The Second Book

The lodge had been closed since October, which Simone knew because the woman in Kinlochewe had told him so, twice, slowly, in the way people speak to the very old or the very drunk. He was neither, technically. He was forty-three and had consumed approximately one bottle of Laphroaig since leaving the rental car at the end of the forest track, which he felt was a reasonable response to the situation, the situation being his life.

He had found a window around the back that wasn’t quite latched. This felt like a metaphor. Everything felt like a metaphor now. That was the problem, his ex-wife Rachel had said. You can’t just live in a thing, Simone. You have to be inside it and writing about being inside it at the same time, and there’s no room for anyone else in there. She’d said this while packing a bag, which gave the speech a certain dramatic staging he’d admired even as it was ending his marriage.

The lodge interior smelled of old smoke and damp wool and something else, something underneath, sweetly organic, like the underside of a log. He clicked on his phone torch and moved it across the room. Mounted stag heads. A cold stone fireplace. A bar still stocked, he noted with professional interest, with half-empty bottles. Above the fireplace, a framed painting of a man who looked profoundly disappointed in everything he was seeing, which Simone found relatable.

He poured himself two fingers of something amber and stood at the window looking out over Loch Nan Car.

The loch was the color of a pewter plate. The hills beyond it were dark and enormous and indifferent. A little snow had fallen earlier and it sat on the heather like something uncertain of its welcome. It was four in the afternoon and the light was already dying, which in late November in the Scottish Highlands was not metaphor but simple geographic fact, though Simone was writing the sentence in his head anyway.

The light died early here, as if the sky had made a decision.

He crossed that out mentally. He’d been crossing things out mentally for twenty-two years.

The Pulitzer had come out of nowhere, which was to say it had come out of a condemned apartment in Port Angeles and three years of writing in conditions his editor had later called, charitably, monastic. He’d been twenty. The novel was called The Fathom Line and it was about his grandfather’s fishing boat and the winter his grandfather went out and didn’t come back and what that silence did to a family over the course of thirty years. It was 290 pages and it contained, his biographers would later note, not a single wasted sentence.

He’d written it without knowing what he was doing, which turned out to be the method.

The second book he’d been writing with full knowledge of what he was doing for twenty-two years, and it was currently 847 pages of material he would never show anyone, filed in a folder on his laptop called MISC as if he were hiding it from himself. Which he was.

His daughter Priya was nineteen now, nearly twenty. She’d been born two years after The Fathom Line and had grown up watching her father not write, which was a particular kind of watching, patient and eventually exhausted. Last Christmas she had hugged him goodbye at SeaTac and he’d seen it in her face — not cruelty, nothing like cruelty — just the small, sad recalibration of expectation. She had stopped waiting for the book. This was, he understood, reasonable. He had not forgiven her for it.

He poured another glass.

The fire, he decided, would be a good idea. There was wood stacked by the hearth and he was a man who could make a fire, one of the few frontier competencies he’d retained from a Port Angeles childhood. He crouched and built it with the focused deliberation of the moderately drunk and got it lit on the third match.

The flames moved strangely.

He watched them for a moment. Not strangely — it was a fire, fires moved. He was projecting. He was always projecting. This was another thing Rachel had mentioned.

He heard it first as a settling of the building. Old timber, cold night, the stone contracting. Then as something more directional. A shifting of weight, somewhere above him. He looked up at the ceiling.

“Hello?” he said, which was idiotic.

Silence.

He turned back to the fire and that was when he noticed the smell had changed. The sweetly organic thing from earlier was stronger now and had acquired a new quality, something almost communicative, like the smell of something trying to be familiar. He thought of his grandmother’s house. He thought of the particular smell of his daughter’s hair when she was small. He thought of the cabin his grandfather had kept his gear in, down at the water, which always smelled of salt and rope and iron.

He was very still.

You’re drunk in a closed hunting lodge, he told himself, in Scotland, in November, because you went to the Edinburgh Book Festival to give a talk about a book you wrote before you could legally drink in your own country and you couldn’t face flying home. He had called Rachel from the hotel in Edinburgh and she had answered, which surprised him, and he’d said I just wanted to hear a voice and she’d said Simone in a way that contained an entire marriage.

He had driven north after that. He wasn’t entirely sure why. The Highlands had seemed like the right direction.

A log shifted in the fire and the flames guttered and in the half-second of reduced light he saw something in the far corner of the room that he couldn’t explain.

It was not a shape exactly. It was more that the darkness in the corner was arranged differently than the surrounding darkness, and it was watching him, and it had been watching him for some time, and it was very, very patient.

“Okay,” Simone said.

The cold came first. Not the ambient cold of the unheated room but something precise and local, as if a window had opened inside the air itself. He could see his breath now and the fire had not gone out, the fire was burning fine, which meant the temperature drop was not the fire’s problem.

He should leave. He was aware of this. He was also aware that his legs were not moving, which was interesting data.

The thing in the corner made a sound. He would later — in the hours remaining to him in which later was still a meaningful concept — try to describe the sound and fail. It was close to the sound of someone reading, the soft rhythmic quality of pages turning. It was close to the sound of a pencil moving across paper. It was close to the sound of a man in a room alone with his thoughts, which was a sound Simone knew so well it lived in him like a second heartbeat.

There you are, said a voice that was not a voice.

“I’m not—” Simone began.

Twenty-two years, said the not-voice, with what sounded genuinely like sympathy. That’s a long time to carry something.

“It’s complicated.”

Of course it is. A pause. Would you like to tell me about it?

And this — this was the terrible part, the part that made it horror rather than inconvenience — was that he did. He desperately, achingly wanted to tell someone about it. About the 847 pages. About the sentence he’d written at nineteen sitting on the prow of his grandfather’s boat watching the strait go gray and silver and not knowing he was writing the best sentence of his life. About Priya’s face at the airport. About the specific quality of Rachel’s voice saying his name from a hotel room in Edinburgh. About the way he’d been hollowed out so gradually he hadn’t noticed until he was all hollowed, just a man-shaped space where a writer used to be.

The thing moved.

It came out of the corner the way water comes over a lip — slow, inevitable, without particular hurry. It was taller than the room should have allowed. It had no face that he could see but it was oriented toward him with the complete and terrible attention of something that had been hungry for a very long time and had learned, over that time, to wait.

It smelled like everything he missed.

Tell me, it said. I have time. I have all the time you’ve wasted, in fact. There’s quite a lot of it.

He opened his mouth.

And then he laughed, which surprised both of them.

“You smell like my grandfather’s shed,” he said. “That’s — that’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?”

The thing was quiet for a moment. The smell shifted, deepened. Now it was Rachel’s shampoo, the specific brand she’d used in the first apartment, the one on the water.

“Okay,” Simone said. “Okay, that’s better. That one lands.”

He was aware he was talking to either a supernatural entity or a stress-induced hallucination born of Scotch and altitude and profound personal failure, and he was genuinely uncertain which possibility was more depressing. He was also aware that his bladder had made certain structural decisions during the corner incident that he was choosing not to examine.

He sat down on the hearthrug. His legs had simply decided.

You’re tired, said the not-voice.

“That’s not a sales pitch. That’s just accurate.”

Twenty-two years of the same room. Different rooms, same room. The book that won’t come. You’ve built a prison out of one good sentence.

“847 pages,” Simone said, before he could stop himself.

I know. And the terrible thing was the warmth in it. The genuine, considered warmth, as if it had read every page. I know exactly which ones are close. Would you like to know which ones?

He would. God help him, he desperately would. He said nothing.

Page 387, it said. The paragraph about the boy watching the strait. You almost had it. You were so close you could have reached through the page and touched what you were trying to say, and then you heard yourself writing and you stopped.

“That’s — how do you—”

Because I’ve been with you since page one. Since before page one. A pause that felt almost fond. I was there in the apartment in Port Angeles. I was there when Rachel left. I was there at the airport with your daughter.

The fire popped. Simone looked at it rather than at the corner. “And what exactly are you selling?”

Nothing you don’t already want.

“That’s the oldest line there is.”

Old lines are old because they work.

The cold had settled into his hands. He looked at them — the knuckles red, the nails bitten, the right index finger with the old scar from a filleting knife, his grandfather’s knife, the one he’d kept, the one that was in his bag upstairs. He’d packed it without entirely knowing why. He’d thought it was sentiment.

He wasn’t sure now what he’d thought.

The book isn’t coming, the not-voice said, gently. The gentleness was the worst part. It wasn’t cruel. It was worse than cruel — it was reasonable. You know this. You’ve known it for years. You’re the only one still pretending.

“Priya doesn’t think—”

Priya has stopped thinking about it. That’s what you saw at the airport. She’s moved on. They all move on. That’s what people do with things that aren’t coming.

“She still calls.”

She calls you, said the voice, with infinite patience, the way you call a person in a hospital. To check. Not because she expects anything to change.

He put his forehead in his hands. The hearthrug smelled of old dog and years. Somewhere above him the building shifted again — that same directional weight, that same deliberate repositioning — and he understood now that it wasn’t structural, that the building wasn’t settling, that something was simply moving around up there in the patient way of something that lives in a place and knows its dimensions exactly.

“Are you real?” he said. His voice came out smaller than he intended.

Does it matter?

“It matters quite a lot, yes. If you’re real I’m being haunted. If you’re not real I’m psychotic and alone in a closed hunting lodge in Scotland talking to myself, which is—” he searched for the word— “also bad.”

What if both are true? it said. What if the things that eat loneliness are real precisely because loneliness is real? What if I’m the shape that your particular despair takes when it’s had long enough to get organized?

“That’s very philosophical for a monster.”

You’re a writer. I adapted.

He laughed again, helplessly. It sounded wrong in the room. Too alive.

The fire burned lower and he didn’t feed it. The cold moved in from the edges of the room like a tide coming in across a flat shore, patient and without malice, just the simple physics of heat leaving. He watched the flames and the thing in the corner watched him and neither of them moved for what felt like a long time.

He was thinking about the knife upstairs.

Not urgently. That was the thing — it wasn’t urgent, which was how he knew it was serious. It was just sitting there as an idea with a certain logical cleanliness to it, the way a sentence sometimes arrives not with excitement but with the quiet authority of this is the one, this is how it ends. Twenty-two years of false starts. A daughter who had recalibrated. An ex-wife who answered the phone out of something that was no longer love but hadn’t found its proper name yet. An agent who still sent the Christmas cards but whose emails had acquired, over the years, the careful neutral warmth of someone managing expectations.

847 pages that would embarrass him if anyone found them.

The knife was a good knife. His grandfather had kept it very sharp.

There, said the voice, softly, like a teacher whose student has finally understood. There it is.

“Shut up.”

You’ve been thinking about it for a while. Not here — before here. The drive north. Edinburgh. Longer than Edinburgh, if you’re honest.

“I’m not—”

You packed the knife.

He said nothing.

I’m not asking you to do anything, it said, and the reasonableness of it was a physical sensation, like warm water, like the specific relief of putting down something heavy. I’m just saying that it’s a thought you keep having, and thoughts you keep having are thoughts worth examining. You’re a writer. You believe in examining things honestly.

“Don’t—” His voice cracked. “Don’t use that.”

I’m using what’s true. You taught me what was true. You’ve been teaching me for twenty-two years.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Stars. The universal private darkness. He thought about his grandfather on the boat, the way the man had moved in weather, unhurried, knowing the water so well that fear had become something else, something closer to respect. He thought about the night they’d gone out past the strait and the old man had turned off the engine and they’d just sat there in the swells listening to the dark, and his grandfather had said some things you don’t fight, boy, you just outlast.

He hadn’t written that scene. It was in none of the 847 pages.

He’d been saving it.

For what? said the voice, and it was so quiet now, so nearly tender. For the book that won’t come? You’ve been saving your best thing for a door that’s locked. That’s not honoring it. That’s just — loss.

The fire was almost out.

He should feed it. That was the concrete next thing. There was wood two feet away and he should reach for it and the fire would come back and there would be warmth and light and then after that he could think about the next thing after the fire, which might be finding his phone, and after that he could think about the next thing after the phone.

But the knife was upstairs.

His hand moved toward the wood pile.

He didn’t know why. There was no epiphany. His hand just moved, the way hands do sometimes before the mind has caught up, operating on some older, dumber instruction set than thought.

He put a log on the fire.

The flames took it.

The light came back, just enough to see the corner clearly, and the corner was empty, and he wasn’t sure if that was better.

He sat for a long time listening to the building. The weight above him had stopped moving. He didn’t know when. He became aware that he’d been holding his shoulders up around his ears for — how long? He let them drop and the ache that came with it told him it had been a while.

He looked at his phone. 11:47. He looked at Priya’s name.

He put the phone face-down on the hearthrug.

The thing had been right about the knife. That was the part he couldn’t get comfortable with, sitting there in the returning warmth. Not that he’d packed it — he’d told himself a story about that, sentiment, his grandfather, the talismanic weight of it — but that the thing had known, and knowing had made it more true somehow, not less. Like a diagnosis. You could feel wrong for years and still feel the specific new gravity of being told the name of it.

847 pages.

He’d read a profile of himself once, in one of the magazines, that described him as a writer’s writer who has chosen silence over compromise. He’d kept it. It was in a drawer in the apartment in Port Angeles, which he was renting by the month now, had been for three years, because committing to a lease felt like a kind of statement he wasn’t prepared to make. He’d read that profile probably forty times. Chosen silence. As if it were a posture. As if any of it were chosen.

He got up. His knees hurt. This was new, the knees, a recent development in the ongoing project of his body’s disappointment in him.

He went to the bar and looked at the bottles and then didn’t pour anything, which surprised him. He stood there with his hand on the neck of a bottle of something and looked out the window at the loch.

The water was black and it moved.

He thought: I should go upstairs and get the knife and I should think about this clearly and seriously the way I would think about anything important.

He thought: That’s not thinking. That’s the thing. That’s still the thing.

He thought: How would I know the difference?

This was the question. This was the actual question, the one with teeth. Because the voice had been reasonable. The voice had not lied to him — not once, not about anything he could identify. Priya had recalibrated. Rachel’s emails had a managed quality. The agent sent cards. These were not distortions. These were the facts of his life, accurately rendered by something that wanted him dead, which meant the facts of his life were the weapon, which meant—

He pressed his forehead against the cold window glass.

The loch didn’t care. That was the thing about the Highlands, the thing he’d driven up here for without quite knowing it — the absolute tectonic indifference of the landscape. The loch had been here before there were words for lochs. It would be here long after the last person who’d read The Fathom Line was gone, and the person after that, and so on until there was no one left to have read anything, and the water would still move in the dark exactly as it was moving now.

He found this, unexpectedly, neither comforting nor despairing.

Just true.

He stood there for a long time with his forehead against the glass and the cold coming through it and his breath fogging and clearing, fogging and clearing.

The weight moved again upstairs.

Slow. Patient. Not leaving. Just — repositioning. Getting comfortable. The sound of something that has decided it can afford to wait because waiting is what it does, waiting is what it’s always done, and he knew, standing there, that it had waited for others in this lodge, in other lodges, by other dark waters, and that some of them had gone upstairs and some of them hadn’t and it hadn’t mattered much to the thing either way because there was always another season, another closed building, another person who had built their life around a wound.

He went upstairs.

The stairs creaked under him and he thought: this is the part where a sensible person turns around. He was interested to discover he was not turning around. He walked down the narrow corridor, his phone torch making the shadows jump, and he opened the door to the room where he’d dropped his bag and he stood in the doorway looking at it.

The bag sat on the stripped mattress. Dark nylon. A tear in the side pocket he’d been meaning to repair for two years.

The knife was at the bottom. He knew exactly where. He’d put it there himself.

Something in the corner of the room breathed.

Not the coat rack this time. Not the shadow of something else. He turned his phone torch toward the corner and the light did not behave correctly — it diffused, softened, as if the dark there was a different texture than ordinary dark — and at the center of it the thing sat with the patience of geology, and it looked at him, and its looking was the feeling of every 3am he’d ever survived, every blank page, every morning he’d woken already exhausted by what the day would ask of him and how little he had to offer.

There, it said, and there was nothing in the voice now but a kind of satisfaction, the satisfaction of a long project nearing completion. You came up.

“I came up,” he agreed.

The knife’s right there.

“I know where the knife is.”

You’ve known for a while. A pause. Since Edinburgh, really. You just needed a reason to stop pretending you didn’t.

He stood in the doorway. He didn’t go in. He wasn’t sure if this was courage or just the specific paralysis of a man who had spent twenty-two years unable to commit to a sentence.

“What happens to you,” he said, “if I don’t?”

Silence.

“I’m genuinely asking. Is there a — do you have to move on? Find someone else? Is this a quota situation?”

You’re doing the funny thing, said the voice, and it was almost gentle. You do the funny thing when you’re most frightened. I’ve noticed.

“It’s been noted before.”

It won’t work this time.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it will.”

He looked at the bag. He looked at the corner. He looked at the bag again.

The thing in the corner had no expression he could read, no face to read it from, but he had the distinct impression that it was not worried. That it had never been worried. That whatever happened in the next sixty seconds had, in some way he couldn’t articulate, already been decided, and the deciding had not happened tonight, had not happened in Edinburgh, had been happening across twenty-two years in every empty room, every opened bottle, every sentence begun and stopped and begun again and stopped.

He was so tired.

That was the realest thing. Under the fear and the Laphroaig and the strange terrible intimacy of being known this completely by something that wanted to consume him — under all of it, just the tiredness. The bone-deep, years-long exhaustion of being Simone, of carrying The Fathom Line like a stone around his neck, of waiting for himself to become again the person who had written it, the boy on the boat who didn’t know what he was doing and so did it perfectly.

That boy was gone. He understood this, standing in the doorway, in a way he hadn’t quite let himself understand before.

He was not going to write the second book.

The thought arrived without drama. Just: no. It’s not coming. It was never coming. That’s done.

The thing in the corner shifted. Something changed in the quality of its attention — a sharpening, a leaning-in, the way a flame bends toward oxygen.

Yes, it breathed. There it is. Now come inside.

He stood in the doorway.

He did not go inside.

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there. Long enough for his phone torch to dim and brighten again. Long enough for the cold in the corridor to work its way through his jacket. Long enough to think about the boy on the boat and the old man who’d turned off the engine and the dark water and the specific smell of salt and rope and iron, and to understand that he’d been saving that scene not for the book but from it, keeping it clean, keeping it separate from the 847 pages of himself failing — keeping it, maybe, just to have one thing that failure hadn’t touched.

The thing in the corner breathed.

He reached into the doorway — just his arm, his body still in the corridor — and he took the bag by the strap and he dragged it toward him across the mattress and he walked back down the corridor without turning around.

He could hear it behind him.

Not following. Just watching.

He went back to the fire and he sat down and he put the bag between his knees and he held it there with both hands and he did not open it and he did not go back upstairs and he did not call Priya and he did not write anything down.

He just sat.

The fire burned.

Above him, the weight in the building moved once, twice, and then settled, and the lodge went quiet, and the quiet was not comfortable and was not resolved and was not the ending of anything, just the specific silence of a man and a thing that had found, for now, an arrangement.

Outside, the loch moved in the dark.

The snow kept falling.

In the morning he would still be there.

That was all. That was the whole of it.

In the morning he would still be there.