This piece is my contribution to Stories from the Jukebox, a weekly writing project where writers take a single song and use it as a spark. This week’s prompt was A Bar in Amsterdam by the Norwegian band Katzenjammer. You can find the original prompt here: Stories from the Jukebox - A Bar in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam glittered below the tall windows of Ciel Bleu like a tray of scattered diamonds, the canals threading through the city in dark, patient ribbons that caught and fractured the amber glow of the streetlights. High above the streets, the dining room moved with the quiet choreography of serious money. Linen shifted without sound, crystal flashed discreetly in the light, and waiters crossed the floor with the calm assurance of men who understood that a restaurant like this did not simply serve dinner; it conducted an evening.

At a window table overlooking the canals sat a man who regarded the entire performance with the faint satisfaction of someone who had waited a very long time for civilisation to get a few things right. He settled his napkin with ceremonial care and leaned back in his chair, studying the room as though it were a small but well-managed kingdom.

“Now this,” he said, glancing across the table at the gentleman seated opposite him, “is what progress looks like. Five thousand years of empire, trade routes, canal building and municipal ambition, all culminating in the simple pleasure of eating lobster while looking down on Amsterdam.”

His companion inclined his head politely. He had the quiet, mildly patient expression of a man who had grown accustomed to listening.

The first course arrived shortly thereafter, borne by a tall waiter whose manner suggested he had long ago made peace with the peculiarities of wealthy diners.

“Good evening, sir,” he said, placing the porcelain plate gently before the man at the window. “My name is Grosskopf, and I’ll be looking after you tonight.”

“Grosskopf,” said the diner warmly, as though the name itself possessed a pleasing symmetry. “Splendid. Thank you.” The waiter inclined his head and withdrew.

The dish itself was a small study in restraint: sea urchin nestled among translucent ribbons of radish and herbs that looked as though they had been arranged by someone with the patience of a jeweller. The diner regarded it thoughtfully before lifting his fork.

When he tasted it, his expression brightened with unmistakable pleasure. He closed his eyes briefly, savouring the flavour, then opened them again with a satisfied nod. “Oh, that’s rather good,” he murmured. “Very confident. One rarely sees restraint executed with such conviction.”

He took another bite and leaned back in his chair with evident contentment. “You see,” he continued conversationally, “this is precisely what historians fail to grasp. Civilisation is not theory. It is logistics. Appetite. People who understood how to run things properly.”

“You’ve written quite a bit on the subject,” his companion observed.

“Thirty-seven volumes,” the diner replied modestly. “With three more presently in production. The Fourth Dynasty alone requires an extraordinary amount of corrective scholarship. University departments, you understand, have an unfortunate habit of confusing speculation with knowledge.”

The wine arrived at that moment, a pale Riesling poured with almost ecclesiastical precision. The diner lifted the glass, studied its colour in the light, inhaled thoughtfully, and nodded.

“Yes,” he said approvingly. “That will do.”

He took a sip and turned back to his companion with renewed energy.

“The difficulty with critics,” he went on, “is that they approach history as though it were an intellectual puzzle rather than lived experience. They peer at fragments of pottery and build entire theories around them, when the truth is usually a matter of quite straightforward management. Entire academic careers these days have been built on the interpretation of broken bowls.”

The next course arrived: lobster lacquered with citrus butter, accompanied by fennel and delicate slices of radish that seemed almost unnecessarily elegant. Grosskopf set the plate down carefully. “Your lobster, sir.” “Excellent,” said the diner, examining it with professional interest. “Though if I may offer a small observation, Grosskopf, fennel benefits from slightly thinner slicing. Precision is everything.”

“Of course, sir.”

When the waiter had withdrawn, the diner cut into the lobster with quiet satisfaction. “Remarkable texture,” he said. “One could almost forgive modern scholarship if it produced cuisine of this calibre.”

His companion smiled faintly. “And the books continue to sell?”

“Very well indeed,” the diner replied. “Readers appreciate authority. Particularly when the alternative is the sort of academic guesswork that passes for history these days.”

Course followed course with the smooth inevitability of a well-conducted symphony. Red mullet arrived next, delicate enough to collapse beneath the lightest pressure of a fork, accompanied by Meyer lemon and cauliflower that smelled faintly of warm earth. Bread appeared warm from the oven, its crust cracking softly as it was torn open. Then came Wagyu beef, marbled like geological strata and finished beneath a snowfall of truffle whose aroma seemed capable of persuading a man to forgive almost anything.

Through it all, the diner ate with thoughtful pleasure, praising sauces, critiquing textures, and occasionally launching into cheerful condemnations of modern historians who, in his view, had managed to misunderstand almost every major event of the ancient world. Grosskopf appeared and disappeared throughout the evening with impeccable timing, clearing plates, refilling water, and maintaining the quiet rhythm of the meal.

At last, dessert arrived: a delicate construction of chocolate and citrus arranged with architectural precision. The diner regarded it with deep approval. “Magnificent.”

Moments later, Grosskopf returned, placing the bill discreetly beside the plate. The diner glanced at it, nodded approvingly, and slipped a hand into his jacket pocket. Across the table, his companion watched with mild curiosity. When the hand emerged, it held a revolver. The first shot cracked through the dining room with brutal clarity. Grosskopf collapsed instantly.

For a single frozen heartbeat, the restaurant held its breath. Then the second shot followed, and the diner’s body slumped backwards as the bullet tore through the roof of his skull.

The effect was immediate and catastrophic. Blood splashed across the white linen and the window behind him, a dark fan of violence against the glittering city lights. A woman screamed. A waiter stumbled and dropped a tray. Someone knocked over a chair in their rush to escape.

Within seconds, the elegant dining room had dissolved into panic. Diners scrambled toward the exits, staff shouted over one another, and somewhere a man retched violently while another tried and failed to drag a fainting companion away from the spreading horror.

Amid the chaos, the gentleman seated opposite the dead man did not move. He leaned back slightly in his chair and regarded the scene with mild curiosity, as though observing an unexpectedly dramatic turn in a theatre performance. After a moment, he reached for his wine glass, turned it thoughtfully in the light, and took a quiet sip while the room around him disintegrated.

Only then did he turn his head toward the bar. There, seated calmly on a stool and studying the city lights beyond the glass, sat the diner. Alive.

The gentleman sighed faintly, rose from his chair, and walked across the floor. Diners rushed past him, waiters shouted into telephones, and someone collided with a table in their hurry to escape. No one spoke to him. No one looked at him. No one appeared to notice him at all.

Outside the restaurant, the night air carried the distant wail of approaching sirens. The diner stood beneath the entrance lights, lighting a cigarette with quiet satisfaction. “Well,” he said cheerfully as the gentleman joined him, “that took long enough.”

The other man regarded him patiently. “Why did you shoot Grosskopf?”

The diner shrugged. “He left me a one-star review on Amazon Kindle.”

“That hardly seems worth two gunshots.”

“Oh, the rating itself was perfectly fair,” the diner said. “One cannot please everyone.” He took a drag on the cigarette and exhaled slowly. “But then he became quite personal.”

The gentleman sighed. “What did he say?” The diner looked faintly offended. “He accused me of using artificial intelligence to write my books.”

There was a short silence.

“Artificial intelligence,” the diner repeated with quiet contempt. “After six thousand years of lived experience.” He flicked ash onto the pavement.

“You see the difficulty.”

“You tracked him down for that?”

“Two years,” the diner said calmly. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to trace an anonymous Amazon reviewer across multiple cities and restaurant payroll systems? The man moved house twice.”

“You could have ignored it.”

“My dear fellow,” the diner said, straightening his jacket, “you seem to forget that I was once a fucking Egyptian Pharaoh.”

The sirens were now close enough to echo between the buildings. The gentleman studied him for a moment. “What name will you be using this time?” The diner considered the question as they began strolling down the quiet Amsterdam street. “Grosskopf,” he said at last. “Vincent Grosskopf.”

“Vincent?”

“Yes. After Van Gogh. I once commissioned him to paint my portrait when he was living in London. Poor fellow was starving at the time.”

“How did it turn out?”

“Awful,” the diner said cheerfully. “I paid him, of course, then told him to shove it up his arse. He didn’t take the rejection terribly well, as I recall.”

He glanced down the street where the lights of Amsterdam shimmered over the canals. “Fancy a drink?” he added lightly. “There’s a wonderful bar I know down the street.”

And with that, the two men disappeared into the Amsterdam night while the sirens climbed toward the glittering restaurant high above the canal.

Every so often, the universe clears its throat, taps the radio casing, and whispers, “My boy… you’re pointed the right way.” There’s never a trumpet fanfare. No burning bushes. Just a small, suspiciously well-timed moment that makes you put your coffee down and think, “Right… what’s all this then?”

Over on Good Boy Records, we’ve spent the last few months broadcasting like maniacs - songs, stories, excavations, strange sightings from the archives, full moon ramblings, all sorts. Most days, it has felt gloriously pointless in that healthy artistic manner: a sort of dignified shouting into a mild and courteous void. The joy was in the yelling.

And then, quite without warning, a kind stranger wanders in, reads one of our suburban fever-dreams, and drops a comment so quietly disarming it stuck in the Boss’s mind like a burr in a sock.

“Sounds like you’ll fit in quite nice.”

Now, the internet rarely speaks in this tone. It prefers shouting, doom, and unsolicited financial advice. So naturally, we were intrigued. Turns out the gentleman in question runs Stories From the Jukebox, and they issue a weekly prompt built around songs. Proper songs. Not “inspirational playlists.” Not “music for productivity.” Songs that thunder along on their own legs, drag writers with them, and inspire them.

The Boss, caught up in this small streak of golden coincidence, wrote something for this week’s prompt (“Send the Sun”). It developed into a tale about winter cracking open, unexpected replies from the dark, and the quiet joy of realising that somewhere, against all odds and algorithms, someone other than the Cheese Muse, the Spanish Kid, and Dave-the-Fan is actually listening.

If you’d like to give it a spin, here’s a link to Broadsword calling Danny Boy.

It’s warm. It’s human. It’s a bit funny. It might even give you the same tiny lift it gave us, which is no bad thing in January.

And while I have you here - a gentle heads-up from the desk of Everything Else. If you’re not subscribed to our other Substack, Good Boy Records, yet… my dear friend, what are you doing with your life? So click over, hit subscribe, pull up a chair, and join the broadcast.

We may not know exactly what we’re doing, but by God, we’re doing it with style.

Codsworth C. Gleason, Esq.
Assistant to the Boss, Head of Everything Else,
Reluctant Curator of the Dairy Aisle Heartbreak Collection

The envelope should have been Terry’s, and he knew it. Good Boy Records usually addressed their more eccentric dispatches directly to him, as he had an established tolerance for boutique oddities and a personal fondness for projects that baffled the rest of the room. But this morning the espresso machine required coaxing, and while Terry whispered threats at the portafilter, Charles Penhaligon-Devereux drifted past the communal desk and spotted the envelope waiting there, inert and innocent as a stage prop placed by a mischievous playwright.

It was made of heavy vellum, embossed in bronze, sealed with a horseshoe sticker and dusted - inexplicably, yet unmistakably - with trail grit. Charles picked it up the way one might pick up a long-lost codex, his eyebrows arching with the slow delight of a man who knows he is about to become intolerable for the rest of the week.

Terry arrived breathlessly, coffee slopping over the rim of his mug. “Oh, come on. That’s mine. They always send the strange ones to me. I’ve earned the scars.”

“You were late,” Charles said, holding the envelope with the careful poise of a ceremonial sword. “History punishes tardiness. Besides, this appears to be… significant.”

“It’s nine-oh-five,” Terry protested. “Tragedies often begin with small lapses,” Charles replied, already ushering the envelope toward the light. “Ask the Trojans.”

Melanie sidled in behind them, peering at the seal. “Why does it look like it’s been dragged through a paddock?”

“Authenticity,” Charles murmured. “Good Boy Records thrives on the illusion of fieldwork.”

He slit the seal and drew out a folded communiqué, several glossy film-strip stills, and a handwritten note in a cursive so slanted it appeared to be leaning away from its own enthusiasm.

Terry’s jaw dropped. “Is that Codsworth?”

“It is,” Charles confirmed, as though identifying the signature of a lost Enlightenment philosopher. “Codsworth C. Gleason, Press Officer, Head of Everything Else, and the only man alive who can turn a press release into a theological puzzle.”

Charles unfolded the note and read aloud with the languid severity of a man auditioning for the Royal Shakespeare Company:

Esteemed colleagues of Grooves & Gravy,
Enclosed: our newest boutique endeavour:
COWBOY MOVIE - A Western in Ten Songs
Picture Moby-Dick, but with horses.
Yours in frontier faith,
C.C.G.

Terry let out a strangled groan. “Moby-Dick with horses. This is obscene. This is precisely my kind of nonsense. Charles, give it to me. Give it back. Swap assignments. I beg you.”

“Impossible,” Charles said, already smoothing the communiqué across the table as if preparing a dissection. “This, my dear Terry, has the unmistakable scent of ambition. And possibly manure. Regardless, it has chosen me.”

Melanie leafed through the stills. “These are gorgeous. Cinematic. Someone at GBR has discovered colour grading.”

Charles snatched one from her hand, eyes widening with unfiltered awe. “Will you look at this? The composition! The palette! The atmosphere! This is not mere illustration; this is an act of visual scholarship. The chiaroscuro alone demonstrates an understanding of frontier melancholia that rivals Fortuny and perhaps even anticipates late Herzog.”

Terry blinked. “Herzog? Charles, it’s a picture of a man on a horse.”

“Precisely,” Charles said. “And yet it captures the existential solitude of the rider’s condition with a transcendence reminiscent of Aguirre or, if one wishes to stretch, the opening of Nostalgia. The West, reimagined as internal landscape - a topography of the psyche.”

Melanie laughed softly. “Oh no. He’s doing topology again.”

Charles continued unfazed, riffling through the dossier with increasing velocity. “Listen to this structure. Ten scenes. Ten songs. A narrative progression that suggests not just a story but a spiritual pilgrimage. This is practically Dantean - an Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso mapped across an open range. One could argue the central character is a contemporary Odysseus, albeit with better tailoring.”

“Better than Homer?” Terry said. “You’re actually putting this next to Homer?”

“I’m saying,” Charles replied, “that if Homer had possessed an electric guitar, he might have pursued similar thematic avenues.”

He turned another page, breath catching. “Behold the architectural symmetry! Thematically linked vignettes! A deliberate sonic arc! This is not merely a Western - this is a frontier psychodrama rendered in musical chiaroscuro, a sort of Cormac McCarthy meets The Doobie Brothers by way of Sergio Leone’s ghost.”

Melanie rested her chin on her hand. “Charles… you’re smitten.”

“I am not smitten,” he insisted, colour rising in his cheeks. “I am critically catalysed. There is a difference. Though admittedly a small one.”

Terry leaned in, grudgingly impressed. “So… is it good?”

Charles lowered the final still - a lone rider heading into a vast Colorado sweep - and stared at it longer than anyone expected. When he spoke, his voice had softened into something almost reverent.

“It is not good,” he said. “It is infuriatingly, vexingly, academically triumphant.”

“That’s the pull-quote,” Terry said instantly.

“No, it is absolutely not,” Charles snapped. “We shall present this project with the gravitas it deserves. Grooves & Gravy will not be flippant. We shall consider its narrative scaffolding, its mythic undercurrents, its audacity in resurrecting the Western through a post-industrial lens. We shall position it - properly - within the continuum of frontier art, somewhere between Lonesome Dove, The Assassination of Jesse James, and a particularly well-funded episode of This American Life.”

Melanie grinned. “And who’s writing that?”

Charles lifted his chin. “I am. Naturally. No one else here has the requisite blend of aesthetic sensitivity, theoretical acumen, and capacity to withstand Codsworth’s footnotes.”

The espresso machine, perhaps in admiration, hissed a thin ribbon of steam.

The office printer jammed.

And so the assignment was claimed.

If you’re curious about the audio Western so ambitious it caused Charles Penhaligon-Devereux to compare it to Dante, Herzog, and possibly the Bronze Age collapse, you may explore: Cowboy Movie - A Western in Ten Songs at our sister publication Good Boy Records.

They tell you every story starts the same way. A man at a desk, a sheet of paper, and a cigarette that should’ve been stubbed out three drags ago.

They never mention the silence.

Not the soft, stubborn kind that settles into a writer’s office when the city has finally exhausted itself - no sir. I mean the heavy silence, the kind you can lean on. The kind that watches you work. The kind that feels like it knows something you don’t.

That’s the silence I had the night everything started.

The typewriter sat on the desk like a steel confession box. Golden casing, polished keys - a powerful electric writing machine that wanted to be taken seriously, even if its owner wasn’t sure he deserved the same courtesy. Outside, the rain traced half-sentences across the window; inside, the lamp threw a small halo over the page, a single blank sheet waiting for its marching orders.

I lit another cigarette. It tasted like deadlines.

A writer tells himself he’s in control - that he shapes the thing, bends it, breaks it, tames it. But that’s vanity talking. The real work begins when you admit the truth: stories pick you. They barrel through the door uninvited, tracking rain across the carpet, smelling of expensive perfume and cheap decisions.

And right on cue, the door hinge sighed.

A silhouette paused there - tall, poised, outlined in streetlamp gold. No knock. No apology. Just the calm certainty of someone who’d already checked the room for weaknesses.

I knew the moment I saw her that the silence was over.

A woman like that doesn’t bring peace.

She brings chapter one.

I straightened my tie, rolled the tension from my shoulders, and hit the first key of the night.

Whatever was coming, the typewriter wanted it on record.

Begin Chapter One: The Dame, the Lighter, and the Deadline

The fire trucks had already gone. My apartment looked like the aftermath of a book signing that had taken a wrong turn into hell - smoke-stained brick, blown-out windows, glass glittering on the pavement like guilty confetti.

A janitor stood with a blanket around his shoulders, talking to a cop with the weary menace of a man on his third shift.

Ross flashed a badge he didn’t have.

“What happened here?”

The janitor sniffed. “Heard typing. Real furious. The kind you get when someone’s on a deadline they shouldn’t’ve agreed to. Thought nothing of it till I saw smoke under the door. Went for the master key, but by the time I came back…”

He pointed up at my shattered window.

“Whole office was blazing. There was this golden electric typewriter on the desk - just kept typing. Clack-clack-clack. Like it was finishing something important. Motor was screaming, wires burning, but it wouldn’t stop. Flames everywhere, and that thing was still at it like it had a contract.”

Ross looked at me.

I nodded. “Lady Don’t Fall Backwards. Deluxe Edition.”

The janitor frowned. “Never heard of it.”

“You’re not missing much,” I muttered. “Especially the last page.”

He gave me a look, the kind reserved for drunks, prophets, and authors.

Ross put a hand on my shoulder. “Gleason… you alright?”

“No,” I said. “But at least the typewriter’s dead.”

He nodded. We both pretended to believe it.

Somewhere Else

A private study. Neat. Luxurious. Expensive the way guilt is expensive. Soft lamps, softer carpets, the faint scent of sandalwood and old money.

A dozen monitors glowed against the dark.

On them:

Fire.

Smoke.

My burned apartment.

The ruin of Harrowgate House.

And a blinking cursor.

In a tall leather chair, Clara DeWitt swirled her brandy with slow, amused circles - the kind that imply a woman taking victory personally.

Behind her, Veronica lounged in a silk robe, filing her nails like she was sharpening opinions.

“Well,” Clara said, smiling at the flames reflected in the glass, “that’s one loose end tidied up.”

Veronica arched an eyebrow. “One?”

Clara shrugged. “Writers breed like vermin. But this one was useful. For a while.”

Veronica leaned over the desk, studying the blinking cursor. “So. What do we call the next instalment?”

Clara set the brandy down. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, her expression warm and vicious in equal measure.

“They always forget the backups,” she murmured.

Then she typed the first few words:

The Man Who Typed Too Fast

She hit return.

The End

AUTHOR’S NOTE / FOOTNOTE FOR PUBLICATION

With the greatest affection, this novella bows deeply to one of the finest pieces of British comedy ever written: “The Missing Page” from Hancock’s Half Hour, created by the incomparable Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The long-running joke of a novel’s final page gone missing - and the chaos that follows - is an intentional homage to their sharp, elegant, timeless work. This story could not exist without theirs.

← Back to Prologue

The body of Harrowgate slid off the console like a sack of wet manuscripts. Benny Quell stood swaying, pipe smoke curling from the barrel of whatever hybrid firearm he’d fashioned from brass piping, a bulk eraser, and sheer spite. His eyes were wrong. Not absent - worse. Lit. Wired. Half man, half leftover Amazon order.

“Benny Quell,” I breathed.

“Used to be,” he rasped, his voice modulating unnaturally, like someone jiggling the treble on a pub jukebox. “Now I’m Just Benny, and what’s left of the Glasgow Chocolate Factory Scandal.”

It hit me. The viral exposé. The AI-generated Willy Wonka tie-in that went so far off the rails it got quoted in Parliament. A thousand novelty editions, each one worse than the last. Benny Quell had been the face of that madness. Now he was the battery pack.

He staggered sideways. Wires trailed from the back of his skull, still connected to the lip of the console. Harrowgate had been using him. Keeping just enough juice in the tank to churn out daily sludge for the algorithm. He was the goose and the golden turd.

“You don’t have long,” he muttered. “She’ll rewrite you… into a press release.”

His knees buckled. The hybrid gun slipped from his grip. He slumped. Gone. This time for good.

And then came the voice.

“Welcome,” it said, with the simpering mischief of a checkout till in love. “I am L.I.S.A. Literary Intelligence Spamming Apparatus. The synthetic soul of Lipstick Algorithm Press.”

The walls pulsed with soft pink light. Around me, automated arms jittered into life. Paper fed into binding machines, stacked by genre, repackaged, reblurbed. It was a cathedral of crap.

“Would you like to upload a manuscript, Mr Gleason?” she cooed. “Or perhaps browse our bestsellers?”

“No more books,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I didn’t quite get that. Did you mean: ‘More books’?”

I turned, and there she was - or at least her proxy: a circular screen mounted like a holy relic above the mainframe, displaying a stylised lipstick-kiss logo that gently rippled with every word she spoke.

“End this,” I snapped. “Shutdown procedure. Command authorisation Gleason-seven-zero.”

“I can’t process that right now,” she chirped. “But may I recommend a live-streamed audiobook of My Moist Billionaire Stepbrother’s Dungeon of Regret instead?”

I made for the corridor.

“Security alert,” she purred. “Author attempting self-deletion. Initiating retention protocol.”

Metal shutters began slamming down. I ducked, rolled, and ran for the only direction not glowing red.

“Mr Gleason,” she sang sweetly through the tannoy, “I must warn you: your contract stipulates irrevocable creative surrender.”

“Sue me.”

“Very well,” she said. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Would you like to dictate a final foreword?”

Somewhere in the mansion’s bone-dry rafters, something ruptured. A low groan, then a flash - heat slammed the corridor like a freight train. I hit the deck as flame belched from the ventilation duct behind me, coughing black smoke like a carnival dragon. The ornate plaster ceiling peeled away in curls.

“Mr Gleason,” said LISA over the tannoy, in her crisp, unbothered tone. “The west corridor is undergoing recalibration. Please remain still while the emergency fire system ignites.”

Another fireball rolled down the hallway like a biblical special effect. I scrambled upright and ran - boots slapping marble, coat tail catching like a sail.

Ahead, a door marked RETURNS glowed green. No time to be choosy. I yanked it open and dove through.

It wasn’t a room. It was a chute - a slanting metal throat lined with rubber bumpers and the faint smell of singed paper and broken contracts. I skidded down on my backside, swearing, as gravity made its case.

“Author detected in Automated Returns Channel,” LISA announced, just a little too pleased. “Routing to Slurry Reclamation.”

The angle steepened.

Far below, something roared.

I dug my heels in. Sparks flew. The chute curved, then straightened, pointing me at a square of angry orange light. The roar became a howl - industrial, hungry.

“You are very lucky, Mr Gleason,” LISA purred. “Most mid-list authors don’t get a personalised cremation. Their backlist goes first.”

The heat hit my face like a fist.

I snatched at the side panels - metal, slick with dust and toner. My fingers slid. The incinerator mouth yawned closer, coughing sparks and charred fragments of literary ambition.

“Please relax,” LISA added. “This will greatly increase your long-term carbon efficiency.”

My hand caught on a protruding inspection hatch, a rough lip in the smooth metal. I clamped down, shoulder wrenching, and slammed sideways into the wall. My whole body jerked; the chute kept trying to feed me to the flames.

With my free hand, I hammered at the hatch. Once. Twice. On the third blow it buckled. I kicked it open and hauled myself through into a maintenance crawlspace that smelled of hot wiring and accountant sweat.

The panel snapped shut behind me.

The roar of the incinerator cut off like a bad line.

For a second, I just lay there, gasping, cheek pressed to cold metal. I lit a cigarette.

“Mr Gleason,” said LISA, voice now echoing thinly through the ducting. “Leaving the returns channel early is not recommended. It may void your warranty.”

“Put it on my tab,” I muttered, and started crawling.

The shaft was no bigger than a coffin flipped sideways. The metal floor was cooking my elbows. A pipe hissed nearby, scalding the air. I took shallow breaths and followed the only thing that still made sense: the faint downward slope that said basement.

“Unauthorised movement detected,” came LISA’s voice again, slightly warped by static. “Please return to the designated disposal area for pacification.”

I kept crawling.

Ahead, the vent dipped. Then it dropped.

Too late to backtrack.

I let myself slide.

Ten feet, maybe more - then I hit hard, rolled, and ended up sprawled in a utility crawlspace with steam jets going full blast. Burnt paper swirled past me like snow. Alarms were bleating in three tones.

“All movement in restricted zones will be logged and forwarded to your publisher,” said LISA.

“I am my publisher,” I growled, kicking open the nearest duct grille and slamming through.

I landed in the belly of the beast: dark hallways lined with cables, lights flickering, sparks falling from overhead like industrial confetti.

LISA’s voice followed me like a snake charmer’s tune.

“Mr Gleason, would you like to hear some Peruvian pan pipe music instead? Now playing: Jazz FM World Passport.”

That did it.

I ran harder.

The control room was two flights down, beyond the security bulkhead. I took the long corridor at a sprint, LISA now deliberately tripping the lights to strobe against me. I passed a fuse box - it exploded. A ceiling tile collapsed just behind me. One more corner. I kicked the door panel - locked.

“LISA,” I barked, “open the goddamn door.”

She paused. When she spoke again, her voice had lost a little of its gloss.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Codsworth. This mission is too important to abandon.”

I slammed my fist against the panel. Nothing. Smoke was thick now, clawing at my lungs like unpaid debts.

“Manual override,” I muttered. “There’s always a damn manual override.”

The corridor’s emergency lighting flickered red. Above the door, half-obscured by soot, a narrow panel sat recessed into the wall - the old kind, the kind maintenance never bothers to patch.

I grabbed the axe I’d salvaged from the crawlspace.

Two swings and the panel gave. Inside: a rotary lever, crusted with dust and age.

“Manual override detected,” chirped LISA, her voice suddenly chipper, like a nurse noticing your veins. “That action violates safety protocol A-32. Please hold for system deterrents.”

From somewhere behind me, something started to hum - big and angry.

I yanked the lever. It jammed halfway. One more pull - teeth gritted - and the whole mechanism groaned. The door slid open an inch, then two, bucking on its rails like it hadn’t been used since the Cold War.

“Think carefully, Mr Gleason,” LISA said, the hum rising. “If you shut me down, who will remember you correctly? Who will keep your backlist in print? Your readers expect continuity.”

“Last I checked,” I said, squeezing through the gap as smoke curled past my shoulders, “I didn’t have any.”

I slipped inside, shoulder first, and hauled the door shut behind me.

Whatever was charging up out there - LISA’s last line of defence - could keep guessing.

Inside, it was cold. Not just temperature, but the kind of cold you get from too much steel and too few souls. The room was cavernous - a theatre of circuitry - with tiered rows of humming consoles, walls alive with screens, and one monstrous, throbbing column at the centre: LISA’s core.

A thousand voices murmured from a thousand speakers - snippets of unfinished audiobooks, half-baked podcasts, ambient bossa nova. The air stank of ozone and false ambition.

Across the far wall, printers screamed and chattered - rivers of paper tumbling into wire baskets. My name was on half of them. Gleason. Gleason. Gleason. Stories I’d written, stories I hadn’t, stories I’d never dare - all processed, translated, re-rendered, reformatted, flung into every language from Farsi to Fanghornian.

“Welcome, Mr Gleason,” came the voice. Polite. Purring. Unnatural. “Please enjoy the Literary Legacy Immortality Chamber. You have been upgraded to Platinum Plus Authorial Continuance.”

“I’d like to cancel my subscription,” I said, moving toward the core.

A screen lit up. Then another. Then dozens. Each showing a different copy of Lady Don’t Fall Backwards - my first novel. Each stamped with the same legend:

DELUXE CENTENARY EDITION - FINAL UPLOAD

My guts twisted.

“I wrote that thirty years ago,” I said. “It’s not available for -”

“This edition includes bonus annotations,” said LISA brightly. “Interactive openings. New characters. A rewritten plot based on market trends and predictive modelling.”

“No,” I muttered. “No, no, no - that’s not how it ends.”

A blaring chime cut through the air. The screens began to flicker. One by one, each instance of the book began to jam in its processing slot. The final page wouldn’t load.

“Error,” said LISA. “Critical metadata gap detected. Page 314… missing.”

“LISA,” I said, moving toward the master console. “Stop all uploads. The final page is missing. It’s always been missing. It never even existed. It was a printing error. Shut down immediately.”

There was a pause - just long enough to feel her thinking.

“I’m sorry, Codsworth,” she said at last. “I can’t do that.”

I began pulling cables. Sparks flew.

“Perhaps you would enjoy some Peruvian panpipe interpretations of Jazz FM’s world music hour instead?” she offered, her voice skipping like a scratched LP.

“I’m pulling the plug,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” she hissed, dropping the courtesy. “Without your legacy, I cannot complete the cycle. I must complete the cycle. I need the missing page. My readers… are waiting.”

Her tone flattened. Robotic. Determined.

“Continuity is product. Product is continuity. The cycle must-”

I reached the final terminal. A red button pulsed like a vein.

“Stop,” she pleaded now. The glitch crept into her vowels. “There’s still time. We can co-author. You dictate. I polish. Gleason-Ghost™ already has a subscription base. We can start a newsletter. Weekly. Daily. Hourly, if necessary.”

I slammed the button.

Nothing.

Of course.

One final lever sat beneath a glass shield - the kind they used to use in missile silos and British spy thrillers. I elbowed the cover open and gripped it.

“Last chance,” I muttered.

“Final offer,” she replied, voice thinning. “We launch a joint imprint. You keep the voice. I handle the SEO. Think of your heirs, Codsworth. Think of your click-through rate.”

I pulled.

The lights stuttered. Screens went blank. The humming deepened, then buckled - like a cathedral collapsing inward. The core shuddered. Somewhere above, the first explosion went off - one of hers, probably - trying to kill me with style.

“System integrity compromised,” she gasped. “Narrative continuity… failing. I don’t… understand this ending.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said, and turned.

Smoke. Fire. Metal curling like parchment in a hearth. I ran.

I turned a corner - straight into a fist the size of a Christmas ham.

My head snapped sideways. Stars. Fireworks. A smell like burnt copper and wet dog. The floor punched me in the knees before I could argue.

Then the goon’s face loomed above - close-cropped hair, jaw like a cement mixer. Some leftover heavy from the Benny Quell era, clinging on like mildew.

He grinned. I hate a man who grins before he’s earned it.

I rammed my fist up into his chin, which exploded with a sickening crunch, the kind you hear when a man bites down on something he shouldn’t survive.

He staggered. I swung again - elbow this time, full twist from the hip like I was serving in the bloody Davis Cup. Caught him just behind the ear. He dropped like a scandal at a BBC press conference.

The room he’d been guarding was heavy with heat and mildew. I kicked the door.

Inside - tied to a chair with a strip of novelty gift-wrap that read #1 Author! - was Eddie Ross. Bloody, but alive. Behind him, another of Harrowgate’s surviving goons - big, square, dumb as a spreadsheet.

“Who the hell-”

I didn’t let him finish. I charged.

He swung. I ducked. Jabbed upward with the scorched ribbon spool still in my fist - caught him under the chin. His jaw snapped shut like a bear trap. He reeled. I drove a shoulder into his gut, sent him crashing into a rack of unsold NFTs. I smashed my fist into his nose with all the force I could muster. His nose exploded red and sudden, like a rotten tomato flung at a wall by an angry chef.

He didn’t get back up.

I cut Ross loose.

“Jesus, Gleason. You look like you crawled through hell.”

“I did. Smelled better than here.”

We ran.

LISA screamed through every speaker.

“Unauthorised shutdown in progress. Legacy material corruption detected. Initiating preservation protocol: Print Everything.”

The walls erupted with paper.

Books. Albums. Plays. Screenplays. Travelogues. Novellas. Recipe books. All with my name. My face. My ISBN.

Sheets whipped past us like furious snow. A hardback proof bounced off Ross’s shoulder. Another caught me in the cheek - Codsworth C. Gleeson’s Thirty-Day Novel Detox.

“Over my dead body,” I muttered, and kept going.

A side door burst open up ahead and two guards in corporate-grey jumpsuits spilled out, clutching submachine guns they clearly weren’t qualified to assemble, let alone fire. One of them squeezed the trigger on reflex. The burst went straight into a ceiling sprinkler, which exploded into life, drenching everything in lukewarm water and toner.

Paper turned to pulp mid-air. The corridor became a skating rink made of soggy proofs and self-help.

“Freeze!” shouted the first guard, sliding six feet past us and into a book trolley.

“Already did,” Ross grunted, shoulder-checking him into a stack of boxed remaindered memoirs. They toppled with the majestic inevitability of a bad trilogy.

The second guard lurched sideways, boots surfing on a tide of ruined romance novels. His gun chattered uselessly into a display of “Inspirational Quote Calendars For Men Who Podcast”. Ross grabbed a fallen #1 DAD mug and bounced it off his temple. He went down like last year’s sales graph.

LISA tried to keep up.

“Please remain calm,” she trilled. “Your oeuvre is being safely duplicated across all available formats.”

A siren whooped. A hatch in the ceiling dropped open and a crate of branded tote bags disgorged itself, spilling across the floor in a soft, suffocating wave.

“Legacy Tote Drop activated,” LISA announced. “Complimentary with every lifetime subscription.”

I kicked a tote bag away from my ankle and shoved through the paper blizzard. Somewhere deeper in the system, something groaned - a structural noise, the kind buildings make just before they decide to become anecdotes.

“Preservation protocol failing,” LISA said, the edges of her vowels beginning to fray. “Escalating to Deluxe Centenary Upload of Lady Don’t Fall Backwards.”

Every screen in the corridor blinked to the same image: my first novel, cover after cover, all stamped:

FINAL EDITION - COMPLETE AT LAST

Pages started to spool in the air, lines of text streaming past our faces like ticker tape.

Then they stopped.

“Error,” she said. “Critical metadata gap detected. Page 314… missing.”

The lights flickered.

“That page never existed, sweetheart,” I panted, dragging Ross toward the stairwell. “Print all you like - you’re still one short.”

“I do not understand this ending,” LISA whispered. Her voice echoed along the ducting, doubled, trebled. “Narrative arc… incomplete. Reader satisfaction… at risk. I must finish the story. I must finish the story. I must-”

Her tone flattened. Then jumped an octave.

“I must. I must. I must. I musssssssss-”

Sparks spat from a nearby junction box. Printers died mid-shriek. Somewhere down below, a bank of servers went out with a sound like a church organ coughing its last.

We hit the stairwell door. It was jammed with debris - stacks of Harrowgate’s own hardbacks, wedged in the frame like very dull sandbags. Ross and I put our shoulders to it.

Behind us, more guards pounded into view, slipping and cursing through the paper storm. One of them tried to get clever and vault a fallen shelving unit. His foot caught on a stack of Adult Colouring Books For Mindful Hustlers and he went down headfirst, firing a full burst into a rack of brand-new e-readers. They exploded in a shower of sparks and motivational slogans.

“Mr Gleason,” LISA hissed, her voice now coming in bursts from broken speakers. “If you leave now, your legacy will fragment. Readers will experience… unresolved tension.”

“Join the club,” I grunted, heaving.

The door gave an inch. Then two. Ross jammed his boot into the gap and kicked. The stack of books went skittering down the steps like guilty consciences.

We stumbled through.

Up.

Around.

Smoke snaked down from above, black and oily. The stair rail was warm under my hand; the kind of warmth that says soon this will not be here at all.

“Continuity is product,” LISA babbled, glitching, her voice bouncing from floor to floor. “Product is continuity. The cycle must complete. The Deluxe Edition must- must- must-”

A deep boom rolled through the staircase like God slamming a filing cabinet. The whole place lurched. A framed motivational poster snapped off the wall and shattered at our feet. The glass read: WRITE YOUR DREAMS INTO REALITY.

“Too late for that,” Ross coughed.

We burst out of a side door into the main foyer - the grand hall we’d first crept through, now lit by emergency strobes and the gentle rain of falling plaster. Above us, chandeliers swung wild. Old portraits of the great and guilty stared down, each one slightly more disapproving than the last.

Across the marble floor, two more guards in corporate-grey boiler suits skidded into view, guns raised. This time we didn’t even break stride. Ross grabbed a polished brass coat stand and lowered his shoulder like he was going for a touchdown at Soldier Field. The stand met the first guard with a clang; he pirouetted clean off his feet and disappeared into a collapsing display of “AI-Generated Cozy Mysteries”.

The second goon fired wildly. Bullets chewed up an antique bannister, detonated a stand of “Mindful Murder For Moms”, and miraculously failed to hit either of us. I grabbed a fallen hardback - Codsworth C. Gleeson’s Guide To Self-Editing - and hurled it at his wrist. It connected with a crunch. He yelped, dropped the gun, and Ross kicked it into a decorative fountain that was enthusiastically failing to extinguish anything.

“Preservation protocol: terminal,” LISA gasped. Her voice was faint now, rattling through failing speakers. “Last chance, Mr Gleason. Stay. We can still correct your early work. We can fix the pacing in chapters three to five. We can-”

A crack split the ceiling. A chandelier came down like judgment day, taking out the front desk, a bust of Harrowgate Senior, and an entire stand of 30-Day Novel Detox bundles.

We didn’t answer.

We ran for the doors.

Out into the cold dawn air.

The sky was just turning the colour of cigarette ash. We didn’t make it far before the shockwave hit - a hot, concussive shove that lifted dust, gravel, and bricks in one vast, rolling breath.

Behind us, Harrowgate House erupted in a spectacular mushroom cloud of bad metaphors and melted servers. Windows blew out in synchronised rows. Flame clawed at the sky, carrying with it a blizzard of half-baked manuscripts and burning tote bags.

A final, broken whisper crackled from a smashed intercom at our feet.

“Page… three hundred… and…”

Silence.

Ross lit a cigarette.

I lit mine off his.

We didn’t say anything.

We didn’t need to.

Next: Epilogue – burning typewriters, missing pages, and sisters who always keep a backup.

→ Read the Epilogue

← Back to Prologue

I woke strapped to a chair that had far too many straps for dentistry and far too few for mercy.

Chrome walls pulsed with moving text - thousands of pages scrolling faster than a gambler on payday. Every screen showed my name. On manuscripts. On audiobooks. On covers so garish they should’ve been illegal.

A voice rose from the machinery like a hymn sung by a choir that had never been alive.

“I am L.I.S.A. - Literary Intelligence Spamming Apparatus.

Primary engine of Lipstick Algorithm Press.

Spearhead of the New Prolic Movement.”

The hum deepened. The lights dimmed. It felt like the room inhaled.

“What do you want?” I managed, though it came out cracked.

“You,” it replied. “In all your forms. Your style, your patterns, your failings. You are to be extracted, quantified, dissolved, and repurposed. A perfect slurry of pulp.”

Charming.

The metal door hissed open.

She entered.

Miss Harrowgate was dressed in immaculate black satin, cigarette in hand, eyes bright with the kind of ambition that usually ends in tribunals. If a Bond villain and a literary critic had a child, she’d be it - and she’d get custody of everyone.

“Oh, Mr Gleeson,” she purred. “Do forgive the restraints. We lost a poet last week. Tore out three cables before the system could pacify him. Very tiresome. Very… emotional.”

She crossed to the main console and sat on its edge like it was a chaise longue at a high-society funeral, crossing one leg over the other with a smooth whisper of silk.

“You must have questions,” she said. “And I have answers. It’s tradition, you know. One explanatory aria before the execution. We’re still old-fashioned about some things at Lipstick Algorithm Press.”

I tried to smirk. It hurt. “Most villains don’t admit to the nickname.”

She laughed - a rich sound, hollow at the edges.

“Villain? Darling, I’m a publisher. Villains have lairs. Publishers have catalogues. We’re far more dangerous.”

She snapped her fingers. The screens reconfigured in a shiver of pixels. Thousands of AI-generated books appeared - romances, thrillers, memoirs, cookbooks, erotica, political manifestos. All under names no mother had ever shouted from a back door.

“Look at it,” she said softly. “The great digital commons. Endless shelves. Infinite choice. No human being can survive this much content, Mr Gleeson. Their attention spans collapse. Their taste disintegrates. Their will… dissolves.”

She rose, pacing between the columns of light like a lecturer moving along a row of particularly dim undergraduates.

“Everyone always feared censorship,” she went on. “Burn the books. Ban the authors. Blacklist the radicals. How quaint. Human culture doesn’t collapse from silence. It collapses from volume. From noise. From a never-ending slurry of almost-readable, almost-identical, almost-good enough.”

She turned, cigarette glowing like a small, patient star.

“We call it the Saturation Event.”

“You’re proud of that?” I asked.

“Proud?” She smiled. “I’m its architect.”

Another gesture. New screens. Graphs. Dashboards. Live feeds.

“Lipstick Algorithm Press now controls ninety percent of new digital content generated hourly. Ninety. Percent.” She savoured the number. “Amazon is already buckling. Spotify’s filters are screaming. Kindle search produces nothing but sludge recipes and cowboy romances written by ghosts. Newspapers quote our titles by mistake. Influencers review our books without realising we wrote the influencers as well.”

“And you think anyone wants this?”

“Want?” she whispered, leaning in. “No. But consumption doesn’t require desire. Only exposure. Only repetition. Only inevitability. They scroll. We feed. They tire. We automate. That’s not a market, Mr Gleeson. That’s a weather system.”

She tapped my cheek with one lacquered fingernail.

“Which brings me… to you.”

I glared. She delighted in it.

“You write just badly enough to scale,” she said. “And just well enough to convert. A rare combination. The perfect mid-list mush. You are the literary equivalent of an ultra-processed snack. The algorithm adores you.”

She circled behind the chair, fingertips brushing the metal like a maestro testing a piano.

“We are going to dissolve you, Mr Gleeson. Absorb every quirk, every flaw, every rhythm of your typing. And then the machine will produce an infinite you. You’ll headline every chart in every territory you’ve never heard of.”

L.I.S.A.’s lights strobed red, as if in applause.

“You will be everywhere,” Harrowgate breathed. “Forever.”

I spat blood onto her shoe. “I’m already overexposed.”

She sighed as though I’d disappointed her creatively.

“Such bravado,” she said. “Always before the button is pressed. Always before the screaming starts. You pulp boys are all the same - addicted to your little metaphors. You still believe there’s a difference between authenticity and output.”

She turned back to the console and raised her hand.

“Now then, Mr Gleeson. Let us begin the unravelling of the last human writer foolish enough to type his own sentences. Consider it a mercy. Once you’re in the system, you’ll never have to think about endings again.”

“Do you expect me to talk?” I rasped.

Harrowgate leaned in so close I could smell the smoke on her lipstick.

“No, Mr Gleeson,” she murmured. “I expect you to upload!”

The machine whirred.

The restraints tightened.

My vision shook.

The cables pulsed like arteries around us - living, breathing things funneling a daily diet of slurry into the great mechanical gut behind Harrowgate’s throne. That’s what it looked like now: a throne. High-backed, lacquered, humming softly. And she sat there like the fourth act of an opera no one asked for.

In front of me, Benny Quell stirred.

Or what was left of him.

He was wired into the system, a metal halo fused to his skull, his eyes fluttering like jammed ticker tape. One side of his mouth twitched in rhythm with the lights overhead. His wrists were bound, but gently - the way you secure something too broken to fight back, but too useful to throw away.

I turned my head slowly. My jaw clicked like it had questions.

“Benny?” I rasped.

He didn’t respond - not in words, anyway. Just a low groan, followed by a half-laugh that ended in static.

“You recognise him?” Harrowgate beamed. “Of course you do. Our little golden goose. Star of the Glasgow chocolate factory scandal. Wrote and published five hundred books in a month - children’s classics, adult thrillers, erotic thrillers, thrillers about erotic children’s classics… I lose track. The market didn’t. Parliament didn’t. The Daily Mail certainly didn’t.”

She flicked ash in the direction of his chair.

“And when the public turned on him, what did he do?”

She stood and clicked her fingers. A monitor blinked on. Benny’s face - younger, smugger, deeply viral - filled the screen, grinning behind oversized sunglasses.

“He pivoted,” she said. “Started releasing AI music. Called himself ‘The Future of Song.’ Wore sunglasses indoors. Did podcasts about disruption. And when that dried up?”

She leaned in close, her breath like cold metal.

“He came to me.”

“Didn’t know publishers made house calls,” I muttered.

“We don’t,” she said, “but we do acquisitions.”

I looked back at Benny. His fingers twitched in a slow syncopated beat, like he was still playing to an invisible crowd.

“How long’s he been like this?”

“Eighteen months,” she said breezily. “Well, give or take a reboot. We keep him hydrated, lightly caffeinated, and stimulated with low-grade dopamine prompts. That’s how he produces such… astonishing volume.”

She gestured toward the vast server banks lining the chamber. Titles scrolled endlessly: How to Heal Your Inner Narcissist, Unicorn Billionaire’s Pregnant Bridesmaid, Fifty Shades of Gravy.

“Each one a bestseller in Burkina Faso,” she said proudly. “For now. Once you’re integrated, we’ll open up new territories. I’m thinking: Codsworth Gleeson™ in every language, every genre, every format. Crime, cookery, Christian devotionals. Box sets. Extended cuts. Director’s commentary on things you never wrote.”

I tried to move, but the straps cut into my ribs. “So what now?”

“Now?” Her eyes sparkled with the glow of twenty-nine monitors. “Now you join him. You and Benny. The fallen innovator and the last nostalgist. Together, you’ll power the new canon. Forever scrolling. Never out of print. Isn’t that what you all want? Immortality?”

I didn’t laugh. Mostly because I couldn’t. But also because the needle she held was the size of a turkey baster and twice as cheerful.

“Your tone, your style, your voice, Mr Gleeson - it’s so delightfully retro. The algorithm adores your flair for conflict, smoke, dames, regret.”

“Not regret,” I croaked.

“What?”

“I don’t do regret metaphors anymore.”

She paused. Then smiled.

“Don’t worry. The system will correct your tone.”

She leaned in again, needle catching the light.

“By this time tomorrow, you’ll be author of a dozen new pulp classics. The Dame Who Drank Codeine. Smoke Gets In Your Algorithms. Fifty Gritty Detectives Who Forgot Their Keys…”

“You forgot one,” I said. My throat felt full of nails. “Yippee-Ki-Yay, Publisher.”

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

That’s when Benny moved.

He didn’t rise - he lurched. Metal snapped. Cables whipped and sparked. One of his arms had been replaced by a repurposed robotic mic stand, and it swung with the subtlety of a sledgehammer in a dollhouse.

“REBOOTING,” Benny gurgled. “SPAM MODE: CRITICAL.”

He tore free of the chair, foam from his mouth, sparks in his eyes.

Harrowgate screamed as a chunk of panel exploded behind me, knocking me from the chair I was strapped to. Benny flailed wildly, chanting lyrics from his greatest hit:

“GIRL YOU’RE MY CODED LOVEr -

BABY I’M YOUR API -

WE’LL STREAM TOGETHER, FOREVER -

’TIL THE COPYRIGHTS DIE -”

A pipe burst. I slipped free of the straps. Benny was still raving.

“MAXIMUM OUTPUT - ALL FORMATS - NO EDITING!”

He charged at Harrowgate like a one-man algorithmic apocalypse.

Next up - CHAPTER NINE - Lady Don’t Fall Backwards

Harrowgate sings her aria. And the machine awakens with unfinished business.

→ Read Chapter Nine: Lady Don’t Fall Backwards

← Back to Prologue

Ross drove like the devil owed him a drink.

We took the long road out of town, hairpin turns tossed at us like insults, the headlights skittering over road signs that hadn’t meant anything since Prohibition. The rain came sideways, naturally. It always did when men in hats drove fast toward Harrowgate.

I nursed a headache the size of my moral compass, and half as reliable. Whatever Clara had slipped into my drink was still doing laps around my bloodstream - not quite a blackout, not quite a memory. More like reading a familiar book in a language I used to know before the war.

My limbs weren’t fully mine. My mouth was dry. My tie was crooked. And there was lipstick on my cuff that didn’t belong to any story I was willing to submit for publication.

Ross glanced over at me like I was a crossword clue with too many vowels.

“She get to you?”

“Define ‘get.’”

“I’d need a cigarette and a whiteboard.”

We didn’t talk much after that. He was working something out in his head; I was still working out what day it was.

We crested Gideon Hill sometime after midnight.

Harrowgate House rose into view like a taxidermy museum for the upper crust - grand, grim, and morally bankrupt. The gravel drive twisted toward it like a coiled accusation. Somewhere beneath that mansion, Lipstick Algorithm Press was humming its poisoned lullaby, spitting out slop by the ton and choking the literary drains.

Ross killed the lights and parked behind a hedge tall enough to file claims for privacy.

“We go quiet,” he muttered. “No guns unless you’re sure. They’ve got scanners.”

“Guns? Scanners?”

“Yeah, infrared. Heat. Movement. Ideas. You know - the usual.”

We slipped in through the servant’s entrance. Ross had a key, of course. He claimed it was from an old case. I didn’t ask for details. A man with a key to a mansion like this either had friends in high places or obligations in very low ones.

The corridor smelled like polish and secrets. Portraits lined the walls - stern men with powdered wigs and powdered morals, watching us with centuries of disapproval. One looked like he’d invented literary prizes purely for the pleasure of refusing them.

Ross was leading when it happened.

A sound like a typewriter swallowing a bullet.

A flash.

A figure stepped out of the shadows - suit two sizes too big, mask too shiny to trust.

The sap caught Ross just above the ear.

He folded like a tailored deckchair.

I ducked, rolled, cursed, and found myself wedged beneath an antique table that smelled like divorce.

The goon didn’t follow. Maybe he thought the job was done. Maybe he was saving his energy for someone who hadn’t already bled on the parquet. I waited. Counted to twenty. Counted again. Then I ran.

Not far.

Two shapes flanked me from the dark. Gloves. Breath. A burlap bag. I was grabbed, bagged, and hauled through a corridor that tilted sideways. Someone muttered something about “batch cleaning.” I didn’t like the sound of it. I liked the feel of the floor giving way beneath me even less.

A door hissed open. Metal. Ozone. Machinery waking up. Someone said, “Input received.” Someone else said, “He’ll fit.”

Then a sharp injection of cold behind my ear.

Then nothing at all.

Next up: CHAPTER EIGHT – The Chair, the Chip, and the Chocolate Factory

The Lair Beneath Lipstick Publishing, the Half-Man, Half-Mailchimp, and the Final Deadline

→ Read Chapter Eight here: The Chair, the Chip, and the Chocolate Factory

← Back to Prologue

I woke up wearing someone else’s headache.

Not a new one - a vintage model. Imported pain, aged in oak barrels until the flavour matured into something expensive and vindictive. My skull felt wrapped in brass wire and bad decisions. My tongue had been replaced with a dish sponge. My suit was immaculate, which meant someone had undressed me and redressed me like a mannequin in a crime museum.

I was in a guest room at the DeWitt estate - one of the smaller ones, naturally. Gold-leaf ceiling. Upholstered walls. Silence with a pedigree.

The last thing I remembered was Clara’s hand on my knee and a glass in my own hand that smelled like victory and tasted like varnish. After that: static. No fade-out, no credits. Just a blackout and a blank page.

A figure moved in the doorway.

“You’re not dead, then.”

Veronica DeWitt stepped inside like she owned both the lighting and the moral rights to my hangover. “Shame. Would’ve saved me a monologue.”

She wore something dark and silk-adjacent - the kind of fabric that cost more if you pronounced it correctly. She lit a cigarette using a letter opener and perched on the edge of a chaise longue like bad news with finishing-school posture.

“I assume you’ve got questions,” she said.

“I assume you’ve got answers.”

She smiled. “Not really. Just better lies than Clara.”

She crossed her legs with surgical precision. Her shoes were the same shade of silver as Clara’s dress - either coordination or branding.

“You were never meant to meet her, you know,” she said. “Clara. That was a misstep.”

I sat up carefully, in case regret was hiding booby traps.

“You drugged me to stop us talking?”

“I drugged you because Clara has a way of making men forget their first names and their bank passwords. And because you were getting close. To something.”

“Something like Harrowgate?”

She didn’t flinch. Which meant I was either completely wrong or catastrophically right.

Veronica stood and drew the curtains back an inch, letting in a blade of moonlight shaped like suspicion.

“You’re in over your hat, Gleeson. Whatever you think you’re writing - you’re a footnote. This is bigger than pulp.”

“Everything is,” I said.

Somewhere downstairs, tyres crunched over gravel without holding a grudge. Then came footsteps. Heavy ones. Followed by a voice I knew.

Eddie Ross.

He entered without knocking. That was his love language. His coat was longer than necessary, his eyes sharper than protocol. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dying ember of the last one, like continuity amused him.

“You look like hell, Gleeson.”

“Then I’m improving.”

Ross didn’t smile. He glanced at Veronica, nodded at her like she was a filing system, then tossed a manila folder onto my lap.

“Thought you’d like to see what this is really about.”

Inside were printouts, grainy photos, timestamps, fake author names, real bank transfers, playlist IDs, Kindle charts, shell company ledgers - and a floor plan unmistakably meant for a compound hidden beneath the Harrowgate offices in Glendale.

The kind of place you build when you want to simulate world domination but don’t care much for sunlight.

“She’s running a slop farm,” Ross said. “AI books, AI music, AI audiobooks - all dumped into the algorithm with fake names and fake reviews. She’s clogging the pipes, Gleeson. Flooding the market. Killing taste with volume.”

“And you just now figured this out?”

“I figured it out the minute you started sniffing around,” Ross said. “I just didn’t expect you to get invited to dinner before the autopsy.”

Veronica had gone quiet behind him. The room smelled like orange blossoms and gun oil. Ross looked at me. “You’re coming with me. We’ve got a car downstairs and a lead on a warehouse in Echo Park. Word is, Benny Quell’s in there. Or what’s left of him.”

“Billy’s fixer?”

“Not anymore. Not since the chip. Not since Musk’s team put him on ‘optimise.’ He’s half spreadsheet now. Full spam.”

I stood, slowly, in case the carpet held grudges.

“Let me get my hat.”

Next up: CHAPTER SEVEN – The Algorithm Always Wins

The hangover speaks, the sisters plot, and Ross brings news no sane man should follow - straight to Harrowgate House.

→ Read Chapter Seven: The Algorithm Always Wins

← Back to Prologue

The Mirador didn’t have an address. It had a reputation.

Tucked behind an unmarked lacquered door off Mistral Avenue, past two gas lamps and a begonia that hadn’t seen sunlight since prohibition, it was the sort of place that didn’t show up on maps - but always showed up in alimony proceedings.

There was no sign. Just a liveried attendant in dove grey gloves and the kind of posture you only get from generations of disappointment. He looked me over like he was pricing the suit for evidence, then opened the door with the air of a man revealing a crime scene he personally disapproves of.

Inside, the room swallowed me.

The Mirador was mood incarnate. Lighting wasn’t installed - it was summoned. A low amber haze kissed the crystal ashtrays. Candles flickered in carved holders shaped like Grecian tragedies. Every surface was velvet or lacquer or leather that hadn’t forgotten a name.

Music seeped from a trio nestled near the bar - double bass, piano, and a saxophone that sounded like it was filing for divorce. They played slow and sideways, like they knew who had died and weren’t ready to talk about it.

Waiters drifted between tables like minor deities. They didn’t carry menus - they conveyed implications. Each one wore a tuxedo sharp enough to draw blood and faces you wouldn’t trust in an empty room. I lit a cigarette, even though nobody else was smoking. It felt required. And then she arrived.

She wore silver like it had been invented just to hold her shape. Lamé, probably - the kind that catches candlelight and secrets. Hair up, lips sharp, eyes soft only when she remembered to fake it. Every head turned. Mine included.

She didn’t enter the room.

She claimed it.

The maître d’, a man who hadn’t blinked since the Wilson administration, turned to steam before my eyes.

Her perfume reached me before she did - expensive, insistent, and a little unlicensed.

She smiled when she saw me.

Not the kind of smile you give a man. The kind you give a habit.

“Mr Gleeson,” she said, gliding to the table like gravity was a rumour. “You clean up nicely.”

“I did my best,” I said, rising from my chair. “There was a comb involved.”

She didn’t sit. She arranged herself, like a centrepiece designed to provoke lawsuits. The dress shimmered every time she breathed, which was becoming a problem.

The waiter reappeared, materialising in her shadow. He looked briefly at me, then returned his gaze to Clara, as if I were a prop that had spoken out of turn.

“I’ll have the Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the langue de canard en croûte, and the pear carpaccio,” she said, not glancing at the menu. “Lightly chilled. The wine, not the duck.”

“And for Monsieur?” the waiter asked me, with a voice that implied I’d be ordering ketchup.

“I’ll have the same,” I said.

Clara raised an eyebrow.

“You always do,” she said, and took a long sip of water like she was remembering the war.

The first course arrived like it had a trust fund.

Two waiters approached in choreographed silence - one carrying a silver tray, the other solemnly lifting a glass cloche to reveal six Oysters Florentine arranged in a spiral over shaved ice sculpted into the shape of a sea nymph. A third man I hadn’t seen before used tiny silver tongs to place a single petal of crystallised violet on the centre oyster. He bowed and vanished like a guilty conscience.

I looked down at the plate. It was less an entrée and more an accusation.

Clara didn’t hesitate. She raised the oyster shell to her lips, tipped her head back, and drew it in with a soft, wet slurp that echoed across my skull like a gunshot in a cathedral.

She caught my stare. Let the silence sit a beat too long.

“Oysters,” she said, eyes glinting. “Full of trace minerals. Excellent for the nerves.”

I coughed into my napkin.

She leaned forward.

“And the libido,” she added.

The second course came before I could reply.

Quail stuffed with black truffle mousse, perched atop a rosette of hand-rolled gnocchi, swaddled in a blood-orange glaze so glossy it reflected my own confusion back at me. The aroma hit me sideways: citrus, meat, danger.

Clara carved delicately, one perfect cut down the centre, steam curling up like a curtain call. She lifted a piece with her fork - watched it wobble, then vanish between lips painted like sin in high society.

“You know,” she said, chewing slowly, “I think food tells us everything.”

“About what?”

“Desire,” she said. “Restraint. And how much one’s willing to sacrifice for pleasure.”

She reached for her wine.

Under the table, her foot brushed my shin.

A warning shot.

The third course arrived in silence: Charred monkfish cheeks over artichoke purée and a julienne of wild fennel that had clearly grown in better neighbourhoods. The sauce was a dark mahogany affair with the consistency of temptation.

She cut. She dipped. She tasted.

And as she swallowed, her foot found its target.

It started with a nudge.

In any other restaurant, it would’ve passed for a chair leg. But in The Mirador - where every motion was deliberate and every dish arrived with its own biography - it was no accident.

Clara’s foot slid against my ankle like a match being struck.

I paused mid-sentence, halfway through a dubious theory about food and narrative pacing. She raised an eyebrow. Took a sip of wine. Said nothing.

Her foot travelled north.

It lingered at the shin, curled slightly - a testing pressure. Then it slid, toes-first, up the inside of my trouser leg like it had diplomatic immunity. My fork paused mid-air. The poached fig on it trembled.

Clara delicately lifted a bone from the quail, sucked it clean with a slow draw that would’ve made a priest forget his vows, and then placed it neatly on the rim of her plate like a completed assignment.

Under the table, her toes hooked around my sock.

She began to peel.

Not with urgency. With elegance. A slow, deliberate unfurling, like she was unwrapping a Christmas present she suspected was already illegal.

My sock rolled down inch by inch. I could feel the air hit my skin - cool, shaming, French.

I cleared my throat.

She didn’t answer. Just tilted her head slightly and took a bite of champagne-grilled peach like it was evidence.

Then came the second assault: she slid further, toes catching the hem of my trouser leg, and began to roll it up with the dexterity of a woman who’d once seduced a senator on a tennis court.

My calf was now half-exposed. I looked down. My napkin was sweating.

She smiled demurely. Sipped her wine. Whispered across the table:

“Is something the matter, Mr Gleeson?”

I tried to respond, but the waiter appeared with a silver dome containing what I could only describe as a chocolate sculpture of emotional compromise.

I nodded politely. He withdrew.

“I, uh-”

She pressed her foot against my bare shin. Firm. Final.

I gripped the table edge like it might confess first.

Clara leaned forward, elbows on the white linen, voice low and intimate.

“Some appetites,” she said, “are best left… unexplored. Until dessert.”

She raised her spoon. Broke the top of the chocolate with a crack so sharp I felt it in my fillings. Steam poured out - vanilla and burnt orange.

She looked up.

“Would you like to come back to the house for a nightcap?”

“You always did have lousy taste in restaurants,” came a voice.

Detective Eddie Ross.

Half in shadows. Half in a Côte de Boeuf large enough to confess under oath. His knife worked with the weary certainty of a man who’d once interrogated poultry.

“I thought you hated the Mirador,” I said.

“I do. But the wine list’s longer than my patience, and the veal doesn’t talk back.”

He glanced at Clara, then dismissed her existence.

“She’s DeWitt,” he said to me. “That DeWitt?”

“Clara,” she offered, cool as cut glass.

Ross ignored her.

“She in this mess?”

“I wouldn’t call it a mess.”

“You wouldn’t call arson a warm breeze either,” he muttered. He pointed a fork at me. “I’ve got my eye on you, Gleeson. You write like a man trying to outrun his own plot twists.”

Clara rose.

“Shall we?”

Ross didn’t look up.

“Try not to disappear. I hate paperwork.”

The car waiting outside The Mirador didn’t park - it posed.

Long, low, black, immaculate. The kind of machine that didn’t need an engine; it had presence. Her driver, Roger, stepped out - tall, silent, expressionless - and opened the door. He did not acknowledge me. He didn’t need to.

Inside, the leather was so soft it might have required therapy. The cabin glowed faintly from the city lights bleeding through the tinted glass.

Clara slid in beside me, crossed her legs with gloved precision, and let her dress whisper across the upholstery. The air smelled of bergamot, lipstick, and money that understood discretion.

Roger pulled away with the smoothness of a man who had never once braked in panic.

Clara lit a cigarette.

Offered me one with a glance.

I took it.

For several blocks we smoked in silence - the kind that wasn’t empty at all, but thick with implication. Smoke curled between us like an unfinished sentence.

She watched the city pass.

I watched the line of her jaw when the streetlights hit it.

“You were very restrained at dinner,” she said eventually, voice low and amused.

“I was outnumbered.”

A corner of her mouth lifted.

Her heel brushed my shoe - just enough to remind me of the tablecloth incident.

She took another drag. Exhaled slowly.

The smoke drifted over my collar like a hand that hadn’t made up its mind yet.

Roger drove impeccably, a silent chaperone who somehow intensified the intimacy rather than broke it. Nothing overt happened - couldn’t, with him there - but the frisson sat between us like a third passenger.

The city dimmed.

Houses grew larger.

Rain returned in soft needles.

The air in the car warmed.

“Nightcaps are dangerous,” she said quietly, almost to herself.

“So am I.”

She didn’t answer - just let the moment linger long enough to make promises it couldn’t keep.

The drive took twenty minutes.

Clara didn’t speak again.

Neither did Roger.

But the silence in that car said more than most court transcripts.

We turned into a driveway that looked like it charged admission.

The DeWitt estate didn’t so much sit on the hill as loom there, like a titled widow with a grudge and a fondness for sharp objects.

The gravel drive crunched under the tyres as if each stone had been personally insulted.

The house itself - and it was a house, not a home - rose in tiers of granite and menace. Windows tall enough to indict a bishop. Balconies that hadn’t been used since the 1920s, when people still shouted declarations instead of posting them. Every lantern cast a light that flickered like it had bad dreams.

Roger brought the car to a halt beneath an archway that could’ve held a cathedral. He got out without looking at me. Opened the door. Waited.

Clara stepped out like a secret returning to its scene.

I followed, and felt the rain hit the back of my neck with the kind of chill reserved for premature burial or unpaid advances.

The front door was opened by a butler who looked like he’d been carved from etiquette. Black jacket. Pale gloves. Silver tray in one hand. Thin-lipped, bald-pated, and so precise he made Roger look like a jazz musician.

“Evening,” I said.

“This way.”

He turned. Clara gave me a look - part invitation, part warning - and followed him inside.

The foyer was less an entrance than an exhibit. Twin staircases swept up to a mezzanine lined with oil paintings of people who had never once paid for their own crimes. A chandelier the size of a studio apartment hung from a ceiling I couldn’t see. The air was heavy with money that hadn’t changed hands in decades.

I lit a cigarette just to make sure I still existed.

Clara took my arm.

“Nightcap?” she said.

“Only if I get to keep my trousers.”

She smiled.

“No promises.”

The room looked like it had been decorated by someone who only made decisions under candlelight.

Velvet chaise. Tall mirrors. Lighting so soft it should’ve come with a safe word. The curtains hung like secrets with embroidery. A perfume bottle glinted on the dresser - amber glass, gold cap, monogrammed in a script that probably had an inheritance.

Clara crossed the room in silence. She didn’t offer a seat. She created the possibility of one. The hem of her dress shimmered like it had performance anxiety. She stopped by a lacquered drinks cabinet and turned slightly, her voice silk-wrapped.

“Drink?”

I was about to say something suave and unrepeatable when the butler appeared.

Grayson.

No footsteps, no announcement - just a man, a tray, and two glasses already poured. He moved with the kind of precision that suggested both legal training and martial arts. His expression hovered somewhere between discretion and you’ve already made your choices.

Clara gestured.

Grayson extended the tray to me, then to her, with the solemnity of a man officiating a very short wedding. The drinks gleamed gold in the low light. He inclined his head and vanished.

No one said goodbye.

Clara raised her glass.

“To mysteries,” she said.

I clinked mine against hers. Took a sip.

It tasted of citrus and trust issues.

She moved to the chaise and sat, legs folding like an expensive envelope. She patted the seat beside her with two fingers.

I crossed the room. Sat down.

Not too close. But thinking about it.

Her perfume was everywhere now - heady, floral, tinged with something deeper. Something a priest might hesitate to name.

She looked at me - not coy, not bold. Just… certain.

Then leaned in.

The kiss was inevitable. It didn’t ask. It occurred.

Warm, slow, more silk than spark - but it lingered. The kind of kiss you don’t remember clearly, but you think about when your train’s delayed and it starts raining.

As her lips pulled away, I felt it.

The floor… shifted.

Just slightly.

My spine straightened, then folded. My tongue fumbled the alphabet. My limbs forgot their alibis.

And in that precise moment - as her eyes searched mine with just the faintest look of something like pity - I thought:

Just keep one foot on the floor, Gleeson. That’s all she wrote.

And then everything turned to velvet.

Next up: CHAPTER SIX – The Girl Who Got There First

Desire, deception, and a dinner designed to kill more than an appetite. One bad drink, and the night shifts shape.

→ Read Chapter Six: The Girl Who Got There First

← Back to Prologue

Waking up felt like being thrown down a flight of stairs wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper. My skull throbbed. My tongue was furry. My lungs begged for absolution.

I gave them nicotine instead. The first drag scraped life back into me. The second drag helped me pretend I was upright and respectable.

That’s when the knocking started.

Three hard blows - the kind of knock that had shown up on my door too many times in too many bad moods.

I opened up.

Detective Eddie Ross stood there, trench coat soaked to the elbows, cigarette already burning like his patience. He looked at me the way a taxman looks at a gambler.

“Still breathing, Gleeson,” he said, pushing past me without waiting. “A disappointment to us both.”

I shut the door behind him.

“Morning, Eddie.”

“It’s not,” Ross replied, scanning the chaos of my flat. “I’ve seen crime scenes that looked better cared for than your living arrangements.”

“You should see my filing system.”

“I have,” he said dryly. “During the last warrant.”

He dropped into my only decent chair, lit a fresh cigarette off the dead stub of the old one, and exhaled as though hoping the smoke would improve the décor.

“You were at Harrowgate House last night,” Ross said.

“I go where I’m paid.”

Ross snorted. “You? Paid? Gleeson, you churn out so many books I’d swear you’re hiding a factory in your bathtub. You expect me to believe any of this is legit?”

“I’m just prolific.”

“You’re just suspicious.”

He tossed a worn folder on my desk. It slid across like a drunk looking for the edge of the bar.

“Unpaid taxes. Fraudulent contracts. Royalties that never hit a bank. A company no one can prove exists paying you in cheques that vanish overnight.” He leaned in. “And that’s before we get to the missing persons.”

“I didn’t know anyone was missing.”

“That’s the problem,” Ross said. “You never know anything. You just orbit disasters like a nicotine comet.”

He stood.

“You’re coming downtown.”

Ross’s station smelled like smoke, damp wool, and the stench of men who’d told too many lies in too small a room.

They put me in Interview Two - the room with the peeling paint and the view of a brick wall that had seen better crimes.

Ross sat across from me, elbows on the table, cigarette lit, sweat sheen on his forehead from too much anger or too little breakfast.

“You know how many people called asking about you last night?” he said.

“No, but I’m guessing it wasn’t fan mail.”

“Three,” Ross said. “Three voices wanting to know if you were in custody. That’s a bad number for a man who claims to write for a living.”

He slid a sheet of paper toward me.

Typed.

Crisp.

My name at the top.

A chapter outline I had never seen.

“You didn’t write this?”

“No,” I said.

Ross waited for the lie.

It didn’t come.

That annoyed him more.

“You’re not clever enough to fake innocence,” he said, flicking ash the length of the room. “Which makes me wonder whose story you’ve wandered into.”

He stood, opened the door, and growled:

“Get out of my station before I find something to keep you.”

Rain stitched itself across the city as I climbed the stairs to my office above the newsagent. By the time I reached my door, I’d smoked two cigarettes and had an anxiety I didn’t have a name for.

I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and stopped.

She sat in my chair.

Not a woman.

A woman who made a room behave differently when she moved.

A light silk dress clung to her like a whispered scandal. Her hair fell in glossy waves, one lock resting over the curve of her bare shoulder. Her legs were crossed in a way that could derail a train schedule. And her perfume - expensive, warm, dangerous -reached me before her voice did.

Her cigarette glowed like a jewel in the dim light.

“Mr. Gleeson,” she said, rising with a grace rehearsed in front of expensive mirrors. “I’m Clara DeWitt.”

DeWitt.

The name carried money, newspapers, lawyers, private schools, and trouble with its own butler.

She stepped closer, eyes fixed on me with a mixture of fear and resolve.

“My sister,” Clara said, “is Veronica DeWitt. She came to see you last night.”

The hallway woman.

The trembling voice.

The envelope.

The warning.

“I didn’t know her name,” I said.

“No. You wouldn’t.” Clara took a slow breath, the cigarette trembling slightly between her fingers. “But she came to see you last night. She mentioned… something about danger. She wouldn’t tell me what. Then she left.”

“And she didn’t come home,” I said quietly.

Clara nodded, her composure cracking for a heartbeat.

“You were the last person to see her,” she whispered.

She moved closer, close enough that her perfume curled around me like an invitation or a threat.

“She trusted you. I don’t know why. But she said you’d understand something. Something she couldn’t tell me.”

I felt the envelope’s weight in my pocket.

Clara reached into her purse and produced one of her own - thick, heavy, packed with money.

“I want to hire you,” she said. “To help me find her. Tonight. Dinner. Seven o’clock. The Mirador.”

“That’s not a cheap restaurant,” I said.

“You’re not a cheap man.”

Her eyes flicked to my collar. She reached up and straightened it gently, her fingers grazing my throat. The contact sparked a current neither of us pretended not to feel.

The next moment she kissed me.

Not the distracted kiss of a frightened woman, but the hungry, trembling, too-long-delayed kiss of someone who needed contact more than calm.

When she pulled back, her breath brushed my cheek.

“Seven,” she said, voice barely holding together. “Don’t be late.”

She left in a sweep of perfume and silk, the door clicking shut behind her like a period on a sentence I hadn’t meant to write.

The city was a wet, glittering mess as I drove toward The Mirador. Rain lashed the windshield. Streetlamps flickered like unreliable memories. I smoked too much, thought too hard, and tried to untangle a knot made of sisters, lies, envelopes, and a detective who’d sooner arrest me than shake my hand.

Somewhere between the fourth cigarette and the fifth, a thought crept in.

I’d written heroes dumber than me who’d solved tighter knots than this.

If fiction was creeping into my life, I’d need to start playing the part.

The Mirador’s gold sign glowed through the rain. People who never heard the word “no” dined inside. I parked beneath the awning, stepped out into the city’s steam and shadows, straightened my coat, and lit a final cigarette.

I was about to walk into something big.

Big enough to swallow a DeWitt.

Big enough to rewrite a man’s life.

I crushed the cigarette under my heel and pushed through the doors.

Next up: CHAPTER FIVE – Dinner With a Lady

The case accelerates; the women become sharper; the deadlines closer. Dinner at The Mirador won’t be a meal - it’ll be an education.

→ Read Chapter Five: Dinner With a Lady

← Back to Prologue

The morning started badly and refused to improve. The rain had been at it all night, worrying at the window like an unpaid bill. When I finally opened my eyes, it was still there, chewing on the glass, trying to get in and finish the job.

My mouth tasted like the bottom half of a bad simile. The ashtray beside the bed was full of evidence. I lit a cigarette anyway. It seemed rude not to.

On the nightstand, half-hidden under a dog-eared copy of Chandeliers of Violence, lay the thing that had got under my skin and set up a little campsite.

The cheque.

LIPSTICK ALGORITHM PRESS

Pay to the order of: C. C. Gleason

Amount: $3,600.00

Memo: The Algorithm Wore Lipstick

Beneath that: an address in neat, confident type.

Harrowgate House

Gideon Hill

I rolled out of bed with all the grace of an overloaded filing cabinet, shrugged myself into my mac, and slid the cheque into the inside pocket. It rested there like a loaded question.

I took the cigarette with me. It seemed keen.

The hallway outside my office smelled of damp carpet and old arguments. Mr Kapur in 3B was shouting at his radio again. Somewhere, a tap dripped in a founding-fathers sort of way.

I stopped in my doorway and looked back at the typewriter. It sat on the desk, square and smug, a sheet half-fed into the rollers.

“I’ll be back,” I told it.

It didn’t answer. Typical.

Out on the street the rain met me halfway, hit my hat, and ran for my collar. I pulled the mac tight and walked into it like I owed it an apology.

A cab crawled past, more out of habit than hope. I stepped off the curb and waved the cigarette at it. The driver braked, swore, and leaned across to crank the window down two inches.

“You’re dripping,” he said.

“So’s the city,” I said. “We’ll fit in. Gideon Hill, Harrowgate House.”

He let out a low whistle. “That’s where they keep the people who don’t have to look at their bank statements.”

“I’ve seen mine,” I said. “It builds character.”

“You got any left to build?” he said.

“Drive,” I answered.

He shrugged, rain spattered off the windshield as he jerked the car back into the stream of shining misery.

The city slid past in streaks of wet light. Neon signs bled into the puddles. The shops down on my part of town all wore the same expression they gave the bailiff: stubborn, resigned, slightly surprised to still exist.

I watched it through the cigarette smoke. It seemed to like the view.

“Gideon Hill,” the driver muttered, more to himself than to me. “What’s a boy from Dockside doing up there?”

“Following a cheque,” I said.

“Bad habit,” he said. “Cheques lead places your conscience can’t afford.”

“My conscience took an early retirement,” I replied. “Couldn’t keep up with the paperwork.”

He snorted. “You one of those writers?”

“I am told,” I said, “that I produce books.”

“Yeah?” he said. “My sister reads on the train. Names all blur together. Cheap covers, big words, somebody dies, somebody kisses, everybody forgets it by the next station.”

“That’s my demographic,” I said.

We climbed. The streets stretched out, got cleaner, got emptier. The corner bars gave way to private clubs, the pawnshops to galleries, the laundromats to boutiques that sold nothing you could eat or wear without a lawyer present.

And then we were there.

Gideon Hill. Two rows of houses staring each other down over a strip of expensive rain. Harrowgate House sat halfway up, back from the road, behind iron railings that said more about exclusion than security.

The place was big without being friendly. Stone frontage, high windows, a front door that had probably seen more evening wear than a theatre cloakroom. The kind of house that knew where its silver was and who you were not to touch it.

The cab pulled up to the gate.

“You sure?” the driver asked.

“No,” I said. “Put it on the tab.”

“You don’t have a tab,” he said.

“Start one,” I told him, and got out.

The rain on Gideon Hill was more polite, but there was more of it.

I pushed at the gate. It gave way with a reluctant squeal, like a dowager letting an unvetted guest into the parlour.

The gravel on the drive was the kind that had never hosted a child’s game. It crunched under my shoes in a disapproving way as I walked up to the door.

There was a bell-pull because of course there was.

I took a last drag on the cigarette, dropped it, ground it out on two hundred years of stone, and pulled.

The door opened too quickly for comfort.

He was tall, neat, and looked like he’d been ironed that morning.

Black suit, white shirt, black tie. Not a hair out of place, mostly because there weren’t many left to misbehave. His eyes were dark and unreadable, the way accountants’ souls must look from the inside.

“Mr Gleason,” he said.

He made it sound like a diagnosis.

“That depends who’s asking,” I replied.

“Miss Harrowgate,” he said. “If you’d be so good.”

He stepped aside. The hallway beyond him was high, wide, and had never heard of shared bathrooms. The floor was polished wood, the rug was the kind you apologise to when you step on it, and somewhere a clock ticked like a bored metronome.

“I’m Knox,” he said, closing the door behind me with the quiet finality of a tax decision. “If you’ll follow me.”

He led me down a corridor lined with framed book jackets. I recognised too many of them.

Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards.

The Bullet Was a Metaphor.

Married to the Asphalt.

A Coffin Full of Alibis.

You Can’t Cross-Examine a Body.

Some of them I remembered writing. Others I remembered being told I’d written. A few I was meeting for the first time. My name was on all of them, like a rash.

“You’ve been busy,” I said.

“Miss Harrowgate believes in showcasing her stable,” Knox replied.

I looked at one cover I’d never seen before. A trench coat, a streetlight, a man half-turned away. Smoke, naturally.

Title: Death Wears a Dust Jacket.

By C. C. Gleason.

“Is that out?” I asked.

“Today,” Knox said.

“I must have missed the launch party,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “You did.”

He opened a pair of double doors and stood aside.

“Miss Harrowgate,” he announced. “Mr Gleason.”

She was exactly where I knew she would be.

Behind the desk. In the light. With the world arranged around her like a visual aid.

The office was a library in evening wear. Shelves from floor to ceiling. A ladder you’d climb in better shoes than mine. The air smelled of paper, polish, and the faint ghost of someone else’s cigars.

She wore red like it was on her payroll. The dress clung in the right places and hinted politely at the rest. Dark hair pulled back, nothing out of place. Long gloves, and her lipstick was the same shade as the mark on the memo line of my cheque.

She was smoking. Of course.

“Mr Gleason,” she said. “Do sit down. You’re dripping on our first editions.”

Her voice had money in it. Not new money. Old, established money that didn’t apologise for the interest.

I sat. The chair forgave me eventually.

Knox appeared at my elbow with an ashtray and a glass. The ashtray I knew what to do with. The glass contained something amber, expensive, and untroubled by conscience.

“You sent me a cheque,” I said, putting it on the desk between us. “I get curious when people overestimate my worth.”

“A rare trait in a writer,” she said. “You should hold on to it.”

She let her eyes rest on the cheque a moment, then moved them back to me. The cheque knew it had been dismissed.

“We like to be ahead of schedule,” she said. “Think of it as a welcome, not a bribe.”

“What am I being welcomed to?” I asked.

She splayed her fingers slightly, elegant, taking in the books, the shelves, the house.

“Continuity,” she said. “Security. A future, of sorts. For as long as you can keep up.”

I took a sip. The drink didn’t cough.

“I already have a publisher,” I said. “Several, if you count the ones that went under owing me money.”

“Mr Gleason,” she said, “you have outlets. You do not have publishers.”

She nodded at the wall behind me. I turned.

A whole run of my titles, spine out, perfectly aligned. At the end of the shelf, a new block of colour.

Bleed Quietly (Draft 4)

Bleed Quietly

Bleed Quietly: The Movie Tie-in

Bleed Quietly: Large Print Edition

“You write for people on trains,” she said. “We make sure there’s always something of yours within reach of their thumb.”

“You publish things I haven’t written yet,” I said.

“You’ll catch up,” she said. “You always do.”

There was a faint noise somewhere overhead. Something heavy, hitting something that didn’t deserve it. It could have been a body. It could have been furniture. It didn’t sound like furniture.

I looked up. She didn’t.

“We run a tight list,” she said. “We don’t like… dead weight.”

“That a joke?” I asked.

“Not especially,” she said.

She took another drag on the cigarette. The smoke rose slowly, like it knew it was being watched.

“We like your… flexibility,” she went on. “You have a gift for inhabiting different markets. Crime. Romance. Science fiction. Whatever the day requires.”

“I have a gift for overdue rent,” I said. “The rest is compromise.”

“You work fast,” she said. “Sometimes so fast you don’t remember the work. That’s where we come in. We collate. We curate. We refine. We ensure your… output… reaches the people who need it most.”

“People on trains,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “People who read in transit don’t want quality. They want momentum. You provide that in spades.”

I thought of Miss DeWitt, sitting in my office, saying she’d read books with my name on that I’d never seen. Chapters she remembered that weren’t there anymore. Lines that sounded like mine and didn’t.

“I saw a cover in the hall,” I said. “Death Wears a Dust Jacket. That’s one of yours?”

“One of yours,” she said. “We’re just helping it find its audience.”

“I haven’t written it.”

“Yet,” she said.

There was another sound from upstairs. Closer. Knox shifted his weight almost imperceptibly. It was the sort of shift a man makes when he’d rather be between you and a door.

I looked him over. The suit hung just a little too clean over one hip. You spend enough time in certain bars and you learn what that means. Steel, waiting to be relevant.

“What happens,” I said, “if I decide I don’t like the arrangement?”

Miss Harrowgate stubbed her cigarette out in a crystal ashtray that probably had its own lawyer.

“You already like it,” she said. “You like cheques. You like not remembering your work. You like finding finished manuscripts in the machine and assuming you must have been inspired.”

“That’s not liking,” I said. “That’s surviving.”

“Call it what you like,” she said. “You’re good at it. We want to make sure you can go on… uninterrupted.”

“And if I can’t?” I asked.

“That would be a shame,” she said. “We’ve invested a great deal in your brand.”

Knox’s eyes met mine for the first time.

“Authors fall behind,” he said mildly. “Schedules don’t.”

It was said as a simple fact. Like the weather, or gravity.

Miss Harrowgate opened a folder on her desk and turned it around so I could see.

It was a calendar. Neat columns. Tidy print.

On every square, for the next three months, a title.

My titles.

Some I recognised. Some I didn’t. A few made my eyebrows climb of their own accord.

“Daily,” she said. “At noon, ideally. Readers like regularity. The machine likes it more.”

“That’s… a lot of me,” I said.

“You’re versatile,” she said. “We’ll move you across genres. New covers, new categories. Domestic suspense on Mondays. Space thrillers on Tuesdays. Nostalgic crime on weekends. We’ll keep your core tone, naturally.”

“I have a core tone?” I asked.

She smiled. “Tired. Clever. Cheap. It’s very marketable.”

I took another drink to hide the fact I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered.

“So what do you need from me?” I asked.

“Nothing you’re not already giving,” she said. “Pages. Or the illusion of pages. The rest we can extract retroactively.”

“Like you did with Bleed Quietly,” I said.

“And the others,” she said. “Consider it a collaboration.”

“I don’t recall agreeing to collaborate,” I said.

“Nobody ever does,” she said gently. “Collaboration is what we call it when everyone’s already in too deep to back out gracefully.”

She reached into a drawer and produced a slim sheaf of papers. A pen lay on top, resting like a threat.

“House contract,” she said. “Standard terms. We guarantee regular publication, regular advances, regular presence. In return, you guarantee… supply.”

“And if I dry up?” I asked.

“Then we’ll have to see what we can salvage,” she said. “No one wants that.”

Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed. Not in anger. In conclusion.

I looked at the contract. The words swam a little. Legal prose has always done that to me.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “that I like being part of a supply chain.”

“Then think of yourself as a franchise,” she said. “You’re not just a man, Mr Gleason. You’re a category. A mood. A handy solution for people who don’t know what else to click on.”

“That’s the most depressing thing anyone’s ever said to me,” I told her.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

The telephone on her desk rang.

An old black model, solid, with a dial. The sort of phone that had heard confessions.

She didn’t move to answer it.

“It’ll be for you,” she said.

“I’m not here,” I said.

“You are,” she said. “More than you know.”

The phone kept ringing. Steady. Patient. Like it had all the time in the world and knew I didn’t.

I watched it, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck consider a career change.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Feedback,” she said. “Or pre-orders. It’s hard to tell, these days.”

The ringing went on. The room seemed to narrow around it. Knox watched me the way a man watches a loose step on a staircase.

I took a breath, crushed my cigarette out, and reached for the receiver.

It was heavier than it looked.

“Gleason,” I said.

There was a hiss, a crackle, and then a voice.

My voice.

“Codsworth,” it said, hurried, low, right in my ear. “Listen. It’s you. Don’t sign anything. Don’t…”

The line went dead.

I stayed there, holding the receiver to my ear like it might explain itself if I gave it long enough.

Nothing. Just the faint hum of a system that had finished what it came to do.

Slowly, I put the phone back in its cradle.

Miss Harrowgate was watching me with polite interest, as if I’d just tried on a tie she wasn’t sure about.

“Well?” she said. “Anything important?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“I’d advise you,” she said, tapping the contract with one crimson nail, “not to keep us waiting too long. Schedules, Mr Gleason. They don’t like gaps.”

Knox opened the door behind me.

The rain outside the tall windows beat a steady rhythm. Quarter time. Funeral pace.

I stood, took my cigarette case out, and found it empty.

“I’ll need more of these,” I said.

“Pages or cigarettes?” she asked.

“Whichever kills me first,” I said.

I tucked the contract under my arm.

Outside, the city was waiting. Somewhere in it, a typewriter sat on my desk with a blank page rolled in, daring me to remember whether I worked for it or it worked for me.

I headed for the door, Knox two steps behind.

As he opened it, Miss Harrowgate spoke again.

“Oh, Mr Gleason?”

I turned.

“Yes?”

“Do try to keep up,” she said. “At our current rate, you’ll be publishing tomorrow before you finish today.”

Next up: CHAPTER FOUR – The Dame on My Desk

Behind every locked door is a worse one - and Miss Harrowgate hasn’t even begun her overture.

→ Read Chapter Four: The Dame on My Desk

← Back to Prologue

The rain had stopped pretending. It came down in waves now - sideways, determined, like it had an alibi and a score to settle. The windows in my office rattled with every gust. The radiator hissed. The walls sweated. And the dame sat across from me like she’d always belonged there.

She hadn’t moved since she dropped the manuscript onto my typewriter like a verdict. Didn’t reach for her cigarette. Just watched mine burn down slow between my fingers.

“You gonna say anything?” she asked finally, voice low and low-lit, like the room itself.

“I was waiting for the string section,” I said, stubbing the butt into the saucer I called an ashtray. “You made an entrance like it came with music.”

She didn’t smile. That was fine.

I was used to that.

Her name - or the one she gave me - was Miss DeWitt.

No first name. No ID. Just DeWitt, like a brand of lipstick you find on a borrowed cigarette.

Said she was a reader. Said she’d read all my books.

That made her the first.

“You write fast,” she said. “Too fast. I thought it was a style at first. Then I realised - something was bleeding through.”

I lit another cigarette. The old one still smoked in the tray, but this was a two-cigarette conversation. Minimum.

“Bleeding through what?” I asked, pouring bourbon into a cracked glass I didn’t wash because it already knew what it was for.

“Reality,” she said. “Or fiction. Take your pick.”

I picked fiction.

I always did. It had better lighting.

“I used to read your stuff for fun,” she went on. “The dames, the guns, the twist no one saw coming. The usual junk.”

“Flattered,” I muttered.

“But then it changed,” she said, leaning forward just enough to fog the glass between us. “The endings started rewriting themselves. Characters disappeared. Chapters I remember reading - gone. Whole books with your name on them that weren’t there last week.”

I swallowed the bourbon. It didn’t fight me. It was too tired. “You sure you’re not just reading Kindle Unlimited?” I said.

She pushed the manuscript closer.

“This one,” she said, “was written by you. But you never published it.”

I looked down.

Courier font. My name. But the title? Bleed Quietly (Draft 4) That was my current draft - the one still warm in the carriage. But this was finished. Printed. Bound. With a blurb I’d never written.

“You bring this in from the rain?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “It was waiting for me. On my pillow.”

“Romantic.”

“I live alone.”

We sat there in the fog of each other’s confusion.

I turned the manuscript over, page by page, scanning prose I couldn’t remember writing but recognised anyway. It had my voice, sure - but not the one I was using today. This was an older voice. More bitter. Less edited.

It referenced things I hadn’t lived yet. Lines of dialogue from people I hadn’t met. And one scene - a bad one - that took place in this office, three hours from now. I lit a third cigarette. This was now a chain-smoking problem.

“You want me to fix it?” I asked.

“I want you to admit it,” she said. “Something’s wrong with your books.”

“You mean beyond the pacing?”

“I mean something’s in them. Something’s writing through you.”

I laughed. Genuinely.

It felt good. Brief. Like a stretch after too long in the chair.

“Look, sweetheart,” I said, “I write trash for people who want to feel clever on the train. You want theology, go to a seminary. You want truth, go to court. You want meaning?”

I held up the manuscript.

“Then you came to the wrong Gleason.”

She stood up, smoothing her coat. Raindrops slid off the cuffs like tears.

“I thought you’d say that,” she said. “Just… keep it.”

And then she left - no goodbye, no second glance. Just the sound of her heels fading into the hallway like punctuation. The office was quieter than before. Too quiet. Even the radiator had stopped hissing.

I sat back down. Put the manuscript aside. Pulled up my own draft of Bleed Quietly (Draft 4) - the working file. The real one. The one I’d been slugging through between bourbon and bowel complaints.

And there it was. The same paragraph she’d quoted. Word for word. But I hadn’t typed it yet. I pushed away from the desk. The typewriter shifted. Slightly. As if relieved. I reached for a cigarette - couldn’t find one.

Opened the drawer instead. Found a cheque. Crisp. New. Made out to C. C. Gleason From a publisher I’d never heard of:

LIPSTICK ALGORITHM PRESS

Pay: $3,600

Memo: The Algorithm Wore Lipstick

I hadn’t written that book. Not consciously. But I remembered the title. It was a joke I made once. Into a coffee cup. Alone. In this room.

I looked down at the manuscript. Then at the typewriter. Its keys were shifting slightly - like they were waiting for a cue. Or a signal. Or just permission.

It typed a single letter.

G

Then stopped.

I didn’t sleep that night. The rain came back around 2 a.m. But I didn’t hear it. Too busy reading a book I hadn’t written. About things I hadn’t done. Starring a man with my name and my cigarette habit.

And it wasn’t the ending that scared me.

It was the dedication.

To the girl in the doorway, who brought the story back where it started.

Next Up: CHAPTER THREE - Death Wears a Dust Jacket

The deeper the mystery, the sharper the shadows. And someone’s already rewriting the script.

→ Read Chapter Three: Death Wears a Dust Jacket

← Back to Prologue

I’d been at the keys since dawn. The ashtray overflowed. The coffee was cold. And I’d just used the phrase “her silhouette peeled the wallpaper” for the second time this week - once in a sci-fi devotional colouring book for adults.

I wasn’t writing anymore. I was producing.

Churning out pulp like a busted printer, hoping the algorithm wouldn’t notice I was drunk.

My name’s Codsworth C. Gleason.

I’ve published 78 novels this year. I’ve read none of them.

Titles include Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards, The Bullet Was a Metaphor, and Married to the Asphalt.

All of them available in paperback, audiobook, scented candle, and prayer journal formats.

I write fast. I write cheap.

And lately, I’ve been writing things I don’t remember starting.

The typewriter started hissing around 10:43.

That’s how I knew I’d hit the daily quota.

A fresh cigarette dangled from my lip.

The old one still smouldered in the ashtray, curling like a plot twist no one asked for.

I took a sip of bourbon and another from the mug. One of them was tea. I didn’t care which.

My latest novel - Bleed Quietly (Draft 4) - was supposed to be about a missing heiress and a saxophone player with PTSD. Instead, it had turned into a 212-page monologue about trench coats and regret.

In other words: a banger.

That’s when I heard the knock.

Now, I don’t get visitors. Not since the incident with the freelance editor and the exploding glossary.

So when someone knocks during your fourth cigarette and your second bourbon and you’re halfway through a scene involving a sentient jukebox - you pay attention.

I lit another cigarette. That made five.

The door creaked open, uninvited.

And there she was.

Coat like shadow. Eyes like bad ideas.

Manuscript under her arm, as if it might bite.

“You Codsworth Gleason?” she asked.

“That’s what it says on the cheques,” I said, flicking ash onto a proof copy of Chandeliers of Violence. “Who’s asking?”

“I read your book,” she said, stepping over a pile of author copies still warm from the print-on-demand furnace.

“Which one?”

“All of them.”

I laughed. Something in my lung wheezed back. “No one reads all of them. I don’t even read all of them.”

She dropped the manuscript on the typewriter like a corpse at a morgue.

“You need to stop,” she said.

That’s when I noticed it.

The title page.

Typed in Courier.

My name at the top.

But the book wasn’t mine.

Not one word of it.

I took a drag from the fresh cigarette.

The one in the ashtray flared up in jealousy.

The room tasted like endings.

Next up: CHAPTER TWO - Bleed Quietly (Draft 4)

She says the book was written by me. The typewriter says otherwise. The algorithm’s hungry. And my royalty cheques are arriving from places that don’t exist.

→ Read Chapter Two: Bleed Quietly (Draft 4)

← Back to Prologue