Between the Lines

Dogeared paperbacks were her preferred companions. These rascally mongrels could suffer the rough and tumble of her daily life, and come back with tail wagging and looking for more. There was love here. Not the polished art of a chocolatier, instead this was roughhewn and had a substantial heft to it. She relished breaking their spines and scarring their faces. Releasing them from the dog pound cage of their conformity so that they were free to become the characters they were always meant to be. This was the conspicuous aspect of her reading. Here was the eager passion and unstoppable energy with which she boundlessly threw herself into each and every page.

Not that she was averse to a hardback. But for her, those items were ornamental. She seldom read a hardback, instead they adorned her book shelf. Snapshots of her reading life. Photo albums of trips she had taken that had forever changed her.

On that shelf was a throng of books by the dark and brooding author Samuel Hoggins. She bought each and every tome he produced, populating the shelf and waiting for the paperback to arrive at her local bookshop some six months later. This was her ritual. The trip to the airport. Standing at check-in. Travelling to a new world that was unique to her. 

Yes, there were millions of readers who devoured Samuel Hoggins’ books. Emblazoned on each and every paperback was the legend; over a million copies sold. But she knew that there was far more to a book than the words on the page. Reading interfaced the reader with the universe, brought them into a higher state. That interface was unique to each and every reader. This extraordinary state of affairs was how a single, ordinary person could be at one with the overwhelming presence of the infinite. Knowing that they had a part to play and that that part counted in a way that no other could.

Sometimes, during her journeys to the unknowable, via the familiar and known, she would pause and wonder at the bond she had formed with Samuel Hoggins’ work. Each and every book undoubtedly spoke to her, but formulating an explanation of what that speech meant did not come easily to her. The challenge of a father; why do you love this boy? Always boy, never man. A father’s love and the protection he was tasked with affording to his children would not allow trivial acceptance of a pretender to his throne. The boy would have to show his worth and become the man worthy of his daughter. And yet, all she had was; I love him, Dad.

This lack was becoming an increasing problem for her. An itch that she’d had to scratch, but in doing so she’d inadvertently clawed at her flesh and the raw wound had become infected. In this wounded and poisoned state she saw beyond her feeling of love and shrank back from what she glimpsed. 

Her fear could not conceal it’s denial and this shamed her. There were things that she’d known and telling herself that those things were formless and unspoken did not make her any more comfortable with her duplicity.

The pace of her reading slowed as she attended to the presence of the predator. She felt eyes tracking her and the cold, fathomless and calculating hunger behind those eyes. Her awareness of the danger she was in created the danger itself. She was as much a creator of worlds as Samuel Hoggins. But now the reality of Hoggins’ creations terrified her.

As she carefully stepped through his latest paperback Just a Question of Time, she saw a truth written between the lines of words. There was a pattern of absence that had always been there. Staring her in the face was the simplest of truths held to the mirror of her being, one truth cascading through the infinite. A truth that once seen, could not be denied.

She dared not consider what this dark revelation meant for her. Now her unique place in the universe isolated her, as did her unwillingness to articulate her discovery. Hiding in cowardice behind her unwillingness was an inability to find words to convey the truth that now stalked her. Her disbelief was so strong that that was all anyone would believe. She was a lie and all she could find to do in the circumstances of her lie was to read on.

The pages of Just a Question of Time ended, but her torment did not. It circled around on her and goaded her. Without Hoggins’ words, she was laid bare and clueless. Helpless in her self-doubt and fear. 

In this state, she broke with ritual and ordered Hoggins next offering in hardback from the internet. There was a sullen and sordid sacrilege in going to the local bookstore now. She was marked and that made her dangerous. And so she holed up in her home in order to contain the contagion that raged within.

The following day, You Know arrived in the post. The ominous presence of the contents of the cardboard sarcophagus intimidated her. She placed it upon the table and paced around it as the kettle boiled noisily behind her. Tears of shame bullied her. She could not bring herself to touch the package, let alone open it and release a curse that could only end in the pitiful destruction of a life.

Her mug of tea died of loneliness beside her as she stared at her destiny. The die had been rolled and her path set long ago. A wave of indignant rage crashed upon her. This was not fair. This was not any choice that she had made. Instead, someone had chosen her path as their own and now they were coming for her.

Snatching the package up, she tore at it and threw the shreds of card to the floor. The tattered remnants of the delivery note lay unloved and broken in that wreckage. This was not her. Such chaos was not her way. But then she was no longer herself. A foul wind of change had blown through her and smashed her carefully constructed life to pieces. Now it was all about survival. That was all that was left to her.

The book lay before her on the table. She did not want to hold it in her hands. Needed all her strength. Wanted to keep her hands free. The danger that she had caught whiffs of in Hoggins’ previous books was now a cloying stench that choked her and misted her eyes.

The first place she looked was the inner flap at the back of the book. In the space where there should have been a noiresque image of the author, there was only a blank square. Previously she had smiled at the author’s anonymity, but now, as she looked upon that square she was dizzied by the dark quality of it. She found herself staring into it and had to pull herself away as it stared back into her. 

Searches on the internet yielded little more than was written here. Hoggins was a pen name. This author guarded his identity with a ferocity and tenacity that should not have been possible as his star ascended. There were rumours that filled her with a cold dread. That he knew too much of the dark machinery of a serial killer’s mind, and so he hid from the monsters he had so elegantly exposed. 

These rumours, she now knew, skirted close to the truth. Too close. But not close enough. Stealing herself for what was to come, the full and brutal truth that she had been approaching for what seemed like her entire life, she opened the hardcover and there before her was a brutal revelation. 

Her revelation.  

Pawing at the book, she rose clumsily, her chair collapsing to the floor in a parody of her despair. Pirouetting, she fell upon the kitchen sink and yawned her terror in a violent bilious stream. Emptying herself of the last of her courage. Her sanity threatening to follow it. 

Slumped into the kitchen units she trembled like a new born fawn. The world beyond her a hungry nightmare. She wanted to remind the world that this could not be happening, but knew before she uttered a word that it wasn’t that the world would ignore her. It was worse than that. This world was his world and she would be punished for such crass and blatant stupidity.

Splashing her face with cold water and cleaning herself up, she remained huddled over the sink with her eyes firmly shut. A stolen moment of life. Then it was time to face the music. She drew in a breath and with it some of the courage she had so recently exiled.

Turning to put her back to the kitchen sink, she held her gaze above the table, looking across the room until she was ready to revisit the page that had brought everything crashing down around her and exposed her to the dark reality of another.

Lowering her eyes she found the words once more. 

A written dedication.

Sue,

You know…

Below it was a signature and that signature told her that this book was her death warrant. That she would not be afforded the time to read this book. This was her story, but she would not be indulged. Not now. Not now she knew.

Samuel Hoggins was such a successful author in the serial killer space because he was a serial killer. Each of his books was an arrogant confession. A celebration of what he viewed as his art. His books were a function of that art and he had no care for them. It amused him that readers lapped up his deeds and ignorantly chose to see them as a fiction. All his readers were victims of one sort or another. Victims of their ignorance. Blind to his true and glorious nature. Blind to the reality of their tiny, inconsequential lives. Monsters were real and the worst of them dressed well, minded their Ps and Qs and smiled frequently. There was so much to smile about in a world festooned with fodder such as this!

Waves of cold, cruel fear swept over her. A promise of an end that the fear itself would never deliver. A self-imposed torture, softening her up for what was to come.

Her glazed eyes refocused on the hand written dedication, and she remembered that it wasn’t always the words themselves that held the meaning. Sometimes it was the absences that told you all you needed to know. 

Shards of ice formed on her spine as she paused to actively read her plight. The book was a piece of theatre. A distraction. Every book was an escape to a new world, but always there was this world. The hub of the wheel with spoke after spoke of reality.

Behind her was a red van. It had not moved on as it should have done. She had read the uniform of the postman and not attended beyond that obvious sentence. Not delved deeper to ask herself why the regular postman hadn’t handed her the parcel. Not noticed that the parcel was small enough to be posted. Now she attended to that moment, she knew that were she to sift through the detritus of the card wrapping, there would be no stamp. Even the wrapping itself was wrong. No tear strip. That was yet another give away.

And that was how he got away with it. No one pored over each and every word. No one spent the time to consider all the potential meanings presented on the page. The reader trotted across the page and infilled the gaps they themselves made. No one ever listened properly. The nature of life necessitated this movement. It’s waters flowed towards death and the trick was to avoid the obvious risks whilst snatching morsels of peace and joy.

The monsters stood stock still in those waters and took from them as and when they pleased. The monsters had no care for life itself. They played an entirely different game. No one ever spotted them. Not the very clever ones. The true monsters were never caught. No one knew what to look for. It wasn’t that the monsters looked different to anyone else. It was that they lacked. They lacked movement, but in a place of constant movement they became invisible.

The lifeblood of her understanding trickled forth. She knew she had precious little time left to her. She stood no chance against such an adept predator. She would not give up though. That would be a travesty in the circumstances. She would continue to read with the voracity that had gotten her here in the first place. She smiled at the calling card on her dining table. There was something special in the way that she had stood out and been singled out by the killer. She wasn’t the disappointment of fast food, she was a meal that he would savour and remember always. After all, she was so important that he’d written a book about her.

Sensing movement in the doorway to her left, she smiled and the smile was as genuine as a smile could be. The smile was the smile of an avid fan. She was being visited by her favourite author and she knew his work well. Better than most. Possibly better than anyone barring the man who now stood in her doorway.

“I know,” she said boldly.

An intriguing silence hung between them. It was now his turn to smile, and his smile was not that of a predator, “interesting,” he said quietly.

And it was. She knew the narrative flow only too well. She was referencing it now and gently subverting it. After all, it was as much her story as it was his. And she knew how to swim these waters better than he did