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Triplets gifts me an idea for this year’s NaNoWriMo:
…
Erasmus Blake, impoverished model turned writer, stirred uneasily in a half-sleep. He’d been drinking too much coffee again and now he never really slept, just dozed fitfully. He’d been spending more and more time on his great work; spurred on by caffeine his fingers twitched over the keys long into the night, lit only by the sickly glow from the recently bought laptop he’d acquired for just this purpose. Eventually the thought of all those unwritten words invaded what sleep he had, and it was almost with relief when each morning he would return to his familiar place in front of the almost welcoming screen. Ironic that a tool designed for its mobility held him so completely in its thrall.
At times he found something awful in the blankness of the white page. His fingers conjured a stream of words that each night briefly fought the empty space before inevitably exhaustion overtook him once again. Sometimes he thought that the struggle carried on in his dreams, that the dark machine was not just a passive vessel for his creation but was somehow hungry for his words, that it maintained some compulsion over him, an ever increasing demand for sustenance, a deep need he was frightened of one day not meeting.
Last night’s girl was already up and moving around the bedroom, hastily pulling on clothes. She needed to get to her work as a dental assistant before nine, but a journalist who was a sort-of-a-friend (not half as good as the other way around) had said she would get in touch about possibly meeting over lunch for a piece on young professional girls moonlighting in far less reputable escort work.
“Mind if I check my e-mail?” she asked.
Blake mumbled something intelligible into the pillow as she quickly opened his laptop and powered it up. For a few minutes there was a silence punctuated by the soft opening beeps of the machine and the sound of hurried keystrokes when a sharp yelp roused Blake from his slumbers:
“Wharrissit?”
She turned to look at him, sucking on two of her long, delicate fingers as if they’d been scalded, but she simply shook her head and turned back to the unmoving, innocuous looking machine, eyeing the coffee encrusted keys of its interface distrustfully.
“What is it?” he asked insistently, sitting up, annoyed at the interruption to one of his rare moments of rest.
This time she didn’t turn. “It’s nothing. It’s just… it’s nothing. For a second I thought that the keys bit me, but…”. She paused, the absurdity of the statement overwhelming her initial instincts, her rationality overruling the sensation of nippin still in recent memory and the single drop of blood whose red splash now joined the coffee stains marking the keyboard, “… that’s just silly isn’t it? I mean, it must have been something else. I’ve not woken up yet. Don’t worry - I’ll just quickly finish this letter and then I’ll go.”
Blake grunted his acquiescence and pulled the dark, dark sheets over his head, a black tidal wave that broke over his temporary waking and pulled him down into unconsciousness. For once he did not dream of the machine. And if afterwards he remembered long, drawn out moans of pain and despair, he thought of them only as the mournful cries of wind along a deserted beach, and the feeding-like slurping and sucking noises as only the sound of the restless tide coming in and out, in and out, of some forgotten oneiric inlet.
When he finally awoke the girl was gone. |
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