William - Hardcover

Coile, Mason

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593719603 ISBN 13: 9780593719602

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Psychological horror meets cyber noir in this delicious one-sitting read—a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI.

Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career—he’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William.

No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.

When Lily’s coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house—the smartest of smart homes—Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it in.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mason Coile is a pseudonym of Andrew Pyper, the award-winning author of ten novels, including The Demonologist, which won the International Thriller Writers Award, and Lost Girls, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year. Both Coile and Pyper live in Toronto.

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1

Every morning felt like Henry's first. Perhaps it came from working with code so much, the detailed sequence of inconsequential numbers that resulted in something coming to life, something that had never existed before. Perhaps it was because his aversion to leaving the house had grown so severe that he'd long given up trying, so he was left with only one wonder within his reach. Lily. The woman sitting in the chair next to his bed, smiling in the lovely, vaguely haunted way he sometimes sees as a side effect of overwhelming love, and other times as merely pity.

"That was a bad one," she says.

"Was I snoring?"

"You were nightmaring. You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear."

"Did you?"

Her glasses are round and too large for her face in a way Henry finds heartbreaking. She pushes them up hard against her brow. "What was the dream about?"

"It was the same one," he says. "More or less."

"Tell me."

"Why? Dreams are stupid. Don't we have other things-"

"Dreams tell us who we are," his wife says, and pulls the chair an inch closer, taps at her chin with doctorly interest. "Don't you think we could all use some help with that?"

He hears the "all" as meaning himself. He could use some help with knowing who he is. It's a very Lily thing to say: superficially supportive, curious, passively superior. His desire for her to stay here with him is so great he forgives her for making him feel like an anecdote, something she might later share with friends for their amusement. Or worse, their sympathy.

"It's our house. This house," Henry says. "I'm moving through the halls like I'm not in control of my limbs. Just drifting, you know?"

"Sure."

"And I'm going up the stairs to the second floor. That's when I start to get scared."

"Are you scared of-"

"Not it. Not exactly."

"So it's-"

"A sense. Like I know something bad is coming but I can't prevent it."

"And you can't wake up."

"I can't do anything except go where I have to go."

"The attic."

"The stairs to the attic, yeah. That's where I stop. Looking up at the door. Except it's different from the real door. This one is covered in chains and padlocks, top to bottom. Like whoever put them there didn't think there was enough of them so kept adding more and more."

There's no way to predict what will catch Lily's interest, and what will cause her to wander off and leave him to what she calls his "pet projects." Henry often feels like there's an undiscovered vein of conversation that might keep her with him longer, maybe even bring her back for good, if he could only stumble on the right topic or theme. He's made the mistake in the past of thinking she wants him to be more entertaining. But after trying to mimic the charm of the leading men in the movies she likes, he saw how she found him the least engaging when he was working the hardest at it. It makes him want to ask what she found most attractive about him before they were married-whatever quality he still possesses that he could try to magnify-but he worries she'll say she's forgotten.

"Then what?" she says.

"I hear a voice behind the door."

"Its voice."

"Yeah."

"But you couldn't hear what it was saying."

"When I've had the dream before I couldn't. But this time I could."

She sits straighter. "What was it?"

"It was quoting something. Lines from a book. A poem or novel. Maybe the Bible? Something it had memorized. It wasn't kidding around about it either."

"What do you mean?"

"The words weren't its own, but they were the truth of its being. Like another voice speaking through it."

"What did the voice say?"

"'I am the spirit of perpetual negation. For all things that exist deserve to perish.'"

"You remembered that?"

"I guess it was memorable."

"Shit." She shivers. A stagy gesture that builds into a genuine shudder. "Perpetual negation. Kinda grim, Henry."

"I wasn't appreciating the meaning of it as it happened. Only that, whatever it was, it meant it."

"At least that woke you up."

"No, that's not what did it."

"What did?"

The locks won't hold. That's what Henry recalls feeling, but he doesn't say it, because he doesn't want to frighten Lily. Every chain and padlock in the world would make no difference. Because what terrified him wasn't the thing on the other side of the wood, but the new thing that had joined it. A presence that will not be contained.

"A whisper," Henry says instead. "But when I got closer I heard it wasn't a whisper. It was a hand. Fingers stroking the inside of the door. And then-boom!-something smashed against it. Hard enough to split the wood. That's what woke me up."

Lily shudders again. "Well, you're here now."

"Where else would I be?"

"Good one," she says, and nods with a mixture of humor and sadness that he thinks of as her trademark, though sometimes wonders if he's reading it wrong. If maybe he always has. "Good one."

2

Things are bad between them, but not too bad. This is the estimation he's held to for so long it's become a truism, comforting as believing there's a heaven awaiting us after death. But sometimes, like now, he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment-the same made by millions of husbands right before the end. He doesn't normally wish he had friends, but when this thought comes to him, he does. It might be helpful to know a man of his age and experience who could tell him whether his troubles were benign or terminal.

But Lily's here now. There may be no magical words to keep her here, but showing his concern for her certainly couldn't hurt. As soon as he speaks, he sees how he may be wrong about this too.

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm pregnant, Henry, not ill."

"Of course. Of course not. I just know how it can make women uncomfortable sometimes. The process. Understandably."

"The process?" She laughs-briefly, resignedly-but not without some trace of warmth. He's useless, but he's trying. This is how he interprets it. Lately, it's been as good as it gets for him.

"When are we going to-"

"Don't."

"-talk about things?"

He raises himself up against the bed's headboard. His hand reaches out to her round stomach to feel the life inside her, but she pulls away. A flinch. Is that what he saw? Not a drawing back, the preference to not be touched, but a reflex of the body. It was as if she moved from him with revulsion, rather than anger or coldness or hurt.

"Not today," she says. "Soon."

"It's lonely waking up in this room alone."

"I know."

"How much longer do I-"

"Not today." She steps away so suddenly her glasses slide back down to the tip of her nose.

Henry was a fool when it came to marriage, and he worked to understand it with the flailing desperation of a drowning man fumbling with a life jacket. But he knew enough to know when to let a point go unpursued. Sometimes you had to wait for whatever bruise that ached between the two of you to darken first before fading, even if, looking back on it, you could never recall the blow that caused it in the first place.

Lily goes to the window at the far end of the room. "Curtain open," she says.

The heavy blackout curtains part on their own. The morning light first slashes, then expands through the space between the halves. It leaves Henry blinking where he still lies in the bed, in part from the brightness, in part to shield himself from the stark vacancy of the room. A single chair with wooden spindles along its back (their knobs poking and painful to sit against). A rug too small for the space, leaving the corners cold and exposed. The double bed of a size...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593719603
• ISBN 13: 9780593719602
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland