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Click, click, click…

My fingers flew over my favorite typewriter keyboard. The keys made a satisfying clinging noise. The words unfurled in my mind like spider silk, sticky and delicate: “He returned with a scalpel, whistling the tune no one else could hear.” I loved to listen to my fingers fly over the keys while finding all the right words that magically formed on the monitor in front of me. This is my favorite part of being a writer. When the words are flowing out of me almost quicker than my mind can think.

I smile. “Yes, yes, yes, I still got it.”

The retreat house groaned around me, all cracked beams and creaky wood. Wind clawed at the shutters. I loved hearing the wind chime outside my window. Upstairs, the other “guests” slept, medicated into a collective stupor. Down here in my dim room, I lived where I belonged: the margins between sleep and madness.

They called this place Blackthorn Manor, a writer’s retreat for the mentally weary. But I had pieced the truth together early. This wasn’t a retreat. It was a sanitarium disguised in cursive brochures and therapeutic schedules.

And what else did I know? They were going to use me as an advertisement. Even the famous Liz Powell, a famous horror author, came to stay with us for a while…

Oh, of course, it wouldn’t be in the commercials on television or radio. That would go against privacy laws and all that, but I wouldn’t doubt that the director of this loony bin doesn’t mention it now and then when it suits her. That Doctor Halleck. She wants to “heal me”. I wish they would just leave me be.

I mean, sure, do I lose a bit of sleep sometimes when I get going…maybe. But that’s just part of being a creative. I’ve made a good living out of it. Then COVID happened a few months ago, and I took full advantage of it. I stocked up my kitchen and made sure that I had plenty of toiletries. I put all my concentration on my novel. I also put my phone on silent and stopped answering my door. My sister, Linda, finally had the police break into my home after not hearing from me for three months.

They found me in front of my computer next to a full ashtray, a case of Red Bull, and a full garbage can full of empty Lunch-able trays. I had lost a lot of weight, and I guess they found sores on the inside of my wrists from where I had sat and typed for days, with no end. Linda had me committed here that night.

Thankfully, my agent fought for them to still let me write at night as long as I agreed to behave and take my “medicine” when I’m asked, and I had to take part in group therapy and my special appointments with the famous Dr. Halleck. I received a small bookcase, a desk, and my laptop (though they disabled my internet access). Linda brings me one book a day from my library during visiting hours. If I act up, I lose my laptop for the night, and she doesn’t visit, which leaves me with no new book to read.

I have been here for about a week now. I have done everything that they have asked me to do, but there is one problem.

“Liz,” Dr. Halleck said the next morning, clipboard tight in hand, “your cortisol levels have normalized. The night tremors are gone. This new treatment is working.”

I glared at her syrupy optimism. “Then why can’t I write anymore?” I can’t live if I can’t write.

“That’s your brain healing. Once the noise dies down, you’ll hear yourself more clearly.”

“What if the noise was me?” I yelled. “What if I wasn’t meant to be quiet?”

Day Nine of sanity. My fingers hovered over the keys. Blank. Nothing happens, no ideas, no thoughts, just a big blank space between my ears.

The voice, my voice—gone. My prose, once torrential, had reduced to a clumsy trickle. I scrolled through my notes. Wooden. Colorless. I tried to read back through my writing from when I first got here. I even asked the nurse as nicely as I could to print it out, and I read each page over and over. But as soon as I got to the last word, there was a big void in my thoughts. Like I was reading someone else’s work.

I tossed a coffee mug at the wall, where it shattered. I could hear my agent’s voice scream in my memory: "Two weeks, Liz. We need a bestseller." I am a two-time New York Times darling. My stories spill from me like ectoplasm. Now I couldn’t even form a metaphor without it choking in my throat.

That night, I met Gavin.

He sat outside on the swing near the dead rosebushes, cigarette glowing. Thin, hollow-cheeked, dressed like an old English professor. His eyes caught the moonlight.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.

“Can’t write,” I replied.

“Maybe the problem isn’t your mind going quiet. Maybe it’s trying too hard to be sane.”

“Excuse me?”

“Madness,” he said, exhaling smoke, “isn’t the enemy. It’s the meds.”

I stared. “Are you a patient?”

“I’m a character,” he smiled. “I’m one of yours. You forgot me.”

“I don’t forget about my characters. You must be crazy.”

“Come on, Liz. The Violet Cathedral. Look it up.” He smiled at me. He swung his feet back and forth to make the swing go higher and faster. I lit a cigarette and tried to remember.

Linda came that afternoon, bringing me a new book, The Book of Doors, by Gareth Brown. I looked forward to reading it tonight. Especially since I won't be able to write. I look up at her and try to sound as nonchalant as I can.

“Hey Linda, could you do me a favor when you come to my next visit?”

Linda always reminded me of a Basset Hound. She had bags under her eyes and a long face. She also always looked miserable. Shoulder-length bob, styled with childlike bangs. Her plain brown hair reminded me it was time to bleach out mine.

“What do you need, Liz?”

“Could you be a doll and bring one of my journals instead of a book tomorrow? There’s a certain one that I need to help with my novel that I’m working on.”

“Liz, are you sure that you should be worried about the novel right now? You should be concentrating on getting better so that you can get out of here.” She looked at the other people around us. I know that this place scared her a bit.

“I know, hon, it is more just to stay busy and not go stir crazy in here. I only work for a couple of hours. Promise. Still gotta pay the bills, right?”

“Alright, where is it and what does it look like?” I told her and she promised to bring it the next day. I cupped my pills that night. Flushed them right before going to morning group therapy, and smiled through the nurses’ checks. My hands shook a little. Good. Now I just had to wait for Linda to come through.

She handed it over. It was everything I could do not to grab it and run back to my room. I pushed myself through our small talk, and she finally left. It was cold in my room. It was always cold. I have kept a journal my whole life. They all come in different shapes and sizes. When I’m in a store, I always walk through the section where they keep the notebooks, and I am always looking for ones that catch my eye. I have a closet full of empty notebooks just waiting to be used. Then I have a special bookcase in my office for my notebooks that I fill. I write everything in these books. Whatever I am working on stays with me. Grocery lists, random thoughts. Story ideas. I once saw a woman just standing in front of the checkout section of a grocery store. She was all checked out, all her grocery bags bagged up. She just stood there reading something on her phone as she ate grapes right out of the plastic container they came in. I wrote it down.

The one Linda brought me was the worst—that year, I nearly bled out in the bathtub. Of course, Linda found me again, and I got more time to spend in a hospital “retreat”. I did this right after finishing The Violet Cathedral. The best book I’ve ever written. But I had refused to publish it. Something about it made me want to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to share it with the world.

“Remember me now?” I heard Gavin whisper.

I did, and I knew what to do. I found some old white candles in a drawer in the kitchen with a box of matches. In the library, they had a copy of all my novels on the shelves. I silently took all these things and went into the basement. Each book had a candle placed on top, arranged in a circle. I sat in the middle with my laptop and the journal with The Violet Cathedral in it.

The séance began.

“Come back,” I whispered. “All of you. Vicar, Mina, Felix, Delilah. Speak to me.”

The flame bent sideways. A breeze hissed. Gavin stood outside the circle, clapping slowly.

“You still know the old rites.”

I laughed. I could feel my brain cracking. “They thought they could scrub me clean.”

I wrote like the devil was chasing me. I looked down and realized that my fingers were bleeding, and I just laughed and kept going. The story, The Man Who Wasn’t There, poured from me, a labyrinth of madness and betrayal. Gavin was the lead detective who realized he was the hallucination of the murderer he hunts.

“Too on the nose?” I asked him.

“Just sharp enough.”

Finishing the draft at dawn, I made sure to click to save, licked my fingers clean, and collapsed.

When I woke up, I found myself back in my bed. Someone had tucked my laptop into my bag. I pulled it out so that I could see the work that I had poured into it the night before. But it was gone. I was so upset that I mentioned it without thinking during my morning appointment.

“What manuscript?” Dr. Halleck asked, looking genuinely confused.

“It was on my laptop,” I snarled. “50,000 words!”

“Liz, you’ve been catatonic for two days. We found you muttering in the laundry chute.”

“Liar! Ask Gavin.”

“Who?”

“My character!”

He leaned closer. “Liz, there is no Gavin.”

They moved me to the white room. They confiscated my laptop and books. Silence grew teeth. I sang my story to myself in the dark. Every paragraph. Every scene. I did everything I could to hold on to it. Sometimes, I even scratched lines into the plaster with my nails. I wept when they bled, but it also meant that it was real.

Gavin came to see me. He sat beside me on the bed.

“They won’t let me finish,” I whispered. I knew I had to be careful. They would watch me and listen to me from that little camera in the room's corner.

“You already did, my love. You just need to remember.” He touched my forehead. “You wrote me into being, and now write yourself back.”

I began scratching faster. Lines across the wall. Under the bed. On the soles of my feet. I spoke each word aloud as I wrote it in secret blood-ink.

The guards dragged me away during the final chapter. I screamed it into the hall.

“The detective turned to ash, and in his place stood the author, broken, brilliant, and alone.”

Three weeks later, a nurse named Marla found the full manuscript etched beneath the bed. A stack of neatly double spaced typed pages.

The final line was: “To create, I had to die a little.”

She sent it to Liz’s agent anonymously.

It hit #1 in two weeks.

Liz never spoke again.

But at night, in the white room, she typed in the air on her invisible keyboard. And sometimes, the nurses swore, you could hear an old-fashioned keyboard sound.

Click, click, click…