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“Right…” she said, quivering. “So, what do you want from me?”
“We’ve come to deliver you a message—Professor Jack Be
“Jack…?” Tess was unable to finish her sentence.
For the umpteenth time, Bill Dafoe checked, but without luck. The conventional communications grid, including the high-resolution microwave signal, was down. The order to search for Tess Mitchell hadn’t made it beyond the four walls of the embassy. Instinctively, he leaned out the window of his office on the sixth floor of the building. To his surprise, all the Christmas lights lining Serrano had gone dark. Not a single bus traveled down this street, one of Madrid’s main arteries, and even the many Santa Clauses that just a few hours earlier had been clogging the sidewalks of this commercial zone, had disappeared into thin air. The city seemed deserted.
“I have to check something,” he said to Eileen, and bounded down the stairs. The elevator, along with all the electricity in the building, had gone dead, as well.
When he arrived at the building’s front gate, the Marine Corps guards and the National Police in charge of watching over the embassy precinct were in a state of distress. Everything had stopped working. Even—and this was the strangest thing of all—the diesel engines of the two assault tanks that the Spanish police used to guard the surrounding streets.
“Bill! Now that’s fu
“A visitor?”
“Yeah…let’s see,” he said, automatically glancing down at the embassy’s entry and exit list. “His name is Francisco Ruiz, and he says that you and your partner have a folder of his that he’d like to pick up.”
“Francisco Ruiz?”
A solemn atmosphere pervaded the ceremonial complex of Teotihuacán. The grayish silhouette of the massive pyramids and the hulking magnificence of Cerro Gordo on the horizon shone dramatically beneath the powerful glow of the moon. Next to the smallest pyramid, in a plaza adorned with reliefs of the Quetzal, a curious cross between bird and insect, Tess just barely made out the familiar image of a man dressed in white. It seemed as though he’d been standing there for a mille
“The best place in the world for us to find each other again, Tess!”
Jack Be
“It’s me—Jack!” he said, opening his arms wide. “I don’t know what the boys told you, but this is real! At midnight the planet entered into a totally new vibrational phase. All matter, including dark matter, has begun to resonate at a frequency that was unknown up until now. Do you understand, Tess?”
“But…you’re alive!” she exclaimed.
“Alive, dead…what does it matter? Those are states of being that belong to the old world. We’re in a new dimension now.”
The young woman’s hands stroked the soft white cotton of Jack Be
“Come on, Tess! Okay, maybe I didn’t enter this dimension voluntarily, but the men who killed me knew that they were just speeding up my passage by a few hours. They even left you a sign so that you wouldn’t worry….”
“They didn’t leave me anything!” she protested, stepping away from him.
“Yes they did, Tess. They left you a Quetzal butterfly, like the ones on these reliefs. Don’t you recognize it? For the people that built Teotihuacán, as well as the ancestors that established the Mayan calendar, the butterfly symbolized the passage of time. The shift from one dimension to another. I just stopped being a larva before you did. But now both of us are like them….”
The young woman touched her handbag, feeling around for the little box she had taken from Jack’s office. Jack looked at her, content.
“And the rest of the world, Jack? What’s happening to them? Are they all butterflies now, too?”
“The rest of the world, too, Tess. Little by little they’ll all begin to realize it.”
Jack Be
“You know something?” he said. “It’s fu
“Fu
“Well, Tess. You should know that Teotihuacán means ‘the place where men become gods.’ And now that you and I have died, that’s precisely what we have become. How does it feel to be a god, Tess?”
GARY BRAVER
Before settling in a teaching position at Northeastern University, Gary Braver worked as a soda jerk, newspaper reporter, tech writer, foundry laborer and project physicist, a job that taught him lab work wasn’t for him. But teaching and writing were, and his double-duty as both a teacher and student of the art of writing gave him exceptional insight that he uses to great effect in “Ghost Writer.”
Some thrillers tap into that part of our subconscious where the worst mistakes from our past linger, waiting for an opportunity to come back into the light. Gary’s compelling portrayal of a disillusioned author asks a question that we all must answer eventually. Are we the authors of our own destiny, or is our fate already written? Turn the page to find out.
GHOST WRITER
“I don’t ghostwrite stories. I write my own books.”
Geoffrey Dane uttered those words and felt as if he were chewing gravel. He hadn’t sold a story in five years.
“Professor Dane, please don’t be offended,” the young woman said. “But it’s really a terrific idea and I think you’re the best person to do it.”
“I’m not offended.” But he was. Offended and bitter. Bitter that he wasn’t what she had assumed—a still actively published bestselling author. Offended because if she were the fan she claimed, she’d know he was a has-been. “I just don’t write other people’s material.”
They were in the English department lounge where he had been sitting, sunk in a couch, reading student stories. Since he was part-time, he had no office of his own, rather a room he shared with other adjuncts and TAs—a space so cramped and noisy he did his paperwork in the lounge, a comfortable space usually empty. That was where this Lauren Grant had found him—this student with the scrubbed good looks, the pricey clothes and a gold Movado watch with diamond baguettes.
As she continued to plead with him, resentment rose up like acid. Here he was a forty-nine-year-old former New York Times list resident now teaching workshops for a pittance and entertaining some rich woman half his age offering to pay him to ghost her novel.
“I thought it might be something you could do between your own writing projects.”
Yeah, rewrite after rewrite that your agent can’t place with a fucking vanity press, whispered a voice in his head. Either this woman had no idea about him or the publishing business, or she was patronizing him. “I’m sorry, but I’m really not interested.”
“But it’s really a terrific idea,” she insisted. “Really. And I think you’d agree. The details we could work out in your favor. But, basically, I provide the idea and you write the book.”
“With whose name on it?”
“Mine. I know I can’t pay you enough, but I’m hoping you’d accept a reasonable fee.”