Inside was the smell of incense, the colors of Halloween. Lamps were kept dim, draped with black linens or lit with dark bulbs.
Exotic music played softly along with other background noises—chimes, running water, even birds. The smells and sounds were
not those of a typical bookstore, but this store on the north side of Chicago was known for more than its books.
The man browsed for a few minutes but hadn’t come here for that. He had called ahead. A woman—big all over, including her
hair that looked like a bad wig, her meaty arms and hands, and her eyes that seemed to look everywhere without seeing anything—sat
behind the counter smoking a cigarette. She didn’t appear interested in asking him whether or not he needed help.
“I called about the book on deaths. Last name is Reed.”
The woman seemed bored as she looked him over. “Cecil or something like that?”
“Cillian Reed.”
It took her a moment to get off the stool she sat on. She disappeared through partial drapes and returned holding a hardcover
book with a Post-it note attached to it.
“
The Visual Guide to Death.
That the one you’re looking for?”
He nodded. The woman didn’t appear fazed in the least. She put the book on the counter, checking the front for a price. She
found the tag on the inside, and for the first time her face took on some expression.
“They tell you it’s fifty-seven dollars?”
He nodded and took three twenties out of his wallet. This obviously surprised the woman, though she didn’t seem easily surprised.
“Not sure why this book is so expensive. It’s in pretty bad shape too. But hey, I don’t price ’em.”
She took his money and gave him back his change. He wasn’t interested in small talk. Not here, not with this woman dressed
all in black, with the tattoos on her arms and neck.
She studied him. “You a fan of horror novels?”
He wasn’t about to tell her that yes, of course he was, and that yes, he was writing his very first novel.
All he did was nod, staring at a trio of jars near the cash register that contained animals suspended in liquid. A coiled-up
snake, what appeared to be a mutating squid, and a floating monkey head.
“Like those?” the woman asked again, prying. “Got a guy who comes in every few weeks with more.”
The big woman reached behind the counter and produced a hardcover book. “Here—I have a few of these. I just finished it. You
might like it. You paid enough for that book.”
He looked at the all-black cover, the ghostly white letters spelling out
Breathe.
“If you like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, check this guy out.”
He nodded at her but didn’t bother saying thanks. He doubted he would read much of the novel.
Cillian Reed had very discerning tastes.
“Where do your ideas come from?”
This was the question he feared the most, the question he least wanted to hear, the question that was always asked. Perhaps
it was prompted by the fact that he was one of the country’s premier writers of horror. “How do you come up with such terrifying
tales?” people always asked, obviously hoping to get some sort of response like, “I was abused as a child” or “I met the devil
when I was seven.” He had his standard quips and comebacks, and usually it was all in good fun. But nothing about this trip
to New York was fun. Answering that question when it came up this time would be impossible.
And Dennis knew exactly why.
Walking back to the hotel, feeling light-headed from the wine shared with his agent over dinner, Dennis felt watched. Everyone
he passed seemed to be staring at him. And not because he had a recognizable face. All sorts of celebrities walked this part
of New York all the time. It was as if these people knew.
At least that’s what his imagination made him think.
It had been this way during the whole trip. They watched him. Strangers in the terminal. Their leery faces followed him as
he walked past or sat reading or boarded the airplane. People on the street and in passing cars and through store windows.
They all watched him with eyes that knew.
Dennis spotted the glowing red sign that signaled his hotel in this part of Gramercy Park. It was a small boutique hotel that
probably cost the publisher some ridiculous amount. Nestled amidst a lush park, Hotel 42 was new and certainly impressive,
feeling like a cross between a modern art exhibit and an Asian painting. Lucy would have hated it, all its ornate excesses
and its cold, dark colors.
Entering the lobby, stepping on crimson carpets with patterns that swooped and showcased the hotel’s emblem, Dennis noted
that this hotel was a perfect reflection of this trip.
New York felt different.
The cab drivers seemed crabbier, the drivers more dangerous, the streets more crowded, the busyness more annoying. It had
been almost exactly a year since his last visit. A year ago had been the last trip Lucy and he ever took together. Nothing
much had mattered then except staying in the moment with her. But the moment was gone now, and Dennis was stuck by himself
in a big city he’d be happy never to see again.
If only he could have persuaded Maureen and James and the rest of them that he didn’t need to come here for the launch of
his new novel. But the advance buzz on the novel and the news about the loss of his wife a year ago made the trip necessary.
Dennis had spent a career saying yes, and this would be no exception. He’d play the game and go through the motions and ensure
another home run. But secretly he hated being here, hated answering the questions, hated being treated like he was special.
Lucy
was
special. He was just a guy who made up strange stories that spooked people.
Dennis stepped into Hotel 42 where a man in a suit stood behind a small desk, the wall behind him adorned with a massive-sized
image of a Kyoto-style woman gazing sadly off to the side. The man simply nodded, acknowledging that Dennis could pass. The
sound of bells echoed as he walked down a narrow hallway lined with wallpaper that looked to him like rivers of blood.
Mystique and expense aside, Dennis couldn’t figure out why they had put him here versus the Marriott or the Hilton or one
of the big guns. He wondered how expensive it was for one night’s stay and felt glad that he didn’t have to pay for it himself.
Money hadn’t been an issue for a long time. But that was just one of the many things Dennis had been left with after Lucy
passed away.
He entered the elevator and punched his floor number. It was close to ten o’clock, and he had a very full day tomorrow, starting
with his annual visit to
The Today Show
early in the morning, then a host of shows before his late afternoon book signing at Barnes & Noble. Just like his usual
September visits, except for two things: Lucy wasn’t there and that other thing.
That other thing.
He pushed the thought out of his mind. He was good at that. Like when he started to dwell too much on Lucy’s absence. He had
mastered the art of not thinking about her. At least he liked to believe that.
As he approached his hotel room, Dennis slowed down on the brand-new black-and-white plush carpet. He could see the door to
his room was slightly open, light peeking from inside.
Dennis edged the door open, looking to see if someone had come to turn down the bed perhaps, give him a special late-night
treat. In a place like this, it might be a fortune cookie dipped in blood with a fortune that said something like, “He who
steals is he who dies.” But as he entered the room that looked like a scene from the Renaissance, with its deep rose and mahogany
colors and its ornate but uncomfortable hand-made furniture, Dennis couldn’t find anyone.
“Hello?” he asked.
The room felt cold, silent. It didn’t look like anybody had been in here. And the only thing worth taking—his laptop, nestled
in his faded leather carrying case—was still there.
Dennis checked the bathroom, the closet, but found nothing. And as he finally sat on the edge of the velvet bedspread, staring
at a painting of a girl running from some unseen attacker, the sky above her ominous with its gray swirls of clouds, he finally
noticed the small envelope next to him.
It was a white envelope with
Dennis Shore
scrawled across the front.
He opened it up and read the short card, immediately tossing it to the ground, jumping off the bed, and searching the room
again, checking under the bed and in the closet and anywhere someone might hide.
Nobody was there. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t been there earlier.
The note was clear enough.
He read it again, then shivered as he tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.
“Lucy was the one who told me to write a ghost story,” Dennis said to the interviewer. “After my first two books came out
and sold nothing, she encouraged me to write in a genre she’d never actually read. She knew my penchant for telling a good
ghost story and how I enjoyed watching and reading them. So I tried it. I guess it worked.”
He had told that story before, but now the anecdote carried more weight. He was a
New York Times
bestselling author of nine novels, soon to be ten. His first bestseller,
Breathe,
was a simple little ghost story about a mother and father who lost their only child and started being haunted by her. The
fact that Lucy, now gone, had told him years ago to try something that had turned into huge success—
that
was the story, not the fact that Dennis was here in New York hawking another book.
So during the day, starting with the fine folks at
The Today Show
, Dennis obliged his interviewers with personal stories. He’d rather talk about Lucy then about the newest book,
Empty Spaces.
Of course, the interviewers always felt like they needed to focus on the book at least a little, but Dennis did his best
to veer off the subject as quickly as possible.
Hovering in the background all day were two very important people: his agent, Maureen Block, and his editor, James Wilcox.
They had remained through the interviews and a fine-dining lunch and now watched the mob that filled the Barnes & Noble bookstore
in Greenwich Village. People of all ages filled the bookstore, from teenagers to seventy-year-old men and women.
“Looks like a bigger crowd than usual,” Maureen had said earlier as they prepared to greet the nervously eager manager of
the bookstore.
The crowd didn’t surprise Dennis, not with the strange buzz going on about this story and about him. His name had been in
the papers a lot more since his wife’s passing, and Dennis knew people felt a connection to his loss. The fact that this book
dealt with a man grieving—it was purely coincidental.
If they knew the truth, they would know how coincidental it really was.
During the book signing, he heard all the usual things.
“My favorite movie of yours is
Sorrow
,” a young man said, as if Dennis had any part in that movie besides signing the agreement to let his novel be adapted for
cinema.
“Are you going to write a sequel to
The Thin Ice
?” a round-faced woman in her fifties asked about the novel that came out last year.
“I can’t read your books late at night.”
“I thought
Scarecrow
was a little too gory.”
“Do you ever scare yourself?”
“Are you getting writer’s cramp from signing?”
“What’s the next book about?”
And then, of course, it came.
“Where’d the idea for this book come from?”
He had probably already signed a hundred copies of
Empty Spaces
, the cover mostly black with his name prominent in red right above a simple image of a path forged through a corn-field.
Dennis looked up from the table near the back of the bookstore and his vision caught on a tall, lean guy maybe in college,
maybe a few years out of it. The young man wore a worn tweed jacket and faded jeans. An aggressive smile hung on his long,
pale face, marked only by the faintest scribbles of facial hair. Looking into his eyes, Dennis noticed something absent. The
dark brown eyes stared at him blankly.
“I get my ideas from lots of places,” Dennis said, scrawling his signature with his black Sharpie.
“Sure, but where?”
Dennis closed the book cover and looked at the young man who had spoken. Something in his tone was just like his glance—off.
“I have a vivid imagination.”
“Do you?”
The stranger didn’t smile after the question. It sounded as though he was really asking.
“Yeah, I do,” Dennis said, shifting nervously in his chair. “At least that’s what everyone tells me.”
“So tell me what this story is about.”
Every now and then one of the fans at these book signings wanted to talk at length. It was hard for him to deny them that,
especially since they had made the special trip to wait and stand in line to meet him.
“It’s about an evil that takes over a town and about one family that tries to prevent it.”
The stranger holding his autographed Dennis Shore book laughed. “Really?”
“Really,” Dennis said, surprised and a little annoyed.
“I wouldn’t exactly describe it that way.”
“Well, you probably need to read the book first before describing it in any way.”
“You’re smug, aren’t you?”
At first Dennis wasn’t sure he even heard the question. A woman behind the tall man heard it, however, and she looked as baffled
as Dennis felt. “Excuse me?”
“Why would I need to read something I know by heart? Authors should know their own writing, shouldn’t they?”
A wave of dread washed over Dennis. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
Maureen was talking with the bookstore manager too far away to hear what was happening. The line behind the young man was
waiting and not paying attention, except for the woman who seemed irritated and impatient. She seemed to be the only one aware
of what was going on.