The Author Behind the Screen Read online

  Copyright © 2020 Vic G. Host

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Also By Vic G. Host

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  For EP and OP.

  Preface

  Dear reader,

  In your hands, you hold the first of my published books. I do not know what made you decide that this was the book that you wanted to read, but I appreciate you taking a step into the unknown with me.

  The story that you are about to read is one of loss, intrigue and obsession. It’s a story that introduces a realm of possibility to the reality that we know all too well.

  Our unconscious mind works in mysterious ways, and there is no telling what may be produced from your psyche and your memory.

  Will you feel empathy for the characters?

  Will the story make you question the noises you hear in your house?

  Will you become attached to the characters and hope to see them again?

  I guess there’s only one way to find out.

  With regards,

  Vic G. Host

  https://vicghost.com

  Chapter 1

  The cursor blinked mockingly. It monotonously bounced on the page with the persistence of a nagging, hungry cat. Blink. Blink. Blink.

  Sigh

  Emily Otterwood sat at her laptop. Her hands were frozen over the keys as if ready to start tapping away at any moment, just as they used to. Only her hands didn't move. And they hadn't moved for the past 15 minutes.

  In fact, her hands hadn’t moved properly in days. Weeks. Months even. She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Emily was an author. More specifically, she was a tiny 31-year-old, introverted, mix-of-emotions-and-quirky-behaviors brunette who just happened to be an author. Not a household name by any means, but she had a decently successful catalog of books.

  She had earned herself a moderately-sized group of loyal readers who picked up her books as soon as they were released. She called her biggest fans her ‘Emmies’. Emily was known for her romance fiction, where imperfect men and equally imperfect women met in unusual, but also very realistic situations. First, they would meet, then the whirlwind of emotions, events, rock-bottom struggles, and accomplishments took place before the final crescendo of feelgood love overcoming all occurred. Her stories could turn anyone’s morning commute into a motion picture rollercoaster of emotion.

  Emily wrote romance fiction, and she did it well.

  That was until that day.

  Three months ago, Sam, Emily’s husband of five years and high school sweetheart, was killed on his way home from work on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary.

  Sam had been stabbed four times, but it was the second stab, the one to his neck, which hit a vital spot and ended his life. Sam’s killer still had not been caught, and the police had told Emily to not get her hopes up of catching the killer. The chances were that it was an opportunistic robbery that ended fatally. Sam's killer took his keys and wallet, but left his phone. The police thought that this was somewhat odd, but in this day and age, phones can be tracked, so it was entirely possible that the killer was trying to avoid capture.

  The whole event had shaken Emily to the core. The stories that her Emmies loved were fueled by the love she and Sam shared. Without Sam there, she was a husk of herself. A shadow. She couldn't muster the passion, the positivity, the 'love overcomes all' that had her readers gushing over story after story.

  The killer hadn’t just taken her husband. The killer had also taken her life, her passion and her reason for living.

  Somehow, though, despite all odds, she had continued living. Her friends and family had supported her, and her fans sent her messages of love. The hardest part after the death was arranging Sam’s funeral. Kyle Ashfield, Sam’s best friend and best man at Emily and Sam’s wedding, had helped Emily get the whole service arranged. He had been a massive help, doing the things that Emily couldn’t think about. All Emily could think about was saying goodbye for one last time.

  At the service, Emily and Kyle chose some of Sam's favorite songs which included an eclectic mix of acoustic country music, 80s British rock and 90s gangster rap. As strange as it was, the music choice fit Sam perfectly, and when the profanity-laden West Coast gangster rap played over the speakers at the service, Emily could see Sam rapping the lyrics in her imagination, taking her back to a time more carefree and hopeful.

  The build-up to the service was slow, but the service was over almost as soon as it had begun, and once again Emily was alone. Alone with her thoughts.

  Alone with the cool September afternoon air sweeping into her kitchen.

  Alone with the empty document and blinking cursor on her laptop screen.

  Alone in silence. Until she heard a knock at the door. Well, three knocks in quick succession that reverberated around the house. The knock of someone familiar.

  She walked up to the front door and peered through the peephole. It was Kyle, and he was holding a big brown paper bag. Emily opened the door to Kyle, greeted him and invited him in.

  “Hey Kyle, I didn’t know you were coming round. You should have rung, come in.”

  “Sorry, Em. I was just on my way back from my parents and I thought I’d drop by.”

  “What’s this?” She asked, pointing at the brown paper bag.

  The six-foot-something redhead set the bag on the large kitchen table. “Ah, I just thought you could use some essentials. I’ve got you some bread, bananas, milk, eggs and some avocados – I know you love those,” he said casually.

  “Oh, Kyle you didn’t have to, but thank you. I’ve been meaning to go out shopping, but I’ve just not felt up to it.” Emily walked up to the bag and started to rummage through it. “Oh wow,” she exclaimed. “These avocados are great! My skin always feels better after I’ve eaten some, you know.”

  Kyle laughed. “Hey, no worries. You’re Sam’s wife. If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.” Then his tone changed to one of concern. “Say, Em, how are you doing?

  Emily hesitated. How was she doing? She hadn’t really thought about it. She hadn’t thought about much to be honest. She was still in a daze. “I’m getting there. It gets a little easier every day. I’m kinda just taking one day at a time, you know?"

  Kyle straightened up. “Yeah I know. It’s tough. Hang in there okay. How about we go out and get some food tomorrow? It’ll be good for you to leave the house for a bit.”

  Emily thought about it. She hadn't been out to eat at a restaurant since Sam had died. She just hadn't seen the point in it. Saying that... there was no reason not to go with Kyle, and it would be good for her to get out of the house and forget about everything – if only for a little bit.

  “Sure”, she said. “That sounds good.”

  "Great. I'll give you a call tomorrow and we can sort something out.” Kyle headed towards the door. “Right, I need to get home before the ice cream in my car melts. Give me a shout if you need anything, all right?”

  Emily let him out. “Hey, Kyle, thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  And with that, Kyle left with a smile, and she was alone again. But for a
brief five minutes, she had felt a little bit energized. The human interaction had given her a tiny buzz of life, but it was enough.

  The five minutes of human interaction had been much needed. She began emptying the contents of the bag that Kyle had brought her on the table: a bunch of bananas, a small loaf of whole-grain bread, a large avocado, milk, half a dozen eggs and a box of green tea and camomile teabags – the decaffeinated kind. She put the milk, eggs and avocado in the fridge, and the other items on the side. As she was putting the teabags away, she noticed a small note stuck to the side.

  ‘Mom said that these help her to sleep. Give them a try. – Kyle’

  ‘Hmm. I’ve never tried green tea and chamomile before. The package says it’s good for sleeping. It’s worth a shot, I guess,’ she thought.

  She filled the kettle up with water, and set it on to boil. While she was waiting for the water to boil, she checked her phone. No missed calls or missed messages. She was generally pretty good at putting up a façade and replying to people no matter how bad things got. It was her superpower: to help people to not worry about things.

  The kettle clicked off, so she took a mug, put a tea bag inside and filled it with water. The steam rose from the mug and met with the gradually cooling September air. She left the teabag in the water while she turned off her laptop.

  “Tomorrow is a new day.” She told herself out loud. “I’ll get started on an amazing new story tomorrow for sure.” She picked up her mug of steaming hot tea. “I feel like things are going to be okay.”

  Chapter 2

  Thud

  Ugh

  Emily sat straight up in bed in a cold sweat.

  She’d just awoken from a horrific dream of her husband’s murder. The scene of Sam’s death was still fresh in her mind, so she sat up in bed and tried to recall what she’d just experienced in her sleeping state.

  In her mind’s eye she saw her husband walking. He smiled and seemed happy. Then, she saw the back of her husband’s killer, dressed in black with a dark hood covering their head. She saw the silver flash of the blade as the killer pulled back their arm and plunged into her husband's body with huge power. She heard the dull thud as the killer struck her husband in the stomach, and she heard her husband groan ugh as the blade sliced through flesh, tissue and organs. She saw her husband gasp for breath as if he had just been punched in the stomach. She watched her husband’s expression change quickly from happy, to surprise to panic as he glanced at the killer and then down at his hands and stomach that were red with blood.

  And then she watched the killer strike again. And again. And again.

  The scene chilled her to the bone.

  "Why am I having this dream now?" she wondered. She'd had this dream a couple of times straight after Sam's death, but it had been months and she hadn't even dreamed at all for weeks. She tried to ignore the images and wrap herself up in her blanket, but she couldn't shake the cold that had seeped into her bones. She checked her alarm clock, saw that it read 3:17am, and let out a sigh.

  “Let’s make some tea,” she announced to make herself feel less alone.

  She left her room and went to the kitchen, stopping off at the bathroom on the way. Emily and Sam’s house wasn’t big, but it was comfortable. They had a bedroom, a study, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a nice sized living room. Nowadays though, Emily spent most of her time in the kitchen with her laptop set up on the table. She had always liked working in the kitchen as it had the biggest windows of the whole house. She believed that the light and the sounds of nature helped her to weave better stories. Besides, the study was Sam’s den. A dark, small room with a desk in front of the window facing the door, and a bookcase full of marketing books against one wall and a cupboard full of bottles of scotch against the other wall. Sam was also a writer, and that’s one of the things that pulled Emily and Sam together – their love of stories and their respect for the power of words. Even when they were in school together, Emily was attracted to Sam's quiet, contemplative demeanor, his love of Greek mythology, and his dark brown eyes which sparkled when he smiled. Sam worked at a local marketing agency as a copywriter – which is a nice way of saying he wrote sales and promotional material. Sam’s den had remained mostly untouched since the day of his death. His laptop still sat in the middle of his desk covered in a light film of dust.

  With a flick of a switch, the kitchen was brightly lit up and Emily put a teabag in a mug and started the kettle boiling. It was still pitch-black outside, so she closed the curtains. The world was silent apart from the sound of the water in the kettle boiling away. In the distance, she heard the engine of a car as it sped down a street a few blocks away. She lived in a quiet and peaceful neighborhood filled with either elderly people, people who worked from home, or people who commuted to the city. It was quiet, but not in a sinister way. It was just still.

  The kettle clicked off, and she made her mug of tea. She sat there at the kitchen table alone with only her tea and her thoughts for company. For the first time, she decided to face what she had been fearing: to recount the events of Sam's last day alive.

  She booted up her laptop, and as it whirred to life, she took out her notepad and pencil and started imagining each detail from the beginning, quickly scratching down notes as she recalled the details of that day.

  It had been May 15, 2019. Sam had gotten out of bed as normal and made a mug of coffee for the two of them. After he had made the coffee, Sam jumped in the shower, and got dressed in the suit he wore for business meetings with clients and a red tie. As Sam was getting dressed and gathering his documents for the meeting, Emily took a shower and got dressed in her cozy clothes, the ones she wore when she was deep in the trenches working on a new book, and dashed on a little bit of perfume, again to get in the mood of writing.

  She remembered vividly how she waited for Sam to wish her a happy anniversary, but he didn't. He had been totally consumed with double-checking that all the documents he needed were in his briefcase. He was so preoccupied that Emily decided to leave Sam’s present and card in her drawer until that evening. Before rushing out of the door, Sam had leaned over to Emily and kissed her, a little longer than a normal ‘see you later’ kiss, and then said “I love that perfume. Addiction, right?”.

  He was right, and with that, he was gone.

  It was a perfectly ordinary morning. The juxtaposition of his frantic rushing with his attention to tiny details was something she loved about him. The way he woke her with coffee every morning – even if he knew that she was pretending to be asleep – made her heart flutter each time. And it wasn’t until those things had left her life that she realized how important they were to her.

  She took a sip of her tea and chewed on the end of her pencil, and moved on to detail the rest of the day.

  At the time, Emily had been working on a book called “Just Out Of Reach”. “Just Out Of Reach” was still unfinished on her laptop. It was a strange title for a contemporary romance novel, and when she did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on the internet for her Emmies, they asked her what the title meant.

  Emily described it like this:

  “You know when you were a kid and you got something, a ball or a frisbee or something, stuck in a tree and no matter how hard you reach out, the ball or whatever just seems too far for you to grab. Like, it doesn’t look that far away, but when you try to grab it, it’s just out of reach. That’s what this book’s about. The truth is right there, but it’s just a bit too far away to grab. So what do you do when you can’t reach the ball that’s stuck in the tree? You go and get a stick or something to help you reach it. When you get this stick, after a few tries of swinging with the stick blindly, you somehow hit the ball and knock it outta the tree. It can take a few tries, but eventually you get it out. And that’s kinda the deal here. The truth is there, they can see it, but to grab it, we need to hit it a few times with a stick. I guess that in the end, sometimes we just need a bit of help to reach our goal.”

  Emily had
spent the first two hours of her morning working on her book. At 11:30am, she had a delivery which she had to sign for. With that delivery, all of her worries that Sam had forgotten their anniversary had vanished. Sam had ordered a huge bouquet of flowers full of pink and white roses to be delivered. In the card attached to the bouquet, she found a reservation for a weekend for two at a countryside spa. The card was signed: ‘Love your #1 Emmy, Sam’.

  Emily smiled to herself and had another drink of tea. She remembered how difficult it was to not call Sam at work and tell him how happy she was. She knew that the meeting was really important, so she knew she couldn’t disturb him. She wrote a few more notes, and started remembering that day again.

  She had been feeling good from the delivery, so she did some admin work before lunch – like replying to fans, emailing her assistant, doing some social media and whatnot. Then she had a simple lunch – scrambled eggs on avocado toast – before doing a couple of consultancy calls with two writers she had been coaching. By the time she had finished her calls, it was 3pm. Sam should have been home at 2pm, but she had thought that the meeting had overrun a bit.

  At 4pm, she had called him, and he never picked up. She remembered trying again and again for at least 10 minutes before she gave up.

  At 5pm she got a call from a Greek restaurant asking her if they could move her reservation from 7pm to 7:30. Whenever Sam and Emily would make reservations, they always gave both phone numbers. It was just their thing.

  At 6pm, she got the call saying that Sam had been killed.

  And that was all she remembered from that day. From the last kiss, to the surprise delivery, to the wrapped present and card that she never got to give Sam, she had written everything down in her notebook.

  She finished her tea and checked the time. It was almost 5am and she was feeling sleepy and drained, so she closed her notebook, put it next to her laptop, and dragged herself to bed. Within minutes, she had succumbed to the silence of sleep once again.