CHARPER 5:
Days blurred.
Elias no longer tried to leave. The car would not start—battery dead though it had been fine the week before. Phone signal vanished entirely. The landline had been disconnected years ago.
He wrote.
Story after story poured out. A Victorian medium who trapped spirits in bottles. A World War II evacuee who discovered a door in the moor that led to the trenches. A 1970s teenager who used the ink for a school project and summoned something that wore her mother's face.
Each tale ended the same way: the teller consumed, the ink moving on.
He learned the rhythm. The pen would rest after a story, sometimes for hours, sometimes days. Then it would begin again.
He tried burning pages. The paper refused to catch. Flames slid off it like water.
He tried spilling the ink. It soaked into the desk and vanished, only to reappear in the well, level unchanged.
He tried writing his own story—something light, something harmless. The pen resisted, scratching deeper, until blood spotted the page from the pressure on his fingers. When he lifted the nib, the words he had forced were gone, replaced by a single line:
Do not mock us.
One night he woke to find himself at the desk, sleeves rolled up, arms scratched and bleeding. A half-finished story lay before him—about a man named Elias Crowe who inherited a cursed inkwell.
He had written the opening in his sleep.
He tore the page out. The paper cut his thumb deeply. Blood welled, dripped onto the journal.
The blood soaked in instantly. The wound stopped bleeding.
The story continued without him.