And where was Meredith? What happened to the McDermotts’ little kid? All the police ever found was the family car, miles away after it lost an argument with a very big oak. No bodies, though. Just a dead car.
And a whole lotta blood.
6
THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPTS were also weird.
Three—and there might be more—were quietly decomposing under house arrest in some vault in England. No one was allowed to see or handle them, period. All scholars like Kramer got were a few choice bits copied from the originals: not enough to make much sense of the stories but just enough to whet their appetites.
This tallied, though. McDermott was a squirrel. Not even his editors were allowed to hang on to his original manuscripts, which were penned on homemade parchment scrolls—no one was quite sure whether these were vellum or the hide of some more exotic animal—with a special ink McDermott also formulated himself. Since the guy made more money than God, the editors put up with it. They also mentioned how the longer they handled those scrolls, the more the ink changed color to a shade as vibrant as freshly clotted blood, as one editor put it. Even this wasn’t necessarily news. From the description, Emma thought McDermott’s brew must be chemically related to iron gall ink, which oxidized with exposure to air. In other words, the ink rusted, and the stuff literally ate through parchment. All the academics made this sound so spooky, but honestly, it was just chemistry. Mozart and Rembrandt and Bach used the same ink. So did Dickens. BFD. All McDermott had done was tweak the original recipe so his work had a built-in termination date: a nice way of sticking it to people like Kramer. Give McDermott an A for effort; Emma almost admired the guy.
Probably would have, if she hadn’t been so freaked about her story.
7
WHAT KRAMER HANDED her was a fragment—a note, really—from a book she’d never read, because McDermott never got around to writing it. All that scholars like Kramer knew about this novel, Satan’s Skin, came from this and a few other jotted entries. The plot involved a demon-grimoire stitching itself back together, only the pages had been reused in other books and so the characters kept jumping off the page while debating the nature of quantum realities. Some loopy Matrix meets Inkheart-with-a-vengeance crap like that.
Her story was about these eight kids stranded in a spooky house during a snowstorm who begin to disappear one by one. Okay, it wasn’t all original; she’d taken a cue from this awesome John Cusack movie. (Sure, the film was completely freaky. All the characters turn out to be alters: different personalities hallucinated by this completely insane, wacko killer. But the idea that people who thought they were real weren’t—well, it was just so cool.) Her first draft had written itself, pretty much. Considering how writing creeped her out, this should’ve tripped some alarms.
As it happened, her story was a subplot of Satan’s Skin. There were differences. In McDermott’s version, the kids—and yeah, there were eight—were nameless. The oldest, a complete psychopath, murdered his nasty drunk of a dad, who deserved it, the abusive SOB. (All McDermott’s dads and quite a few moms were the same, too. Guy had some serious parental unit issues.) In her version, the characters had names, but her hero—this sweet, sensitive, gorgeous, hunky, completely yes-please guy—had killed his nasty dad in self-defense and was haunted by what he’d done.
Both her draft and McDermott’s fragment shared something else: neither ended. Kramer said McDermott’s note stopped in midsentence, a little like Edwin Drood, although Dickens had the decency to put in a period before up and dying. Hers was like McDermott’s. Not only had she written herself into a corner; she couldn’t figure a way to tie up all those loose ends. The last sentence just sort of floated all by its lonesome. Since her assignment was only a first draft, she had the go-to of needing feedback from the Great Bloviator … er, Kramer.
But, to be honest? Imagining a final period or the end set up a sick fluttering in her stomach. She just couldn’t do it. She’d never admit this to a soul, but … well … her hero was the perfect guy and she … she really liked him. In that way. Okay, okay, fine, she even daydreamed about him, and how lame was that? Mariane had this stalker thing for Taylor Lautner—seriously, the girl was obsessed with those pecs and that six-pack—but at least she drooled over a real guy. Emma’s perfect boyfriend was an idea that lived in her head, but he was also so real, the most well-rounded of her characters. The others were just one-dimensional placeholders. This guy she actually thought of as a complete person. Wrapping up his story would be so final, a lowering of that damn bell jar. Once done, her guy was finished, no way out of the box—not unless she decided to chuck science and write herself into The Continuing Adventures of Emma Lindsay, Loser and Social Misfit. Maybe that was why writers did sequels; they just couldn’t let the story really die.
Anyway. Her draft and McDermott’s fragment were virtually identical.
“Other than the madwoman in the attic, which is so utterly Brontë but perhaps understandable considering Meredith McDermott’s long history of mental illness, that subplot is baffling,” Kramer said. “It’s as if these teens in Satan’s Skin are … stand-ins? Alters? Different possible versions and aspects of McDermott himself? Because, clearly, the man’s reworking his abusive past. That miserable childhood in Wyoming always haunted him, and of course, the snow and deadening cold are symbolic of slow soul murder. Very Joycean, wouldn’t you agree? He does much the same with the mother in Whispers—absolutely brilliant; we’ll be reading that after break … and of course, madness as a slow cancer, a rot eating away at the very fabric of reality, is rendered with stunning effect in this very bizarre little Victorian pastiche that exists only in fragments itself and yet is thoroughly blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah.”
Numb, Emma grayed out. Who gave a wet fart what McDermott had in mind? How had she copied a manuscript she hadn’t known existed?
Hating Kramer would’ve been easy; he was such an asshole. But she couldn’t, not really. From his perspective, she was a cheater, a plagiarist, the academic scum of the earth. But he just didn’t know the whole sordid story.
No one did.
8
EVERYTHING SHE KNEW about her bio parents fit the back of a stamp, with room to spare. Dear Old Drug-Addled Dad tried a two-point set to see if Baby really bounced against a backboard. (Uh, that would be no.) Mommy Dearest boogied before Dad tested whether she might be less sucky on a layup. Later, Daddy hung himself in lockup because—oops—someone forgot to confiscate the shoelaces of his All Stars. Big whoopsie-daisy there.