Introduction

Kindle version available November 10, 2015. Suffering from writer's block, novelist Rachel Ames escapes to a lake cabin to calm her mind and regain a sense of herself. The location is perfect. Isolated. Beautiful. Inspiring. It even comes with a good-looking landlord who shows an interest in her. But she can't shake the sense that something terrible has followed her to the lake, something just beyond her consciousness, something out on the edge where the sounds of a raging fire and sirens linger whenever she slows down to listen. Determined to make the cabin work, she tries to settle in and give her new life a chance. But when strange things begin to happen around her, she wonders if she's made a terrible mistake. As the darkness that's followed her manifests itself in inexplicable ways, her concept of reality is stretched thin and she realizes nothing at the lake is what it seems. As she fights to survive with her sanity intact, she understands too late that the location she's chosen for herself is far from perfect.

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Excerpt

Rachel Ames knows she’s making a terrible mistake, but that’s never stopped her before. Even as she speeds down the empty highway, she’s certain nothing good will come of this trip. She can’t say why she has this belief, only that it’s deeply rooted, part of a visceral animal instinct clawing away at her insides. Call it intuition. Or call it common sense, doesn’t matter. Can’t change the fact that it’s the truth.

She refuses to change her destination, even if the rising sense of dread causes her heart to beat right out of her chest. She’s committed, this much is a fact, so she pushes aside all thought of turning around and focuses on the road ahead.

She checks the map on her phone, taking comfort in the little blue dot on the screen that symbolizes the exact spot in the world occupied by her aging Honda Accord with faded red paint, bad muffler and squeaking brakes. The dot sails along a straight white line surrounded by an ocean of green. She appreciates the simplicity of the image, the perfection of it. An object moving at a steady rate along a direct path toward a specific destination. No hurdles. No obstacles to navigate. Not even an intersection or a fork in the road. There are only two decisions to make. To continue forward or stop the car and go back.

And there’s no chance in hell she’s going back.

Her two gentlemen passengers are the perfect companions. Silent, good-looking and only there to cater to her whims and needs. They sit together in the seat next to her, sharing the seatbelt. That might have been overdoing it, but strapping them in together makes her laugh, so she forgives herself the indulgence. This is her journey, her time, so acting odd is her prerogative.

Besides, the two of them are the perfect complements. Daniels and Underwood. Booze and typewriter. Soul mates bound by common history and mutual reliance.

The Underwood typewriter was a great find her sophomore year in college, given to her by Professor McNeely’s widow soon after his very public death from a massive aneurism. It’d happened right in the middle of her creative writing class, just as the old bastard was finally saying something nice about her novel-in-progress. Mid-sentence, he’d slapped a hand to his head, made a small grunt and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. At first, she’d thought he was mocking her work, but then his back arched and he collapsed to the floor. After that came the convulsions, followed by the shit and urine filling his pants as her classmates screamed. Then, as the good book says, the lights went out and Elvis left the building.

But unlike Elvis, the man wasn’t much loved. A taskmaster who hated any writer besides himself, he used critiques as an assault rifle to mow down any young soul with the temerity to attempt the art that, in his mind, belonged only to him and a handful of his peers. Sure there were the appropriate candlelight vigils and the church service to honor the brave soul who died fighting the good fight in his ivory tower, but right under the surface, the humor rolled dark and furious.

I heard that the last pages he read really blew his mind.

You know that saying, would it kill you to say something nice?

Rachel guessed it had. The jokes and her connection with the man’s grisly death gave her some level of notoriety in the English department, something that had its pros and cons. The con being that the rumor mill grouped her in with all the other young coeds McNeely had been schtupping, an insinuation she detested. She hadn’t been like all the others. She was certain that she’d been his favorite.

There were two pros to the rumors. The first being that others on the faculty, and even a few agents looking for newbie writers, wanted to read the student novel that the great Stan McNeely actually liked. This attention got Rachel her first agent, Hank Wells, and eventually her first sale. The second pro was that McNeely’s widow had given Rachel her husband’s prized Underwood typewriter.

This last little windfall was so unexpected that it would have been met with an editor’s red pen if she’d ever tried it in her fiction. On hearing that her dearly departed philandering husband had liked Rachel’s writing, she’d sought Rachel out at the viewing. It was an awkward meeting, but the widow McNeely made it clear that life without her husband¬—but with her husband’s royalty income—was a welcome turn of events. When she offered Rachel her choice of McNeely’s personal items it took only seconds to decide on the typewriter. The Underwood was the same one that had given the world McNeely’s Booker Prize winning novel Of God Alone and, in her own not incapable hands, had since kicked out two well-reviewed novels with her name on the cover. One of them, her second, had even been called mind-blowing by a reviewer for The New York Times, who may or may not have meant it as a sly reference to the typewriter’s pedigree. No, the Underwood had served her well. Until the last book. That was a different story.

The reception of her last book had led to the other man in the front seat. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s, making a pleasant clink-clink-clink sound as it knocks against the painted metal of the antique typewriter.

Daniels and Underwood. Together forever.

She glances back at her phone but the map is gone. The pleasant view of her abstract-self making steady progress through the world is now a grid of light blue lines on a white background and a single word in the top left corner of the screen.

Searching. Searching. Searching.

She laughs, hearing more bitterness and fear in the sound than she expects. She tosses the phone aside, now useless, and grips the wheel, noticing the sweat on her palms for the first time. A quick check in the rearview mirror shows an exact replica of the road in front of her, only with black, churning shadows filling the distant sky. Seeing it, her breath catches in her chest. She twists the mirror to the side so she won’t be tempted to look back there again.

She faces forward, trying to calm down. Her stomach rolls over on itself and she lowers her window to get some fresh air. It helps, the air cool and sweet, filled with the smell of pine. She feels herself relax again, pushing aside all thoughts of the dark sky behind her.

The Honda eats up mile after mile, straight as could be. Tall pines on either side of the road create a corridor that feels somehow both majestic and claustrophobic. A couple of checks of the phone shows the fancy map is out for good, but she’s made her peace with that. She has the simple directions in her head.

But that’s what scares her. Wasn’t life simple? Just a few simple rules to follow. Treat others as you want to be treated. Tell the truth. Do the right thing. Only kill what you intend to eat. Keep those you love safe. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. Don’t pee in the pool.

Simple enough instructions, as clear-cut as the road down which she now travels. But the one thing she’s proven over and over in her life is that she’s capable of violating the simplest of rules. Even unintentionally. So, even on a straight road with no turns and no decisions to make, she knows she’s still right on the edge of being lost. She feels as if she’s teetering, balanced on so fine an edge that she’s at the mercy of the direction of the next breeze.

If she were to get lost, the certainty that she would never find her way back again coils around her heart and lungs and squeezes tighter with each thump of her tires along the highway.

You’re not going farther, you’re going deeper, says a voice in her head.

Not farther, deeper.

It’s a ridiculous notion. She’s in a car, on a road, with a place to go and directions to get there. Everything else is noise.

Her phone has it all wrong. She isn’t searching, searching, searching as it insists. Its little electrodes and transistors might be panicked from losing touch with the outside world, but it’s exactly what Rachel wants.

Consequences be damned. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What was your overall emotional reaction to the novella?
2. Did you read The Torment of Rachel Ames in one sitting or a few? How do you think that affected your reading experience?
3. When did you start to suspect that things weren't as they seemed? What were your early suspicions about what was really going on?
4. Did you have any theories as to who Horace Granger really was? What were those theories? Did your any of your theories turn out to be correct?
5. There are several literary allusions in the novella given that Rachel is an author. What were some that you noticed?
6. How did the author foreshadow the torment Rachel was suffering from?
7. Did you expect the ending or did it throw you for a loop?
8. What two words sum up your reaction to the “twist?”
9. Is Rachel’s reaction to the events in her life realistic? Can you imagine coping with the experience she had?
10. What do you think happened to Rachel Ames after the story?

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