Who Is Peter Fury, And Why Are Kids Dying To Find Out?

We know Peter Fury only through his CYBER SCREAMS. Oh, we’ve heard the stories, which have been swirling like Halloween leaves since the Cyber Screaming started, but separating fact from fiction has been difficult in all the din. We are in the middle of it only because our parent company, Van Ness Development Corp, owns the old Salem Evening News site at the corner of Washington and New Derby streets in the Witch City of Salem, Massachusetts which is the center of the storm. Evidently it is built on filled land over the site of the ancient wharves that marked the commercial center of the old city. Bill, a Van Ness project manager, uncovered a fragment of a stone tablet during excavation to remove an oil storage tank. He thought little of it. It was broken up with other rocks and cast in centuries before as fill. There were markings on other rocks as well, none of it in English, and none of it seeming to signify much. A building owner knows not to raise archeological questions that can grind his development to a halt and so the stone was thrown out along with the storage tank and debris.

Several years passed before Bill, in the lunch room, told us about the graffiti that had popped up in his abandoned Salem building: The Seven Tablets Tell The Tale. He found it curious that the graffiti was inside the building, instead of outside where he was accustomed to fighting battles with local spray paint artists. And this writing was in painstaking calligraphy, painted in oil. He spray painted it black, but the oil bled through: The Seven Tablets Tell The Tale. He left it in place, having no spray paint with him on this visit, and was encouraged that since then no new art work had joined it.

It wasn’t long before Bill had new stories for us. I live in Salem and so was used to the ghost stories swirling about the mysterious Salem Evening News site. I figured Bill had joined the para-normal crowd, but this time he had something to show me – the first few pages of a story he claimed to have found on a shelf in the abandoned darkroom. He swore it hadn’t been there before, and the paper did look crisp, the ink fresh. It was handwritten, in painstakingly perfect lettering that could not have been Bill’s doing to judge by what I’ve seen of his hand. I expected to get some background on The Seven Tablets, but instead read the first few pages that make up the initial chapter of CYBER SCREAMS – NUMCHUK’S CURSE. I wanted more, and so tried to contact the Salem Evening News to see if there might have been a writer or editor who had left the pages there when they had moved in 2001. But the paper had been sold. The trail went cold.

I chase down wild leads and crazy ideas for a living. I thought no more about this one until Bill showed up with new pages a few months later. His story was it had mysteriously appeared on the same shelf in the darkroom on his latest visit to the site. I guessed he had taken up writing on the side and wanted an anonymous critique, so I determined to go easy on him. But no offense to Bill, the writing was too good. This was no work of a project manager. Desperate for more I decided to play along and so had Bill leave a note in my hand explaining I was a publisher eager to see more of this work. And more we got, at irregular intervals since Bill’s trips to the building were sporadic. But it didn’t take long before I knew what I had. I left my number, desperate for this author to call me. But while new chapters appeared, no call came. I needed more to go on, and thought myself clever in setting up a spy camera in the darkroom, thinking to unmask this ghost writer. But all we got on tape were ghosts in Puritan garb. (This is Salem. My immediate thought was to go through the list of who I had told about the camera who might be determined enough to stage a production to make me look foolish). The ghost show is quite good and can be seen at (www.whatever.com). No one has confessed, even by a snicker when I bring it up. Some even believe the ghosts real, though that is no my affair. I am a chaser of manuscripts, and with the camera in place, my chapters stopped coming. Or so I thought, until some months later Bill, while following up with the Fire Department on the storage tank removal of several years back, discovered new chapters in the basement, far from the camera’s prying eyes. As you know if you’ve read CYBER SCREAMS, the story takes off. We loved it! I determined to publish at all costs. But how do you publish a ghost? We drafted a contract leaving the name and author’s advance blank, removed the camera from the darkroom, and waited. All speculation about an actual ghost writer vanished when the contract was filled in with a one hundred thousand dollar author advance, with a note in bold in the margin: IN CASH. The handwriting matched the manuscript. This was our man. But $100,000.00 is a big pill to swallow for a small publisher wooing an unknown author. I had to sell the owner, who likes real estate more than books. Intrigued, he asked how I proposed to pay this ghost? To verify a signature on the contract? So I left another note, with a plan. Get me a photo copy of an I.D., sign the contract, and I would pay $10,000.00 for the chapters to date, with equal installments to follow as he delivered future chapters. I got my signature, with instructions to wait at (place of public phone) for a phone call. The money was delivered like ransom. A bag of cash. The phone call. A drop.

We got the remaining chapters and then some. We’ve been treated to advance chapters of the sequel, which take the story in the direction of Seven Tablets, which got us to wondering about the Puritans we caught on tape. This is a strange story, in a City known for strange stories. We like being caught in the middle of it. We think.