I’m working on my new book which is the haunted house story that I’ve been trying to unlock for a long time. This is the first draft of the first couple minutes of it…

The white bars of light that passed periodically over Audra’s sandstone face as she drove us down the serpentine road into our deep-exurban destination reminded me of something faintly recalled from childhood that I, eventually, after several dead-end memory-alleys,  zeroed in upon: flash cubes. Flash cubes. My father’d had a cheap snapshot camera that he’d bring out for Xmas and maybe July 4 and maybe my b-day and maybe an occasional pool party, and an important part of this camera’s successful exposure of the film (so that we’d actually have legible pics to look at weeks later from the pharmacy) was to get light from a plastic cube that flared hotly and rotated on top of the camera. Actinic, I thought. What the fuck does that word even mean? Actinic. It’s a word that I seemed to remember from Asimov-era sci-fi stories that I’d read in kid-hood while getting ridiculed by other boys for reading, and it seemed to have something to do with a particularly dramatic quality of light that you’d describe in a sci-fi story if you were a writer of that age. Was this it: the brief and harsh chemical light of the flash cube that’d made my little kid eyes still glow red to this day in every single 5×7 faded pic from those days that I still kept in a shoe box?

From sparsely-spaced street lamps, actinic light passed in bars every fifteen to thirty seconds over Audra Kamnotta’s face. Flash and she said, “You still with me, Zach?” and I nodded and maybe made a noise and, when I looked at her, she appeared almost as if she’d become some kind of sculptural element fused naturally with the expensive details of the German luxury car’s interior that surrounded her, like a whitewashed waxen glossed statue that flared occasionally in the actinic white light of the flash cube that twisted and burned every thirty seconds. She’d been my best friend for twenty years and I marveled on this night how she’d somehow looked like no one I’d ever met before. Flash and she said, “He still loves, you know.” And I didn’t say anything, and so she added, “He can’t stand being away from you.”

Flash, and I said that “He certainly didn’t seem to love me anymore when he shut me out of this investigation.” And I looked at her white statue face in austere profile with my glowing red eyes, and I started to say something else, but I didn’t after all because my lower lip started to tremble.

Audra, now an aeons-bleached figure fully fused with her ancient Phoenician luxury car as if she were merely a bas-relief feature of it, said—flash—“I was at the team-briefing the other night. Dathan treated us to dinner. A big mess of pizza delivery and box wine at the house. He really thought you were going to show up. He really did. And he was sad that you didn’t. I could tell.”

“I wasn’t invited.” Flash.

Audra didn’t say anything for a minute, not for the span of a couple more flashes of the actinic light, and then she said, “Well, I suspect he’s inviting you now.” And then the obnoxious klaxon tone of her phone blasted on the car speakers and Siri said, “Call from Ando. Answer it?” Audra glanced at me. I said yes to the phone and said to Ando, “This is Zach.”

“Thank fucking Christ,” Ando gasped throughout Audra’s giant SUV on its many speakers. “How close are you?” I looked at an animation of our juddering progress on the console screen. “Close. About ten minutes.”

“Zach, I cannot overstate how fucked this is,” said Ando. “You are our last hope to get through to Dathan and get him to stop this fucking shit.”

Flash. This sounded entirely absurd. “What do you mean? What shit?”

A sound like a choked sob and then an electronic squelch and then Ando again: “Sorry, I needed to get a little further away from him. Listen: drive faster if you can. I have an ambulance here already just in case. He’d be so pissed off at me if he knew about the ambulance but I had to do it. And he wants to see you now.”

Flash. What the fuck? “An ambulance?”

“Zach, he’s mad at me about every goddamned thing right now but I’ve been keeping a blood pressure cuff on him. He’s at one-ninety over one hundred now. He’s going to fucking stroke out if he doesn’t stop this!”

I couldn’t process this under the actinic light. “What does he need to stop? Why is he in this situation?”

Over the phone speakers Ando gasped and—flash—and said, “He thinks he’s brought an Other entity to the surface. He’s trying to fucking channel it! It’s that thing again, Zach. He’s doing it again.” 

Calmly, very calmly, so calmly, my eyes not reflecting the red at all in the flash cube’s light, I told Ando to calm down and don’t worry and that we were almost there and then I ended the call and then I screamed and screamed and screamed at Audra to drive faster.

Flash.