Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

She opened it and read,

The Hospital Is Haunted: Chapter One. People in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent had known the hospital was haunted for many years.

When she looked up, Donald St. John finished writing out a check, and passed it over to her. It was for fifteen hundred dollars. “I'll just give you that now, and you can tell me when I need to give you more,” he said. “How soon can you start?”

“I can start now,” she said.

“Good.” He scooted closer on his wheeled chair. “Now, listen. I've gotten up to chapter five, and I'd like you to take a gander at chapter six. There's an outline at the back with the basic story. When you've got a draft, call me up and we'll take a look.”

She looked into his blue eyes, wondering if he was entirely sober. “I'm a copy editor, mainly,” she said.

“You work with language, though, yes? And you have wonderful references. Just try it,” he said heartily. “If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. No harm done. You've read mysteries, right?”

She nodded.

“Then you know that to those of us behind the scenes, they aren't mysterious at all.”

She nodded again.

“Stay to lunch,” he said.

Unable to stop the momentum, she kept nodding.

“Excellent. Corazón is a wonderful cook.”

All three of them sat around a yellow Formica table in the kitchen. Corazón remained silent while Donald St. John spoke at great length about a trip he'd recently taken to the south of France, photographing the landscape and eating local stews. Their own lunch was a Mexican soup so spicy that Karin ruined her cloth napkin by having to wipe her nose so often. Corazón evidently spoke no English. As soon as she politely could, Karin refused coffee and left, carrying the mystery in her briefcase.

At home that evening, a glass of wine in hand, she read the first five chapters in one sitting. Ages ago, in college, she'd written poetry, but she had long since stopped thinking of herself as a creative person. She had become a competent person instead. In the first fifty pages of the book, a male doctor was killed and a female doctor was raped by a ghost, the latter act described with loving, brutal specificity. The female doctor's best friend, Rose, a sexy but hard-nosed hospital administrator, was determined to put a stop to these crimes and didn't believe in ghosts. Rather, she suspected the hospital's new doctor, a testy, handsome, brilliantly accomplished brain surgeon named Rusty McGovern. In the outline, the evidence piled up against Rusty, as did Rose's attraction to him, until he turned up at just the right moment to save her from the raping ghost.

The writing varied from mechanical and simplistic to outright awful. Rose had shiny auburn hair that cascaded down her back like a brown waterfall, Rusty was part Irish, part Cherokee, and all man. Karin's first thought was that of course she could write this stuff — much better, in fact. St. John was right, it wasn't that mysterious at all, and she went to sleep that night looking forward to the next day's work just as, when a child, she'd looked forward to a new year at school.

Chapter Six, she typed in the morning. In this chapter Rusty stepped outside of the hospital one gloomy, rainy night — all the nights in the quaint mountain town of St. Lucent seemed to be gloomy and rainy — and discovered a dead dog lying by the entrance to the emergency room in a pool of blood. He was bent over the canine corpse when Rose happened to exit the hospital, and of course she believed he'd killed the dog. Rusty arrogantly refused to try to persuade her that it was only a coincidence, and they argued until Rose, convinced of his guilt, drove away into the night (though, according to the outline, she would later discover that Rusty had thoughtfully arranged for the dog's burial in St. Lucent's quaint pet cemetery). While Marcus's dog snored beside her, her legs twitching in dreams, Karin felt she was able to describe the corpse with some exactitude. If not creative, she was certainly accurate, and there was satisfaction in that.

That weekend, when Marcus called, she told him about her new job.

“Who is this guy, anyway?” he said. “You just went over to his house without knowing anything about him?” For years now they'd played these roles — him protecting her, both of them acting as if she were the vulnerable one.

“He's a successful writer, and Sid knows him,” she told him. “Don't worry about me.”

“There's a lot of creeps out there, Mom. You can't be too careful.”

“I'll be fine. You worry too much.”

He sighed and asked after the dog.

“She misses you. She sleeps by your bed sometimes.”

“It's weird not having a dog,” her son said. “I wake up in the night thinking I forgot to feed her. It's like I have a phantom limb, but instead it's a phantom pet.”

“I know,” she said.

The next week she wrote another chapter, following the outline— the raping ghost continued to maraud, with increasing frequency and violence, throughout the hospital — but adding her own touches. She grew more confident as the writing went on. Deciding the plot was too simple, she introduced some other potential suspects: a cranky, balding internist who had wanted to be promoted to Rose's job; a lesbian nurse who'd once made advances that were spurned. Other characters she simply fleshed out. To the mentally disturbed custodian, for example, she gave every annoying mannerism she remembered from her ex-husband, Mitchell — the constant, vaguely sexualized jiggling of change in his pockets, the refusal to clip his nose hairs, the tendency to eat or drink something and then say, “Oh, this tastes terrible, try it”—while keeping the physical description of him very different, as she was mindful of the legal dangers. Writing became more fun every day. The characters were garish and crude, but this was the whole style of the book. She didn't think St. John would mind the liberties she was taking. He seemed to her like a man at the end of his rope, a burnt-out case. Why else hire a ghost writer?

Indeed, as she wrote, the question of St. John began to occupy space at the back of her mind. How did a person become a mystery writer in the first place, she wondered. And now that she was writing his book, what did he do all day? Karin had other work to do, other deadlines, but this was somehow always the file that remained open on her monitor. She was even enjoying the almost mathematical progression of the book's formulaic plot. Each chapter set up clues that would come to fruition later in a tidy, satisfying sequence; even the dead dog turned out to have a role, as it had been killed just when it was about to bark at the ghost.

Before she knew it, almost, she'd written four chapters. Not wanting St. John to know how much time she was devoting to the book, she waited a few days before e-mailing him the work she'd done. She expected him to write back immediately — at least to acknowledge receipt — but after three days she'd still heard nothing. Not knowing what else to do, she began writing chapter eight, in which the custodian and the lesbian nurse were now in cahoots, though she wasn't quite sure about what. No word yet from St. John. She was too distracted to concentrate on her other work, the medical journals and newsletters. All she thought about was The Hospital Was Haunted. At night she even dreamed of its creepy linoleum floors and Gothic shadows, waking not afraid but feverish, itching to get back to writing.

Finally an e-mail arrived: Come for lunch tomorrow.

This time she dressed up, in a dark purple dress, a black blazer, and boots. She put on lipstick and corralled her hair into a bun — not a librarian's but a sexy one, at least she hoped, with a few fetching loose strands. She wasn't out to seduce Donald St. John; she just wanted to dress like someone who had taken command of the situation. As she sat in the car checking her makeup, she glanced up at the second floor, mentally preparing herself for the conversation to come, and was stunned by what she saw. St. John was walking around the room without a stitch of clothing on. Clearing a stack of files from his desk, tapping a book's spine into place on a shelf, he roamed around his office and then stood at the window surveying his spoiled view. His body was pale, vaguely muscled, bulging at the hips above legs that were thin, delicate, practically feminine. At his crotch was an enormous spray of dark hair, thickly streaked with gray. Karin looked down at her lap, blushing, finding it impossible to fathom. Was this show being put on for her? Or was it his daily habit to inspect his kingdom like this? Was she imagining the whole thing?