The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Anti-Muse
K.R. Morrison

She’d found the old typewriter at a dingy antique store in a more questionable part of the French Quarter. The proprietor had let it go for a song. It was one of her prized possessions.

Now she was pounding away at the keyboard, finishing up what she thought would be the Steamy Romance of the Century. No computer for her—she preferred the labor of hitting the keys of her old Royal. Fast enough to keep up with her mind, but not so fast that the keys would stick across the typewriter ribbon. That took finesse.

She was nearing the finish line. After “He ran to her outstretched arms,” however, she had to screech to a stop.

No maudlin, everyday finish would suffice. She got up and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea as she thought about what kind of fantastic finish she would give her best-seller.

Upon her return to her desk, she sat down and flexed her fingers, ready to begin again. A perfect ending had occurred to her somewhere between the teakettle and the hallway, and she was eager to get it down on paper before it could take flight.

To her dismay, however, she saw that the keys had somehow gotten tangled up in the ribbon. She was perplexed; surely, she had not whacked the keys as she had gotten up for her refreshment?

As she gently untangled them, a line of type caught her eye. It was not one she had written:

“And he bashed her head in.”

Her heart leaped into her throat. Who had written this? She looked around the room in alarm.

The doors were locked, the windows were not open. If there was someone here causing mischief, where were they?

“Hmmm,” she thought to herself, “maybe I was just not paying attention, and the anti-Muse kicked in. The one that doesn’t want me to finish this.”

She opened her desk drawer and searched for the typewriter eraser she just knew was in there somewhere. As she bent her head to the task, she suddenly heard something that froze her where she sat.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptap.

She looked up, and could only stare as the keys pounded out a line, slowly and deliberately, on their own. No hand to the board, no presence behind her.

The line read: “Her head came down on the keyboard…,” then the keys stopped their sinister clacking.

A smash against the back of her head, and darkness eternal.

They keys tapped out one more line.

“And then she died. The End.”

Fiction © Copyright K.R. Morrison
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.