What do you listen to while you work?

In the ominous glow of a flickering candle, I huddled over my weathered desk, the scratching of my pen on the parchment echoing through the crooked cottage. Outside, a relentless tempest raged, raindrops pounding against the windowpanes like restless spirits seeking entry. Each flash of lightning briefly illuminated the room, casting eerie shadows that danced with the howling wind.

My heart raced with a mix of excitement and dread as I feverishly toiled away on my magnum opus. The words flowed from my quill, the ink staining the pages like dark secrets etched into the fabric of my soul. The trinkets of old that adorned the cottage seemed to come alive in the dim light, their eyes seemingly following my every move, as if urging me to weave a tale beyond the boundaries of reason.

As the night wore on, the stool beneath me creaked with every shift of my restless body, amplifying the tension in the air. The persistent rain drummed a haunting rhythm on the roof, harmonizing with the storm’s fierce symphony outside. I could almost feel the cottage itself pulsating with an otherworldly energy, as if it too were a character in my chilling tale.

But as my story took shape, the line between reality and fiction began to blur. The cottage door jingled with each gust of wind, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something lurked just beyond the threshold, eager to cross the boundary into my world.

Driven by an irresistible force, I wrote faster, the urgency in my words matching the intensity of the raging storm. Lightning flashes illuminated the pages before me, revealing glimpses of the horror I was conjuring. I could no longer tell if the sounds that echoed through the cottage were from the outside world or manifestations of my imagination.

Yet, I pressed on, unable to resist the compulsion to finish my masterpiece. The rain intensified, and the cottage seemed to groan with the weight of the night’s mysteries. With each sentence, I felt the presence of an unseen audience, as if the trinkets and the cottage itself were spectators, witnessing the unfolding horror I had unleashed.

As the final words spilled onto the page, a deafening thunderclap shook the cottage to its core. The door swung open, unleashing a rush of wind and rain that scattered my papers and extinguished the candle. In the darkness, I glimpsed a shadowy figure standing at the threshold, its eyes gleaming with malevolence.

Terrified and unsure if I had written this entity into existence or if it had been lurking there all along, I froze in my seat. The storm outside seemed to intensify, as if nature itself recoiled from the ominous presence now within the cottage.

With trembling hands, I reached for the quill once more, desperate to find a way to undo what I had wrought. But as I poised the pen over the parchment, the trinkets began to move, swirling around the room in an unnatural dance. The figure at the door drew nearer, and I realized with horror that I was trapped in my own creation, a character within the very story I had penned.

In that moment, I understood the true horror of my magnum opus – I had become entwined in a nightmarish tale from which there was no escape. The storm outside mirrored the turmoil within me, and as I gazed into the abyss of my own creation, I knew that my fate was sealed, lost forever in the horrors of the crooked cottage.

©️ Arwen-Wynter Oakley 2023