A psychological short story by the author of ‘Depravity’, ‘The dream’, ‘Meltdown’, ‘The machine’ and ‘(Un)happy Christmas’. Ross Stubbard is a failed, angry, and depressed writer who struggles to find inspiration for his next book. One night a strange apparition stands by his bedside – an apparition that embodies Ross’s ghostly alter ego. The apparition urges Ross to write a short story. At first, working with the apparition helps Ross to rediscover his lost writing skills, get him out of his writer’s block, and to develop a gripping story. But then what his alter ego suggests takes on a much darker hue and urges Ross to write a tale of darkness and despair based on himself and his own failed life. The apparition unlocks a Pandora’s box of Ross’s suppressed emotions and memories where accounts of his deep depression intermix with his fear of alcoholism, where the abuse he has metered out on his wife and kids bleeds into narratives about his darkest suicidal thoughts, and where memories of wanting to hurt people and his readers, who have so selfishly abandoned him, intertwine with his darkest visions of extreme violence and murder. Too late, Ross realises that his alter ego has become his puppet master, guiding him down a path of self-destruction. The apparition has made him slip further into the abyss, forcing him to lose his grip on reality, urging him to re-enact the horrors he has written, to make the story a reality. The failed, angry, and depressed author, has himself become the embodiment of the darkness he has conjured up in his own, final, story. He, who has sought solace in the cold embrace of his alter ego’s story writing, has unwittingly become the protagonist of his own macabre masterpiece, a story of a man consumed by his own demons, and a cautionary tale of the perilous path that lies at the intersection of creativity and madness.
