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The Keys to Madness 
by Kathleen McCluskey 

The typewriter sat heavy on the shelf, its brass keys tarnished with age, yet gleaming as if they held secrets. The writer, Aiden Thorne, couldn’t remember where he had found it. Perhaps it was at an old estate sale or buried under forgotten relics in a shop. It called to him. Its metal clinking like the whispers of ghosts. The way the words called to Edgar Allan Poe.

Aiden was a writer on the brink, desperate for inspiration, anything to drag him from his creative purgatory. The stories had stopped coming weeks ago. Now he was a hollow shell of frustration and sleepless nights. But that morning, when he’d spotted the typewriter in the dim light of his cluttered study, something in its ancient allure begged to be used. He hesitated as he approached it, his fingers twitching. The room seemed to hum, faintly, as though the air vibrated with anticipation. His hand hovered above the keys.

Click.

The typewriter began to type without him. The keys clattered, hammering the paper in a rhythmic fury. He watched. Entranced as words materialized on the blank sheet. They weren’t his words. They were dark, twisted, like the fevered thoughts of a mind unraveling. The sentence, one he did not recognize, read: “Death is the only escape from the madness of creation.”

A chill crawled down his spine.

Aiden jerked his hand away. The typewriter stopped as suddenly as it had started. Silence filled the room, heavy and oppressive. He placed the typewriter on his desk. He could feel the weight of its malevolent presence pressing against his mind. It was like the touch of icy fingers.

But against his better judgment, he sat down. His hands trembled as they hovered over the keys. Then, almost by a force outside of himself, his fingers began to move. The keys clicked rapidly, as if guided by invisible hands. He spewed forth a torrent of prose, lines upon lines of words that Aiden knew didn’t belong to him. They were vivid, grotesque descriptions of horrors too foul to name, of shadows that walked in the light, of creatures born from the depths of despair.

As he typed the room darkened, as if the very walls were closing in on him. His breath quickened. His pulse raced. But he couldn’t stop. He was consumed by the machine, each word a brand on his soul. The stories were madness. The kind of stories that swallowed Poe and Lovecraft whole. Aiden felt his mind fraying with each stroke of the keys. His reflection in the window was unrecognizable. His eyes were hollow, skin ashen, as if the typewriter was draining the very essence of his being.

When the final word hit the page, a monstrous scream echoed through the room. Not from the outside, but from within the typewriter itself, as if the machine had birthed it. Aiden’s body seized in the chair, his hands stiff and claw-like. His vision blurred, and the typewriter, for a moment, seemed to grow teeth, jagged metal dripping with ink the color of blood. His mind fractured, splintering into a thousand pieces. Each one lost in the dark corners of creation that man was never meant to touch.

In the end, it wasn’t Aiden that wrote the story, it was the typewriter. It had used him, hollowed him out. It feasted on his thoughts then filled the empty vessel with madness.

They found Aiden days later slumped over his desk. His fingers were bloody from pounding the keys long after his soul had left his body. The typewriter was silent now, but the final sentence on the paper stood as a grim epitaph.

“Madness consumes the writer, for the story is never finished.”

The investigators were baffled. They took the typewriter as evidence. It now sits in storage quietly waiting. Waiting for another soul to devour.

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Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!