Writers’ Block
It’s late and the writer wants to stop working…
The cursor blinked.
That was all it did. That thin, pulsing vertical line on the otherwise blank white screen. Taking the piss out of him with 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 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, winced, and set the mug 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.
—Come on, he whispered. — Come on.
Nothing. The well wasn’t only dry. It had been filled in, concreted over, and had a bloody takeaway built on top of it.
He’d finished novels before. None had gone anywhere. This new idea had seemed different, but here he was again, staring at a screen at three in the morning while the mortgage waited for a better ending.
He was going to quit. Not for the night. For good. 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.
He never reached it.
His hands snapped back to the keyboard with a force that sent pain up both forearms. As if someone had seized his wrists and slammed them onto the desk. The impact rattled the mug, sending cold coffee spilling across the notebooks.
—What the —
He tried to pull away.
His arms wouldn’t move.
Something held his wrists from behind. Cold pressure, wet against his skin. It felt like fingers, but there were too many of them.
Then the first jab came.
Something sharp punched into the back of his right hand, between the second and third knuckles, with a wet, meaty pop.
He screamed.
A pale splinter protruded from his flesh. Blood welled around its jagged edges.
His fingers began to type.
He wasn’t doing it. His hands hammered the keys with a speed and precision he’d never had.
A sentence appeared on the screen.
He sat in the dark and the thing behind him breathed.
Something exhaled against his neck.
—Stop, he hissed.
He wrenched his left hand upward. For a moment it came free, his fingers hooked above the keyboard.
The shard struck his palm.
He saw it clearly this time in the blue-white light: a yellowed sliver of bone. It drove into the soft meat below his fingers. Blood spattered the spacebar.
His hand slammed down.
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The typing resumed.
He tried to stop, but the thing would not let him.
The stench rolled over his shoulders. Old blood. Wet earth. Meat left too long in the sun.
Something pressed against the back of his chair. He felt its weight shift as it leaned over him. Its breath touched his neck again.
Baltic. The kind of cold that burned.
He tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t work. He opened his mouth to scream, but his throat closed as if a fist had tightened around his windpipe from the inside.
His fingers slowed.
The shard struck his right wrist.
He jerked against the pressure. It struck again, splitting the webbing between his thumb and forefinger.
His hands sped up.
Blood seeped between the keys. His fingers slipped, caught, hammered down again. A fingernail snagged beneath a key and tore away.
He couldn’t even pull the hand back.
The screen filled. Paragraph after paragraph scrolled upward. Through his tears, he caught pieces of what he was writing.
A man at a desk.
A shard of bone.
A fingernail lying beside the keyboard.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
The keys kept rattling.
When he opened them, another sentence was waiting.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
The typing stopped.
His hands lay ruined on the keyboard. Shaking, dripping.
The silence rushed back in.
The pressure on his wrists eased. He lifted one hand a fraction. Nothing forced it down.
He waited.
The cold withdrew from his neck.
For one stupid moment, he thought it was over.
Then the bone shard touched the soft flesh beneath his jaw.
Almost gentle-like.
He stopped breathing.
The point pressed harder.
Slowly, he lowered his hand to the keyboard. Spread his fingers across the slippery keys.
The screen scrolled to a fresh, white page.
The cursor blinked.
The thing behind him leaned close, and in a voice like wet gravel, it whispered:
—Chapter two.
