You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.

No matter. This was my stage, my play. Nothing would go wrong this week; I’d obsessed over it for far too long. After so many years, you were mine.

I’d given myself to our plan: my name on every work order for Wolf Harbor Estate’s renovation, Alastor’s credit card in my wallet, and his whispers of bringing you to justice sweet in my mind.

Creating written worlds ex nihilo—from nothing—is the closest we get to the divine. Perhaps, in writing, we are divine. But I wonder: what if the page wasn’t the only place we could control fate?

The hostess smiled. “I would encourage you to come up with an answer, whether you’re confident in it, or not. Mr. Alastor believes in consequences for poor effort.”

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

Cursed Artifact (n.): a haunting reminder of the sins one has committed, usually planted by someone bent on revenge, intended to disturb and ultimately provoke madness.

You stole that from me. You’d completely ripped away my ability to write, as if you’d sliced me open and scooped out the creative spark from beneath my rib cage and left me cold and dark. You’d stolen every word I could ever have put on the page, and that hurt most of all.

J. R. Alastor knew my name. The award-winning, bestselling author whose murky identity had been a source of news speculation for the last twenty-nine years, had sought me, a random nobody, out. Asked if I’d take part in enacting justice for some crimes the law couldn’t touch. Rumor had it he’d been a cop or a lawyer, having a knack for insider knowledge on procedure and prosecution; others claimed he might be a doctor, or a murderer himself, to write so accurately about injuries.

But after all these years, I was so very tired. Of holding so many secrets, so many lies, both mine and not. But it was all coming out now, a bottle unstoppered, splashing to the floor, and this was the first time I’d felt free in a long while. Karma and all that, they say.

Then there are the thieves, stealing the voices and experiences of others and claiming them as their own. I wouldn’t want to be one of them when it catches up to them.

An experienced, tired author whose real name no one could ever know, and a young, failed writer whose name no one would ever know. Both hungry for justice. And for once, we’d wield our anonymity to our advantage.

They took a life. In some cases physically, in others, symbolically, and as a result forfeited their own. It is justice. Just not the pretty kind.

Our justice system is broken because humans are broken. You know they can’t be trusted; you experienced it firsthand, with Rodrigo Sandoval. The only justice in this life, Mila, is the one you take.

If they play the games and win, they’ll survive. But to win they will have to change, internally. Every good story is about internal change, after all.

“Sometimes wounds become scars, not because they’ve healed, but because they’re hiding what’s underneath from ourselves.”

Desperate people did desperate things, and it terrified me to think what people who made a living off of fear and death would do if they thought I was lying.

Three cards for each of us. Character, profession, sin. “It means,” I said slowly, “that if this game is to be believed, and we match the sins to our characters, we’ll be left with who Alastor really is.”

But when we experience the horrors of our own human hearts, we see the possibility of them everywhere. We’re all capable of them, after all.

Memories were demons, and no amount of therapy or booze or anything stronger could exorcise a certain one from the home it’d made in my bones.

“I think in everyone’s life,” I started slowly, “you get an event that cuts everything in two. Like an axe splitting wood. And there becomes a before and an after.” “A who I was and a who I became,” he murmured. “Sucks, doesn’t it.”

But anonymity is a double-edged sword; the fewer people know about you, the easier it is for someone else to claim your work, publishing it as their own.

The purpose of art is to evoke emotion—and what are the horror and thriller genres for, if not to incite feeling? Fear is an art. It can be done poorly or well. It can be used poorly or well, and additionally, it can be enjoyed poorly or well.

My last advice is not to run from pain, nor the people who have caused it. In fact, I highly recommend you keep a little anti-acknowledgments list, as it were, of people you’d love to thank for making life difficult. For making you who you are, whether by spite, defamation, negligence, or indiscretion. What better way to give life to your words, than drawing on your experience?

Vengeance is a poison you consume alongside your victim; the only antidote is reconciliation.