Manuscript in the Dark

Manuscript in the Dark

What he sent wasn't long, and by the second time through it my hands were off the keyboard and flat on my thighs, and I still hadn't let go of the breath I took at the first line:

"Have you ever thought about what it feels like for a victim to have her life taken at the exact moment she reaches the peak of physical pleasure?"

I got up out of the chair. I walked to the window and back, and when I sat down again the sentence was still on the screen with the cursor blinking after it.

Then something came up underneath it, a wave of excitement, sick and corrupt, and a good deal louder than the first feeling.

That was it. The strange, cruel, half-haunted material my stuck brain had been starving for all these months. I typed and had to go back and fix two words, and my eyes stayed on every character on the screen. The suspicion I started with was gone, and in its place was a writer looking at dark treasure.

I held my breath, swallowed against a dry throat, and typed straight through:

"What do you mean? Spell it out. A murder during sex? That motif isn't new in this market, so what makes you sure it can carry something nobody's written?"

The reply blinked back in under a minute. GhostInk's lines came fast and smooth, like a man who had been waiting a long time for me to step into it:

"The difference is in how the killer thinks, my friend. He doesn't use crude violence; he uses a complete understanding of human physiology. He turns the suffocation of death into the last step of pleasure. The victim has no idea her life is being taken until her pupils fix for good."

I sat still. Scenes started drawing themselves in my head without any help from me. I put my chin back in my hands and typed:

I reached for something to write on and came up with a gas receipt out of my coat pocket, Poughkeepsie, $41.20. I put three lines on the back of it in block capitals and underlined the third one. Then I turned it face down on the desk and went back to the keyboard.

"Cruel. But how does the detective in the book ever pull that apart, when with no violent injury the case reads as a heart attack in bed and nothing more?"

"That's the perfect trap I'm building for your book," GhostInk wrote back, every line of it going over my skin like something mild and poisonous. "The killer leaves one mark, and he leaves it on the room instead of on the woman: one strange fold in the bedsheet, one artificial scent that has been canceled out, and one keepsake swapped for another, which only a mind built the same way would ever catch."

"What's the keepsake?" I typed it fast, with nothing over how badly I wanted it.

"I think that's enough bait, my friend," GhostInk wrote, and put a flat dash under it. "I've shown you the magic I own. If you want the whole outline, the case structure, the psychological map of the characters, and every planted detail for the opening chapters, we have to talk about a number."

I stopped. My breathing had gone rough with disappointment, and the morbid curiosity had already carried me too high up to stop:

"What are your terms? Name the price."

"Fifteen thousand dollars. One hundred percent up front, through an encrypted wallet. The moment the money lands, the detailed outline and the first case structure go straight to your email."

Fifteen thousand dollars on the screen took the last of my hesitation off clean.

There was $23,000 in my bank account at that point, what was left of our savings after Emily's fertility treatments and the cost of living in the city. If I sent $15,000, I would have about a third of it left to live on.

But ambition, and the humiliation of Emily threatening divorce, and the need to get my name back had swallowed whatever judgment I had left. I set my teeth until my jaw hurt and told myself this was an investment, the one that would save the rest of my life.

I opened the wallet and entered the encrypted address he had given me, my hands unsteady on the keys. Confirm transfer.

The address ran 42 characters. I checked it against his message three times, six characters at a pass. The network fee came to $11. The room was cold enough that I could hear myself breathing through my nose. I put the cursor on the button and left it sitting there a while.

The screen showed the transaction as complete.

"Money's sent. Send me the manuscript." I hit enter.

The screen stayed quiet. No tone, no email back. The GhostInk account went offline.

One hour... two hours... then three.

Toward noon the excitement drained out of me and something tighter took the room. I sat hunched at the desk with both hands on my head and my eyes fixed on the screen, refreshing the inbox. The fear of being scammed, of an anonymous account online taking the last of the money we had to live on, started working through my head like a thousand termites.

I refreshed the inbox with the trackpad, then with the key, then with the trackpad again. The receipt page was still open in the other tab. It gave the time of the transfer as 10:07. My laptop clock had said 10:18 when I hit confirm, and it was still running the way it should.

I got up and walked circles in the living room, then went up to the second floor to check my phone. Nothing there either. His silence hung over the house like a sentence that hadn't been read out yet, and it made me a fool who had just thrown his own future down a hole with both hands.

I couldn't stay inside with it, and around 3:00 p.m. I went out to walk.

Milton was gray and cold. The fall wind came up off the Hudson flats carrying wet leaf rot. I walked the weedy yard of the old house with my hands pushed down in my coat pockets.

At the foot of the drive, where the gravel meets the road, there was a patch about the size of a car hood where the stones had gone black and stayed black. Nothing grew in it. The weeds had taken the rest of the yard up past my knees, and they stopped at the edge of that patch and started again on the far side of it.

When I reached the rotted wood fence that separated our lot from the one beside it, I stopped.

In the yard across from me an old woman stood at a fogged window, bent with age, her hair all white. She wasn't doing anything, only standing there with both eyes wide open on me through the glass. Her thin arm had a grip on the edge of the curtain.

Nothing in that look belonged to an old neighbor recognizing a face after many years. It was blank and lost and frightened, the way you look at something that has come up out of the ground.

I swallowed, worked a polite smile onto my face, and raised a hand:

"Hello, Mrs. Fox... It's James. The Millers' son..."

The second my voice reached her she jerked back like she had touched a live wire. She let the curtain drop, stepped away, and pulled the window shut. The latch went over fast, and after that there was nothing left to hear but the wind.

I stood there in the cold with nothing to do with my hands.

When I was small there was a man who came to the house in the evenings. What I had was a wool coat over the back of a kitchen chair, the smell of wet gravel he brought in on his shoes, and a voice going on in the back room after I had been sent up. I couldn't put a face on any of it. I never had been able to.

I kept walking, farther down the dirt road. The area around the old house had never held many people, and 31 years had emptied it out further. Most of the old neighbors had moved away or died, leaving wood houses shut and quiet among maples that had dropped everything.

About a third of a mile on, near where the ground runs down to the river flats, I saw a small wood house sunk in reeds taller than a man. It was old, the tin roof gone heavy with rust, and it looked like only a few poor families were still living out that way.

In the corner of the yard in front of that house, a rusted metal swing was moving a little with the wind: creak... creak...

On the swing was a child, seven or eight years old. He had on an oversized sweater the color of gray rot, and his thin legs hung in the air.

When I came closer he didn't get scared and he didn't run. He stopped his legs, sat there on the swing, and turned a pair of large dark eyes straight up at my face.

The look was empty and flat, with nothing in it of a child that age.

I stopped at the edge of the road, a few steps short of the swing:

"Hey, buddy... do you live out here?"

He didn't answer the question. He tilted his head, his eyes still fixed on my face, and then the corner of his mouth came up a little and he said something in a thin, half-formed voice that came through the wind perfectly clear:

"So you came back for the devil in the crawlspace?"