Writer's Life by Eric Brown

about you in return?"
    She was crying now, leaning against the door-frame and sobbing.
    I twisted the knife. "I sometimes wonder why the hell you bother staying with me!"
    Shocked and angered, she looked up and stared at me, and I knew I had gone too far then, and would regret it. "If that's how you feel..." she wept.
    She hurried into the hall.
    "What?" I called after her.
    I heard the front door open. Then, suddenly, she was back, framed in the doorway, staring at me. "You bastard," she said. "Don't expect me to be here when you get back."
    And, before I could reply, she was gone.

THREE
    As a child I read a lot, lost myself in adventures and quests along with characters more real than anyone I had ever met in real life. Books were my refuge, a bolt-hole to other, better worlds than this one, an escape.
    Perhaps they served much the same function now, though on a more sophisticated level: now I might lose myself in a book to escape the exigencies of this life, but at the same time fiction was a way of understanding others, of realising that one's own psychological viewpoint was not the only one. By engaging with the diversity and variation of thought and character to be found in literature, I was making my own life richer and more rewarding.
    Vaughan Edwards' books had fulfilled both the above criteria; they had offered me a brief escape from this reality, and a means of understanding another person's unique world view. For me, the bizarre, other-worldly tales they told functioned as a grand metaphor for something very strange.
    And I wanted to experience that strange reality for myself.
    I awoke late the following morning in a bed cold without Mina. I forced myself to drink a cup of coffee, and at ten set off for Highdale.
    As I drove, I considered Mina's declaration that she would not be at home when I returned. I decided that later, when I had met Vaughan Edwards—or whoever he might be—I would seek out Mina, and apologise. I could always tell her that I had acceded to her wishes, and not gone to the Hall.
    But lies breed a subsequent duplicity, the need to follow up the original untruth with a series of others. I had never lied to Mina, and I did not want to begin now: what I was doing meant something to me—even though I was filled with apprehension at the same time—and I knew that it would devolve to me, upon my return, to attempt to explain this to Mina, somehow make her understand. If she were to share my life, then she must also share my mind. Relationships are founded on mutual understanding, and how could our partnership work if she failed to comprehend what the mystery of Vaughan Edwards and Edgecoombe Hall meant to me?
    I arrived at Highdale just as cloud cover occluded the sun and a squall of heavy rain began. I drove past the Hall and into the village, glad of the excuse to delay the inevitable encounter: I had brought back the books I had borrowed from the White Lion on my last visit.
    It was just after eleven when I pushed into the snug and returned the novels to their shelf. I was tempted to delay the rendezvous still further by ordering a drink, but resisted the urge. The sooner I learned the truth of Edgecoombe Hall, I reasoned, the sooner I could return to Mina.
    I left the pub and drove slowly up the hill. The rain was torrential now, making ineffectual the laboured swipes of the windscreen-wipers. I slowed to a walking pace, hunching over the wheel so as to make out the road ahead.
    I came to the ivied gateposts and turned, feeling as I did so the oppressive weight of something very much like fear settle over me. It was not, I told myself, too late to turn back. I could retreat now and be back home inside the hour, and I would be able to tell Mina that I had not set eyes on Edgecoombe Hall that day.
    Even as I considered this option, I knew that I would not take it. I had set out with the express intention of meeting with Vaughan Edwards, if such was who he was, and I could not at this late stage