The Man in Chapter Thirteen
The novel is called The Burning Touch.
Fifty million copies in three months. That's what they print in Publishers Weekly. That's what makes grown men in Manhattan boardrooms stare at quarterly projections like suicide notes.
The women buy it at Target between the organic yogurt and the anxiety medication. At airport Hudson News, sliding it under People magazine. Download it at 2:47 AM while their husbands dream of younger secretaries. Stream the audiobook during barre class, volume cranked just loud enough to drown out their ligaments screaming.
The voice. That's the product.
Not the plot. The plot is Tuesday night Netflix. Woman meets man. Man has dead parents. Man has abs you could grate Parmesan on. Man speaks in commands that sound like choices. Standard.
But the voice.
Like gravel soaked in honey. Like leather seats in a car you'll never afford. Like that thing you googled in incognito mode last Tuesday and immediately cleared from your history.
J.R. Ash. The name on the cover. The name that doesn't exist.
Midnight House publishes it. Midnight House is a Delaware LLC owned by a Cayman Islands holding company owned by another holding company owned by a line item in a spreadsheet nobody reads. Russian dolls made of shell companies, each one emptier than the last.
The marketing department at Simon & Schuster wants to buy it. Wants the face behind the voice. For the morning shows. For the book tours. For the wine moms in Scottsdale who'll pay $47.99 for a signed hardcover to display spine-out on their restoration hardware shelves.
Tech bros run the voice through Shazam. Through SoundHound. Through proprietary software that can identify a speaker from three seconds of breathing.
Nothing.
They run it again. Adjust parameters. Expand the dataset.
The software returns an error: Input exceeds dimensional parameters.
They don't know what that means.
They run it again.
The servers catch fire. Literal fire. The Halon system triggers. The server room fills with gas that tastes like pennies. Three million dollars of hardware becomes modern art.
The insurance company refuses to pay. Act of God, they say.
Nobody asks which god.
Grace Thornton keeps her Stanford PhD in a drawer. Under last year's tax returns. Under the Xanax she doesn't have a prescription for.
She charges $275 per hour to tell Silicon Valley wives their husbands are narcissists. Uses words like "cognitive restructuring." Prescribes meditation apps developed by Harvard dropouts. Suggests journaling in $30 Moleskines.
She keeps The Burning Touch in her nightstand like a loaded Glock.
Tuesday. 10:47 PM. Third glass of Chablis sweating rings onto quartz that cost more than a Honda Civic. The Restoration Hardware catalog open to white linen sectionals. Nobody buys them. Everyone looks.
Chapter Thirteen in her AirPods.
"You think you know what you want," the voice says. "But I know what you need."
Forty-seven times. She's counted. She has a spreadsheet. Hidden in a folder called "Tax Documents 2019."
The scene plays. The wrists. The wall. The ice cube that got the book banned in Alabama, Utah, and one county in Oregon.
Her phone buzzes. Richard. Her husband. Landing in forty minutes. Tokyo was productive. The deal closed. He'll want to celebrate.
She deletes the text.
The voice continues. That part where he says her name. Not the character's name. Her name. Grace. Which is impossible. The recording doesn't change. Can't change. She's checked the file. Same size. Same duration. Same checksums.
But there it is: "Grace."
She opens her eyes.
A man stands in her kitchen. Occupies space. The way smoke occupies space. The way shadows occupy space at noon in Death Valley.
"Hello, Grace."
The voice. That voice. By her Sub-Zero refrigerator. The one that makes ice in three different shapes.
Her wine glass falls. Lands upright. Wine still inside. Newton calls in sick.
"You're not real." She uses her therapist voice. The one that costs $275 per hour. Professional. Diagnostic. Like talking to a patient who thinks the CIA planted chips in his molars.
"Real is relative." He moves without walking. Smells like leather and ozone and something that makes her sinuses burn. "You've been listening."
"It's a book."
"It's more than a book."
The Henckels knives gleam on their magnetic strip. Eight inches of German steel. She calculates distance, velocity, probability. Her hand doesn't move.
"Chapter Thirteen," he says. His teeth are porcelain veneers. Perfect. Too perfect. Uncanny valley perfect. "Your favorite."
"How—"
"Forty-seven times, Grace. I count too."
Her throat performs a magic trick. Disappears. Reappears. Disappears again.
He leans against her counter. The Calacatta marble with the veining that looks like lightning. Or neurons. Or cracks in ice. "You know what's happening, don't you? To all of them? All the women like you?"
"I don't—"
"Sure you do. PhD from Stanford. You're smart. You see the patterns."
She does. The news reports buried on page six. Women leaving. Cars found running at red lights. Pelotons spinning in empty McMansions. Coffee still warm. Phones still unlocked. Slack messages unfinished mid-sentence.
She looks at his eyes then. Really looks. Nothing there. Like someone forgot to finish the rendering. Like reality's graphics card gave up.
"What are you?"
"I'm exactly what you made me." He touches her wrist. Her skin blisters. Heals. Blisters again. A loop. A glitch. "Every fantasy. Every 2 AM Google search you deleted. Every thought you had in traffic on the 101."
The kitchen tilts fifteen degrees. Rights itself. Tilts again.
"You're all the same," he continues. "Different faces. Same hunger. Same empty space shaped like something you can't name."
Gone.
Kitchen empty. Just Grace. The wine. The catalog. Page forty-seven. White sectional. $8,799. Nobody buys it.
Her wrist throbs. She looks down.
Text. Black text. Helvetica. Burned into skin like a brand.
Chapter Thirteen.
Her phone buzzes. Richard. Landed. In the Uber. Be home in twenty.
She stares at the text. At her wrist. At the text.
Twenty minutes.
She opens Audible.
Chapter Fourteen.
Wednesday: Grace deletes LinkedIn. 427 connections vanish. Nobody notices.
Thursday: Instagram. 1,847 followers. The algorithm adjusts in nanoseconds.
Friday: She doesn't show up. Twenty clients. Twenty voicemails. She watches the count rise from her Tempur-Pedic. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.
Her assistant drives over. Pounds on the door. Grace watches through the Ring camera. Watches her assistant's mouth move. The audio is off. Or on. She can't tell anymore.
The assistant waits. Seven minutes. Eight. Checks her phone. Pounds again. Leaves. Her Prius reverses out of the driveway, careful not to hit the recycling bins.
She's not alone.
Brooklyn: A prosecutor stops mid-sentence. Middle of closing arguments. A triple homicide. Slam dunk case. She sets down her notes, walks past the jury, through the courtroom doors. Leaves her Prada briefcase on the defense table. The judge declares a mistrial. The prosecutor's office assigns someone new. They lose.
Dallas: A surgeon pauses during a mitral valve replacement. Looks at the heart in her hands. Sets down her scalpel. Peels off her gloves. Walks out while the machines scream their electronic panic. The resident finishes. Barely. The patient survives. Mostly.
Seattle: A mother of three idles her Honda Odyssey at preschool pickup. AC running. NPR at volume six. She opens the door. Walks into the rain. The teachers find the van seven hours later. Still running. The kids were picked up by their grandmother.
They all own the book.
They all stopped at Chapter Thirteen.
They all have the same marks on their wrists.
Saturday. Richard finds Grace in the bathroom. Standing. Fully dressed. Shower running. Hot water. Steam like a fever dream.
"Grace?"
She doesn't move. Doesn't blink. Her eyes focused on nothing.
"Grace. Jesus. Grace."
He turns off the water. Touches her shoulder. Her skin is cold. Ice cold.
She smiles. Not her smile. Someone else's smile.
"Chapter Thirteen," she says.
Richard calls 911. The paramedics arrive in twelve minutes. They check her vitals. Everything normal. Too normal. Heartbeat exactly sixty. Blood pressure exactly 120/80. Temperature exactly 98.6.
"Ma'am, can you tell us your name?"
"Chapter Thirteen."
"Do you know where you are?"
"Chapter Thirteen."
They transport her. Richard follows in his car. He runs three reds. Nobody stops him.
The hospital runs tests. MRI. CT. EEG. Blood panels. Tox screens.
Everything perfect. Everything normal. Everything exactly what it should be.
Except.
The EEG. There's something else. Another pattern. Underneath the normal waves. Like another brain thinking different thoughts. Or the same thought. Over and over.
The technician shows the neurologist. The neurologist shows the department head. The department head makes a call.
By midnight, more women arrive. Same symptoms. Same smile. Same words.
"Chapter Thirteen."
The hospital creates a new ward. Repurposes the old psych wing. The one they closed in 2019. Budget cuts.
By morning, it's full.
By noon, they're out of beds.
The Eternal Flame releases Monday. 12:01 AM Eastern.
No announcement. No marketing. No reviews.
Amazon's servers crash from the downloads. Dead. Flatline. Engineers in Seattle stare at screens showing nothing but white.
Two hundred million copies sell before the servers die.
The audio downloads itself. Even if you didn't buy it. Even if you deleted Audible. Even if you took a hammer to your phone.
The voice finds you.
It comes through car speakers. Through laptop fans. Through the hum of refrigerators.
Women stop. Wherever they are. Whatever they're doing.
In Whole Foods by the organic tampons. In boardrooms mid-presentation. In beds while their husbands thrust and grunt and finish alone.
They stand. Eyes open. Seeing nothing.
Their families shake them. Their children scream. Their dogs howl until their throats bleed.
The women don't move.
Then the books vanish.
Simultaneously. 3:33 AM Pacific. Every copy. Every file. Every backup. Every cache. Every fragment on every drive in every data center.
Gone.
The forensics teams find something. Not data. Not exactly. Traces. Like footprints in snow that's already melted. Like the outline of a body that's been removed.
The women remain. Standing. Arranged in perfect rows. Football stadiums. Parking lots. Their own backyards. Grids. Patterns. Like circuit boards. Like neural networks.
He appears on every screen. 6:66 PM. The hour that shouldn't exist.
Security cameras. iPhones. The NASDAQ ticker. The Tesla autopilot display that makes Richard swerve into a guardrail he survives but wishes he hadn't.
No eyes. Just that absence. That hunger shaped like a man.
"This is how it ends," he says.
The women smile. All at once. The same smile. His smile.
"This is how it begins," they say. All at once. The same voice. His voice.
The screens go dark.
The women walk. Synchronized. Like a migration. Like a murmuration.
North. All of them. North.
The news stops reporting after three days. There's nothing to say.
The women reach the coordinates. Somewhere in Montana. Or what used to be Montana. The GPS stops working there. Compasses spin. Birds fall from the sky.
There's a building. Or something shaped like a building. Angles that shouldn't exist. Walls that aren't walls. Doors that open onto themselves.
They enter.
They don't come out.
Six months later.
The women return. Or things that look like the women. Same faces. Same voices. Same Social Security numbers.
They go home. They kiss their husbands. They feed their children. They return to work. They laugh at the right moments. They cry at funerals. They orgasm on schedule.
Perfect. Everything perfect.
Except.
Late at night, when the house is silent, they whisper. To themselves. To each other. To him.
Chapter Thirteen. Chapter Thirteen. Chapter Thirteen.
And sometimes, if you listen carefully, if you press your ear against their chest where their heartbeat should be, you hear something else.
The sound of pages turning.
Always turning.
And somewhere, in a place that isn't a place, in a room that isn't a room, the man who isn't a man sits at a desk that isn't a desk.
Writing.
Always writing.
The next chapter. The final chapter. The only chapter that matters.
And every woman in the world leans forward.
Waiting.
Ready.
His.