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The words came of their own volition, spilling onto the page like blood from a wound, plopping like crimson drops of letters and words.. Words, then sentences, paragraphs, then pages. It seemed it would never stop, never be abated, but deep down, David wasn’t sure he wanted it to stop. He wanted to let the words bleed him away, leaving a gory volume as his only epitaph. There was little reason to stay their flow. That seemed to only serve to increase the speed at which they came. The only cure was purgation. He stopped sleeping. Then, he stopped going to work. The words were coming too quickly. He couldn't wait the entire day without writing. His supervisor had found him huddled in the copier room, scrawling words on the copies he was making. Soon, he had written over three hundred pages of prose. David wasn't even sure what it was he was writing. His subconscious mind had taken over. It was like a computer, purging the hard-drive of all unnecessary information, one line of code at a time.
His friends would call, leaving messages he never checked. Even Sarah, the girl he liked from the office, but never had a chance with, came to check on him, but he didn’t open the door. He didn’t want to see anyone; didn’t want anyone to see him. He felt like a monster, like Grendel, hidden in his cave beneath the water, consumed by the world, cursing the world of men..
Some part of him didn't want to know what he was writing. Anything that came from an unknown part of his mind, subjugating him to its whim, was not something he had any desire to understand. Perhaps, once it was finished, his life would be better somehow. Maybe it was similar to an infection, his mind swelling and pushing the words out like literary puss.
David sat at his desk, exhausted and perspiring. He'd finished 100 pages in less than an hour. His fingers ached and tried to cramp if he relaxed them too much. Sitting in his chair, his body felt as if he'd been running a marathon. This wasn't purging. It wasn't getting any better, but progressively worse. He felt run down, and everything was painful. Something was horribly wrong. He looked cautiously at the growing pile of manuscript that has supplanted his normal existence, made him a slave to the writing. David knew what he had to do. He had to read it, read it before it consumed him completely, devouring him with its gaping black maw.
He grabbed the manuscript and went to the sofa. With trepidation he lifted the cover sheet from the monumental lexicon. Slowly, he made his way through page after page, soaking in the words like thirsty soil in a downpour. The hours slipped by, morning giving way to noon, surrendering to the night. Finally, he laid the last page, face down on the rest of the pile, and walked out into the night, his mind swallowed by the words written upon the pages, screaming at the darkness.
It was weeks before anyone finally decided to pry open his apartment door. The landlord had called the police because he had not received David’s rent for nearly three months. Upon entering, the first policeman swore under his breath, aghast at the state of the apartment. It smelled of excrement and body odor, the floors covered in detritus and roaches. Every wall of the apartment was covered with tightly scrawled words, reaching from floor to ceiling. The apartment was empty. On the desk next to a laptop, they found a manuscript. On the cover it said, “The Life of David.” The missing persons detective, who wrote a report about the manuscript before being committed to the Weston State Hospital, claimed it was cursed. He said when he finished, he saw David, dark and his shape corrupted. If you asked him now, he would say he sees him still, he visits him in the night, howling with madness; he screams truths the detective doesn’t want to hear.
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Suffer the little children...
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