By morning, I convinced myself it was all a glitch.Writers blame everything on exhaustion — it's easier than facing madness.
So, I made coffee, black and bitter, like punishment.I opened my laptop again. The file was gone. Not deleted, just... not there. As if the night had never happened.
For a second, I felt relief.Then, the phone rang.
An old landline. Beige. The kind that never rings unless it's bad news.I didn't even remember plugging it in.
"Hello?"
Static.Then, a voice. Low, rough, like it hadn't been used in years.
"A.K."
I froze. Nobody calls me that anymore. Not since him.
"Who is this?"
"You stopped writing."
The voice wasn't angry. It was disappointed — like a teacher scolding a favorite student.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
The static thickened. Then:
"You know who I am."
And then it hit me, that strange mix of familiarity and dread. I'd heard that voice before.In old interviews. In my own recordings. In drafts that were never published.
Kane.
But that was impossible. Kane. O had been dead for three years.
"You shouldn't have taken it," the voice said. "You shouldn't have finished what wasn't yours."
My throat went dry. I tried to hang up, but the line crackled louder, like it was laughing.
"You wrote my ending, A.K. You think that makes it yours?"
Then the line went silent.
I sat there, the dial tone humming like a funeral hymn. The coffee on my desk had gone cold.When I looked back at the laptop, the document had reappeared.
And a new line blinked at the bottom of the page:
"Now it's your turn to finish the story."