Ghostwriter

by Travis Thrasher

  Audrey smiled, her wavy hair bouncing as she moved around the kitchen. The girl never stopped. She had a drive just like…

  Just like you used to have before there was no need to have a drive anymore.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Just fine?”

  “Don’t give me that. There’s nothing there.”

  “Good to hear that.”

  “But that doesn’t mean there can’t be.”

  Dennis asked if she had any plans while she was here.

  “I’ve called several friends. I won’t be in your hair.”

  “I want you to be in my ‘hair.’ ”

  “That sounds weird.”

  “You know what I mean,” Dennis said.

  “Yeah, but I have a life too, you know.”

  “Okay. But my time is your time.”

  “I want to go see her.”

  Dennis held her eyes for a long moment, then looked away. He knew what she was talking about. It had been a long time since he had gone to Lucy’s grave with Audrey. Or even on his own.

  “Okay.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Yes.”

  “Last time you didn’t.”

  “I know. I will. I promise.”

  “She might be gone, but she’s never leaving us, you know. There are reminders of her every day of my life.”

  “Isn’t that something I should say to you?” he asked as he walked over and put his arm around her.

  “Probably, but you’re not good at the sentimental stuff. Blood and guts. That’s your specialty.”

  “What a legacy,” Dennis said, rolling his eyes.

  3.

  Blood and guts.

  He could hear Audrey’s words in his head. That was his specialty. At least it used to be.

  After spending an hour persuading him to let her go, Audrey had gone out to see one of her friends. He wanted to warn her but didn’t know what to say. “Stay away from any ghosts you see.” She would be more worried about him than ever before. All he was able to do was tell her to come home quickly.

  As Dennis sat in his office worrying, staring at the blank screen, the familiar routine mildly comforting even though he had nothing he wanted to write about—his e-mail inbox began to fill, the pings providing yet another distraction. When there were twelve waiting to be read, he decided to check them.

  He knew who they were from.

  All dozen e-mails were from Demonsaint4424@gmail.com. Some were simple:

  Busy Dennis?

  Others had profanities, hundreds of times over. One came with an attached snapshot of that afternoon, taken in the kitchen as Dennis spoke with his daughter.

  He’s just toying with you, that’s all. Just ignore it. Ignore the e-mails and Cillian.

  Dennis forced himself to start focusing on his novel. He typed something just to prove he could at least do that.

  Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow. Sometimes if you stub your foot, you’ll get a big fat toe.

  Dennis continued on with this gibberish, reassuring himself that at least he could type, he could spell, he could complete whole sentences.

  And then the tapping stopped.

  His middle finger pressed I and stayed there. He couldn’t release it. The computer followed his command.

  He glanced and saw the caps-lock key lit. He tried desperately to remove his finger from the I, but it wouldn’t come off. It was stuck, some unseen force holding it there. Slowly, one by one, as he tried to wiggle free of the wireless keyboard pad, his fingers found themselves locked onto letters.

  And as the letters continued forming, he stood and tried to jerk the keyboard away. But it was stuck. He shook his arms up and away from his chest and even used his knee to brace against the keyboard.

  This is insane.

  He tried to break the keyboard in half, but it suddenly became heavier and started to glow.

  This is all in your mind, Dennis. Nothing is happening. Your fingers aren’t superglued to the keyboard.

  But a ripping pain told him otherwise.

  His face winced, and he screamed. The wireless pad had turned into a red, glowing blade, a long knife that looked like it had just been taken out of the fire.

  He wailed and jerked his arms and heard his skin sizzling and saw pieces of flesh dripping off the knife.

  And as he screamed and shut his eyes, he collapsed to the carpeted floor.

  4.

  This is all in your mind.

  But the sickly pink and red hands said otherwise.

  He could barely dial 911. Dennis held the phone between his chin and shoulder, his hands throbbing, shaking, his entire body shuddering.

  This is not real. You’re going to wake up any moment now.

  But he already had woken up. And he had found his keyboard monitor split in half across the carpet. The burns on his hands were real. The tears lining his face were real. The paramedics who arrived were real. The bandages placed over his hands were real. The ride to the hospital was real.

  His stomach rolled and ached, his body shaking, and it wasn’t because of the pain. It was because of fear. He would have thrown up if he hadn’t already done so.

  The snarling cry of terror filled his heart and his mind and his soul. And he had no idea what to do about it. Not anymore.

  5.

  Maybe this is what really happens.

  You find yourself staring at the keyboard, your fingers unmoving.

  Then you stand up, holding the wireless pad with fingers that have control but a mind that doesn’t. You shake and rattle and roll but nothing happens because you don’t let it happen. Then you crack the monitor in half and walk out.

  You go downstairs and turn on a burner on your stove. Then, as the gas flames warm the black iron grill, you pick it up and sear your hands and scream and wail and imagine that you’re holding your keyboard.

  This of course is the only logical explanation because fingers don’t just get magically stuck to keyboards. And keyboards don’t suddenly get magically turned into hot molten knives. And minds don’t suddenly just go loopy.

  It takes a long time for a mind to melt away.

  Say, nine books or so.

  That’s when the imagination turns on you like a tidal wave. And when you’re forced to lie to the doctors about your third-degree burns, the same way you’re going to have to lie to your daughter and everyone else.

  The same way you’ll lie to yourself that you actually turned on the stove because you know for an absolute positive fact that you didn’t.

  The only thing you did was write a book about a killer who liked burning things, especially his victims, and he would often work on them slowly and deliberately.

  Many times starting with their hands…

  October 30, 2009

  Rain caresses his forehead, his cheeks, the back of his neck. For a moment Bob stops, looking off across the fields to the highway in the distance. Flickers of light shine from moving cars. He’s alone for miles. Nobody will ever see the hole he just dug. Nobody will ever dig up the two bodies he has thrown into it.

  There is already a pool of water forming at the base of the hole, where the trash bags lay.

  He decided to give them a resting place. They were his parents. Whatever that meant, it meant something different. The regular place he put bodies—the stalls in the barn—just didn’t seem to fit. This hole in the middle of nowhere fit. They came from nowhere and ended up nowhere.

  Lightning lights up the ground. Behind him are the small house and the big barn.

  His back aches, but he piles the mud and dirt back into the hole.

  His hands are blistered and raw.

  But he knows their work is not done. Not yet.

  As he digs he thinks of her, he thinks of them.

  He will soon be heading back to town and to the life that awaits him there.

  Wife and Mother

  1.

  Dennis awoke with a deep ache. Even with
pain meds he hadn’t been able to sleep well. His body burned one minute and shivered the next. He sat up and looked at the bandages on his hands. The thought that ran through his mind had nothing to do with his hands or the fact that he might be losing his mind. It wasn’t about the ghosts or the paranormal or the ache or his writer’s block.

  It was about Lucy.

  She passed away a year ago.

  That was why Audrey was home.

  That was what October 30 would always mean.

  And the pain that beat inside him was worse than any third-degree burn could be.

  He looked at the photo of her smiling at the age of thirty-five, greeting him in the photo like she did every morning. He delicately grabbed a T-shirt out of the dresser, walked into the bathroom, and examined himself in the mirror. The bags under his eyes said enough, and if they could be unpacked they would say more. His eyes were beginning to look more withdrawn than resilient.

  He found some jeans, and his eye caught the plaque Lucy had put up many years ago, one of the many memories he passed by every day of his life.

  EVERY DAY IS A GIFT

  He looked at the plaque long and hard, then sat down by the big bathtub that had gone unused for a year. Dennis stared at the plaque as if someone had just hung it there.

  I hope you’re not up there, looking down at me, not like this, he thought. Because if you are, you’ve seen everything that’s happened and you probably can’t help but be disappointed.

  A deep throb made him wince. He stood up and found some more pills to swallow.

  2.

  “How are you feeling today?”

  “Good,” Dennis said, lying to Audrey.

  He had called her from the hospital yesterday with assurances that he was okay. Even though he told her not to come, Audrey had come to Delnor Hospital with her friend Natalie to make sure he was okay. The bandages on his hand convinced her it wasn’t quite the tiny household mishap he’d said it was. And even after asking half a dozen times if he was telling her the truth, Dennis never wavered.

  “I was an idiot for grabbing the grates. I thought the burners were off.”

  “But how would you think that?” Audrey kept asking.

  She didn’t understand such a stupid thing because he hadn’t done something stupid. But what was he supposed to say?

  “I was typing and my computer suddenly became glued to my fingers, then became hot as molten lava.”

  She would think he was losing his mind, that too many horror stories were turning his brain into Jell-O, the kind they feed you at hospitals.

  So he stuck with the explanation and continued even this morning.

  “Did you sleep okay?” Audrey asked.

  “Well enough.”

  He hated lying to her, but he didn’t want her to worry.

  Audrey kicked him out of the kitchen. “I’m making the coffee because I like how I make it better than you. And I’m cooking breakfast. You’ve lost all your privileges in the kitchen.”

  He nodded, seeing if he could even lift the remote. The bandages didn’t allow him to pick things up. He had to scoop them in his palms.

  Audrey watched him as he tried.

  “Dad?”

  He looked at her, saw the same few freckles Lucy used to have, those dark eyes looking at him with concern.

  “What happened to you? What’s really going on?”

  Tell her. Just tell her.

  “Audrey, look—it’s complicated.”

  “Are you okay? I’m worried about you. Not just your hands but you.”

  “Don’t be. I’m fine. I am.”

  “But what happened? Did you try to do that to yourself?”

  “No. Of course not. Audrey, look at me. I’d never do anything like that.”

  “I just thought—with Mom’s anniversary—that maybe…”

  He came over and put his arms around her. “No. I didn’t do this. I swear. I’d never do anything to hurt myself or hurt you.”

  Audrey started crying, and Dennis knew it wasn’t just for him.

  “One year,” was all she said.

  It was all she had to.

  3.

  Does it matter what one wears to a gravesite?

  Do the dead watch, and if they do, why visit the cold, unmoving stone that rests above their decomposing human remains?

  Does a lack of tears mean a lack of feeling?

  “Dad?”

  “I’m coming.”

  But what Dennis was doing was sitting in the Volvo SUV they’d picked up earlier that morning. It was as if nothing had touched it, the work on it was that good. He couldn’t help hoping his hands would turn out the same way.

  Now he couldn’t get himself to get out of the car, even as Audrey stood outside the cracked window.

  He managed to climb out and follow her.

  Lucy had told him that she didn’t really care where she was buried. Both of her parents were buried in the hometown they grew up in: Elgin, Illinois. She eventually decided to be buried in the small cemetery where her parents were, in the plot next to theirs.

  Burying her anywhere hadn’t seemed right, just like the dirt that went over her casket or the cries from people he’d never seen or met. Nothing about the way they said good-bye or the way she died so soon or the way the color of the sun was slightly different after she passed was right, nor would it ever be right.

  The only reason Dennis was here today was because of Audrey.

  But that’s not true, is it, Dennis?

  He knew he needed to be here, that the teeny, tiny little glimmer of hope that Lucy still lived on mattered and meant something, that it meant enough for him to come back and pay respect and remember the woman he fell in love with and would always love.

  Even the words on her tombstone didn’t feel right.

  Lucy Nessa Shore

  March 18, 1957–October 30, 2008

  Cherished Wife and Mother

  It felt wrong. Four words to describe someone. It was like having to describe a book he’d spent three years working on in just three sentences, yet it was a thousand times worse.

  Standing there, his daughter in his arms, sunshine spilling through the trees, the grass still green around the stone, Dennis thought of Lucy.

  I could write books the rest of my life and never sum up the joy and goodness of your soul, Lucy.

  Audrey wasn’t emotional, and neither was he. The cry earlier that morning had gotten it out for his daughter.

  Where are your tears, Dennis? They’ve been strangely missing for a long time, haven’t they? Are your tear ducts broken, just like your heart?

  A distant memory floated by like a flower petal blowing in the wind.

  It was when his first book got published.

  The best feeling wasn’t holding the book in his hand or flipping through the pages or seeing his name in bold print.

  It was seeing Lucy’s face when he gave her the first copy, signed.

  Her eyes lit up, her face so strong and so proud, her expression saying more than words ever could even though she tried.

  “I’m so happy for you. Just remember us little people when you make it big. And you will, Dennis. I know you will.”

  Even though his first two books tanked, Lucy’s faith never wavered, not one bit.

  She was so good, in a thousand different ways.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  He sighed. “Just thinking about how she never stopped believing in me, even when I did. Even when I almost threw it all in.”

  “Threw what in?”

  “The writing.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “She encouraged me even after my first two books went nowhere. She got me to write Breathe when I was contemplating giving up the notion of being a writer.”

  “She never doubted either of us.”

  “I know. I think I have enough doubt for all of us.”

  “Really?
You don’t ever show it.”

  Dennis nodded, staring at Audrey. “I mask it. I bury it in words and stories. All the angst in here,” he said, tapping his heart, “goes into those stories.”

  “Does that get rid of it?”

  “No. I don’t know if anything ever does.”

  “Mom would disagree.”

  “Yes, she would. And you know, maybe—maybe she was right.”

  “Well, if she was right, then she still is.”

  Dennis smiled. Audrey took after him, but she was still both of them, still so much of Lucy that he felt fortunate to be part of her life.

  “You think she sees us right now?”

  “Yeah,” Audrey said. “And she’s wondering why your hands look like they’re auditioning for a mummy movie.”

  And then, out of the blue, like when a story took an unexpected turn and his fingers kept going and his mind had to try to keep in stride with them, Dennis spoke out loud:

  “I still love you, Lucy.”

  Audrey smiled and seemed relieved to hear him say that. “Me too, Mom.”

  The wind picked up as if in answer to their words.

  4.

  Garbage strewn all over their lawn greeted them back home, ruining the moments shared earlier.

  For a second Dennis flashed back to the night he and Maureen found pages of his books scattered everywhere. But this was different. These scraps and pieces were actual garbage— plastic bags, crunched-up boxes, an old glove, paper of all sorts, a soup can.

  “I can’t believe how much garbage that family has.” Dennis would have normally gripped the steering wheel in anger, but his bandaged hands wouldn’t allow him to. The anger still burnt inside him. This is ridiculous.

  As he opened the SUV door, Dennis realized how much the wind had been picking up. Audrey’s hair blew around her face.

  He had to do something about this.

  But as he reached for the cell phone in his pocket, he realized he hadn’t carried it with him. He was unable to pick the thing up.

  He used the regular phone inside.

  Somebody needed to talk to the neighbors, someone who would get their attention.

  He called Ryan.

  5.

  Do you see me, Lucy?