The Ink of the Damned

They told me writing was a safe escape. They told me fiction was shelter, a place where I could spill my fears without consequence. They lied.

It began with small things. I wrote my first horror story, about a woman trapped in a house that breathed, that wanted her. I thought it was imagination, a harmless exercise. Days later, I recognised that breathing in my own home. The walls exhaled, and the floor sighed. I told myself it was faulty plumbing. But it wasn’t.

Then came the footsteps. Soft and deliberate. Always behind me. Never when I was awake, always in dreams.

My next story was darker. A girl who wrote her nightmares into reality. I laughed at the idea, until I found myself writing without remembering it. My words were not mine. They came in fits of fevered trance. My fingers felt like conduits, and my desk became an altar.

One morning, I woke with ink in my palm and a fresh story in front of me, a story I swore I hadn’t written. It described a burning house, and a victim trapped inside. The news later confirmed it. Every detail. Every word. I began to believe it wasn’t me writing. It was her.

And then she appeared. At first, in dreams. Later, in mirrors. She looks exactly like me, but her eyes are hollow, black wells, and her smile is too wide. She holds a pen. She is writing something.

Now I understand that my stories were not escapes. They were invitations. The veil has been shattered.

I have a new idea. A final story. Where the writer becomes the story. Where the page bleeds into reality. Where there is no difference between me and her.

I will finish it. Because she’s already here. And she is me.

I write the last line. My pen scratches, bleeding black ink across the page. The words twist, rearrange themselves. I read them aloud.

They are my confession. My surrender. My end.

And then I vanish.

The pen still moves.

And she begins to write.