Writers' Block

The cursor blinked.

That was all it did. That thin, pulsing vertical line on the otherwise blank white screen. It ticked away like a digital heartbeat. Taking the piss out of him every flash. On. Off. On. Off. Like a countdown.

2:47 a.m.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and groaned. The sound came out raw, scraped from a throat that hadn’t spoken aloud in hours. The house was silent. Apart from the hum of the fridge in the kitchen. Outside, somewhere on the estate, a dog barked once and then went quiet.

The mug of coffee beside his keyboard had gone cold an hour ago. A skin had formed on its surface, dark and wrinkled like something you’d peel off a burn. He drank it anyway. Wincing as the bitter sludge hit the back of his throat. And set the mug down on a stack of half-empty notebooks.

Three hundred and twelve words. That was all he’d managed since nine o’clock. Three hundred and twelve words of absolute shite. He highlighted the lot and hit delete. The screen went white again. The cursor resumed its blinking.

—Come on, he whispered. —Come on.

Nothing. The well wasn’t only dry. It got filled in, concreted over, and had a bloody takeaway built on top of it. He needed to get the novel written. The only way to make it as a novelist was to write books. He knew that. He’d written full manuscripts before. They all failed. Now, the new idea seemed good. But the fucking thing wouldn’t come.

He needed to earn money. To pay the mortgage, to feel like all the effort was worth it. But now he wondered about his lifestyle choices. The ones that left him staring at a screen at three in the morning pondering where it all went wrong.

He was going to quit. Not for the night. For good. Pack it in. Stick to the day job. Something that didn’t involve sitting alone in the dark. Trying to squeeze nightmares out of a brain that had packed up and buggered off.

—Fuck it, he said, and reached for the laptop’s lid.

His hands didn’t close.

They snapped back to the keyboard with a force that sent a jolt of pain up both forearms. As if someone had seized his wrists and slammed them down onto the desk. His fingers spread across the keys. The impact rattled the mug. sending brown droplets of cold coffee trickling across the notebooks.

—What the—

He tried to pull away. His arms wouldn’t move. Something was holding him. Not gripping, exactly. More like a pressure, immense and cold, wrapped around his wrists from behind. It felt wet. It felt like fingers. But there were too many of them and they were pressing into his skin with a strength that made his bones creak.

Then the first jab came.

Something lethal. Something sharp drove into the back of his right hand. Punching through the skin between his second and third knuckle with a wet, meaty pop. The writer screamed.

The pain was immediate and total. A white-hot spike that shot up to his elbow and down into his fingers. He looked down and saw a thin line of blood welling up around something embedded in his flesh. Something pale and jagged, like a splinter of old bone.

His fingers began to type.

He wasn’t doing it. He couldn’t do it. His hands were moving on their own. Hammering the keys with a speed and precision he’d never had. The words that appeared on the screen were not his words.

He sat in the dark and the thing behind him breathed.

—Stop, the writer hissed.

He wrenched his left hand upward, fighting the pressure, muscles straining—

The jab came again. Harder this time. A bone shard. He could see it now in the blue-white glow of the screen. A yellowed sliver of something that had once been inside a living body. It punched into the soft meat of his left palm. Blood spattered the spacebar. The pain was huge, a grinding, tearing agony that made his vision blur and his stomach lurch.

His hand slammed back down. The typing resumed.

He tried to stop but the thing would not let him stop because finishing the story was all that mattered. But the story was not his to end.

The stench hit him then. A wave of rot, thick and physical, rolling over his shoulders like a fog. Old blood. Wet earth. Something sweet and spoiled, like meat left too long in the sun. He could feel the entity behind him now. A mass of cold and weight pressing against the back of his chair, leaning over him. Its breath touched the nape of his neck and it was baltic. The kind of cold that burned.

He tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t work. He tried to scream again and but throat sealed shut. Then his muscles locked as if someone had wrapped a fist around his windpipe from the inside.

The jabs came faster now. Every time his fingers slowed. Every time he tried to stop the thing controlling his hands, the bone shard struck. The back of his left hand. His right wrist. The webbing between his thumb and forefinger, splitting the skin open in a ragged gush. Blood pooled in the keyboard, seeping between the keys, making them slick and sticky. His fingernails cracked against the plastic. One of them tore clean off and he felt the raw, screaming nerve beneath it like a live wire.

The screen filled with text. Paragraph after paragraph, scrolling upward. The writer could read enough of it through his tears of pain to understand what was happening. The story was about a man at a desk. A man getting forced to write. A man whose blood was feeding the words, whose pain was the ink.

And the story was almost finished.

He understood now that the writing was the door and the door was open and what had come through would never go back.

The typing stopped.

The writer’s hands lay ruined on the keyboard. Shaking, dripping. The silence rushed back in, enormous and suffocating. The pressure on his wrists eased. The cold receded, only a small bit, but it did recede.

For one stupid moment, he thought it was over.

Then he felt the bone shard press again. Almost gentle-like. Against the soft flesh beneath his jaw. And the cursor blinked on, The screen scrolled down to a fresh, white page.

The thing behind him leaned in close, and in a voice like wet gravel, it whispered:

—Chapter two.