood.

“Listen, um,” Stuart still looked the part of the penitent child. “I know I don't really deserve to ask but...could you sleep in front of my door? I don't think it'll stop me from getting up if...it wants me to, but at least it'll wake you up at the same time.”

Jeff felt nothing but pity. The grown man before him was melting away, to be replaced by a sad kid and an old man. “I can do that, yeah.”

Stuart nodded without speaking, blinking back tears. “I'm sorry,” he said again, his voice trembling.

“Vic.”

“Yeah?” The man kept looking down.

Jeff put a hand on his shoulder. “We can beat this thing. I know it.”

“I hope so,” Stuart replied, but he didn't sound like he had any hope left.

Chapter Fifty: The Problems

2010-03-01T19:18:00.000-08:00

August 3

Jeff looked at Stuart. The man seemed to have aged as he told his story, gradually shifting from a man who only partially looked like his author photo to a man who seemed a hollow shell of himself. The bourbon that Stuart had poured him at some point was now a watery mess. He sipped at it and then sighed.

“So now what?” Jeff asked.

Stuart shook his head. “Beats the shit out of me, kid.”

“How much is really left?”

“Of Tomb? Well, I'm pretty confident there isn't going to be a false ending and I'm coming up on the showdown between Wilcox and the spirits in the tomb itself so. After that, there's a brief wrap up and denouement.” Stuart pronounced the French word with a surprisingly cultured accent. “I couldn't guess pages numbers, you know I don't really think that way, but...” he looked up, thinking. “I can give up editing it, just focus on getting the book out and, figure three full days. Minimum.”

“If you write full days, will that be enough?”

“For the...” Stuart avoided saying anything about where the book came from, “process?”

“Will it be enough for the process?”

“I don't know. This fucker is kicking and screaming to come out like an angry baby. It might not be.”

“Well, what if you let that happen? Won't you be done in, what, 24 hours?”

“Maybe, but I won't do that. One, every time it happens, and it's happened at least once since you've been here, too, by the way, I slipped away and came back and I'd just kept at it, I feel like another part of myself is stolen. I won't do that voluntarily. But the other danger is that if I go under, I'll just keep at it and start on the next one, and that's something I really want to avoid. Both because I need to break away and because I do not want to keep writing that thing.” He almost spat this last word. “To say nothing of the fact that by the time I finished, my hands would be ready to fall off.”

“What's it like when you can't stop?” Jeff asked.

“It's miserable. You know what melatonin is?”

“No.”

“It's supposed to be the chemical that regulates your sleeping cycle. You can buy it at drug stores and some people take it instead of a sleeping pill. Natural, and all that shit. I tried it once, years ago, my wife suggested it. It put me into a half-sleep, I was lying in bed, I couldn't move, but I was conscious. It was awful. Most of the time when I sit here and write, it's my idea, you know? I mean, I'm sure as hell being encouraged, but it is voluntary. Then sometimes, it's like I'm done, but the book isn't done with me. So I have an experience like on that pill, I'm only partly there. I guess that state is halfway between me writing and the book writing itself. Sometimes I can break out of it, sometimes it's just one more chapter before I go to bed. It's like a petulant kid at bedtime. I'm finished, it wants just a little bit more.”

“What if...”

“What if what?”

“What if you let the battery run out?” I mean, you can't keep writing if the computer is dead. A few hours before quitting time, you unplug the thing and then you're done whether you like it or not. Or whether it likes it or not.”

“I tried it. The battery never goes beneath half power.”

“But that's—“

“Impossible? Crazy? Yeah, it is. It's still the truth.”

They both sat in silence for a minute, thinking.

“Well, let's start with something easy. What's a schedule you can maintain. You said full days writing, what does that mean? Eight hours? Twelve?”

“At least.”

“Okay. Well what's a regular pace. Noon to midnight? Can you do that?”

Stuart considered. “I think so. How would you keep me on it, though?”

“One question at a time.”

“Yes, twelve hours of writing would exhaust me. Not enough to make me go to sleep, maybe, but damn well enough to make me sick of writing for the day.”

“What time is it now?”

Stuart touched the pad on his computer and woke it up. “It's almost three.”

“Are you done for the day?”

Stuart's hands twitched. My body says no, but I'm about ready to call it a night. What about you?”

“I'm fuckin' exhausted.”

“Right. Of course you are. Well let's try to get some sleep for now and see what tomorrow looks like, okay? I'm going to get up and go to the bathroom. I'll be a couple of minutes. When I'm gone, make sure I can't see this,” he said, nodding at the laptop. “Hide it from me. Maybe that'll help me sleep. Sure can't hurt.”

“I can do that.”

Stuart got up and went to the master bath between the bedrooms. As soon as the door closed, Jeff got up, slapped the thin Air laptop shut and unplugged it. He couldn't think of anywhere in the house that had a lock on the door, certainly not one that wouldn't lock him in with the laptop. “The further away the better,” he muttered to himself, thinking that the more distance he could get between the laptop and the thing in the crawlspace beneath him that the less power it would have. He had a mad flash of the post with a giant orange cat eye atop it, vision courtesy of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, naturally, casting about the house like an obscene radar, trying to find the computer.

Before he ran out of time, he ran into the kitchen, grabbed his keys from their hook, and took the laptop outside. He locked it in the trunk of the Land Rover, using his key to avoid the alarm beep sounding. It wasn't the best hiding place, he was sure, but getting it out of the house seemed like a good start.

He was safely back at the table when Stuart came out of the bathroom. The author never looked at him, but moved to the door to his room. He stood there for almost a full minute and Jeff could see the muscles bunching and releasing beneath his thin and dirty t-shirt. He was fighting the urge to return to the table.

Stuart willed himself to stop trembling. Fuck this house, he thought to himself. No more. This gets done and I'm out of here, do you hear me? He took deep breaths, inhaling, counting to five, exhaling. Gradually the muscles that strained at the sides of his face chose to release and his teeth stopped grinding.

“Good night,” he said, without look at the kid or the living room. “I took a sleeping pill. Hopefully it'll help.”

“Good night,” he heard the young man call after him.

Jeff set himself up on the couch, feeling uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in the kids' room. Shit, just about everything in the place made him uncomfortable, he realized. It shouldn't matter, if Stuart was as good as his word, his children would never see the house, let alone the room again, but it was their space, not his. Just as the basement wasn't his space either, and never had been. He didn't have a space, he realized.

The couch would have to do, it was comfortable and there were blankets and he was, at least, willing to steal a pillow from the children's room. He opted for the royal blue one rather than the one with prancing unicorns on it.

Even though his body was exhausted the revelations and ideas of the day still had him wired. He wondered if he'd be able to sleep and had a vision of himself sitting up and typing all night instead of the author, his insomnia keeping him going until the house took over and then—

He shook his head. He vowed then and there not to type another word until he left this place. If he were a good writer, he could finish Danny's Dime on his own. He'd written another book before he came here, just like Stuart had, and he'd be damned if he sold himself as cheaply as the famous man had. He wouldn't let things slip away like that. He would keep Stuart's warnings in mind and he would not sell himself cheaply, not to agents and publishers, and certainly not to this fucking place.

Sleep came for him aggressively, even though he left the light in the living room on. He could see the bulbs making globes or light reflected in the black screen of the television and he was thinking of how he could creatively describe them and then he was asleep.

Less than two hours had passed when he woke up. He could see Stuart standing over him, his face shining with moisture, tears or sweat, and his eyes blaring in the leftover light.

Jeff twitched in surprise, pulling his blankets closer and struggling to sit up. “Jesus, what—“

“Where is it, Jeff?” Stuart asked. Jeff could tell from his voice that the wetness on his face was from tears, not exertion. “You know I need it. Give it back to me, please.”

Jeff said nothing, shocked, still fuzzy from sleep.

Stuart's face twisted, and he saw the animal in there once again, the thing behind the man. “Give it to me,” he said, and this time his voice was in his throat, no longer teary, but angry and feral. “Give me my fucking computer.”

The Author, Chapter Forty-Nine: The Truth, At Last

2010-02-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

August 3

I was just a kid when I first came out here and it was just so easy. My first book, the cancer one, the one you read, that was fuckin' hard, man. It was too much like work. So when I was out here and everything got so easy so quickly, who was I to argue or complain?

And when the book sold so easily, it felt like fate or destiny or any of those other things you believe in when you're still too young to know better. No offense. I was successful because I was good, because I deserved it, whatever, not because there was a vampiric pagan something or another underneath the house, for Christ's sake.

I didn't dream the first year out here. Other than the energy and the book, that first year was kind of its own thing. Maybe it's because I wasn't as alone as I was after that, maybe it was his energy, or maybe it was just the seduction.

The second year, for the second Wilcox book, was a whole different story. Because that year I was completely alone. That was the year it snowed, I told you. And I was able to convince myself that it was a freak weather pattern. In July. Even though it was falling on less than a square acre. And right now I wanna tell you that it was the stupidity of youth, but I think I just believed what I wanted to believe.

Because that whole year was weird and maybe you think that I could have chosen to break away at some point later, but I think that first year I sold myself to this place. To that thing. Wholesale, even.

That was when the dreams started. Almost every night, so vivid and epic that I could have written them down and had a second career as a fantasy author. Dreams where I was a priest of some kind, where I was a warrior, where I was a Victorian writer of some kind. Not Lovecraft, though, I checked some details. Just some hack scribbling away, lost to time. I have no doubt he was a real person.

So here I was, all of 21, already well off, if not rich. I'd troop into town every couple of days, stock up on booze, cigarettes, and food. Sometimes I'd stop by a local bar and people were already whispering about who I was. I was living the dream, man, no one to tell me what to do or what not to do, living how I wanted while I wrote what I already somehow knew would be an even more successful book.

One night, maybe halfway through, I was sitting here, at this table, with my typewriter, in fact, it's this burn scar on the table right here. I...well, I can't say I passed out or that I fell asleep. Neither is accurate. My consciousness slipped, I suppose, would be closest, stepped sideways maybe, and when I woke up I had a crick in my neck like you wouldn't believe, a burn mark on the table, and I had 20 more pages of manuscript.
I didn't accept it, exactly, but I certainly didn't question it like I think you would have. I just rolled with it. I didn't drink as much the next night, so it didn't happen. Didn't happen again for years, in fact. Maybe after that happened I started to subconsciously protect myself a little bit, wall myself up some, just in case.

So that year was rough, because I did some maintenance myself, and mowed the damn lawn, because it was my house now, after all, and all that shit, so the book mostly came pretty slow, just a few hours a day, afternoons or evenings.

It wasn't until 10 years later that I realized that little by little, the house was taking things from me. It didn't give them back when I left, either. I mean, I'll tell you that my wife left me at least partly because she lost patience with me, the way I was out here, the priorities that I made. But that's only because, year by year, I stopped giving a shit. About her, I mean. I realized after what you said that it never even occurred to me that bringing my kids out here was dangerous, but now that I have the thought, it's terrifying. Who can say how much damage might have already been done. At least neither of them is writing yet.

So it started out that I was grateful and excited to have this opportunity, to be this person, and it ended up that, well, I just kept at it. I probably talked around it a bit when I described it before, but my year revolves around being here. As miserable as I might be when I drag myself away from the new book and get the hell out of here, by April I'm excited to come back here again.

So, yes, I'm, for want of a better word, perfectly happy to sit here and let this house suck me dry. Not because I get anything out of it, not really, but just because it's what I do and what I've been doing. Sad, I guess.

But I've known the truth of that for a while. I have the last page of the thing I wrote about the posts. I always had it, but it wouldn't have made much sense until you discovered the post under the house.

Each line of stones reaches a point and these points are the most powerful locations of all. They form the locus of a pattern of stones, a focal point where the power is stored and where it may be used. On these points horrendous battles have been fought, like those at the Alamo and Little Big Horn. The stones clearly thrive on sacrifice of life or life energy. Loss of life seems to be inevitable in their presence.

The base of each of these stones is littered with the bones of sacrifice and death, and the ashes of worship.

They are to be feared. They are to be revered. They may be used, by those who have the understanding, to amplify power, to heal or to hurt, but they are never to be truly understood. They are not sensible. They represent only power, which may be abused, which may be focused, but never controlled, but which must always be feared.

But here's the kicker. I told you that early on I was being used for automatic writing? It started again, a few years ago. Once in a while, I'd come to after being mentally away for an hour or two, and I'd find that I'd been writing the whole time. Believe it or not, by that point, it didn't seem like a big deal. But two years ago, when I was getting to the end of Fear, I went to bed one night and woke up in the morning at the table. I'd gotten up sometime during the night and started up again, while I was asleep.

So last year I brought Xanax. And when I was really involved in the book, but when I needed a break, I'd take one, and that seemed to work. I drifted off at the table and kept writing once, but it didn't seem like a big deal. Then, when I was almost at the end, and it is, if I say so myself, a hell of an ending, the kid who was staying here last summer left. He had a family emergency and I figured, shit, the book's almost done, why not?
It was like the place was waiting for me to be alone. The next day I woke up at the table. So, the next night I took a Xanax and a sleeping pill and I woke up at the table after ten hours, with a crust of drool on my face and a film on my tongue and a neck that was stiff for days.

I tried to slow myself down, I actually put a chair under my doorknob and tied myself to the bed, thinking that, for some reason, I would be dumber when I was asleep. Of course it was simple for me to untie myself and move the chair and I still woke up at the table and by then the book was just about finished.

I manged to finish the book while I was awake and went to bed that night expecting that the automatic writing episodes were over. When I woke up it was almost twenty hours later, I had been sleeping on the couch, and I found that I'd started a new book. A non-Wilcox book, much more blatantly Lovecraftian than anything I'd ever written. It was like now that the post had my silly project out of the way, it was going to say something directly instead of wasting any more time being subtle. It never had a title. And I had something in common with the post, finally. I knew what it was like to hold on to something for years, aching to get it out.

So the pattern started up again and I stopped thinking about it, stopped fighting it. Once I was on board, it seemed like the pace dropped off a bit, and things went back to what passes for normal out here. I started cranking out pages for this new book, and so long as my productivity kept up, there was no more automatic writing.

My kids came out for Labor Day and I still don't know exactly how it happened, but when I took them back to the airport, I got on a plane to New York, with just the clothes on my back, and didn't come back. Some part of me had planned it all along, but most of me had been unaware of the idea. I called someone from the law firm to ship me my laptop and that was all there was to it. As soon as I got it I deleted the partially completed novel.

I spent three days in a hotel room in New York detoxing from the house, keeping myself stoned and doped enough so that I couldn't get back here under my own power. When I came out the other side, I still had the itch to come back here, like I still want to smoke a cigarette sometimes, but the real impulse, the irrational one, was gone. That's the way it usually is at the end of the summer. Sometimes it's worse than others. Last year, that was the hardest it has ever been.

So you, and that suicidal asshole before you, have a more important job than my caretakers usually do. You're here to make sure that doesn't happen again. You're here to keep an eye on me so that it doesn't get worse. You're here to make sure that I finish this book, and then, when it's done, that I get the hell out of here instead of starting another one. Because if that happens again, no exaggeration, I'm pretty sure I'll never leave.
I'm sorry to dump this all on you, kid, I know it's a hell of a burden and definitely not what you signed up for.
But I think that if you leave me here, I'm pretty sure my writer's hell will come true. I'll just sit here and keep typing and when I get tired my body will keep typing while I sleep because that's what...IT...wants. I'll sit here and just write and write until I die. And I don't know what that will take. Because in addition to the books, another thing this place, this thing, has given me is health.

I haven't had a cold or a flu in about as long as I can remember. And while I take care of my health the months that I'm not here, at least partly to make up for the way I abuse myself when I am here, I'm not sure I need to. I have the heart of a teenage distance runner. I have the blood pressure of a happy house cat. I have the lungs of someone who never smoked a day in his life, even though I smoked like a chimney for 20 years. Whatever the plan is, this place has insured that I'll stay healthy until it gets what it wants from me.

Short of a bullet to the brain pan, I'm not sure what would kill me. I fell off the deck once a few years ago and heard a snap when I landed on my wrist. I took some pills and went to bed. The next morning it hurt, but not enough to keep me from typing. I got it x-rayed after that summer and there was a break there, but the doc told me it looked years old.

So know you know. Now you know all my secrets. And now, hopefully, you get it, you understand. Why you're here. Why I need you here. And why I can't let you leave.

Author's Note: Full Circle

2010-02-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

The last few chapters have been amazing to write and surprisingly emotional, I think because I finally came full circle, as I'd planned, and the book is now where it began. Maybe it just feels like a big deal because I feel like it has worked so well. Tomorrow will be chapter 50, which seems like an accomplishment for some reason. This isn't the longest thing I've ever written, but it certainly has the most chapters.

For a new project, one unrelated to any I've written before, a stand alone book, I'm very proud, especially to have written it so quickly and so faithfully. I will tidy up the first few chapters and begin seeking representation as soon as the book is finished, which should be within a week or so.

I don't need feedback if you haven't already had a burning desire to share it. However, I would like a sound off of those who have actually gotten to this point on the novel. I know there's more of you out there than the two or three I see in person on a regular basis. I would find it encouraging to know how many people have made this journey with me.

See you tomorrow!

The Author, Chapter Forty-Eight: The Escape

2010-02-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

August 3

It took Jeff the better part of an hour to get himself under control. He climbed under the sheets and breathed air that smelled like him instead of air that smelled like...the other thing. Then he went to the bathroom and cleaned his body of the smell and his mouth of the taste of his own vomit and bile.

He stripped the bed, took off his clothes and started a load of laundry. His new clean shirt went into it, as well as the dirty socks and underwear that had been in the corner. Anything that had been exposed to the foul air.
Then, he packed his bag. He took his clean clothes from the dresser, the laptop from its place in the desk and the toiletries he used from the bathroom. He did a quick once over of the room, making sure he was leaving nothing behind. Then he dragged the suitcase up the stairs to the laundry room, went back down the stairs, and closed the door to the basement. He never opened the door again.

The panic and terror had been too much for Jeff to stay pissed at Stuart again, particularly without the evidence of Mac's body. He'd been convinced, as soon as that scent had struck him, that he knew what had happened. It hadn't been far from the truth, but Stuart hadn't fed Mac to the post. The post was apparently doing a fine job of feeding itself. Jeff shuddered. Where Stuart fit into this, he wasn't sure. Intellectuals were cowards, he'd read that somewhere once, and he supposed it must be true, to one degree or another. Certainly, he could see Stuart on trail as a Nazi war criminal, swearing he was just taking orders, he'd done what was necessary to survive, he'd meant no harm. But how much harm would such a person really cause?

The suitcase thumped on the floor of the kitchen as he yanked it over the threshold. Stuart didn't notice. He left it by the back door and then crossed the kitchen to get his new bottle of rum from the freezer. His first pull from the bottle cleared the neck, and the liquor was so cold he felt the thick line of it sear its way down his throat and into his stomach, where it started to thaw.

He decided one uncivilized drink was enough, even in the face of a night like this one, so he poured himself a full glass of the stuff, and then ate two cookies over the sink, just so something would be in his stomach. As he walked to Stuart's table, where the man sat, eyes intent on his computer, Jeff wished he had a cigarette. No, a whole pack of them. He felt like he could chain them end to end and just never stop.

Jeff sat across from the writer, who didn't blink.

“Vic,” Jeff said, hating how familiar the name sounded when talking about the deceptive, unknowable figure across the table. “Stuart,” he said louder, angrier, liking the sound of it much better. The writer still didn't notice him.

Jeff reached out and started to push the laptop closed. At first, Stuart simply shrank from his shoulders, keeping his eye on the screen as long as he could. When the line of sight was broke, he lifted his head up and looked at Jeff. Stuart was there, he could see him, but on top of him was something that looked more like an animal. More than rage bore out of his eyes, it was pure and simple hate. If there had been a weapon nearby then Jeff was certain, in his gut, that—

“What's up?” Stuart asked, casual as ever. The animal mask was gone, it was the same man he'd spent two months with.

Jeff had too many things to say, so he started with the easiest one. “I'm leaving. I have some clothes in the wash, but I don't give a shit about them.”

“What?”

“It would be decent if you could take me somewhere, but if you don't, I'll call a friend or a cab.”

Stuart's reply was immediate and cold. “If you bring someone else out here you'll be no better than me. You'll put them at risk, just like I put you at risk. Maybe at the top of the driveway they'll decide it's a good idea to just put the pedal down and try to see if they can reach the water. Or they'll leave their seatbelt off and ram the house.”

“Fuck you!”

Stuart nodded. “I know, Jeff. I keep saying it, I guess, but I'm sorry.”

“Then I'll walk. I'll haul my bag up that hill just like I rolled it down when I got here.”

“You think this place will let you?”

Jeff realized he hadn't touched his rum since he'd sat down. He chugged some of it, coughed, and then stood. “I'm leaving.” He started toward his bag.

“It can get worse, Jeff. A lot worse. I'm willing to bet the last few times you've gone into town you've felt it, headaches maybe, in your gut, in your teeth, your ears, it could be anything, but that's this place, Jeff, calling you back. Reminding you where your home is.”

Jeff whirled. “This is not my home.”

“I know that.” The man was being impossibly calm. “I can't help that.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“I know it feels that way, but you can make it. We can make it. The book is almost done, I'm sure of it, and when it's finished, the grip is less, and we can get out of here. You'll still be miserable for a couple of days after, I can promise you that, but we can get out of here It will be okay, I swear. Now, come back over here, sit down, finish your drink, and tell me what set you off.”

Jeff did so, taking another heavy pull of the rum and staring at the writer. As volatile as he'd seen the man be, he couldn't believe how calm he seemed. Part of his mind whispered that it was because the sad bastard had already given up.

“Do you know what's under the house?”

“Of course.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Not in person.”

“Just in dreams?” Jeff asked.

“Something like that. I'm very aware of the fact that the post is beneath me, I can tell you that, and I know that it has...needs. But most of the time it's out of sight, out of mind, I suppose.”

“You got used to it. Like the fucking smell.” Just the thought of it almost made Jeff retch.

“Just like that.”

“There's a panel behind the closet. When I opened it and I,” Jeff realized he'd been about to say 'when he saw the smell,' “When I smelled what was down there, I was sure it was Mac.”

Stuart laughed softly. “Again with the murder angle. Well, after all this, I suppose I can't blame you for hanging onto that.”

“I mean, maybe you didn't even kill him, you know? Maybe part of the story was true, but when you found him, instead of doing something else it was...” Jeff swallowed.

“Feeding time?”

“Yeah.”

“I've never fed it. I really never have been down there. The knowledge and the faint traces of the smell are enough for me. I don't know how it works, but I know that I've never let my kids bring a critter out here, not even a hamster.”

“Why doesn't it eat you?” The words sounded strange, but there didn't seem to be any other way to put it.

“I don't know,” Stuart said. “Honestly, I could give you plenty of guesses, but the truth is, I have no fucking clue. Maybe it likes puppets better when it finds someone...compatible. Because that's what we are. Maybe it's because we're insane or maybe it's because we're uncensored or better than other people or worse or whatever. But there's something about us that connects with it and maybe that's so rare that it tries to take advantage of us. And, to be honest, it's not like it isn't eating me, you know. It really is, you know. It's just taking a lot longer to go about it.”

Jeff clearly hadn't thought about that, Stuart realized, as he sat there stunned. Stuart got up to get a bowl of ice and a fresh bottle of Woodford. His present bottle was almost empty.

“I guess I'll start at the beginning,” Stuart said.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Seven: The Bodies

2010-02-26T02:52:00.000-08:00

August 2

Jeff staggered back from the closet. He then charged back into the fray of the rotting fragrance and slammed both doors shut. He ran into the bathroom and hid behind that door as well. He tried to breathe easily, to take in the uninfected air from this room, but he could smell, and even feel, that appalling scent all over him.

His first instinct was to go upstairs, get Stuart, bring him down here and shove his nose in his mess like a bad dog. But he remembered how that had gone the first time, and if he really had evidence of Stuart as a murderer, especially if the man had a gun, he would have to be as insane as the writer to just confront him with it.

No, God help him, he'd have to do this himself. And he'd have to be careful, too. Although the writer wasn't easily distracted while he was writing, it wouldn't do to make a racket underneath the house. Especially if Stuart thought someone was on to his secrets. The thought that passed through his mind, but that he did not want to acknowledge, because it was preposterous, was that he would have to be careful or the house itself would warn the writer.

There was a flashlight on a shelf in the laundry room, Jeff knew. He'd seen it every day since he moved in. He couldn't remember if he'd closed the door to the laundry room or not, sealing the writer upstairs and the smell down here, but that would be best.

He forced himself to tromp to the top of the stairs as if nothing was wrong and he saw that he'd left the door open. He'd need to go into the kitchen to get something, he realized, or else it would seem like he had come upstairs just to close the door, which was weird. This was all supposing Stuart even gave a damn, but he couldn't take the risk.

Jeff crossed the kitchen and got himself a beer. The sight of the food in the fridge, even the thought of the beer turned his stomach, but he turned, away from Stuart so he wouldn't have to look at him, and moved back to the stairs.

“Hey, kid,” Stuart called out to him.

Christ he knows, he knows, he knows, a high pitched voice chanted in Jeff's head.

“Yeah?”

“Can you bring me a beer, too?”

“One of yours?” Jeff asked automatically, blessing himself for being so natural. Stuart occasionally liked to break things up by having a Coor's.

“Nah, I'll have one of yours.”

“'Kay.” Jeff got the beer from the fridge and walked it to the writer, who didn't look up when the can was placed on the table.

“Thanks,” was all he said.

He doesn't know! Jeff reassured himself as we walked back to the stairs again. But he knew he could not be sure. Stuart was too unstable to judge by any normal standards.

Jeff closed the laundry room door behind him, grabbed the flashlight and walked slowly down the stairs. The light was the kind that used a box-shaped battery, and the weight was reassuring in his hand.

The smell was worse now, of course. Not nearly as bad as it was when he'd opened the closet, of course, but it was enough to turn his stomach and make him dread what would come next.

He knew from books, Stuart's among them, that crime scene techs and coroners and the like used tools like mint-scented face masks, or a dab of VapoRub beneath the nostrils to combat the stench of death. Jeff had nothing like it in his toiletries. He settled for a liberal application of mouthwash on his upper lip. The then tied a t-shirt over his nose and mouth, figuring it couldn't hurt.

A massive impulse, for preservation of life, health, and sanity, forbade him to return to the closet, but he did. With his mask the smell in the room was not noticeable, and with the closet open, it was still much better. It was, however, bad enough that he could remember what it was really like, which was almost as bad.

He gave the second door a light shove and it popped open again. As he climbed into the closet he was again reminded of the idea of passing into another world. “I suppose I am,” he muttered to himself, “Into the fucking looking glass,” and he was surprised and even impressed by the hard resolve that he heard beneath the fear in his voice.

There was no instant of stench as he passed into the crawlspace as there had been when he'd opened the closet. Instead, the ruthless smell just kept coming, seeping through his mask and beginning to overpower the mint scent beneath his nose. There was no escape from the overwhelming, nauseating stink. There was, he could see, raw, gray soil beneath his hands and feet.

Until now he'd been using the ambient light from his bedroom, but now he turned on the flashlight. And, of course, there it was.

Just as he hadn't been surprised by the snow, he was not surprised by this, but the sight of the stone post, reaching almost to the floor joists above it, fired an icy dart of fear into his guts. It didn't hit his heart, it hit lower, his diaphragm maybe, and he began to shake. He shuffled back against the stationary part of the closet panel, placing his free hand against it, needing to feel something more stable and solid that he felt.

He had no thoughts now, simply a survival impulse that told him to run, as fast and as far away as he could. There was something else, though, of course there was, with this bastard post and the bastard upstairs, the goddamn thing wanted him to come closer, and Jeff knew that he was going to.

He was afraid to see Mac's body, but he knew where he'd find it. He kept the light on the post and began to move forward. The stone stood perhaps only 20 feet from the closet, over nothing more than packed dirt. As he crawled, he could see that this post was the most clearly marked of all the ones he'd seen. The sigils and runes carved on the outside of it were fresh, still powerful, as fresh as when (HE) the Shaman had streaked them with blood and he knew that if he looked too closely he would see bloodstains in the cracks and that if he got that close to the goddamn thing he really would go completely and totally insane and then—

The runaway train of Jeff's thoughts was derailed by the feel of his free hand landing on something soft and wet. He made an infant sound and snatched his hand back. The movement upset his balance and he fell onto his side and he felt something splatter his face.

He scrambled, unseeing, panicked as a trapped insect, scraping his exposed skin on the dirt. He shivered in revulsion but he did not hesitate as he used the light to reveal what he'd touched.

There were bodies. Dozens of them. No, there were hundreds, a cold, observant internal voice told him. They started about ten feet out from the post and grew more and more dense, forming a barrier of flesh and blood and bone and hair.

He could see tell tale markers. Here was the black and white striped tail of a raccoon, there was a clump of feathers that looked like it had once been a seagull, and of course there were rats and rabbits and shrews and mice and...and there, shining in the light, was a dog tag.

Jeff looked away and scrabbled at the shirt over his face. He got it away in time to keep from soiling it as bile spewed up out of his mouth. He wheezed and coughed, sobbing in the dark and that was all that kept him from screaming.

Feeding. The thought came without warning to his head and he realized that's what it was doing.

Again, he did not hesitate. The primitive part of his mind knew that if he hesitated, he'd never escape, or at least, not all of him. He had to know.

Because the perimeter of flesh was so close to the post, it did not take long to evaluate it. Even with almost two months to rot away, there would be plenty of evidence of Mac if he were here. Jeff couldn't bring himself to get closer, but he shifted from side to side to see what was behind the post's shadow. He saw something long and brown that could have been a large nutria or a terrier. There was a skunk. Another raccoon. He saw more pets, cats and dogs with metal tags, decorated with the phone numbers of owners who loved them, who missed them, their collars multi-colored reminders in the brutally revealing light from his hand.

In the center, closest to the post, there were no bodies, just a dark, clotting ooze. The post stood in the midst of it, proudly, looking much higher than it possibly could be in the crawlspace. Jeff's imagination played awful records for him, the lapping of waves of gore against the post, or the slurping sound of it consuming all that blood and viscera.

At the far side, there was a carcass that was mostly skeleton and Jeff only focused on it because the size would have been right for a man. But it was not. It was the wrong shape, if nothing else, and dark fur clung to its ribs in places. He began to whimper and he tried to shove the realization down before it ate his mind.
Mac was not here. That was what mattered.

But it wasn't all that mattered. As Jeff scraped his way back to the closet he found that, against all odds, he did notice the smell less. He sent his mind scurrying off in all directions, thinking about Stuart's books, his own book, his mom, the dinner he would have wit her tomorrow, all trying to keep away from the sledgehammer blow of the one thought that followed after him, from the far side of the post.

It was no good. As he stumbled out of the closet and closed it behind him, no longer trying to be quiet, he threw himself on his bed and crammed the comforter in his bed to block his screams, sure that if they started they would never end.

There was no stopping something so powerful, so hungry, so fucking empty that it could summon and then devour...

That it could call and consume a bear.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Six: The Closet

2010-02-25T03:23:00.001-08:00

August 2

Jeff woke up hungover, as was becoming typical for him. He had stayed up until almost two in the morning, not quite matching the pace of the maniac upstairs, but putting in another good night's work. He felt like another few nights and Danny's Dime would be done, although what he would do after that, he had no idea. Certainly the notion of finishing the rest of Stuart's books wasn't as appealing as it had been a month ago, but who knew what he would resort to when he got bored enough. Perhaps, he thought to himself as he showered, he'd get around to that stupid deck after all.

The day, sadly, was of a kind with the last week: still, stuffy, and too damn hot. Jeff changed into shorts before he left the house, knowing it wouldn't help much, especially once he was out in the sun.
He stopped for lunch at the local Jack in the Box, mostly craving something cooked by someone, anyone, other than him. The meal tasted incredible, the salt and fat sitting well with his hangover, but it turned sour in his stomach as he continued his errands.

First, he went to the grocery store and suffered through Muzak that seemed designed to drill into his ears. He bought the usual supplies, beer for both of them, Stuart's chili and biscuits, frozen pizzas and waffles (which both of the men had developed a taste for after they had been stocked for Vanessa), chips, and bread and turkey breast, with which Jeff always vowed he'd make himself a healthy sandwich, although he rarely got around to it.

Then, to the liquor store. Stuart consumed so much bourbon that he had a standing order for a case of Woodford Reserve every two weeks. The six bottles rarely lasted the whole two weeks, but it was a good cornerstone. To that Jeff now added his standard Bacardi Limon, which he drank with Coke. The last bottle had only lasted him three evenings, so this time he bought two.

Finally, even though he was feeling like ass, he drove past the new restaurant his mother was so excited to eat at. It was just past California on Admiral, a rustic Italian joint called Sonore. It looked like it would be expensive just to prove that it was tasteful and chic.

Once he reached the house, Jeff stood at the sink and drank two glasses of water, hoping it would help his stomach or his head or both. Then he began to unload the Land Rover. Stuart, he noticed, apparently still wasn't awake at past 1 p.m. Shocker.

The food and booze stored away, Jeff fixed himself a drink rum and Coke and sat on the deck in the sun, in defiance of the weather. There was no breeze from the ocean and the heat sat around him like a gravity-defying hot tub. Behind him, he heard the doors open.

“Shit, it's gross out here,” Stuart said. Jeff did not reply.

Instead of sitting across from him, Stuart moved to Jeff's side of the table and sat next to him on the bench. Jeff noticed that he, too, had a drink, but still felt superior because at least he'd been up for a couple of hours. And eaten. And showered.

“Listen, kid,” Stuart started. “Jeff. The book is calling me, but I owe you an apology. I know that. I was thinking about it and I realized that, at least partly, I never expected this to happen to anyone else. Not the way it's happening to you. Other people have reacted badly to the place, but if they didn't like it, they fuckin' left, you know? They didn't goddamn well kill themselves!”

Jeff took a drink and continued to look out in the yard. His focus had drifted into neutral, so he was just looking past the yard at the green of the trees and the iron gray of the water underneath the overcast sky, but when he blinked and refocused, he realized he'd been staring at the post as well. The fucking post, he thought.
Stuart reached out as if to touch Jeff, to put his hand on his shoulder or his knee. Jeff didn't notice. Stuart put his hand back in his lap and took a drink of his own. His jaw worked as he thought a moment longer.

“So, yeah, I fucked up. I swear to you, when he killed himself, it really didn't cross my mind that it was anything to do with here. I figured it was all him. I mean, he'd only been here for ten days!”

Jeff finally turned his head to look at the writer. “And when Thorsen died?”

“Even then, do you think you'd have been able to take it all in if I'd have told you the truth? Hey, Jeff, every summer I come out here and let something control me and pump out a book. Are you having crazy dreams? Imagine more than twenty years of them.”

“You're right, I wouldn't have believed you. But maybe after two months of this shit you'd have been willing to give me that chance.”

Stuart looked down like a chastened child. Jeff wondered how long it had been since anyone had really confronted him, talked back to him.

“I really didn't mean to get you into this,” the older man said contritely.

“No, I get it,” Jeff said. He swallowed and decided to speak his thoughts. “Maybe you got me into this because you stopped thinking about anyone other than yourself in a long time. Out here with your weird shit and your books and your bourbon and your millions of dollars. Feel sorry for me, I'm successful because I sold my fucking soul.”

Jeff stood up without thinking. His drink spilled and he paid it no mind.

“But you know what, stories about people who sell their souls are about them fighting to get it back, you asshole, not spending their life feeling sorry for themselves and saying it was too late to do anything.”

Stuart kept his face down. “Not Dr. Faustus,” he said. Jeff opened his mouth and realized the man was right. “Faust comes out on the stage at the end of the show and warns the audience. He is damned, but we can learn from his example.” He looked up at Jeff and there were tears streaming down his face. His voice cracked as he said, “I did that, at least. It's the most I've ever done for anyone.”

Victor's grief sluiced Jeff's anger away. “You're right,” he said. “I guess you tried, didn't you. Maybe...”

“Yes, Jeff. Maybe I'd have even done more if it weren't for this goddamned house!” The last word was almost a scream and it flew away to the corners of the yard, vanishing into the woods, the grass, the sky. “I wanted to do more,” he said. Then he gave a small, bitter laugh. “But then, I always want to, and I so rarely actually do.”

This time it was Jeff's turn to reach out and almost place a hand on Victor's shoulder. He swallowed his own emotions, instead, picked up his glass and went into the house. Behind him, he heard the sound of Victor actually breaking into sobs. He looked back at the door and saw the man's shoulders heaving. Jeff knew it was at least a summer's worth of tears, but probably a lot more than that.

Jeff took another shower, washing away the sweat that so quickly accumulated, as well as trying to was everything else away. He rested his forehead against the tiles as the water broke over the crown of his skull. “This goddamned house,” he said, repeating Stuart's words. “This goddamned house.”

The tension broken, the men ate dinner together, Stuart eating his lava chili and Jeff eating his plain. Stuart ate his over his biscuits, like gravy, and Jeff using his biscuits like spoons. They spoke little, but the words they exchanged were companionable. Stuart was only snatching a few minutes away from writing (“Getting there,” he'd said) to gobble down some food before he continued, but it was more than they'd given each other in some days.

After cleaning the dishes, Jeff returned to the basement and saw that he had a voice message. He listened to it in where he was, so it was garbled, but it was a reminder from his mother. He sent her a text message letting her know he hadn't forgotten. And he hadn't forgotten about dinner. He had, however, completely blanked on his dress shirt.

It was the same shirt he'd worn when he went to Stuart's law firm on that first fateful day, which didn't seem like it could possibly have been the better part of two months ago. He took it upstairs and hurled it in the washer on a short cycle, watching television while Stuart tapped away. After tossing it in the dryer, he opened a beer and a bag of chips and found a Yankees evening game to watch. It was the first time he could remember every voluntarily turning on a sporting event.

He put the dry, fresh shirt on a hanger and examined it. He had snatched it fresh and hot from the machine, and even though it had been a wrinkled mess when it emerged from his suitcase, he deemed it good enough to wear without ironing. He laid it carefully on his bed before going to open the closet.

He realized now, standing in front of the closet, that he'd never opened it. He had a brief flash of an imaginary world behind it, straight out of a children's book. He would open the door and find himself...where. The first world that leaped, unwelcome, into his mind, was not Narnia, but the drab, ugly world of his nightmares. The ones in which he—

Jeff shook his head. “Just a goddamn closet,” he said. He opened the door.

His first realization was that the smell, which he had become complete numb to, was much stronger here. His second realization was that there was a seam running down the back of the closet, splitting the back panel completely in half. He swallowed against the smell, which was not just stronger here, but...thicker, almost, more substantive.

He placed his hand against the right side of the panel and gave a small shove. Nothing happened. “Right,” he told himself. “Because you thought it would be a secret fucking panel. I guess Vic must be right, you really are a writer, son.”

Then, for the sake of his curiosity, he placed his left hand on the left panel and shoved. It immediately popped in and out, and a small part of Jeff's mind realized that it must be a magnetic catch.

The rest of his mind was screaming in horror at the smell that slapped him in the face. The small gap that opened in the back of the closet had released a stench that was like a wretched, furious, living thing. It clung to Jeff's face like a barber's towel soaked in excrement and intestinal fluid.

His stomach turned on him, violated by the smell, and he puked his dinner into the bottom of the closet. The small part of him that had made the realization about the magnetic catch was also glad that he hadn't brought his nice clean shirt with him to be vomited on.

The rest of Jeff's mind was sure that, finally, he knew where Mac had really gone.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Five: The Quiet Week

2010-02-24T19:02:00.000-08:00

August 1

Jeff did his job for the next week, but little else as far as Stuart was concerned. He mowed the lawn, did the laundry, bought the groceries, and cooked the food. Him sanding and refinishing the deck hadn't come up since he'd moved in, and he'd be damned if he'd mention it, especially with things as they were now.

He had been at Stuart's for almost two months now and he would stick it out, regardless of how lousy things were ending up. At the rate he was writing, it seemed like Stuart would be finished within two weeks at the outside anyway. He could stand to live with someone he was largely ignoring for another few weeks, especially if it was for another thousand dollars.

He stopped being pissed after the first night. He wasn't going to be enough of a child to stomp around upstairs wearing an “I'm mad” face. Mostly he was...shit he didn't know what he was. Hurt, confused, scared even. It was like the fallout from a breakup, without many of the better benefits.

Mostly he was let down by the fact that A: His hero was a liar. He should have known better, he supposed, than to trust a guy who pulled a fucking gun on him the day they met, let a lone someone who told lies for a living. But so much of the conversations they'd had, it seemed to Jeff, had been based on self-disclosure and true insights. Somewhere there was a line in Stuart's mind between what he would disclose and what he would not, and Jeff, of course, had no way of knowing which was which.

In terms of issues, B: Stuart had put him in harm's way. Either intentionally or by neglect, Jeff had been brought to an environment that seemed to be responsible for two suicides in as many months. Even though sometimes he felt shitty and he was having weird dreams, he didn't feel at risk on that front at least. But it was the principle of the thing. Of course, Stuart wouldn't be able to present something so preposterous to his law firm (Help wanted for famous writer, exorcism and sense of humor required), but Christ, the man had brought his kids out here! What kind of an asshole took a chance like that with his own children. Then that led Jeff down the rabbit trail of how much the bastard's wife knew, which couldn't be much or she'd never let them come here at all. And the kids were supposed to come out here again in August and for Labor Day if Stuart was still here. Jeff fervently hoped that they would not be, but he would not fold. He would add one more item to the list of ways he was better than Mac.

So he drank too much and mostly stayed in the basement, and slogged through Danny's Dime. It was a fast first draft, he knew, there would be plenty more details to come later on, but for now he was on a drive to the ending, when all the plots and machinations of the thieves would add up to nothing.

* * *

Stuart was ashamed, but he didn't know what else to do. His writing shifts were stretching into 10 hour slogs, editing be damned, with the hope of finishing the novel sooner and getting away from the house before things got really bad. The snow had been a bad sign.

Today, he had skipped baseball in favor of doing some editing so he wouldn't get too far behind. He felt like the pages he wrote were piling up behind him and he could see the chapters and pages ahead of him in his mind that he still had to write. He was excited to get to them, but some part of him, as was typical by this point, dreaded the ending of the book. Because then he'd have to stop writing, make the conscious decision to move out of the house before he got caught up again.

Yes, there had been more things he could have told the kid and yes, and there were things he still hadn't told him. There was a lot of information that he'd never had to pass on before. He didn't know what it was about Jeff that made him so much more open to the house's mojo. People like Roger, two years ago, simply slogged through the summer with near-constant headaches. People like Mac couldn't hack it, for whatever reason, but they usually just left instead of...taking such dramatic action.

There'd never been someone like Jeff, that was the problem. Someone that was attuned to the same thing that he was. That could harness it the way that he had. Stuart realized, now, that it had never occurred to him that he'd find someone else who could tap into the same thing.

The kid was pissed and had every right to be. But there's no good way to sit someone down and explain what was going on here, was there?

In his pocket was a scrap of paper, the second sheet of the passage about the posts. If and when Jeff talked to him again, he would tell him the rest. It was unfair to get the kid out here on what, he supposed now that he really thought about it, were false pretenses. It was even more unfair to expect him to stay here now that he knew, even if he didn't know all of it.

* * *

Jeff's phone, his personal phone, rang. He couldn't think of the last time he used it, and when he saw it was his mother, he rolled his eyes. He answered it and said, “I'll call you right back, Ma,” he said, and hung up.
He walked upstairs, not looking at Stuart. He got a beer in the kitchen, even though his head was already swimming, and he went outside.

He punched the speed dial and she picked up immediately. Jeff sighed. “Hey, Ma.”

He was silent while she berated him, knowing that he probably deserved it after only speaking to her once that he could recall in the last month.

“I dunno, Ma, that's only, what, two days from now? Okay, three. But—“

His shoulders sagged. It wasn't that he didn't want to see his mother, not exactly, it was more that he didn't want to see anyone. That, as shitty as he felt here sometimes, he didn't want to leave the house.

“Well it was very nice of Aunt Marie to give you a gift certificate. Yes, I understand it's in West Seattle, you're right, that makes it very easy for me.”

He nodded, even though no one could see him.

“Okay, Ma. I'll see you there on Wednesday, okay? Yes, I'll wear a nice shirt, I promise. Yes, Ma, I love you, too. You're right, it will be nice to catch up.”

* * *

Jeff came in from the porch, got himself another beer (Stuart heard the fridge door open and the thunk of a can against other cans) and went into the basement. Stuart almost got up and followed him. If he told the kid everything, then what would happen? They'd take him away? Jeff would run? Jeff would try to fix things? Instead, he stayed in his chair and followed Wilcox on his quest to find the stone key that would open the last door to the ancient tomb.

Stuart hadn't lied when he told the younger man that it was too late. Perhaps it had been too late the first time he'd sat down at a typewriter at this house. He could think about it, but he'd never know. He shook his head, took a drink, and got back to work.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Four: The Page

2010-02-24T05:46:00.000-08:00

July 25

“What? Bullshit!” Stuart threw a piece of popcorn at the television.

“He looked out to me,” Jeff said, without thinking.

Stuart looked at him with a smirk. “And you're the fuckin' expert now, are you?”

The television showed a replay and the red-socked and cleated foot of the St. Louis Cardinal clearly did not manage to reach second base on time.

Neither man said anything about it.

Then Stuart spoke. “Shut up,” he said, belligerently, although he grinned afterwards.

Jeff went into the kitchen for refills. He looked out the window over the sink with the same caution he had for the past two days. They hadn't spoken about the snow. Jeff had come upstairs in the evening, treading lightly on the stairs as if nature might hear him coming, and there was still snow on the ground and on the porch, but it was melting away. Even that had been something of a comfort.

He chalked it up to something like Thorsen, or Stuart's admission that he thought about suicide. Just another elephant in a room that was gradually becoming quite crowded with pachyderms.

But, to be fair, they hadn't spoken much since it had snowed at all. Stuart had kept drinking bourbon and eating chili, and Jeff had kept cooking, reading and writing. And now they were watching baseball.

“Oh my God! Fuck you!” he heard Stuart yell from the other room. “Get in here, you gotta see this!”

Eventually pizza was ordered and consumed and Stuart got a bit more obnoxious as he began to feel the beer he had been drinking since before noon. When the game drew to an end, the doomed Cardinals finally succumbing and letting the Astros put them out of their misery.

Stuart got up and took a very loud piss in the small bathroom. He tended to leave the door slightly ajar when he did this, with his typical carelessness, but Jeff had long since stopped noticing.

“You gonna write tonight?” he asked, coming out of the bathroom.

Jeff arched his head over the back of the couch to look back at the writer. “Yeah, I was planning on it.”

“You wanna just bring your laptop up here, work at the table with me?”

Jeff would have swore that if such a circumstance ever came up, he would have taken it without question. But now that the opportunity was here, that wasn't true. The idea made him nervous, just like sharing the book did, and he realized it was part of the same pattern of superstition that had made Stuart twitchy about doing something as insignificant as using a computer instead of a keyboard. He didn't want to fall prey to such an idea, an idea that was, really small and petty and frightened.

“Hell, yeah,” Jeff heard himself say, before he could reconsider. “Thank you.”

So, an hour later, the two men were hunched over the relative laptops. Jeff writing in long, slow slogs, Stuart writing with his trademark rapidfire bursts wrapped around thoughtful pauses.

Jeff had thought it might be different, but he wasn't sure why. The new location became something he didn't think about at all, once he focused on his own book, and he was listening to music, as he usually did, so the stop and start of Stuart's typing was a distant sound, like city construction several blocks away. If were honest, with all the other ridiculous shit that had been going on, he had assumed that the power of the two of them writing together in the same small space would have caused the table to float into the air or something. It was not a truth he was keen to admit, but it was there, he realized.

After he finished a particularly involved conversation, and reached almost 120 pages, he saw proudly, Jeff noticed that Stuart was standing over him. He pulled out his earbuds.

“Sup?”

“I'm getting a drink, you need one?”

Jeff's mouth was dry and when he looked at the clock on his computer he realized that he had been sitting here, focused, for more than an hour.

“Some water would be great, thanks.” He couldn't remember the last time the author had served him. “What's this,” he asked, noticing a piece of paper next to his laptop.

“Something you should read. Something I meant to show you a while ago.”

“Is it yours?”

“As much as anything I write here is mine, I suppose,” Stuart said, returning and placing Jeff's water on the table. “But yes, I wrote it.”

The paper was yellowed with age and crinkled as if someone had thought about destroying it or balling it up, or as if it had been lost in the back of a drawer for years.

These stones are more than ten thousand years old. Their origins have been lost to history. Those who know of them, and there are not many, argue they were placed by aliens or lost civilizations, the lost tribes of Israel, druids, forgotten First Peoples. Perhaps the Earth herself grew them, as an expression, as a weapon, as a defense. Regardless, these stones, older than memory, older than recorded time, still remain and still have memories of their own. Curiously, although perfectly visible, they remain largely unnoticed in the modern world.

Each stone has a name, a personality, a value, and each feeds into the stones near it.

The natural world understands and fears this power. Simpler beings such as animals and plants fear them or revere them, moving away or moving toward.

Humans also feel the power of the stones in different ways. Some draw from them, others run from them, shunning them or condemning them.

Perhaps they are the American equivalent of ley lines, which form conduits of power throughout the European continent, forming the basis of main roads and the axis upon which important buildings, such as churches and houses of government, are placed. Sometimes these decisions, a road here, a cathedral here, are conscious, but most often these decisions are only obvious to those who understand and observe the power of the ley lines.

They were used for worship once, yes, and human sacrifice, although this is more because their powers are unknown than because they require blood shed.

It is recorded that in their presence headaches and toothaches may be generated or cured. Cancers form or fall.

These stones, like those at Stonehenge and on Easter Island reflect pagan beliefs, faiths that go...

Jeff looked up. “Is that it?”

Stuart nodded. “It's all I found.”

Jeff looked from the document back to the writer. “What the hell, Vic?”

“I wrote it a long time ago. I don't remember when, one of my first summers out here. It came out as a chapter of...Ash or Watching, I don't know. Obviously it didn't fit, didn't make any sense for the book, but it was pretty obvious that I was writing about the posts in my goddamn yard. The ones on the beach, too.” Stuart sat down across from Jeff with a sigh. “Keep something in mind for me, though, okay kid? I write fiction. The shit that comes through me onto paper at this place is all lies. Its lies with a ring of truth, or else people wouldn't care about it, but it's still bullshit. It's made up.”

“You can't really believe that. What about that H.P. Lovecraft crap?”

“I said we were subject to the same insanity, that we were tapped into the same thing, not that we were fucking prophets, Jeff. Two men telling similar lies just means they have similar stories to tell, not that they are tapped into some kind of intergalactic truth. Don't be foolish.”

“Foolish?” Jeff said, his voice getting louder and higher. He slapped his hand down on the table, held up the old piece of paper. “Are you really going to try to tell me you don't think there's any truth in here at all? That it might not explain the shit that goes on here?”

Stuart was looking at his hands. “No, Jeff, it really might. But so what? Does your laptop work better when you know what a megawatt or a kilobyte is?”

Jeff opened and closed his mouth several times, ready to start talking and then abandoning the idea. “Where the rest of it?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't believe you.”

Stuart looked up at Jeff. “I don't blame you. I don't know why you would.”

“All the shit I've seen out here and accepted because that's just the way it is, because it's the way you do it. But someone died out here, Vic, and I can't believe you don't have the same thoughts that I do, that Thorsen offed himself, that fucking Mac did the same thing, because of these goddamn posts.”

“Of course they did.”

“So you deliberately bring someone out here every summer and put them in harm's way, just so you can write your precious fucking novels.”

“No, Jeff. It's only the truly gifted people that are really affected by this place. That's why Mac got the job. He wasn't gifted. But clearly he had some buried talent somewhere, and the posts devoured it and gave him back bile. And Thorsen? Well it was his time anyway. Maybe it wasn't his idea to kill himself, but did you see him? Have you read what he wrote recently? He didn't have anything left and he fucking knew it. So yes, he acted on something that was already there with a little help and then it snowed which means shit is going to keep ramping up until this is finished.”

“What, it dies down when it's finished?”

“Unless I start another one, yes, it'll start to ebb.”

Jeff stood up, unplugging his laptop to take it with him.

“You told me you felt trapped here sometimes, like you want to come back here and you're afraid to do it at the same time. And you're such a bastard about it that every year you bring some poor sap like me out here and throw him under the fucking train while you're at it.” He held up the paper in the other hand. “But this? You could use this. Maybe you could find out a way to free yourself, so that if you wanted you could stop being all talk about how I shouldn't sell myself up the river and how I should retire when I want to and how you're stuck in the same old patterns, you could sit down and try to write this again, write the rest of it, and maybe figure out a way to set yourself free.”

“I'm not so far gone that I didn't think of that as well, Jeff,” Stuart said, looking up at the younger man, his eyes glistening in the light over head. “But it's too late for that. I know that, don't ask me why, I just do. It could be that when I wrote that, if I'd have realized what was going on instead of just being so insanely grateful to be rich and successful, maybe back then I could have escaped. Maybe. But now? Now I'm stuck. They're thousands of years old, Jeff, and they'll be here long after I am. And there's nothing you can do about that, I'm afraid.”

“Good night,” Jeff said coldly, and went down the stairs to his room. He wouldn't be able to write anymore tonight, and he sure as hell didn't feel like reading one of his books now. He opted to watch a movie, which turned into two and a half, before he was able to fall asleep.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Three: The Weather

2010-02-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

July 23

Jeff woke up late, at almost 11. His mouth tasted like an old sock and he groaned when he tried to sit up, remembering that after he'd finished his twelve pack of Coors he'd actually drank some of Stuart's Woodford Reserve with some Coke.

He was drinking a lot more since Thorsen's death. Strangely, he was also writing a lot more, even though he certainly didn't feel like the drinking was helping his process, as it did for the man upstairs.
Still, he had blown past 100 pages of Danny's Dime last night and that was probably worth a hangover.

He didn't bother showering, just went straight upstairs and poured himself some OJ. He chugged the first glass without stopping, then poured himself a second. Already he felt better. His stomach rumbled and he realized it had been almost 18 hours since dinner last night. Cereal wasn't going to cut it, but he had bought a big bag of pre-baked biscuits the last time he'd been at the grocery store.

As Jeff had started to drink more, so Stuart had devolved into the eating patterns of his 21-year-old self. He had eaten chili twice in the last three days and showed no signs of stopping. Jeff had learned, to his regret, that he could not digest the chili he made for Stuart, which called for hot sauce, Tobasco, and jalapeno peppers. His time on the toilet two mornings ago had been miserable, so he ate his right out of the can without Stuart's accouterments.

To accompany his two biscuits, Jeff found some sausage gravy in the back of the fridge. It was at least a week old, but when he snapped open the Ziploc container, his stomach sat up and begged like a hungry dog.
“Done,” he said, and microwaved his breakfast.

He took his breakfast and a third glass of OJ into the living room, as there was a cigar butt in an ashtray on the dining room table, looking like an abandoned turd and he didn't want to smell it or be near it when he ate. The air, he finally noticed, was scented with the smell of the cigar smoke, not unpleasant, and he realized there was a thin blue haze around the light fixtures.

When he was done eating, he got a plastic grocery bag from under the sink, where he had started to keep them, and disposed of the ash and the cigar butt. He tied up the bag and put it in the trash.

With that done, a clearing head, and a full stomach, he decided to keep cleaning. He put on the rubber gloves and gave the half-bathroom off the living room a once over. Then he rotated the laundry, remembering that he'd given up asking and just changed Stuart's sheets for maybe the third time that summer. It had gotten to the point that when he walked by the room with the door open, he could smell them, musty and dark. It was just one of the many things that Stuart let go unnoticed when he was hard at work.

And, like Jeff, he was very hard at work. He had told Jeff that this was going to be one of his long ones, possibly as long as 600 pages. Although his books nudged into the fantasy genre, they were typically more of a length that fit the mysteries that they actually were, around 400 pages. Stuart was approaching that mark and, “I know the end, now, he said, but I'm not there yet.”

Stuart had shared another chapter of Tomb with him after the Thorsen mess, and it had been riveting. Jeff didn't even really know what was going on but the chapter smoked with action, much more so than a regular Alistar Wilcox novel. Vic had even hinted that he might let Stuart read the thing at the end of the summer, if he'd decided it was good enough before he started editing it full-time.

The cigar smoke was still noticeable when Jeff finished with the laundry and cleaning the kitchen, so he opened the dining room doors.

He was not exactly surprised. The sight was shocking, of course, dramatically, almost obscenely, out of place, but Jeff remembered most of his dreams now. He froze and stared and heard the blood rushing and pulsing in his ears.

“Oh, God,” he said, as if someone had just told him about a disaster. There was pity and sorrow in his voice.
It was snowing. He had been looking out the kitchen window moments ago, and there was nothing but now, there were already flakes starting to build up on the table and the railings. The flurry was thick and dense, the flakes were not drifting but pelting down as if they had something to prove.

Jeff took a step forward and hissed at the cold of the snow beneath his feet. The cloud cover had lowered to the tops of the trees that surrounded the house, so even though he was now outside, it felt like he had simply entered a larger, brighter room with a fuzzy gray ceiling.

A small part of him wanted to go out into the snow, he'd always enjoyed the peace and quiet of the snow, the way it seemed to suck the sound out of the world, creating a white cocoon of world for you to enjoy by yourself. But the snow was unnatural. Most of him was reviled by just the idea of it, false, improper, out of place...

The word evil occurred to him as well, but he quickly tried to quash that thought. Snow didn't have consciousness. The snow wasn't malicious, it was just in the wrong place. Or the wrong time.

He closed the doors, banning the alien snow from the house. He crossed to Stuart's bedroom on stiff legs, anxious and pushing down much larger, bolder sensations like panic.

He opened the door without knocking and shook Stuart, who was face down on his pillow. For a heart-stopping moment Jeff was sure he was dead, that the snow had killed him, even though the body was warm and there was a drool stain on the pillowcase. He wasn't snoring. He always snored.

One eye half opened.

“Mmmf tha fuck?” he mumbled.

“Vic, it's fucking snowing. I'm freaking out.”

The eyes opened completely. “Did you say it's snowing?”

“Yes!”

Stuart closed his eyes and sighed. Then he opened them again. “It's okay,” he said. “I kinda thought this might happen.”

“It's OKAY? It's July, Vic and...Jesus this has happened before, hasn't it?”

Stuart nodded, his head rotating against the pillow. “Just once. The second year I was out here, the first year I was out here alone.”

“And?”

“And I freaked out like you were, but nothing happened. It's just snow, man, moisture. It'll go away when it's done.”

“This is not right.”

“All the other weird ass shit you're okay with, but this bothers you? I said it happened before. The world didn't end then, it's not gonna end now.”

“But...”

Stuart just looked at him.

“Doesn't anyone notice?”

“It stops at the base of the driveway and the edge of the trees. It probably looks like a fog bank from above. Who's gonna notice?”

Jeff opened his mouth to say that he thought the neighbors might damn well notice, but then he realized there were no neighbors. Not any more. The only real neighbor they'd had was dead. A sense of dread melted in his stomach. It was as if the house had been waiting for him to die so it could do its thing. Or as if...as if the house had gotten Thorsen out of the way.

Stuart looked at the clock and grunted. “I only went to sleep at six, kid, so I'm gonna try to get another hour or two, okay? Just ignore it, it'll go away.” He rolled over, dismissively and after a moment, Jeff left him alone, closing the door behind him.

Beer wasn't strong enough. Jeff reminded himself to get a bottle of something stronger the next time he left the house, which sure as hell wouldn't be today. He poured himself another Woodford and Coke, grimacing at the taste and the memory of how it had made him feel when he woke up. He stood at the kitchen sink and stared out at the snow as it fell in a fuzzy-edged box around the carport. He stood and watched it snow for a long time.

Then, he pulled the blind. Following Stuart's example, he went back to his basement and returned to sleep, hoping, praying, craving, that when he woke up the world would be back to normal.

As he lay there, more and more details of his dream, the dream where it had snowed just as it had today, returned to him. Back-spiraling, the word had been and the more he thought about it, the more its meaning became clear to him. Back-spiraling. The unwinding of progress. The unspinning of the world.

The Author, Chapter Forty-Two: The Curse

2010-02-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

July 23

He crouched in the dirt, makings notes on a flat, bleached piece of bark with a scorched twig. His worst fears had come to pass.

The day after the sacrifice, he and his boy had gone out into the woods with a whetstone and spent an afternoon reshaping the bone blade so that it did not appear to have been broken. Then they had returned to the village and undertaken the challenge of appearing as if nothing was wrong.

In this task, at least, they had succeeded. The People knew that something was wrong by now, of course, but they did not know who to blame. As much as he wished he could lay the blame at someone else, Jeff knew that, as the spiritual leader of the tribe, let alone the individual who broke the knife during the sacrifice, everything that had happened since was his fault.

The deer they had hunted and killed since that time looked healthy, but the meat they provided was tough and unpleasant. Small birds and animals that Jeff cut open to prophesy the next days and weeks were often diseased inside or filled with worms. He had even brought in a soothsayer from a neighboring tribe, who had brought his own duck with him, and the expression on his face when the man cut open the tribe was enough. They were doomed.

It was possible, Jeff reflected, as he sketched on his bark, that a large enough sacrifice could undo the damage. If they had the magic and talents of the People of the coast, perhaps they could sacrifice a whale and redeem themselves. If nothing else came to him, he supposed he would be forced to take a journey to the coast, to see if such a thing was even possible.

He could picture himself standing over a whale on the beach, the People of two tribes standing around him, and in a nightmare vision he saw that the bone knife would not even penetrate the flesh of the whale. The edge he had placed on the knife was false. The entire concept of the holy weapon was now a lie. The People would tear him to pieces.

The shamans had a word for this, and they shuddered between themselves to say it. Things were back-spiraling. It was a difficult concept and one not known to the People, but the energy along the posts moved in one direction, the same direction as the sun and the stars, the earth and the rivers. Now, it turned against that flow and it was destructive, pulling life out of the world where it had once pushed life into it.

This explained the three children that had been stillborn in the month since the failed ceremony. The People were not foolish, they understood something was wrong, but they had not seen the knife. They kept coming to him for an explanation and he kept delaying them, hoping that he would find a solution, even though he knew there was none.

“Master?” the boy called from outside the lean-to.

Jeff grunted and the boy came in, a squirming sack in his arms. He nodded his approval at the boy's burden.
The boy took his place before the door to catch the animal if it ran and Jeff opened the mouth of the sack, and the snapping, whipping tail of the animal emerged. It was thick and heavy, and Jeff used it to pull the young otter out of the bag. The animal arched its body, twisting back on itself, trying to reach Jeff's capturing hand.
Jeff jerked his head at the boy and he approached, holding out his hands. In a quick motion, Jeff pinned the beast's neck to the table with his hand, and the boy trapped the tail and the body in the same way.

“Hold it!” Jeff said and he watched the boy's knuckles turn white.

The more common an animal, the less high it was considered in the eyes of the powers. The same was true with the less life an animal had. The boy had brought him an animal that was rare, difficult to catch, and very young. It was the best they would be able to do.

Jeff closed his eyes, reaching into the otter with his mind, feeling its spirit struggle just as its body was. He spoke soothingly, reassuring the beast, promising him that his death would be quick and that it was, sadly, necessary.

Then he raised his closed eyes to the ceiling, mumbling and calling out. This would not be a sacrifice sufficient to change things, he was sure of that, against the irrational hope that stirred inside of him, but he thought that it might be enough to put him on the right track. He might learn that there was, at least, a solution, in the face of what he felt now.

Without opening his eyes he gave a quick jerk and snapped the neck of the young animal. After a final, spasmodic jerk the animal lay still and Jeff could smell the tang in the air that came from the animal voiding itself. He felt a tear creep from the corner of his right eye. He whispered a final benediction over the generous creature.

He heard an intake of breath from the boy as if he were about to say something, but no words came. This was good. It was not the time for speaking. He looked at the boy, who was holding out the bone knife. Jeff shook his head and nodded to the boy's belt. The boy handed him his own knife, flint with a leather handle, chipped to a perfect edge. It would not do to use the blade that had started all this trouble, not here.

He placed the point of the flint at the throat of the otter and cut down, sharply and quickly. The blade did the job, opening the soft belly of the animal. Blood squirted and oozed from various locations. The blood had to stay in the animal until it was opened so that the signs could be read. You could not slit the throat of an animal when using it for soothsaying. It was messier, of course, but it spoke the truth. Throat-slitting was for animals that you would eat, or for sacrifice.

The blood was still spattering, and Jeff begin to push into the animal's guts with the knife point and his fingers looking for information. The heart had stopped beating, but the innards were still warm, moist and slippery against his skin.

Suddenly, the otter jerked, startling Jeff, causing the knife point to slip. He severed the animal's intestine, and a sharper, riper smell filled the room. Then the otter jerked again, and just as Jeff was about to pull his hand away, its head snapped up, its eyes furious and blazing and it snapped at the hand that held the knife.

Jeff dropped the flint knife into the animal as its needle teeth sank into his hand. He felt, rather than heard or saw, a tendon in his small finger pop, one end of it retreating far into his hand, and in a small corner of his mind he knew the use of that finger would be difficult, if not impossible, for the rest of his life.

The animal was silent, which was somehow much more terrifying than if it had been growling. The boy had frozen, was clearly useless, so Jeff reached into the animal's guts, found the leather handle of the knife, brought it out.

He gritted his teeth in pain as he used the bitten hand to hold the otter's head still. With his other hand, he drove the knife into the beast's head. The glow immediately left the otter's eyes. Jeff was drawing ragged breaths, his chest heaving, when the muscles in the animal's mouth finally unclenched and released his hand. All the movement had made ugly, torn wounds, instead of the neat, tiny holes that the otter's teeth should have punched. He looked down at the animal, its ruined body, torn open, a knife in the head, and he knew, a broken neck. He had done it himself.

There was a cry from outside and the boy's head whirled around, fast enough that it popped. He brushed the curtain door aside and stared out into the clearing. He dropped to his knees in the doorway and began praying, loudly. The curtain fell back, covering the boy and the view, so Jeff left the otter and pulled it open again.

It was snowing. It was the end of the summer season, the days still starting early and lasting late, but it was snowing. This was a rare enough occurrence here in the winter, but now...

The fat, wet flakes drifted slowly back and forth, silently falling out of the air like a drift of death. And death, Jeff knew, was what it would bring. The back-spiraling, the unwinding of the world, was complete or near to it. The world would crumble around the People until they starved or turned on each other. And, as unfair as it was, he knew it was his fault.

He reached down and snatched the bone knife from its place on the boy's belt and began to follow the line of the stone posts. They did not camp at the apex, it was too dangerous, but they were always close.
When Jeff reached the central post, the Mother post, as he sometimes thought of it, he stood looking at it. He wanted to be able to blame it. To say that it decided that the knife would chip during the last sacrifice, and who was to say that it wasn't true? But it would not matter, at all. The responsibility rode with him.

He dug the knife deeply into his left wrist, pressing and pressing with the blade until it broke down into the flesh. He put the knife in his teeth then, tasting his own blood, as he began to take blood from his wrist and dab it into the runes on the stone. Different runes, this time. The right ones, he hoped. This had never been done before. This was, he supposed, something new, in the face of all the old gods. He hoped they would understand. He hoped they would accept a new sacrifice.

Snow struck the pillar and melted into the blood, causing runnels of pink water to streak the sides of the stone. Jeff reached up, stretching, and placed his hand on top of it. He mumbled his last prayer and then he dropped to his knees.

He took the knife from between his teeth, marveling a little at the fact that the last thing he would ever taste would be his own blood. Then he realized it did not have to be so. He leaned back and opened his mouth. He was transported, for a moment, to a time many years before, an easier time, a time before his responsibility crippled him. A snowflake, damp and heavy, burst on his tongue. He felt its texture, the crystals falling apart on the hot pillow of his tongue, but there was no taste. He still only tasted his own blood, metallic and salty.

He held the knife before him, in both hands, and looked at the post. He began to mutter the sacrificial rites and when he was finished, he would drive the knife into his heart, just as he always did with the sacrifices. Yes, this time the knife was going into him instead of away from him, but how different could it really be?

Jeff knelt in the dirt, with snow building up around him, and continued to pray as the snow flakes spattered on his body and dissolved.

Author's Note: For What It's Worth

2010-02-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

For those of you keeping track of such things and who are at all here for the BTS aspect, the chapter I am about to post is NOT the one I had in mind. The one I had in mind involved Malcolm, Jeff's bestie, visiting the Stuart place. This has not fallen by the way side but doesn't help my narrative reach its conclusion at this point. I might find a place for it in the second draft.

This chapter is another flashback to the ancient or alternative time where the posts are worshiped, etc, that Jeff has experienced in a dream. I woke up and realized that, based on what I have planned, I needed to add a chapter like this. So here it is! I hope it's as fucked up as I think it is.

Author's Note: Progress

2010-02-19T20:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

I have not posted for the last two days, as some of you will have noticed. This is for several reasons, both personal and practical.

On the practical side, those of you who are paying attention will notice that we are hurtling towards the end of the book. The prologue, The Beginning of the End, takes place on August 3. In book time, we have reached the latter part of July, meaning the shit is about to hit the fan and the climax of The Author is right around the corner. This last week, if you will, of the book, was giving me some trouble.

Thanks to some recent clarity, which I am crediting to a conversation with Miss Willow Bl00, which got me thinking about the book and about other things, I am now on the right track to complete the book. I know what the next few chapters will be, which will bring us to the conclusion, which I have had in mind, more or less, for quite some time.

A new chapter will go up tomorrow and I should be able to continue with a chapter a day until we reach the end of the book. I am thrilled to have you all with me, and I hope you enjoy the conclusion as much as I'm sure I'll enjoy writing it.

The Author, Chapter Forty-One: Wisdom

2010-02-17T16:58:00.001-08:00

July 22

Here's the extent of what I have to tell you, Jeff. With the sun down and the cool breeze blowing, the damn heat finally breaking off the place, I'm gonna tell you what I have to tell you, and you can take it or leave it.
Number one: If you're gonna take it seriously, take it seriously. If you were me, you could have made a couple million bucks by the time you were 25 and then gotten out of the business. Trouble is, the people who are really serious about this shit aren't looking to get rich, God help us, we're looking to be writers. So give that some thought. See if you can justify making a big splash and then opting out. Your bankbook might not thank you, but the rest of your life will. The returns on a decent investment of a million bucks will keep you in beer and steak for a good, long while if you're careful.

The second part of that is, don't forget to take it seriously. You've seen me do it. I don't write on the road, I don't write on a laptop wherever I happen to be, you know? But when I write, that's all I do. The shitty thing is, is no one's gonna pay you to write until you break through. It's lame, you know, working a shitty job, scrabbling for rent and grants or whatever, or living with your parents until you're 30, but that's the way it has to be some times.

I realize I'm not the guy to be talking about that, I'm the great white success story, $500,000 advance at 20 years old and I just moved on from success to success. I was declared the North American Publishing Association Young Writer to Watch in 1990. I've had a book at the top of three bestseller lists at the same time.

But it's true. When there's nothing left to be loyal to, you fucking be loyal to you, man. You stick that shit out. Because no one will believe in you as much as you do.

Be careful when you get married. Admittedly, these are the words of a callous guy over 40 who has been divorced, but my words are still valid. I'm not here to tell you to get a pre-nup so she doesn't take you to the cleaners. If you make it you'll have lawyers to tell you that. I'm here to tell you to hitch your wagon to someone who gets it. Who gets that just because you succeeded doesn't mean you're ready to retire. That just because you're rich doesn't mean you've told all the stories you have to tell. That just because you have kids doesn't mean you don't have to be loyal to the angry, hungry, story-writing machine that lives inside you.
But the hardest truth I have to tell you, Jeff, is this. Consider the consequences of your actions. You want to be a man of letters, be a lit teacher. Be a literary agent. Be an editor. If you sign up to be the coal-fed word engine that propels an entire industry, you may not be happy.

Ask yourself if I'm happy, or if you'd be happy sitting where I am. I ask myself that all the time, and I'm still not entirely sure, you know? For that matter, what is happy? Happy was where I could have been fifteen years ago, one kid, another one on the way, millions of dollars in the bank, and that should have been it, right? But it wasn't. I don't know what more I wanted, but I wanted more.

Even if I'd have been strong enough to leave and never come back, if I'd have sold the house and moved away with my family to live off the successes of my youth, it wouldn't have been enough. Whoever bought this house would have woken up one night at two in the morning to find me sitting at this table with a bottle of booze and a laptop. Maybe I'm a cautionary tale or a rare example, Jeff, but I think I'm less rare than you might imagine. Just because I'm lucky enough to be the guy whose books are a compulsion tied to a location doesn't mean that I'm the only one.

The only old man of fiction who quit while he was ahead that I can think of is Tom Clancy. Maybe Rowling will stay silent now that she's as rich as God, but I doubt it. Think about it, how many novelists of 60 are multi-multi-bestsellers and could afford to quit whenever they wanted to. Grisham could have quit after five books and never worked again, but instead he keeps cranking out stuff that makes him happy that people don't even like that much. Critics and fans will have told you that Stephen King could have quit three different times and maybe been liked better than he would be today because he kept writing. There are people who don't forgive the poor bastard for not dying after he got ran over by a car, can you believe that shit? Lawrence Block, Stephen Cannell, Dean Koontz, even someone who only hit the jackpot a few years ago like Janet Evanovich, how much is enough?

And that's what I'm here to tell you, Jeff, as I sit here at my expensive house with my expensive bourbon and expensive cigar, is don't do it. It's not worth it. This job, if you can even call it that, has been an albatross around my neck since the day I signed that contract with Wally, the devil take his soul. Decisions, deadlines, editorial choices, photo shoots, compromises, always the fucking compromises. Maybe you really think it's necessary for your story to accurately and brutally portray a pedophilic relationship, but your editor, your agent and your publisher are all terrified of it. And maybe that will be your one way of trying to say enough is enough, this is my ejection seat, let me out, I don't want to play anymore.

Ah, Jesus, kid, I'm sorry. The job is amazing. Most of the time I love it. But when I'm out here, busting my ass for a public that just expects me to operate like a giant, annual literary jukebox, it gets kind of hard to deal with sometimes. I'm sorry. It's really not all that bad, it really isn't.

The Author, Chapter Forty: The Walk

2010-02-16T17:59:00.000-08:00

July 20

They didn't speak much for the rest of the day. Stuart decided to throw himself directly into his work, since he was already up, and he did so with gusto, pouring himself a towering glass of bourbon without bothering to put any ice in it.

Jeff tried to find something to do, but nothing stuck. He tried to read and found his mind wandering. He had absolutely no interest in trying to write, either. He tried to watch a movie and then he started doing laundry. He found himself staring into the open washer, half loaded, his thoughts far away.

Eventually he gave up and tried to take a nap, closing the door to his room to shut out the sound of Stuart's typing. He gave up on that idea as soon as he closed his eyes and found that the only thing he could really see was Thorsen's staring, milky eye.

“Fuck it,” he said, and went back upstairs. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it over the sink, then he went into the living room.

He touched Stuart's shoulder to get his attention. The writer looked up impatiently.

“I'm going out for a while,” Jeff said.

“You taking the car?”

“No, I'm gonna walk.”

“Okay.” The writer returned to the laptop.

Jeff took two beers from the fridge and went out the back door. He pounded one of the cans standing under the carport and dumped it in the trash. The other went in his back pocket. He put on his headphones, dialed up Fallout Boy on his iPod, and started to walk.

What he hadn't told Stuart was that he was going to buy cigarettes. The one he had bummed from Mandy had jump started a craving that would not go away. The only two things he could think about were getting cigarettes or Thorsen. He hadn't smoked since he'd come out to Stuart's house until today and it had gotten under his skin more than he would have thought possible. He kept swallowing in anticipation.

He'd felt this before, when he'd tried to quit once in college. Eventually his smoking had petered out when he lived with Malcolm because he couldn't justify buying them himself with how little money he had, and he rationed how many he would cadge from his friend. But he remembered the texture of his mouth and the slight swaying sense of his body that came from the addict's necessity. The shitty thing was, if his behavior followed the pattern, the first cigarette would taste like shit, regardless of how much he wanted it.

The sun wasn't quite at full height yet, but light was direct and strong and the air was hot and getting hotter. Jeff stopped on the side of the quiet, woodsy street, finished the second beer and threw the can in the ditch.
He was punishing himself, he knew. He could have easily driven the damn Land Rover to get his fix, but then he wouldn't have earned it. If he was going to be this weak, so weak as to be a pussy about seeing a dead body and so weak as to need nicotine after being free of it for more than a month, then by God he would walk his ass of for it. It was at least a mile to the nearest convenience store, and in this temperature, he would feel it.

Once he got to the end of the street where he turned left to head towards the main road that would lead him to civilization, he was already feeling the buzz of the beer. It didn't seem to be sitting well with his stomach, however, it was occasionally gurgling and once he burped and could taste bile in it. He just kept swallowing.
He turned right onto California Avenue, and he could see the 7-Eleven sign in the distance. “Almost there,” he said. And then he answered himself, “Yeah, and then you just have to walk back.”

His steps were heavy and he could feel the wetness of his t-shirt as it clung to his back between his shoulder blades before he reached the store. His stomach continued to twist and clench. The sun was on his back, and that meant it would be on his face when he returned, and he was sure, now, that this impulsive decision was a bad one. Not only would he have an unsatisfying cigarette, and then he'd feel compelled to smoke more of them because he'd blown seven dollars on the fucking pack, but then he'd walk back home facing the sun and he'd get a fucking sunburn to show for it as well. “Fuck this for a shitty idea,” Jeff mumbled.

When he reached the store he spent a moment standing in front of the magazines, simply soaking in the wonderful air conditioning. Then he went to the cooler and grabbed a Gatorade and immediately chugged half of it, which made him feel a bit better.

He was on his way to the counter to pay for his drink and buy the cigarettes when he saw the beer cooler. He went over, just to take a look at it.

But why the hell not? He'd already started drinking. It wasn't every day you saw a fucking dead body, was it? Some more beer would be therapeutic. He could raise a can to Thorsen, even though he'd never read anything by the poor bastard, and after the build up Stuart had given him, he imagined he'd never bother.
He was reaching for a simple six pack when he decided it wouldn't be enough. So he grabbed a 40-ounce bottle, of Bud Light, as they didn't have his brand in the ghetto bottles, just in case. His arms were full now, a plastic bottle in one hand, a glass bottle in the other, a six-pack hanging off of one finger.

The man in the turban began to ring up the items and Jeff was sure he could see a look of disapproval. Fuck him. “Pack of Marlboro Lights, too, please,” he said, remembering his manners through the light beer haze in his mind. He grabbed some 7-Eleven branded matches from the counter as well, proud of himself for having remembered. Wouldn't he have felt stupid getting ready to light up and finding nothing to do it with!

With a plastic bag in each hand, he broke back out into the sunshine, squinting. There was a park across the street, but it was too public for him to drink it. He wandered around behind the store and found a pile of milk crates there, with cigarette butts scattered around. The employee break area, apparently.

Just as he went to sit down, there was a sudden, swollen pain in his stomach. He almost doubled over, carefully setting the bags down and holding his gut. He groaned, but the feeling passed quickly. He chugged down the rest of the Gatorade, telling himself it would make him feel better and then threw the bottle in a dumpster.

He started with the 40, drinking the neck dry. Then he packed the cigarettes on the butt of his left hand and lit up. He had been wrong. The smoke hitting his tongue, following the crisp bitter-sweetness of the beer was perfect.

He'd smoked four more cigarettes by the time the bottle was empty and by then he realized he probably should have eaten something. He wobbled as he stood up, ready to return home before the store clerk came out back and found him.

His stomach was not feeling any better, “And of course it isn't,” he told himself, “You're drinking and smoking on an empty stomach.” He walked down the sidewalk, down to one grocery bag, holding his six-pack, his other hand saluting over his forehead to protect him from the sun.

It was a relief to get off California, and once he was a few blocks away, he found a quiet place to step over the ditch and sit in the scrubby grass there. He placed his feet on the road side of the ditch to keep himself from sliding in, and opened another beer. He felt better, sitting in the shade now, although his stomach continued to gurgle.

He stopped several more times along the way, smoking and surreptitiously drinking, even though he grew more and more paranoid about someone seeing him.

He broke the cigarettes into the trash can behind the car port, knowing that if he kept them around he'd just smoke the rest of them. He finished the last can of beer and threw it in after.

Jeff opened the door quietly, not wanting to disturb Stuart. The writer did not look up, but kept staring intently at the laptop. Jeff walked unsteadily to the laundry room and staggered down the stairs. He managed to turn off the light and kick off his shoes before he passed out on the bed.

He woke in time to make dinner around 7:30, and Stuart did not mention his absence. He probably had not noticed at all. Jeff work still craving beer, for some reason, and managed to get drunk again and pass out for the night by 11 p.m.

It never occurred to him that his stomach didn't hurt any more, or that, even though he had drank an entire six-pack of beer on his journey home, his stomach had hurt less and less the closer he had gotten to the house.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Nine: Thorsen's Body

2010-02-15T17:29:00.000-08:00

July 20

There was no smell, that was what surprised Jeff the most. Well, to be accurate, there was no smell of dead body, just the typical smells of a bathroom, smells of soap and the faint odor of mildew. When he took a deeper breath, he realized the air was also tinged with the iron tang of blood, but it was not obvious. He had expected the room to smell like bad meat that had been left out too long, or, he realized, like a much stronger version of the very faint smell in his basement.

Stuart was standing in the bathroom, staring at something behind the door. As soon as Jeff saw Vic framed that way and saw what room the body was in, he knew what they would find.

The water was so dark with blood that Jeff couldn't actually see the wounds. The color of the water made it look as though Thorsen had been left to sit in a Jello mold that had yet to solidify.

“Shit,” Stuart said softly, his eyes riveted to the old man's body.

Thorsen's eyes were open, which made Jeff uncomfortable. He saw that one of the man's eyes was white, deformed in some way. He had always assumed that Thorsen's eye patch was either a preposterous affectation or covering up some kind of actual injury, not that it was simple vanity.

The razor sat on the side of the tub, inside a ragged, diluted puddle of blood and water. It was an old fashioned cutthroat razor and Jeff could see small pieces of tissue on the blade from where it had bitten in—
He turned to the sink and wretched into it. His stomach was empty, so nothing came up or out of him except a few strands of that incredibly stretchy saliva that seems to come from down in your throat. He coughed, swallowed, took a drink from the tap. He stayed there, his hands on either side of the sink, not wanting to look at himself (and at that moment he had a flash of the different face he'd seen in the mirror after his dream), not wanting to see anything. His breathing was ragged and he kept shaking his head, as if it would make it all go away.

A moment later, Stuart was there, his hand on the younger man's right shoulder.

“Alright, buddy,” he said. “We'll just go, okay?”

Jeff took another swallow of water and spat it into the sink, then he turned away from the tub and Stuart and left the door without looking again.

They went and got the girl out of the truck. Stuart wanted to wait on the porch, but neither Jeff nor Mandy, as it turned out her name was, wanted to be that close to the house. Reluctantly, Jeff helped Stuart bring a chair and a bench off the porch so they could sit in the yard and wait for the police.

Jeff bummed a cigarette off the girl while she shared her brief life story. She was from South Dakota, she'd finished high school and run off to the West to get away from her parents and small town life. She tried Los Angeles and hated it, and she was on her way back into the Southwest, where a high school friend had settled, when she passed through Las Vegas. She'd never left.

She told them that she met Thorsen on one of his frequent trips to Vegas, where he always stayed at the Riviera, where he had been staying since it was actually a hotel to brag about. She was working as a cashier at the hotel when he had cashed out after a big run at the blackjack table. He'd asked her out.

“And it's not like we're allowed to date the customers, you know? But I knew who he was, so I took the risk and we met across the street at Circus Circus, which is an even bigger dump than the Riv, and when he went home he asked me to come with him. And it's not like I was doing anything in Vegas, and he even gave me a check to cover next month's rent so I could leave me place! That was, I dunno, a couple of weeks ago. Then we had this conference and we came back here and...”

Her voice trailed off and she turned her head to look at the water, checking out of the conversation.

The police arrived soon after and excused the two men after taking their statements and personal information.
“Seems real clear-cut,” Officer Stanley told Jeff at the end of the interview, “But we might call you up for s'more details later.”

The two men left Mandy with the authorities with mixed feelings of relief and guilt and returned home.

“I'm almost proud of the son of a bitch,” Stuart said, as they found the path.

Jeff gave him a sharp look. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The guy built his life on Hunter Thompson. As soon as you realized she was saying he killed himself, didn't you figure he shot himself, just like ol' Hunter S?”

Jeff blinked at that and realized that yes, that's exactly what he'd thought. It occurred to him that it would also explain why he'd been expecting such a strong smell. He'd been expecting cordite and scorched brains and burnt hair.

“I guess,” he said finally.

“Well, I sure fuckin' did. I'm honestly shocked. I mean, he clearly had all those guns around, right?”

“Oh, wow.”

“What?” Stuart looked at him so quickly he almost lost his footing. “What is it?”

“You don't think...Uh...”

“What!” Stuart almost yelled.

“Shit, this is a bad idea. I mean, if he didn't go out the way you'd figure a guy like that would...maybe she did it.”

Stuart's mouth dropped open. He coughed once, in surprise, and then slapped both hands over his mouth to muffle his laughter. Hysterical hooting noises came from behind the hands as Vic's eyes crinkled and twisted with hilarity.

“Shut up!” Jeff said, embarrassed.

Stuart removed one hand and waved it at Jeff, trying to reassure him. When he finally caught his breath, he reached out to him and pulled him closer.

“Ohmygod,” he panted. “That is brilliant. I don't give a shit if it's true or not, that, my friend, that right there is one of those things that makes you a writer. Who else would be mean enough to go there? But you're fuckin' right, dude. I mean, the guy seems like a sad bastard to us, so we're perfectly willing to accept her explanation, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be bullshit. That doesn't mean there's anything to believe about it at all! God damn. You know, I think if you hadn't have said it, it would have occurred to me at some point.”
“Should we—I dunno, should we tell the cops?”

“Oh, shit no, kid, if there's really something there, they'll catch it. I'm sure it's just overactive imagination, even if it is a hell of a good one. Don't sweat it. Although, come to think of it, would you get tired of that girl in just a couple of weeks?”

“You gotta get tired of everything sometime,” Jeff said.

“Such wisdom you have in you,” Stuart said, in an awful faux Asian accent.

When they reached the house, Jeff went in and fetched some beer and they sat on the deck. Jeff didn't even consider the fact that he was drinking beer before noon. They sat in silence, sipping, Jeff wishing he had another cigarette. He looked down and realized that his hand was shaking. He wondered if he was in shock. He figured he probably was, a little anyway.

“You ever think about it?” Stuart asked him, his words hanging in the air between them.

Jeff knew what he was asking, but played dumb.

“Think about what?”

The look Stuart gave him made it clear that he knew Jeff was being intentionally dense. Jeff caught it out of the corner of his eye and didn't react.

“Taking the easy way out,” Victor said eventually.

Jeff took another swallow of beer. “Not lately,” he said finally.

“Yeah.” Stuart finished his beer and burped. Jeff kept looking out at the trees, keeping his eye off the post and off of the writer. He'd had enough of suicide for one day.

“I think about it every summer,” Stuart said. Jeff heard the clink of his bottle as he put it down on the deck and then the writer stood to go inside.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Eight: Thorsen

2010-02-14T15:20:00.000-08:00

July 20

Jeff was elbow deep in a sudsy sink, washing dishes, when the thumping came. After the fact, he realized that it was knocking, but the sound was so much larger that that, he didn't realize it at the time.

He quickly walked into the living room, wiping the soap from his hands with a towel, and he could see a silhouette knocking on the door to the deck. Ordinarily the doors would be open overnight to let the house breathe and let out the hot air, but last night there had been a breeze that was too cool to be comfortable and Jeff had locked up before going to bed. Later he wondered if the girl would have just walked right in if the doors had not been closed and locked.

“Help,” he heard a woman's voice call over the pounding.

“What the fuck is going on?” Stuart said, emerging from his bedroom, rubbing his eyes.

Jeff threw the bolt and pulled the door open. A young woman took a step back, apparently startled at the response. Her eyes were staring, haunted for a moment, and then she pushed her way in.

“You have to help me,” she said, screeching, grabbing at Jeff. “I think he's dead!”

“Who?” both men said together.

“Henry! He wasn't breathing, we need to call someone!”

So instead of asking all the questions that were on their minds, and there were lots, Jeff called 911 on the landline and Stuart got the girl some water.

“Just a second,” Jeff said, in response to a question from the emergency operator. “Um...” he looked at the girl, unsure what to call her. “Henry is Henry Thorsen, right?”

She looked up and nodded urgently.

“They're on their way,” Jeff said, hanging up a moment later.

“We have to go and help him,” the girl said, and the men looked at each other. Morbidly, they both wanted to go to the next door house, so they let her lead the way.

“He said...he said he was gonna do it last night,” she stammered, as she led them through the line of trees. “But I didn't believe him.”

“What?” Stuart asked.

“That he was gonna, you know, do it.”

Stuart rolled his eyes at Jeff. She sounded like a sixth grader talking about sex. Jeff changed the subject.

“So how do you know Henry?” he asked, intentionally using the same name for him that she had used.

“Oh, I'm his girlfriend,” she said, without hesitation.

Stuart threw Jeff another glance. Jeff would have guessed young relative, niece or daughter, certainly not lover. But now that he took a second look at her, it made sense. She was wearing a wife beater and boxer shorts, clearly what she slept in. Her hair was wound together in gentle dreads at the back of her head, there were spacers in her ears, and she had henna markings on her hands. She would dig a counter culture icon like him. Although Jeff could not imagine sleeping with anyone that much older than himself, no matter how cool they were.

“Okay,” Jeff said, just to keep her talking. “How long have you been out here?”

“We just got back from a publishing conference. They gave him an award.”

“Oh, yeah,”Stuart said, “I forgot that was this weekend. Chicago Publisher's Convention,” he told Jeff.

“So that was this huge deal, and then we got back here and he was all down and said that even though they gave him an award, no one actually wanted to publish his fucking books anymore.”

Stuart reached forward and grabbed her arm. She was pliable now, talking about Thorsen as if he were a concept instead of a person. Her face was slack and empty of expression.

“And he threated to hurt himself?”

She nodded.

“And he's inside?”

She nodded again.

They were in the yard of the Victorian now, so Stuart led the girl over to the truck, which was unlocked, and put her in it. He left the door open and returned to Jeff.

“You follow all that?”

“Yeah. You really think...” Stuart started nodding, so Jeff didn't bother to finish. “I guess I figured he just had a heart attack or something, you know?” he said instead.

“Yeah, me too. 'Specially with Miss My Legs Up To My Chin, over there.”

“So, now what?”

Stuart grinned, his teeth flashing with a carnivore's glee. “I dunno about you, kid, but there's no way I'm passing this up.”

“But if he really topped himself, this place is gonna be a fucking crime scene in ten minutes!”

“Suicide isn't illegal in Washington State,” Stuart shot back. “I'm never gonna have another chance like this. I've sat in on autopsies before and shit, but it was never real. As far as the cops were concerned, we thought there might be a chance he wasn't dead, okay? It's not like we really got much info out of her, is it? She's hysterical or in shock or something.”

Jeff shook his head. “You're nuts.”

“I'm just making the case for what we both wanna do. Imagine the shit this'll give you for your book!”

That, of course, was what did it. It was what pushed Jeff's reason off the cliff and propelled him to follow Victor Stuart as they entered Thorsen's house.

The door was ajar, and Victor pushed it open with the tip of his shoe. He looked back at Jeff and the two of them entered.

They did a quick circuit of the ground floor, which was set up as a huge square around the giant staircase that divided the house. In one corner was a small bedroom, filled with the remnants of Thorsen's career, awards, posters, trophies, a stuffed lion's head, and a wall covered in rack-mounted guns.

“I could spend a fucking day exploring just this room,” Stuart said quietly, as if he were in church or a library.
Jeff put his hand on Stuart's shoulder. “We don't have time, dude, c'mon!”

The rest of the downstairs held nothing interesting, except that, on some level, it was all interesting. If Thorsen were really dead, then this entire house was practically a museum of his life. What magazines did he read in this living room, what food did he eat in this kitchen, did he shoot the colossal buffalo whose head was mounted over the dining room table?

Jeff found a door in the kitchen that led into a cellar. It was not finished, like his basement, it still had dirt walls and it was filled with swollen, oozing boxes of documents, magazines, manuscripts, catalogs, newspapers. As soon as he saw the contents of the room, Jeff was tugging on Stuart's arm again, anxious that if they were going to see the body, they should do so ASAP.

“Yeah, yeah,” Stuart said, almost to himself, looking over his shoulder as they went back up the basement stairs.

They split up at the top of the stairs to the second floor, Jeff going left, Stuart going right.

Jeff found what seemed to be a guest bedroom, devoid of any particular personality. There was a larger room next to it, which might have been a study 100 years ago, but which was now an entertainment room, with a digital project and small rows of theater seats.

“Found him!” he heard Stuart cry, and he ran out into the hall.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Best Books

2010-02-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

July 17

“You ever see High Fidelity?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah. I liked the book better,” Stuart said, smiling. “When they moved the movie to Chicago they gutted a bit of the book's instincts, since it was a British novel. If you haven't read About a Boy, by the same guy, you should, especially if you're a fan of Nirvana.”

“So, if you saw it, you're familiar with the Top 5 concept?”

“Top 5 Desert Island Whatever, sure,” Stuart said.

“So the Top 5 are what your favorite things are. Not the most important or the ones you think others should check out, but the ones that you would be stuck with if you only had five, right?”

“Right.”

“Top 5 Desert Island Books, then, Victor Stuart edition.”

Stuart nodded and poured himself some bourbon. “You first. And defend your selections.”

“Okay,” Jeff said, as if he had been expecting such a response. “Me first.” He took a breath and cracked his beer. “In no particular order, mind you.”

“Of course. Top 5 does not mandate values in order,” Stuart said, reasonably.

“Needful Things, by Stephen King. He claimed that it was a satire of Reagan's America, but I feel like the book takes his powers of observation and his affection for small town life and threw them together like a car crash. No holds barred, a happy ending, yes, but only after a dozen unhappy ones. Ruthless, even. And an ending that leaves questions to be asked instead of sewing everything up tidily, as he sometimes does.”

“'Kay,” Stuart nodded. “Continue.”

“Watership Down. Richard Adams called it a grown-up's book for children, but I've always maintained it was the reverse. Kids shouldn't read it. I tried to read it when I was 12 and barely got through it. It wasn't until I read it as an adult that I could stomach it or understand it. Plague Dogs was even worse.”

“Plague Dogs is a hell of a book, but I'm not sure anyone should read it. It's too grueling and depressing.”

“Says the author of the Alistar Wilcox books.”

“Point. Watership is really heavy, too, though. With all that stuff with the general and the prophecies and everything. Not something I'd read to my kids, at any rate. What else?”

“Preacher, a comic series—“

“By Garth Ennis, yeah. I know it. A fan of mine recommended them a few years ago and I read them all in one sitting, basically took up a whole day. I liked Y, The Last Man, better, but not by much. Why?”

“The foreign perspective of the United States and our culture meshed with spirituality and a spaghetti western is just, I guess it's just too surprising and original not to acknowledge.”

“Agreed. Keep going.” Stuart seemed to be enjoying Jeff's selections.

“By The Rivers of Babylon,” Jeff said.

“DeMille, really?” Stuart asked.

“It was the first book of his I read, and probably still his strongest. It was probably also the first book that I read that really opened my eyes to an international perspective, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“No cardboard characters, no easy ways out, original solutions to common problems, and a genuine perspective on what a fucking no-way-out mess there is in the Middle East.”

“Sure. Last one.”

“You're not gonna like it,” Jeff said.

“Try me.”

“It's this book by a hack named Victor Stuart. Cemetery. I read it when I was 15.”

“You mentioned that before, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“So now tell me what happened to your father.”

Jeff looked at Stuart for a long moment. “Cancer,” he said in the end, quietly, “He died of lymphoma.”

“I'm sorry. I know that of all my work, that book speaks to those who lost a parent, whether they died or ran off, or whatever. It makes sense, too, because I wrote it about my own father, right after he died. Ask me about that some time, yeah?”

Jeff nodded, trying not to be overwhelmed by unhappy recollections.

“Alright, my turn. Since you chose Needful Things, I'll start with my favorite Stephen King book: Thinner. Writing as Richard Bachman, which means he could be as mean-spirited and unpleasant as he wanted.”

“I read somewhere that the big difference was that in the end of King's books the good guys lived and in the end of the Bachman books no one gets out alive..”

Stuart snorted and then considered and began to laugh. “Yeah, kid, that's pretty accurate. I like it. His observation is at its finest in that book, cutting and clever, the descriptions, the Gypsys, the fuckin' ending. I reread it every so often, it's a fast book.

“Second I'm gonna go with Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.”

“Good choice.”

“I mean, everyone quote-unquote literary likes Stephenson, he's and geeky and literate and everything all at once. Cryptonomicon, though, got me excited through the treasure hunt and the World War Two stuff, and all the code geekery was just gravy.

“You mentioned a comic, so I suppose I will have to, too. I'll say The Crow, by James O'Barr. The movie wasn't bad, but never really did the original work justice. Some of the same things about Thinner are what I like about The Crow. It's unhappy, it's mean-spirited in places, it doesn't offer easy answers. It's brutal, more than anything.”

“I cried like a little bitch when I read it,” Jeff said. He then immediately regretted it.

Stuart looked at him for a moment. “Of course you did,” he said. “You have a soul. It's a tough book to get through. I read it when it was pretty new and I was...I dunno, not very old. I didn't just have a young wife, I had my first kid at the time and the idea of losing those that I held most dear was just...heinous.”

“That's three,” Jeff said.

“Yeah. I'm gonna say Small Town. It's mostly because I want to list a book by Lawrence Block, who is the fuckin' man, and I can say that having met him. He's a gentleman and a hell of a writer. Have you read it?”

“No. I've seen it at the stores, but I haven't read it.”

“It's an ode to post-9/11 New York City. There's a mystery, but it's really secondary to the intertwining stories of all these people and how the tragedy affected their lives. One of the reasons why I respect him so much is he can write on all these levels, humorous, serious, snarky, scary, and that book was the culmination of the lot of it. A love story to the city. It's on my shelves, I think, if you wanna look for it. You can't read just me all summer.”

“I'll check it out,” Jeff said. “What else?”

“The Hobbit,” Stuart said. “It's a cliché choice, I suppose, as it's a formative work for many writers, but I can always go back to it and remember what it was like to not be a writer yet and be so enamored of the fact that some guy, in another country, decades before, could suggest all these ideas that would resonate with a 10-year-old in 1978. I'd been a scribbler before then, but that book was what turned me into a writer. Or, at least, a kid who wanted to be a writer.”

“For me that was Grave.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I wrote my first real short story after that.”

“Wow. Thanks, kid, that's really flattering. Was it any good?”

“No, it was a complete rip off. But it was a place to start.”

“Damn right. Good for you.”

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Six: The Sacrifice

2010-02-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

July 15

Jeff has never felt so exhilarated in his life. He can feel his pulse throbbing in his wrists, his neck, in his groin, at his ankles. He flexes his fingers, feeling the power that rests there, ready to be deployed.
His shoulders are powerful and wide, different from how they usually feel. His cloak is magnificent, made of a mat of woven feathers that falls almost to the ground. He wears a circlet with a single, rough jewel at his forehead.

The young man before him is also naked, with ropes binding his neck, waist and arms, and ankles to the strong, tall stone post.

Around them is a circle of the tribe, the People, as they call themselves. They are the first and the oldest, for certain, but in the back of his mind, he knows that they will be forgotten by the years, that they are not as permanent as they assume themselves to be, as they pretend to be, as they claim they will be. There will be no kingdom of a thousand years, or even a hundred from this day, but today's ceremony will insure that what time they have will be prosperous.

His apprentice, boy learning the trades of prophecy, soothsaying, and medicine, approaches. The boy bears a simple wooden bowl that he holds forth, bending his head in respect.

Jeff dips his finger in it, taking a small pleasure in the texture of the mixture that is made from ash, ground bone, and fish oil. It smells richly of the herbs that have been sprinkled in it, each one significant, signifying a wish, a dream, or a curse. Jeff gently rubs it between his fingers and thumb to make sure it is properly made. It is his apprentice's first true test. He touches his index finger to his mouth and rolls the taste, rich and repellent, over his tongue. The boy has done well. He grunts in satisfaction and takes the bowl. The boy takes a step back, watching.

He begins to paint the post with the ash, filling in the markings that are appropriate for today's ceremony. He indicates life, health, and fortune. He touches the markers for earth, food, and crops, leaving a black fingerprint.

Then he turns his attention to the young man tied to the post. His eyes are open, staring, entranced, far gone on the fermented berries he was fed earlier. He will go compliantly, gently, Jeff is certain. He paints his forehead and chest with the ash, duplicating the stained runes on the post.

He hands the bowl back to the boy and keeps his hand there, expectantly. The boy hands him the knife.
It is old, as old as the People themselves, and it is said that it was one of the first gifts from the gods, along with speech and fire. It is formed the jawbone of a deer, one end worn smooth and dark from being handled by many hands over thousands of years. The other end is a narrow blade, sharpened on both sides, with a point as sharp as a shark's tooth. Never once has this blade been chipped or broken. Never once has this blade failed. Jeff himself has used it more times than he can count and it is flawlessly reliable.

He holds the knife aloft in both hands, feeling the weight of the feather cloak shift on his shoulders. The people around him, the People, cry out at the sight of the blade.

Lightning flashes overhead, but there is no accompanying roll of thunder. He begins his incantations, the boy repeating them quietly, memorizing them for the time when he will lead the ceremony. The words are as old as the knife, also handed down from on high, the words that will continue the cycle of survival in a cold, hard world, overseen by cruel, unseen gods.

Jeff nods at the boy, who slips something into his mouth and screams, a high-pitched yelp that pierces the ears. Soon he is mentally beyond the clearing, his mind elevated and the words he chants are in another language, the words of the gods.

Jeff approaches the young man at the post again, holding out his empty left hand. The eyes do not blink or shift as Jeff caresses his cheek, continuing to talk, to soothe, to deliver the benediction for this hero, this victim.

The boy is almost running in a circle around them now, panting, screaming, howling. The others in the circle begin to take up his cries, pleading to the gods, each in their own way, to bless the coming days.

Swiftly, so swiftly that it is almost invisible to the People in the circle, Jeff drives the knife forward, confidently, never removing his eyes from those of the young man. The eyes do not move as the knife slides between two ribs, piercing the heart. The man sighs and sags against his bonds.

A lesser shaman breaks the circle, picks up the bowl where the boy discarded it, and brings it forward, holding it beneath where the knife still penetrates the young man's body, and Jeff feels the last, weakening pulses through the handle. He draws the blade out.

The blade sticks, catches on a rib, and there is a hesitation where there has never, never, been one before.
With a wrench the blade breaks free of the flesh and the blood gouts forth into the bowl, overflowing, covering the shaman's hands.

Jeff tucks the knife, bloody and warm, into a secret fold in his cloak. He will deal with it later.

The ceremony is finished with him painting the blood on the sacrifice, and the post, and then a mark for the body of ever member of the tribe, in the location that they desire, where it will help them the most.

Then there is feasting, dancing, singing, and stories on the beach, and the posts are decorated with garlands of flowers in gratitude. Later, it begins to rain and the People return to their shelters, exhausted from their day.
It is not until later, in the light of a small brazier in his hut, that Jeff removes the knife from his cloak and examines it. In the orange firelight he can see, even through the dried blood and gore on the blade of the knife, that there is a chip in the point, where it appears to have struck a rib when he pulled it out. Perhaps the rib had a flaw that dragged against the blade.. The notch is not large, but on a knife that has not needed to be sharpened in the history of its existence, it does not bode well.

The boy comes into the tent without announcing himself, wet from rinsing himself in the ocean. His eyes gleam in the firelight as they see the blade of the knife. His vision leaps to Jeff's face and Jeff nods, slowly.

Tomorrow they will sharpen the blade, reshape it so that it appears as if it has never been damaged. They will do this for the sanctity of the People. They will do this because the gods must be obeyed and because without tradition, without ceremony, the People have very little else.

But they both know that this means something more. It means an ending. An ending of a way of life, of a perfection that was unbroken. It means that the boy's reign as Great Shaman may be the last. Or the boy he trains up may be the last. But the end is drawing near.

The blade is notched. The sacrifice was not deemed worthy by the gods. The coming year will be hard. The years after, perhaps harder still.

This dream Jeff will remember when he wakes. And when he looks in the mirror in the morning, he will decide not to shave, because when he looks at his reflection, he does not see his own face, but rather he sees the high, dark cheekbones of the Great Shaman, still speckled with blood from when Jeff had sacrificed another human life.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Five: Character Work

2010-02-11T14:32:00.000-08:00

July 13

Jeff stood over the grill, basting sauce on skewers of chicken. Stuart exited the house, groaning as he stretched.

“Smells good,” he said.

“Thanks,” Jeff replied, and he heard Stuart grunt behind him. When he turned, the writer was laid out on the table, eyes closed, sun on his face.

“Is it must me, or is it getting hotter in there?” Stuart asked him, lips barely moving.

“Yeah, we're not getting much wind anymore.” The grill hissed and spat like a feral cat as the sauce dripped onto the heating element.

“I think we got a fan around here somewhere. Remind me to look for it after we eat, yeah?”

“Sure.” Jeff killed the burners on the grill and rotated the skewers. “I'll be right back,” he said. He went to the kitchen, grabbed two plates and dished out some of the pilaf that had been warming on the stove. He poured two glasses of lemonade, put napkins and forks in his pocket, and managed to get the whole mess outside.

“Here we go,” he said, as he came back out onto the porch. Stuart took this as his cue to get off the table, so he rolled onto a bench.

“Feed me!” he cried.

Jeff placed the plates and then served the chicken. Stuart burned his fingers in his hurry to sample the grilled meat. Jeff just shook his head. They had managed to return to June's equilibrium, making time for writing and for not writing.

“I'm finally caught up after the time I took off from editing over the holiday,” Stuart said, around a mouth full of food. When he looked up, he saw the expectant expression on Jeff's face. He swallowed. “Ah, shit,” he said. “What's tonight's question, quizmaster?”

“Who is the favorite character you created?”

Stuart made a couple of faces and drank some lemonade. “Jesus. Well, this may not be the answer you're after, but character that makes me the happiest is Rast Harker.”

“Who?”

Stuart nodded. “Are you still ripping through all my books?”

“Yup.”

“Which one are you on now?”

“Creature.”

“Well, Harker is in Victim. I'm sure you'll remember him when you get there. He's a lawyer who serves Wilcox with a lawsuit and—“

“Oh, that guy!”

“That guy. Everyone remembers him, even though no one remember his fuckin' name. I created him on a whim, he's just an excuse to move the story forward, to be honest, but I figured if I was going to be so cheap as to create a human plot device, then I should make him interesting. He's in the book just enough to raise about a hundred more questions than he answers, and I implied that he knows stuff about Wilcox and his history. It was a lot of fun. I get people asking me about him all the time, who he is, what he meant, all that. Truth is, what you see is all there was, I just dropped a bunch of hints for things I never intended to explore.” He gave his fierce grin. “I love being a bastard sometimes.”

“Awesome.”

“Now that you've got me thinking about it, I really liked Eria, too.”

“The voodoo priestess?”

“Mmm-hmm. I don't create a lot of love interests for Wilcox. One, 'cause he's just not that kinda guy, but two, because I hate reading novels, especially mystery novels, where the hero,” he snorted, “Okay, bad term, protagonist, main character, whatever the hell, I don't like reading books where the main character is a cocksman. It bugs me. So Wilcox usually runs solo.

“But with Eria, I did something very intentional. I created her to kill her off. Often I kill characters off because when I get to the moment it seems like the right thing to do for the story, or the right thing for the character. Sometimes it just happens. With her, I built her from the ground up just to bump her off. It was really satisfying. I created this person and this relationship that really worked, one of the most genuinely interpersonal relationships this guy has ever had, and then she dies. It must be like being a set designer for plays or movies, everything you create is temporary, you put all this work into something knowing that when it's finished, you're just going to take it apart again.”

“Yeah, that was brutal.”

“Why?”

“Cause...shit, I guess because the poor bastard was happy for a few chapters. You really are a son of a bitch, aren't you?”

“Guilty. And the worst part was, since I knew that's what was going to happen, I built her to be someone that my readers would really like and identify with.”

“Just so you could killer her.”

“In the most brutal way I could think of, too, of course.”

“And it worked.”

“Goddamn right. I get people coming up to me all the time telling me how much they liked her and how painful it was when she died. And I deserve it, for sure, but it was worth it. I don't usually get the chance to get under people's skin like that. Well, I get under their skin all the time, I suppose, just, you know, not emotionally.”

“You did that in your first book, too.”

“You think? I suppose. It seems like less of a victory to create a character that people care about when he's dying of cancer instead of someone who practices human sacrifice.”

“Good point. God, I hope I can do that some day.”

“What, break people's hearts?”

“Create someone or something that makes people respond that strongly.”

“Even if it makes them hate you?”

“Better than nothing, right?

“And don't you forget it. It's better to be loathed than forgotten, despised than neglected. Ask Roman Polanski.”

Jeff narrowed his eyes. “Ouch.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Why are artists so fucked up?,” Jeff asked.

“Aren't you an artist?”

Jeff shrugged. “I guess.”

“Then you fucking tell me!”

“I dunno.”

“Yeah, well, lots of people will give you excuses, but I don't know either. We're different, so no one understands us. Shit, most of us don't even understand ourselves. Maybe we produce art because we're skewed, because we can't see things the way everyone else does, which means that we're broken, that, by a conventional definition of normal, that there is something wrong with us.

“And then maybe you add fame or fortune or reward to the fact that we're broken, that on a basic level we're effectively being supported for being fucked up, and then the public is surprised to find out that we kill puppies, or eat people, or collect kiddie porn, or beat our wives. Of course we do. There's something inherently fucking wrong with us!”

“What's inherently wrong with you?”

“What's inherently wrong with you?”

Jeff opened his mouth to say 'Nothing,' and then paused.

“Gotta be something, kid.”

“I think too much.”

“That'll do it.”

“Like, the other day I...” Jeff stopped himself.

“Go ahead.”

“There's this homeless guy in Danny's Dime. I wanted to make him pathetic, but have you sympathize with him and I decided he's one of those people who is homeless because he was released from a mental hospital. And he was being treated because he's a pedophile. And I started to think about...”

“What that must be like.”

“Well, yeah.”

“What did you come up with?”

“Well, I realized that a guy like that, unless he's a sociopath, would be completely conflicted. He's attracted, just like I am to, say, a supermodel, to little kids. I didn't wanna get into a psychological thing, so I just said he couldn't help it. That's who he is, the way he is.”

“And then?”

“And then...I tried to think like he would. Like, how would I flirt with kids? How I would get their attention, gain their trust. And I thought about what I would find attractive about them.”

“Sounds like it scared you.”

“It fucked me up.”

“Good. Just because you can do it, doesn't mean it should be easy for you. Or easy on you. Psychologists do it, too. You can even enjoy it, you know, checking out the other side of things. Christ only knows what I'd have gotten into if I didn't have my writing for exorcising that shit. That's exorcising with an O, mind you.”

“Yeah, I caught that.”

Stuart burped. “Good chicken, kid. The book is calling.”

“Hey, wait. What about you?”

“What about me?” Stuart was standing now, looking down at him.

“What's wrong with you?”

“Kid you've been living here for more than a month. If there's an answer to that, you know it as well as I do.”

Author's Note: RnR

2010-02-11T14:29:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you about the kind of love I have for you, dear reader. I am on my way out of town for a few days with my buddy Landon, and I just cranked out a chapter on the bus so that I can post a chapter today AND pre-date two chapters to post while I'm gone.

So, while I'll be out of town, you won't miss out on any chapters. I do this because A: I took two days off without intending do for Cheese! last weekend (which was a rousing success, if it wasn't mentioned before) and B: Because I'm supposed to be posting every day and I don't wanna be a dick. I also know that C: Some of you are serious junkies who will start coming after me if I leave you in the lurch.

So there you go. See you when I get back on Sunday, just in time to write another chapter.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Four: Danny's Dime

2010-02-10T11:18:00.000-08:00

July 11

It was the first day in two weeks the men had watched baseball, since the kids had been there the previous weekend. They ordered Arturo's pizza for lunch and Chinese food for dinner, and Stuart drank his Alaskan Amber and Jeff his Coors Light. They didn't about the beach or the posts at all.

The Dodgers took the Astros into overtime in the afternoon and Stuart's enthusiasm was contagious. Play after play came down to the wire, with a handful of almosts and maybes dragging the game until the 17th inning. When the winning run, for the Astros, crossed the plate in the bottom of the inning, finally ending the game, both men cheered and toasted each other with their beer.
In the lull after the game, before the Chinese food arrived, they adjourned to the deck and Stuart let a cigar.

“How's it coming?” Victor asked.

It took Jeff a moment to realize what he was asking about. “My book?”

Stuart nodded.

“It's coming along really well. I'm past 50 pages.”

“You still excited about it?”

“Totally.”

“Awesome, man, I'm really happy for you. When are you gonna let me take a look at it?”

“I'd say when I'm done, but I dunno if I'll be finished before the summer is over.”

“Go get your laptop,” Stuart said.

Jeff hesitated. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, I wanna take a look. Since today is a no writing day, I'll have the head space for it.”

Jeff scurried down to the basement and retrieved his Dell, almost running back up the stairs in his enthusiasm. He hadn't intended to show the book to Stuart yet, still not wanting to break the spell, but things felt like they were getting back to normal, at last, and he didn't want to break that spell either. Call it a draw.

Stuart was sitting at the dining room table when he returned, staring at the painting on the wall.

“You know who that is?” he asked, as Jeff placed the laptop on the table.

“No.”

“Abel Rasmussen. Ever heard of him?”

Jeff shook his head.

“Get me another beer, will you?”

Jeff went into the kitchen and got them each a drink.

“Rasmussen was a painter. Was well recognized in the late twenties and early thirties as advertising artist. This is back before photo manipulation and Photoshop and all that shit, so when you needed an ad, you either needed to stage a photo or get a good artist to do you a painting or a line drawing. Rasmussen wasn't the best, but he was good. I'm sure you've seen a retro Coke ad or two that he made. He retired here, spent the last five years of his life at this place. It was a different house, then, of course, no basement, the original place was broken down to build this one, but this is where he ended his life.”

“Wait, you mean...?”

“No! Ha, sorry, not like that. This is just where his time ran out. At least, that was the assumption. His wife had left him after he moved out here, as I understand it, and at some point someone dropped by to visit him and he just...wasn't here. He was never seen again, so the conventional wisdom was he went for a swim and never came back. Whether it was on purpose or not probably doesn't matter.”

He stopped speaking and Jeff really looked at the painting for the first time since he had arrived. The man's chin was slightly turned up, giving him an arrogant look. His ears were barely visible, crimped tight to his head, and his colorless hair was swept back from his forehead. The eyes were narrow, permanently squinted, Jeff supposed, from hunching over a drawing board or an easel.

“Why do you have the painting?”

“I haven't done a damn thing to update this place since I moved in except buy some furniture. It came with the place, along with that ugly-ass deer.” Stuart pointed at the other painting. “Doesn't matter. You should Google his illustrations sometime, though, they were something. He captured a, I dunno, a life, I guess, that most of the work from that time didn't have. He was different, I think, which is why he didn't make it bigger, like your Rockwells or what have you.”

Stuart heaved a breath and then turned to Jeff.

“Let's take a look!”

“The idea ain't bad,” Bobby said, begrudgingly.

“Not bad?” Danny demanded. “Fuck you, you never had a good idea in your life. It's a great idea. It'll set us up to do whatever we want.”

“Yeah, and what's that, Danny?” Bobby said. “Fuckin' settle down and pop out some kids? Maybe you think you got what it takes to be a squarejohn, but the rest of us know you don't. You're no better than us and just because you pull a big job won't make you any different from anyone else. You think some broad's gonna give you the time of day when she finds out where your money came from?”

“He won't never have to worry about what some broad thinks of him,” Moses contributed, “Cuz we ain't never gonna live to tell the tale.”

Danny stood at the head of the table, rage boiling like indigestion in his gut. He played his trump card. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the long, heavy key. He dropped it on the table with a decisive thunk.

“No one else has this,” he said proudly. “So stuff your naysaying. This is all we need. This is all we need, and that is that!”

The others around the table stared at the key. Betty crossed herself. Moses clicked his dentures back and forth in his mouth. Slim just shook his head.

“No one knows we got this,” Danny said, slamming a hand on the table. “They'll be so busy looking to chew up someone in the organization that they'll never look at a buncha low-level players like us. That's the whole goddamn point! Getting the job done is easy enough, right, you can't argue with that. It's the getting away with it that's the hard part.”

Betty's eyes gleamed with the wealth she could accumulate. She adjusted her bra and Danny knew what she was thinking about. “I'm in,” she said.

“Shit, son, if you can pull that off, I'll believe in whatever other magic you got to sell,” the old black man said.

Slim just nodded.

Bobby shrugged. “If you say so, man. God only knows I ain't never gonna do any better.”

“You're having fun with it, I can tell,” Stuart said, after he finished another chapter.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It comes through in the writing. Something like this could totally be a heavy affair, all posing and bullshit, but you've got a nice Elmore Leonard tone going on here. Lots of character in your characters, you know? Maybe Carl Hiassen would be closer, but you've found a good energy, a nice center. Stick with it.”

“Wow, that's...amazing. Thanks.”

“Just get it done. That's the important thing. You can fix all sorts of things when you get back to it, but the most vital step you can take when writing a book is just getting the fucker finished.”

Jeff sat at the table for a moment, just basking in the praise of Victor Stuart.

“You already got an idea for the next one?”

Jeff should have known that Stuart would know such things, but he was still taken aback. “Yeah.”

“Great. You come up with good people, good ideas, and they'll stick with you. Some of my stuff seems to come out of thin air, or not from me, I told you that, but the way my characters talk and act, who they really are, that's all my creation and I'll never tell you different. That's one of the areas were I know I'm damn good. You've tapped into that and it shows. These people are real, you know, and that'll carry you a long way.”

“Thanks.”

“Now, you'll need to tighten it up when you come back to it, keep the conversations from meandering, maybe cut back on the patois a bit, but that'll be easy. Worry about it after the book is done. Where is it going?”

Jeff explained it all then, spilled his guts to his hero, about how the book was really more or less The Old Man and the Sea, how Danny and his crew would succeed and then have their success taken away from them.
When he was finished, Stuart stood and stretched. “I gotta take a shit,” he said. “You mind if I take this with me, read some more?”

It never crossed Jeff's mind that there was something weird about another guy using his laptop on the can. Victor Stuart wanted to read more of his book!

“Knock yourself out,” he said.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Three: The Beach

2010-02-09T16:32:00.000-08:00

July 11

It was the earliest Jeff had risen in his life. He had considered simply staying up all night, but in the end he was too tired, and had settled for getting three hours of sleep before his alarm blared at 3:15 a.m.

He had half expected Stuart to still be up, chattering away at his laptop, back in the solid groove he had discovered after his children had left. “Now we're getting to the good stuff,” he had told Jeff the other night. But he was apparently asleep in his room, a habit that seemed to have stuck after his kids had visited.
Jeff was having a similar experience. He had torn into Danny's Dime like he had something to prove on the evening after the Fourth of July and he had not looked back. He was coming up on 50 pages and his first elaborate crime scene was impending. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been so excited to write something.

Things had quickly returned to normal. Stuart had said goodbye to his children at the house, and Jeff had taken them to the airport. The plan was simply to drop them off, but he felt so guilty about the idea that he wound up paying for parking so he could walk them up to the security check point. Kids shouldn't have to travel alone, he thought to himself, as Riley slouched his way off while Vanessa turned to wave at him.
Jeff's instincts had been right, he had missed them and he had not. He had not been magically filled with energy after they left, though. Between working on his own book and the nightmares, he seemed to always be tired.

“Like getting up at three in the goddamn morning is gonna help that,” he muttered, stepping down off the deck.

The light above the deck partially illuminated the yard and once Jeff broke through the line of trees, the light of the moon and the stars reflected off the ocean was more than enough to see his way down to the beach. He had forced himself to look straight ahead as he crossed the yard, ignoring the post even as it crossed in his peripheral vision.

Thorsen's Victorian looked like a toxic mushroom perched at the edge of the sea. The son of a bitch had, of course, thrown a Fourth of July party the day after the damn holiday, setting off elaborate, whizzing, screaming fireworks until after midnight. Based on the voices that wafted back to them, apparently there were actually people who could stand to hang out with the crazy bastard.

Stuart hadn't minded of course, had barely noticed, as Tomb took him over again. And Jeff had retreated early to the basement to start his own writing, but part of him stayed wary, remembering Stuart's story of the crazy old man fishing with dynamite and waiting or expecting him to cap off his Independence Day celebration with a hand grenade or napalm.

Jeff hadn't even noticed when the party had ended, he'd been so wrapped up in his work.

Stuart and he were talking less lately. Jeff wouldn't have believed that he would prioritize anything over spending time with the writer, but the more they both fell into their books, the more they kept returning to them. They still talked casually, over meals, and Stuart still showed him pages occasionally, which was still flattering and exciting, but they had only had one real conversation since the children had left.

He looked at his sneakers as he shuffed through the tall grass above the beach. He was afraid to look up. Part of it was delaying...what? Not pleasure surely. Excitement, anticipation? Yes, anticipation. He knew what he was going to see and he wasn't excited about it at all. In truth, he was terrified. His heart raced and his hands seemed to be clenching and unclenching all on their own.

“What are you doing?”

Jeff was not quite surprised. The presence of the writer next to him, in the small hours of the morning, felt inevitable. His body still started at the sudden voice, but in his mind, he was not surprised at all.

Jeff was grateful to have somewhere to look other than at the water. He met Vic's eyes, which were points of reflective light.

“It's low tide,” Jeff said. “One of the lowest of the summer.”

“You came out to see them?”

Jeff nodded.

“The tide doesn't have to be that low, but you'll definitely be able to see them tonight. How'd you know?”

“Riley told me. We lost a ball in the blackberries when you were sleeping and I found the other one. He told me about these.”

Stuart broke their eye contact and turned his head to look at the beach. Jeff couldn't bring himself to follow just yet.

“They're part of the weird energy of this place, Jeff,” Stuart told him. “I could tell you things, but they'd be guesses at best. They form a line that points at the house and when I'm drunk, like I am now, I'll admit to you that I think they're what powers me. They're why I can write here and can't write anywhere else.”

“But that's not true,” Jeff said, “You wrote your first book at home in high school.”

Stuart nodded in the dark, his face a soft, dark profile against the lighter color of the Victorian behind him. “Maybe I cheated and now that I did, my own gift is gone.

“Wanna hear something scary?”

“No,” Jeff said. He really didn't.

“Who is the one writer people compare me to the most often?” Stuart asked.

“Lovecraft.” It was an easy question.

“Right. And it's not because I write boring, meandering sentences or refuse to actually tell you what something looks like. It's because of the mythos, they call it. All his Ancient Ones and parallel worlds and monsters with names with no vowels. That stuff is all over my books.”

“How is that scary?”

“Because I read one of his stories, once. When I was 25 and people really started comparing me to him all the time. And I'll tell you something else, I hated that story, too. Not because it was like my stuff but because it was fucking boring.”

They stood in silence, Jeff looking at Stuart, him looking out, Jeff was sure now, at the posts.

“I think all that stuff, the cracks in the Earth, the monsters, the tentacles, that's,” he shivered and swallowed. “I think that's the posts telling their own stories.”

Stuart turned then. “I'm going back to the house. You should come with me. We'll get you a drink and then I have something for you to read. Something about them.”

“But I didn't...”

“Look at them, then. Go ahead. Do it quick. Then you can come back with me.”

They held eyes again for a moment and then Jeff broke the gaze, turning his head to the left to look at the water.

The line of the sand was paler than the water and the tide was, indeed, very far out. The hushed sounds of the ocean moving continued and he could see rills of white as the foamy surf broke on the dying waves.

He couldn't see them and he had a relieved moment when he thought Stuart was fucking with him again, of course he was, the great goddamn prankster just making stuff up, pulling his leg—

And then there they were. Impossibly, he became aware of both of them at the same time, each at one edge of his vision. One was just a stub, beaten down by the ocean, or boats, or weather, or human hand. The other was tall, the tallest, and proud. It stood on the beach, solid black against the sand, like an emphatic finger.

Jeff's focus leaped back and forth between them, taking one in and then the other. Eventually his eyes settled again and he was looking at both at the same time. The tall one would be visible at most low tides, he supposed, and you would be forgiven for mistaking it simply for a broken off part of a dock.

He was beginning to think he could feel them...what? Speaking to him? Reaching out for him? Trying to touch him? The sensation was indistinct, but the intent was clear. They wanted him. Whether it was to be broken over one, like in his dream, or to simply go out and cling to one as the tide came in, he didn't know, but they wanted him. It was nice to be wanted. He felt wanted so little of the time. Stuart needed him sometimes, but he never wanted him exactly.

“Kid,” Stuart said softly, but Jeff did not hear him.

The hand placed on Jeff's shoulder shook him from his stupor. “What?” he asked, his voice high and child-like.

“We have to go,” Stuart said. “Now.”

Jeff blinked at the interruption, remembering who he was, where he was, what had happened. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, let's go.”

Stuart kept an arm over Jeff's shoulders as they walked back to the house and Jeff closed his eyes as they walked through the yard, not wanting to see another post that evening, or ever again. His body trembled, but then again, it was quite chilly at 3:30 a.m. and he was just wearing a t-shirt.

It was warmer inside and his body began to regain control. It wasn't until Stuart walked into the kitchen, tore off a paper towel, and then handed it to Jeff that the younger man realized that he had been weeping, his nose oozing and his cheeks wet with tears.

“I don't think you need a drink after all,” Stuart said. “You just need some sleep.”

He went into the kids' room and brought out a blanket. He spread it on the couch and led Jeff over to it.

“I don't think—“

“You'll be able to sleep,” Stuart interrupted. “Trust me. You'll sleep fucking hard, too. They wear you out, believe me.”

At that moment, Jeff loved Stuart more than he ever did before, more than he'd thought he would ever be able to love anyone. At the same time, he had never been more afraid.

Sleep came, quickly, as the writer had said it would, and when it did, it was blessedly dreamless.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-Two: The Fourth

2010-02-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

July 4

“Suck it down, bitch!”

Jeff was still not able to get used to the sparkly little-girl voice of Vanessa talking like a well-hung porn stud. She was presently kicking her brother's ass at the newest installation of a first-person shooter franchise. She was used to playing with her brother and his friends. She even had her own Xbox Live ID, she had bragged to Jeff, which she used to serve up rocket propelled death to nerds all over the country.

She and Riley were both crouched in front of the television, just a few feet from the screen as Jeff emerged from the basement. He had woken several more times during the night and now he felt like a wrung-out sponge. The last thing he wanted to do was walk into a room with yelling kids.

It was only 9, so of course Stuart was still asleep behind his well-insulated door. Jeff, on the other hand, had been dozing uneasily for almost an hour, until finally giving up and coming upstairs after hearing the hoots and cries of the kids.

Jeff fixed cereal for the three of them and they started a movie soon after, following a science fiction adventure that involved swapping brains, technology theft, and laser guns.

Stuart finally rose at just after noon and took a shower, as he did when the children were around. Jeff himself had long gotten used to the man's scent as he skipped showering for days at a time when it was just the two of them.

“Boat's at three, folks,” Stuart said brightly, exiting the bathroom in a towel.

“Yay!” Vanessa cried. Riley tried to look stoic, but a smile seemed to break through.

The door to Stuart's bedroom closed and a minute later he exited, dressed in jeans and a Nirvana t-shirt.

“What are we gonna do until then?” he asked.

It turned out that the plan was another movie, and eventually Jeff went into the kitchen and packed two coolers, one with food and one with beer and soda. Both Jeff and Vic looked warily at the Victorian that sat next to the beach, but it was quiet. The truck was gone.

They walked down to the beach and, when Vic waved to a large Bayliner off shore, a small speedboat broke away and picked them up.

A half an hour later Raider joined the flotilla off of Alki Beach, dropping anchor and taking place with hundreds of other boats. Many had been there since the morning, and based on the volume level, several boats contained people who had been drinking since then. The fireworks weren't due for hours yet, and Jeff wasn't sure some of them would even manage to stay conscious until then.

The captain was a surprise. Jeff had, of course, expected a crusty old salt, a Quint, and instead the captain was only a few years older than him, dressed in baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. His name was Steve. It was almost disappointing.

Riley and Vanessa sat on the deck under an awning and played games on their Gameboys. Stuart had brought his laptop and was editing below deck. Jeff walked up to the bow of the boat, dangled his legs off the side, and opened a beer. Even with the shouts and laughs from some of the more obnoxious boats, he was relaxed for the first time in what felt like weeks. It wasn't that dramatic, he told himself, but it was nice to catch his breath. For his first real experience on a boat, he would have been hard-pressed to improve on it.
Some time later, the sun was retreating behind the mountains and the random pops and snaps of small fireworks were starting. Jeff could already see the occasional bottle rocket float past in the water. He finished the last of his third beer and went back to check on the kids again. They were still perfectly happy, drinking Coke and eating chips, playing with each other at some game.

Steve was sitting at the captain's chair, his ragged straw hat pulled down over his eyes. He was silent and still. Jeff thought that such peace was admirable when sitting so close to Riley and Vanessa.

He ducked his head as he descended into the cabin which was a bit stuffy, but nice and cool. Stuart sat in a banquette at a very small table. His face glowed in the blue screen of his laptop. He looked awful. As comfortable as it was down here, his face shone with sweat.

An unpleasant thought occurred to Jeff then, which that right then the author looked the way he had when he had woken up after his nightmare. Like someone who had been awakened from the dead. The comparison might be a bit extreme, and it certainly had its roots in reading too much of Stuart's fiction, but the hollowed-out, desperate appearance was concerning.

“You okay?” Jeff asked. He remembered what a poor traveler Stuart had been on the way to the airport and he wondered again if the man was just a lousy traveler.

“Nah, this suck,” he said. “I can't get shit out here. I dunno why.”

“You wanna come up for a while, get some sun?”

Stuart looked up at Jeff then, meeting his gaze for the first time. For just one instant, Jeff thought the writer was going to yell at him. Then he shook his head.

“No. The editing I can force and it's gotta get done.” He looked back down at his computer. “Shit, it's almost six. I'll be up in a bit and we can eat.”

So Jeff went back up on deck. On an impulse he woke Steve and the two of them convinced the kids to try fishing off the back of the boat. Steve had an assortment of spinning rods, armed with spoons and lures, and Jeff raided the cooler for some bread and bits of meat for baiting hooks.

When Stuart finally emerged from the cabin, looking, if anything, worse, Riley was hauling in his second catch. Neither of them had caught anything impressive, but they were entertained and, although moderately troubled by the adult nature of the thought, Jeff thought that fishing was a better outdoor activity on a holiday than playing video games.

They ate while the kids continued to fish, and as the sky turned dark blue and then purple started to creep up from the horizon, the fireworks from the surrounding ships grew more frequent. Eventually Steve broke out the deck chairs and they sat at the front of the boat, Vanessa with a blanket over her lap, Stuart with a cigar, staring at the sky.

The stars were not quite out yet when the fireworks started, fountains and trees of multiple colors exploding in the air above them. The crowd on the boats began to cheer appreciatively.

Jeff's stomach was upset by the time they headed home, too much beer, not enough food, and the movement of the boat, particularly after all the fireworks had ended and everyone chose to leave at the same time, creating a disastrous wash of wakes that had to be traversed.

Vanessa's head was lolling as they rode toward the house in the smaller boat, Steve driving at the rear, Riley at the front, staring up at the massive blue moon that hung above.

The house on the beach was still gratefully quiet, but there were still pops and bangs up and down the beach as celebrators continued.

Stuart handed Steve an envelope with the rest of his pay after they unloaded the kids and the coolers.
“Just head up with them,” Jeff said, “I'll bring this crap.”

“Yeah?” Stuart said, and Jeff could see that being on land had already helped him.

“I'll be right there.”

So Stuart walked ahead, holding Vanessa's hand on one side and his other arm over his son's shoulders. Jeff realized that while he would not be sad to see them go, he would probably miss them. Especially the lively energy of the little girl. He was also struck that, weird and self-destructive as Stuart's routines were, he would be glad to get back to them. There was peace there, reliability.

He turned and looked out at the water. He could mentally place where the posts were and he realized that part of his mind accepted where they had been in his dream as where they were located in reality. Maybe they weren't there at all. Something like that would be much less sturdy in the water than on land. It was preposterous, actually, especially the idea that they just kept going on and on. There weren't any such things anywhere. If there were, he would have surely heard of them. He liked the mysterious and the unexplained, he had read all the Time-Life Mysteries of the World books, but things like that were a lot more interesting when they were in Egypt or South America than when they were in your back yard.

Jeff picked up the first cooler and then he saw a flare of light. It was a match, or a lighter, it was hard to tell, and it bloomed to life on the deck of Thorsen's house. The old man was standing there, lighting a cigarette. His eyes glared red in the flare of the tiny fire. Jeff stared at him for a moment, startled, afraid. He shivered.

He bent and stacked the second cooler on top of the first. They were mostly empty, so they weren't heavy, but he had to adjust his stance and his stride to get them both up the trail to Stuart's house. He could feel the man's eyes on him the entire time.

Once he broke through the line of trees, he felt safe to leave one cooler there and carry the other to the house. Riley was doing something on his laptop, sharing the table with his father. Vanessa was apparently in bed.
When he returned for the second cooler, he stopped to stare at the post for a moment. He returned to his dream again, the unrelenting line of posts, stretching out as far as he could see from his tied-down position. It hadn't meant anything of course, but the idea that there could be so many of, well, anything, in so specific a pattern spoke to Jeff of power or structure or...he didn't want to think about it.

He dropped the second cooler on the deck with a hollow thunk. His stomach hurt, his nerves were crawling, and all he wanted to do was go to bed, to retrieve some of the sleep that he had lost the night before. One more day without writing, then in the morning he would take the kids to the airport and things would go back to what he already thought of as normal, after less than a month.

“Thanks,” Stuart said, and Jeff was surprised to see that he was aware of his surroundings, not already lost in his book. His appearance had returned to normal. He looked fine, healthy, as he usually did.

“Sure.”

He really is a shitty traveler, Jeff thought to himself as he descended his stairs.

It wasn't until he was almost asleep, washing back and forth in the space between conscious thought and whatever the other side is, when it came to him what Stuart's behavior was really like. He wasn't acting like someone who didn't travel well, someone subjected to motion sickness. He was acting like every television and movie cliché of a junkie removed from his source, jonesing, just trying to get by until he could find another fix.

The Author, Chapter Thirty-One: A Rough Night

2010-02-07T17:12:00.000-08:00

July 4

Jeff pulled off his shoes and flopped face down on his bed at 1:30 in the morning. The kids were finally in bed and Stuart was finally at his table again, with laptop and bottle.

Jeff found it amazing how much the children wore him out. It wasn't that they were doing anything in particular, either, but he had gotten used to taking care of one person, not three. He liked the kids and he was glad that they seemed to respond well enough to him, but he'd be glad when they were gone. It wasn't the cooking for four instead of two, or the driving, or visiting the video store once a day, either. He couldn't put his finger on what it was, but their presence was wearing him out.

He thought briefly about what he had planned for Danny's Dime. He was excited to take Stuart's suggestion and explore the ideas behind Mac's suicide in his book, but he hadn't had the time. He hadn't had time to do much of anything, and he was beginning to get frustrated. He was constructing a scene in his mind, Danny talking to one of his cronies, a new character, about safe cracking, when he drifted off altogether.

He was pinned in place. Not in the manner of dreams, but with actual ropes that were tied to stakes in the ground. He was cruciform, his arms held out straight from the shoulders, pulled taught with loops over his wrists. His ankles were tied together and were tied to another stake. He could move his head, but the tension on his body kept him from being able to move anything else. The more he strained, the less he seemed to be able to move, and the straining of the muscles in his abdomen began to pull at his groin until he started to feel aroused.

He stopped to catch his breath and actually look at where he was. He knew that it was the location of the Stuart house, even though there was nothing there. There was nothing at all. The landscape was blasted, no trees, and almost no grass, simply rocks and sand, down to the edge of the sea, where there was no water, but simply a stretching, shifting mass of red sand. And in it, stark and dark against the burnt red of the sand, he could see the posts.

They stretched to the horizon. They were placed every mile or so, and the closest ones were the posts Riley had described to him, Jeff was sure. He could see the post from the yard and the one from the blackberries and he saw that they formed a massive triangle or V shape, pointing at him.

And that was when he realized what the uncomfortable sensation in his back was. It was the stiff, unyielding square of the top of another post. It was level with the ground, but now that he was aware of it, its strong, hard presence made him nervous.

He looked from side to side and then craned his head to look above him. The landscape was the same, low, featureless, miserable.

He grunted in surprise and pain as the post began to rise beneath him. The ropes bit into his wrists and ankles and burned. He tried to arch his back away from the post, but the tension was on his limbs was too great. He could picture, in a future flash, the end result, his body broken and shaped like a boomerang, bent over the post, his limbs still tied into place, the skin around the ropes bloody and savaged, a ghastly expression on his dead, or soon to be dead, face.

He woke curled in a ball, his knees on his chin, his clothing drenched and reeking of the sweat of fear, his chest and shoulders heaving with panicked breaths. He wanted to move, to sit up, to do something, but he simply lay in place and shook, shoving out sharp exhalations as hard shivers, almost convulsions, periodically struck his frame.

Eventually he swallowed, shifted over to the edge of the bed, and sat up. He ran his hands through his hair and they came away wet, not just damp. Moisture shone on his palms in the light that came from the bathroom.
He peeled off his sopping socks and threw them in the corner. Then he got to his feet, unsteadily, and stepped out of his pants. He was so wobbly he had to put his hand on the wall for support. He tugged his shirt, which smelled awful, off over his head and threw it in the corner after his jeans and his socks. The boxers were skeevy, too, so he pitched them as well.

He walked tentatively to the bathroom, taking short steps. He took a leak and rinsed himself off in the shower, standing under lukewarm water and thinking about the dream. He could remember this one, some details were particularly sharp, the red color of the sand, the dank smell of the air around him, the perfect square shape of the pressure in his back. It had been terrifying, but he was not sure what was more frightening, his death, the inevitability of it, the posts, or the wasted, bleak world he had found himself in.

He dried himself briefly, anxious to brush his teeth to rid himself of the vile taste he had discovered in his mouth. He was brought up short when he caught himself in the mirror.

He looked like an exhumed body. His eyes were sunken and deep, dark pits hovering beneath them. His skin tone was awful and still shiny from the shower's water. His hair was stringy and flat and as lifeless as the rest of him.

“Shit,” he said to himself, and then he brushed his teeth. He tried to avoid looking at himself again, but he caught another glimpse just before he left the bathroom. He shivered again, this time from a chill. He was naked and still damp, he realized.

He slid into some clean boxers and crawled beneath the covers, glad that his nightmare had taken place on top of the sheets and not under them, so his bed was still intact and didn't reek the way his clothes had.
It took him much less time than he had imagined to fall asleep. He had anticipated staring at the ceiling for quite some time, and he saw from the clock that it was after 5 in the morning. He had a dreadful premonition of not being able to sleep at all and dragging like a sloth through the Fourth of July.

He fell asleep as he had done the first time, thinking of his new book and ideas for explorations of Danny and his criminal associates. The safe cracking ideas were interesting and would require some Google research but the character of Slim, the suicidal safe cracker had sprung to life, multi-faceted and fully-developed, with the ease that was characteristic of the development of this book. It was amazing and exciting and then it was all gone and he was outside in the blasted environment once again, the red sand in the distance, the gray, rocky soil beneath his feet.

This time he was standing in a circle, a henge, of stone posts, and they were closing in on him. As they drew nearer, they grew taller, too tall for him to jump over, and as he tried to climb one, another pressed in against it, crushing his fingers and he cried out...

Author's Note: Days Off

2010-02-07T17:10:00.000-08:00

Cheese!, the fundraiser for Vita Arts (www.vita-arts.org) took up all my last two days, so forgive the lack of updates. Hopefully I'll have two chapters for you today to make up for it. The first is going up now.

The show went very well. See our website for blog posts now and pictures soon!

The Author, Chapter Thirty: Playing Catch

2010-02-04T15:07:00.000-08:00

July 3

Later, Jeff realized that the events of early August were inevitable, but it always seemed to him that what happened on the day before the Fourth of July was somehow the beginning of the end.

The day was clear and bright and warm enough that it was obvious that by the afternoon it would be too hot to do much of anything.

Around 11:30, Jeff and Riley went outside to play catch. Stuart was still in bed, having taken to writing even later than normal since his children had arrived. They were allowed to stay up late, hanging out with dad until midnight or later, watching movies, playing cards and games, or kicking the older men's asses on the Wii. However, once they went to bed, Stuart made sure to get his time in on Tomb, and he told Jeff that although the editing part of his work was falling behind, he had managed to keep at a fairly steady rate of productivity. “These chapters will just be rougher,” he'd said the night before, when the kids were tucked in and Jeff was heading downstairs to sleep.

The work on Jeff's own book had largely stalled as he had been playing babysitter, but he found that Danny's Dime filled much of his spare thoughts, in the shower, on the toilet, lying in bed, and he was ready to write several more chapters in one long tear as soon as the kids were gone. The feeling made him antsy, as if he were waiting for Christmas, and he remembered the way that Stuart had spoken about his own urge to get cracking when he had first arrived.

Playing catch had been Jeff's idea. He felt bad that the kids had to kill time during the day when they could be out and about, just because their dad was sleeping. The day before they'd gone out to lunch while Stuart slept, coming home to find the man ready to spend the afternoon with his kids.

Today, Riley had been planted in front of his laptop, while Vanessa was watching a movie. She seemed to have an endless stream of films where outcast teen or preteen girls found out they were lost princesses of various tiny European kingdoms. Were the girls not clearly different actresses, Jeff would have sworn they were all the same film.

So Jeff had found some old baseball equipment in a cupboard, probably left over from the author's first summer here with his college friend by the looks of it, and they had gone outside.

Jeff had made sure to mow the lawn before the children's arrival, so the yard behind the house was soft and clear for running and fielding. They started out gentle, getting a feel for each other and warming up their muscles. The sun was still behind the trees, but it was warm enough that they were beginning to sweat as they grew more confident.

Soon the ball was popping into the pockets of the gloves with a slap, and Riley and Jeff began to challenge each other, throwing towering fly balls, rudely hopping grounders and lightning line drives.
Jeff had not worked so hard and been so satisfied since co-ed flag football in college, when they would all return to the dorms, pumped up on adrenaline and caked in mud.

As soon as the throw left Riley's hand, Jeff knew he didn't stand a chance of retrieving it. He turned and ran, trying to gain some distance, envisioning himself making a miraculous diving catch anyway, but he quickly saw that the blackberry bushes would make that impossible, or at least very uncomfortable.

“Fuck,” Jeff said to himself, facing the brambles.

“Shit!” he heard Riley call from behind him, “Sorry!”

“S'okay,” Jeff heard himself yell, even though it really fucking wasn't.

Riley quickly puffed up beside him and they both stared at the twisted green obstacle for a while.

“Maybe it's in the clearing,” Riley said hopefully.

“What clearing?”

“Here,” Riley said, and stepped back from the bushes. He lowered himself to his hands and knees and pressed his face close to the recently mowed grass.

Jeff followed suit and he saw that the kid was right, through the initial bushes he could see a large, dead patch of yellowed shrub and thorn.

“There used to be a trail,” Riley said, standing up and dusting off his palms.

Riley was wearing shorts and he was barefoot, having shed his flip flops as soon as they had started running for the ball. Jeff knew that his shoes and jeans made him the defacto explorer for this miserable expedition.
Riley walked along the blackberries until he came to a gap that could have been imaginary.

“It used to be a real trail,” he reassured Jeff, “It's not too bad when you get in there. At least, it didn't used to be. Just a sec,” he said, and ran back to the house. A moment later he appeared around the far corner, dragging a two-by-four. Jeff was grateful.

They flopped the board into the bushes and stomped it down, using their mitts to take the brunt of the vines that sprung back. Sure enough, once the initial bushes were cleared, there was an obvious trail that lead a few feet in and then curved back toward the clearing.

Jeff walked along the board and when he stepped cautiously off the far end into a deep bed of mulch, he felt like he were a world away. The trees above and the bushes around him acted as insulation, quieting the world to nothing but the faint hum of insects. The temperature was much cooler and he immediately pictured himself as a jungle explorer, machete at the ready, listening for some giant creature stalking him.

“Okay?” Riley asked, ruining the illusion.

“Sure,” Jeff said, beginning to walk along the narrow path. He still had to reach out with the mitt and hold vines away as he walked along, his shoulders were too wide, and it occurred to him that if this were an animal trail, he'd be better off crawling, or being four feet tall. But there were too many thorns around for him to be tempted to proceed on hands and knees, and he could already see the yellowed opening of the clearing.

“Got it!” Jeff said, seeing the ball almost immediately, the white sticking out against the gray and brown of dead blackberry roots. He stepped into the clearing, hearing the dead foliage crunch loudly beneath his feet and reached for the ball. He snagged himself on a dead thorn, hissing as it drew sharply across his skin, tearing without penetrating. He hurled the ball over the bushes into the yard.

“Okay?” he called.

“Yeah!” Riley called back, his voice already fainter.

Jeff was ready to leave when he saw it. From one angle it simply looked like a tangle of dead vines, but now that he'd moved into the clearing, it looked familiar. He'd seen something like it before. In the yard.

He approached in tentatively, reaching out with his glove as if expecting to be hurt or stung. He squinted, leaning forward bit by bit until he could touch it with his covered hand. He flicked his wrist, stabbing at a clutch of the dead vines. They fell to one side and left an opening like a wound, and beneath it was just what Jeff had expected. Or perhaps feared.

It was maybe a little taller than the one in the yard, and it was much less weathered, being sheltered by the trees and bushes. The writing on it was clearer, but they were still apparently just runes or symbols, nothing he could make out. He wanted to draw away, but part of him was fascinated. Just what the hell were these things?

He reached out his bare hand then, not even realizing what he was doing, and pressed a fingertip against the stone. It was cool, almost cold, certainly much cooler than the surrounding air. Almost immediately there was a sound, at the edge of hearing, a humming? It was like electronic feedback or white noise, practically beyond perception. Jeff's eyes began to water and his vision began to swim.

“Yo!” called Riley, from just the other side of the bushes. “What's up?”

“Sorry,” Jeff called, all himself again, “Be right there.”

And he was right there, stumbling off of the board into the open, embracing the warmer air and the louder environment.

“You stop to take a shit or something?” Riley asked.

“No, I was just looking...” Jeff pointed at the post in the yard, which was clear, and now that he saw it again, much sorter and worn than the one in the bushes, “There's another one of those things back there.”

“Oh, yeah. There's a couple of them down at the beach, too.”

“There are?”

The kid nodded.

“Where?”

“Oh, most of the time they're under the water. You can only see them when the tide is way, way out.”

“What are they?”

“No one knows. They're hella old though.”

“No one knows?”

“I guess someone must. But if they're way old you'd think someone would dig them up and put them in a museum or something, so I guess they don't matter.”

Why the fuck would you want to dig them up? Jeff wondered to himself. When he did speak, he said, “But your dad...”

“What about him?”

Jeff had been about to say, 'But your dad said there was only one of them,' but that wasn't true. Jeff had asked about them and the man had been dismissive. He had never said there was only one. Hell, maybe he didn't know about the rest of them. Jeff shook his head. “What do you think they are?”

“Dunno. Dad always told us they were old grave markers or some shit, but that's the kind of thing you'd figure he'd say, you know?”

“Right.”

Riley held up the ball and they played for a bit longer until Stuart emerged onto the deck with a squealing Vanessa under one arm and announced that they were going into the city for hamburgers at Dick's, a local drive-in institution.

Jeff's mind was far away as he played with Riley and as he drove the family into Seattle. He felt like Stuart had lied to him, again, or still, or something, but he couldn't quite pin it down. Stuart had said he didn't know what the post in the yard was, had been dismissive, but there were more of them. Several more, apparently. And it wasn't like it had to mean something, not really, but it seemed like it should. It seemed like it had to mean something.

Later, Jeff thought of the discovery of the second post as the beginning of the end. It was also when his dreams grew worse. Much worse. And he began to remember them.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Nine: Allison

2010-02-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

July 2

Your life can change in one day, in one moment, don't you ever doubt that, kid.

I met my wife, my ex-wife that is, Allison Greta Harding, while I was on a book tour for Faith. I was a fucking rock star. After my first book came out, everyone had heard of me. I was on the cover of People goddamn magazine, and you better believe shit like that goes to your head. And to a lot of other people's.

But I was aware of it. Aware of what my fame could mean. Allison was pouring beer in a hotel bar and, bless her, she'd never heard of me. She worked a late night shift and then partied with her friends after the bars closed until like six in the morning. Theirs was a bizarre, twilight existence. I met her in Chicago and paid for her to travel with us to the next two towns we traveled to. It took me that long to talk her into bed, and you can believe that kept my attention.

Because that became rare very quickly. I was on a book tour, for Christ's sake. All these people coming out to see me. Me! I had a 50-year-old woman slip me her panties, her phone number, and a small bag of blow. It was surreal. And of course, as they always tell you, you want what you can't have.

In the end, what impressed her was my writing. It was the converse of what I'd wanted. I wanted someone who didn't know who I was, so that they would be with me because they didn't care about my writing. They could like it, but they'd like me more. In the end, what got her to pay attention to me, got her to sleep with me, spend time with me, was my first book. The real first one. I'd taken to carrying it with me, as a reminder of where I'd come from.

Allison had never read any of my books, wasn't much of a reader and had never heard of me. Maybe she'd seen my books in stores somewhere along the line, and she wasn't impressed with Wilcox. As much money as he put in her pocket before she left me, and even now, I suppose, she was never a fan. But she was a fan of me, of my turn of phrase, my way of using words, the way I could make her feel things. I could probably fill an anthology with the little short stories and poetry I wrote her, but she's got all of it. That was the writing I did when I wasn't here, and I was able to do it because it was small, if not insignificant. None of that was stuff that needed to be inspired like my novels were, it was all material that just flowed out of me, spur of the moment. I guess you'd say it was inspired by her, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time.

So she married me, of course. She was my first assistant out here, really. I became a faster, cleaner writer with her out here to spend time with me. She didn't like me during the summers, but the summers were short when she was with me, and we spent the time I wasn't writing having sex outside in the grass or going to movies and plays in the city. The illusion was perfect until we had kids.

She quit smoking Basic Lights the day she found out she was pregnant. It took me five years of struggling on and off. That should tell you all you need to know. She was my assistant by default, because she was my companion, not because she cared or believed in the work. And how fucking pretentious does that sound “believed in the work”. God.

I think, subconsciously, we had the second kid because we had the ridiculous idea that a matched set would solve our problems. Because one hadn't been enough, two would make everything perfect. And how ridiculous does that sound when you say it out loud? But of course, we weren't talking about things like that by then.

It only took two years before she stopped coming out here. She'd stay in Portland with the kids, so my trips up here took longer and longer because I didn't have anyone to shore me up when I was working. Then she began to resent the amount of time I spent on the road. I'll admit it, eventually I started spending more time on the road because she was such a bitch about it. And the accusations that I was sleeping with my groupies on the road, which started out as obscene and preposterous, well of course they all became true before too long. She was speaking her curses into life, like something out of one of my goddamn books. I blamed her for a while. Then I blamed me. Now, I don't know. It doesn't seem worth trying to assign blame anymore, I suppose.

I love my kids, don't get me wrong, I'm a different guy with them, you've seen that. But on some level I will always resent them because they took my wife away. I wrote about that with the parasites in Sphinx and while no one knew exactly that I was talking about them, the idea wasn't subtle. I guess, in a way, based on what we talked about yesterday, that might be the most direct thing I stole from my own life, because it was about the way I actually felt about something, not about what I observed.

She left me, and I don't blame her. She served me with papers when I was here, of course, and I was most of the way done, so I managed to finish that book. The next summer was the first time I didn't complete a book. The only time I haven't since I was 21, if you can believe that. I came out here, and there were fits and starts, and I bought a truckload of food from Costco beforehand so I'd never have to leave, and I never did, and I drank enough Woodford to fill a bathtub but...the gears were stuck. I started four different books the first two weeks I was out here and none of them took. I wrote...lots of little things. Nothing that counted. Nothing I could work with. My agent freaked out, but we did enough publicity to cover for it. It was only a couple of years after we jumped ship to Vintage, so you can imagine they were pissed.

We don't talk. Well, obviously we exchange words, because we have kids, but we don't do any more than cover the basics, the bills, their needs, their schedule. She feels betrayed by me, that I placed my work ahead of her, and in some ways I can't blame her. I return to this place every summer, like a junkie returning to his dealer. I could afford to quit. I could have afforded to quit ten goddamn years ago and save my marriage, but I didn't. I'm not really sure why.

I don't have anything to prove to anyone, not any more. I'm a good writer, a popular writer, a famous writer. I could write a final Wilcox book, in fact, I already have, and that would be that. I told you I wrote two books in a summer once. The second book was the final one in the series. It'll need some tweaking before it's published, out of date references and what have you, but that second book I wrote was the end of the series. I've known for years how it would all end, where things would finish up, and eventually it just came out. That was a hell of a summer, I wrote till the middle of September. So even though I have an extra book floating around, I still can't afford to take a vacation, unless it's a permanent one.

And maybe I should, you know? I'm not here to prove anything to anyone. I bet you if I stopped coming back here, I'd just stop writing. But I don't even know if I really could stop coming back here. I mean, that's what she wanted from me, in the end, not even that I stop writing, but that I stop coming out here every summer, writing like a zombie and coming back fat and logy after three months. She wanted the man she fell in love with to stick around instead of periodically vacating the premises and putting on another man's skin for a quarter of the year.

In the end, my need to keep writing, for whatever reason, was stronger than my need to keep her happy. To keep my kids happy, come to that.

I guess the resentment is pretty equal on all sides by this point. I can't see that I'm going to do anything to change it any time soon, either. I suppose you think that's sad. Shit, I suppose it is.

I just think of myself as being trapped. Maybe that's an excuse, but it's where I'm at, whenever I think about stuff like this. I'm stuck. And I don't know that I can do anything to change things or make things any better.
I'm not brave enough to change, really change things. It took all my guts to change from a fucking typewriter to a laptop, on the odd chance that it wouldn't work. How am I supposed to summon up the strength to stop doing the only thing that I know how to do? The only way that I know how to do it? It's beyond me. I can't do it. I'll just keep coming out here until I die.

And like I said before, this is probably be where it'll happen. No peacefully passing in my sleep for me, at least not in Portland or London. No dying making love to a beautiful woman, or surrounded by my grandkids. It'll happen here and my last work will finish with a string of the letter N where my forehead hit the keyboard and never came back up again.

There's a Far Side cartoon like that. Shows this guy slumped over a piano, and you can see one hand and it's skeletal, and there are people looking in on them and one of them says, “Shh, the maestro is decomposing”. I think it'll be just like that.

And now that I think about it, that's not the writer's equivalent of dying with his boots on. It's the equivalent of them finding Elvis dead on the fucking toilet. Your output, your shit, was what ended you.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stealing

2010-02-02T15:58:00.000-08:00

July 1

The children were inside watching a movie as Jeff and Victor cleaned up. Dinner had been hamburgers, grilled by Riley himself. Once the kitchen and the dining room table were cleared, the two men retreated outside as Los Angeles sank into the ocean on the television.

“You ever see that movie?” Stuart asked.

“Yup.”

“It's retarded, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“But you don't realize it until after the movie is over. It's a great trick. It's how Dan Brown has a career, because Christ only knows the guy can't write a paragraph to save his ass, but the motherfucker can pace within an inch of his life. Everything takes place with a ticking clock, hurry-hurry-hurry, and you get so pulled into the urgency that you don't think about how ridiculous it is. Same thing with the movie. I don't do that a lot, but when you need your reader to buy something that's a bit iffy, toss it in a place where they don't have time to think about it.

“And don't break that illusion, ever ever. If there's one thing I hate in movies and books, is breaking the illusion. In books especially. Take a dig at George Bush if you must, but have a character do it, in character. As soon as I know that the writer is talking directly to me, his reader, taking a stand on whatever, it jogs me out of the experience. To say nothing of the fact that it won't age well.”

Stuart paused for a moment and then regarded Jeff. “What the fuck was I just talking about?”

Jeff laughed, “I'm not sure.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Stuart took a drink of a soda. He said he didn't drink around his kids. It occurred to Jeff that looking inside the recycling bin under the carport could ruin a lot of illusions for them. “What do you think of my kids?”

Jeff nodded, without saying anything.

“Yup, they sure are kids,” Stuart agreed.

“You ever put them in your books?”

“What do you think?”

“I think there really aren't kids in your books.”

“True. I try not to put real people in my books at all. It gives people an excuse to look into your books for deeper psychological meaning, am I talking about my cocaine problem or my abusive childhood as opposed to just telling a story? Once you get caught mining your real life for details, people start looking for them everywhere.”

Jeff consider this for a moment and then opened his mouth.

“Sorry,” Stuart interrupted him, “I should clarify that. Couple things: I totally lied, I mine stuff from real life all the time. However, I don't take things such as they are. Of course, I already told you I put Wally in a book, but it wasn't him as such, the guy didn't look like him or really act like him except for the fact that he was gay and a betraying coward.”

Jeff nodded.

“But yes, in that way, now that I think about it, my kids are in my books. One book, anyway. The two hit men in Weapon were based on the way my kids treated each other that year. Riley couldn't stand to have her around most of the time, until he wanted something or needed something and even then Vanessa could never say no to him. It was so fucked up. So that became part of the characters of Zip and Sky.

“But I'll tell you what I steal the most. Personalities I make up most of the time, because I deal with so many gray areas and unnatural things that it's easier, to be honest, to just pull stuff out of my ass. But what I steal all the damn time is ticks.”

“Like what?”

Stuart reached up with his left hand and began to caress his ear, starting about halfway up and sliding his thumb and forefinger down to the earlobe. He repeated this several times.

“Durance,” Jeff said, automatically.

“He's the guy that just about everybody remembers. Part of that's because I liked writing him so much I put him in several books, partly it's because he's such a dirtbag, and partly it's because of that tick. I dunno why it stuck so well for so many readers, but just one detail like that is all it takes, sometimes.

“Now, tell me what Durance look like,” Stuart said.

“Well he...” Jeff considered. The darkest, meanest villain in the Wilcox books and he was having trouble remembering, even though he'd jumped right to the character in his mind with Stuart aping that gesture. “You never say, do you?”

Stuart nodded and smiled. “Exactly. My characters, I draw an outline on a piece of paper and hand it to you with some crayons to fill in. You'll remember them better if you make it up yourself. I tell you that Durance does this thing, that he's evil, that he has dark hair, a big nose, a nice suit, and he's fat. That's it. After that, you're on your own.

“And people go crazy. He's a fan favorite, so I get notes about him most often, but people tell me all the time they know people who look exactly like my characters or that such and such a celebrity would be perfect to play so and so in the movie. Who would you pick for Durance?”

“Harvey Keitel,” Jeff said, without needing to think about it.

“Solid choice. What's worse, I can't tell you what I actually think Durance looks like, if you can believe that.”
Jeff shook his head.

“I read a critique of those fucking Twilight books,” Stuart continued. “It said that one of the reasons why they were so popular is the girl character barely exists. She's simply a characterless template that any girl reader can put herself in the place of. It's your story. And it worked remarkably well, clearly.

“So obviously, I do that a little bit. Not so you'll fill in the blanks with yourself, but with your experience. So when you tell me that Durance looks like your uncle, I generally assume it means you don't think too fucking much of your uncle.”

“What else?”

“I saw a guy walking down the street once with this weird, twisting gait. My conclusion was that he must be missing a leg, that this was the way he walked with his false one, and that gave birth, almost on the spot—“

“To Nuratz,” Jeff finished.

“Mmm hmm.”

“Give me another one,” Jeff said.

“Oh, no, I'm not going to ruin the magic, the illusion, and then every time you read one of my books you'll be wondering where I ripped something off from.” But he said it with a smile.

“C'mon, this is great.”

Stuart leaned back and sighed. “Let's see.” He clasped his hands together and then placed his right thumb over his left. Rapidly, he placed the left thumb on top, then the right, then the left, twiddling them meticulously.

“Stark,” Jeff said.

“My college roommate,” Stuart answered. “And that's all! Now, the truth is, this is always here to find. You look into the way a guy writes enough, you'll find his bugaboos, his cheats, where he gets his material. Could be that one guy sits on a street corner, slaps a character together with her face, his ears, those shoulders, and that voice. Beats me. There's enough writers in the world that I'm sure we all have a different way of getting there. But I listen and watch for those shorthand things, those cheats that will immediately tell you what kind of a person you're dealing with.

“I tell you there's this frail old man, skin so light it's almost blue, very thin, with intense eyes, but he walks like a young man, determined, with long strides, what do you get?'

Jeff shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Well, in Tomb, you get the sorcerer who has managed to keep himself alive well past his expiration date. He has the body of the old man but the energy of a younger one. And he has a tick you will remember, believe me.

“You try one,” Stuart said.

“What?”

“Go on, give it a shot.”

“Uh...” Jeff's thoughts ran wild.

“Remember, less is more.”

“Right. Thirty-year-old woman. Missing part of her left ear. Scar tissue on her neck. Drags her left foot just a little.”

“There you go. I already know what she's wearing and what color her hair is. What happened to her?”

“Bomb blast ten years before.”

“There you go! Now what did you steal?”

“Her walk. It's from a college professor I had.”

“Excellent. I'll give you another example. Murray, the guy that I based on Wally. That bad eye? I saw it on a guy in line at the drug store one day and I could not get it out of my head. I didn't have to give him anything more than that. He was the creepy guy with the fucked up eye and you remembered that.”

“How is it that easy?”

“Ha! You think this is easy? Trying doing it 50 times a book, more. No, sometimes it's not hard, but sometimes you find such a good mannerism or character quality that you have to force yourself not to use it again.

“I mean, all of this stuff is just an easy way to communicate something to your audience. Think of all the visual shortcuts that we have: Stop and go signs, engagement rings, electric guitars, black leather jackets, I guess basically anything you can think of that says 'cool,' for that matter.”

“Tattoos!”

“Fuck, yeah. What kind of assumptions do you automatically make about someone with a tattoo? Completely different ones if it's a tramp stamp versus the Marine Corp seal on their shoulder, but we leap to conclusions. This is just more of the same, letting one part of the brain make associations while the other part is taking in the story. To me, there is no better way of derailing a book than by trying to go into too much detail.”

The two men had been caught up in their experiment, leaning close to each other, getting drawn into the conversation. They took a moment and caught their breath.

“Mac did that, you know,” Stuart said, quietly. “It was one of the things I noticed about his writing that I didn't like.”

“What?”

“He tried to show me everything. He tried to paint all these word pictures so I knew exactly where I was and exactly what was going on. If you tell me the paint in the bathroom is peeling, I can figure the rest of it out for myself, you know? Lead me to the water and let me drink my own damn self.

“That's a big difference between movies and books. In a movie, you want to show me instead of telling me. If you tell me, it'll be boring. In a book, you need to tell instead of show. That way I can fill the details in for myself. It's better to say there's a horrifying smell in the air and hint as to what's in it than to try to describe it precisely, because your reader may not have the imagination to follow you, but they've smelled some bad things in their time, I promise you that.”

Jeff nodded. Once or twice in the past few days he had noticed the smell in the basement again, particularly this afternoon after they brought the kids back to the house. The smell wasn't worse, he just noticed it more after an absence. When he smelled it again, he often thought of Mac, even though he knew now that they were not connected. They had not talked about Mac since Stuart had finally told him the truth. He hadn't thought about him much either, but the smell from earlier and the reminder of Mac's writing now made Jeff wonder what had happened. Had he really gone nuts? Had he actually tried to kill himself or was it an accident? Where had the pills come from?

“I didn't bring him up for that, Jeff,” Stuart said, gently.

“Hmm?” Jeff came back to the conversation.

“I know the questions you're asking, and I can only tell you one way to answer them, the only way that's ever worked for me, anyway.”

“What's that?”

“Put it in a book.”

And Jeff's mind flashed then to Danny's Dime and the possibilities rose up before him.

Stuart grinned, understanding where the younger man's mind had gone.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Kids

2010-02-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

July 1

Neither of the men had risen this early all summer. The author looked truly unhealthy for the first time, slumped in the passenger seat of the Land Rover. They had stopped for coffee and sausage biscuits at McDonalds on the way south, and Stuart had barely touched his food. He was wearing sunglasses to cut against the bright early morning sun. Jeff thought at first that the man was simply hung over, as one would expect, but the further they drove, the more poorly he looked. Jeff concluded that the older man simply wasn't a good passenger and was getting motion sick.

“You okay?” Jeff asked.

Stuart gave a barely perceptible nod and left it at that.
Jeff exited the highway for the airport and a few minutes later the car was stopped and the sunlight was blocked by an overhang.

Stuart looked at the dashboard clock. “Be a few more minutes,” he said. Jeff killed the engine and sipped his coffee. Stuart wrapped his arms around himself as if he were cold and slumped back against his window.
They had gotten up just before 7 a.m. Jeff had gone to sleep just after midnight, after an hour of reading Plague (the seventh Wilcox novel, but Stuart's eighth, he always reminded himself) and two hours of writing on Danny's Dime. It was still coming together and Jeff was amazed, expecting the story to slip away like a squirmy fish every time he sat down to continue working on the book. But it had not yet done so.

Stuart had, of course, stayed up writing, perhaps trying to make up for the fact that he didn't expect to get much work done with his children around. Jeff hadn't asked, but had assumed the man had not gotten much sleep at all. He thought that perhaps it would have been better for the kids if their father didn't look like a walking coma patient, but the further Stuart got into his story, the less inclined he was to take a break from it. It had started going well again.

The clock said 10 minutes had passed since the plane landed, so Jeff called Stuart back from whatever half-conscious state he was in. The writer went to go find his children, leaving Jeff alone, fiddling with the radio.
His fantasy of the children loving him and being an uncle figure to them and all that silliness had evaporated some time before. The reality of his experience at Stuart's house had forced out most of his illusions. He didn't have much of an opinion on kids. He didn't like the small ones that always seemed to be sticky, but he had a high opinion of himself as a twelve-year-old, being well-spoken, a reader, communicative, so it seemed fair to hope that these kids would be in the same vein. One could only hope.

A knock at the back door of the Rover brought him to his senses, so he jumped out to help with the luggage. He lifted the girl's small pink rolling suitcase in first, then the boy's larger, manlier bag. Then there were introductions.

The girl, Vanessa, was young enough to still be at the age of a complete lack of self-consciousness. She brightly greeted Jeff and then went to hop into car. She was wearing shorts, showing off legs that looked too long for her, and her hair was pulled back in a loose braid.

Riley, the fourteen-year-old, was enough of a teenager to be suspicious, but not enough of one to be an outright dick. He was wearing scruffy jeans and an All American Rejects t-shirt. He had shaggy hair that sloped across his forehead which was probably supposed to make him look older, but instead made him look as if he were wearing his older brother's hair. He shoved it out of his eyes and held out his hand like a good little man.

“I'm Jeff.”

“'Sup?”

Riley was headed for his seat when Jeff got the author's attention.

“Would you feel better if you drove? You don't look so hot.”

“Nah, I'll be fine. Let's just get home.”

So they drove home, stopping for fish and chips at Salty's on Alki Drive. When they were finished, they crossed to the beach and Vanessa squealed with laughter as she fed leftover bits of french fries to seagulls. Riley threw rocks into the water and kept an eye on two 20-ish girls who were sunbathing. One was face down with her strap undone to avoid tan lines, and Jeff had a good idea that, at fourteen, the idea of such a thing was very distracting to the kid.

The fourth itself was on a Sunday and while it was only Thursday, the beach was already getting crowded. The wait at Salty's had been annoying long, and the small dining area had been packed with too many people.
“Gonna be a fucking zoo out here this weekend, let me tell you,” Stuart said. He was still sipping at his soda and seemed to be feeling a bit better with some food in his stomach.

“It gets pretty bad, huh?”

“Standing room only. Then at night, for the fireworks, you'll barely be able to see the beach for all the people. And the traffic. Jesus Christ.”

That lead to talk of their own plans. Come Sunday evening, they would all troop out to a boat that Stuart had rented for the evening and sit out on Puget Sound to watch the fireworks. Seattle's would be the biggest, but several other community's celebrations would also be visible. “We did it last year and the kids really dug it,” he said. “Should be a good time. You said you've never been out on a boat before, right?”

“Well, canoes and the ferry.”

Stuart nodded and watched his kids. Vanessa had tried to take her flip flops off, realized how hot the sand was, and then put them back on. Riley had surreptitiously moved a bit closer to the sunbathers and Jeff remembered what that was like: Desperately hoping to be noticed, terrified that you would be, not having any idea what you'd do after that.

“Okay!” Stuart yelled, standing up. Vanessa quickly trotted up, but Riley's course brought him on a ragged trajectory, making sure that his father knew that he wasn't going to come right away like some kind of dog.

Once they were in the Land Rover, Stuart turned to check on his kids. “Seat belt, you little punk,” he said to his son with affection, pointing at the kid's lap. “Now!” he said, his voice dominant in the small space of the car. “Boo wants ice cream?”

“Boo!” Vanessa yelled immediately. Jeff watched in the rearview mirror as Stuart turned his attention to his son again.

“Does boo not want ice cream? I think boo does. Does boo? Does boo want ice cream?” Eventually the boy's mien cracked at the author's ridiculous baby talk and he said his own boo very quietly. Stuart turned back in his seat and pointed his arm forward. “Boo!” he cried, and Jeff pulled into traffic to take them to the old-fashioned soda fountain on the top of the hill.

“Boo,” he said to himself.

Stuart still didn't look well, but he looked much better than he had when they'd been at the airport. Jeff wondered if it was just driving on the highway, recalling that he'd been a fine passenger when they'd first met and gone to breakfast. The day the son of a bitch had pointed a gun at him, he recalled.

“What's funny?” Vanessa asked from the back seat and Jeff realized he must have been smiling.

“Your daddy is funny,” Jeff replied. “I was just thinking of something silly he did.”

Vanessa reached over the chair in front of her and ruffled her father's hair. “Silly daddy,” she sang.

“Yup,” Stuart acknowledged. “Very silly.”

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Six: Before the Fourth

2010-01-29T16:07:00.000-08:00

June 30

“Do you know how much I'm worth?” Stuart asked.

They had just finished a complete cleaning of the house, whisking cigar ash off the porch and putting the empty bottles from Vic's room in the trash. The kids were coming the next day. Jeff had completed extensive shopping for both of them. Riley was on some kind of diet to prepare for wrestling in the fall, so Jeff had bought him Blue Monster Naked Juice and protein bars. For Vanessa, the twelve-year-old, he had bought a frozen apple pie and chicken nuggets. The shopping list sent from their mother had been specific and thorough.

“No,” Jeff said.

“Yeah,” Stuart said, lighting a cigar, “Me fucking neither.” He looked over at the younger man. “I know, right? But, not to sound like a rich twat, after the first 10 mil, I just stopped paying attention. I pay 5 grand a month in child support. If you want a real measure of a man's wealth, that seems like a good one to me.

“It's weird, having kids,” he said. “Especially now that they're not around most of the time. When I was in college, a buddy of mine and I got in a fight. I said that people only had children because they thought they would leave nothing else in the world, like they hadn't contributed to society any other way, that their children were their immortality. He fuckin' punched me. Only fist fight I've ever been in. I think I made him feel marginalized, like his parents had brought him into the world because they couldn't think of anything better to do with their lives.

“Then one day you're in love, or you think you are, and having children seems like the natural expression of that, you know? Well, maybe you don't know, but it's true. And then they come into the world, and what the hell do you do with them? At first they're helpless, and then all they want is your attention and love, and then they don't want anything to do with you. Well, maybe that last part is what happens because of divorce or because I'm a shitty parent, but that's how it feels.”

Jeff didn't say anything. The week or so since he had accused Stuart of murdering Mac had been a dark one. He couldn't quite say the writer had taken it personally, but his writing had slowed and his talks had been more introspective, more bitter. He watched sitcoms and reality television. He seemed to always be apologizing for something.

“I think my assumption always was that my children will find me fascinating. That they would want to know what I was about, so I read to them, you know? Redwall, Narnia, all that shit. I think my hope was that they would find the fact that I was a writer interesting and want to be a part of it. And maybe it's just that way with any kid and they way their parents earn a living, but to them, I might as well be a fucking accountant or whatever. Like even the astronaut's kids think their dad's job is no big deal. They were never interested.” He swallowed. “They were never proud of me.”

He took a drink of bourbon and smoked his cigar. “Maybe it's because my parents died when I was young. But I wanted my wife to be proud of me, you know? And she was, for a while, right up until she realized that my methods, being here, drinking, cranking out books, were not going to be changed. Wally was proud of me, and that was actually good enough for, you know, a while.”

He stood up and leaned back against the deck railing, looking at the house, past Jeff. “Who's proud of you, Jeff?”

It was the first time the writer had used Jeff's given name and he was so surprised he spoke without thinking. “My mom's proud of me no matter what. That's what she says, and I believe her. I graduated from college and it was a big deal.”

He didn't say anything more and the silence hung in the air.

“You said that Cemetery was a favorite among people with father issues, yeah?”

Stuart nodded.

“My father died of lymphoma when I was a kid. We saw him waste away in a hospital and after that it was just my mom and me. She always believed in me. She slaved away in medical records, a job she was good at but she hated, to put clothes on my back and then to put me through college. Do you know what it's like to be good at something that you hate?”

Stuart looked at him evenly. “Sometimes,” he said.

“No. I see the way you work. You might hate the industry or what happened to you, but you don't hate the writing, do you?”

The author considered this. “No, you're right. I don't.”

“You can tell. You can't talk about writing the way you do if you hate it. You could be committed to it, because of your kids or your fans or whatever, but not the writing itself. I see you do it every single day and you fucking love it.”

“Yes, you're right, I do. Should I apologize for that?”

“No, you shouldn't. But you should realize what it gives you. Where it puts you in the world. My best friend, Malcolm, he works for an accounting firm. He's damn good at it. He hates it. My sister, she's an office manager and while she might not hate it, most of the time it makes her fucking miserable. She works ten hour days and comes home every night so exhausted her fucking teeth hurt.”

“Really?”

“No, of course not.”

“That's why you're a writer, too, kid. Making shit like that up off the cuff. It's something you love. It's something you can make a living doing, I believe that, and if you can do that, then you mother won't have to work her shitty job forever.”

“And how will I ever turn my writing into a career?”

“I did.”

“You had a one in a million chance. Everything fell into place. How often do you think that really happens?”
Stuart nodded then, took a deep breath, and looked away. “I could help you.”

“You said that was not part of me being here.”

“It's not. I've never stuck my neck out for anyone before, not just my summer kids, but anyone, but I have a good feeling about you. The way you talk, the questions you ask, I don't need to see what you write to know that you're good. That your instincts are right. If you haven't yet, by the time you're done here, I'd like to think you'll have learned something.”

“I have.”

“Good. And how's the book coming?”

Jeff looked up at the writer sharply. He had not spoken about Danny's Dime to anyone. It was still his baby. Had Stuart been in his room?

“Relax, kid, it's no mystery. I've heard you typing away at nights, sometimes like there's a fire under you. Don't you think I know what that means?”

Jeff nodded. “It's part of the power of this place. Doesn't mean you have the same bug as me, but it means you're feeling the same power. Is it good?”

“Yeah, it really is.”

“Coming along pretty easily?”

“Yes, it is.”

Stuart nodded, sagely. “There you go. When you're done with it, we'll take a look at it and see what we can do.”

Jeff felt a tingle of excitement rush to the end of his fingers. Never in a thousand years could he have dreamed...

“What's it called?”

“Danny's Dime.”

The author grinned that savage grin of his. “I like it,” he said.

Author's Note: A day off and Cheese

2010-01-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

Firstly, we still haven't sold enough tickets for Cheese! the benefit show we're doing for Vita Arts, the arts education non-profit I helped found.

Go here for more details: http://vita-arts.org/2009/12/03/vitas-next-show-cheese/

Secondly, I am taking the weekend off! I actually have a few more chapters in the hopper, but the fourth of July is coming up (in the book, obviously) and it's going to be a big deal, so I'm going to get some rest and perspective before attacking it.

A chapter will be posted soon for today and then I won't be back till Monday. Thanks SO much for reading, it's really exciting to know that I'm actually writing for people who are excited to see what happens next. Especially Baron, who sends me texts and chapters almost every day that say things like "Moar chapters!"

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Five: The Rest of the Time

2010-01-28T14:15:00.000-08:00

June 26

Now, I know I told you that this is not what I'm like the rest of the time, you know? Like this eating frozen pizza, drinking bourbon all day thing, it's not the way I am. And I know that if that's all you see, that's all you're gonna think my life is like.

You'll see something a bit different when my kids come up here, but I want you to know what it's really like. I know that one reason why you're here is because you want this, and you should want this, you should be motivated to market the shit out of yourself when you're ready, but the life you see me lead, I'll admit it, it might not be that appealing. Or it might be appealing now, but believe me, you can't live like this after 30, at least not for very long.

I have four homes. I have this place, I got a cabin in Montana, a condo in London and a house in Portland, where I grew up. My parents are both dead, but at least four months out of the year I live in Portland. In between books, I guess you might say.

When I'm done here, I go to my cabin, which is an hour outside of Whitefish, Montana. That's where I get my shit together after spending two or three months trying to poison myself here. There's a landline, but no cell phone, no internet. I spend the first month meditating and going on long runs. I spend the second month negotiating with my editor via fax and talking about the edits on my new book.

Then I move to New York for a month and I stay in this apartment suite that the publisher maintains. I've gotten the same one a couple of times, but it varies. And for the most part, I never get to appreciate where I am anyway. By that time it's fucking winter and New York winters suck. I have a car that takes me to meetings, to the gym, and back home.

I'll spend hours in an office with my editor, sometimes with my agent as well, and sometimes the arguments will go all the way up to the publisher. Most of the time I win, but sometimes they make me see reason. Usually a month is all it takes and then the book is finished.

Then, a month or so later, they'll send me proofs of the cover and a marketing plan. My books usually come out in February, so after I spend Christmas with the kids at the house in Portland, every other year, anyway, and then spend a month getting ready for all the press bullshit. By this time I've probably lost the 20 pounds I put on over the summer.

February and part of March will be all about the book. I'll hit 50 cities in 30 days, doing signings, jumping through hoops, appearing on local or national TV shows and it sounds fun, and it is for the first week, but when it's over you just wish you could sleep for a month.

April and May are touring months. I do speaking engagements at other times if I care or if they offer me enough money, but mostly I do college appearances and fiction conferences and publishing shows and shit in those two months. I go to London when I can, a week a season when I can manage it. If I get done early here I might take some time over there, but that hasn't happened for a while. Usually I get a week there in December and one in the spring. One in the fall if the editing of the book goes easy.

Februaries are the worst and the best. I love getting out there and meeting the people who like me enough to spend $25 or $30 of their hard earned money on my book every year, you know? I love meeting those people, looking into their eyes, shaking their hands. Sure, some of them are creepy, or intense, or weird, but they're what makes me successful. Hundreds of thousands of them turn out every year to buy whatever it is I've cranked out. That's amazing to me. Even after all these years.

But those Februaries are exhausting. Thirty different hotel rooms in as many days, city after city until you don't remember where you are, answering the same 10 fucking questions over and over again until you wish that your readers were a little less retarded. Explaining how you make things up about the occult, you don't spend your life in a goth-inspired home, sleeping in a coffin and sacrificing goats. That Wilcox is not me, he's not a friend of mine, he was created as a fictional character, maybe as the best friend you always had, not with integrity and bravery, but with guile and a survival instinct to rival a cockroach.

But the bitch of it is, is I envy you a little bit. You, who could afford to take three months this summer and live with me. I don't have three months to spare, anywhere. I'm a slave of my own schedule now. At least six or seven months a year are spent creating and selling the damn thing, between writing it, editing it, and plugging it. If I want to spend some of my money to take a ridiculous cruise with this incredibly hot 22-year-old Brazilian girl who has a tongue ring and thinks I'm a genius, I have to argue with all these people, my publisher, my assistants, my ex-wife, my agent. I have this money and no time or place to spend it.

So boo hoo, poor little rich boy, right? And I'm not saying I want out, but I'm telling you that I'm a prisoner of my own success. What's working is working so we're going to keep at it. And if I want to go to London in September because writing the book really took it out of me this year, there are people who are going to tell me I can't.

And of course, my ex-wife will be there to give me a guilt trip about being so selfish as to take a vacation when the kids need me, even though she's conditioned them to barely give a shit about me anymore, to show up here and faithfully serve their time with crackpot dad who doesn't have time for them, to go back home to that harpy who just...

You know what, that harpy just wants what's best for her kids. For our kids, although they are less our kids every year. So yeah, when I want to take a break and go to London for Christmas instead of putting up with her insufferable family to spend the season relaxing instead of listening to passive aggressive bullshit for a week, she makes me feel crappy about it. And I'm enough of a bitch that I let her. And she's right, of course, what kind of a dick am I that I treasure my own security and sanity above that of my progeny?

I've been writing for more than 20 years and I'll be damned if I really believe that if I took a year off the world would forget about me, but that possibility eats at me. When you have so many other writers, with bigger names and higher sales, you feel like you can't take a break. I could take one year off, take one summer where I don't come back here, where I take a month to explore Europe with my kids and then the next year when I write another book, no one will be excited to see me any more. In this short attention span universe, maybe they will have forgotten me.

So you think about selling the rights to your books for movies, because then your name will be out and about more, people won't get to forget you, but then you're paralyzed with fear that what is produced will be bullshit and you'd rather be forgotten than associated with tasteless pap created under the heading of your name.
So you come out here again and again and keep following the same pattern. It ain't broke, so don't fix it, but sometimes I feel like a goddamn hamster on a wheel, you know.

But you know what, it's probably my fault. You can see how hands on I am, so I never just let them take my book and run with it. I have to be part of all of it, so I have to lose a month in New York.

And let me tell you, those weeks when I'm in London? Best of my fucking life. Well, my adult life, maybe. I feel everything melt away when I get off that plane and I get to just be me, the simple me who goes to plays and museums and who bitches about the miserable London weather, even though secretly I love it. That's who I want to be all the time. Of course, I suppose the truth is if I lived there, I would cease to be that guy. I'm only that happy for a week at a time because I don't have that constantly. Or else I'd get tired of that.

Sometimes I think that if I didn't have a responsibility to see these books get published, if I hadn't started down this track as a kid who craved success, that all I'd do is sit here and write and write and write and no one would ever read any of this shit, it would just go on a pile and I'd just keep going until...I dunno. I starved to death? My liver exploded? I can see the headlines now, the winter grounds keeper discovers me in the house in November, rotting away, slumped over my laptop. Wrote himself to death. It'd be the author's equivalent of dying with your boots on.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Four: Myths

2010-01-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

June 23

Stuart spent very little time editing that day, he had seemed to feel the need to babysit Jeff instead. Jeff had loosened up a bit after a margarita at La Salsa and had finally felt like himself by the time they got home, full of various iterations of tortillas, meat, and cheese. On the way back, Jeff had stopped at the post office and mailed the memory stick and the receipts into Arthur Reed.

At home, Stuart had been antsy, sitting down, trying to edit, getting back up again, practically pacing, so Jeff had found a Mariner's game and they had watched that instead. Then they ordered Chinese food for dinner and sat out on the porch, waiting for it to arrive. Stuart was drinking beer instead of his usual Woodford, and Jeff wondered if the events of that morning had derailed him so much that he would not write that evening at all.

Stuart lit a cigar and stretched out his legs. They were seated with their backs to the table, staring out at the yard. Jeff noticed that damn post again.

“How are you doing, kid?” he asked.

“I'm okay,” Jeff said, sipping his cold beer.

“I've got an olive branch for you,” the writer said, “To make up for, you know, things.”

“What's that?”

“Ask me anything you want. Ask me the shit you've been afraid to ask me. I'll be up front with you.”

“Tell me about Wallace Preston.”

“Jesus, diving right in huh? Wow.” Jeff shrugged and remained silent. “Alright, fair enough. It's a famous story and it is one that no one actually knows, regardless of what you read or heard.” Stuart regarded the younger man and sighed again. “I'll tell you, and I won't insult you by telling you that what I tell you has to stay with you, okay?” Even though, by saying that, he had reminded Jeff anyway. Jeff nodded.

“As you know, my book was bought in 1988. Wally wasn't the smartest agent around, but what he did was jump the queue. He didn't seek out permission from his agency, he read my letter, read my sample, and he was on a plane the next day. Showed up at my fucking dorm, if you can believe it, and I was lucky that he wasn't a swindler, because that son of a bitch had my signature within an hour of meeting me. He convinced me that I was a genius, that I was going to be huge, and that he was going to be the guy to get me there. As it turned out, he didn't lie.

“The half million dollar advance was all Wally's leg work and I always admitted that. When he suggested that we jump publishers because Viking wasn't taking me seriously anymore, well, that's what we did, and we moved to Vintage, who was going to take more pride in having a writer like me in their stable. Vintage, ironically enough, being an imprint of Random House, who wanted me in the first place.

“So there we were, me and Wally against the world, he was beside me at the hospital when my first kid was born and we both got rich.”

Stuart looks past Jeff, towards the lights of the house and smokes. His jaw clenches and Jeff can't be sure, but he would almost swear that the man had tears in his eyes.

“Betrayal is always worst when it comes as a surprise. Sometimes you can see it coming and it stings, but it's not so bad, you know?

“Wally's betrayal was simple and sad. He'd had a fucking crush on me since the day we met, and after he convinced me to jump to Vintage and we were swimming in money, well...

“At first I told myself he was just getting carried away, wanting to celebrate and getting inappropriate. But eventually the truth came out. I owed him. He wasn't trying to blackmail me, he probably didn't have much of an idea what he was doing, but he didn't negotiate the deal because he wanted me to succeed or because he wanted more money. No, the son of a bitch did it because he thought it would put me under his thumb and get me to let him put his cock in my mouth.”

Stuart went and poured himself a bourbon then, while Jeff sat, speechless. When Vic returned he brought Jeff another Coors. Jeff had asked out of curiosity, because the parting of Wally and Victor had been big news at the time, before Jeff's time, of course, but he had read everything on the man's biography that had ever been published.

“The real world ain't pretty, kid. You think life gets easier when you have money, and it fucking does, I'll tell you that, with maids and housekeepers and nannies and assistants, but...it doesn't change how much the world sucks. It still stings just as much when someone you love shows their true colors and they are ugly.”

The truth dawned on Jeff. “Oh my God,” he said, realization melting across his face.

Stuart smirked. “Just caught onto that did you? Yeah. My second book for Vintage, the first was already in the pipeline when the deal was made, so yeah, in Creature I wrote him a little Valentine. We haven't ever spoken since I left his agency. Only my wife knows what really happened. For all I know, the bastard still thinks he was perfectly within his rights to try to pressure me into..whatever. So yeah, I took the only little revenge that I could. I turned off the tap of the money that he made from my books, as much as I could, anyway. All of the first eight or whatever books he negotiated, he'll always get a piece of those. Can't be helped. But what I did was put a betraying, craven little fag into one of my books. For all I know he never even read it. Doesn't matter. It made me feel better, I'll tell you.”

Stuart reached behind him and ashed his cigar. “So there you go. The truth, for better or worse. And that leads us to Vic Stuart's trust principles.”

“What?” Jeff asked, tilting his head.

Vic put down his drink and held up one finger. “Never trust a man with a boy's name, like Billy, or...”

“Wally?”

“Yeah.” He held up a second finger. “Trust no men with girl's names.” Third finger. “Trust no men with facial piercings, lemme tell you,” fourth finger, “Trust no men with ponytails, and of course,” thumb, “Never trust a lawyer. I shouldn't have to tell you that one after today, right?”

“I'll keep it in mind,” Jeff said. “What about the other myths?”

“Myths?”

“Other larger than life stories.”

Stuart took a drink and looked amused. Jeff was hoping to draw the author away from the depressing track he had led them down. “I'm larger than life? Do tell.”

“For example, did you really reject Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott when you were approached to make films of the Wilcox books?”

Stuart laughed, a single loud HA. “Kinda,” he said. “As with all myths, there's a bit of truth and a lot of bullshit. I had a meeting with Scott's people, Scott Free, a few years ago. They weren't interested in buying a single book, they wanted the whole damn series, every one of them, to develop as a serious series for Showtime or HBO.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.”

“But...that would have been amazing!”

“Coulda been. Coulda sucked. There's very few ways of being able to tell until the product is finished. They showed me special effects tests and scripts and production schedules, tried to really impress me, and then one day I was in an office with Scott himself, and I said the only thing I knew to say. I said I'd need to be in on every step in the process and have to sign off on the lot of it. If I didn't like a script, it didn't happen. If I didn't like an actor, I'd pull the plug on the whole thing.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Some people have told me that it showed a lot of balls and others have told me that it makes me an idiot. But what's the point? I mean, I liked the Lord of the Rings movies as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure they were necessary, you know? Certainly the Narnia movies weren't. Some things deserve to live in the imagination more than on a screen. But that's the only time we really got close.

“I've had plenty of offers, but most of them are for quick and dirty horror movies that are cash grabs for title recognition. They're not people who actually wanna make a Wilcox movie. When I was just getting started, New Line offered me a million flat so they could make a movie called Grave and put my name on it, even though they didn't actually wanna use my story. And that's been a bit more typical than the Scott Free business. I haven't given up, but I'm not in any kind of a hurry, believe me.”

Then the food came and Jeff needed another beer and then they back out on the porch with plates and noodles and soy sauce. Stuart used chopsticks. Jeff stuck with a fork.

“Okay,” Jeff said around a mouthful of rice, “What about Tales from the Crypt?”

Stuart gave his large, toothy grin. “What about it?”

“There was a rumor that you wrote a few episodes under a pseudonym.”

Stuart gave a few nods. “Guilty as charged. That's why I've got the whole series on DVD, if you noticed. I loved the idea of the show and when they asked me to contribute, I couldn't do it fast enough. But we were negotiating a movie deal at the time and it had some exclusive clause in it. Don't even remember now, but the pleasure for me was in writing for the show, not in seeing my name in the credits.”

“Damn. That's awesome.”

“Yeah. I might not be in a rush to see movies of my books, but creating something to be filmed and getting to witness that whole process was amazing. I was able to write two short scripts at the end of one summer out here. The year after that, when I was done with that year's book, I tried to write a full length movie. Could never quite get it together. But I'm still young, right?”

“That would be so cool.”

“I think so, too. You hear all this shit about the Hollywood machine, but the days I spent on set at Tales from the Crypt were amazing. Zemeckis keeps saying he'd like a shot at Wilcox, but he keeps getting distracted with all this digital 3D nonsense he's making instead.

Stuart let out a loud burp and took a drink. “Any other myths you want to debunk while we're at it?”

“I don't...” Jeff laughed, “I can't remember any more.”

“Well, let's see,” Stuart helped himself to more cashew chicken. “I've never slept with anyone famous. No matter what you've heard, you can take that to the bank. No movie stars, no pop stars, no one you've ever heard of. The opportunity has come up every once in a while, but I've convinced myself the illusion is probably always gonna be better than the reality.

“Tales was the only TV or movie writing I've ever done. I got paid to do a rewrite pass on a horror movie once, and I was useless. Free money, in the end, but I never did it again.

“I've never killed a man, either,” he said, bringing his head down to look at Jeff. “I'm not just talking about today, either. I know there are stories, it's inevitable when you write about the kind of stuff that I do, but I make stuff up, man, I don't write from experience.”

Stuart butted his cigar. “What time is it?”

“Uh, it's a little after 7,” Jeff said, checking his phone.

“'Kay. I don't think its gonna happen tonight, so let's just call it a wash. I think what I'll do is watch SportsCenter for some highlights and then I'll take an Ambien and call it a night.”

“Okay,” Jeff said, starting to rise from his seat to begin cleaning up.

“Siddown, kid. Take it easy for once. Get out of here if you want. Go for a drive, go see a movie, go to bed early, do what you wanna do. You're off duty for the evening.”

After their talk, Jeff didn't have more questions, but he didn't want to leave, either. Instead, he opted to have another beer and watch SportsCenter with Victor Fucking Stuart, who had just disclosed some of his darkest secrets.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Three: The Confrontation

2010-01-26T11:29:00.000-08:00

June 23

Jeff whirled and saw Stuart was standing in the doorway. He looked like he did most of the time, like he had just rolled out of bed, with greasy cowlicks, days of stubble, wrinkled jeans and a stained t-shirt.

“I woke up and you weren't around,” he said mildly.

Jeff's heart was pumping like a straining locomotive. He felt like it might burst out of his chest. “What? No, I just...uh...”

“What's up with you?” Stuart asked, an amused tone in his voice, tilting his head a little.

Oh, God, he knows, Jeff thought, he knows, this is it. Because of course what had been galloping through the back of his mind the moment he had coupled Mac's mad journal entries with the smell down here and Stuart pulling the gun on him it had all made sense. Mac hadn't quit and run away. Mac had been sacrificed to whatever mad process Stuart followed when he was out here. And now it was Jeff's turn. The lawyers were probably in on it, too, feeding him a young college student or two a summer for whatever sick shit—

“Are you okay?” Stuart said, taking a step toward him, false concern on his face. “You look like you took a shit and found your spleen in the bowl.”

Jeff stumbled out of his chair and it fell over as he retreated to the wall. The solidness of it behind him made him feel better, although his animal instincts realized that he was trapped down here.

“Don't you touch me. Don't fucking come any closer.”

“Hey, man, calm down, what the—“

“What did you do to him?”

Stuart looked as though he couldn't decide whether to laugh or call for help. “Do to...who, kid?”

“Don't fucking call me that! Mac. Tell me what you did!” He couldn't bring himself to actually voice his accusation.

“What's going on? What are you talking about?”

“Tell me!”

Stuart crossed his arms over his chest, and Jeff was struck again, even now, at how thin the man really was. Victor began to nod, very faintly at first, then larger, keeping his eyes locked on Jeff.

“All right. How did you find out?” he asked, and Jeff's legs almost gave way. Part of him had hoped it would not be true.

Jeff pointed at the desk. “He left his thumb drive. It's got all his writing on it, like, all of it, and he never would have left that behind.”

“No, you're right, even a shitty writer like him would not have left something like that behind.”

“So you tell me what you did to him.”

“Okay.” Stuart did that building nod again. Then he sighed. “Okay,” he said again, then sat down on the bed. Jeff twitched as he moved and Stuart gave him a strange look when he did.

“I don't even know what day it was, but I came down here one morning because he wasn't up yet. It was like two in the afternoon and he was always up long before I was. I didn't pay much attention because I didn't care because we didn't like each other. Tell you the truth, I was a little nervous about coming down just now here because of it.

“So I come down here, and it smells weird, not like it always smells weird but like vomit. And sure enough, I come in here and there he is, sprawled on the bed, puddle on the floor, puddle on the bed, shit all over his face, and he was dead. Pills and vodka.”

“What?”

“So I called some people and the coroner came and I packed up his shit and sent it to his parents. I guess I missed the drive, you know?”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Well, we can call the lawyers or the poor bastard's parents, I guess.”

The truth was seeping into Jeff slowly. “But then...what about the smell?”

“What about it?” Then realization dawned slowly across the writer's face, like a special effect and he began to laugh, the whinnying pony laugh, up in his nose. He clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle the cries, and Jeff, frightened, pressed harder into the wall.

“Oh...shit! The smell! You thought that...and shit, why wouldn't you? I'm the crazy fucking writer!” He kept laughing, sliding off the bed, onto his knees, laughing until he wept. Then he panted, his eyes wild and his face wet.

“Oh, Jesus, you poor bastard. You really thought you were living with a guy who killed his summer workers? What am I saying, of course you did. A: You're a writer. You probably had this ridiculous back story all cooked up. And B: I pulled a gun on you the moment I met you. There's a creepy smell down here because a raccoon died under the house or something, I swear to you. I'll call an exterminator and we'll have it taken care of if you want, okay, but I didn't kill Mac,” Stuart had a snorting giggling fit again, as he wiped his tears away, “And I certainly didn't bury him under the fucking house, alright?”

Part of Jeff still doubted, but the relief was enough to make his body sag. He righted the chair and sat on it. He wanted to put his head between his knees, but he didn't trust the author again that much. Not yet. He would again later, in the manner of a puppy who doesn't get that some people really can be cruel, but now he was still paranoid.

“The lawyers didn't tell you because I needed someone out here and who would come out here after the last guy fucking died? His parents didn't put out a notice in the papers because they were ashamed of the poor guy. So you didn't hear about it through your school grapevine because no one knows. He didn't leave a note, unless there was one on that drive you found. Was there?”

Jeff thought of the rambling journal file. “No,” he said.

“Just a bunch of shitty writing?” Stuart asked, smiling.

Jeff had to laugh then. “Yeah.” Then the rest of it flowed out of him, the panic, the adrenaline, and he howled in laughter and panic and fear and cried a little, and when Stuart scooted along the bed to pat his knee, he allowed it.

“I'm sorry, kid,” Stuart said. “All this shit must be pretty tough on your ticker, huh?”

Jeff shook his head. “I guess I'm getting used to it,” he said.

“Well get your shit together in your own time and come upstairs when you're ready. We'll go out to lunch, yeah? It's a beautiful day and there's a good Mexican joint on the beach. I have some more chapters that you can read, too.”

Jeff realized that the man was trying to make up for what he had been through, but he was willing to accept it.

“Sure,” he said, “I think I'll take a shower first, but I'll be up in a bit.”

Stuart clapped him on the knee again and then went upstairs.

Jeff sat on his chair for quite some time, processing what had happened, shaking his head, smiling, grimacing, letting out soft chuffs of laughter. “Jesus,” he finally said, exhaling heavily, and then went to clean up.

In the bathroom, he put the shampoo bottle marked MAC in the trash and tied up the bag. He would take it upstairs with him and put it outside in the garbage. The USB drive would go upstairs into an envelope and it would go back to the law firm. With the receipts, Jeff realized, that would make everything very convenient.
As he began to lather in the shower, luxuriating in the hot water, his thoughts remained on Mac. What had driven him to it? What kind of pills had he used and where had he gotten them? What kind of experience must it have been for Stuart to go through? Would he write about it? He probably would. Had he been through something like that before?

The smell of the Irish Spring body wash and Pert Plus (shampoo and conditioner in one!) was strong enough on Jeff's person that he didn't notice the musty, rotting smell in the basement at all when he got dressed. Even though it was what had been behind his murder conspiracy, he didn't notice it at all, anymore, really.

Author's Note: Imitation and Flattery

2010-01-25T23:34:00.000-08:00

When I was very young, I realized that I could spell ridiculously well, including many words that weren't even necessarily in my vocabulary. The theory is that I picked up on not only how to spell words, but also the rules regarding how to spell them, from reading so damn much.

I think, to some degree, the same is true of my writing. I mention in my book here, The Author, that most writers start out as imitators. I think I read somewhere that Stephen King started out re-writing stories, simply copying them out. Not passing them off as his own, just scribing them like a monk. Judd Apatow, who is now a screenwriter, started out by transcribing VHS recordings of Saturday Night Live skits. I think another writer claimed to do the same thing with radio shows.

Some of my earliest works of short fiction were intentional rip offs, trying to ape the style or ideas of Poe and Bradbury. I even wrote a Frank Peretti knockoff once.

You learn by example and so, it follows, that the best examples will be the ones that you strive to be like. One of the greatest compliments I was ever paid as a writer was being compared to King. I believe it was in my use of metaphor. Not that I was particularly trying to write like him at the time, at all, but just that it was powerful being compared to a writer I admired.

What I'm getting around to is that in writing about it, and writing about writing about it, if you know what I mean, I'm becoming conscious of who's knees I spent my time learning at. I loved the thrill of James Patterson when I was in college (I think he's something of a hack now), but I first learned pacing and cliffhanging chapters as an adult from him. I learned it much at a much younger age from Hardy Boys books, so either way, lesson learned. Writing two books in this serial fashion has been very exciting, stringing one event to the next, and realizing how much tension I can build. And I learned it all from the examples of others who successfully used the same technique.

From Stephen King, as noted above, I got my use of metaphor. In his book On Writing he talks about trying never to use turns of phrase that people have heard before. Of course that's basically impossible, but when you describe something you can at least strive not to use a turn of phrase that everyone has seen 100 or 1000 times over.

Also from King, and I've used it several times in The Author, but less in much of my other writing, is creating a sense of forboding. I just finished the audio book of Thinner, and he ends one chapter with something like: "They went upstairs and made love. It was the last time they ever did so." He doesn't do this a lot, but sometimes it is in annoying places. I don't think he did it in The Dome, so it might have been something he grew out of. I remember reading passages like that sometimes and thinking, "You son of a bitch!" It can be a tease and it can be torture and it's probably a tool not to abuse.

One thing that people compliment me on that I think is most my own is my dialogue (and can you believe my browser's spell checker wants me to use dialog? Ugh.). I can't point to a single source for that the way I can for some other things. My theater background helps a bit, I think, in that when writing I practically have conversations with myself. Reading writers who do great dialogue, like Lawrence Block, is part of it. I think listening to a lot of audio books has probably helped as well.

The thin line to walk with dialogue comes from keeping it "realistic". I was struck by the first few minutes of the movie United 93 because it actually was realistic. It was a couple of guys talking about their weekends and you could not have cared less, but tension was there nonetheless because you knew what was coming. And then a plane plowed into a building. Movies, television and books pretty much NEVER have realistic dialogue. If they did, they would be boring. What media does is boil down conversations to an essence. When we say a conversation in a book was realistic, it usually means it was what we wished real life sounded like. Some writers get recognized for leaping so far past realistic that it becomes another thing altogether, like Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith.

I realize now that I've spent more than 20 minutes writing this for no reason in particular. I walk around these days composing passages for The Author in my head for the next time I sit down and write, and for some reason things like this were bouncing around in my head this evening. As also noted in The Author, it is bad form to ask a writer where his ideas come from (Of course, I haven't been asked that question over and over yet, so I don't mind if you want to ask). So this, instead, is me talking about where my technique comes from, I suppose. Maybe you won't care or maybe it'll be a nice DVD extra for the book until the next chapter gets posted. A look behind the curtain.

If so, I'm glad you care and I'm glad you're interested. If not, then the next chapter will be up soon enough.

Thanks for reading.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-Two: The USB Drive

2010-01-25T12:13:00.000-08:00

June 23

The phone woke Jeff. It wasn't the Family Guy ring, rather it was a piercing, obnoxious beep-beep-be-beep that made you wish unpleasantness to the inventor of the cell phone, or the ring tone, or the telephone in general. Fuck Alexander Graham Bell and let me sleep.

The phone began to ring again and he staggered out of bed, clapping his hands to the desk, finding his personal phone, a pen, and his wallet before the Nextel fell into his hand.

“H'lo!”

“Mr. Reynolds?”

It was, of course, the soothing, imperturbable voice of Mr. Lawyer Reed. Jeff let out a heavy exhalation, rolled his eyes, and flopped back into bed.

“Yes, sir?”

“Mr. Reynolds, I trust I have not called you too early?”

Jeff looked at the clock and saw that it was not too early. In fact, Reed had called at 10:34, long after Jeff was supposed to be up. It boded for how the rest of his morning would go.

“No way. What's up?” Jeff winced as soon as he heard his words, conscious that he sounded like a stupid kid.

“Tomorrow—be the third Friday that you have been working for—first Friday was only your second day and the second Friday I gave you the benefit of the doubt. However, this Friday—must be inflexible. Mr. Stuart has a fax machine and I need you to make copies of all of your purchasing receipts—number is the first preset in the fax machine. Mr. Stuart also has it and you also simply need to add—of the office phone number.”

“Of course, no problem.”

“It should not be a difficult task, Mr. Reynolds.”

I said I'd take care of it, cockbag, Jeff said internally, while saying, “Consider it done.”

So Jeff's entire morning was derailed. He didn't brush his teeth, shower, or shave, instead he dove straight into the wide, flat drawer that sat above the knee space in his desk, hunting for receipts. There were two for delivery pizzas, four from Safeway, the one from the brunch on his first day (and what a fucking wild day that had been) and...

Jeff's heart would freeze later, when he realized what it meant, but initially he was just puzzled. He had felt a brush of cloth and when he grabbed it between his two fingers, he pulled out a thumb drive, dangling from a lanyard. 1GB Sandisk, it read on one side and as the drive slowly rotated on the lanyard, it revealed what was written on the other side: “R. McKenzie.”

Weird, he thought, Mac left this behind as well. He immediately plugged it into his laptop. He had to jump through a few hoops, as the memory stick had been formatted for a Macintosh (Jeff had forgotten Mac was a Mac douche on top of everything else, not quite as annoying as a Linux evangelist, but certainly a pain in the ass), but when he did, he saw that there was a folder and a file on the stick. The folder was full of documents, and when he opened a couple, he saw that it was all Mac's work. Short stories, essays, possible a book or two in progress.

A doubtful hand began to walk its fingers up Jeff's back then, as he saw more and more documents that he was sure Mac would not have left behind. The beginning of a biography and what more proof did you want of what kind of a jackass Mac was than that he would begin a biography when he had only just graduated from college?

He backed out of the folder and opened the single document. It was a journal. The entries began with observations of the property and the man himself (judgmental) and then moved on to other things.

5.25.10 The dreams I have here cling to me in my waking hours. I don't know what they mean, I often don't remember them at all, but they affect my mood and my outlook. Every day here feels like a chore, even when the weather is beautiful. I look haggard, as if I had not slept for a week, and even the sun does not seem to improve my coloring.

Christ, he was such a douche, Jeff thought, flipping through the next entries. He even wrote this way for himself! The entries devolved quite quickly after that, becoming less coherent and also less flowery.

5.30.10 I could never describe what I experienced last night, but I woke up retching, it was so awful. I did not quite vomit, but I felt as if doing so might break something loose inside me. I cannot keep this up.

6.1.10 He will be the end of me, I'm sure of it. It all comes from him, it has to, that twisted, repulsive imagination...

6..2x..10)- Oh god its hereits her it is he its its its oh god fuck oh here its here its he

“Hey, man, what's going on?” Victor Stuart asked from behind him.

The Author, Chapter Twenty-One: The Second Nightmare

2010-01-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

June 22

Before Jeff discovered the USB drive and accused Stuart of murder, he dreamed. It was not the first dream he had experienced since coming to live with Vic, but it was the first dream that he remembered. Mostly he remembered it because the post stuck with him.

He recognized it now, recognized it from the nightmare he'd had on Malcolm's couch, the one with the giant, iconic monolith. It was not the same object as in his last dream, but it was similar. This post was whole, not like the one in the yard that had been smoothed down, but with a rounded top and clear, deeply engraved sigils on every side. The symbols stood out in particular because blood flowed over the stone.

Stuart sat on the far side of the post from Jeff, smoking a peace pipe and sitting in a recliner that was at least two times too big for him. He smoked massive, slow traveling rings, like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland.

“Is it still mine?” Jeff asked him.

“Only if you still want it,” the writer replied. He reached for the handle and ratcheted the chair back, flinging himself prone. Jeff approached the writer and saw that he was now plugged into various machines, pounds having magically melted away from him, the fragile frame of his skeleton peeking out of what little flesh remained.

“Do you still want it?” Stuart asked, his lips straining to cover large, thrusting teeth that were now too big for his mouth. They caused his words to slur.

“It's all mine,” Jeff said, remembering what the writer had said to him before, when they stood atop the giant stone tower.

“You're goddamn right it is,” Stuart said, and he reached his cadaverous hands up to his own head. He plucked his head from his shoulders and offered it to Jeff. “Take it,” he said, insisting, “It's yours.”

Jeff turned without turning and expected to see the post towering behind him, gouting blood. Instead, it sat there, sedately, clean now, no blood or lichen on its surface, and Jeff thought he would be able to discern what the symbols on it meant. He saw that the reason the shape and the symbols were intact, unlike the post in the yard, was because the post was covered by a small roof, like the shelter on the top of a well.

“It's protected,” he said aloud, his voice echoing into the void of infinity. “It's covered.”

“It's been covered forever,” Jeff's father said, standing next to him. When Jeff turned to look, the figure was actually Jeff's father and mother both occupying one body. The voice was Nicholas Reynolds, circa 1990, and so was the mustache, but the eyes were his mothers and so were the breasts.

“Is it mine?” Jeff asked.

“NO!” His father's voice and his mother's voice and Victor's voice and the faggy lawyer's voice and Malcolm's voice and the voice of God and all his angels all echoed at once.

Jeff looked down to see that Victor's head still rested in his hands. It was now wearing sunglasses. “That don't belong to anyone, kid,” he said in a broad, shit-kicker drawl. “Everything else is yours, ain't no one keeps that.”

Jeff looked up again and saw that there was a circle of people around the post now. They were all kneeling before it, genuflecting in fear and awe at the power contained within the rune-covered stone. He stepped over them, placing his feet carefully on their smooth, bronze backs, approaching the post.

He touched it then, and it seemed like for the first time, even though he had stood on the post in his previous dream and touched the one in the yard in real life. The stone was rough beneath his fingers, as rough as if it had just been carved and not yet polished with sand and wind and time and weather. The symbols on the outside of the post seemed to light up as he touched them, each instilling in his mind their distinct, flawless meaning.

He nodded, the wisdom of the ages and the philosophy of creation all imparted to him simply, directly, sensibly.

don't a tiny voice whispered. Jeff whirled to see who had spoken, but saw no one.

don't it said again, from the deep black of space.

A memory floated back to him, a balloon in a storm, a memory of Vacation Bible School. He sat there, his young hair parted, his small face turned up, eager to please, listening to the teacher as she spoke about the voice of God being still and small. “If you aren't listening, you'll miss it altogether,” she had said.

i said don't, you fucking moron the voice cried, and it was not subtle anymore. Jeff the dreamer had a vision of himself as a cartoon figure, Jim Carrey in The Mask, his flesh almost peeled from his face with the force of the crying voice, his lips and ears flapping in the breeze generated by the words.

Jeff awoke in a panic. It was dark. Fuck, it was black! Where was the window? How would he get out? Then he saw the green light of the numbers of his alarm clock and remembered that red numbers meant home and blue numbers meant college. Green numbers were somewhere different, where was it? Oh, holy shit, he was sleeping in fucking Victor Stuart's basement and it was amazing. The man spoke with him and Jeff was writing a new book and...

And what the fuck had that dream been about? Jeff realized that the sheets were damp with his sweat and that, unlike the last several times he had dreamed, he could remember what had happened. He kicked off the blankets that were too warm and tried to recall what had happened. The post had been there, and he remembered now that it had been there before, in another dream as well, but when? There was blood, and Victor of course, and his dad... Jeff shook his head. He didn't need to think about dear old dad, not at—he looked at the clock again—4:14 a.m. He had just had a nightmare, that's all. It wasn't scary so much as disorienting, it wasn't a big deal and after he had some time to think about it and remember it he could write it down and interpret it and then he would—

Sleep snuck up on Jeff like snake, silent and menacing. He was just about to remember exactly what the symbols on the post meant when it engulfed him entirely. This time, when he woke up, he would remember vague details, his mother, his father, Victor, the post, blood...

oh god i said don't the voice cried, and Jeff's body started as it drifted down into sleep again, but did not quite wake up.

The Author, Chapter Twenty: The Next Ten Days

2010-01-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

June 13-June 22

They fell into a routine quite quickly. At first it was by default, Jeff getting up before Stuart every morning and cleaning up. Eventually he stopped worrying about waking Stuart in the mornings and just got to work around 10. If he made too much noise, Stuart would retire to his bedroom, where he never seemed to sleep unless forced to do so. Soon Jeff was setting his alarm for 9:30 so he could continue the pattern. Sometimes Jeff would make an effort at breakfast, other times it was cereal or toaster pastries or oatmeal. Once, bored, Jeff hopped in the Rover and went to buy donuts. He was getting better at navigating the driveway.

Strangely, the more he fell into these patterns, the lazier Jeff became about everything else. Yes, he eventually mowed the lawn, but it took him two afternoons. Stuart did not seem to mind. Every night he would go to bed with the best of intentions for the next day, starting on the pile of Stuart's laundry, going for a run, getting up to watch the sun rise, and every morning he would wake up, clean up after Stuart, make breakfast, and simply ride along with the days, which quickly flowed together.

Lunches were whatever Jeff made, usually sandwiches or something equally easy, while Stuart edited what he had written the night before. Afternoons they talked until Stuart could no longer fight the impulse to return to writing, and then Jeff would start dinner. They would chat over dinner, not the deep, heavy discussions of the afternoons, but surface talks, light conversation, nothing that would remove Stuart from his precious groove.
Then, Stuart would return to work, and Jeff would have the evening to himself. Here, again, he found he had no motivation. Two of the summer's big movies had opened by this time, and he made plans twice to go see the new Spielberg picture, and it never happened. Once it slipped his mind and the other time he just decided not to go. Instead, his evenings were filled with two things: Reading the Wilcox novels and writing.

On Tuesday evening, after putting up the leftovers from the pot roast he had made (he'd called his mother to find out how), which they would likely have for lunch tomorrow, Jeff had begun to experience the itch. He remembered Stuart talking about it, and he'd had a vague recollection at the time of what it felt like, but it came back to him all at once, like a relative or friend not seen in quite some time, but who never ceases to be familiar and comfortable.

He sat at the desk in his room and played Tetris, his old trick from school for clearing his mind before a study project. He didn't realize it, but this idea was no different from Vic's drinking: getting out of his own way. He reminded himself that if he was writing, he should be working on Hard Time, but it didn't seem to matter. Instead, what came out of him for two hours on Tuesday, and most evenings after that was something new and exciting.

When he started writing, Jeff was almost convinced that whatever he would produce would be nothing but a Stuart rip off, in the grandest tradition of his writings at 15, somehow absorbing the energy of the man and his home. That was not the case. Instead, he began to tell the tail of Danny Costa, a small time con man from Chicago who comes across his one chance for a big score. In Jeff's mind, the story would somehow become the hard-boiled equivalent of The Old Man and the Sea. Danny's commitment to the Big Job (as Jeff began to think of it), would be so all-consuming that he would not realize that the money he would bring in had already all been spent, either on setting up the score or in shares to the other people involved. He would succeed, and he would be a legend, but he would end with nothing to show for it, and likely be killed by the mob for his troubles.

The story appeared out of whole cloth, without any investment on his part at all. On Wednesday, as Jeff mowed the lawn while Stuart edited, Jeff had conversations, out loud, with himself as Danny and his various cronies: Betty, the grifter who was convinced all she really needed was a bolt-on set of tits to make herself irresistible to men, Bobby Costa, Danny's useless cab driver brother who had initially found out about the score and who was now part of the deal whether Danny liked it or not, old Moses, who referred to himself as a “nigger Jew fence”, and of course Alphonse, the neighborhood cappo, who acted twice as Italian as everyone else to make up for the fact that he'd been born with blond hair.

Part of Jeff desperately wanted to tell Stuart about it, especially since the author had shared another passage from Tomb with him, but he did not. Partly it was because he feared criticism from the writer, especially as brutal as he had been about Mac's work (even though, of course, Mac sucked ass), and partly it was because he wasn't ready for the world of Danny & Co to be shared. Not even with Victor Stuart.

The more he wrote and thought about writing, the more insight he had into Stuart's books, as well. He realized that partly these insights were due to the fact that he was reading the books as an adult (or so he told himself), rather than the kid he'd been way back when he was 15. But these insights also came to him from being around Stuart, from their extensive discussions, from the writer's insight into process, inspiration, and creativity.

Jeff had finished Stuart's second Wilcox book, Faith, on Monday night. It had been widely criticized as a limp sophomore effort by Stuart, one that undid some of his initial splash. After reading it again (as a grownup, of course), Jeff had found Faith to be much more mature than he remembered.

Jeff realized now that Stuart had simply defied expectations. When you produce a second novel in a series, no one will ever be happy. If you give them the same book a second time, people will recognize it for what it is and bitch about it. If you give them something different, people will whine because you didn't give them what they expected, which was exactly the same thing again.

Stuart had thrown all those expectations away and had produced Faith, which was a rollicking adventure yarn to contrast the slow burning terror of Grave. Yes, both mined the Cthulhu mythos to some degree, but there the comparisons ended. Where Grave was a mystery, Faith was effectively a treasure hunt, filled with enough hidden chambers and conspiracies to give Dan Brown an chubby.

And of course, in Cemetery, the third Wilcox novel, Stuart had taken another random turn, creating a balls-out thriller, with Wilcox's own fate hanging in the balance as he was caught between a cult and a crime syndicate. Jeff was gaining a greater appreciation for the tightrope act Stuart had performed early in his career, defying and challenging expectations while successfully capturing more and more readers.

Now, of course, the man did not have to suffer the expectations of fools, or at least not as much, but he continued to unexpectedly change directions, visiting genres and topics such as romance, politics, history, and art, navigating new waters with every book and constantly defying expectations.

Jeff didn't like to admit that he was thinking so far ahead, he felt that it was unlucky, but he could see himself doing something like that with his new book, which was untitled, but which he was mentally thinking of as Danny's Dime. Hard Time was the work of an immature writer, still regurgitating the tropes and stories that he had seen before, but this new book was the beginning of something else, something that could expand into a psychological thriller next, pitting a still broke but plucky Danny against a mob hit man in a battle of wills and guts and guns. The potential was unlimited so long as you didn't let yourself get pinned in.

Stuart's days were less complex that Jeff's: Wake, eat, edit, talk, write, sleep. On Sundays he watched baseball. The man confessed to having more trouble now that he was a bit further into Tomb. He was happy with what he wrote, but the pace was slowing. “No second book this summer, kid, I tell you what,” he'd said. The writer still wasn't referring to Jeff by his name, but he held out hope. As it was, the way Stuart called him kid seemed to carry plenty of affection, and Jeff could not help but think of the way Han Solo referred to Luke Skywalker by the same term. It was a comparison Jeff was very happy with.

So it continued for ten warm days. Pizza dinners, cereal breakfasts, Stuart's nigh-constant Woodford Reserve consumption, writing, reading, talking. It was not exactly how Jeff had pictured his summer would be, but he had no complaints, aside from the occasional heartburn. He'd learned to make separate batches of chili when he cooked that particular dish, as Stuart insisted on so much Tabasco Sauce and red pepper flakes that Jeff's tongue almost melted.

It was not as he'd pictured it, not completely. Stuart had worn nicer clothes in his imagination, and not smelled like a homeless person. The children had already adopted him as a de facto uncle in his fantasies, looking up at him with adoring eyes. In his mind, and Jeff would have never admitted this, even under the most strenuous torture, he had also painted himself a summer romance, torrid, exciting, doomed to end with the season.
But the important expectations, spending time with the man he so admired, being privy to the man's wisdom, experience, and advice, Jeff would not have traded that for anything in the world.

Then came the events of June 23rd, when Jeff found the USB drive and became convinced Victor Stuart had murdered Reginald “Mac” McKenzie.

The Author, Chapter Nineteen: The First Sunday

2010-01-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

June 12

Saturday night Jeff finished Grave before he went to bed. He was wired when it was done, but he couldn't be bothered to go upstairs to get the second book. The second Wilcox book, he reminded himself, thinking of The Best Year. Instead, he brought his laptop to bed and tinkered with his own book, Hard Time. He knew he needed to add several chapters to help develop his main character, Harvey Clinton, to help justify his personal choices. A new chapter would not come, but he fixed several conversations that seemed clunky.

Jeff awoke more tired than he had been when he turned the light out, and he vaguely remembered dreaming of strange shapes and worlds. He realized that the more he stayed here, the earlier he seemed to be waking up, as it was just a little after nine. He hoped the trend did not continue. He didn't like waiting around for Stuart to wake up, and although there were many books to go in reading all the Wilcox books in a summer, he wasn't ready to start the second one just yet. Part of it was delaying pleasure, but partly he just wasn't ready to jump into another 400 pages.

Jeff went upstairs to find a movie and was taken aback when he found Stuart awake, sitting in the living room, watching baseball on television. The older man looked over his shoulder and saw him.

“Early East Coast game,” he said, “National League, Pirates versus the Braves.”

Jeff didn't know how to react. He thought he'd known just about everything about the writer. He had no idea the man was a closet baseball fan.

“Siddown if you want,” Stuart said, “Game's just starting. It's supposed to be a blowout, but you never know.”

Jeff sat down and watched 20 minutes of television he didn't care about. Occasionally the writer would point out the nuance of a play or the significance of an umpire's ruling.

“You ever play baseball?” Stuart asked during a commercial break that mostly plugged beer and shaving cream.

“No. I played basketball in junior high.”

“I played football when I was in ninth grade. Got my ass kicked all over the place and never tried it again. I never appreciated baseball when I was younger, but when I'm out here in particular, it's a great distraction. I got the super ticket thingee through the cable, so there are games all day on Sunday. Today's my day off, in case I didn't mention it before. We don't talk or think about books today.”

“Got it. Do you want breakfast or something?”

“Nah, I had some cereal earlier. So, since I'm using the TV, your choices are pretty simple. You can watch the games with me, Cardinals/Mets is on later, it's supposed to be a fucking barn burner, or you can go mow the lawn.”

Jeff spent another hour trying to get into the game, watching men strike out repeatedly, while Stuart got more and more excited about a potential shut out and Jeff got more and more bored.

Eventually he gave up and went outside to mow the lawn. There was a small shed behind the car port, and inside Jeff found a ride-on lawn mower. The battery had been disconnected for the winter and sat on a shelf by the door. Jeff took the battery and a charger up to the deck and plugged the battery in.

In the meantime, he went downstairs, got his iPod, and began to edge the lawn using a weed whacker while enjoying the soothing sounds of Tool. The smell of gasoline exhaust from the power tool was oddly enlivening.
He quickly chopped down the lengthy grass at the sides of the house and the carport and moved onto the bigger job of edging the yard and the driveway. It wasn't too hot yet, the sun still indirect, the grass still dewy, but he began to sweat with the labor. Once he reached the opening of the path to the beach he paused and looked down it, as if expecting to see the Henry Thorsen coming up the trail with his trusty shotgun.

Then he turned and saw the post, in the center of the yard. He approached it, meaning to chop away the grass that grew around it and over it. He primed the weed whacker and extended his arms to the post, wincing. The dead grass fell away from the post and nothing else happened. When the grass was clear, he put the weed whacker aside and knelt next to the object. It was still in shadow, as it had been the other morning, and he wondered if he would be able to make out more of the designs on it with better light.

He finished edging the lawn without incident and decided to take a break before beginning to mow. The battery sat on its charger as Stuart called him back to the couch, using the TiVo to show him several plays he found particularly impressive. The man's enthusiasm was infectious, and now that the Cardinals were showing the Mets what for, Jeff found himself a lot more interested in the game. If Jeff was being honest with himself, it was also because he was not looking forward to mowing the lawn, riding mower or not.

Lunch was nachos and beer, Alaskan Amber for Vic and Coors Light for Jeff. While Stuart was drinking less than Jeff was used to witnessing, he acted the drunkest Jeff had ever seen, getting boisterous and loud. As the afternoon passed quickly, Jeff forgot about the lawn and began to be drawn into the world of outs and strikes.
Dinner was more beer and a pizza that Stuart ordered. “None of that frozen frisbee shit, tonight,” he said. “This stuff is pricey, but you know what?”

“It's worth it?” Jeff guessed.

“Your damn right.”

Jeff wasn't the biggest fan of pizza in the first place, let alone twice in a couple of days, but he had to admit the delivery pie was excellent. It was in the Greek style, Stuart informed him, the flat crust painted with olive oil so the result was crispy, almost fried.

The pizza place was called Arturo's, Vic informed him, “And it's run by this short little Mexican guy. Furthest thing from genuine Italian you could imagine, but damn he knows what he's doing.”

True to his word they did not discuss books or “the work” at all, but when the Yankees finished creaming the Mariners, much to Stuart's dismay, Jeff was ready to call it a night. He was logy from heavy food and beer, but when he got up, he saw the battery and the charger on the deck. He returned them to the shed, figuring he'd mow the lawn the next day. It reminded him of the post, so before he went downstairs, he returned to the living room.

“Hey, Vic?”

“Hmm?” The man glanced over his shoulder from flipping channels to find the next exciting game.

“What's the deal with that stone post thing out in the lawn?”

Stuart raised his eyebrows. “That thing? No idea. It's been there as long as I've been coming out here. I always just assumed it was an old property marker or something.”

To Jeff's buzzing mind, the answer was sufficient at the time, but in retrospect, particularly when the truth came out, he realized that on some level he knew the writer was not being completely honest with him.

The Author, Chapter Eighteen: Gunfire, or, The Second Morning

2010-01-21T12:32:00.000-08:00

June 11

The firing of the shotgun was not what awoke Jeff on his second morning at the Stuart house. What woke him was the sound of Stuart's body hitting the floor above him. Jeff's eyes snapped open, his body trying hard to panic, and then he heard Stuart swear, muffled, through the floor. There was another thump and Jeff was out of bed, running up the stairs.

He skidded out of the kitchen, feet sliding on the hardwood floor of the dining room when he first heard the shots. Stuart was still lying on the floor, his chair splayed beside him, and whatever panic Jeff had been fighting took over completely. At the sound of the shots he threw himself onto the floor and began crawling toward the writer.

“Vic! Vic, are you—“

“God dammit!” Vic said, rising up onto hands and knees. “What the fuck time is it?” He looked at a clock on the wall. “Seven-fucking-thirty and he pulls this bullshit? I swear to Christ. We went over this last summer!”
Jeff was speechless as Vic calmly walked to his room and began to rummage through it. He walked out with a cell phone to his ear.

“Yes, police? This is Victor Stuart, I'm at 517 Beechwood Drive. My phone number is 503-621-6169. My neighbor is discharging a shotgun. If it's like last time, he is skeet shooting off his front porch. Yes, that's right. Yes. I believe it is Henry Thorsen, but I do not plan on walking over there to confirm it while the crazy old bastard is armed.”

Jeff pulled his knees up to his chest, conscious for the first time of how little clothing he was wearing. He slept in his boxer shorts and for a brief, sunny moment he was relieved that he had slept in anything at all. It was bad enough to parade around in front of Vic Stuart in his underwear, it would have been a whole different matter to fall on the floor next to him with his cock flopping around like a dying fish.

He started as another volley of shots began. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing the sound away, completely lost.

“C'mon, kid,” Victor said, and when Jeff opened his eyes, the writer was standing over him, hand extended. It reminded him of the day he had met Stuart, and could that have only been 48 hours beforehand? Only this time, someone really was shooting, it wasn't just a terrible joke.

Stuart helped him up and lead him to the living room, where Jeff was deposited on the couch. Vic handed him an afghan that was folded over the back of the couch and Jeff gratefully wrapped up in it. It was a little cool in the room, Victor had left the outside doors open to let the afternoon heat out and probably fallen asleep, but the comfort was largely due to putting something around himself, putting something between his almost naked body and the threatening world.

Jeff was unaware of the passage of time, other than two more shotgun volleys that caused him to close his eyes and grit his teeth. Eventually Vic returned with a tall glass of orange juice for himself and a hot cup of coffee for Jeff. With the first sip Jeff could tell the coffee was fortified with something, probably bourbon. He was grateful.

“I've got some pills around here somewhere,” Vic said, “Maybe some weed, too, if you need something to help calm down.”

Jeff shook his head. He was too confused to make any decisions. Waking up suddenly wasn't his strong suit at the best of times. Having it happen and immediately feeling like he'd woken up to an exciting morning in Baghdad was a completely different thing.

He realized he was shaking like a baby with a fever. “What...the fuck is...going on?”

“It's my neighbor. I told you I have a gun because I'm convinced he's gonna come up here and try to kill me one day.”

“This is insane.”

“Well, he's insane, if we're being honest. A nutball of the highest caliber,” he winced at the inadvertent pun.

Something that had been worming around at the back of Jeff's mind finally caught up with him. “Thorsen?”
Vic took a sip of his OJ and nodded. “Wait, the Henry Thorsen?”

“The one and only. Gun nut, drug addict, hippie baiter.”

“What the hell is this, some kind of retreat for crazy writers?”

“Does that mean you think I'm crazy, too?”

Jeff opened his mouth and realized what he'd just said. His mouth snapped shut with a click. Victor laughed at him.

“Don't sweat it, kid, I know what you meant. I don't take it personally.” He gave that wild man grin of his. “We all go a little mad some times,” he said, widening his eyes and speaking in a passable Norman Bates voice.

“I saw him,” Jeff said.

“Who?”

“Thorsen, yesterday, I went down to the beach. I think part of me recognized him and that stupid hat.”

Victor laughed again. “He loves those hats.”

“I didn't make the connection, I would have never dreamed two famous writers lived right fucking next door to each other.”

“Hold up there, buddy. Let's get something clear. Me,” Victor pointed at himself. “Famous writer. Henry fucking Thorsen?” he pointed to the other house, “Crazy bastard hack. Calling him a writer insults Charles Dickens and John Milton, alright? He rode the bullshit gonzo craze on Hunter Thompson's coat tails and managed to be the only guy, other than H.T., to make a career out of it. Now he lives off residuals and speaking engagements and apparently only exists to be a pain in the ass to his neighbors.”

“He's done this before,” Jeff said, Vic's phone conversation sinking in.

“Not all the time, just often enough to keep things interesting. There was a year or two when he was keeping it quiet, but I think he was on a book tour or some shit. Few years ago he was fishing with dynamite, if you can believe it. Where do you even buy dynamite?”

Jeff shook his head.

“I just hope that one day he'll die from taking too much hillbilly heroin or he'll fall down the steps and crack his fucking head open or he'll finally be committed.”

“Did he live here first?”

“Nope. Total coincidence as far as I can tell, unless he heard I lived here and decided that bugging me would be a good hobby. Can't say we've ever much talked about it though. I first met him when I went over to find out why he was having a weenie roast at two in the morning while blasting Zeppelin loud enough to hear in the city. Stupid thing is, if I'd have been here by myself I never would have noticed. My wife had to get my attention and point out the fact that for the last hour the bass had been rattling shit off the shelves. I was in that deep.

“So I go over there and he's got three half-naked chicks and a couple of scary, hairy bikers. You can barely see through all the smoke, not all of it from the fire, and I'm sure they were all cranked up on something as well. Someone's truck was running the stereo with the doors open, the music so loud you could almost see it when you got that close.

“I asked the first person who noticed me to turn it down and she passed it on to him. He had a fucking La-z-Boy out there on the lawn, sitting in front of this big bonfire, smoking a fucking peace pipe, if you can believe it. The chick speaks to him, he waves a finger, someone turns the music down. He nods at me, like the big leader or some shit, so I turn to walk away. Then the music goes right back up again and I look back and they're all laughing like he just told a goddamn joke. That was the first night I became familiar with the police's non-emergency number. They don't like you calling 911 for noise complaints. They like to keep the lines open for people who are bleeding.”

“That's...I don't...”

“I know,” Victor said, nodding sagely, “It's nuts. Listen I'm not much of a cook but I can manage not to fuck up toast and eggs. Lets put something in our bellies and go out in the sun and things will look a lot better in an hour or so, yeah?”

Victor was right. The eggs were overdone and the toast was burnt, but soon Jeff was laughing at the absurdity of it all. The second coffee loaded with bourbon also went a long way to improving his mood.

The Author, Chapter Seventeen: The First Pages

2010-01-20T07:57:00.000-08:00

June 10

“Here,” Vic said, pushing a couple of sheets of paper toward Jeff as he placed a plate of sandwiches next to the writer. After his surprising bout of self-disclosure, Victor had returned to his laptop and written as though the devil himself were cracking a whip over him. “Read this,” he said, then went back to his work without even acknowledging the sandwiches.

Jeff picked up the pages, realized there were just two of them. The first page read, Chapter Three: The Catacombs, and a thrill rolled through Jeff's heart. Part of him had reasonably assumed that Stuart would be sharing his work with him, what else would he be handing him from the table where he wrote? But the reality was almost overwhelming.

He sat down across from Stuart, gathering himself as if he were about to lose his virginity.

Chapter Three: The Catacombs

The inside of the church was drier than it had been in the storm outside, and Wilcox gratefully shook the rain from his coat, but the dryness was the only thing about the interior of the church that was welcoming. A vast crucifix, agonizingly realistic, dominated the altar at the head of the church. Somewhere, in the distance, there was a drip, a regular plonk plonk plonk of water. The church was cold and dark. The interior was so tall as to make one feel that it was only a matter of time before the church collapsed in upon itself, taking any hapless attendees with it.

Jeff shivered and read on, as Wilcox met the young priest who was on duty that day, flashed his investigator's ID and then talked the priest into giving him a tour of the famous catacombs beneath the church. The priest had not wanted to cooperate, but eventually Wilcox had won out.

“The catacombs are beneath the water table,” the priest said, guiding them down the stairs, “So be careful on the steps. They are often damp.”

Wilcox was used to the damp, his shoes were studded for just such occasions, but he didn't feel the need to mention it.

“This level is often referred to as the false catacombs,” the priest said. It was constructed in the dark ages, above the original catacombs, which date back to the 8th Century.” His flashlight played across the primitive stonework, decorated with the silhouettes of bones and skulls. “Very few bodies were actually buried here. Rather, the false catacombs were a place of worship and hiding. They were created as an extended entrance to the true catacombs, which are beneath us. We will descend at least another 20 feet, so it will grow quite colder.”

The priest's voice was gentle and soothing and clearly he had often given this tour before. He was surefooted as they moved into a corner niche, which cleverly disguised spiral stairs. They took it down, leaving the false catacombs. The spiral staircase was so tight that Wilcox often lost sight, not only of the priest, but of the light he carried as well. He continued breathing in a relaxed fashion and walked slowly, steadily down the stairs. This wasn't his first rodeo.

“Here we are,” said the priest gently, and when Wilcox took a last turn, he saw that they were in an antechamber. The priest pushed gently on a heavy stone wall, which pivoted on a gimbal and opened into the true catacombs.

“The Catacombs of Alphonse the Broken,” the priest said, by way of introduction. He played his flashlight into the room, the light catching on small pieces of decorative glass that were embedded in the walls and individual resting places, reflecting like the eyes of small, watchful animals. “This is one of the most untouched catacombs in the world,” he continued, still acting the tour guide. “There are examples here of architecture and design that are found nowhere else.”

The priest gave a slight bow and waved his free hand into the large, dark room. “After you.”

Jeff finished and put the pages down and looked at Stuart for several minutes before the author noticed and stopped his typing. When Stuart finally surfaced for air, he picked up one of the sandwiches and began to chew and swallow. Jeff had gone for simple, turkey, Swiss, mustard and mayo. The author didn't appear to be complaining.

“Well?” he asked through a mouthful of food.

“I really appreciate you letting me—“

Stuart shook his head. “That's not what this is about. I need feedback. Keep me going. What did you think of it? And remember what we talked about before.”

Jeff, who had been about to say 'it was really good' was glad of the reminder. “The priest made me uncomfortable,” he said, after some consideration.

“Good, he's supposed to. Why?”

“Well, speaking for myself, I don't trust religious people, I suppose.” The writer nodded, his mouth full. “But his introduction made him, not suspicious, exactly, but, like, hard to trust, I guess.”

“Why?”

“He seems to young for his position?”

“Good. How about the introduction of the catacombs?”

“I li—“ Jeff corrected himself, “The idea of the catacombs being in layers or tiers was very effective. Especially the older ones being more sophisticated. It speaks of lost technology or power as well as, uh, an intentional effort to shield the older or better catacombs from sight. The mention of the false catacombs generates the idea of secrets and discovery.”

Stuart kept nodding and washed down a mouthful of sandwich with some bourbon. “What about the true catacombs?”

“The line about...” Jeff looked through the two pages, “The line about the reflecting glass being like the eyes of small animals was creepy. It really sets the reader on edge for what may come, and then you don't end the chapter with the relief of them entering it, but leave us having to turn the page to find out what happens when Wilcox enters.”

“What do you think happens?”

“I actually expected it to be the end of the chapter, Wilcox entering and then the priest closing the door behind him.”

“Oh, is that what you thought?” Stuart asked, an arch in his eyebrow. It was Jeff's turn to nod. “You got good instincts, kid. It's not exactly what happens, but you don't ever want to describe exactly what the reader expects and any reader of my books or anyone who's ever read a horror novel or seen a scary movie will expect something like that. So you throw them a bit of a rope-a-dope and give them part of what they're expecting and something they're not.”

Stuart handed Jeff another few sheets of paper. Jeff tried not to grab at them in his excitement.

“I won't ask you about those ones until tomorrow,” he said. “Now fuck off, I've got work to do.”

The Author, Chapter Sixteen: How It All Started

2010-01-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

1987-1988

We had just finished our first year of college and we were planning to spend the summer out here in West Seattle. Ralph, my best friend at the time, had an aunt who lived in this place during the year and then summered out on Whidbey Island. She didn't have any great plans for the place, so she said we could spend the summer here. Ralph had a car and a bit of money saved up, so the plan was we'd get a couple of easy jobs to carry us through the season and spend most of our time getting fucked up and laid. Ralph scored some weed before we left school and we packed our shit and came straight here. We'd had enough of parents and education and structure. We wanted to be our own fucking men for a while, you know?

It was a different color back then, and Ralph's aunt had a guy who looked after the property, so the lawn was mowed and shit, but otherwise it looked about the same. It might not look like much to a homeowner, but this place looked like magic to two horny, bored 19-year-olds.

The first couple of days we lived off the little money that we'd brought, smoked out, prowled the beaches, drank too much, ate easy crap we could prepare ourselves, like what I eat when I'm out here now, stuff young kids eat because they don't know about things like cholesterol and trans fats and triglycerides.

You're a writer, so you might know what I'm talking about when I say that after the third or fourth day out here, I started to get the itch. I'd only experienced it once before, when I wrote The Best Year, which was an experience I hadn't been happy with. I'd forced that one, sat down and beaten it into submission until it was all on the page. It was not an enjoyable experience, just an inevitable one. Like vomiting when you have a stomach bug, you know?

Maybe out here it was just because I didn't resist it, but I don't think so. It always felt like...like this was the place, as stupid as that sounds. I've never met another writer who can't operate anywhere else. Most of The Best Year I cranked out at the desk in my high school bedroom, a lot of it in long hand, and it was like spending six months giving birth to a kid with a giant head.

The first day I gave in and quit resisting the itch, I woke up about six in the morning and I just knew I was giving in. I got the typewriter from the master bedroom, sneaking past Ralph, who was sleeping like a fucking log, and carried it out to the living room. I put it on the table, exactly where I still work, and plugged the fucker in. It had all the bells and whistles, a little beeping noise if you typed words its internal dictionary didn't recognize and shit like that, but all I cared about was the fact that it would be faster than doing it long hand. I'd taken typing in high school, and I was okay. By the end of the summer I was a fucking typing prodigy, believe me.

I don't think I ever found out why Ralph's aunt had that typewriter. If I did, I don't remember. Sometimes it feels like the thing was just there waiting for me.

So there I was, at the table, typewriter plugged in, a few sheets of paper still in it, but I wasn't quite ready. I went to the bathroom, thinking that was it, and then I found myself in the kitchen. I wasn't ready to eat and I was too excited to sit down and write still, something was missing. I needed a drink. I'd only finished drinking with Ralph maybe four or five hours before, mind you, so it wasn't an idea that would normally occur to me. I should still have been a little drunk, or hung over, to be honest, but I wasn't. So I made myself a half-assed boilermaker, poured a glass of whatever piss beer we had around and dumped a shot of Jack Daniels in it. Then I made myself another. I chugged them both in the kitchen, then made myself another and went back to the living room to get started.

It was like pulling the pin on a grenade. Ralph told me he came out of his room and gave me a hard time for making so much noise a few hours later, and let me tell you, electric typewriters are not quiet, especially if you have to erase a word or type something it doesn't recognize, like ichor. I don't even remember him talking to me about it. That first day, I just vanished into the book.

Eventually Ralph gave up on me and went out to find a job. He got a gig as a server in a tourist restaurant on the beach. It's still there, but it's changed its name a bunch of times since then.

It wasn't the summer he'd signed up for, him getting up and going to work and me getting up and pounding away on a typewriter for hours at a time. I didn't go out and prowl for pussy with him like we'd planned and he had a tough time bringing girls back to the place with Victor Llewellyn Stuart, the amazing typing man, holding court in the middle of the house. For that matter, he was never much good without a wingman, either.

It never even occurred to me that I was effectively living off of him, although clearly I was. I never bought any food or alcohol, and I drank plenty that summer, believe me. I don't think Ralph ever expected anything to come of my book, but he could tell, he told me later, that it wasn't something he should get in the way of. He told me that he was a little scared of me, finding me there, plugged into that typewriter like a machine. “Like I was channeling something,” I think he said, and if you know what writing can be like, it's not too far from the truth, is it?

To this day, I don't know where the book came from, or any of my books. I can point out locations and names and conversations to you and tell you where they came from, but the total project, the sum of the parts is a kind of alchemy that I will never properly understand. And it's the alchemy that only happens here, for some reason.

We came out here before Memorial Day weekend, and I was finished a week or so after the Fourth of July. When I was done, all 327 pages of it, I put the pages in a box, put the box under my bed, and went out and got a job. All the good ones were taken, of course, so I wound up bagging groceries for six weeks. It went a long way to win Ralph back, though.

The rest of the summer was what he'd signed up for, and it almost made up for it, I think. I bought him a Commodore 128 with my first advance, which helped a lot, too. He was always a code nerd and he eventually wound up getting in at Microsoft when they first arrived in Seattle. He never had a big position, but he got in early enough that he was one of those rich guys you always hear about. He went on to found his own special effects company. He died of a heart attack in 2003. Too much high living. While my bad habits were usually limited to what I did here, three months out of the year, his just went on and on. You name it, the big lifestyle shit, he got into all of it and you just can't keep that up.

So I made an effort to make it up to him, but a small part of him never forgave me, I don't think. As long as I had this place he never came back out here again.

I didn't get much school work done in my second year of college. The first two months I edited Grave, perfecting it as much as I could on my own. The rest of the time I spent fishing for an agent.

Now, what happened to me doesn't happen often, but it might happen more often than you'd think. The eighties were huge for Stephen King, we're talking the era of Christine, Pet Semetary, It, The Tommyknockers, Misery, and you get the idea. Now, King and I don't get along that well, but I know damn well, and so does he, that I owe a lot of my early success to him. It's possible I could have gotten successfully established on my own, but I can tell you that my initial advance would not have been half a million fucking dollars.

So yeah, round about Easter in 1988, Random House and Viking just about came to blows over me. I actually went with the lower bid, in the end, with Viking, because Random House was more or less expecting to purchase my soul. But that was how I became Victor Stuart, as he exists today.

I dropped out of school, so the only degree I actually have from Pacific University is the honorary one they gave me for contributing so much money to the alumni fund.

The first thing I did, of course, was to buy this house and the Stingray. At that time I didn't realize that I wouldn't be able to write anywhere else, I'd been able to edit and rewrite big parts of Grave at college, but the house was just supposed to be my good luck charm.

It only took me another year to realize that it wasn't. I moved out here and wrote my second book almost immediately. It didn't come out nearly as easily as the first Wilcox book. It was a fight every step of the way. And when I was done, I started another book. Eventually I moved out. For some reason, I couldn't get comfortable here. Especially if I didn't want to write. I could barely take a day off here. I just couldn't do it. You might think I drink a lot now, but I probably drank more than year than I have in the 20 odd years since. I shit you now. I drank like I had something to prove. I ordered wholesale. I went to a doctor and got a prescription for Xanax, nothing helped. Until I went home to my mother's for Christmas and it was like walking out of a storm into the sunlight. It had never fucking occurred to me that my writing was giving with one hand and taking with the other. Yes, I would have to be here to get the work done, but no, there was no reason for me to stay here.

So I didn't. And I never have since.

More than 20 books. Only one summer off, the year my wife left me, and even then I pushed and pushed, but nothing came. A marriage, two kids, countless millions of copies of books sold. I've had three other houses and two condos. I've had just the one car.

So that's the short version. Well, maybe it's the medium version. And now, I think I should get back to work, kid. Make me a coupla turkey sandwiches in an hour or so, will you?

Interlude: Author's Note

2010-01-19T05:50:00.000-08:00

Wow. When I came up with the idea of this book several years ago, let alone when I started writing it, I did not imagine it was going to come together so well or so easily. This book is clearly ready to come out and yesterday I wandered around the city for an hour or so running errands and another piece fell into place after just rolling things around in my head.

This book represents a lot of things to me: Discipline, maturity, development of my voice, and showing off and having fun.

I'm up to 70 pages of manuscript, give or take, which is more than 100 pages when formatted for publication. That's half a novel, easy, which is fantastic. The last novel I wrote in blog format was finished at around 90 pages and this one is clearly going to be longer.

If you're following me regularly, I really appreciate it. If you're not and you receive this notification, you really should check this puppy out. It's going gangbusters and I'm thrilled about it.

New chapter, coming up!

Please post questions and/or feedback if you have them. It'll help keep me excited.

The Author, Chapter Fifteen: The Second Talk

2010-01-18T03:39:00.000-08:00

June 10

Later, Jeff sat respectfully in silence while Vic lit up a fat, brown cigar. He used a stick of cedar, lighting it off a Zippo, then lighting the cigar from the wood. The burning cedar smell was rich in the air, and eventually it was joined by the denser, somehow woodsier scent of the tobacco. The sun was just dipping past the edges of the trees, evening coming, but in no hurry.

A glass of Woodford was perspiring before the writer, and a can of Coors Light sat before Jeff. It was the writer's first drink of the day. After how Stuart had behaved the day before, Jeff had expected him to tuck into the bottle as soon as he sat down at his laptop. Not for editing, apparently.

“So...yesterday...we talked about what...I wanted to talk about,” Victor said, smoke streaming from the side of his mouth as he puffed on the cigar. He pulled it away and observed the end, making sure it was burning evenly. Satisfied, he waved out the piece of cedar and left it to smolder in the large cut glass ashtray on the table. “So what would you like to talk about?”

Jeff had thought about this since the night before, when Stuart had told him that after their 'orientation' talk, he should think of what he wanted to ask the famous writer.

“What is writing like for you?”

“You mean my process?” Stuart asked in return, puffing.

“No, like, what does it feel like?”

The author took a deep draw on the cigar and let the smoke waft from his mouth. Then he smiled. “Good fucking question. I'm going to answer it with another question though. What is it like for you?”

Jeff was unprepared for this and opened his mouth, then paused.

“You wanna challenge me, you better expect to be challenged, kid.”

Jeff nodded and thought for a moment. “Well...huh,” he chuffed out a small laugh as it came to him, “Sometimes it's like taking a shit.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Sometimes it wells up in you and you just need to find something to put it in as quickly as possible, you know?”

“Yes, I do. When I'm here I suffer the writer's version of diarrhea. It just wants to keep on coming, sometimes when there's not really anything left to come out.”

Jeff nodded and kept going, feeling the words come to him, driven on by the older man's approval. “Sometimes it's like sex. You push forward through the stuff you don't really wanna do to get to the good part.”

“Goddamn right.”

“Get the boring shit out of the way so you can get to something you're really excited about.”

“That's very good. What else?”

“Well, most of the time it's just like...work, I guess. Manual labor. Like digging a hole. At the end of the day your shoulders aren't as tired, maybe, but it takes it out of you. Sometimes you just have to chug away at it until you get into the zone.”

“Absolutely.” Stuart continued to puff. “So why do you need to know what it feels like for me?”

Jeff didn't answer, thinking the question might be rhetorical. The other man killed his bourbon and refilled his glass before speaking again. “Why do you think it's any different for me, or anyone?”

“I've talked to other writers and they've said different things.”

“Like what?”

“Are you ever gonna answer the question?”

Stuart looked at him, flatly, his smoking on pause. Jeff thought for a moment he had crossed a line. “You see, Jeff, that's why I like you. That's why this is a good fit and you're gonna enjoy being here for the rest of the summer. You're not afraid of me. You're not here trying to impress me like that last jerk-off was. It's different because it is. Just because you and I both see a blue sky right now and we can agree on the definition of blue doesn't mean we see the same thing at all. There's no way to prove that we do. But we can agree on it anyway. Everything you said is true, but just because I agree that writing is like chasing an orgasm doesn't mean it feels the same way to both of us.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes, for me, it's like you described. As soon as I get here, I need to start working. If I don't, it's like craving a cigarette, the less of it I do, the more of a fucking bitch I am. I come here to write. If I'm here and I'm not writing, I feel like a guy at the World Series who's warming the bench. So that needing to take a shit or come urgency is there. But let me ask you something else, if you'll permit me.”

The statement was sarcastic, but Jeff couldn't help but feel that if he said he didn't want to answer, Stuart would keep talking anyway. He nodded.

“You said yesterday you've written a novel, right?”

“Just a first draft.”

“Don't knock it, kid, you wrote a fucking book, alright? Now, how much work was it?”

“A lot.”

“Why?”

“I took notes for two years before it all came together.”

“What came together?”

“The final piece fell into place. I was waiting for everything to fit right.”

Stuart nodded. “Not me. You wanna know how I write?”

“Yeah.” It hadn't been the question he'd asked, but it had been something Jeff had hoped to hear.

“I get tanked. It's the only way I can do it. I get tanked, and I have to be here. I had an idea in a hotel once, so I ordered up a bottle of this,” he pointed at the Woodford, “From room service and got down to it. Couldn't produce a thing. But, to beat your metaphor to death, it wasn't like being constipated. It was a phantom shit. I thought it wanted to come, but it didn't. 'Here I sit, broken hearted.' For whatever reason, I have to be here. This is where the magic is. You believe in magic?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, me neither. Even though I write about it. But I believe in superstition. I wrote on the same typewriter that I wrote Grave on for more than 10 years before I took a risk and tried a computer. I was ready to go back to the typewriter if it didn't work. I was practically expecting it not to work, but it did. So whatever is here that lets me create, it isn't in how I write. So I recreate the way I wrote the first book I wrote here. I sleep in the same room, even though its not the biggest, I eat most of the same stuff, I stay up into the wee hours and sleep late into the day, and I drink bourbon. This is not my lifestyle the rest of the year, believe me, it's unhealthy as shit, but its all part of what produces what I write, and I can't fight that.”

“So you write drunk?”

“Not hammered. Not buzzed either. I get into a zone with it. I drink to remove the blocks between my conscious mind and my creative mind. What's in there wants to come out and the more I think about it, the less it does. So I drink to get out of my own way.”

“I can't do that.”

“You can't write drunk anymore than I could write sober, I'm sure. Different strokes. As a further example, I know a writer. Won't tell you who he is, but I promise you've heard of him. Guy smokes enough weed to bake an elephant. I shit you not. And that's the way he writes. Moreover, that's the way the son of a bitch functions. He has so much social anxiety that he can't leave his house without getting stoned first. But that's how he creates. He gets high and he writes. And he's good. I tried it once and after I sobered up, what I had written looked like the ramblings of a retarded third grader. Now, admittedly the guy edits when he's straight, but what he writes while high is still very good.

“And that's why writing seminars are a crock of shit.”

“What?” The non sequitur was jarring.

“Okay. So this guy is well-respected as a writer and as a speaker. Makes a lot of money on the lecture circuit, just like I do. Only because of his social whatever, he has to get high before he can leave his hotel. So he gives these talks on how to be a writer while he's toasted like a marshmallow.”

“Really?”

“Hand to God. But you better believe that he never tells the people in the lectures that step one to being a successful writer is to find yourself a good weed dealer.”

“No.”

“No. So while he's not lying to them, he's not telling the whole truth. I don't tell people that I have to drink to write either. Or that I have to be here. Someone who hates my books would burn the place down, and then where would I be?”

“Up shit creek?”

Stuart grinned. “You're goddamn right. Could be I could find another place or another work-around like I was able to give up the typewriter, but I would not be hopeful.

“Regardless, that's why these seminars are a crock. They can all give you the same basic advice, keep a journal, write every day so you stay sharp, blah blah, but what works for you is what works for you and no one can give that to you. So save your money.”

“Okay.”

“You ever been to one of those lectures?”

“David Balducci came to our school. So did you.”

“Oh, yeah, I suppose I probably did, huh. How was I?”

“Better than Balducci.”

Stuart threw back his head and let out a single, loud Ha. “But how was I?”

“You didn't give us any advice. You told stories about who you were and what it was like being you. I liked it, and your stories of meeting famous people might have inspired someone to want to be a big novelist, but you didn't give us any nuts and bolts.”

“Yeah. When I do real lectures sometimes I get into that a bit, the talks that people pay a lot to come to, and usually they're for some charity or another, but when I'm talking to college kids I try to stay out of the mechanics. You pretty much have to discover them for yourself. How'd you do it?”

“I fucking sat down and started writing.”

Stuart thumped the hand that wasn't holding the cigar on the table twice, in applause. “Damn straight. And how was it?”

“It was shitty.”

“But you got better.”

“Yup.”

“What was it?”

Jeff should have seen this coming, but he was still strangely embarrassed. “Um...”

“Love story?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“No shame in that. Happens to the best of us. Was it your fantasy, were you part of it?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“That or raw imitation is where we all start, kid, don't sweat it. You got better. That's the part that matters.”
They sat for another minute in silence, Stuart puffing the cigar, Jeff looking past him at the trees. He noticed the post in the yard again.

The author leaned back in his seat and looked straight up into the sky, at the few clouds parading past.

“When I'm here I think that I'd keep coming out here even if it wasn't where I had to be to write, you know?” he said. “But when I'm not here, sometimes I think I don't ever wanna come back.” He pulled his head back down and looked at Jeff. “Doesn't that seem weird?”

The Author, Chapter Fourteen: The Second Day

2010-01-17T00:08:00.000-08:00

June 10

When Jeff got back to the house it still wasn't even 11. There were dishes he could clean, and he was hungry for some real food, but he decided to wait until noon at least before he started clanging around in the kitchen.

Even before he'd gotten the caretaker gig, perhaps partly as penance for not getting it in the first place, it had been Jeff's intention to re-read the Stuart canon this summer. There was no time like the present.

He carefully crossed the living room and grabbed an edition of Grave from the bookshelves. While the title was the same, the book was in the wrong language, so he exchanged it for a U.K. edition, featuring a pictures of an open grave with a blank headstone above it. He took it out onto the back deck, sat at the picnic table, and put his feet up on the porch railing.

In no time at all he was wandering the foggy back streets of an alternative London, as Alistar Wilcox searched for a body that had been robbed from a grave. A body that might not be as dead as everyone expected. Jeff was instantly transported to the bedroom where he slept when he was fifteen, where he had sat up most of the night, taking the same journeys through the same streets of London. The book functioned as a instantaneous connection to his past, to a time when his largest concern was passing his Biology tests and whether Katrina Sheridan would ever acknowledge that he was alive.

Cemetery had been the book that started Jeff's love affair with Stuart and his creations, but it was Grave that cemented them. He had finished the book, white-knuckling it to the end and gone to sleep as the sun was coming up. The next morning he had written his first short story. He had done some small creative writing assignments in school, but his short story, Bodies, was the first time he'd ever sat down with a story to tell. It was a complete rip off, of course, but imitation was the sincerest form of whatever, then he was a flatterer indeed.

Jeff's stomach was getting more insistent and he was about to put the book down and start preparing breakfast, regardless of the time, when his phone rang. It was his personal ring, the ring tone simply Peter Griffin of the Family Guy's laugh, looped over and over, like an obnoxious, nasal machine gun: 'eh eh eh eh eh eh...'

“Hello?”

“Sweetheart, it's your mother. I'm pretty sure you were supposed to call me yesterday and tell me how your job search is going.”

“Oh, yeah, I—“ Jeff began to laugh.

“What's so funny.”

“Mom, you'll never believe it. Are you sitting down?”

Once Jeff got the salient facts out, he had to pull the phone away from his ear as his mother screamed in excitement. Then he had to explain the specifics about the position, even though he had described them very clearly to her six months ago when he had thrown his hat in the ring for the position in the first place.

“So that Mac guy quit?”

“They told me he did, but Vic said the guy just packed his shit up and vanished.”

“I'll be damned.”

“I know!”

“Honey, you ride this pony till the legs fall off, okay?”

“You know it, Ma.”

“I'm very proud of you.”

“I didn't really do anything yet.”

“You will, honey, I know it. Go get 'em.”

Jeff smiled. His mother had been excited about his graduating from college, of course, but that had been eclipsed by the notions of what would come after, and the massive debt they would both be facing. This was the first time in a long time he could remember her being excited without any hesitation. It felt good.

Since he still had his phone out, he called up Malcolm and told him what was going on. He told him briefly about The Best Year, knowing that his friend would appreciate the idea of reading such a book, even if he wouldn't appreciate the book itself. He reassured his friend that he would soon ask about having him over to meet the author and they left it at that.

Jeff went inside and cleaned the detritus of the author's late night writing session. There was a plate and a bowl, two glasses, and an empty bottle of Woodford. Then he started getting ready for breakfast. He brought a package of sausage out of the fridge, put a frying pan on the stove, and rummaged around until he found the seasoning packet he'd bought the day before. He preheated the oven to 350.

Browning meat was about the extent of his cooking expertise, but the instructions for sausage gravy on the back of the packet didn't seem much more complicated than that, so he'd planned on giving it a shot.

The timing turned out to be the biggest pain in the ass. He put the biscuits in the oven after the sausage was brown and the gravy was done well before the biscuits were. Otherwise, the gravy looked, well, like gravy, and the biscuits smelled spectacular, as though he had put much more effort into them than he had.

Surprisingly, by the time he was ready to serve, Victor was still asleep, his head on his chest, snoring in his small animal way. Jeff wasn't sure if he should wake him, after all, the man could have been writing until 8 a.m., but Jeff was so proud of his cooking that he took the risk. He loaded a plate with two split biscuits and covered them with the meaty goo. He poured Vic a glass of orange juice and took them out to the living room. He placed them on the coffee table with a fork and a napkin and looked at the man.

His eyes were squeezed closed, as if he were concentrating. One hand was splayed out like a dead spider beside him on a cushion, the other hand lay on his thighs, fingers twitching. Jeff wondered if it were possible the man were writing in his sleep.

“Hey, Vic,” he said.

Immediately, the author's eyes snapped open and Jeff was pinned in their gaze. Jeff wasn't even sure if the man was awake for a moment, it was as if he had been lying in wait.

“What time is it?”

“Uh, about noon.”

“Mm-hmm.” Vic continued to stare at him, up through his brows, for a moment longer. Then he let out a deep breath and rounded his shoulders, stretching himself up on the couch. He groaned, stretched his shoulders, and when his eyes opened again, he looked a lot more conscious. “That smells really good, buddy, what is it”

“Biscuits and gravy.”

“Seriously? That's amazing. Keep it up, kid.”

He ate as he had the night before, as if he had been on a temporary hunger strike. The food was still too hot, but Stuart didn't seem to pay any attention to it, lowering his mouth to the edge of the plate and scooping it in. He rolled his eyes early on and gave Jeff an appreciative grunt and nod, which he took as a good sign.

Jeff went back into the kitchen and started to eat his own breakfast, flipping through Grave. A minute later, Stuart entered the kitchen, his plate shining and clean, his glass empty.

“Is there any more?”

Jeff took his plate and served another biscuit with another cup of gravy over it, as Stuart looked on lustfully.
“It's really good, man, seriously.” Stuart proceeded to inhale another biscuit. “I can't think of the last fucking time I woke up to breakfast.”

“How late were you up?”

“I dunno, actually. I got five chapters, I think, so late, I'm sure.” He swallowed another bite and planted his hands in his low back, arching it. He moaned appreciatively. “I'm already antsy to get back to it, to tell you the truth, so I'll probably edit what I've got now and take a break this afternoon. And you've gotta go buy yourself something to drink, remember?”

Jeff nodded.

“Let you practice on that bitch mother driveway, some too.”

The Author, Chapter Thirteen: The First Morning

2010-01-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

June 10

Jeff dreamed in the small hours of the morning, dreams more violent and unsettling than the esoteric dream of the night before. When he woke, he was aware that his dreams must have been unpleasant, as he came to in a knot of bedsheets, having torn the base sheet loose, his face pressed against the rough mattress.

He showered using shampoo and body wash that was left behind by a nameless caretaker, not Mac.

Upstairs, he found Vic sitting in front of the television with the volume off. Morning talking heads were still yammering, and Jeff saw that it wasn't quite ten. It was much earlier than he had assumed it would be, but then again, he had probably fallen asleep before midnight.

Brian Robeson's journey in The Best Year had left Jeff emotionally wasted, coming to a haunting, final exchange between the young man and one of his teachers. Brian had not been on his death bed, he did not die in the book, but you knew that his death was imminent. In all his years of reading Stuart's books, Jeff had learned to expect the man's talent for being disturbing and disruptive, but he would have never guessed the man had the power to make him weep. Jeff had wept, racking his underground room with sobs by the end of the book, at the pitiless disease that was taking his friend from the world (fiction or not) and at the triumphant way Brian had stood up to the universe and accepted his fate.

I can't say this year changed my life, he'd said, talking to Mr. Grimm, his high school history teacher, as he lay in hospice care, wasting away, My life had been changed for me whether I liked it or not, maybe the first time I got a stomach ache and didn't know what it was from. I just did the best I could with it. I ran with it, I guess you could say. I had a hell of a run, though, didn't I?

And Grimm had taken Brian's hand and they had sat together quietly, knowing that they had reached an end, if not the ultimate one.

Jeff realized that he had cried himself to sleep for the first time since...when? He told himself he didn't remember, but the nagging clerk in the back of his mind that never forgot anything flipped through the catalog of slights that he kept and came up with spring, 2002, 8th grade dance. The clerk licked his pencil and consulted the specifics, ready to rattle off the facts of the entire miserable evening, but Jeff shook himself loose from that.

He wanted breakfast, but he didn't want to wake the writer, especially now that he knew the man wasn't a particularly heavy sleeper. Too bad he didn't sleep the way he wrote.

So Jeff dug in the cupboards until he found a cereal bar and grabbed a can of Sprite. He didn't want to hang around the house actively working to not wake Vic up, so he would check out the beach.

On the way, he passed the large clump of grass that he had noticed in the lawn the day before. He was trying not to think about what a bitch it would be to mow this disaster. He saw that the grass was entwined in a yellow clump, dead and stiff. He assumed what was beneath was a small tree stump or some other plant remnant, but when he pushed at the dead grass with his foot, it fell easily away and revealed a piece of rock.

Jeff made a puzzled face and shoved more of the grass off the rock with his foot. It stood perhaps a foot high and it was rough and old. It was square, about the size of a CD jewel case across the top.

Now that he had started, he felt compelled to finish, so he put his breakfast down in the grass beside him and began to pull the grass away from the piece of rock, the post, as he thought of it. The dead grass came away in easy, thick handfuls; damp and muddy on the underside, dry and hay-like at the top. The first time Jeff touched it, he brushed his knuckle across the surface and then hissed and brought his hand back to his mouth like a child, dropping the fistful of grass.

Now why had he done that? He looked at his knuckle and saw that it was just slightly abraded, but the rock had not been hot or cold, there had been no reason to jerk his hand back. But he had. He wondered why as he reached forward and tentatively touched the rock again. Nothing happened. Well, that wasn't entirely true, a humming in the back of his brain, somewhere between pain and excitement, the kind of sensation one might experience before a challenging test, physical or mental, had started up. Jeff didn't notice it.

Once the grass was all pulled away, he saw that there had once been characters or symbols carved into the rock. He could not make them out, he suspected no one could by now, the weather and time had done too much damage. He wondered how old it was. The material was not concrete, but that didn't mean that it had to be particularly ancient. With weather driving right up off the ocean, he suspected that depending on the kind of rock, something like this could get worn down to a nub in just a few years. But he didn't think that was the case here. Touching it made him feel...reverent somehow, as he had felt when he had entered St. Patrick's Cathedral the one time he had visited New York City. The post and its apparent age made him feel insignificant, small, fragile.

His stomach grumbled and a gull cried and Jeff's reverie was broken. He cleared his throat, picked up his food, and returned to the trail.

The band of trees that surrounded the property was just thick enough to create a sense of privacy and it only took Jeff a few steps to cross it. When he broke out into the sun again, he saw that there was another house on his right, this one much bigger and older than Stuart's. It was more like he'd had in mind when he'd envisioned the house he would be spending the summer in. It was in disrepair, a rowboat rotting away on the lawn, a sagging shed next to the house, but the house itself had clearly once been magnificent, full of Victorian glory, no doubt built for some rich showy twat at the turn of the century.

Jeff walked past it, occasionally sneaking glances at the staring windows of the old house. It looked like it could be abandoned, but there was an old Toyota truck in the driveway.

The tide was in and Jeff sat on a driftwood log, high on the beach, a remnant of a past storm, broken loose from some raft of logs being ferried around Puget Sound, driven up on the beach by wind and water. He cracked his Sprite and sipped at it, appreciating the sweet tang, realizing for the first time that he had woken with a mouth that was both dry and ill-tasting.

He consumed the Honey Nut Cheerios Milk N' Cereal Bar in three quick bites, his stomach roaring its approval and demanding more prey.

For the second time in ten minutes, Jeff was again visited by the notion that he was but a small and fragile part of the world, the universe, but here on the beach it was not a distressing notion. There was a comfort being here, feeling the morning sun, smelling the sea and feeling the breeze from it caress his face. This was a world you wanted to be a part of, even if it was only a tiny part.

Jeff gave a deep, satisfied exhale, chugged the rest of his can of Sprite and then threw the sea a loud, wet burp.

He returned to the trail he had followed, which started as a path of rock and crushed shells, but quickly devolved into a beaten trail through the grass.

There was someone at the Victorian, Jeff saw. He wasn't sure if the man had not been there before or if he had simply missed him. He was leaning on the porch of the house, as if he had been looking out at the sea like Jeff. Perhaps he had been. But now, he was looking at Jeff. His posture made Jeff think that the man was old, certainly older than Vic. He wore clothes that would have looked appropriate on a homeless person or the resident of a senior care facility. He wore a straw Panama hat and huge sunglasses that seemed to cover half of his face.

Jeff nodded at the man, trying to be polite, hoping he hadn't broken any rules by coming down to the beach. Vic had told him that he was allowed to come down here, that it was a private beach. And the guy wasn't telling him to get lost, after all.

Jeff received no indication from old the man at all, so he turned his head away and kept walking. He felt the eyes behind the oversized sunglasses watching him until he passed beyond the side of the Victorian house and out of the man's sight.

The Author, Chapter Twelve: The Pizza

2010-01-15T21:11:00.000-08:00

June 9

At ten minutes to six, Jeff's cell phone began to bleep out a happy little tune. Jeff was jerked from Brian Robeson's world, where he was in Vienna and the cancer was beginning to catch up with him. He was starting to see the world with a new perspective, through a haze of pain and medication. He was alone again, his most recent travel companion having stayed in France.

Jeff tromped up the stairs, manuscript in hand, and realized that he had been so excited to start the book that he had left both doors open. He stood in the laundry room and listened. There was, again, the pause and insistent rattling of Stuart's writing. Jeff hoped it was going well. Tomb, he'd said the new book was called. The title made him think of a chamber, deep inside an Egyptian pyramid. Or the hole carved in the rock where Jesus had been laid, according to his one summer in Vacation Bible School when he was eight.

Jeff opened the freezer and checked the instructions on the Four Cheese DiGiorno that was on top of the pile. He preheated the oven to 400 degrees.

Vacation Bible School had been during the first summer he spent alone with his mother and she hadn't known what to do with him. So, for four hours at a stretch he had spent his afternoons in a cool church basement, learning songs, coloring, snacking on Hawaiian punch and Nila Wafers, and of course, hearing about Jesus. Jesus had been laid in a tomb and, according to his teacher, whose name escaped him (but whose massive stature and hairy top lip remained permanently carved onto the tablet of his memory), God had raised Jesus after he had been dead for three days. That tied in with heaven and sin and all sorts of other things Jeff couldn't remember. He wondered if that Vacation Bible School was the first time he had ever heard the word tomb.

And then there was Tomb Raider, of course. Couldn't forget the delectable Lara Croft and her outfits that, while pleasing on a surface level, seemed completely impractical for her chosen profession.

He looked out of the kitchen to see Stuart and you could be forgiven for thinking the man had not moved anything but his fingers in the three hours Jeff had been in the basement. The chattering of the keys continued periodically and the man continued to stare. He must have moved, however, as the glass next to the white Macbook was half-full and there were two bourbon bottles on the table, one empty, one on the way.

The oven temperature read 325, so Jeff pulled the pizza from the freezer, peeled it from its plastic sheath, and placed it on the center oven rack. He set the timer and now had twenty minutes to kill, and he didn't want to start back into The Best Year and stop again, and Stuart was clearly not going to be bothered by anything. He walked past the author into the living room and the man didn't seem to even notice him.

He delayed his pleasure for a few moments by exploring the movie collection beneath the television. He mentally set aside the titles he had not seen before to watch later. He was too self-conscious to examine the porn more closely.

Instead of standing up, he crawled over to the bookshelves, sitting before them with his legs crossed, feeling like he could hug the entire assembly and all the rewards that it held. He browsed a copy of the fourth Wilcox book (and one of his least favorites) Ash, written in what Jeff took to be Italian. He wondered what it would be like to teach yourself a language by comparing this version to the English version. How different was the language when you really got down to it, the metaphors, the idioms, the quirks? Stuart would be a more difficult writer to translate than, say, John Grisham, he supposed.

The covers were fascinating. The United States was apparently the only market that employed the iconic black cover and colored title scheme. The U.K. editions all featured an image of the titular object. The covers of Plague and Blood could have been mistaken for medical thrillers. There were several books with titles in Asian lettering that actually depicted Alistar Wilcox himself, in one particularly ridiculous image, which Jeff took to be the cover of Rain or Storm, the man was standing in the rain, pulling his coat back over one hip as if he were about to perform a quick draw.

The oven beeped in the kitchen and Jeff put the books back and stood up. He stretched out his thighs and groaned as he arched his spine. He heard the slap of Stuart's laptop closing.

“That the pizza?” he asked.

“Yup,” Jeff replied, moving to the kitchen.

He found a hot mitt in a drawer next to the oven and moved the pizza to a heavy marble cutting surface on the island in the center of the kitchen.

“That smells great,” Stuart said from the kitchen door. “I'm starving.” He pulled a large carving knife from magnetic bars above the dishwasher and handed it, handle first, to Jeff. He pulled a fistful of paper towels from a roll and then he pulled two plates from a cupboard and held them out as Jeff served the steaming slices.

“Grab me a Coke, yeah?”

Jeff grabbed a cold can for both of them, and Stuart led them to the living room instead of the dining room. He flopped on the couch and put the two pizza plates on the coffee table. Jeff sat down next to him

Jeff was waiting another minute for his pizza to be ready to eat, but Stuart tore into his, hissing at the heat and then chasing it with the Coke to fight it off. The first slice vanished in much the same fashion before Jeff even started his.

“Thanks,” Stuart said, talking around a mouthful.

“You bet. How's it going?”

“Excellent. I don't keep track of pages, but I'm into the second chapter. I'm toying with the idea of trading off chapters between Wilcox and the other side of things.” Jeff nodded. Stuart slugged back some more Coke and burped. Jeff was conscious of the fact that, while he could smell the bourbon and knew that Stuart had drank a substantial amount that evening, the writer seemed quite sober. “At this rate I'll get at least four chapters today, which is great, but not normal. Like I told you, this book has been waiting to come out for a while, so I'm making a big splash at the outset, but it won't continue. Tomorrow, before I write, I'll go back and read what I've already got, refresh my memory and edit it a bit. A good day for me is usually three chapters.” Stuart then inhaled the second slice of pizza and chased it with the remnant of the Coke. “You want any more?” he asked Jeff, who was only halfway through his first piece.

“No, go ahead.”

Stuart went back into the kitchen and Jeff heard the clank of his plate and the hiss and pop of another can of soda opening. By the time Jeff was finished, the writer was back at his table, writing and staring again. There was one slice left on the counter, so Jeff helped himself, eating over the sink.

When he was finished, he put the plates in the dishwasher and the paper towels in the trash. He paused at the kitchen door and looked back out at the writer. Stuart was pouring himself another hefty glass of bourbon.
Jeff returned to his room to finish The Best Year. It would only take another couple of hours. It was already one of those books that he was excited to get to the end of, even though he knew he would be disappointed when there was none left.

He made sure to close the door at the top of the stairs this time. When he reached the bottom, he was struck again by the odd smell in the room, but he knew he would stop noticing it soon enough.

The Author, Chapter Eleven: The First Book

2010-01-14T07:51:00.001-08:00

June 9

“Hey, one more thing,” Stuart called out. Jeff stopped and turned in the doorway to see the writer getting up and coming after him. He moved past Jeff and jerked his head to indicate the younger man should follow. “You said you like my books, you should check this out.”

Jeff tailed Stuart to the living room bookshelf. The author sank onto his haunches and examined the bottom left shelf. At the far left side, next to several different editions of Grave, the first Alistar Wilcox novel (Jeff easily identified the original pulp paperback, a copy of which he had bought used when he was 15, the trade paperback reissue and the 10th anniversary hardbound edition) was a sheaf of papers held together with a fat, black clamp.

Stuart pulled it out, letting the other books all tilt to one side without the support. He theatrically pretended to blow dust from it and then handed it to Jeff.

“I can't tell you how many people have read this, kid, not exactly. My ex-wife, my mom, a teacher or two. Not many, I'll tell you that.”

Jeff looked at the thick stack of sheets. The cover sheet read “The Best Year, by Victor L. Stuart”.

“That is the first book I ever wrote. I was 17. Two years later I wrote Grave and my life changed. Read it. Enjoy it. But we probably won't talk about it, okay? I don't think about it much any more. But you claim to be a fan, so I thought you might get a kick out of seeing where I started out.”

“I...Oh, man, I...”

Stuart clapped him on the shoulder and the touch gave Jeff a surge. It was the first time the man had touched him. He was giving him the book he wrote when he was still in high school. A book almost no one had ever read!

“You're welcome to read anything else on the shelf, too, of course. Just be careful with the first editions of my books. Some of them are worth a lot, so don't get salsa on them or nothin'.”

The treasure he held in his hands was blocking out almost everything, but he had noticed several times already the author's lazy speech. For someone who had been called 'erudite and accessible' by the New York Times Book Review (no, not the New York Review of Books, but what can you do?), his spoken communication was awfully sloppy. He certainly didn't talk like he wrote. It's because he's been drinking so much, a small part of him spoke up, and Jeff accepted that as just as likely an explanation as any other.

“Thank you so much,” Jeff said, getting wound up to make a fool of himself.

“It's cool, kid. I'm gonna get to work.”

Jeff stood there a moment longer, staring at the bookshelf as if expecting it to discharge other secret volumes.

When he turned, Stuart was already at the table, his back to the living room, facing out toward the yard, the laptop open. He was either staring outside or staring at the computer. The house was quiet. Outside there was the drone of a distant lawn mower or even more distant airplane. Then, there was the sound of a muted machine gun and Stuart was off. His hands worked in fits and starts, cranking out fistfuls of letters and then pausing for long stretches. The writer continued to stare and if Jeff hadn't known better, he'd have thought the man wasn't look at the screen at all.

Jeff took the book and went downstairs.

He checked the Nextel and saw that no one had called him. The reception bars on both the work phone and his personal cell phone were scraping the bottom of the screen. He reminded himself to take the phones upstairs when he made dinner to check if he had any messages. Then he set the alarm on his personal phone so that he would remember to prepare Stuart's pizza later.

Then, he allowed himself the second greatest regular activity of his life. Third if you counted sex, which wasn't exactly regular. He took The Best Year and went to take a dump.

He sat on the toilet long after he had finished moving his bowels, turning page after page. The manuscript was a clean copy, probably photocopied from an actual typed manuscript. There were no notes and each page was carefully numbered at the bottom, in the center. Slap a cover on it and you wouldn't know that you were reading an unpublished book. For that matter, you would never guess you were reading a book written by a rookie, let alone a minor.

It had all the trademarks that Victor Stuart had become recognized for, deep characters, awkward situations, flowing dialogue, and crystal clear descriptive pose. Other than that, Jeff would have never guessed that Stuart had written it. The Alistar Wilcox novels were all about the unfamiliar, the unknown, the dirty, the mysterious. The Best Year was, Jeff was sure, mined from the details of Stuart's own youth. It was the story of a high school senior who discovered he was dying of cancer. So he robbed and bank and went on to live the life he'd dreamed of for the last months of his life. At least, that's what the book had been about so far.

Jeff would have never dreamed Stuart capable of writing with such...he grasped at words. Emotion seemed like a good one, but all of Stuart's books had emotion, just not the emotions this book had. In the place of fear, terror, and anger there was...sentimentality. That was it. Where the other books were confrontational or abrasive, this book was soft. Even if, in the end, it was about a kid dying, it was a gentle book.

Jeff pulled up his pants, flushed and went to lie down on his bed. He turned on the bedside lamp, propped himself up against the wall with a few pillows, and buried himself further in the world of Brian Robeson, the boy who knew he was dying, and the best year of his life.

The Author, Chapter Ten:

2010-01-13T16:20:00.000-08:00

June 9

Another thing that had not occurred to Jeff was to bring toiletries. He realized this as he opened the door that sat opposite the closet, which opened into a small bathroom. A glass-enclosed shower sat across from a toilet, with a sink in between. The soap on the corner of the sink made him realize that he hadn't brought any of his own, but it turned out not to be an issue.

Mac, anal retentive knob that he was, had left his Pantene 2-in-1 as well as shaving cream, toothpaste and a glasses case. Jeff could tell because he'd written his name on them like a 12-year-old going off to summer camp. Jeff smirked at the mental image of Mac's mother writing his name in the back of every pair of his tighty-whities as he went off to college.

There were razors and a toothbrush as well, and Jeff assumed they were Mac's also, although there were no labels on those. A fresh razor he would deign to use, but the toothbrush he dropped in the small blue trash can that stood next to the sink. In the cabinet beneath the sink were cleaning supplies, in addition to a rainbow assortment of shampoos, conditioners, body washes and soaps. Apparently most caretakers couldn't be bothered to take such things home with them. There was even a fresh toothbrush, still in its package. It was softer than Jeff would have liked, but free was free. Free toiletries had not been a benefit that Arthur Reed had listed when describing the caretaker position, but Jeff was pretty happy about it.

He was putting his boxers and the neatly folded balls of his socks into the top drawer on the dresser when the door to the laundry room banged open. Jeff hadn't bothered to close the door to his room. He made a note to do so when he went to sleep.

“How's it going down there?”

“Good!”

“You getting settled?”

“Getting there.”

“Cool. Well, listen, I'm gonna start working in a bit, but I wanted to talk to you a bit before I did, alright?”

“Sure!” Jeff said, immediately wincing at the child-like enthusiasm in his voice.

“Alright, finish up and I'll be out on the deck.”

Jeff flipped his bag shut, still half-full, and looked around. The room looked as bare as ever, but it was growing on him. The room mattered a whole lot less than the company.

He left his door open but closed the door to the laundry room behind him. As he left the kitchen he saw that the accordion doors off the dining room were open and sunlight was streaming into the house. The computer and the bottle were still on the dining room table, but the glass and the plate were gone. Jeff squinted in the light.

“Hey,” Stuart called, sitting beneath the umbrella. He was wearing sunglasses and his hair was damp. Wet patches stood out on the simple white t-shirt he was wearing over a pair of sweat pants. Apparently he had recently showered.

Jeff saw that there was another bottle on the picnic table, the same shape as the one in the dining room. There was a plastic bucket of ice cubes on the table, along with two glasses. Stuart tossed a fistful of ice in the empty glass and pushed it toward Jeff.

Jeff sat down and looked at the bottle.

“Woodford Reserve,” Stuart said, tilting his glass toward Jeff. “Small batch Kentucky bourbon. Put hair on your chest.”

Jeff picked up the glass and matched the other man's salute. He smelled the liquor dubiously. He took too
deep a whiff and it made his eyes water. Stuart took a pull from his glass and Jeff matched him. The fluid was cool in his mouth from the ice, but warm in his throat and he felt it slowly blaze a trail into his gut. He managed not to cough or wince, but it was with an effort.

“That's the stuff right there, lemme tell ya.” Stuart killed his glass and rattled the mostly-melted ice cubes in the bottom. “I'm raring to get back to work. I sat around for two weeks waiting to get started with that asshole sitting around here and it never happened. But I got a good feeling about you. I think things are coming together already, and I got this book that's ready to come out, whether I am or not. So I wanna talk to you a bit and then get to work, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Couple hours from now, if you could put one of those pizzas in the oven so I can keep working, I'd really appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

“Okay. So I'm sure you have a lot of questions for me and we'll get to them, but not today, okay? Think of what you wanna ask me tomorrow. Right now, there's still plenty of day left and if I get a good start, I could write eight, maybe ten hours before I have to call it quits. That'll help me get back on schedule. So I'm just gonna run down the rules for you and that'll be it, alright?”

“Yes, sir.”

Stuart smiled and put more ice and bourbon in his glass. “Step one, stop calling me sir. I don't want you calling me dude or bro, either, but you and I are gonna be smelling each other's farts before the summer is over, so we might as well be informal from the beginning.”

Jeff nodded.

“Here's what this summer is and what it is not. You work for me. I'm not gonna work you hard, but that's the way it is. This is not a stepping stone for you. At the end of this summer, no matter how much I like you, you will not have a career thanks to me. This also won't make much of a resume credit, either, I'm afraid. Babysitting a novelist while he drinks too much and cranks out another book isn't much to brag about to a job recruiters.

“You're gonna want to ask me about my writing, we both know that, and we'll get there. But you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to ask me the question. You know what the question is?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Sometimes I know exactly where my ideas come from and sometimes no one, least of all me, does, but either way it is an annoying fucking question and I get asked it enough on tour. Otherwise, you can just about ask me anything. I might not answer you or tell you the truth, but I'll answer you.”

“Okay.”

“Sometimes I like to share my work with whoever's around. Sometimes I'll email my editor or my agent, but mostly I just want encouragement or enthusiasm. So I might give you something to read. If I do, you are not allowed to tell me you like it, I cannot make that too clear. Tell me what means something to you and why. Tell me what you hate. Tell me what makes you cringe. If you say, 'It's good,' or 'I like it,' it will take all my self control not to slug you.” He smiled when he said it, but Jeff understood. Inside, he was thrilled. He would be the first person in the world to read a passage of Stuart's new book. The first person in the fucking world.

“Totally.”

“Attaboy.” He drank some more. “Now, you came out of the English department, so I suppose that makes you a writer, huh?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well I hope to Christ you're a better writer than that other jackass was.”

“Who, Mac?”

“Yeah, him. Fuck he was boring. I mean, he was a stuffed shirt in person, too, but he asked me to read something of his, the Playboy story I think, and I don't think he appreciated it when I called it pedestrian.”

Jeff barked a laugh in response. “Awesome,” he said, grinning.

“I'm not gonna bullshit you, kid. But how 'bout you wait till I share something with you first before you gimme anything to read, though, okay?”

Jeff found himself nodding again. He looked down. The ice cubes in his bourbon had melted and he risked another sip. It wasn't much better.

Stuart didn't seem to notice. “So what kind of a writer are you?”

“Crime fiction, mostly,” Jeff said. “At least, so far.”

“Right on. What have you been working on?”

“Well, I spent senior year writing the first draft of a novel.”

“Wow. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Take that to the bank, kid, I mean it. That's something to fucking be proud of. Not many of us get started that early. Gives you a lot of time to make mistakes and still be a big shot by the time you're thirty.” Stuart poured himself another drink and Jeff took a delicate sip of his own. He was surprised to see what a dent the writer had put in the bottle in such a short period of time.

“This book has been coming to a boil for more than a month now and I think it's time to let 'er rip. You wanna watch a movie or something, you can do it with the volume low. Once I'm into the story, you could have sex on the table next to me and I would block it out. Don't, please, but you know what I'm saying.”

Jeff nodded again. “What's it called?”

“The new one?”

Stuart smiled gently. “You like my books, don't you?”

“I really do.”

“What's your favorite?”

“Crypt.”

“What happened to your dad?”

Jeff blinked in surprise. “What?”

“Never mind. Some other time. It's just a thing with the people who like Crypt. The new book is called Tomb. That's all you get from me for now. Be off with you.” He waved his hand like Jeff was an annoying insect. “Put the pizza in around 6, yeah?”

“Sure,” Jeff said, standing to leave.

“Oh, and kid?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time you go shopping, buy yourself something you'll actually drink okay? I don't care what it is. You don't have to get hammered, but I feel like a dick sitting here while you pretend to sip that stuff. Rack of beer, bottle of vodka, don't care, just pick something up for yourself, okay?”

The Author, Chapter Nine: The First Day

2010-01-12T15:08:00.000-08:00

June 9

When they returned to Stuart's house it took Jeff three tries to back the Land Rover down the drive. As he drove back up to the top of the driveway after his second attempt, his face burned with humiliation.

“It's a big car, takes some getting used to,” Stuart offered kindly. “Don't sweat it.”

It didn't actually make Jeff feel any better, but he appreciated it anyway. Within three hours of their meeting, Victor Stuart was consoling him. It was not an auspicious beginning.

They unloaded the groceries that Jeff had put on his new AmEx at the Safeway. No one would have mistaken their cart full of canned and frozen food as anything other than the sustenance of two bachelors. The keystones were frozen pizzas and canned beef stew, but there was also an assortment of ground beef, cheese, tortillas, soda (Sprite for Jeff, a cheap knockoff of Dr. Pepper for Stuart) and snacks.

“When I'm out here I keep things pretty basic with the menu,” Stuart had said, dumping a stack of pizzas into the grocery cart, “Mostly because I want to have plenty off stuff around in case I have to fend for myself. I sure don't expect you to cook.”

Once the food was packed away, Vic gave Jeff the complete tour.

“I don't expect you to have anything to do with these rooms,” the author said, gesturing at the two bedrooms at the far end of the house. “You don't have to do any cleaning at all, either. We have a woman come in once a week, Mondays, she's been doing my cleaning for years, we're used to each other. Most of the time she's gone before I even wake up. My room will basically always be a pig sty for the summer, so if it bothers you, close the door.” He did so, shutting away the mess. “The kids and the maid are responsible for their room. They'll only be here a couple weekends this summer. When they're here, I still write, but I start later and we generally spend the days together. We usually order in or eat out when they're here. They'll bring their Wii with them, so I hope you know how to play fake tennis.”

They went out onto the deck, which looked onto the back yard, fenced in by trees and brambles. The lawn had a full spring's growth and stood almost a foot deep in places. Jeff could see a single heavy clump of grass halfway between the deck and the trees. The deck was railed in, with a set of steps leading onto the lawn. A picnic table stood beneath a large umbrella. Stuart took a deep breath.

“The ocean. Dunno what it is about smelling the ocean, but it's one of the best things about being here. You got yer grill,” he kicked it, “And the trail through there,” he pointed to a break in the trees, “Leads down to the beach. Private beach. Doesn't mean you can go naked, but it means you can tell tourists to get bent if they're hanging around walking a dog.”

Back inside, Stuart showed Jeff how to use the three remotes to turn on the television and stereo and use the cable. “Movies on the left, porn on the right,” Stuart said, pointing to a low cupboard in the entertainment center. Jeff thought he was kidding, but when he opened it, there were mainstream movies on one side and there were more than a dozen porn DVDs on the other, mostly of the barely legal vein with titles like, “Don't Tell Daddy.”

“We'll stash those in your room when the kids are here, if you don't mind. They snoop around in my stuff every so often.”

“Uh...sure.”

“Is that weird?” Stuart was looking at him like he genuinely expected an answer. Jeff didn't have a problem with porn, but he thought of it as a private thing. He assumed that Malcolm must own porn for those dry spells, but damned if he'd ever ask about it.

Jeff shrugged. “No biggie.” He wondered how many other things he would discover about his hero before the end of the day.

“Speaking of your room,” Stuart said, and lead the way back to the kitchen. There was a door opposite the fridge that Jeff had taken for a pantry. Instead, it lead into a small laundry room and a staircase. At the bottom of the staircase, which was surprisingly wide and well-lit, there was another door.

Stuart opened it and recoiled from the neck up, sucking air in through his teeth.

“Shit, I thought that would be gone by now. Sorry. I shoulda let the place air out after whatsisname left. I think something died under the house, you know? A rat or something.”

Jeff caught the scent as it wafted up the stairs, stale and unpleasant, a smell of the rot after rot, the dry putrid stink that came after the wet, nauseating one. It smelled like vegetables that had been forgotten in a fridge drawer for too long, the kind that would inevitably be steeping in their own brown juices.

Stuart fumbled inside the door and the lights came on, along with a humming. “Since there isn't a window, there's an exhaust fan,” he said. “I should have left it on, but it'll have you sorted out soon enough. If it still stinks tonight, you can sleep upstairs in the kids' room or something.”

“I'm sure it'll be fine.”

“So if you wanna drag your bag down here and set your shit up, this is all you.”

Jeff did so, bumping his rolling bag down the stairs, and ignoring the smell until he got used to it, which took less time than he would have expected.

There was a closet built into one wall, a simple double bed that sagged a bit, a bedside table with a lamp, a desk with another lamp, and a dresser.

Jeff plugged in his laptop and left it on the desk. He plugged in his new phone and turned it on. He scrolled through the numbers in the phone book and saw that there were only two listed. 'Firm' and 'Stuart'. The phone rang and he dropped it in surprise. 'Firm' blinked insistently on the screen.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Reynolds?” The effete voice of Arthur Reed was on the line, sounding, if Jeff wasn't mistaken, quite put out. There was interference on the line and Jeff remembered the lawyer saying the reception out here was shitty.

“Yeah, hi.”

There was a hiss on the line. “—attempting to reach you for several hours, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Oh, God, I'm sorry, it's just—“ What? Your client pulled a fucking gun on me and then made me pay for brunch? “The phone they gave me was dead and once I met Mr. Stuart we went to breakfast and...”

“I'm having a hard time understanding you, Mr. Reynolds. Normally this would not— but after the last caretaker—” There was another hiss, but Jeff knew what the man was saying. After the last guy fucked up, we're a bit gun shy.

“I'm charging the phone right now and I'll keep it with me once it's charged up.”

“Very good. How is everything so far?”

“I'm just unpacking.”

“How is—uart?”

“Ready to get started, I think.”

“Yes, I would—you for your time. Give my best to Mr. Stuart. Don't forget to send receipts at the end of the week.”

“Of course.” A cold panic stabbed Jeff's heart as Reed hung up the phone. He'd fucked up already and they would can him. One day on the job and he'd already fucked up and now the job would fall to the third runner up and whoever the hell that was they didn't want this job as much as he did.

But, consciously or unconsciously, Jeff had done the right thing. Both the brunch receipt and the Safeway receipt were safely in his back pocket. He pulled out the top drawer of the desk to put them safely away. The wide pencil drawer had several odds and ends in it, a pair of scissors, a Sharpie, some paper clips, a pad of sticky notes. Jeff dropped the two receipts in with the rest of the clutter and sighed. He wasn't sure he would be able to handle any more adrenaline spikes today.

He sat down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. He took a deep breath and realized that, while the smell was still there, it was much less noticable.

The room was very brightly lit for what could virtually be a cell under other circumstances. There were no personal touches and Jeff wondered if Mac had brought decorations with him and then packed them up again or if it hadn't occurred to him to bring in some touches of life either.

If you were a glass half full kind of person, you'd say the room was bland. Glass half empty folks might call it bleak. Jeff had a sudden impulse to pick some flowers and find a vase for them, bringing a small touch of life into his monk-like suite, but he quashed it. Men don't need flowers, he told himself.

The Author, Chapter Eight: Brunch

2010-01-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

June 9

They locked Jeff's bag in the house, and even though Jeff was excited to drive the Land Rover, he was disappointed that they didn't take the sports car. Stuart told Jeff to drive, saying he might as well get used to the big car, and then dug around in the back seat until he found a Seattle Mariners cap. He put it on over his unwashed hair.

“Driveway's easier to get out of than get down,” Vic said as Jeff drove up it. “Backing down this bitch ain't much of a treat, but you'll get used to it.”

“I like your car,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, she's a pretty little thing, huh? 1976. She was the second thing I bought when I hit it big, after this house. Cracked her up twice now, not too bad the second time, so it's not all original anymore, but she still looks and drives the same, which is all I care about.” Stuart interrupted himself. “Turn left and then left again. Left and then right instead to get to the Safeway up here. It's pretty easy to spot. We'll swing by after we eat and lay in some supplies. There's a couple of banks up there too, a McDonalds, couple taverns, and a Chinese joint that delivers. They make their own noodles and do a badass chow mein.”

“Cool.”

“Restaurant is coming up on the right down about a half mile,” Stuart said when they pulled onto a busy street.

“You really not leave the place during the summer?”

“Not much. Once I get in the zone I like to stay there. Since your friend did such a piss poor job of managing the place, I never got into the zone, so I haven't really started this summer's book. I piddled around with some short stuff and some editing. Hopefully tomorrow I can actually get started.”

“So you really do write a novel a summer?”

“I really do. Once I got on a tear and wrote two. Here's the thing though. If I don't finish the book by the end of the summer, it never gets finished. I don't stay here past the middle of September, at the latest, and once I get out of the groove with a book, I can't finish it.”

“Really?”

“I know it's weird, but that's the way it is. That's a big reason why you're here, to make sure I have my time to myself so I get a book finished. Cause if I don't, my publisher gets pissed, and my audience gets pissed and I don't get paid so my ex-wife gets pissed and my agent gets pissed...It's just a bad idea all around.”

“Have you ever not finished?”

“Couple of times I've started a second book during the summer even though I knew I wouldn't have time to finish it. I usually cannibalize the incomplete ones for ideas, characters, conversations...so parts of them see the light of day eventually. But only once have I not finished and that was the summer the lean, mean writing machine came off the rails. For almost 10 years I relied on my wife to keep me on track and when she left me, well, nothing went right for a while. I hired an assistant for the second summer and made that poor bitch miserable, but I managed to write a book that summer.”

The conversation came to a lull as Jeff hit a stop light. He had questions to ask, probably hundreds of them, but he didn't want to ruin what was happening. He was having a casual, real conversation with the adult who had most influenced him in the world, after his parents, maybe. It was possible Professor Higgins could give Stuart a run for his money, but he knew who he would try to save first in a fire.

The light turned green and as they pulled forward, the passenger breathed heavily through his nose and leaned his chair back. “It's called the West End,” he said.

“Okay.”

Jeff wondered if the people at the restaurant knew Stuart. Looking over at the author, he wondered how often he was recognized on the street at all. Mostly, he just looked like a guy. If Jeff had bumped into him, he wasn't even sure he would have recognized him, certainly not with a few days of stubble and a hat. Was it a comfort or an insult to not be recognized? Was an anonymous brunch a privacy that Vic treasured?

Jeff pulled into the parking lot, which was almost empty at 10:15 on a Thursday morning. Stuart straightened his seat and seemed to visibly brighten when he sat up.

“I've got an itch only a bacon waffle can scratch, let me tell you!” He hopped out of the car like a kid on his way to a Happy Meal.

Jeff locked the car, finally getting the satisfying “beep boop” he'd wanted earlier. He tailed Stuart, who was already most of the way to the front door.

Vic held the door for him, and they both entered the foyer, which smelled of sausage and featured pictures of little league teams on the walls, as well as a tiny blond hostess at a podium.

“Dos, por favor,” Vic said, flashing two fingers.

“You bet!” the girl said brightly, grabbing two menus and leading the way to a sunlit table by a window. The restaurant was empty except for an elderly couple finishing up in the corner. “This okay?” she asked.

The author winked and threw her a thumbs up.

“Coffee for either one of y'all?”

“Sure,” Jeff said, and Stuart shook his head. “OJ, thanks.”

“Comin' right up!”

Stuart grinned at her retreating skirt. “I swear to God. They keep getting younger, my hand to Christ they do.”

“Doesn't look to old to me,” Jeff said, then immediately regretted it. His face fell, but Stuart broke into that wild grin of his and then laughed.

“Well, she wouldn't, would she? I'm gonna have to keep an eye on you, kid. What do you think? She's either an import or a hick, because no one in Seattle says y'all.” He emphasized the last word with a drawl of his own.

“I can't remember the last time I saw a girl wearing a hair band, either.”

Stuart nodded.

The girl returned with their drinks, and Jeff noted that her name was Mindy.

“We're between shifts right now, so I'll be taking your order. One of the other gals'll probably be bringing it out to you. You just let me know when you're ready.”

“I'll have the bacon waffle with hash browns. Thanks.” Stuart hadn't bothered to pick up the menu.

“Sure thing. Do you know what you would like?” she asked Jeff.

“Uh, what's good?”

“The stuffed French toast features fresh strawberries today.” Mindy sounded like she'd never been more excited about anything in all her life.

“Sold.”

“Anything else?”

“Eggs over easy.”

“Okey-doke.” She closed her order book and went off.

“And to cover the other side of the spectrum, our orders will be delivered by an 80-year-old woman named Flo who smells like an ashtray, calls us 'Hon,' and sounds like Ronald Reagan,” Stuart said.

# # #

Her name was Marge, not Flo, but otherwise Vic had not been far off. Jeff was starting his third cup of surprisingly good coffee as Marge cleared their dishes. Both men were full to the point of groaning and Stuart's eyes were starting to glaze over.

The time before their meal arrived had been taken up by them inventing stories about Mindy, who never returned. The time after the meal had arrived had been taken up with them making noises like hogs at a trough.

Jeff's story had Mindy running away from her trailer park in North Carolina to follow her favorite band on tour. When they had arrived in Seattle, the band broke up and she stayed here. She was in school to be a dental assistant. He had thought for several minutes on his story, trying on ideas and discarding them until he came up with one that he felt actually fit the girl's image.

Vic's story came quicker and uglier. Abusive father, alcoholic mother, grew up in a small town in New Mexico. She was a church girl and had bided her time until a touring preacher had come to town. She had helped take the offering and when her offering plate was full she had walked out the back door and never looked back. She had moved to Arizona, fallen in love with an ASU Sun Devil who got a job with Microsoft. She followed him to Seattle, where he fell in love with a gothed-out barista who was everything Mindy was not, and she had been forced to move out.

“Why West Seattle?” Jeff had asked Stuart.

“Why yourself?” he had replied.

Jeff decided that she loved being close to the water, that its movement reassured her.

Stuart said that she lived in White Center, one of the poorest and most notorious neighborhoods in the greater Seattle area, just to the south of West Seattle. She lived there because of the cheap rent and this was the best job she could manage. She worked under the table because she didn't have a social security card.

The truth was that Mindy was from the south end of Boise, Idaho. She went to high school with a bunch of hicks and it had affected her language. When she got married and moved to the big city with her husband, she realized that two things positively affected her tips: Her folksy way of talkin' and her lack of a wedding ring. So when she went to work the ring came off and the accent went on. When she went home to Horace and two-year-old Nathaniel, the accent mostly went away and the ring came back out.

“This was a good idea I had,” Stuart said, leaning back in his chair and contemplating his gut. “I don't get out of the house much when I'm here for the summer.”

Jeff looked around the dining room. The elderly couple was gone and Marge was undoubtedly off on a smoke break.

“Do they really not know who you are?” he asked.

“Most of 'em do. Some of 'em don't give a shit, some of them just pretend. I'd tip the same if they made a big deal about it or not, but I come here because it's quiet and they treat me like everyone else. Then I go back to the house and have you serve me hand and foot. But mostly its that they know I'm around every summer. It's only exciting the first time or two you see me, because after that, what happens? I'm not gonna put you in a movie, I'm not particularly good lookin', and if you see me around town, the most exciting thing you're gonna see me do is buy ice. Of course, you get superfans out here every once in a while, people stake the place out every summer, hoping to see me or talk to me. Some of them even manage it. Mostly the cops keep an eye out and you can usually tell the difference between city slickers here to visit the beach and the kid dressed all in black with a pierced lip who wants to tell me how much he gets my books. Hey, you got your expense card?”

Jeff was momentarily startled by the segue. “Yeah.”

“Great. Then you got this. I forgot my wallet.”