QUERY
An editor becomes haunted and plagued by a mediocre manuscript.
Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.
The Graveyard is the fiction side of the newsletter where I share unpublished or reprinted literary speculative fiction short stories, novelettes, and potentially even a novella or two.
Rewrite for clarity.
That is most of my life. Finding the mistakes, annihilating them, and making beauty out of their ashes without leaving any residue. A quiet, still life is what I wanted, and it is the life I lead. Like a ghost in-between the lines, I simply exist.
There are few moments spared far between each other where I must go into town or interact with one of the assistants at the publishing house. Those moments sprinkle bitter salt on my otherwise sweet life. It can be a thankless and lonely job editing manuscripts, but it is better than any other job imaginable.
Where I live, the internet deteriorates as the day goes on, making for the best times to get all details about a project early in the morning when everyone else within a holler’s distance is asleep. After checking in on all assignments and projects—if there’s new updates or deadlines I need to factor in, I put them into my calendars(the ones on the walls, on my computer, and outlined on my desk)—I resign myself to eating a light breakfast heavy in protein and coffee. In combination, they have stained my teeth black.
I imagine a visitor, a stranger, coming to ask of my day, of my subscriptions, of the caller in my walls, and me being the monster that they find.
After feeding, I crawl to my bathroom to clean myself as best I can. I untangle the mess of dyed golden coils on my head and clear my eyes of the detritus of sleep. It is by far the quickest of my morning routines. Once I have become the monster before you, stained teeth and rancid breath, I am called home by the sound of wind rustling against the pages of whatever piece of fiction I am fortunate enough to be reading at the time.
Not every story is an exciting read, thoroughly informative of self and space, but by the fact that they exist, they are great beyond imagine. A manuscript is a testament to the wonders of pure imagination. Within an unfinished manuscript, you find the hidden markings of what makes that particular author tick. I have not truly spoken to a soul in years innumerable but have spent ions in the sacred care of these celestial beings whose names get lost in the fictional landscapes and characters they create.
My commitment to the WORD is what brings me such continued business that I am able to live my leisure away in the shadows of obscurity. It is my dedication to the WORD that leads me to finding such manuscripts as the one that lies in wait for me on the patio. Captured in the light streaking through the pocket of wooden giants that I’ve named brother, sister, father, mother, MOON CACDE sits open, bare. Undiscovered.
As is my routine upon receiving the first payment and manuscript, I did a quick scan of the document. You take in more than you know when you’re barely looking at all. The first thing that I noticed was the excess of white space. In a tomb of this size, the white space felt almost haunting like empty corridors connecting to empty rooms. For some authors, this is their signature style.
I prefer to work and read blind. All works should stand alone. The only person I want to know is the person weaved into the story. I can follow the traces of blood left along the lines and make my own biography of the author behind the book. What white space tells me about this particular writer is that they will use all types of visual tricks to distract from the point they are trying so lavishly to make.
I’ll work it out through my revisions, no doubt. By the end, this book will be some recognizably sellable beast.
Currently, it whispers like a nightmare for me.
And I go to it out of obligation, not passion.
To tackle this manuscript, breaks are the only thing that keep me from passing out at the desk within an hour of beginning the text. A simplistic plot following a crew of space marauders as they land on an unknown moon in the dwellings of dark space. Unfortunately for them, there is no such thing as discovery, first landing, there is only the fight for survival and the stomping out of what was once lush. They find themselves landing in the midst of a terrible storm that works its way across the planet like a destructive cyclone while trying to mend broken family ties on the pirate spaceship.
A book that promises to be as intricate as premade pie.
But it is not all as it seems. It’s introduction, a short twenty pages, has taken me more than three days to read; luckily, I’ve allowed for room in my deadline to account for any days of rest or failure on my part. The sentences held within MOON CACDE can sometimes run pages long and fall into a certain poetic incoherence that makes me pause to reorient myself within myself so that I can go back, retrace the prepositions and clauses and crisscross through the brambles of prose to begin the sentence again.
MOON CACDE has set on my desk for the past week and three days, and I have yet to break into the first act fully. I am suffering the fallout of the introduction that spent its entirety recanting a religious story from one of the factions living and suffering within the 500,000-word space opera.
All my wits scatter at the doorstep to madness surely held within the pages of this manuscript. I have never returned a manuscript due to a lack of understanding or fear on my part, and in my mind, this MOON CACDE has mounted a war against my personal reputation and grasp on sanity. With a timer, I will scratch my way through the text, taking breaks every twenty minutes to give my brain and soul a break.
It is on the fourteenth day, the day of the spirit, as I will now and forever know it, that the manuscript’s true form and purpose reveals itself to me. The shadow beyond the smoke of the text was a rouse to get inside of my head and home.
The creature or being from the book appeared in the night when I was hoping to turn away from the manuscript for the last time this week. It never scares away when my eyes land on its deformed shapeless body. Its monstrosity is an unspeakable mystery to me. How a thing so horrible and horrifying can exist, breathing the good sacred air of the forest, is a question only the gods and devils can answer. At first when it appeared, I was scared out into the dark surrounding woods, but found in a short hour that wherever I went, it too followed.
Like a parasite on the sweaty brown bark of my body, it clings to me, sucking away the precious life I have worked so hard to cultivate.
What nefarious means it has for me only became apparent after days of it hunched in a corner, lapping at the damp air around us with its bulbous feelers. I am meant to feed its hunger for the real. A spirit such as this, born of the fabricated magic within MOON CACDE, could only want one thing, life. My life to be exact since I am the one who brought it out of its literary tomb.
It creeps behind me from room to room. With it as my shadow, I try to stick to the spaces that I still feel safe in my home. There is a small shed in my back yard used for storing firewood that is too dark for me to see it if I stand with my back to the door. I can still hear the sound of its prehensile tongue gripping against whatever surface it explores while watching me in the dark.
That sucking sound becomes the quiet lullaby of my demise into a remarkable insanity.
I stick to the inky gloom that resides in the empty spaces of closets, sheds, and the woods at night where the ghost, and myself in turn, can fade into darkness. I spend my time with the spirit raised from the pages of MOON CACDE. My only escape is within the white spaces of the manuscript where all is void and nothing is lost.
One day a knock comes from far outside the reaches of myself.
“Maunt?” a voice calls from the porch.
They pound on the windows, rattling the old wooden stool.
Stumbling out, I try to speak, to warn the newcomer of what houses with me, but my throat is dry and swollen from disuse and dehydration. All I manage is a cough and choked wail.
“Maunt, my god, are you all right?” they ask, attempting to grasp what little is left of me.
I dodge their hands and bark. It is the only sound that comes out of me strong, intelligent.
They take guarded steps back. “Do you remember me? It’s Cate, from Dandy Press. We met over Skype a few months back for the quarterly review of your books.”
Cate. Cat. Call. Cacde.
MOON CACDE.
“Moon Cacde,” I believe I mumble, for my voice is unlike any I have ever heard—it, like me, is haunted.
“Yes,” Cate says. “That’s why I am here.”
Behind me, I hear the familiar suckling sound against the window.
“You’ve missed your deadline by quite a bit of time. When you stopped returning our emails, I volunteered to come out and see if you were alright.”
I nod, sweat dripping from my frail face.
“We need your marks on the manuscript today. I am here to retrieve them.”
“Take me.”
She steps outside my reach and skirts around me into my home.
No. I want to say but can’t because I’ve caught sight of the hungry figure made of the dusty white spaces between the pages of MOON CACDE. If the beast is tired of feeding off my leftover bits, it will move on to them, take them like they have me. I am overdue and they are out of luck.
The manuscript lays on my desk, dancing in the wind from some unknown place. The only marks across its flesh are that of my dirty fingerprints. In the smudges, there is a cry for help.
“Is this it?” Cate asks, stepping into my room and sniffing at the air. “Great.” They pick it up but hold it at a distance from themselves.
Behind them, the figure crawls over the ceiling, latches on to one of the rafters and droops its dark form down so that its tongue can wrap around Cate’s neck. She can’t see it, of course. You need to suffer to see the spirits that exist alongside us, seeping the life out like sweet, sweet nectar.
I hiss, lunging toward the spiritus creature.
“Maunt!” Cate dodges me.
Using the manuscript as a shield, they shove me aside and flee. As I run with or after Cate, pages scattering behind and all around us, the spirit chases us on the rafters, a tongue flicking like fire in the air. It stops at the threshold of the house and howls, howls, howls like wind through my empty forest.
My legs give out under me as I try and cling to the bumper of Cate’s red Saab convertible.
We, that is the spirit and I, are rapturous. It only wants to eat, to destroy, to make new of what has died inside. I simply want to live. I can understand a something such as this. I can become something like this, like this being yowling for my return. Pages of the manuscript litter my driveway, porch, and home. Some still rain down, whispering to me of a death I will soon know. The empty spaces held within give way to a burning corridor I am sure only I, myself, can see on the dirt road leading away from my home.
Within the empty flames, I will be rewritten, cured. Clarified.