Chapter Four -The Ghostwriter a Serialised Story

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Chapter 4 -  Begin with What You Fear

For three days, Peter didn’t appear.

No critiques. No muttered asides. No footsteps at the edge of hearing. Just me, a half-finished draft, and the sound of my own breath in a too-quiet room. It should’ve felt like freedom. It didn’t. Without him, writing felt like typing with gloves on. My sentences slouched. The story went limp around the edges. I hadn’t realised how much I was writing for him... until the approval I’d been chasing simply vanished.

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t peaceful; it was expectant, like the pause before a storm breaks.

On the third night, I dreamt I found Fugue State again; the same dog-eared copy I’d picked up on a whim at the charity shop off Lark Lane fifteen years ago. In the dream, the pages turned backwards. Time folded in on itself, paragraph by paragraph, until I hit the first line: The mind is never silent, only muffled.

When I woke up, that line was scrawled on a Post-it stuck to my laptop.

I hadn’t written it.

The First Slippage

I stared at the Post-it for longer than I care to admit. The handwriting was mine, definitely mine, but I had no memory of forming those letters. Eventually I peeled it off, stuck it to the inside of my notebook, and told myself I’d been writing in my sleep. Sleep-writing existed, didn’t it? It had to be better than the alternative.

The Second Slippage

The next evening, I was reviewing a scene I’d written, something about a lost postcard turning up in a second-hand book. In the margin, someone had written: Too neat. Let it ache longer.

The ink was still wet. My pen lay uncapped beside the page, a small blue stain bleeding into the paper. But I hadn’t written those words. I was sure of it. Almost sure. I held my hand up to the light, examining the familiar slant of my letters. It was my handwriting... but it felt like a forgery. The letters were sharper, the slant more aggressive, like a stranger had worn my hand and left their mark on the page.

The Third Slippage

This one came silently. No edits, no snide notes. Just a low electronic hum behind my bookshelf. Not quite like a computer fan or a phone charger, more rhythmic, like breathing through a machine. It pulsed in time with my heartbeat. Or rather, my heartbeat was trying to match its rhythm.

It stopped the second I stood.

When I pulled the shelf away from the wall, there was nothing. No wiring. No loose socket. Just a hairline crack in the plaster, and a brittle draft that smelled of burnt paper and something else, something sweet and chemical, like developing fluid. The hum was gone, but the silence it left behind was worse. My ears rang, and the pulse stayed with me... just beneath the skin, like a second heartbeat.

That night, I dreamed of Peter again. He stood in the hallway, soaked to the bone, water dripping from his cuffs onto my carpet. His shirt clung to his ribs, and when he breathed, I could see the outline of his bones.

“You shouldn’t write in the dark,” he said.

“Then come back,” I told him.

He shook his head slowly, like he pitied me. “Truth keeps me here. Lies send me away.”

I woke up with my hands stained in ink. It was a cold, thick substance that had seeped into the creases of my palms like a strange, black tattoo. The smell wasn’t ink. It was metallic, almost surgical, something left behind after an autopsy. When I tried to wash it off, the water turned grey in the basin.

The Silence

I stopped writing the next day. Just closed the notebook, shelved the laptop, and tried to breathe without thinking in narrative. But the quiet that followed wasn’t relief; it was the kind of silence that watches you back.

The flat began to hum again. Not just in one place, but everywhere, brief static blips from the toaster, a hiss of white noise through the radio even when it was unplugged. My television flickered on by itself, showing me a single frame over and over: a page from a manuscript, with one line underlined in red ink.

 Begin with the thing you’re most afraid to remember.

Just before the line appeared, the screen stuttered. I saw a filename flash for a split second: Draft 7 – Elwood.

Had I really seen that? I blinked, but the manuscript page was back, pulsing like a heartbeat. I sat there for ten minutes, watching that sentence burn into my retinas. When I finally reached for the remote, the TV went black.

I unplugged everything. Burned the Post-it. Blocked every email address I could think of, convinced someone was playing an elaborate trick.

The Package

That night, there was a package at my door. No postage. No delivery label. Just brown paper tied with kitchen string, the kind my mother used to save in a drawer.

Inside: a copy of Fugue State. Not mine. Not a reprint. The first edition. Hardcover. 1983. The dust jacket was pristine, as if it had been waiting thirty-seven years in perfect storage.

I opened it with trembling hands.

The inscription inside made my blood freeze:

To S—, who sang when I had no voice. Until we find the melody again.

—P.E. December 15th, 2025

The date was three weeks from now.

I slammed the book shut. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped it. The flat trembled with me. Or maybe I was trembling because the flat was.

Somewhere behind the walls, the typing started up again. Slow. Deliberate. Each keystroke, a brittle tap through the pipes, like Morse code dredged from the dead.

I pressed my ear to the wall, and the typing stopped.

But I could still hear the breath of whoever had been doing it.