Ghostwright

by Michael Cadnum

  What made it worse was the needling doubt he now felt toward his writing. He had always known that many of his ideas had been rooted in his friendship with Asquith. But now he was beginning to wonder. Maybe it was Asquith’s—every moment. Surely that wasn’t true, he tried to reassure himself.

  But he couldn’t be sure—not now.

  Maybe, he thought, Asquith was right. Maybe I was stealing his life all along, and the last, great theft of the Mexico play was a crime too great to tolerate.

  My work, he told himself, is abandoning me, and there is nothing I can do to call it back.

  It was hard to tell what attracted his attention to the darkness outside. Perhaps there was a vague movement, or perhaps he simply knew, in his bones, that there was something out there. He turned, straining to see, his mouth agape, sure that he was staring at nothing but the blank darkness.

  That’s all there was—just the dark, beyond the windows behind his desk. The friendly dark, where the oaks and the lawn that he loved so much were thriving in the dew. He couldn’t see them, because the world could only be remembered now, not seen. But everything was out there, just as it should be. There was no threat there, surely. There was his own reflection, a hulking figure clinging to a crystal decanter.

  And nothing more.

  Then he saw it.

  Something drifted out there. It was less than a vision, little more than a thought. A vague presence, a smudge, began to coalesce before his eyes. A gray shape began to focus into a figure.

  The figure was a cloud, a column of smoke. The smoke figure stepped slowly, very carefully, as though unsure of its own existence, its own power, into the light.

  The stare was what froze Speke. Froze everything in him. Every gland, every follicle was crystal.

  The man outside was staring at Speke. Staring into Speke’s eyes.

  He must have screamed. He must have dropped the decanter. He must have leaped to the far wall and continued to cry out, because when Maria was at his side, calling to him, he was hard against the wall and glass and scotch were all over the floor.

  She put her hand over his mouth, and her hand was strong. “It’s all right, Ham. Please be still—it’s all right.”

  “It was him!”

  “You’ll wake everyone. They’ll be able to hear you. Calm down, Ham. It’s all right.”

  “It was him. Looking right at me. Maria, listen to me. He was standing right out there in the dark.”

  III

  FLASH

  13

  Sarah was up early, brushing her hair.

  She had always loved morning. A day could become almost anything. Why not believe that it might be sweet, and promising? She had not slept well, and it had seemed that horses, gigantic, airy mounts, had galloped over the roof of her cottage all night, although when she peered out through the curtain she saw no evidence of storm, or even wind.

  Her sleep had been stirred, too, by knowing that not far away, beyond the lichen-splashed boulders, Christopher Bell was sleeping. The end of her present life was very near. She knew too much, although she had tried to pretend to herself for so long.

  Bell’s presence touched her. It was like a long stroke on a violin, a sound that grazed the mind as well as the flesh.

  For some reason, feeling foolishly worried, she had crept to his cottage last night, and made sure that it was safely locked. Then she had locked herself into her own cottage. She never did that. She was not afraid, usually.

  But in the night, hurrying on her self-appointed errand, she had felt herself running hard. There was something about Live Oak now that was menacing, as though the oaks had all crept inward toward the house just a few steps and now waited.

  Now she shielded her eyes against the bright dawn, amused at her foolishness. She had always loved this place. The great oaks were not simply trees. They were branched monuments, and some mornings there were deer the color of the hills at sunset, red gold figures like dream deer that were so unafraid they watched her, as she approached, before vanishing into the underbrush.

  Before moving to this estate, she and Ham had worked out of an office in San Francisco, like an attorney and his legal secretary. This place had meant complete peace for her, and yet she wondered if it had been a good thing for Ham.

  The antics with the stump had been painfully embarrassing. She had tried to stop them as soon as she could. Ham, though, had a reputation as an unpredictable denizen of the hills, an intellectual, heroic figure, and so his public would take it all in stride.

  Sarah was not so sure. The look in his eye had disturbed her. The frenzied slashing with the shovel had not been an act. He had been out of control, on the edge of some sort of neurological collapse.

  She found herself in her small office, glancing into the hand mirror she kept in her desk drawer. It had an ebony frame and was, for her, a rare extravagance. She was stroking her hair and thinking of Ham in a way she had never allowed herself to think before. She had sensed such feelings in the past, and always turned away from them. She turned away from them now, just as briskly as she whisked the mirror into the drawer. This certainly was a peculiar morning. She rarely paid so much attention to how she looked. But she could not hide the truth: Ham was more than a career, more than the artist she managed.

  She did not allow herself to consider what he really meant to her.

  In the kitchen, Clara was sliding a tin of muffins into the stove. She was a quiet, dark woman in a white uniform, and Sarah always understood that she, too, saw much and was deceived by little. She lived in one of the most remote cottages, beyond Maria’s studio.

  “Have you seen Ham?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him,” said Clara. But the way she said it made Sarah straighten from the coffee she was pouring.

  “But you know where he is.”

  “I think he’s up, going for a walk.” Clara was one of those rare soft-spoken people who are as kind as they seem. Some made the mistake of ignoring her, but Sarah knew that she saw and heard all that mattered.

  Good. A quiet walk was what Ham needed. “He’s been under so much pressure,” said Sarah.

  “I think he still is.”

  This struck Sarah with the force of bad news on television, a bulletin that had to be believed. Clara was right about things like this. Why had she expected this new day to bring a new, more peaceful Hamilton?

  The animals were waiting for her usual morning gift. The squirrels bounded across the lawn, and then paused to watch her, and to watch the bread spin through the air. At moments like these Sarah knew that human beings were not sole masters of the earth, that the triumph was well-shared by other creatures.

  She did something she knew was unwise. She knew that she should go into her office and deal with Ham’s correspondence. Musicians sent him jiffy bags of tapes which had to be returned with polite thanks. He received dozens of letters a day, and scripts from aspiring playwrights and screenwriters, and he answered all of them—or she did.

  But as she stood, sprinkling the last of the crumbs, she decided to do something that made her uneasy.

  She went looking for him.

  Don’t follow him, she warned herself. Stay where you are, feeding the sparrows.

  The sun was hot and yet the chill of the air carried her through the light, into the shade of the woods. Insects hummed, and juncos flashed through the mesquite. Bay trees in the creek bed filled the air with their sweet scent.

  She wanted to know only one thing, and then she would be at peace. She needed to be assured that Asquith was gone.

  That man, that enigma from Ham’s early days, had some power over him. He was trouble, and he did not belong here. She could not help feeling a deeper, more baritone sensation: that enigma was also dangerous.

  This was a foolish thought. There was no real reason to believe this. But why was she so careful not to make a sound, stepping over what fragments of last-years acorns the jays and squirrels had left behind?

  Be very carefu
l, she told herself. Don’t be afraid, but make no mistakes. Ham was upset for a reason, and she wanted to know what it was.

  The Outer Office was a bright white bungalow through the trees. The sunlight broke into rays through the branches of a buckeye. Standing there in the morning calm she was convinced that she was mistaken. There was no motorcycle anywhere to be seen. At some point in the afternoon, or even the evening, Asquith must have departed.

  Her fingertips tingled with relief. She did not sense a foreign presence. Everything was as it should be.

  But then she knew that it was not. A leaf crackled. A branch lifted, and there was no wind. There was another sound in the woods nearby. Birds scattered from where someone was standing close by her and there was the non-sound of someone standing very still, holding his breath.

  Speke had insisted on staying in the office, helping Maria to pluck the crystal from the floor. He had always thought such a decanter would have a certain amount of strength, but he knew that it was the high-whine in his ears, the keen of blood through his brain that had smashed the crystal, not the fall.

  As soon as it was barely light, the first blue of dawn that made everything bruise-colored, grass, trees and sky, he climbed into clothes and looked, he hoped, like a man about to go for a morning walk.

  “Be careful,” Maria had said, and her tone stayed with him long afterward. He was convinced of it now: she had left him during the night, in the hours before the nightmare.

  He stole from the house, and did not breathe easily until he reached the trees. But then he stopped. He did not want to take another step.

  So he delayed, trailing upward along the path that held to the mouse hole, where he deposited the only gift he had this morning, the remains of a bag of Corn Nuts.

  The morning was new, the day perfect. The lightest dew had touched every leaf, the huckleberry and the hazelnut, the sword fern in the clefts where there was always, even in the summer, the kiss of moisture.

  But all of this was sealed off from him now, like the twigs and lichen of a diorama, enclosed behind glass and apart from the life he was now living. He was delaying, and wasting time, because he was not going on a simple morning walk. He was on a mission to discover whether or not Asquith’s grave had been disturbed.

  He told himself that dead people did not arise to walk again. Perhaps there was an existence after death, perhaps not. He was not sure what he believed. But the apparition he had seen last night was either an amazingly vivid hallucination, or an actual, living human being.

  Asquith must not be dead. Proof would be a grave that was empty, with signs that an unconscious man had stirred, awakened, and fought himself from the earth.

  He wanted Asquith to be alive. But the thought of a living, furious Asquith somewhere in the dry creeks and bay trees made him afraid.

  Doctors had warned him that his insides would kill him if he didn’t start to calm down. You must change your life, everyone had said, every specialist, every smiling professional.

  Onward I go, into this glorious morning. The brave Hamilton Speke, forging ahead through the trees to find an old and trusted friend.

  It didn’t work. Humor was futile. He evaded his duty, and followed a deer path along an outcropping of basalt, to one of his favorite places, the place where the Indians had lived.

  Go back. You are a coward.

  He had played war with friends as a boy, and they had taken turns gunning each other down. He had prided himself on his ability to sprawl realistically, even to the point of lying with his eyes open, a bit of drool spilling from his mouth. Friends had invariably been impressed.

  Go back, Hamilton. You are afraid of what you’re going to see.

  The Ohlones had ground their acorns here. The mortar holes were in the rocks, darkened with black moss. He often came here to be close to something ancient and sane. The Indians had ground the acorns from these very trees into a flour so acrid it had to be leached with hot water. And yet, the land had supported them. An entire culture, a nation of faiths and songs, had lived here, and now it was gone.

  He was stalling again. He must be more afraid than he wanted to admit to himself. He hurried back, nearly running. No, he was not a coward. Not now. The old Ham would be queasy, but not the new, Killer Ham. He could do anything.

  He stood still. This was the place. It was unmistakable. He stood, with his arms slack and strengthless, the blood draining from his brain, making the scene before him go gray.

  The grave was undisturbed. The flat stones he had pressed into place were still there. The rocks around the site would have betrayed no footprints in any event, but he was standing and looking at a resting place which was entirely peaceful. There was no sign that so much as a skunk had come foraging.

  The stone had not rolled away from the tomb. Lazarus had not stirred. Wasn’t resurrection, after all, much like something vile, something one never wished to see?

  Whatever appeared before me, thought Speke, it was not real. It was not Asquith.

  He felt himself smile. It was not a pleasant feeling to know that you were either going mad or being visited by what would have to be a vengeful spirit.

  How heavy the motorcycle was, unpowered by its motor. And big—it was a weighty hulk, the skeleton of an iron and alien race. The helmet dangled from a handlebar as Speke rolled the machine over the leaves. The wheels rolled almost silently, but with a hint of resistance. This thing did not want to move.

  He balanced it at the edge of a dry ravine, a creek bed tangled with fern and poison oak. The wheels would not turn. The front wheel locked, and when he gave the machine an extra push it merely turned aside, teetering, staying where it was. Then, finally, it sank forward, rolling, twisting. There was a rush of sound, tumbling dirt, snapping stems. The motorcycle vanished into the ferns.

  He took a deep breath. He had been erratic yesterday, and today he was weary, stiff, and emotionally drained. In recent years he had suffered panic attacks, an ulcer, and migraines—all the physical byproducts of resounding success. But for all of his present stress, and past frailties, he never considered himself a likely candidate for a straitjacket.

  He returned to the grave. If anything, in the past he had been all too sane, and had required the occasional case of Glenlivet to give him any release at all. A nervous wreck, yes. A psychotic, no.

  This would have been, in normal times, reassuring. But he was confronted with the possibility that he was going to be pursued by something unthinkable.

  Good news, Ham. You aren’t having hallucinations. The bad news is—your house is haunted.

  I’ll ask Maria what to do. Thank God for her help.

  The memory was torture: the memory of that dawn in Cozumel, the sun bursting above the sea, the ground, chalk white, alive with tiny frogs. That had been the morning, the single moment, when their friendship changed. Twisted. Died. He kept remembering the frogs, each creature too tiny to be real. Had they been real? Maybe it had been yet another hallucination.

  Those were the days of the Black Cat, the days he had been unable to work into a play, the days Asquith had claimed as his own.

  His breath caught. There was the whisper of a step, and the bright snap of a leaf. He crouched beside the grave, and listened. Somehow he had never expected ghosts to walk the earth during daylight, but life was proving to be full of surprises.

  If only his legs weren’t trembling so badly.

  There was the sound of another step, a small foot, he judged, kicking a pebble aside.

  He crept into the brush, careful to avoid the green-scarlet leaves of the poison oak. This was no ghost, he told himself. This was a living, warm-blooded human. He could see the shrug of a mesquite as she passed, because he sensed that this was a woman, and he sensed more than that as he gathered himself to confront her.

  Who did she think she was, sneaking around like this? He had trusted her too long, with too much of his life. He was going to put a stop to that. But he needed her, he knew, and admired her.
He would simply explain to her.

  But when he fell through the brush there was no one there. A figure vanished up the trail, and he took a breath to call after her.

  But then he stopped. Perhaps it had been someone else. Perhaps it had been someone—or something—quite different. Jesus, why was he trembling so?

  For the first time ever he knew that the forest was not a friendly place. He felt it watching him, all the little eyes in the shrubs, the beaked, shrill little lives, the small, rodent lives burrowed underfoot, the entire mass of peering lives around him that knew him and did not hold any love for him at all.

  “Sarah!” he called.

  She had seen the grave. She had seen him standing there looking at it, and she knew what it was.

  14

  The sun dimmed. Brothers was burning the bougainvillea. The veined, magenta blossoms withered in the golden flames, and the air was dark with the taste of water which had, until minutes ago, been the stuff of life.

  When the fire had burned long enough, Speke played the hose, spattering the flames. The smoke leaped at once to white steam, and Brothers turned over the ashes with the rake.

  I will have to rely on Maria, Speke thought. I will have to do as she says.

  What impressed him more than anything was his ability to forget, for several minutes at a time, what was happening. He had powers of concentration which were virtually a form of self-hypnosis.

  He could stand in the morning sunlight, chatting with Mr. Brothers about the buck-to-doe ratio, and it was as though no one had ever died, anywhere in the world.

  Perhaps he had inherited this ability. His father had been able to ignore everything, too. “One of the drawbacks of the mental life,” his father had said, wiping his hands with a rag, “is that you have to ignore your surroundings. Sometimes, even the people in the surroundings. You have to ignore what they say, maybe even what they feel, and do your work.”