We here at the Last Estate have been inundated with query of what our contributor policy is — if we would ever pull from outside minds to supplement our content; as if, by dropping a new piece every day of our inaugural week, we were somehow offering doubt to our productivity. 

 

But it was a fair enough question from one Jesse Hilson, the genre-jumping, keeping-everyone-guessing author/commentator of prolific nature, when he asked how to submit, considering his top-shelf quality output overflows. I made my lisp joke (THE LAST AESTHETE) to prove that everyone is welcomed here “as long as you can get past the armed guards.” 

 

“Who are the armed guards?” Hilson asked. 

 

“We all take turns, alternate while the others sleep,” I replied.

 

Yet, this afternoon is a rare exception, where everyone is wide awake while someone hogs the shotgun: me, standing inside, fogging up the front window as I stick the rifle barrel through an old bullet hole in our wood paneling, waiting, wondering where it all went wrong; how Evelyn Winters could have actually gotten our address here, and what her, or Tom Buckner’s intentions were by sending us her full-length manuscript unsolicited. I won’t allow the others to stand guard until we figure out how, and who, these people really are. Since I appear to be the one targeted, I feel I should be the one behind this scope and barrel.  

   

 

About a month ago, I found myself on an email list I didn’t willfully subscribe to — to be fair, not the oddest thing in the world when you’re a writer, a reader, a mover, a shaker like me; who often acquires new strangers presuming I’ll appraise their work, even when I currently can’t sell my own fucking novel. It was the email list of Evelyn Winters, a writer whose name I vaguely recognized from lit mags where we have appeared in tandem.

 

Hi Stephen King! Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter everyone is talking about! is how the first unwanted email addressed me, before it further devolved into a brief Q&A, mainly to raise awareness Winters had new pieces out at Maudlin House and Bear Creek Gazette that day. I don’t have Internet, but I heard they are in there, somewhere was her last comment in this interview, a total nosedive intended to raise intrigue that Winters may live in the middle of nowhere with shoddy or no internet, even though some of us really, really live like that, man. 

 

I’ve smelled sub-par performance art like this before because it tends to reek. 

 

Thankfully, the second email was benign enough, a simple quick link to her newest story minus the (wacky! kooky!) one-sided fanfare of the first. But I heard from others, like Speak of the Devil Hilson and Karter Mycroft that they too, were receiving these emails. It’s not like we were shying away from eye contact to someone who couldn’t read a room — our eyes were just busy, rolling into the backs of our skulls. 

 

Then, Winters ramped it up with the introduction of Tom Buckner, a man who she/he claimed to live in her basement, who may or may not be the one sending these emails, the third of which was just a link to a podcast featuring an interview with Buckner, whose voice is pitch-shifted akin to someone in witness protection. 

 

In cre8collbor8’s episode entitled Arson, Arms, and the Art of Bartering, Buckner hijacks this interview from host Jody Sperling, carrying on the intricacies of trading buckets of rusty nails for chainsaws, between meandering ramble-fluff about, well, nothing; not unlike getting cornered at the gas station by a stray meth head who’s run out of projects. Buckner occasionally refers to Evelyn Winters as his significant other, but this episode is clearly the Buckner Show, though we are confused why the Sperling went to such lengths to track down, much less feature Buckner. 

 

However, goosebumps are raised towards the 45-minute mark, where he says he definitely did not burn down Odie Greens Hardware store (AKA the Great Calamity of 1991), where he says he definitely did not drop a cigarette in a pool of gasoline (“What kind of fool would do that? Things could happen…”). When the host reminds Buckner that his car was right there when it happened, Buckner swerves into musing on firearms and property rights instead: “You can shoot whoever you want when they come on your property, so if you come on my property, we’ll see what happens… I don’t want anyone knowing where I live,” he says.

 

(Relatable, I think, as I gently massage my finger with the trigger here, though it’s my neck that really needs work — it’s cramping up since I refuse to move an inch from my guard post — we’ll call it FOMO until they figure out what’s really wrong with me. In the meantime, Tom, now I know where you live because…)

 

The package showed up here two weeks ago. I had just returned home from the big city where I witnessed two people overdose on Fentanyl in close quarters; one of them inside a nightclub, the other outside of another bar (because downtown is simply suffocating). As a result, I may have been bringing that residual mortal dread home with me when I opened the mailbox, framing this odd parcel in immediate existential paranoia, but come on: from the return address of Tom Buckner in Cody, WY is a full-length manuscript authored by Evelyn Winters entitled Everything, Ever. Even stranger, while this was addressed to the house here, instead of me or anyone else who lives here, the proposed recipient is a fairly well-known Los Angeles-author who is published by Penguin (that’s big time — so this author, like, isn’t necessarily even in our scene, man). Stranger still, it’s postmarked in Pesco, WA — thousands of miles from WY. 

 

Before I showed the package to my housemates here at The Last Estate, I tweeted at this well-known author, requesting he messaged me, alerting him there was some “weird shit afoot.” Prompt with his response, I presented him with the incongruence, complete with photos of the package. 

 

“Well, this fits with the strangely similar emails I’ve been getting from that mysterious person! No idea why or how they got your address. I don’t know, that person is very strange and unsettling,” he said “Thanks for letting me know though!”

 

“It seems like a bi-polar ‘bit,’” I said, remembering similar untactful stunts I pulled when I was younger, the sole intention to make people uncomfortable. “And yeah, I’m unsettled someone has the address of The Last Estate. I guess, let me know if you hear anything.”

 

“Will do,” he said. “I unsubscribed from the emails, of which I never subscribed to begin with, and I’ve been worried ever since that it might set someone off…”

 

 

I call for a meeting with my housemates. We gather in the living room, sitting Indian style in whatever spots aren’t piles of broken glass or mildewing newspaper, where I tell them everything — the emails, the vague recall of Winters name; I play the weird podcast, then I show them the package. We chatter intermittently with speculation until:

 

“Wait a sec,” says William. “Rudy and I just accepted a piece from Evelyn Winters for Misery Tourism. We’re publishing it next month.” 

 

In that moment, assorted projections compel all seven of us to stand erect, pointing fingers at one another like the Spider-Man meme: My left-hand points at William and Rudy, who had yet to turn in their secret collaboration for The Last Estate, so I immediately suspect this is their infuriating meta-tempt. My right-hand points at Jake Blackwood, a born prankster, whose voice/cadence I realize sounds very similar to Tom Buckner on the podcast if he disguised it in an even lower pitch than his notorious baritone. Derek points to Unity, who is infamous for his multiple personalities writing under various alts. Every suspect immediately denies the accusations, every accuser accepts their plea of stood ground. “Hold on, where’s Stuart Fucking Buck?” I say, totally forgetting he’s been in the kitchen making us cake for the meeting this whole time. “Nope, not me neither!” I hear him holler from the ovens. It takes me a second to believe him, since this also seems like something that would come out of Bear Creek, but the collective’s trust is among The Last Estate’s most important virtues. 

 

“But, you know, I published something from Winters in the last issue of Bear Creek!” he followed up, walking out to the living room, wiping his hands on his apron. This was getting aggressively vexing from my own falsely persecuted coven, whose only crime was the inability to provide all the answers for me the second I demanded them. 

 

The collective dove onto their monitors for their own detective work, to further expunge their names from the suspicious hat. William suggests the piece may be AI generated, as the rhythm and usage seems akin to clunky bot-language we’ve read before — which opens up a whole other suspect: fucking autocastratrix. Not only were they supposed to be the eighth member of The Last Estate before they amicably bowed out a month ago, but I also interviewed them for my piece on AI-generated fiction at Lit Reactor last October. But this too, was debunked by raw editorial instinct — after revisiting some of autocastratrix work, the work of Evelyn Winters just didn’t read as sophisticated, not as writhingly witty as autocastratrix. 

 

To our emails, Will forwards the Evelyn Winters piece they’re about to publish entitled “Cynthia’s Mug.” The title alone freaks me out, raises my blood pressure — not only does it share the namesake of my shadow-casting ex, who is one of the only two people in this whole big bad world who I am sort of terrified of (even though I also sort of miss her; typical), but this mug she made in ceramics class happens to be the last thing I have of left of hers. The synch is chilling, really. I speed read the piece, searching for clues to solidify my nostalgic paranoia, though nothing hits, pure coincidence, thank fucking God. 

 

Now, I feel like I need to take all the blame for this — it was my responsibility to get The Last Estate a P.O. Box so our location could remain un-porous, and last fall I accidentally sent copies of my books out with our real return address. I checked my PayPal history, though, and no one from WA or WY has bought a copy of Fallout from Our Asphalt Hell. Then, I blame the vinyl mail orders I fulfill for my band Jail Weddings and my mind collapses — our fans tend to be their own sick quivering web of deceit. Luckily, most Jail Weddings devotees are too drunk to read, so those two sides of my coin are dismissed. 

 

Still, I still feel bad I may have let the house down, somehow, sharing our address willy-nilly; some other reason I’m projecting, territorial with the house gun, the roiling gut feeling this all feels nefarious… so if anyone gets hurt first it’s going to be me, who will also shoot first. 

 

I decide to grow a pair and reply to one of the emails, curtly. Hi, this is Gabriel Hart and I have no idea how I got on this list, nor what the intentions were of receiving Winter’s manuscript, or much more, how you got the address here. 

 

They responded immediately:

 

 

Even in (or maybe because of) it’s playful tone, something about this was feeling more sinister by the second; like some real Chain Letter by Christopher Pike shit… or…

 

Besides the ex who I mentioned, the one other person in this whole world I’m terrified of is my first editor, who I have far more reason to avoid and guard this house from, who’s name I’ll withhold to avoid further descent into endangerment for him or I. Though I am alive and breathing, one could argue this man ruined my life; at least seven years of it, back when I was just starting to take writing seriously. This man, who was brilliant and charismatic as much as he was diabolical and manipulative, was the sole reason my first novel was held hostage for nearly a decade. 

 

It began fortuitous: he was a fast-rising author who saw value in my work, demanding me under his wing — quickly becoming my liaison for a hot indie publisher who agreed to publish my book on his word alone. Gradually, like the frog in boiling water, I was pulled into his psychic vampire undertow; a bewildering gumbo of co-dependence (my fault), narcissism, domestic violence, embezzlement, drugs, his mother’s tragic murder, and other things I’ve since blocked from my memory. Before I knew it, he had ingratiated himself into my life, moved himself in with me in Echo Park; turning my basement into sketchy lair I was afraid to enter. He was the embodiment of entities I allowed to fly into me, one of the main living catalysts for me leaving Los Angeles, for fear I would never get rid of him, the man who was supposed to be my conduit for the publisher, who he was also draining money, resources, and sanity from. 

 

During my first year of relative safety in the desert, after blocking him from my phone, I got a call from the editor’s baby-momma, a dear friend of mine, with a full-report he was involved in a three-hour stand-off with the police at the residence of another host he was playing parasite to, climaxing with him finally giving up their four year old son to the cops through the small window of the downstairs apartment he had barricaded the two of them in, where he was howling psychobabblic non sequiturs until someone finally called the pigs. He was 51-50d, and when they drew his blood, he tested positive for methamphetamine. Shocked but not surprised, I was almost impressed by how much he had damaged my own recognizance by then, when my own experience with that drug in my teens somehow fallen short to spot this specific of red flag. Sadly, I was likely in denial, as he remained the one standing between my publisher and I, with all the edits of my book he’d been withholding, stalling the process with his own detours of devolution, of which I made excuses for him to protect my own narcissistic ambitions. 

 

Six months after the book was finally published elsewhere, my band Jail Weddings had a show downtown. As we set up to play, I nearly lost all my mojo when I saw a ghost across the room — the shell of the man who was once my editor, at least 80-pounds lighter, for better or worse. I had told him to stop contacting me, so his appearance, and subsequent staring at me across the room (as he inched closer and closer into arm’s length) was a major breach. I marched to him, drunk on adrenaline, “What the fuck are you doing here? Leave — now!” 

 

He argued he was just coming to see us play, that it was a public space, that everything was fine now because he said so. He then launched into scolding me for mentioning him (I withheld his name, obviously) on a podcast, after the host asked me why the book took so long to be published — I couldn’t not vent about it, as his calamities had become part of the book’s delayed history. Luckily, someone came to break it up between us — unluckily, my defenses came down again, and before I knew it, I was somehow apologizing. He insisted on buying one of my books (since edited by someone I trust) under the insidious presumption he was doing me another favor. Salvaging some fumes of compassion, I hugged him, wished him well, and he dipped, leaving behind a shaky but stubborn sense of resolution. 

 

Three months later, I receive horrible news from his baby-mama again: after miraculously regaining joint custody of their son, it had been the editor’s weekend with the boy. When it was time for her to pick him up, she began to worry when he wouldn’t answer the phone. Concern tightened when she rang the door for hours — no one answered. She called the police, they break down the door, and the young boy is found alive with multiple incisions all over his body from a steak knife — wounds most notable from the boy’s bleeding mouth, where the editor had been performing rogue dentistry, convinced he would extract miniature hidden cameras that were surely implanted into his jawline by the police. 

 

Old habits die hard, but there’s a place in Hell for those who force the young into their struggle. I didn’t need to hear any further to know he was on meth, as I know from first-hand experience the whole “hidden cameras in the human body” bit is a mysterious shared hallucination among users. The editor ended up going to prison for child abuse, and while I wholeheartedly believe in rehabilitation, I selfishly pray for my own sanity he’s still in there. The good news is the young boy is happy, healthy, and has a fantastic, strong mother leading his way. 

 

 

“Wow, get this…” I hear William exclaim. “I just read Evelyn Winter’s bio on her piece we’re running — all it says is: You’ll never find Evelyn Winters.”

 

So, Evelyn Winters, Tom Bucker, whoever/wherever the fuck you really are — let it be known: we harbor no delusions of phantom hidden cameras in our anatomy, nor have we installed any real state-of-the-art exterior ones at The Last Estate here (bullets are faster than video, you know…), but please, be mindful of the potential temperaments of those you attempt to pull the wool over — some of us have been through enough deception, blinded enough to stumble clumsily with loaded guns, unsure of our breaking point until… well, it’s like I always say: 

 

“Sometimes, you never really know someone until it’s too late.”

 

 

Postscript: For further proof of the simulation unraveling — when I searched for Evelyn Winters’ piece in Bear Creek Gazette to hyperlink the mention earlier, the first thing that came up was what I can only perceive as another Evelyn Winters, and her erotic romance novel Guardians of Bear Creek. You can’t, as they say, make this shit up. I’m beginning to feel Stuart’s Bear Creek concept is becoming its own magnetic Mandela-effect Area X, pulling us in, spitting us back out into altered time/form.

Editors note: If they are reading this, we’d like to invite Evelyn Winters and/or Tom Buckner to write us — we want to hear your story. Drop us a line (or a noose) at first@last.estate.