Ghostwriting by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

staggered backwards with a cry. The door snapped shut, and I was pitched into relative darkness. Sobbing, I clawed my way to the banister and staggered up the stairs. I made it to my room, switched on the light and curled myself into a protective ball, shaking with delayed and paralysing shock at what I had witnessed.
    I must have slept, against all odds, though fitfully. I came awake often, and always the first vision that greeted me was that of the blue light with Sabine at its centre.
    I awoke finally with a bright winter sunlight slanting into the room. It was late. Hurriedly I dressed, fingers fumbling with my clothes. I made my way down the stairs, and as I approached the study I relived the events of the early hours. I knew that this time I had to confront Beauregard with what I had seen.
    He was no longer in the study. Not even his rucksack remained. I hurried to the door and flung it open. He had taken his leave, perhaps hours ago. A line of footprints, almost filled in by the new fall of morning snow, led away from the house and up the hillside to the far horizon.

    ~

    If this were a work of fiction, one of my stories Beauregard so despised, I would take pains to craft a satisfying denouement; I would explain everything and tie up all the loose ends, in the manner that Beauregard disdained in his marginalia. It would be a ghost story, and I would show the reader what horror he had made manifest to Sabine all those years ago. The apparition of Sabine would be a Tulpa, a spectre from Tibetan lore, returned to haunt Beauregard for showing her what should have remained his own, private secret.
    But life is not fiction; there are no neat resolutions and answers, no cosy denouements to satisfy and entertain. I have presented the incidents as they occurred, and for the sake of my sanity I prefer to think that what I saw last night was no more than the product of my drunken imagination, fuelled by lack of sleep, Beauregard’s recollections, and my own confused thoughts of the poor German girl who was driven, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, to end her life.
    I often think of Beauregard as I sit here and type my safe, satisfying little stories. I consider the torture of inhabiting a world that ordinary people are unable to perceive, and I see him walking, always walking, through freezing winter landscapes, pursued by the spectre of the young girl who forever haunts his guilty conscience.

Li Ketsuwan
    Never go back, poets and wise men tell us, but we do go back. There is something instinctive about returning, a base desire of the heart, even though the head knows better. Never go back, but I was returning: I was driven by necessity. I was going back to Paradise after a year spent in Hell.
    I arrived in Bangkok on a direct flight from London. I left the capital immediately on a train bound for the northern city of Chiang Mai, dozing fitfully to the rhythmic pulse of the rails, the sing-song glockenspiel chatter of my fellow passengers. Three hours later the train drew into the town of Khon Khai and I alighted.
    The platform was deserted. Sunset lay gaudy acrylic tones across a flat horizon. Crickets thrummed their monotonous double-notes like faulty electrical appliances. I was back, and the sight of the ramshackle town, stark unshielded bulbs illuminating bamboo kiosks on flimsy stilts, the aroma of barbecued rat and chicken, tore the months away from under my feet: it might have been 2002 again; I might have arrived in Khon Khai for the very first time.
    I made my way to the town’s only hotel, a whitewashed hovel with a corrugated tin roof opposite the station. I booked a room for three days, surely long enough to do what I needed and be away.
    I showered, changed and left the hotel. I would go first to the Café Bar, where Li had worked, and ask for her there.
    “Mistah Grant! Mistah Grant!”
    I turned, surprised. A wizened old man, bent almost double, plucked at my shirt with fingers like mangled