Chapter 5 - Fugue: A Journey Through Memory and Truth

The Awakening

The laptop woke me before I woke myself. The screen glowed on my face. The cursor blinked at an open document I did not remember creating.

Draft 7: Elwood

My name was on the title line. My voice echoed in the first paragraph. It felt like my life, but a half step ahead of me.

09:17. Trish would buzz, balancing a paper bag and a guilt-laden smile. She would say, “Please do not hate me for bringing marzipan.”

I put the kettle on. I pretended I had slept. The timestamp in the corner read 02:41. Last modified 03:03.

I checked Recent Files. Nothing.

I checked Trash. Nothing.

The document was there and not there, like a trick played by a bored god.

I read on. It was domestic and precise. The flat was described exactly as I had left it last night. The chipped mug. The broken piano key that sounded like a cough. Then the paragraph shifted key.

If you write the truth, he can come through. If you sand it smooth, he thins out. You know this already. You just do not like the rule.

I pressed Command–S, then pressed it again. My hands were shaking. A line near the bottom made my stomach drop.

When you ask about L, do not say the name out loud.

The kettle clicked. 09:17. The buzzer.

Trish, with a paper bag and a guilt smile.

“Please do not hate me for bringing marzipan,” she said. Not a question. A line given.

I put the kettle on and pretended I had slept.

The Tension Builds

She noticed the laptop but decided not to ask. We moved around each other like people who had already had a row earlier in the week and were determined not to have another.

“Eat,” she said, pushing a slice under my nose. “You vanish when you don’t chew.”

“I’m busy not hating you.”

“Good. Progress.” She grinned. “Anyway, I’m still trying to win my bet.”

“Which one?”

“The one about whether you’re a human being or a ghost made of caffeine and angst.” She tore a dramatic bite of marzipan. “Finally, a prize I could actually win.”

I almost laughed. Almost.

While she rattled on about the neighbours’ compost bin war, I scrolled back to the top of the document. The text looked ordinary. Serif font. Black on white. The way nightmares look ordinary in daylight.

Trish left at 10:06. I watched her out of the window until she turned the corner. When I looked back at the screen, the file title had changed by itself.

Draft 7: Elwood — To L

I whispered the letter, very quietly. The document glitched. A faint shiver ran through the lines, as if someone had breathed on the glass. Then new text uncurled at the bottom.

Not out loud.

“Fine,” I said. “Not out loud.”

“Thank you,” said Peter, from the reflection in the laptop bezel.

The room had not changed temperature. No curtain stirred. He was not in the air. He was in the edges. His shape lived in the gloss of the screen and the black window behind me and the metal rim of the desk lamp. If I shifted my head, he shifted too, a page-shadow staying faithful to its book.

“You wrote the kettle,” I said. “You wrote Trish.”

“I wrote what would be true if you let it,” he said.

“You mean you guessed.”

“I mean I remembered.”

He did not look the way he had looked the last time. Either I was getting better at seeing, or he was getting better at hauling himself across. The lines of his face were clearer, less like a wet thumbprint. When his mouth moved, the reflection of it lagged half a heartbeat behind, as if sound and sight were catching up with each other across a bad connection.

“Rules,” I said. “Give them to me plain.”

He nodded, grave as a child taking an oath.

“One. I come when you write something that costs you. Not trivia. Something you have paid for.

Two. If you smooth it, if you make the sentence pretty so it doesn’t sting, I thin out.

Three. I cannot cross without a surface. I live in margins. Glass, water, the lacquer on the keys.

Four.” He paused. “Music helps. Four notes is enough.”

“What four notes?”

“You know them,” he said. “You have known them since the book launch.”

The Book Launch

The book launch had ended with a broken microphone and a queue of strangers who wanted me to bless their first chapters. On the last page of Michelle Shearer’s final reading, when she signed copies, she had written the same line over and over.

To L—

I had not asked her who L was. I told myself I did not care. I told myself it was none of my business. I told myself a lot of things. They sounded like lies now.

“You put 'To L' in the document,” I said. “That was you.”

“That was you,” he said. “I nudged.”

I looked past him to the piano. The C above middle C coughed like an old smoker. The sticky A looked accusing even when no one was playing it.

“Four notes,” he said again.

I played the first shape my hands knew. Not a melody. A thought. Two steps up, one step down, a drop. The flat vibrated, almost not at all, the way buildings hum at night if you tune yourself to it. Peter brightened, which is a strange word for a man who had no light of his own. The reflection stopped lagging. For a few seconds, the mouth and the voice matched.

“That helps,” he said.

“Then tell me who L is.”

“You will have to write it,” he said. “Or you will have to ask someone who hates me.”

“Short list.”

“Short and obvious.”

“You mean Michelle Shearer,” I said, and the document pulsed. A single word appeared under the last paragraph, faint as pencil under tracing paper.

Fugue

“Do not do that,” I said. “Do not type on my machine when I am looking.”

“Write the truth,” he said. “Ask the book. It has your answer.”

He meant the first edition on the shelf above the desk, spine weathered, paper foxed. I took it down and opened to the flyleaf. The dedication again.

To L—

No name. Below it, where Michelle had pressed her pen a beat too long, a tiny bruise of ink had bled through to the next page. It looked like nothing. It looked like a note head. My hands moved before I could tell them not to. I held the page under the desk lamp and tilted it. Under the light, a ghost-line appeared. Not letters. Staff lines, faint as veins. Four notes pencilled so lightly I could have imagined them.

G, A, F, D. Steps up, one down, drop.

“Lullaby,” Peter said.

“For L?”

“For the one she did not save.”

The room went very still. Noise bled away. Even the fridge decided to keep quiet.

I put the book down like it might bite me. The laptop chimed. New text crawled along the bottom of Draft 7, playful as a cat.

15 December 2025. You already know this is the day. You do not know why.

“I do not like it when you are jaunty,” I said.

“I do not like it when you pretend you do not understand dates,” he said.

“You called it out. You never do that. You make me dig.”

“We are running out of time,” he said. “And you keep filing the edges off your sentences.”

“Tell me what happens on the fifteenth.”

He shook his head, and the reflection stuttered again.

“Rules. I am not an almanac. I am here when you write something that hurts you to write.”

“Then tell me what L stands for.”

“Write it.”

“I do not know it.”

“Then find it,” he said. “Ask the woman who hates me.”

The Haunting Truth

A chill slid under my skin. A memory flickered—the last launch, Shearer’s smile rehearsed one time too many, her eyes flicking past me to someone not there. For a second, I had thought she saw something I could not. The first haunting, maybe. Before mine.

“Michelle Shearer is alive,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But her archivist is not. Nor her students. Nor the woman with the red scarf who stood at the back of every launch and left before the applause.”

I did not remember the scarf until he said it. Then I did. A line of red in my peripheral vision, moving early, leaving early, never queuing for a signature. She had been there at every reading, always in the back corner, always leaving before the lights came up. Always alone.

“If this is a trick,” I said, “it is a cruel one.”

He watched me through the glass. Not tender. Not cold. Just present.

“You asked for rules,” he said. “Here is another. I am strongest when you remember your fear. Not perform it. Remember it.”

I do not cry easily, and I did not now. But I let my throat do the work of someone who might. I remembered the hospital corridor and the smell of bin bags and lemon floor cleaner. I remembered the nurse at the end of a double shift who said it kindly and then said it again when my brain decided to skip. I remembered the first time a strange number rang after midnight and how it felt in my bones before I even picked up.

Peter stepped closer in the reflection. The line of him grew darker. For the first time, I could see the nick on his left eyebrow that matched the one in the press photo. He had stumbled over a monitor cable on the panel stage and made a joke the audience loved. I did not laugh. He apologised in the green room later, and I forgave him. It was the last simple thing between us.

“If you keep me,” he said softly, “you will not keep yourself.”

“Very poetic,” I said. “Give me something practical.”

“Left-hand drawer,” he said. “Under the receipts.”

I pulled the drawer. Receipts, yes. A failed stapler, three free pencils from a festival tote. At the back, an index card folded in half. I knew the hand before I opened it.

To L. Do not say the name out loud. Play it.

Under the line, the same four notes, smaller this time, carelessly drawn. Someone had folded the card and unfolded it a hundred times. The crease was shiny.

“Where did this come from?” I asked. “I do not put sentimental treasure in the drawer with broken stationery.”

“You do when you are trying to forget,” he said.

I pressed the keys again. G, A, F, D. The cough of the broken C vibrated in sympathy. Peter steadied. He looked like a man caught in a lift between floors. The laptop fan spun up. The screen dimmed and brightened, a heartbeat.

“You tried to save her,” I said. “L. You failed.”

He did not nod. He did not deny it. He looked at the book on the desk and then at me.

“If you say the name out loud,” he said, “you will bind yourself to the wrong story.”

“And if I keep quiet?”

“You might have a chance to hear the right one.”

The cursor on the screen blinked and blinked, like a metronome losing patience. The text at the bottom of the document shifted again.

15 December 2025. 08:12. When the kettle clicks twice, do not answer the door.

I saved the file. I printed the page. I watched the paper feed out of the machine like a tongue. I wrote the four notes on the back in pencil, in case the machine decided to eat itself next.

“Peter,” I said, and he was already thinning. “One more rule.”

He waited.

“You do not get to choose when I am brave.”

“No,” he said. “But you do not get to choose what the truth costs.”

The reflection faded until it was only me again. The flat returned: kettle, mug, cough of the C, the stubborn A. I opened a new tab and typed the university’s name and the word “archives” and then “Shearer.” A results page bloomed, full of bland courtesies and email addresses.

I hovered over the contact link, then closed the laptop. I did not say the name out loud. I played the notes again, softer, so the neighbours would not complain.

Somewhere in the pipes, very faintly, something answered. Not words. The sound of typing. Four beats apart. Then silence.

I wrote the sentence that hurt most, the one that made my hands angry:

I think he is using my work to make me remember his.

The screen brightened. The air did not move. The flat was a held breath.

From the hall, the kettle clicked once. Then again.

I did not answer the door.

But through the letterbox, something slid across the floor. An envelope. Heavy stock, thick as if it had been meant to last. My name was written in a hand I recognised but had never seen Peter use.

Inside: a black-and-white photograph. A woman at a piano, hands poised above the keys, face turned away. The paper smelled faintly of old libraries.

I turned it over. On the back, in faded ink: L. December 1987.

Thirty-eight years ago. Before I was born. Before Peter was dead.

And before Michelle Shearer began to write dedications that might not have been hers at all.

The longer I stared, the more I thought the curve of the woman’s fingers looked like my own.

⸻

Deleted Scene: Draft 7a (Recovered Fragment)

[File Corrupted. Partial recovery only.]

Title line: To L—

The kettle has not clicked yet but you hear it anyway. Twice. The sound runs ahead of itself, like a memory rehearsed before it happens.

Play four notes.

G, A, F, D.

You always miss the last one. You slide too far. You apologise to no one.

The photograph is already in the drawer. You put it there. You will put it there again. The crease is older than your hand.

Elwood never wanted to write the dedication. He wrote it because I asked. He wrote it because she asked. He wrote it because none of us could look at her.

Do not say the name. Do not put the notes into words. Paper is safer. Paper forgets.

You are writing this now. You were writing it last night. You will write it on 15 December, just before the second click.

You already know what you will do.

You already know what you will lose.

[End of fragment. Timestamps corrupted: 1987 / 2025 overlap detected.]