...So in Death
by Razzek Mecotl
Just a little one-shot written late one night when I badly wanted to write something, anything.
Ghost Writer is (c) Nickelodeon, Viacom, and Butch Hartman.
He felt sick. Not truly sick, the sort of illness he still remembered from life, just a vague sensation, more memory than physiology. If he'd still had skin he would have been cold, too. The pages before him quivered. All these centuries dead and still he was the same.
Ghost Writer closed his book and set it on the table. Routines established by a man long-dead were enacted again. He made a cup of hot cocoa, to stave off the chill and assauge a stomach which hadn't been fed in...days? No, longer.
"Didn't I die that way?" he mused to the typewriter. "Hmm. I don't recall."
When he thought about it all, he supposed it could have been anything that had done him in. The hunger, the cold, some vagabond with a knife looking for money he, a homeless poet, didn't have. He wondered if he'd ever finished that last sentence before dying, clutching those ragged pages to his thin chest as if they were all the comfort he ever needed.
"It was behind the library," he took a sip of cocoa, smiled. "Where it was warm. All the treasures of the world inside... It would have been nicer to die inside instead of out, I suppose."
The ritual complete, he settled himself and reached for the dusty typewriter, itself the ghost of some long-departed machine. Thin, pale hands shook as he loaded a page. When the first words appeared, he felt a tightening where his innards had been. Sickness, pain, fear...exhiliration.
I'm a hack, not fit to write... A genius, the best there's ever been!.. Garbage... Wonderful... Feelings and thoughts tumbled through him all unnoticed.
No matter how many times he began a tale it was always the same. Sometimes he wept, sometimes he snarled and ripped a page free, tearing it apart in fury. He was both master and slave, willing captive to this thing inside which screamed to be let loose.
As in life, so in death, he was still a writer.