by Z. M. Wilmot
***
The play had been marvelous and the food wonderful, but Emilio had scarcely noticed. The fire of creativity blazed brilliantly in his mind, and it was all he could do to keep track of what was going on in front of him. He and Greta had returned to his apartment following their evening out and had bid each other fond farewells, complete with much embracing and promises of seeing each other again on the morrow. A small voice in the back of Emilio’s head, which grew louder as they approached his flat, told the author that his story was more important than Greta was, and that he should cancel all of his plans, but he quelled the voice uneasily and made plans for the next night anyway.
The instant Greta was gone, Emilio turned his light back on and bent over his typewriter, his hat and coat still on. He reread the last lines he had written.
As he wandered to his mother’s grave and laid a flower upon it, a noise sounded from behind Emile. He snarled and whirled around, a bestial gleam entering his eye, and began to stalk amongst the gravestones. His ears pricked up as he heard heavy breathing and a rapidly-beating heart nearby. He paused before one of the large mausoleums, and silently padded around its edge. Without even breaking stride, he leapt around the corner, his hand slashing outwards, ripping the throat out of a terrified young girl crouching there. She fell before she could scream, and Emile knelt down next to her twitching body and buried his teeth in her throat, his hand running up and down her slender body. He could feel the excitement stirring within him…
But no! What was he doing? The young author came back to himself and stood slowly. His eyes widened as he saw what he had done. He cried out and howled pitifully as he fell back down to the ground, the beast having gone from his mind, replaced by a terrible remorse. No… it can’t have been him who did it! It was all just a dream! Wasn’t it?
And yet when he opened his eyes, the corpse was still there, and Emile knew that what had occurred had been all too real. He slowly gathered himself back together and resolved to bring the body back to his home, hiding it there. “Yes. Then I can make amends! Somehow…”
He wasted no time then in dragging the corpse from the graveyard and back to his home, making great use of the dark alleys on that moonless night. Following his depositing the body upon his bed, he went back with water and towel and cleaned up the trail of blood as best he could, before furtively locking the door to his flat.
What had come over him? Would it happen again?
The author paused, suddenly feeling nervous. Did I write those last two paragraphs? They don’t sound familiar…
But they were good paragraphs. “It must have been me,” he reasoned. “No one else could have gotten into the flat. Plus, this would be a pretty stupid prank.”
And so he did not let himself be overly troubled, and launched again into his composition, losing himself in the Words. What do you think would happen if the beast that originally inhabited the printshop returned?
Emilio thought. “Well, my dear muse, doubtlessly it would take revenge on the place that had imprisoned it. It would return just as the shop was closing, when it was dark out, and sap the essences of everyone still there.”
If the beast has so much power, then why has it not sucked out Emile’s essence yet?
“He’s an author. We are strong-willed.” Emilio smiled. “We do not succumb easily to the leaching of our essences.”
Interesting.
Emilio looked at the typewriter and blinked. It had felt like five minutes had passed, and yet three pages had come out of the typewriter, covered in words. As Emilio read them, they seemed vaguely familiar to him, but yet he was sure they were not his words.
What does it matter? His muse said. My Words are your words; all Words are the same. And it is your idea behind it all, your imagination laying the seeds for the world to grow. The Words are merely vessels through which the seeds can become all they can be.
“Yes… of course,” Emilio said, still reading the pages. They were a very good three pages, he had to admit. It detailed the beast of the print shop returning to its home and slaying the shopkeeper and his final two customers as twilight fell.
And so the shadows fell across the print shop , and one by one the gaslights all went out as the beast stalked by them. It was the final customer who noticed first the chill in the air, who turned around and for a terrible instant caught sight of the beast, its eyes glowing malevolently in the shadows, before an appendage snaked out of the darkness and dragged her away. As her essence flowed into the maw of the beast, it felt its power grow, and moved again in a final attack as the last gaslight went dark.
The beast in Emilio’s tale was becoming too powerful to remain unnoticed, and the author saw that soon his tale must end soon, with either the death of the beast or the death of the author. But which ending would be better?
Suddenly realizing how weary he was, Emilio decided that he would sleep on it and decide in the morning what to do. He stood and stretched, stepping over his landlord’s notice, and collapsed into a fitful sleep, still fully clothed, upon his unmade bed.