The Girl on the Glider by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page B

this and that all of life’s struggles are ultimately pointless. What if everything we know, every person we’ve loved, every kiss we’ve shared, every tear we’ve shed, fight we’ve had, breath we’ve taken, every laugh and shout and orgasm and idea and everything else that constitutes life just doesn’t fucking matter the moment our heart stops beating and our brainwaves go flat? Which is it? Where is the proof? I’ve thought about this all year, and I’m no closer to an answer. All I know is that I don’t want to die. I think I might have developed a death phobia. I’m terrified of dying.
        There’s one more occurrence to write about. One more example of the weirdness that has infected my home and my life. The incident with the baby monitor. That’s the biggie, and once I’ve written about it, we’ll be all up to date.
        But I still have no idea what it all means. It turned out I didn’t have a brain tumor after all, so if these things are hallucinations, then they’re being caused by something else. In truth, I suspect they aren’t hallucinations, which takes us back to the beginning-and means that I’m either being haunted, or I’m crazy.
        Before we tackle that, though, I should write about the baby monitor.
        Tomorrow. Sleep now. Tired. Mid-life crisis, maybe? Feel old. Feel older every goddamn day. Creeping toward an ultimate end.
        A sense of finality seems to hang over everything I do.
        

ENTRY 14
        
        Haven’t worked on this in quite some time. Caught in the perfect storm of deadlines and a cash crunch, I fucked off to the wilderness and got some things done before I snapped and started shooting motherfuckers. Cassi was the one who suggested that I do this. It was a week before Thanksgiving, and I was under a lot of stress. A Gathering of Crows was three months overdue, and although my editor, Don D’Auria, was being incredibly gracious and understanding in regards to the missed deadline, I felt like I was letting him down. Don is one of the few editors who has always been straight with me, and it bothers me to think I might disappoint him in any way (and I’m sure it bothers him that his superiors owe me a bunch of money for previous novels-novels for which the deadline wasn’t missed).
        But it wasn’t just one missed deadline. I’d have been able to cope with that. In addition to A Gathering of Crows , I owed Maurice Broaddus a story for an anthology called Dark Faith , a novel synopsis to Bantam, two issues of The Last Zombie to the guys at Antarctic Press, a television treatment that I knew wasn’t going to go anywhere, two comic book pitches that I also suspected would go nowhere, and assorted other things. Gak was waiting on me to finish The Wanderer . I owed Full Moon Press a novella of some sort that I couldn’t even remember signing a contract for. Wrath, Bev Vincent, Steven Shrewsbury, Tim Lebbon, Bryan Smith and Jim Moore were all waiting on me to finish my collaboration with Nick Mamatas so that I could work on the collaborations I’d promised that I’d eventually do with them. Plus, there were signature sheets to be signed, introductions to write even though I keep telling people I don’t have time to write introductions, three months worth of email to answer, a message board to keep up with, weekly installments of Earthworm Gods II:Deluge (lest people bitch about it not being updated), and somewhere in-between all of this, trying to be a father to my sons, a friend to my friends, and a husband to my wife. It had also been six months since anybody had paid me. Oh, they all wanted their manuscripts on time, but when it came time to send me my fucking check, that was a different fucking story.
        I’d also become distinctly aware that a number of people who I’d thought were my friends were my friends only because of who I am and not because of who I am . There is a distinction there, and I bet Stephen