“Ever hear the dead knocking?”

Leland Hugh watches the forensic psychiatrist ease back, no reaction on the man’s lined, learned face. His body lists to one side, left elbow supporting the fist under his sagging jowl. Legs spread apart, right fingers across his thigh. The picture of unshakable confidence.

“No, can’t say I have.”

Hugh nods once and gazes at the floor. “I do. At night, always at night.”

“Why do they knock?”

His eyes raise to look straight into the doctor’s. “They want my soul.”

No response but for a mere inclining of the head. The intentional silence pulses, waiting for an explanation. Psychiatrists are good at that.

“I took theirs, you see. Put them in their graves early.” Deep inside Hugh, the anger and fear begin to swirl. He swallows, voice tightening. “They’re supposed to stay in the grave. Who’d ever think the dead would demand their revenge?”

From outside the door, at the windows, in the closet, in the walls — they used to knock. Now, in his jail cell the noises come from beneath the floor. Harassing, insistent, hate-filled and bitter sounds that pound his ears and drill his brain until sleep will not, can not come.

“Do you ever answer?”

Shock twists Hugh’s lips. “Answer?”

The psychiatrist’s face remains placid. The slight, knowing curve to his mouth makes Hugh want to slug him.

“You think they’re not real, don’t you? That in my room if I’d just padded over and opened the door, no one would have been there. I’d have seen it’s all in my imagination.” He wags his head, steepling his fingers together with mocking erudition. “Yes, esteemed colleagues.” He affects a serious, highbrow voice. “I have determined the subject suffers from EGS — Extreme Guilt Syndrome, the roots of which run so deep as never to be extirpated, with symptoms aggrandizing into myriad areas of the subject’s life and resulting in perceived paranormal phenomena.”

He drops both hands in his lap, lowering his chin to look derisively at the good doctor. The man remains unfazed.

Hugh sniffs. “Do you know, Doc, that psychosomatic pain hurts just as much as pain caused by actual physical trauma?”

“Yes, I believe that’s true.”

“Then what difference does it make?” Hugh surges forward, palms planted on his knees. His tone falls to one of cold steel. He is sick of the psychiatrist’s face, sick of these sessions in this nasty, dirty little room. “If mere guilt makes the dead knock, I hear them just as clearly. I am still reduced to a trembling idiot who can do nothing but pull the bed covers over my head.” Indignation pushes Hugh to his feet. “And they taunt me too. Whispering of the symbolic clues I left behind, insisting the explicit actions to which I was driven became my downfall.” He throws his hands toward the ceiling. “I hate them, every one. I wish I could kill them all over again!”

The gray-haired doctor inhales slowly. “Yet you do feel guilt for their murders.”

“No, I don’t! Why should I? They deserved it.”

He slumps back into his chair.

He slumps back into his chair. He paces the room.

He slumps back into his chair. He paces the room.

The psychiatrist.

Hugh’s hands fist,

He cannot

He can only

He

“Aaghh!” Novelist Darell Brooke smacked his keyboard and shoved away from the desk. All concentration drained from his mind like water from a leaky pan.

His characters froze.

Darell lowered his head, raking gnarled fingers into the front of his scalp. For a time there he’d almost had it — that ancient joy of thoughts flowing and fingers typing. In the last hour he’d managed to write three or four paragraphs. Now — nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

King of Suspense. He laughed, a low bitter sound that singed his throat. Ninety-nine novels written in forty-three years. Well over a hundred million copies sold. Twenty-one major motion pictures made from his books. Countless magazine articles about his career, fan letters, invitations to celebrity parties. Now look at him. Two years after the auto accident and still only half mobile. And wielding a mere fraction of the brain power he used to have.

What good is an author who can’t hold a plot in his head?

Darell stared at the monitor, reading over his words, struggling once more to settle into the story. Pictured the psychiatrist, his killer…

No use.

Face it, old man. You’ll never write that hundredth book. You’ve been put out to pasture for good.

He wrenched his eyes from the screen, reached for his shiny black cane. With effort, he pushed himself out of his leather chair to unsteady feet. The broken bones in his leg and ankle had long since healed, but the ligament damage had not. Despite painful physical therapy his left foot never regained its full flexibility. Amazing — the constant flexing of a foot to maintain equilibrium. He hadn’t realized the importance of those muscles and tendons until his were torn apart.

Daryl shuffled across the hardwood floor of his large office, repelled by his writing desk and computer. Every day they wooed, then betrayed him. At the tall, mullioned window near the far corner he stopped, spread his feet wide. Hunched over, both hands on his cane, he brooded over the green rolling hills of his estate, the untamed and capricious Pacific Ocean in the distance.

He used to go to the beach to write a couple times a week. Tapping his laptop keys as the surf pounded in rhythm to his pulse. Now he never left the house except for doctor’s appointments.

Darell Brooke had no use for a world that no longer had use for him.

The sides of Darell’s mouth moved in and out, puckering and unpuckering his lips. Characters’ faces in shadow, snippets of scenes filtered through his mind. Fredda Lee. Now there was a delectable killer. Or Leland Stone with his black hair and eyebrows, an intimidating figure much as Darell had appeared in his younger days. Black Tie Affair, that was Leland’s book.

No. Not right.

Midnight Madness?

Darell shook his head. He used to know. Before the accident, he remembered every story he’d written, every character.

“You knocked your skull pretty badly,” the doctor told Darell as he watched the hospital room spiral from his bed. “The dizziness will pass, but you might find it hard to concentrate…”

As if drifting outside his body, Darell pictured himself standing in front of his office window, a shell of his former indomitable self. The undisputed King of Suspense had reveled in playing the part. Now there was no part to play. That once stern, arrogant countenance — blank-faced. His black hair now an unruly shock of white. The wild gray brows jutting over his deep set, dark eyes no longer intimidating, merely straw-like. The muscular arms — even into his early seventies — sagging. Straight back now bent.

“Pshhh.” His lips curled.

Slowly, with defiance Darell raised his chin.

He focused through the glass once more. At least the gnarled trees on his property still looked formidable, their branches scratching windows in the wind. And his mansion looked just as severe from afar, with its black shutters and multiple wings and gables. From the outside looking in, people would never guess…

Darell turned, glared across the room at the phone near his computer. On impulse he clomped over to it, picked up the receiver. His thick forefinger hovered over the keys.

What was the number? The one he’d dialed countless times, year after year.

He lowered himself to the edge of his chair, flipped through his Rolodex. There.

Malcolm Featherling, agent to the country’s top writers, answered his private line on the third ring. Clipped tone, terse greeting. Malcolm was always pushed for time.

“Hello, Malcolm. Just checking in to give you an update.” Darell pushed the old confidence into his voice. After all, his agent worked for him, not the other way around.

“Well, Darell, nice to hear from you. It has been three days.”

Darell blinked. He’d called three days ago? Surely it was at least a month. Maybe two.

He cleared his throat. Sounded phlegmy, like an old man’s. He hated that. “I wrote some today. Almost a page. And another yesterday. You know what they say — write a page a day, and you’ve got a novel in a year.”

He used to write three a year. All brilliant.

“That’s good, Darell, good…”

“Maybe I can get that contract back. Just think, Malcolm, fifteen percent of ten million is a lot of dough. I’ll make you rich. Again.”

“You do that, man, you do that. Keep up the good work.”

Darell could hear the disbelief in Malcolm’s response. The agent was patronizing him. HarperCollins had waited eight months after the accident, strung along on Malcolm’s promise that the King of Suspense would be able to write his one hundredth bestseller — the assumed milestone that had landed him on the cover of Time Magazine. But a worldwide publishing conglomerate couldn’t wait forever, even for Darell Brooke. Not with half the contract — five million dollars — already paid up front, and doctors advising he may never write again. The deal was cancelled. Darell had been forced to give the money back. Malcolm had to cough up his fifteen percent.

I’ll show you, Malcolm. Maybe I’ll even get a new agent.

“All right. Well, got to get back to my writing. See you, Malcolm.”

Darell clicked off the line.

He sat there staring at the phone in his hand.

Just three days ago he’d called?

With a loud sigh, Darell hung up the receiver. He shifted his legs, focused on the half-empty page on his screen. An emptiness he used to love to fill. Now it mocked him. His killer was still on his feet, frozen. The psychiatrist watched from his chair.

What were they supposed to do next? Where had he been headed with this story?

What was the story?

He had to do this. Somehow.

Oh, to regain half the concentration he’d once had. A fourth. A tenth. The thought of spending day after day in this mansion-turned-prison, in this office, unproductive and used up filled him with an emptiness as deep as staring into the face of black eternity. Like Satan and his demons cast from dazzling heaven to the dungeons of hell. Despairing of their loss and hatching vain empires of exacting their revenge on God.

Darell lowered his head. Such melodrama was usually beneath him. But not today. At this moment, steeped in depression, it seemed a worthy comparison.

He straightened and dredged up his self will. Placed his fingers on the keyboard, straining to turn the gears of his mind. One more page, just one. He’d give anything to finish this book. To gain back his reputation, his life. Anything.

The gears refused to move.