#i miss connecting with others my dash is a total wasteland now but i just

[myfirstandlast]

going through answered asks from when i was 18 wanting to hold myself so tightly

[theyearoftheking]

Book Fifty-Seven: Cell

“It was the cell phones...”

Actual conversation with my daughter while reading Cell...

SB: “What’s that book about?” 

Me: Cellphones that turn people into murderous, rage-filled zombie cannibals.” 

SB: “Yep, that sounds about right!”

Cell is equal parts cute in it’s nostalgia about a time where cellphones were NOT surgically attached to peoples hands; and oddly prophetic. I actually deleted my Facebook account last month, because scrolling was filling me with the same rage I imagine characters in Cell felt. I mean, I might not have tried to rip someone’s throat out, but I definitely would have slapped a bitch. Or seven. I was tired of every damn decision/preference turning into a political, polarizing, them-vs-us debate. 

Masks

Voting

Covid

Reproductive rights

Science 

Religion

The list goes on and on. I just got tired of people being ugly towards each other. I was tired of the sick feeling I’d get in my stomach when I saw a friend I really liked posting hateful memes, or misinformation, or referring to people who wore masks as sheep. This was finally the meme that did it for me...

In a bitter twist of irony, this person’s workplace (with no masks or social distancing) just had a massive Covid outbreak. So there’s that. Who’s the sheep now, motherfucker?! So, yeah. I primarily hang out on Instagram now, looking at pictures of dogs, and posting pictures of food. It’s not terrible. It’s far preferable to Facebook, that’s for damn sure. But I do miss snooping on people. Not going to lie. 

Ok! So, Cell... This story takes off almost immediately. Clay Riddell, an artist, is celebrating a massive deal he just signed in Boston. He bought his wife a fancy paperweight (as you do); and is in line for an ice cream cone when it all goes to hell. People start getting calls on their cellphones, and beating/mauling each other to death. Clay dashes off, and eventually meets up with Alice Maxwell and Tom McCourt. They hide out in a downtown Boston hotel, and determine the cellphones are behind the rage-filled attacks the city is experiencing. Clay is worried about his wife and son, and convinces Alice and Tom to travel north to Maine with him. 

The rest of the story is like a shortened, but more graphically violent version of The Stand: a long journey on foot, some characters die, some new people join their trio, cryptic messages spray painted all over the city (KASHWAK=NO-FO), and of course a villain: Raggedy Man. 

This was my first time reading Cell, and it was fine. It was a fast read, but I didn’t really feel any connection to the characters or their plight. It was solidly “meh”. There was one Dark Tower reference: a shout-out to our pal Charlie the Choo-Choo. And one Wisconsin reference: the lovely city of Madison was mentioned. 

Oh, and there was this. We can file it under, “Author Bios that Didn’t Age Well and Most Certainly Untrue in 2020″ 

Total Wisconsin Mentions: 38

Total Dark Tower References: 53

Book Grade: C+

Rebecca’s Definitive Ranking of Stephen King Books

The Talisman: A+

Wizard and Glass: A+

Needful Things: A+

On Writing: A+

The Green Mile: A+

Hearts in Atlantis: A+

Rose Madder: A+

Misery: A+

Different Seasons: A+

It: A+

Four Past Midnight: A+

The Shining: A-

The Stand: A-

Bag of Bones: A-

Black House: A-

The Wastelands: A-

The Drawing of the Three: A-

The Dark Tower: A-

Dolores Claiborne: A-

Nightmares in the Sky: B+

The Dark Half: B+

Skeleton Crew: B+

The Dead Zone: B+

Nightmares & Dreamscapes: B+

Wolves of the Calla: B+

‘Salem’s Lot: B+

Song of Susannah: B+

Carrie: B+

Creepshow: B+

From a Buick 8: B

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: B

The Colorado Kid: B-

Storm of the Century: B-

Everything’s Eventual: B-

Cycle of the Werewolf: B-

Danse Macabre: B-

The Running Man: C+

Cell: C+

Thinner: C+

Dark Visions: C+

The Eyes of the Dragon: C+

The Long Walk: C+

The Gunslinger: C+

Pet Sematary: C+

Firestarter: C+

Rage: C

Desperation: C-

Insomnia: C-

Cujo: C-

Nightshift: C-

Faithful: D

Gerald’s Game: D

Roadwork: D

Christine: D

Dreamcatcher: D

The Regulators: D

The Tommyknockers: D

Next up is Lisey’s Story. I’ve seen rave reviews all over the Constant Reader fan pages; and I just don’t get it. It’s been so slow to start, and it’s very psychological. Stay tuned...

Until next time, Long Days & Pleasant Nights, Rebecca

[unpack-my-heart]

The Ghost of You

A new Reddie AU featuring property developer Richie and ghost Eddie. I know I have other unfinished stories but I’ve been working on this today as a distraction from various things and thought I’d post it. 

Read it on AO3 HERE

or I’ve also posted it under the cut:

Preview:

The first time Richie sees him, he falls out of a window.

It’s about ten at night, and Richie is painting the grilles on his open bedroom window with the night breeze caressing his face. He’s got the radio on, but every so often the music is suddenly replaced by harsh static that screams into the room for five or six seconds, before the music starts up again like nothing had happened. Richie doesn’t pay attention to it, assuming it’s to do with the terrible reception, until the radio howls like a banshee. When he turns around, he’s met with the sight of a man dressed in an old-fashioned looking khaki uniform who is squatting next to the radio on the floor, and staring at it intently.

Richie promptly jumps, before stumbling backwards, and falling out of the window.

@constantreaderfool @xandertheundead

Richie’s first love is stand-up comedy. He spends most of his adolescent years with his eyes glued to the flickering TV screen, watching late night comedies protected by a blanket of darkness, ready to charge straight up the stairs should he hear the familiar pounding of his father’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

Richie always assumed he’d become a stand-up comedian, or something similar. His mother was forever smiling at him with this dopy, indulgent grin.

‘You should be on the stage, child’, she always told him.

He believes her.

Standing on stage, in front of a sea of squawking, laughing faces. The I did that in your stomach, the I made these people happy.

It doesn’t work out, though. Richie gets horrendous stage-fright, and runs straight off the stage clutching his stomach the first time he attends an open-mic at his local late night coffee shop. It doesn’t make sense. His mom says he’s funny, Bev says he’s funny, the waitress at the diner that does those paprika fries he loves says he's funny (but maybe she’s just being kind and trying to get him to leave a decent tip. He always does.)

He isn’t too cut up about it though. Shit happens. So he leaves stand-up comedy to the professionals, and proceeds to have a minor existential crisis about the direction his life is going in.

His father starts getting a bit impatient, not because he’s frustrated that Richie didn’t go to college, or because Richie is leeching off them or anything remotely similar, but because it cuts him up inside to see his nearly-20-year old son so morose and directionless. So he takes him to work with him.

Wentworth Tozier works as an architect in a small firm in Maine. It’s mainly small domestic projects, the occasional corporate one. Nothing too major. Small houses, buildings to put a new Subway in. Richie is entranced. He loves going with his dad to the sites, he can practically see the cogs in his father’s brain spin and whir as he envisages how he’ll turn this small patch of wasteland into someone’s private sanctuary. Richie decides immediately that he wants a part of this.

Richie apprentices with his father. His dad agrees easily, ecstatic that his son is so enamoured with the field that claimed his own heart when he was pre-college and panicking about where his own life would lead. Richie doesn’t want to go to college, so he can’t become an accredited architect, but that doesn’t matter. Richie isn’t interested in modelling power sockets and skirting boards on the computer. Richie dreams of moulding timber, brick and concrete with his own bare hands, sculpting and crafting and carving out a small piece of perfection.

Property development, is what his father tells him it’s called. He’d be a renovator, and Richie decides that that word sits very nicely indeed on the end of his tongue.

He starts off small. An tired-looking apartment with creaking bones and a dusty sigh. Richie tears out the connecting wall between the lounge and the kitchen, allowing the small space to inhale a much-needed breath of fresh air. He extends the bathroom into the needlessly large master (and only) bedroom, and removes the garish pink ceramic bath, replacing it with a walk in shower. A lick of paint here, a sprinkling of tile here, a dash of wallpaper and some new faux-marble countertops. His father claps him on the back when he sees the finished product. ‘you’ve done good, kid’. Richie knew this was what he was made for.

He’s 28 when he starts feeling the first pinches of boredom at the soles of his feet, 30 when his stomach aches slightly when he wakes up in the morning before work, and 34 when he decides that it isn’t enough for him anymore.

His father, now retired and living off a very comfortable pension, offers to lend him some money while he figures out what he wants to do next. Richie grumbles for a few weeks, feeling uncomfortable about taking his dads money. He uhms and ahhs about it, waxing poetic to Bev in the bar after work about how property development wasn’t sparking the pilot light in his soul quite like it used to. Bev nodded sympathetically, and made comforting hums at all the right intervals. Richie left the bar five times drunker and fifty times more appreciative for her friendship.

He’s 36 when he decides to move to Scotland.

He’s been considering it for a while. Find a derelict church, or a run-down old manor house, buy it for an eye-wateringly cheap price, live in it, renovate it, and flip it. A two year project, max. Something to get his teeth into and stave off the anxious dreams that have him shooting up in bed at night, face sticky with sweat and heart beating with ‘this can’t be it, please say this isn’t it’.

His relationship with Jasmine had broken down. She couldn’t understand why Richie was so restless, why he’d toss and turn at night instead of hunkering down into the cosy nest of safe, steady, predictable. He didn’t blame her. He knew it was frustrating. Hell, he was frustrated. They ended it pretty amicably. A few tears on both sides, a half-hearted promise to remain friends. Richie knew they wouldn’t. He didn’t really mind.

He’d been half-cut and half-asleep when he’d stumbled on it. A beautiful 19th century building on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It had originally been an orphanage, before changing hands and purpose multiple times over the years. School, a brief stint as a police station, before it was abandoned in 1947, just after the war. The building is on the lip of a lake, and sits nestled comfortably into a small hillock. The brickwork is run down, patches of orange lichen growing excitedly across the otherwise grey surface. There are two working chimneys emerging from the slate roof that connected to two working fire-places. There’s a small porch connected to the front door, and a back door in the kitchen that leads out into an unfenced back garden. It’s ugly, and sits tired and unassuming against the harsh bracken moors of Scotland, not a neighbour in sight. Richie is immediately besotted with it.

He phones Bev, not caring that it’s nearly 3am and he’s definitely still drunk and is probably definitely somewhat delusional. She picks up on the fifth ring.

“what the fuck, Rich, it’s arse o’clock in the morning. Are you dying? If you’re not dying you’re gonna wish you were”

“I found it”

“Huh? Found what? If you found your lost sock and decided to ring me to tell me, I swear to god, Trashmouth, I’m gonna gut you, you –“

“No, Jesus Red, no. I found it. I found the one”

“the one? You mean that dude you were grinding on yesterday? I mean, he was kinda weird looking, wasn’t he? Looked a bit like a trout. But if you think he’s the one I guess –“

“Can it, Marsh. One, I wasn’t talking about him but oh my god he totally looks like a trout and two, I mean, the house”

“Shit. The house?”

“Yup”

“The house, the house? You mean – THE house?”

“Yes!”

“Holy shit. Where is it?”

“…”

“Rich…”

“Scotland”

“Holy shit”

“I know”

Getting a visa is about as much of a nightmare as Richie expects. It takes forever, and every day he checks the real estate website, sweaty palms and palpitating heart, expecting the little house on the moor to have disappeared from the internet. It never does.

After about four months, and tearful goodbyes to Beverly at the airport, Richie’s on a plane to Scotland. His parents were initially hugely sceptical, lecturing him on the dangers of buying a property without viewing it, and lamenting about how much they’ll miss him when he’s thousands of miles away. They don’t try to stop him though.

Richie spends most of plane ride jittering in his seat. He ends up sat next to a Scottish woman, who balances her tiny daughter on her knee. Richie smiles at the tiny redheaded girl and she smiles back at him, all gums and no teeth. He falls asleep half an hour before they land.

He hires a car at Edinburgh airport. The drive takes him around six hours, a combination of busy main roads and winding country tracks that split the Scottish landscape like veins. He sails over the Skye bridge, and he’s only an hour or two away from paradise.

When he’s about twenty minutes away, he starts getting panicky. He’d spoken to the letting agent at length over Skype, and they’d emailed him a list of all the things that would need fixing, or replacing. It was a very long list. When Richie had received the list he’d not been able to see it as anything other than a challenge, something to get his teeth into. Something to occupy his restless brain. Now though, the list sat like lead in his pocket.

The house sits at the end of an unkempt muddy track, standing alone amongst the foliage. Richie pulls himself out of the car, stretching his aching arms behind his head.

He stares at the house.

The house looks back at him.

He rings his dad.

“y’ello?”

“Hey, Dad”

“Rich! Did you make it okay, laddy?”

“Och, aye!”

“Your Scottish accent is as awful as mine”

“I know”

“How is she?”

“She’s beautiful”

“Need a lot of TLC?”

“More than I think I’m capable of giving her”

“Hey, now. Where’s that trade-mark Richie confidence? Or, should I say, trade-mark Richie arrogance?”

“You’re supposed to be giving me a pep-talk, old man”

“I know, I know. You’ve got it, kid. You know you do. I’ll come out and visit you in a few months, maybe stay for a few weeks. Scotland is supposed to be real nice in the summer. Save some of the really tricky parts until then, okay? I don’t want you to hurt yourself”

“Your concern is touching”

“Richie, I’m serious”

“I know”

“Your mother misses you already”

“I bet she does, now she’s only got you for company”

“I miss you”

“I know”

“I’m here for you. Even half way across the world. You’re my boy”

“love you, dad”

“Knock ‘em dead, son”

Beep beep beep beep

The house stands in front of him, silently waiting. The wild, windy moors stretch far away.

Richie doesn’t do anything to the house for a few days. He drives nearly two hours to the nearest town, and stocks up on all the tools and equipment he thinks he’ll need, before quickly realising that he’ll need to take a trip to one of the larger cities to buy the more expensive materials. He imagines the postal services out in the middle of nowhere leave much to be desired.

The house is much louder than he expected it to be. The moors are noisy, rustling leaves and bleating sheep and wind that whips through your skin and freezes your bones. The house is nearly as loud. Everything creaks, and moans and sighs, loud protests against whatever Richie happens to be doing, whether walking up the stairs or throwing logs into the burner.

He starts working on it four days after he moves in.

The first time Richie sees him, he falls out of a window.

It’s about ten at night, and Richie is painting the grilles on his open bedroom window with the night breeze caressing his face. He’s got the radio on, but every so often the music is suddenly replaced by harsh static that screams into the room for five or six seconds, before the music starts up again like nothing had happened. Richie doesn’t pay attention to it, assuming it’s to do with the terrible reception, until the radio howls like a banshee. When he turns around, he’s met with the sight of a man dressed in an old-fashioned looking khaki uniform who is squatting next to the radio on the floor, and staring at it intently.

Richie promptly jumps, before stumbling backwards, and falling out of the window.

When Richie comes to, he’s lying on the ground directly below the window he fell out of.

There’s a pillow under his head.

The second time Richie sees him, he pours boiling water all over his foot.

It’s been a few weeks since Richie fell out of the window. He’s forgotten about the man in the khaki uniform that he thought he saw looking at his radio, having convinced himself that it must have been a figment of his overtired imagination.

The house is still, for all intents and purposes, unliveable. There is no hot water, there is no gas, and Richie has to go to the toilet in trenches he digs in the middle of the woodland a few minutes’ walk from the back door. He has never been happier.

He’s knocked a few walls through, the downstairs is now an open plan space, and he’s ordered a new bathroom suite that is supposed to arrive today, along with a plumber that he found online. His name is Mike Hanlon, and he’s lived in the Isle of Skye his whole life.

When Mike arrives, he’s joined with a collie who Mike affectionately calls Mr Chips. Richie scratches the dog behind the ears, and receives a few licks to the inside of his wrist for his trouble.

Mike helps Richie haul the constituent parts of the bathroom suite up the rickety stair case, and Richie is overjoyed to discover that Mike doesn’t complain once. Richie leaves Mike in the bathroom, tinkering with the pipes connected to the old, broken ceramic toilet, and begins to make them both cups of tea using a camping stove connected to a gas cannister he’d bought when he’d been in town.

He’s pouring water from the small camping kettle into Mike’s mug (breakfast tea, no milk, no sugar, thanks, Rich!) when Richie catches sight of the man in the khaki uniform, turning the ring  on the gas cannister with a hesitant finger.

Richie startles, the force of which sends his arm flailing through the air, and sends the contents of the kettle sailing through the air in a graceful arc before landing on his foot.

Richie curses, grabbing the bottle of cold water sat on the worktop, and quickly proceeds to pour the contents over his poor, red raw foot.

When he looks up again, the man has gone.

One of the other bottles of water has upended itself on a cloth, however. Richie doesn’t think anything of it when he grabs the soaking wet cloth and wraps it around his foot.

The third time Richie sees him, he learns his name.

A month later, Mike has finished the bathroom. The plaster on the walls is still white and unpainted, and the floor hasn’t been properly tiled yet, but the bath, sink and toilet has been replaced, and Richie was half way through wiring the extractor fan. Mike had kindly agreed to stay on and help Richie replace the kitchen sink, and install the washing machine and tumble dryer. Richie was elated. He’d grown close with Mike quickly, and he loved listening to Mike’s stories about Scottish folklore. Richie listened to Mike talk for hours about kelpies and the loch ness monster and never found himself drifting off.

Soon enough, they broached the topic of ghosts.

“Do you believe in ghosties then, Mikey?” Richie asks, the man in the khaki uniform a vivid picture in his mind.

“Well, they say that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, right? That’s an important element of the physics of life, so, I can’t accept that when we die we just … disappear, and all that energy just leaks into the air? Where would it go?”

“I dunno, back into the ground?”

“Nah, I don’t reckon so. I reckon it’s gotta go somewhere else. I reckon our consciousness, like, the thing that makes us truly us, escapes our physical bodies when they run out of energy and become something else. Maybe we become light. Maybe we become oxygen, I don’t know.”

“So you don’t believe in ghosts in the sense that you don’t believe we can walk around as physical manifestations of how our physical bodies looked, then?”

“I just dunno, Rich. We probably will never know. Here – hand me that spanner, this bolt is being a feckin’ nightmare”

Richie thought about what Mike had said for a long time.

The third time Richie sees him, he learns his name.

When Mike had left for the evening, Richie waded into the shallow lake, water lapping around the tops of his rubber boots. He threw small pebbles into the water. Plip Plip Plip. The moor was uncharacteristically silent. He stared down into the water.

The reflection of the man dressed in the khaki uniform stared back at him.

Richie turned around.

The man in the khaki uniform was stood next to him, wringing his hands, his brow furrowed.

Richie swallowed.

“Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Eddie”

“Why d’ya keep letting yourself into my house, Eddie?”

Richie fought against his quivering voice to keep his tone stern and challenging.

“I – I don’t. It’s hard to explain. What year is it?”

“Uh… what?"

“What year is it?”

“Are you on drugs or something, dude? Lost on your way back from a costume party?”

“Please, just tell me, what year is it?"

“2019”

“Ah”

“What’d’ya mean, ‘ah’?”

“I mean, I haven’t seen anyone in this house since 1947”

“… Dude you cannot be over 70 fucking years old. Stop bullshitting me, just tell me the truth and I promise I won’t get Mike to impale you on one of those rubber poles he keeps in his van”

“I’m not over 70. I'm 38 – I was 38.”

“Well, how do you know no one’s been in this house since 1947? And what do you mean, you 'were' 38?”

“Because I’ve been here on my own since 1947”

“You’re still not making any sense, my man”

Eddie rubbed his hand over his face, and sighed.

“You won’t believe me, so there isn’t much point”

“Try me”

“I worked here. This place was used as an evacuation safe house for children from across Scotland, but mainly Edinburgh and Glasgow. They were moved here to escape the bombing. I worked here as a doctor, I cared for the children. I – I died here.”

“What do you mean, you died here?”

“I was stabbed”

“hang on – bombing? To escape bombing?”

Richie could barely breathe.

“Yes, bombing.”

“… And you said you haven’t seen anyone here since 1947”

“That is correct”

“So, what you’re telling me is that –"

“Yes”

“You’re …”

“I am”

Richie doesn’t reply. He turns around, and walks back into the house.

When he shuts the door, the lake glitters like a pool of liquid mercury. Eddie has gone.