Splinters of You: Retired Sinners

By Anne Malcom

Words are my weapon.
Stories wrap around my soul, choking me, capturing you.
I don't work in dreams.
I don't offer escapes.
I cage you within my nightmares.

Magnolia Grace is a horror writer, despite what the name might suggest.
One of the best in the business, if you asked around.
Pressure comes with that title. Expectation for the next nightmare. The next bestseller.
Sickness.
That's what it is.
She can't be healthy. Because that means she won't write.
And she hasn't been writing.
A looming deadline and a crumbling psyche drive her into the woods. To a cabin which was the site of a grizzly murder.
A serial killer, butchering women, toying with her.
Her plan is to borrow some of the horror that seeped into the soil.
But hers follows her.
The woods are meant to be her escape. But they are almost her demise.
Almost.
He was an unlikely saviour. An unlikely muse. He has horrors of his own. A motorcycle club looking to settle a score. A soul too broken to offer her anything but pain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Malcom
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393357469

Book preview

Chapter 1

Her blood was like wine. Aged. Rich. Rare. No one else would spill it but me.

---

I knew I made a mistake the second I pulled off the interstate and onto a winding road, poorly paved, full of potholes, bordered by dense wood.

Even though I’d only been on the road a handful of minutes, with the open spaces of the interstate still visible in my rear view, the feeling of suffocation was overwhelming. The woods strangled me. Nature smothered me.

I had to clutch the steering wheel to stop myself from slamming on the brakes, turning the car around, and driving all the way back to my apartment in New York. The city had never felt this suffocating, despite the fact it had one of the highest population densities in the country.

In New York, there was no such thing as privacy, people defecated on the streets, fucked in parks, had babies in cabs, and died everywhere—but that was what I’d liked about it. That life was lived in the open. Started in the open. Ended that way. There was an ugly honesty that fed my own ugly soul.

Granted, I had a lavish, spacious apartment overlooking the park and even with the millions it was worth, it wasn’t exactly huge. I had it up until about a week ago, shared with my now ex-fiancé.

I figured if I did turn around right now, swallow all of my pride, abandon my dignity, I could take the ex out of that title.

No, I couldn’t do that. Fail before I’d even truly started. That wasn’t an option anyway. The aforementioned apartment was already in escrow—thank you to the New York property market—and all my stuff that wasn’t in the back of the car—which was a lot despite the car being full to the brim—was in storage.

My friends (people who pretended to like me for their own selfish reasons and that I pretended to like for my own) had thrown the goodbye party, pictures were taken, and farewells were made.

My best friend had considered having me committed against my will as she thought I’d truly gone crazy when I announced I’d be leaving the loud, dirty, noisy city I had once loved to move to a tiny town in Washington State.

I was, of course, crazy. All authors were crazy, weren’t they? If I could still call myself an author. I hadn’t written in months and my overly large advance from my latest book was dwindling—draining, really—in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The kind of city I’d always dreamed about. The kind of life I’d always dreamed about.

I had money. I could pay back the advance and retire, if I wanted to be careful. Quiet. But it wasn’t about the money. It was about the empty page. Despite the materialistic and superficial shrew I’d turned myself into, I’d still trade a full page for an empty bank account.

I’d never had this problem. Not since I started writing. Not since my debut set the world on fire.

But lately, I’d felt lost. Restless, despite my literary success, my bulging bank account, my rabid, if not obsessive, readers. I liked that obsession. I loved it. The darker the better. The mail that bordered on psychotic and maybe should’ve been passed on to a law enforcement professional…yeah, that was my favorite.

I was living a life most true artists never got to live while creating. Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, to name a few. They lived sad, sparse lives, and their books made them millionaires in death.

I had parties thrown for me—despite the fact I despised every guest and the leeches throwing them—I went on talk shows, book tours. Again, I hated those and had significantly cut down on them the past two years, and cancelled all my upcoming ones. My reason for that wasn’t exactly hatred, but it was a lie I told myself to keep it all together.

In my career, despite the dark shadows, I had it all.

Personally—surface level, of course—I also had it all.

The man who got down on one knee with that deep red box edged with gold and promise. He wore ten thousand-dollar suits. He had been featured as one of the most eligible bachelors in the city. Family was moneyed, snobby, and still had household staff. Everything that was wrong with society and wrong with us as humans, it was still desirable. We all ached to be part of the club that had systematically destroyed empathy, humanity.

Even me. The dark sheep of my family, the literary world. I reveled in being an outcast but basked in the beige, rich, and bigoted world of my fiancé, and the boyfriends that came before him.

Then there were the hotel rooms. The rooms I had once loved for their lack of personality and wealth of possibly only taunted me with my empty page and broken brain. That yawning emptiness that only intensified as I continued not writing.

Not writing turned me into…something.

Someone decidedly more volatile and unhinged than I already was before, which was pretty fucking unhinged.

I became more paranoid, uncomfortable, moody, all-around evil, if I was honest. My vision sharpened as well. I saw too clearly just how much I’d been lying to myself. The horrid and vapid life I’d wrapped myself up in. Starting with the man who gave me the tacky, expensive, and cliché diamond I’d slid off my finger the same morning I’d bought the cabin in Washington.

Yes, bought. Sight unseen. In somewhere as drastically different from New York as I could possibly get. I wasn’t known for doing things by halves, and this was a full overhaul of my life.

The plan was to lock myself away from civilization—if that’s what you could call New York—and write a book I’d promised my publisher. That’s what all the great writers did, didn’t they? Shut out all outside distractions, forced themselves to look forwards for the story, for their madness.

It had seemed so simple, so enticing. It was a Band-Aid over a bullet wound, to be sure, but I thought it would tide me over for this book, at least.

But now, staring at the road, feeling the trees swallowing me up…it was not enticing at all.

I’d made a mistake.

A huge one.

But I had to follow it through.

So, I followed the road.

The feeling of panic and suffocation followed me, just like the memories I was leaving behind.

You’re not serious, he said, sneering down at the small picture open on my laptop.

I hadn’t planned on showing him the cabin before I bought it. In fact, I hadn’t intended on telling him I was buying it at all. I was planning to do the evil, selfish, and cowardly act of slipping away in the night, selling the apartment from under him—it was in my name anyway, because despite his trust fund, he was cheap—and blocking his number.

Things didn’t really go to plan when he snuck up behind me, saw the photo on the screen, and demanded answers.

I wasn’t one to give in to the demands of men in general, or this man in particular, but I was meant to love him. Except I had realized I really despised him.

Case in point, the sneering tone. One of many, many things I hated about him.

And the fact he hadn’t noticed I hadn’t been wearing my engagement ring for two days.

I hated him, and definitely didn’t want to explain myself to him, but the only other way to escape the conversation at this point was to hit him in the head with a blunt object. As much as I was obsessed with violence, I wasn’t too keen on wasting a potential felony on this manicured fucker.

So, I told him.

I was buying a cabin in Washington and would be staying there until the book was finished, and who the heck knew how long that would be.

You better not be expecting me to come with you.

I stared at him. Really stared at this man. Classically handsome in every single way. His face so symmetrical it was giving me a migraine. How did I not notice that before? Or the fact he had no features that were weird or unique. No, he was a cookie-cutter guy. Tanned. Muscled. Three-hundred-dollar haircut. T-shirt that cost the same. Loafers that were made from some endangered animal and were definitely at least eight percent gay. I had been aware of all of this when I slipped the ring onto my finger and his moisturized body into my apartment, of course. Aware of how utterly wrong he was for me but that had served a purpose. He had served a purpose.

And now he was expired.

No, I’m not expecting you to come with me, I said, closing my laptop and standing. In fact, I’m demanding you don’t.

I glanced down at my phone, vibrating in the passenger’s seat. Man of the hour. He’d been calling me since that day. I hadn’t answered.

He wasn’t calling because he loved me.

He was calling because I’d walked away from him. From his perfect version of the relationship. Being married to the sex symbol famous author. Intelligent and pretty in a way that looked like I did porn, but he could still take me home to his family.

They pretended to like me because of my social cache.

They hated me.

But they all hated each other, so it worked.

Todd had maybe hated me too. But he loved what being married to me would mean. He didn’t want me to succeed beyond something he would be happy to introduce me as at dinner parties. Other than that, he wanted a pretty face, a mind that wasn’t smarter than him, and devotion and support that would not be reciprocated. He wanted to be seen as the man with the famous, depraved, beautiful, and so obviously kinky Magnolia Grace.

Maybe I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d continued to write. To see success. Success made you blind to the truth. As it was, writer’s block and self-doubt stopped me in my tracks, bringing on a functioning version of depression that forced me to see everything as it was.

Lacking.

Hence me landing myself here, thinking if I threw myself into the proverbial deep end, it might not feel like freefall anymore.

I definitely wasn’t falling.

I’d landed. Right here, in the middle of the woods.

I wasn’t sure that was better.

My GPS told me to turn right and I yelped with the foreign voice interrupting my blaring music. I’d been driving straight on this road for so long, I’d forgotten the near constant "turn right here, take exit 54" that had become my background. Even though I’d been so sure I was suffocating with all these trees, they’d relaxed me enough to get a goddamn fright from the GPS. Magnolia Grace was not one to get frights. She was one to give them.

I recovered enough to pull into the small gas station from every horror movie ever invented and hoped my story didn’t end with my car being stored in an impound lot out the back and my body being hacked to pieces by cannibal locals.

I’d done my research on Terror, Washington. From what I’d found, the locals had no history of eating tourists or lost travelers. And I was really fucking good at research. It was meant to be quaint, quiet, and unpretentious. Up until recently, it hadn’t made any headlines because it was just too boring. That wasn’t why I chose it. I chose it because its name was Terror, a woman had been brutally murdered there last year, and if that wasn’t a sign for the famously fucked-up horror author going through an existential crisis, then I didn’t know what was.

The gas station itself was clean, cluttered, and about ten years in the past. It was not quite as dramatically eerie as it had seemed on the road, but it was close.

Especially when a man came lumbering out of the small building, which housed what I guessed was a tiny store, a lacking restroom and food packets likely full of high fructose corn syrup and covered in dust.

He was dressed pretty much exactly as one would expect. Plaid shirt, slightly rumpled, stained and worn almost to threads. Jeans were much the same. His work boots were worn but good quality.

Something made me feel a little comforted by that. A man with a reasonable taste in shoes wasn’t going to drag me into his little store and murder me, would he?

Even if he did decide to do that, he looked to be approximately one hundred years old, so I figured I might be able to take him. I trained daily to make sure I had a really good chance against any man who wanted to try anything. The handgun in my glove compartment helped if I didn’t have a chance.

He appraised me as I got out of my car and approached him.

Not leered, as I might expect.

I was used to getting leered at.

Most women were.

Despite the strides that had been taken for our rights, the male gaze was the pesky thing that remained like a cockroach after a nuclear explosion.

Most women had gritted their teeth through many a crawling gaze, a suggestive remark…if they were lucky.

Lucky.

I swallowed that word and it went down my throat like a half-chewed potato chip.

I focused on the not leering look. This man was assessing me, I was sure. Upon first glance, I wasn’t really that difficult to assess. Dark, long hair I didn’t bother to cut—despite my best friend threatening to hire a hair stylist to break into my apartment at night to, at the very least, trim it—so it fell down to the small of my back. It was piled into a haphazard bun that looked effortless and chic, but which really took twenty minutes to perfect.

My makeup took a little longer, even if, to the untrained eye, it looked like I wasn’t wearing any. Most women knew that the no makeup makeup look was the longest to perfect. My pale skin was flawless, thanks to layers of foundation perfectly matched to my skin tone.

Lips that were red enough to look endearing and natural all at the same time, though it was a little touch of filler that helped me along the way. Ditto with my Botox.

I had a seven-step beauty routine. Morning and night. My skincare products combined could’ve bought a reasonable used car.

I looked good. At a price. Always at a price.

And it seemed none of the things I did to move myself from a firm eight to a nine point five were working on Father Time in plaid.

That your car? he said by greeting.

I stopped walking, mostly out of a surprise from the greeting, and also because my heels were Manolos and there was a mud-filled pothole right in front of me.

I glanced back at the BMW, black, sleek and expensive. I didn’t really know much else about it because I wasn’t a car person, beyond the image I wanted it to portray. And the image I wanted to portray was that I had money, resources, and could make a quick getaway.

It’s a pretentious piece of shit, he said, lighting up a smoke from a packet in his front pocket.

I smiled. Not something I usually did with strangers, or anyone else. It gave the wrong impression. But I couldn’t help it. This man was gruff, rude, and obviously not at all impressed by me. I loved everything about that. This helped to quell some of the bone-clenching panic I’d been struggling to contain since I turned down this road.

Thank you, I said, skirting the puddle while he watched me do so.

You lost?

I observed the gas nozzle. It was old fashioned enough not to have a credit card reader on it and looked easy enough to work. I hadn’t pumped gas in what seemed like an age. In New York, my car sat in a parking building that cost me the same amount as the rent on a studio apartment.

The man did not seem inclined to help me, which made me continue to like him.

Why would you think I’m lost? I asked him.

He raised a brow, not replying, but looked pointedly from my car to me as I started pumping the gas.

Fair enough, I muttered.

He didn’t push conversation while we waited for the car to fill up. Just stood there, smoking his smoke, probably not at all a safe distance from someone pumping gas, not looking the least bit worried about social graces or the prospect of blowing us both up.

I bought a cottage. I offered the information about three quarters of the way into the tank. It was the first time in recent memory I’d done something like this. Gave a stranger a piece of information they didn’t need nor have the right to. In my opinion, strangers, or even people that shared blood with me, didn’t have any rights to get anything from me.

It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable in silence with a stranger. I preferred it. I enforced it.

But now, with this strange man endangering my life, I broke away from my shield of rudeness and cruelty. A little.

He took a long inhale. Long enough for the tank to fill.

Ah, Emily’s place, he said finally.

There was an edge to his husky voice. An edge I recognized. An edge of death. Of darkness.

I guessed the history of my new home wasn’t going to be a secret around here.

But secrets were still waiting for me.

They always were.

I glanced to the tank for the price of my gas, then regarded the small store behind the man. After fastening the nozzle back on to the rickety pump, I grabbed a wad of twenties from my car, crossed the distance between us, and handed them to him. He took them with oil-stained hands.

You’re not gonna last long, New York, he said finally. There wasn’t a hostility to his voice. No threat. Just knowing.

I smiled. Ah, I’ll surprise you.

The corner of his mouth ticked ever so slightly. Women tend to do that.

Well, shit.

I took in the cottage in front of me, the one I found thanks to the surprisingly detailed directions from Just call me Ernie. My GPS never would’ve found this place, thanks to the address being attached to the wrong fricking location on the map. I planned on penning a very strongly-worded email to my realtor.

Or, I had on the drive here. Which was not great. Unpaved, potholed, dirt road, overgrown enough for rogue branches to trail along the sides of my car, screeching and telling me they were ruining my paint job.

I’d cursed Sally in my head, deciding her charming email and phone demeanor was nothing but a ruse in order to sell me a piece of shit cabin in the middle of nowhere that was haunted by the ghost of a Victorian teenager who would possess me and ultimately kill me.

And that wasn’t really even Sally’s fault. I was the stupid idiot who bought a fucking cabin without even looking at it. Plus, it would make for great irony that a horror writer was murdered by a ghost when she made her living writing about them.

I was half-expecting this place to be a hovel, for me to have to either figure out how to do moderately complicated renovations or slink back to New York with my tail between my legs. I even had rough plans for both scenarios.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself the character in a sitcom. A lumberjack to melt out of the woods to either murder me or save me from myself and the wild. A cliché. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have the strongly-worded email to that deceitful realtor drafted in my head.

As it turned out, I didn’t need that email. Or any kind of knowledge of construction. Or the tail between the legs return to New York.

At least not yet.

Because I was standing in front of a one-story cottage that couldn’t be described as anything less than idyllic. And, unlike many Tinder dates, exactly like its picture.

The A-frame structure was small, tucked in between the woods it backed on to. A welcoming cobbled path banished the unruly driveway, bordered with bright flowers and foliage this black thumb had no hope of identifying. There was a small front porch, complete with a freaking porch swing. Lights were left on, as Sally had promised when I’d called her a couple of hours ago to inform her I’d be arriving later tonight.

The key was under the mat—only in the middle of the woods, could you do something like that. Smells of dirt and nature chased away the woefully inadequate fresh pine scented air freshener in my car.

The key stuck a little in the lock and I decided not to think of that as some kind of an omen. Though it was hard. I was a writer, I conjured up all sorts of symbols, ghosts, demons, curses, murderous spirits as a part of my day job. I couldn’t help but let it leak out of that and into every day.

No, that was wrong. I had made a career out of that stuff that was already there. I was the girl who woke up every morning at precisely 3:33 a.m. convinced I was being haunted by a demon. That my dreams painted pictures of the future. That death was following me and would stalk me if I cheated it.

All dark thoughts scuttered back to their respectful places when I opened the door.

The interior of the cabin was not like the photos.

It was better.

Since the place was small, I walked right into the living area.

A fireplace, unlit but bursting with possibility, was at the back of the living area. Right beside a huge window boasting a view of a lake twinkling in the moonlight. Freaking twinkling.

The place was warm.

Inviting.

Cozy.

I wasn’t even a person who used the word cozy, let alone would want to be anywhere that personified it.

I’d been all about chic, functional and expensive in my former life.

I was one step inside this place and I was already thinking of New York as my former life. Which I guessed was accurate. I felt like it was leave with a chance of survival or stay and die. Inwardly, of course. But for someone as interior as me, inward death was as bad as the real one.

The floors were hardwood, covered in a mish mash of rugs that shouldn’t match but did. White sofas circled around the fireplace and a coffee table looked to be made out of an old ship door. The kitchen was tucked away into a corner; it looked nice, though it didn’t interest me overly. I was a shitty cook. Living in New York, I didn’t have to learn. And with my job, the social media image I’d perfected, food wasn’t something I deemed as important, apart from the fact I was obsessive over it.

I knew the bedroom was off to the right of the open plan living area so I made my way there, noting everything that had been done to this place. Or, more accurately, everything that had been left.

This place was sold completely furnished, on account of the previous owner being murdered. A woman not that much older than me. Living alone. Targeted by forces unknown, found outside her quaint little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The case remained unsolved with no leads.

Such a detail was something that brought the price of this place and the surrounding land way, way down. No one wanted to buy a murder house. Except a horror writer with a fascination for the morbid. That was what pushed me to buy it in the first place. Though I did not mention such a thing to my best friend. Katy was pretty crazy in a lot of ways. In very Katy ways, at least. Like rejecting a multi million-dollar contract at a cosmetic surgery practice in order to become a neurosurgeon kind of way.

Not in a let’s buy a house where a woman was murdered for reasons unknown and her killer was still at large type of way.

My mother was still the hen that pecked at her only child now that her husband wasn’t really able to be pecked at. Because he wasn’t her husband, not really, just like he wasn’t really my father anymore.

I shook that thought from my brain and focused on something less dark. Like the grisly murder of Emily Andrews, age thirty-four, graphic designer with great taste, if the bedroom was anything to go by.

All earth tones. White duvet, quilt that cost a mint, artwork that was simple, powerful and carefully spaced. The closet space was even decent considering the size of this cottage. Her clothes had been taken out, thankfully. Even I would draw the line at wearing a dead woman’s clothes. I wandered into the bathroom.

There had been minimum work done on the cottage itself, apart from essential modern appliances. Oh, and the expensive furnishings. The bare bones had been polished, carefully maintained.

But the bathroom.

That had been taken apart and gutted.

I winced at the expression, thinking of what had happened to poor Emily.

Emily who, obviously like me, loved a good bath.

Not just a good bath.

A freaking magnificent one. An old, claw-footed tub sitting at the edge of the bathroom right in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that showed me more of the beautiful fricking lake that was a big part of the reason I bought this place sight unseen.

And the murder part feeding my dark soul.

Of course, I’d seen some pictures of the bathroom. They were well-staged with pretty good lighting. But it was nothing like the real thing.

And the real thing was Greek styled tile all over the floor and halfway up the walls. An antique sink and mirror.

I took it in for a while, making a mental note to soak in the tub with a bottle of wine that was waiting for me in the car. I should’ve topped up the whisky I’d finished at the hotels I’d stayed in to break up the drive. To delay getting here. To delay getting to a destination, so I could linger in the in-between. Getting drunk in the bath seemed like a good way to stay in the in-between. I needed to bathe, didn’t I?