… when I switch my writing practice out of my moleskine and into the spartan green-and-black landscape that is WriteRoom.
—
He stood in the space between two doors. Two minutes remained. Mounted on one wall was the twisted effigy of some stitched demon. Pushed up against the other wall was an old dead stove. Scrapemarks were on the floor before it, from when it had been roughly pushed there.
Max pulled a bright orange capsule from his pocket and threw it roughly in his mouth, snapping it with his molars. Just caffeine, this one. It was all he had left. A snarl grew unevenly in his throat.
He sprinted into the building, the floors warping strangely as he turned. Shades of fleeing people sputtered to life around him, wailing and then dissolving again. He pushed himself off walls as he took sharp corners, trading his momentum for more time. One minute and thirty seconds remained.
Before him was an open space from some other dream. The air was partitioned by slats of blue, venetian blinds fashioned from dust motes and tricks of the light. More of the wailing shades. A blur of stairs, a solid thing. A man.
After seven years, here was Dreyfus. The pursuit had been so long that it was inseparable from the man. A manifestation of over 2500 hundred days, subtract a minute and twenty-two seconds.
“It’s too late, you know,” Dreyfus said wryly. “But here I am.”
Max killed him, then. Had he the time, he would have bowed to convention and played out the drama, would have indulged in the escalation of words and feelings into posturing and, finally, action.
But this was now. And Dreyfus hadn’t a reason to defend himself, really.
Max searched through stiff pockets that rested on stiff flesh. He withdrew the first edged thing that he touched. His need was sufficient that anything he found would be enough. He spun and ran and the thing grew into an angry turquoise djinn in his hands. It was a roar in every dimension: Its distorted mouth screamed, its eyes shrieked violently, the flames of its flesh howled as they consumed the air. The slats broke, the motes were no more.
Back now, through the hallways again, but different this time. Darker, less defined, fewer turns to navigate. Ahead, now, the doors once more. Glass, all of them, but the outermost ones could not be shattered and could not be pushed open.
The stitched demon was alive. It was Max’s task to make it otherwise. He hurled himself at it, stabbing with the djinn, working with calm intent. The demon swung negligently at him. It was not overly concerned with its own survival. Forty-eight seconds remained.
As the periphery faded and Max worked at the demon, his thoughts proceeded with absent whimsy, failing to settle long enough on any particular concept that could be assigned a name. Time passed quickly. And then, it ran out.
The demon still lived. Max lowered his arms. He turned. The stove was gone.
He walked out of the doors, and some of the shades followed. The ones that appeared did not re-disappear. Things moved forward.
A feeling of insubstance, and then white blossomed. The blot washed all contrast away.