He didn’t come out here at night to get caught up in the melancholia of life. He didn’t have any room in his life for that. Yes, he missed Audrey and Lucy, and yes, it was a normal emotion. But he knew how to control those feelings, right? He told himself this over and over even as he found himself pining away for his deceased wife and grown daughter every single time he saw a sea of stars.
I came out here because I saw something.
At the edge of the river, he tried to spot what had been glowing. There was nothing. He waited and watched for several moments.
Someone on the river perhaps? Occasionally someone decided to take a boat down the river at nighttime. It wasn’t all that dangerous. There were spots that were tricky and certain places you couldn’t pass. But he doubted someone was actually out there at this time of night.
There were no sounds, no teenagers with flashlights, no helicopters hovering above.
I know I saw something.
Dennis waited. They had moved here back in 2002, a couple years after the publication of Breathe, when things were really getting interesting with his publishing career. It had always been Lucy’s dream to live in Geneva along the Fox River, so Dennis surprised her with this. He knew the house was one of those she loved to look at when they drove by. You could just see the top of the Victorian house back then; now, because of the trees and landscaping, not to mention the fence, you couldn’t see their house at all from Route 31.
Seven years should’ve felt longer. But it felt like they had moved into this house just yesterday. And now it was just him, outside trying to find what he had seen on the water, trying to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
Give me another ten, fifteen years, and that’s when I’ll be going senile, he thought as he turned back toward the house. But not yet. I’m not crazy just yet.
He heard a shuffling in the bushes and walked over to see what it was. A cat jumped out and scampered across the lawn. For a second he thought it was Buffy, the cat Audrey had brought home a month after Lucy passed away, the cat she had left behind after going to college. But the color told him otherwise.
This cat was white and seemed to glow in the dark.
It must belong to his elderly neighbors. They probably hadn’t fed it in a week or two.
Maybe it was walking on the water, Dennis thought. Right. That would explain it. He stared up at the heavens before shaking his head and gritting his teeth.
He’d give anything to know she was up there watching him.
Anything.
6.
It had been last year, the night before the benefit in New York, when Dennis found the novel.
He still had nothing of his own to read to the gathering, not even a brief section of a chapter. And his conversation with Maureen earlier that week still resonated in his head.
“Who’s going to be there?”
“Spielberg, for one.”
That’s just perfect. Is it possible to option a book that doesn’t exist?
“Any other big names?” Dennis asked the familiar voice on the other end of the phone.
“Lots,” Maureen said, rattling off a list of who’s who that would be attending the fund-raiser. With each name, Dennis winced, glad he wasn’t talking to her in person.
It was around lunchtime, and Maureen was returning his call. He hoped she would have some kind of solution for him when he told her he had nothing to read, but the literary agent was unusually silent and offered no ideas to help him out.
“You can read just a portion of it,” she eventually said, her tone asserting that surely he had a portion to read.
“I don’t think I can,” was all he would reveal.
Again, Dennis got the silent treatment. He could tell Maureen was alarmed. Finally she cleared her throat and seemed to regain her composure.
“Just read anything—they’ll enjoy it,” the New Yorker said. “Don’t you have an old short story laying around? The start of a novel you never finished?”
“Lots of literary crap,” Dennis said, “but nothing like my last nine novels.”
“You have a few days—you can do it.”
I don’t think you understand, Maureen.
As with the last three books he had written, Dennis had not given the publisher an outline or a synopsis. That’s how much they trusted him. They knew the story would be in the same vein—that’s what they wanted and cared about. No creative diversion. Readers wanted something to scare the snot out of them, to keep their eyes open after slipping under the covers, to give them second thoughts about opening a closet or going down to the basement or even turning off the light. Even if it made them terrified of what was under the bed, readers still wanted something scary to put on their bed stand at night.
“What’s this one about again?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s a romantic comedy,” he joked. “About a man searching for his missing wife and discovering this whole underground… thing.” Dennis laughed.
“Thing?” Maureen asked.
“Yeah—you know, cults, witches, all that fun stuff. Evil.”
“Sounds perfect.”
The two of them often laughed about the amazing success of his books and the reading public’s appetite for horror. He had done everything, from his haunted house story to his ghost story, even to his demon-possession story, which people often said should have been another sequel to The Exorcist because it was so frightening and disturbing. This was his missing-persons story. And as much as he might have liked to do something else, to tell a story that didn’t have severed limbs and evil spirits and lots of blood, he had to take this idea and weave it into the Dennis Shore world. So that meant it wasn’t just a missing-persons story. Evil rested at the heart of the book, at the heart of each of his books, and readers would be sucked in and become too invested to stop reading when the horror got turned up.
“What are you calling this again?”
“Empty Spaces,” he said.
“Is that another Floyd song?”
“Yep. Keeping the chain.”
“It’s worked this far.”
“The writing’s not working. Nothing’s coming. Nothing at all.”
“When you say nothing, Dennis, do you mean—”
“Yeah, I mean nothing.”
“Okay. Let’s see.” Maureen was quiet, surely thinking through the ramifications of what “nothing” meant. “So you write a scene between now and Saturday. No problem. It doesn’t even have to be the beginning.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“And that chapter can jump-start the writing. That’s all you need.”
“Sure.”
“You can do this in your sleep. It’ll be great. Now, how long are you going to be in New York? I have a few people who want to meet you, and I was thinking we could go to this great restaurant—”
Reliving this pep talk from the previous week did him no good now that it was the night before he was supposed to go to New York. Those who sold and marketed art didn’t know how difficult it was to actually create it.
Dennis sat in the squeaky writing chair he had owned for fifteen years, ever since he started writing. He had penned four unpublished novels sitting in this chair, those dreadful things that still sat in his closet and that truly were unpublishable. He had tried too hard to be the next Hemingway or Faulkner and failed on all accounts. All four of those books were terrible. He had written his first two published literary novels in this chair too, the two novels that garnered his best reviews… and that sold under five thousand copies each. And that’s when he had made the fateful decision, again in this chair, to do his best Stephen King impersonation. And what happened was Breathe, a ghost story that sold millions and made him a household name.
As he sat rocking back and forth in the chair, he stared at the words he’d scrawled after talking to Maureen: One chapter. One scene. Any scene. Several thousand words.
He looked at the words, then added an exclamation point at the end.
> In only eight hours he would be boarding a limo to go to O’Hare and fly to New York, where he was supposed to give a reading to a special VIP dinner of more than five hundred people.
Like Jerry Seinfeld and Oprah and a hundred different big-name actors, actresses, musicians, athletes, and authors.
That’s all. No pressure.
“Spielberg for one,” the voice of his agent said again.
Standing in front of people didn’t bother him, and celebrities didn’t intimidate him. But reading something that wasn’t entertaining—that horrified him.
I could just read them something from one of my older novels. Stephen King loves to read the puking scene from Stand by Me. I’ve been in the audience twice when he’s done it.
But people wanted something they hadn’t heard before. Something exclusive to make it worth their while.
He had made a promise. And he had his agent and publisher to think about, both of whom would be there, sitting at the table with him.
That’s why it was nearly two in the morning, and he was going through his closet, searching for something, anything.
A scene never seen before. A chapter never typeset. But Dennis knew it was impossible. He wasn’t going to find anything.
Seinfeld would deliver hilarious one-liners and Oprah would talk about saving the world. Would they really care what Dennis Shore the horror novelist was writing about? Why should he care what he read out loud?
Why is it so hot? Why am I sweating?
The stereo pumped in the loud rock music. He went by his desk and finished off his Diet Coke. It didn’t matter what time it was. It felt like it could be ten in the morning or two in the afternoon. He was wide awake, and he suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe.
I’m in serious trouble.
Horror wasn’t somebody chasing you with a chain saw. It was standing in front of a room full of somebodies, feeling like you didn’t belong there, having to deliver something you didn’t believe in, reading something that didn’t impress anybody.
The stacks of paper in his closet seemed endless. One day he would organize everything. He had said that five months ago to Lucy, who had told him she would help him. But she was running out of time to help him with this project or any project.
All of his writing was in here. He even had a filing system which used to work but now was overloaded and disjointed. There was everything from folders and files of previous novels to book ideas to works in progress to interesting articles to his massive, stuffed contracts file folder.
There was a hard copy of Sorrow, his fourth horror novel.
There was a photo album next to it.
There were a handful of foreign editions of Run Like Hell.
Dennis sucked in a breath. Tried to figure out a plan.
Tell them I’m sick.
That was a horrible idea. So were the other ten he had.
No, I need to sit my butt in that seat and write, advice I’ve given a hundred, maybe a thousand aspiring novelists who want to see their name in big print on a book cover and want to be one of the headliners at a big-name gig in New York.
Just then something in the closet caught his eye.
It was colored paper. Orange paper in fact.
It was under another thick manuscript—some early draft of one of his unpublished novels. He didn’t remember ever printing anything on orange paper.
It was a manuscript printed in very small handwriting. There had to be at least 250 pages, maybe 300.
The title was one word that didn’t ring a bell.
Reptile.
Neither did the author’s name.
Cillian Reed.
Dennis turned the page and started reading. He couldn’t remember reading this before, and he knew he would have remembered.
The opening sentence was good.
Chilling and creepy and good.
The first person he killed didn’t scream and didn’t cry because she was too surprised that her son could do such a thing.
He continued reading, walking across the office to the leather love seat against one wall. He sat down, turning the first page.
The actual killing was on page two, and it took his breath away, surprising him, making him want to know what would happen next.
He devoured the next thirty pages in perhaps fifteen minutes. He got goose bumps. Glanced over his shoulder. Felt a bit panicky.
For the first time in a long time, he wanted to keep reading, he wanted—needed, in fact—to see what happened to the young woman, the girlfriend at the center of the story, to see if she got out alive.
Where did this come from, and who is Cillian Reed?
He looked for anything else in the manuscript—an address or an e-mail or even a date—but he couldn’t find anything.
Dennis searched his closet for half an hour. It was almost three thirty in the morning.
He couldn’t find anything else. No more orange sheets, no more pages with typewriter imprints, nothing else connected with this. Just a manuscript that appeared out of nowhere.
As he returned to his computer, the screen sleeping the same way he should have been, the orange pages lying on the edge of the couch, Dennis suddenly had an idea.
2004
The creak in the door awoke him.
One hairy finger wrapped around the edge of the door, then another, then an entire spider scurried across the carpet toward him.
He had never seen a tarantula before, but it fascinated him.
It crept closer.
He stared in front of him at the pages, so many pages, all written with black ink on orange paper.
He looked at the last page he had written.
A rustling near the door brought his attention back. Another spider. He wondered where they were coming from.
Then another, another, one more.
The first furry creature had made it to his desk and now rounded the edge to go underneath, to his bare feet. When it made its way over his feet, onto his toes, he wasn’t surprised. It felt odd, itchy, but he didn’t move, not even when he felt the bite.
The tiny teeth dug into his skin and made him wince, but he remained still.
He wrote another page, then looked up again. There were spiders crawling up the walls. One crawled up his leg, toward his lap.
He looked at the bottle on his desk. Then at the pills next to it. But that was just liquor and speed, nothing crazy, not enough to make him hallucinate.
It might have been some of the other things he took. He couldn’t remember the day, the time, the year, anything, nothing but the story.
He was almost finished.
Ten—eleven—twelve?—days ago, he had started this. Writing in a mad, desperate, frenzied state, letting the drugs and booze keep him going. Going going going.
“Gone,” he said to the tarantula that crawled up his belly toward his face.
Now they were dropping from the ceiling too.
Onto his head, his arms, his hands.
He kept writing.
The music played, and it helped him too.
It was so loud.
In his head, everything was loud.
And the words kept coming, like yesterday’s lunch you couldn’t help puking, like a deep, dark secret you couldn’t help telling, like a deep, dark hole you couldn’t help falling into.
“The lunatic is in my head,” someone sang, and he agreed.
Tarantulas were everywhere, and he brushed them away, his pen running out of ink.
“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”
He was running out of adjectives, and the sentences were running out of structure, and finally finally finally he finished.
And he wrote the words, “The End.”
And then, covered in spiders, furry, hairy, thick spiders, he rested his head on the book, his first, his masterpiece.
This will get Dennis Shore’s attention, he thought. This time he won’t simply send me a generic form letter. This time he’l
l take notice. He will have to.
The words went around and around and around.
Scared
1.
Dennis.
He stopped typing for a moment, the voice a whisper but somehow heard above the music blaring from his computer. He could see the word count on the bottom of his document, the number continuing to get higher and higher. It already read 35,000 words. He was soaring.
Dennis.
He turned around but knew the only things behind him were bookshelves. Dennis muted the song, waited.
I’m not far.
His head jerked left. Toward the closet.
Don’t stop looking.
He stood and walked over to where the voice seemed to be coming from. It was her voice. He could picture her and sometimes smell her and could even sometimes hear her when he was trying, but not like this, not this way.
It’s time.
The door was closed. He turned the handle.
The faint light spilling into the closet from his office showed him enough. He saw the bare legs, so long, and the ankles. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The shirt was wet with blood, as was the carpet next to her. A fresh wound bled from her head, her eyes closed, her mouth caked in blood.
And just as Dennis was about to go to her, her eyes opened. A bloody cracking mouth spoke.
I will always love you. Always. Forever.
And then a ping sounded, the ping of an incoming e-mail, the ping awakening him from this deep sleep at his computer.
The music had stopped. He checked the time. In half an hour it would be midnight.
Dennis looked over at his closet door and saw it was closed. His head hurt. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. For the first time in—well, maybe the first time ever—the thought of that door and what lay on the other side of it scared him. The stillness of the suburban night and this empty house and that horrific vision and that door…
Come on, Den. Get a grip.
He jogged his mouse to wake up his computer, which he was sure wasn’t dreaming about his dead wife. The empty page on the screen was the first thing he saw.
He hadn’t written 35,000 words. He didn’t even have 3,000 words.
Dennis shook his head and cursed. He decided to open up his e-mail, which probably wasn’t the best idea but there was nothing else to do.
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