Things Harold Friends Knew

Harold Friends wrote about murder the way some men wrote about love, slowly, obsessively, and with the faint smell of whiskey and ash clinging to every sentence. He’d been publishing for twenty years, a dozen novels centered around the same man: Detective Claude Ryman, a brilliant, haunted investigator forever circling the mind of a killer he could never quite catch.

Readers called it genius, critics called it obsessive. Harold called it money.

At signings, people always asked him the same thing, “How do you think like a detective, Mr. Friends?”

He’d smile and say something clever about observation or human nature. Nobody ever asked the other question, the one that scraped at the back of his skull when the nights ran too long and the bottle too low.

“How do you think like a sociopathic serial killer?”

He knew, of course. You don’t invent men like the ones in his books. No, you remember them.

You feel them move inside you, stretching their hands, seeing through your eyes. Harold stopped worrying about where Claude Ryman ended, and his killers began years ago. They all came from the same place, the same basement of his brain.

That winter, Harold’s publisher wanted another book. “Ryman finally catches him this time,” the editor said. “Make it conclusive. Give people closure.”

Closure. The word made Harold laugh.

There was no closure for men like Ryman, or for the things that haunted them. Still, he agreed, because he always agreed.

He rented a room in a cheap hotel downtown. He brought his typewriter, two bottles of rye, and a box of notes scrawled in half-legible ink. Each page was a confession in disguise: things he’d imagined doing, or almost done, or maybe had done once and never written down.

He worked late, typing until his fingers cramped, until the room filled with cigarette smoke so thick it turned the air gray. In those hours, Ryman came alive again. And opposite him, the killer emerged, a man without pity, without conscience, but with Harold’s steady hand guiding him through every terrible act.

Some nights, the line between creator and creation went thin. Harold would wake in the chair, the typewriter silent, a single word on the page: Listen. He didn’t remember typing it. He’d pour another drink, sit back down, and the keys would begin again, faster this time, as if someone else were pressing them.

The story grew darker than he’d planned. The killer began sending letters to Ryman that quoted lines from Harold’s earlier books, private details no one should know.

The detective unraveled, and so did Harold.

He stopped answering calls from his publisher. He stopped leaving the room. The hotel clerk said she heard him talking at night, holding long, quiet arguments with someone whose voice never answered.

One morning, she knocked and found the door unlocked. The room was neat, almost sterile.

The typewriter sat in the center of the table, a fresh page rolled in. On it, a single sentence, “Ryman finally understood that the killer had been writing him all along.”

Harold Friends was gone. No note, no forwarding address, just that page, and the faint smell of whiskey and smoke.

Weeks later, the publisher received a package, Harold’s final manuscript. The return address was blank.

It was a masterpiece, they said, a perfect conclusion to the series, but there was something strange about it. In the book’s last chapter, Ryman walks into a shabby hotel room and finds a typewriter still warm from use.

On the paper left in the carriage: “Listen. And in that moment, the detective heard someone breathing, just beyond the words.”