“Hurry up.”
From the doorway she watches Laika circle the backyard in the bright glare of the motion light, sniffing the grass. Emma’s clothes are packed. Just one last bathroom break for Laika before they leave.
“Do it.”
More hesitant circles. More sniffing.
“Just pee. It’s not that hard.” Squinting into the rain, Emma scans the dark grass for more suspicious cuts of meat. The wind growls over breaking waves. She knows her retriever is vulnerable—and so is she, standing in the open doorway.
Laika is still circling. Pacing. Sniffing.
“Come on.”
More circling.
“Please.”
Finally Laika finds a suitable spot. She doubles back, stops, and squats.
“Yes. There—”
Her ears perk. Then she stands up again, rigidly alert.
“Seriously?”
Then Emma notices Laika is staring farther inland, toward the house’s opposite side. A new glow illuminates the dune grass. The east motion-sensor light—the one that faces the driveway—has been silently triggered.
Someone is here.
From the front door, Emma hears a violent, hinge-rattling knock.
She carries a kitchen knife underhand. Her bare feet pad on cold tile.
“Who is it?”
Silence.
She stops at the foyer’s edge. From here she can see the paneled front door, reassuringly solid. The brass latch is still locked.
She raises her voice. “Identify yourself.”
Seconds pass. Rain drums the roof. The gutters drip. The house’s old bones settle around her with a low, bass creak.
No one answers.
For just long enough to get her hopes up.
“It’s me. Deek.”
She’s never heard her neighbor’s voice before. It’s soft, surprisingly smooth for an elderly alcoholic. Nonthreatening as it is, it still makes Emma’s heart explode inside her chest like a fragmentation grenade. She’s gone weeks without hearing a human voice. Here, now, it’s shattering. Just ten feet away, on the other side of a door.
She says nothing.
“Sorry if I scared you.” He sounds winded.
She should feel relieved—it’s not her stalker, after all—but she’s still on edge. Say something, she urges herself.
Say anything—
“I was . . .” Deek is still catching his breath. Porch boards creak as he paces, as if he is making sure he wasn’t followed. “This is going to sound crazy, Emma, but I think there’s someone inside my house. Right now.”
Fear quivers in his voice. She turns sharply and looks out the kitchen window. Far to the north, Deek’s house stands dark and silent.
“I called the police,” he pants. “They’re coming.”
She studies those distant windows for light. Motion. Anything.
Then back to the door.
“I was in bed when I heard it,” Deek says. “A male voice downstairs, humming. Just softly humming. I ignored it for a while. I thought I’d just left the radio on. But then I heard movement. Stomping around my living room, searching for something. Opening cabinets, rifling through my old books.”
Emma’s heart flutters.
His old books.
Deacon Cowl isn’t famous—at least, not anymore—but he’s still summited every aspiring writer’s dream. He’s been published. He’s hit bestseller lists. He’s guest-starred on The Tonight Show and met Jay Leno, back when broadcast television was the apex of fame. Narcissists feel threatened by the achievements of others—what might H. G. Kane do now that he knows the real deal lives next door to Emma, alone and unprotected?
“From the top of the stairs, I could only see the guy’s shadow on the floor. And his shoes.” Deek swallows. “I saw . . . combat boots. Military-style.”
Her skin prickles with goose bumps.
She remembers the exposed nerves, the raw pain in the author’s words: By slandering me and limiting my readers, you are attacking not only my daily income but also my chances of ever getting noticed by an agent or editor.
Whatever his intentions with Emma, they pale beside what he might to do Deacon Cowl in the flesh. She imagines H. G. Kane begging Deek for an endorsement. Thrusting his latest literary excretion—Murder Whatever—into the old man’s hands.
“I panicked.” Deek’s voice wavers. “I snuck down the stairs and ran outside through the back, as fast as I could. My keys were in the living room with him. I just ran through the grass and called 911. And I kept running until I got here. To you.”
The rain intensifies, a sheet-metal rattle.
“I’m . . . I’m almost positive he’s still in my house.”
Almost positive.
She keeps her eyes locked on the faraway structure. Studying the windows. Somehow she doesn’t believe this. The unhinged creature she’s tangled with wouldn’t allow a witness to escape. He’s followed Deek here to her door. No question.
“Sorry. I . . .” He forces a laugh. “I haven’t been this scared in years.”
She says nothing.
“And I’m so sorry to bother you, Emma. I couldn’t just stand around in the rain. I figured I’d take you up on that whiteboard offer. You know? Talk in person, finally. We could maybe have some ginger tea while we wait for the cops to—”
“No,” Emma says. “I don’t think so.”
She won’t dare approach the locked door.
“You’re not Deek.”
“That’s fine,” the voice says. “I’ll get in another way.”
Emma feels insects crawling on her skin.
It adds: “I can get inside whenever I want.”
She grips her knife and watches the door with her breath held tight, bracing for a splintering crash. But nothing happens.
Yet.
Emma’s thoughts are thick, sluggish. Her muscles slushy. It all feels like a dream. She forces herself to speak. “Who are you?”
No response.
“How did you find me?”
Nothing.
“Answer me.” She takes a step forward. “How did you get my address?”
“In a story,” the voice answers, “the author is God.”
Now that it’s no longer imitating her neighbor, the voice seems to have relaxed to a growl. Low, breathy, dispassionate. Emma feels a bead of cold sweat on her eyebrow.
“You already know who I am,” it says. “Is there anything you’d like to change about your one-star review?”
Silence.
She should have expected this, but it’s jolting all the same. The voice outside is waiting for an answer, and she’s deeply unsure. Is this a trick question?
Say something, she thinks.
It’s unfair. She was so close to leaving tonight. Her Seaview Inn reservations are made. Her toothbrush and clothes are bagged on the table. It’s as if the stranger knew, somehow, and now he’s standing in her way—literally—between her and her car.
He’s still waiting for her response, but Emma’s thoughts are water. She can’t even remember what the hell she wrote, exactly.
Say anything—
“Okay, then,” the voice continues, low and measured in its cadence. She can hear a strained smile. “Want to say it again, now that we’re here in person? It’s too easy to type hateful criticism in the anonymity of the internet. Go ahead. I invite you to open the door and say it to my face.”
Nope.
“Please?”
Not a chance.
The door creaks in its frame, startling her. He must be leaning against it. “I always welcome feedback from my readers. Positive and negative alike.”
Your book sucked, she wishes she could say. But she can’t. She knows better. Maybe there’s an invisible trigger somewhere; a razor-fine trip wire that will end the conversation and ignite violence. Like navigating a minefield.
With her thumb, she dials 911 on the phone in her pocket. It will quietly listen in. Emergency operators are trained to stay on the line, right?
A huff outside. “Well?”
She steps forward.
She needs to see the creature’s face. To make it real. She approaches the door on her tiptoes. Carefully, with a swollen breath, she presses her face to the peephole and her cheekbone touches clammy wood. Her eyelashes flutter against the lens.
Blackness.
He’s holding his finger over the aperture.
She backs away. She speaks clearly for the emergency operator listening in her pocket: “I don’t know you. What are you doing at 937 Wave Drive?”
The voice outside says nothing.
Immediately, she worries. Was that too obvious?
“You’re a shy girl, aren’t you?” After a stomach-clenching silence, the voice softens. “As a sigma male, I’ve always been drawn to loners. And I liked that about you. Your solitude. Your independence. But you’re grieving, too. I can tell. No offense, but you love that golden retriever too much. It’s unhealthy.”
Leave Laika out of this.
She hates him. She loathes him, this uninvited organism at her door who wears a rubber face and calls himself a sigma male. Whatever the hell that is.
“And now . . . now I’ll ask you one last time. Do you stand by your review?”
She says nothing. Maybe there’s no correct answer? She hears a sharp crackle outside the door, like paper unfolding.
Of course, she thinks.
Of course he printed my review—
The voice clears its throat, like a stern parent reviewing a report card. “This was the worst book I have ever read.”
Yes. Now she remembers.
“It’s not just crap,” he reads. “It’s a giant, fifty-gallon cauldron brimming with ice-cold diarrhea. To any potential readers, I’ll save you ninety-nine cents: the hikers both die at the end. I’m not sure if the author has ever encountered a human female before, but at one point he likens their breasts to ‘sumo citruses,’ a mental image I find viscerally terrifying.”
She had forgotten about that. Still true, though.
“And if you’ve ever seen a slasher movie, you’ll predict every unrealistic trope. Of course the victims have no weapons. Of course there’s no cell signal to call police. When one woman finds a truck, of course the engine won’t start. When she takes refuge from the magically indestructible killer inside a cabin, of course she stupidly corners herself in a room with no exit. What are the odds of it all? Coincidences happen in real life—but in fiction, they’re bad writing.”
He pauses.
There’s more, she knows. But the voice outside has stopped himself, gathering his composure before continuing. She hears a shaky breath.
“I would rather die than read Murder Mountain ever again.”
Silence.
When she typed that sentence days ago, she never expected to hear it spoken aloud at her front door. Then a draft of cold air strokes the back of Emma’s neck and she remembers with a growing pit in her stomach—the back door is still open. Just a few inches.
Laika is still outside.
“In addition to being nasty, your review isn’t helping anyone.” She hears him lean closer to the door. “You know that, right? None of this is valid criticism of Murder Mountain. You call these ‘unrealistic tropes,’ but that’s how it really happens. It’s true to real life, Emma. How can it be unrealistic? You realize how stupid you sound, right?”
She says nothing.
“And the rest is just insults. You’re cherry-picking pieces without any context to set up your little jokey-jokes. To invite people to laugh at me.”
To laugh at me.
It’s subtle, but she heard his voice quiver there. An exposed nerve.
“I mean, obviously I know breasts aren’t like sumo citruses. I have a lot of experience with breasts. That was a metaphor. Don’t you know what a metaphor is? And it’s . . . it’s so grotesquely unfair that some people will now be discouraged from reading my hundred-thousand-word novel because of your hundred-word review. With two minutes, you get to cancel out a year of my hard work.”
From here, Emma can’t see the backyard. Her stomach twists into anxious ropes. She hopes Laika is still safely enclosed in the fenced area, not circling the house right now to greet this new stranger.
“So to make it up to me, can you please describe what things, specifically, you didn’t like about my novel?” The voice is bristling, rising. He’s working himself toward a jagged edge.
She steps back.
“Specifically, Emma. What can I do better next time?”
Silence.
The knife is growing slippery in her hand. Her fingers are sweating.
“Answer the question.”
She can’t. It’s too hard to remember.
“Emma?”
“I thought it was . . .” She strains for details. “I thought it was . . . convenient that the two hikers kept splitting up, so they’d be more vulnerable to—”
“People split up in real life.”
“And they just die anticlimactically at the end.”
“Like real life.”
“And one of them even has a chance to grab the villain’s gun,” Emma remembers. “The serial killer sets his rifle down so he can strangle one, and the other comes up behind him and doesn’t pick it up. Instead, she fights him hand to hand. The killer should’ve gotten his head blown off. The only reason the story doesn’t end there is because the heroine is a dumbass—”
“Just. Like. Real. Life. What part of that is hard to understand?” The voice outside heaves with exasperation. “Emma, it’s time to take the red pill. My books are realistic. You can’t think clearly in a life-or-death situation because adrenaline overrides logic, okay? It’s hormones. It’s science. Readers expect characters to always make perfect decisions, one hundred percent of the time. Most average people won’t survive an encounter with a killer. Most females, especially. You can’t fault me, the author, for being authentic to—”
“I guess it just felt amateur.”
He stops, his sentence severed as cleanly as a lopped limb.
She didn’t meant to interrupt. She had been grasping for the word in the past few seconds and it finally came. She backs away from the door, keeping her eyes on the brass lock latch.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Could you . . . could you repeat that?”
“Repeat what?”
“Just now. What did you call me?”
“I was talking about the—”
“You called me an amateur.” He forces a laugh, a ragged bark. “Really? That’s your insult of choice? Amateur? Can an . . . can an amateur write sixteen novels, tens of thousands of words each? Does an amateur get five-star reviews describing his work as ‘terrifying’ and ‘brilliant’? Do I sound like a fucking amateur, Emma?”
He’s trying to laugh, like it’s all a misunderstanding. But his words are strained and volatile, shivering with rage. She pats her phone in her pocket to make sure it’s still there, still listening—somewhere, an emergency operator must be baffled.
“You thought . . . you thought the characters in Murder Mountain were stupid? Well, lucky you. The internet is full of unproven opinions, but tonight you get to prove yours. Let’s see if you can do better.”
Her spine chills. A slow climb, one vertebra at a time.
On the other side of the door, a long breath. “For what it’s worth, I think you’ll like this one better.”
“What?”
“My next one,” he says. “Tonight.”
Wind howls over the waves outside. The downpour changes pitch—whipped sideways—and taps the house’s sea-facing windows.
“It’s all about you,” he adds.
A new gritty sound makes her stomach turn. At first it’s subtle, like a dentist’s pick scraping gently. Then it digs in, hard, rising to a nerve-shredding peak. Alarmingly close. Just outside the door, something plastic snaps free.
Jules’s doorbell camera, she realizes.
He’s pried it open.
“Emma.” His voice curdles with venom. “Welcome to Murder Beach.”