Ghostwright

by Michael Cadnum

  “You are a brave man, Hamilton,” said Asquith.

  It was not courage, Speke marveled at himself. It was some power Asquith had over him. He felt a deep need to reassure his old friend, as though they were somewhere far away, in entirely different circumstances, years before now.

  Asquith waved him into the chair in front of the desk, an emperor about to release a minister. “We might as well talk, since that’s what you wanted.”

  Moving slowly, Speke crept into the chair, but not until he shifted it just out of reach of any quick gesture Asquith might make. Asquith observed this, and showed his teeth.

  “You see,” he said. “I made no move to hurt you. I am harmless.”

  “I’ve never seen a worse case of it,” Speke offered. He couldn’t help it, somehow consolation seemed appropriate. He had, actually, seen a case nearly as bad. A neighbor had been burning weeds, and had inhaled smoke. He himself had once needed medical help with a nasty episode.

  “I was foolish.” Asquith studied one of his blistered hands. “Poison oak.” He said the words slowly, with wonder. “I do believe I am losing my mind.”

  Speke sat poised on the edge of the chair. Your mind, he thought sardonically, was gone years ago. He did not say this, however. Instead he said, “Clara.” Just that—just the name. He could not let himself keep silent any longer. The outrage was too great. This is the business at hand, he told himself. Do not be distracted, and do not let Asquith worm his way into your trust. The man kills.

  The name meant nothing to Asquith.

  “Clara!” Speke bellowed, slamming his fist into the arm of the chair. I am the dangerous one here, he realized. Asquith is right to be afraid.

  “Who is that?” said Asquith, like someone answering a call.

  Speke controlled himself, blinking tears. No need to bellow. He could handle Asquith. “The woman you killed.”

  “The woman I killed,” echoed Asquith drily.

  “She was a kind, gentle person,” said Speke.

  Asquith seemed not to hear, shivering and starting to scratch the raw flesh of his arms, and then restraining himself. “She was my sister,” he said abruptly.

  Speke stared. “Clara?”

  “No, heavens no.” A snicker. “Maria. She was my sister. I planned all of this, for a long time.”

  “A long time.” Speke said it woodenly, as though recollecting a phrase in a foreign tongue.

  “I was quite brilliant, I think. Even your courtship was planned by me, the master puppeteer, the lynchpin of the masque. The invitation to her gallery, all of it. I planned it all. My sister was bait, continued to be bait, and at last was bait even today. Her cry got you out of the house.”

  Speke had to look away for a moment. Perhaps he had tried to believe Maria was lying. Perhaps he had tried to convince himself that Maria might still be innocent. Certainly she could not have anything to do with Asquith, he had thought.

  His breath was ragged. He was broken. His beloved Mouse had tricked him from the very beginning. Had she ever loved him? It was bad enough to have one’s future evaporate. But now his past was shifting, fading away, his recent past, his love. His tongue was foul, his stomach a cold, black wad.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” said Asquith, “I think she gradually came to love you. It’s true. She came to love you, against all that I could say. You are that sort of man, you see, like King David in the old tales. No matter how he sinned, and how much punishment he required, God loved him steadfastly. There are people like that, Hamilton. You are one beloved of the sun itself.”

  Speke could say nothing.

  “And I. I am a dissembler, an adversary, one of life’s shadows, the sort that must make do with a life behind the baseboard, under the foundation.”

  Asquith’s blistered hand crept toward the poker. It stroked the length of the shaft that lay on the desk. “I knew you would be easy to deceive. You have no idea that there are other people in the world, or what they are really like. Hamilton, you were always so trusting. You believed the world was good.”

  Speke’s voice was broken. “I loved her.” Why, though, did he use the past tense. Didn’t he still love her?

  He shook himself. He had to pay attention to the business at hand, this ugly business of dealing with Asquith, dealing with the truth. He had to go forward.

  “You don’t want to hear more,” said Asquith. “It will make you sick.”

  “I want to hear all of it,” said Speke in a rasp.

  “You don’t.”

  Speke waited.

  “I planned to at last arrive at your estate, your lovely estate, subject of so many magazine spreads, and feign my death at your hand. For it to work, I had to take the worst possible day, a day on which your schedule was especially difficult, even aggravating. I chose my day, with Maria’s help.”

  He waited, perhaps for applause. “Go on,” said Speke.

  “Are you interested in self-torture, Hamilton?”

  “It’s not self-torture. You are causing the pain, and I can take it.”

  Asquith gave a hard little laugh. “You were always the strong one, and I was always weak.” He paced, as though standing still, or sitting, caused him agony.

  “I had an aggravating schedule,” Speke said, to urge the confession—or the speech of triumph—forward.

  “I had to provoke you in some way, which was easy enough. You think your old days of bad temper are over, but they aren’t at all. I’d hoped for something a little more convincing than a mantelpiece. A blow to the tummy, resulting in a burst spleen, convulsions, bloody foam—I was ready to earn an Oscar. But, I did what I could with what you offered me. My leap into the grave with the cry ‘It is I, Asquith the playwright,’ with the same sort of Halloween stage makeup I used in my expiring sweet prince days was all so delicious. You can do miracles with little bags of blood. Do you think it was easy, keeping myself alive on stage-corpse breaths for half an hour? More important than fencing or tap dancing. Underappreciated. Notice, I don’t say how to ‘play’ dead. This wasn’t play.”

  He started, as though recalling something particularly painful. “Buried alive. And buried so carefully, I thought I was going to suffocate while you tamped the rocks over my head so gently. I nearly died.”

  He interrupted himself to savor the presence of his dear friend. He gazed upon Hamilton and knew at last how much he wanted Speke to admire him. That was what this was all about, this little encore, this coda. Love me, Hamilton.

  Speke kept himself steady—and aware. He had already become entangled in a conversation with his adversary, and he played out silence like a line descending far into the deep.

  “The deer,” Asquith continued, “was a bright stroke, unplanned for. I had seen it on the way in, by the gate.”

  “The face on Seven Samurai …”

  “I had my doubts about that. It wasn’t really my style. A little too obvious. Maria did that. Your tape splicer, your video cam. It was simple. It had to work. It simply all had to work, so that I could torture you. We took all the pills out of the house, and I determined that I would gradually drive you mad.” He winced as he slipped his hand into his pants pocket. He pried the lid off a vial of pills. “I’ll swallow a few more of your pills. Maria emptied the house of them. Thank you. I would have suffered even greater misery without them.”

  “I might have attacked the ghost and ended up really killing you.”

  Asquith was chewing three blue pills and four large, chalk white capsules. He swallowed, without water, and coughed. “Maria would soothe you—” He coughed again. “And keep you just this side of doing that. My plan was that you would gradually drink yourself to death, or start mixing pills and booze when Maria finally reintroduced the drugs. ‘Oh, look what I found, some nice pills,’” he said, in an excellent imitation of Maria’s breathy reassurance. “Then, there was your ulcer. Or maybe you wouldn’t die. I didn’t care, as long as you suffered.

  “All along,” Asquith
went on, “I really just wanted you to feel the kind of agony I feel. That’s all. I wanted you to deviate just a little from your ridiculous mental health, and see what it’s like to be someone like me.”

  He paced and did not speak.

  “What did you hope to accomplish?”

  “I saw you smiling in magazines, smiling on television, smiling in your sleep, probably, because you were a success. Success! Do you know what success—fame, money, glory—mean? They mean that you are alive, really alive, while I was not even a person any more. They gave me drugs that made me drool, uncontrollably. A drooling zombie. I, who could play the Goldberg Variations both drunk and blindfolded. Do you remember that favorite trick, Ham, that magic trick that so amazed you?”

  “Which one?”

  “The old Houdini trick with the needles and the thread. I can still do it, I suppose. You put a pinch of needles on your tongue, and a thread, and swallow water from a glass. Remember? Then you put your fingers into your mouth and pull on the thread, the glittering needles dangling from it in a row. It took only what all magic takes, or most of it. Planning. Preparation. The needles already threaded, tucked into the cheek, the disorganized needles all sleight-of-tongued into the other cheek. It’s not easy to deceive, but it’s easier than an actual miracle would be. It’s easier than real power, real life.”

  “Revenge.”

  “Something greater than that. Your soul in exchange for my emptiness.”

  “Spite. Ugly spite.”

  “No, it’s something more celestial than that, Hamilton.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes, let’s swap cute words, shall we? I’ll say ‘celestial’ and you’ll say ‘spite,’ and then you’ll ask me if I’m happy. We’ll make a song of it.”

  Speke stared, biting back a response. Color flushed the room. Control yourself, he commanded his body, but he couldn’t help it. His fists were hard, and he had trouble sitting still. “I always did the work. You were always afraid to believe in work. You thought it would amount to nothing.”

  “You may be right, Hamilton. I can’t tell any more. Were the plays mine, or yours, or someone else’s, some other entity neither of us can claim?” Asquith gave a quiet laugh. “You aren’t afraid of me, Hamilton, are you?”

  Speke waited.

  “It was always so easy to manipulate Maria. She was, you see, afraid.”

  “What do you suppose I’m going to do?”

  “You will try to destroy me.”

  “I’m not as sick as you are.”

  For an instant, a moment so brief it was almost undetectable, Asquith’s eyes flicked to the poker on the desk. Speke sat on the edge of his seat, confident he could react at once to every move Asquith made. The poker lay still, although something made it shiver from time to time, perhaps Asquith’s step as he paced. The iron behaved as though something magnetic in Speke made it point directly toward his heart.

  “I was hoping,” Asquith was saying, “to come to an understanding. Just a little understanding with you. Everything has unraveled.”

  “You are dangerous,” said Speke quietly, controlling his voice with the greatest effort. He remembered the fax Holub had left, the one he had read so carelessly. He remembered the black jam that had been Clara. “How many other women have you killed?”

  The words were terrible. He at once regretted uttering them.

  “An understanding,” Asquith repeated.

  “What sort of an ‘understanding’?” asked Speke.

  Asquith was weeping now, but managed to stop as he said, “I’ve begun making one mistake after another.”

  Speke was surprised by a further burst of compassion. He had to remind himself not to take his eyes off Asquith for a moment. But it was difficult. The old Asquith was in there, somewhere, his old friend who was now suffering so terribly.

  “I’ll tell the world what an inspiration you were,” said Speke. “I think it’s time for everyone to know how much our friendship meant.”

  Asquith turned away, and gazed out the window, just as he had stood when Speke first entered the room. He was no longer weeping. He looked upward through the glass, pensively, as though watching something.

  “You don’t understand,” he said quietly.

  Speke struck at the air with his fist. “I don’t care about the plays any more.” His voice was ragged, but he continued, “What are they worth to me, compared with this horror?”

  “Hamilton,” said Asquith, spinning to face Speke. “You miss the point entirely.”

  “You have a future, Timothy.” A tremor of compassion made it hard for him to speak. “They’ll hospitalize you, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you. You deserve my help. And the truth is—we can help each other.” Speke could not continue for a moment. “The new play is not going well at all, the play about us, about our life together.”

  “The black cat was mine,” said Asquith.

  It was difficult to speak. “I know that—”

  “But you can have it.” He considered Speke, as if reflecting over the words Speke had just spoken. “‘Hospitalize,’” Asquith mocked. “Do you know that at one point I drank so much aquavit that I stopped breathing? When I woke up my lungs were full of fluid. They had to practically teach me to breathe all over again. I used a Triflo II, an Incentive Deep Breathing Exerciser. You have to learn to inhale more and more deeply to get three blue balls to spin up within their little plastic tubes. A toy, to keep the patient from developing pneumonia. You have no idea who I am, what I have done, and what I am doing,” said Asquith, in a tone of amazement.

  “You can have years ahead of you, Timothy. A future. You can have what every living creature has a right to expect—”

  “You don’t understand,” snarled Asquith, and seized the gleaming poker. He slammed the iron shaft into the desk, and the room seemed to leap. There was a gouge in the desk, a bright puncture in the dark surface. “You don’t understand anything about me at all. I am not the old Timothy Asquith, your friend. Not any more. I am something else now, something that wants what it cannot have.”

  He did not release the poker. He held it in one corrupted fist. Speke eased himself to his feet. The span of iron waved in the air, like a baton, like a magician’s wand, as though it had a will of its own, apart from Asquith’s body, as he continued, “I loved you, Hamilton. And you have no idea what that means, do you? Think of it: love.”

  Speke watched the poker. Urged by the need to distract Asquith, and also by the need to know, he asked, “Those little frogs, do you remember them? They were real, weren’t they?”

  “Maybe you are the only person I ever actually loved. Hamilton Speke.” Asquith shook his head slowly. “I give up, Hamilton. I quit entirely. I give up on being a human being. I want to be something else, some other sort of creature, something far more alive.” He turned again, and gazed out the window, looking upward.

  Something out there, Speke told himself.

  “Yes,” said Asquith. “I do believe that the frogs were really there.”

  There is something out there that troubles Asquith.

  “Don’t you like this last soliloquy, Hamilton? Remember Stanislavski’s caution: ‘Has my imagination initiative?’ I could not have done what you did. I could never finish a single scene, a single act. Hammering the plays into works that could float upon the light, and not sink. Knitting life into a costume. Answering one question after another on the trashy beach of publicity, but most of all believing in it, having the faith. The plays are yours, the songs, all of it. You deserve them.”

  Speke could barely whisper. “Where is Maria?”

  “She’s entirely happy.”

  It was all but impossible to ask. “Where is she?”

  Asquith gave that otherworldly glance, that actor’s start—the ability to hear the far off bell, the warning carronade, the call that lives only in the empty, white spaces of the script.

  What, Speke wondered, did he hear?

&n
bsp; When Asquith spoke again, he said, “She’s just outside. My loyal sister, netted by her fear of me, and by her love. She is outside, dear Hamilton, in the arms of a tree, where no harm can ever befall her again.”

  37

  The chain that fastened the gate was a living thing to her, something monstrous, an iron, writhing knot. Sarah tugged at it, knowing that would be futile.

  It had looked black and new-forged, but when she put her hands on it she could see the dark glaze of years of dust on the surface of the links. The dirt was clawed where someone had dragged the chain into place, up the drive, from the direction of the house.

  Someone desperate had done this. Someone determined to the point of remarkable strength. Someone who wanted Sarah to stay far away.

  She had to hurry to his side, and there was no way in. It was a harsh joke, a vicious lesson. Love was nothing compared to a Gordian tangle and a steel lock.

  “We can dig under the fence,” in a tone so definite he sounded cheerful.

  “The spears are sunk far into the ground,” she said. “They are made to deter people who might want to ‘dig under the fence.’”

  “Then it’s hopeless,” he replied. When she did not answer, he added, “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  She dusted off her hands.

  “We can climb over,” said Bell, with just the least touch of doubt in his voice.

  Her fist closed around one of the spears. The thought of scaling the gate made her wince. The top of it was lined with black spear points, not mere ornamentation. The iron fence along the road to either side, too, was a line of black spears.

  “Don’t even try,” she said.

  “I might be able to make it.”

  She had always found the black spears attractive, in an unremarkable way, without really noticing them. Now they were arrayed against her, weapon upon weapon keeping her from where she belonged, and what had been intended to be decorative would serve just as well to do harm. Ham had never given a thought to security, but someone had, in the past.