Kill Creek Read online

  This was not lost on Moore.

  “Fuck you, Tanner.” She tilted her head to stare at the boss man in the baggy black suit. His steak was momentarily forgotten, its juices beginning to congeal on the plate. “What is this really about, Gary?” Moore asked. “Why did you ask me to dinner?”

  Gary set his fork down. “Look, sweetheart, it has nothing to do with your novel.”

  Sweetheart. Call me that again.

  “We love it. That’s why we bought the rights to it.”

  “Love it,” Tanner repeated.

  “It’s just a little . . . extreme.”

  “Just a little,” Tanner parroted again.

  “We want to tone it down a bit. Try to reach a wider audience.”

  “You mean you want to turn it into a PG-13 teen romance,” Moore seethed.

  “No,” Gary insisted. “No, we’re simply focusing more on the dark love story at the heart of it. Make the subject matter a bit more palatable.”

  Reaching down into the sleek leather purse hanging from the back of her chair, Moore pulled out a paperback book and tossed it onto the table. It landed dead center, the weight of its four hundred and thirty-two pages causing silverware to clank against plates and ice to bob in cocktail glasses.

  “Tell me what you see.” It was not so much a demand as a dare.

  All three men looked to the book’s cover.

  The image was simple and explicit, like the cover images of all of Moore’s novels: a teenage girl’s hand held a bloody razor blade over her bare thigh. Carved into the thigh in crude, jagged letters was the title of the book: Cutter. The shadow of a second hand, this one clearly male in its size and menace, fell over the girl’s wrist, as if it had guided her in the self-mutilation of her supple flesh. The spine of the book was creased with countless lines. The upper right corner bulged with dog-eared pages.

  Gary was the only one to take the dare. “Well, it’s a very complex book. It’s sexy, it’s dark. That’s why we want to tell this story, why we want to capture the essence of your novel—”

  “Okay,” Moore cut him off. “So obviously no one’s bothered to take your dick out of their mouth long enough to give you the back cover synopsis. So allow me.”

  She picked the paperback up off the table and turned it over to read the paragraph printed on the back. “‘Set in a seemingly idyllic suburban town grappling with a rash of teen suicides, Cutter is the pitch-black tale of a clique of high school burnouts growing bored of homemade drugs and casual sex. Desperate for a new thrill to shake up their painfully dull lives, they decide to break into and vandalize a classmate’s home. They find the girl dead by her own hand, her body covered in thousands of slices from a bare razor blade.’”

  Tanner gave an irritated sigh. “Please, Ms. Moore, we know what the book is about.”

  “This is where it gets good,” she said, ignoring him. “‘Open on the floor is an ancient, unholy tome: a self-hurt guide to astral projection through self-mutilation. Soon the teenagers are engaging in increasingly violent rituals as they leave their bleeding bodies to surf the outer edges of reality on orgasmic joyrides.’”

  “Is this really necessary?” Tanner asked.

  “Yes. Yes, it is,” she said clearly and plainly. And then she continued reading. “‘But something wants to keep them from returning. Something far more perverse, far more powerful than anything they’ve dreamed in their wildest fantasies or darkest nightmares.’”

  “What is your point, Ms. Moore?”

  Without warning, Moore ripped off her sunglasses. Her eyes were gray and cold. Flecks of green in her irises offered the hint of life, like moss creeping over ancient stone. But there was something distinctly different about her right eye. The pupil. It was ruptured like the smeared black yolk of a bad egg. Its oblong body bled into the iris, threatening to devour what little color existed there.

  “What about that sounds like a goddamn love story?”

  “No one wants to turn Cutter into a love story,” Gary assured her.

  Slowly, Moore turned to face him. Her ruptured pupil seemed to expand, sucking in what little light hovered around their table. “I know you’ve brought a new writer on board. I’ve read the latest draft of the script.”

  Gary’s eyes flashed to Tanner, who immediately shrugged and passed the buck by turning his own accusatory glare on Phillip.

  “She had every right to see it,” Phillip said.

  Gary rubbed a hand over his slick, pasty forehead. “Oh Christ, Phillip. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “All we’re doing is trying to appeal to a larger audience,” Tanner insisted. He was trying to regain control. “So we’ve taken the most sympathetic characters in the book and elevated them.”

  “Elevated them,” Moore sneered.

  “That’s right.”

  “What you did was invent a love story that doesn’t exist in my novel in order to turn the whole movie into some sort of pathetic, mystical Twilight bullshit.”

  “And honestly, what the fuck is wrong with that?” Gary spat.

  “It’s not my book!”

  “You’re right. It’s not your book.” Gary leaned back in his chair. “It’s our movie.”

  There it is. The truth. Finally.

  The time for pleasantries had long passed. Gary had Moore right where he wanted her, and everyone at the table knew it. “We own the rights. You had your pass at the screenplay. Our deal with you is done. And now we’re going to make Cutter the way we see it. Hell, we’ll probably end up changing the fucking title too. You know, to something less grotesque. You want to scream and stomp your stilettos at somebody, try the lawyer who made your deal in the first place. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to finish my steak. I might even order dessert. You can stay or you can go. It’s up to you.”

  Picking up his knife and fork, Gary hacked off a chunk of cold steak and popped it happily into his smirking mouth. He stared straight at her as he relished both the meat and the moment.

  Slowly, Moore replaced her sunglasses. And then, to everyone’s surprise, she began to nod.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  For the second time that night, Gary stopped mid-chew.

  Moore ran her hands over the shaved sides of her head as if throwing back a hood that had temporarily blinded her. “You’re right. I guess I wasn’t thinking about it that way.”

  Gary’s eyes darted to Tanner and narrowed as if to say, What the hell is this bitch up to?

  Tanner shrugged.

  Reaching across the table, Moore touched Gary’s hand. The edges of her silver fingernails lightly grazed his sun-damaged flesh. A shiver ran from the base of his skull down to the tip of his cock.

  “I’m sorry, Gary,” she said. “I really didn’t come here to fight.”

  Gary turned his attention from his meal, letting his gaze pause briefly on the exposed curve of Moore’s breasts before settling on the dark lenses of her glasses. The flickering flames where back. Captured there. Dancing.

  “It’s just . . . horror is very important to me.”

  She took his stubby fingers in hers and drew his hand closer.

  “Well, I mean, I get that,” Gary babbled. “I don’t blame you for speaking your mind.”

  Moore laughed, relieved. “Thank goodness. I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  With his free hand, Gary waved the apology away like a foul odor. “Not at all. It’s fine, really.”

  Tanner and Phillip were watching the exchange with growing disbelief. Neither man had ever heard T.C. Moore apologize for anything.

  “I just need you to truly understand something.” She was staring at Gary’s hand with something close to adoration. With one of her silver nails, she traced an ambiguous pattern up over his hairy knuckles and across the back of his hand, to his wrist.

  Gary straightened up in his seat.

  Moore let her caress drift back down to the tip of the man’s index finger. His nails displaye
d the perfection of a top-dollar manicure, the only part of him that appeared meticulously kept.

  “You see, to me, horror is something that must be experienced.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s not light and fluffy.”

  “Yes.”

  She gave his index finger a light tug, like a farmer testing a teat.

  An almost imperceptible gasp escaped Gary’s plump lips.

  Tanner looked to Phillip in disbelief. They were both realizing they no longer existed at the table. They were unnecessary. This moment belonged to Moore and Gary and no one else.

  “Horror is a lot like sex,” Moore continued. “It’s raw and it’s primal and when it’s good—when it’s really good—it even hurts a little. But the good kind of pain, you know?”

  The doughy man nodded and made a sound that he meant to be a word but in reality was nothing more than a breath.

  Moore stroked his finger. Up and down. Up and down.

  “Because that’s what horror is. Pain. Unbearable, all-consuming pain. So real and brutal that we almost crave it in a sick way. It prickles our flesh and gets our pussies wet and our cocks hard. We need it to feel real. It reassures us that we exist. And what’s truly frightening is when we realize that our pursuit of that sensation—of that reassurance of our own validity—has led us to a dark, terrible place from which there is no escape. That’s true horror. When the seducer turns on us, and we are no longer in charge. We’ve lost control. And now we have to pay an awful, unspeakable price.”

  Moore gripped Gary’s finger so tightly, the tip went white. With her other hand, she snatched the steak knife from his plate.

  “Like how a second ago, you actually thought I was coming on to you.”

  Moore pressed the point of the knife against his finger, resting it just under the beautifully manicured nail.

  “And now I’m about to jam a fucking steak knife under your goddamn fingernail.”

  Moore pushed the knife forward ever so slightly, its tip sinking into the soft flesh. A tiny spot of blood blossomed under his nail.

  A horrible sound, like the terrified yelp of a kicked puppy, escaped Gary’s open mouth. He jerked his hand back, and Moore let him, releasing her grip on his finger.

  Tanner lunged across the table, but Moore had already set the knife down and was on her feet.

  “You bitch!” Gary hissed. “You crazy fucking bitch!”

  The entire restaurant came to a standstill, all eyes on Moore and the three men at her table.

  “Thanks for dinner, Gar. It’s been a real pleasure.” She slung the steel chain-link strap of her purse over her shoulder, her black hair curling around the links like the tendrils of a sentient plant.

  She pointed a silver nail at the paperback on the table.

  “Keep the book,” she said. “You might even want to try reading it.”

  “You’re done, you hear me?” Gary’s body heaved with anger.

  But Moore was already pushing through the front door and into the still warm air of a California autumn night.

  Headlights streaked across the face of the hilltop home, illuminating the midcentury modern’s unforgiving façade of concrete and glass.

  The chrome Maserati GranTurismo whipped into the driveway. Tires chirped as it came to an abrupt stop.

  The engine had barely died when Moore burst out of the driver’s side. She was shaking, her entire body racked with uncontrollable spasms. She had been fine when she left the restaurant, her hands steady on the steering wheel. But the higher she drove into the Hollywood Hills, the closer she got to home, the more she began to tremble. Had her house been one block farther up the twisting, narrow road, she feared her quivering hands would have sent her sailing over the edge and into the canyon below.

  But she was home now. She was safe.

  Then why am I still shaking like a fucking Chihuahua?

  The sensation filled her with rage, and an explosion of adrenaline shot through her veins. She felt her heart pound furiously in her chest.

  Take a breath, she commanded herself. And she did, drawing the cooling night air deep into her lungs.

  She began to steady. Her hands stopped shaking, and the rest of her limbs followed suit.

  For a solid minute, Moore stood at the edge of her driveway and just breathed.

  In and out. In and out.

  Okay, she thought.

  Okay.

  She was in control again. The panic, for the moment, was defeated.

  “Bitch, you need to get a grip,” she said to herself, chuckling at the sound of her own voice.

  She was halfway up the front walk when she saw the small, pale rectangle hovering, apparently in midair, before her front door.

  As she got closer, she realized it wasn’t actually floating; it was taped to the heavy oak door, the glow of a nearby street light bouncing off the surface of the cream-colored envelope to create the optical illusion.

  Written across the front of the envelope, in an elegant script, were two words:

  An Invitation.

  Moore was reaching to rip the envelope from the door when she paused, suddenly frozen in place.

  There was no stamp. No return address. It had been hand-delivered.

  Don’t open it, her mind warned her.

  It was an irrational thought. There was no reason to fear the contents of the envelope. Yet her mind turned over every stone, every possibility: a love letter from a stalker; hate mail from an angry parent who blamed her for their child’s self-harm; pleasantries from a neighbor she did not care to know.

  And then there was the most troubling prospect of all, that it was none of these things, that it was something entirely unexpected.

  The words came again, louder this time.

  Don’t open it.

  T.C. Moore stood at her front door, the October breeze running invisible fingers through her wild mane of black hair.

  THREE

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11

  IT WAS THE house.

  Something was reaching inside. Surrounding him. Suffocating him.

  Silence.

  A silence that made it hard to breathe.

  Outside the large picture window in the second-floor office, the dark, jagged shapes of bare treetops swayed against a night sky illuminated by an unseen streetlight. Branches jutted out of the blackness like piles of misshapen bones, clinging desperately to brittle autumn leaves. The wind whipped up, angry and invisible, and swirled past the double-pane window. It whistled softly as it went, a strange minor tune. And then it was gone. The house was silent once more.

  Sam sat at the heavy wooden desk with its flaking white paint and ghosts of coffee cup stains. He stared at his monitor, the cursor on the blank page taunting him. Blink, blink, blink, the cursor went, a beat to which his fingers had once danced. No longer. Now they were folded reluctantly in his lap. He willed them to life, to leap to the keys and put on their best Fred Astaire. They did not.

  He had started this new novel at least a hundred times. He had exhausted more first sentences than he could remember. They were single lines on one-page documents, saved on his hard drive in a folder named, appropriately, “Crap.”

  Little Keller Reed woke up in the middle of the night, his breath like a frozen cloud in the dark, and he knew the man had come out of his closet again.

  It took four of them to lift the sun-bleached headstone in the field behind Keller Reed’s house.

  Sarah Ann stared at her reflection in the mirror and waited for it to make the first move.

  At a quarter past three in the morning, on her sixteenth birthday, Sarah Ann Baker came stumbling home and saw the pale face staring out from her bedroom window.

  It was a tradition for fishermen to hammer the head of their biggest catch to a telephone pole along River Road, but the head Sheriff Beaumont was staring at did not belong to a bottom-feeding catfish—it belonged to Sarah Ann Baker.

  The doll was not where she had left it the night
before.

  And perhaps Sam’s most inspired first sentence:

  Sam, you suck as a writer and will never write anything that anyone cares about because you are a fraud and your books are shit.

  Yet here he was, another night facing a blank page.

  High on a built-in bookshelf, the second hand of a metal alarm clock pulled the minute hand closer to two a.m.

  Sleep. He needed sleep. He had to teach at ten o’clock in the morning, and the five beers he’d consumed were going to make it even harder to shake off the haze of exhaustion.

  Blink, blink, blink.

  Sam rested his fingers on the keyboard, lightly and deliberately as if he were resting them on the planchette of an Ouija board.

  Blink, blink, blink.

  He had other stories in reserve, fragments written on yellow pages of legal pads, scribbled on napkins, stored away in the recesses of his mind. Many of them stalked similar ground as his four published novels—Under the Rug, Crimson Moon, A Mounting Scream, and Bad Blood—the books that held a place of honor on the shelf just below that damn clock that refused to stop ticking toward dawn. He could switch gears, take another idea for a test drive, see if he could lay down some pages. They didn’t have to be great. They didn’t even have to be good. They just needed what his readers had come to expect from a Sam McGarver book: men who worked hard and drank harder, the women who loved them, and the unspeakable thing that lurked just below the surface of their picture-perfect Midwestern town.

  Pivot, he thought. Change direction. Just write something. Anything. Write a goddamn paragraph. A sentence. A word!

  Blink, blink, blink.

  “There’s a better story in you.”

  Sam gasped and twisted around in his chair.

  He had heard it. A voice. Echoing from down the hall.

  The doorway was an empty black monolith.

  There was no voice. There was no one there.

  He was alone.

  For another thirty minutes, Sam sat obediently before the blank Microsoft Word document. Then, with no more than a sigh, he shut down the computer. The hard drive whirred to a stop. The monitor blinked its weary eye.

  It shouldn’t be this hard. This was his job. This was the only thing he knew how to do. Just tell the damn story.