DAY 25: The Cestus Code

Willow stepped into her bedroom and made a dash for her cell. The screen was just going off. This was the cell with her more popular number. She gave the number of this phone out often as her business number. She hadn’t felt like taking it along on her walk in the park. Willow really needed to work her body and rest her mind so she would be ready for her muse when she by the time she got back to the house.

Perspiration stood out on her forehead and arms like great balls of crystal freckles. She looked like she’d done a sprint around the block not once but six or seven times. She picked up the phone and saw the call was actually a notification. Email notifications from social networks. She flicked through the messages and when she got to the third message she froze. The first was an update from a Facebook friend, the second message contained a +1 of her comment by one of her circles on Google +. But the third message grabbed her attention by the lapels and shook it until all the bones in her body rattled when she shuddered.

Willow was so excited she felt like biting a big chunk out of something. The #mention was from a guy who claimed to be a representative of a big time film production company. Willow had been trying (without success, if I may add) to get her book turned into a movie. She was well beyond the limits of her wits. And now this; an opportunity that could only be termed a breakthrough.

Willow couldn’t recall if she ever sent out her proposal to the studio this guy was representing but since the diner they were meeting at was close by and she probably knew half the staff working there by first name she agreed to meet this strange personality in person.

The meeting never happened. The diner was a decoy, after all. The guy, Homer Gates, was a chronic schizophrenic who had delusions that everything and therefore, everyone in the world was against him. Willow had written a book she titled The Cestus Code about a woman who finds her place in the family and decides to follow it but the man of the house would hear none of it. Trouble came when the lady who was a writer herself decides to walk away from the marriage. The hubby is enraged when he finds out and a fight ensues.

The lady has her way in the end and becomes the writer she hungered to be. A few years later, somebody finds the woman dead on the bank of a canal; her corpse washed up by the flood tide. It’s a kind of whodunit story. Naturally, all eyes turn on the husband as accusing fingers point everywhere.

This man (the fake publisher guy who @mentions Willow asking for a meeting) kidnapped Willow and took her to a remote location. His real life story is quite similar to Willow’s fictional plot line.

            “Where the hell did you get that story?”

Of course, Willow’s dumbstruck. If you’re a fiction writer and somebody picked you out and asked ‘Where the hell do you get your stories from?’ with a Glock 18 plugged into one of your ears and you know you don’t know then, you understand Willow’s dilemma.

Well, Willow tried to explain herself, it sounded a bit like a creative writing class in her own ears.

            “You write a hell of a story, you know that?” The man said. “I thought you heard my story from someplace and change one or two things to achieve your version. Man, I gotta admit I had plans for you.”

Willow didn’t dare ask what plans. She knew better.

            “I want you to write my story,” The man said. “It’s close to what you got in your book, novels you call ‘em right? I want to write mine. Like it really happened. Cause it did. But I never killed my wife, okay? I loved Amy so much but she just wanted to go on with her fiction stuff. So we parted ways. But I never touch a hair on her head. When they found her she was cut into so many bits they couldn’t recognize. But the bastards thought I did it. Of course, the jury didn’t buy their story. So, I want you to write my story. Tell the world the truth.”

            “Look buddy, I don’t know what you got in mind but I got a family waiting for me to come home and fix their dinner . . .” Willow stopped in mid-sentence. Now the Glock changed position. It moved to the bulge of her forehead.

            ‘Don’t play that card. If you ever want to see your family again plus, if you’re ever gonna convince me what you got in that freaking book of yours ain’t the story of my life then, write my story. This is non-fiction and this gun’s real baby.” He pointed the muzzle of the gun to her eyes so she could take a peek. To Willow it was 6 feet deep. “Now do as I tell you. Don’t make me tell you twice!”

So, Willow stayed in captivity and wrote under the worst editor a man could ask for-a memoir based on the ordeal of this psycho (of course, she never mentioned the guy was a psycho in the manuscript). For the first time she’d come to see writing as a way back to life.

Notes to myself:

Much of the story’s told. Just work in the dialogue.

And the lady’s working conditions in hostage situation.

Does she finish the story?

Does the psycho kill her?