It came as a gift – wrapped in silver paper, in a little box with small dents on the side, evidence of too much rough handing. The box –- big, shiny, almost foreboding sat on his front step with a smug self-awareness as he wound his way home from another night of inebriation. His head was pounding –- each unsteady footstep sent cannonades of pain thorough his mind and his vision was doubled. Farhan had to make sure by touch that the gate he was touching was, in fact, real.

When people saw him, he wasn’t immediately recognized. Farhan thought that as both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because it afforded him a level of privacy and a sense of normality to his life which his celebrity status shouldn’t otherwise have provided and a curse because, on the few times that people did recognize him, from the grainy pictures of his book jackets, they would immediately crowd him and ask him when the next book was due and what was it going to be about.

When he first started out, Farhan Ahmed, who was born with a love of words etched into his bones, loved that attention. People would come up to him, take pictures with him, take out battered copies of his novel (at the time, there had been only one – a book about three friends who started a company together) and ask him to autograph it. Incredulously, he would do so, not quite believing that this was happening to him and that people were actually reading what he had written.

However, sometime after the death of his father, something had changed - had curdled inside him. It wasn’t a sudden change as well – a far more gradual descent, a loss of momentum similar to how a car will coast before stopping after its engine has stalled. Farhan started to hate making public appearances on the off chance that people would recognize him. When going out with his friends, he would only agree to meet when the restaurants would be at their most empty which was very late at night. His friends protested from time to time but eventually they came to accept it – that was one of the perks of being a creative individual; your weird idiosyncrasies were just your artistic quirks and easily forgiven.

Eventually though, his friends dwindled or rather, when those bridges started burning, he chose to let them. Friendship, or any relationship for that matter, is a tenuous connection at best, a sapling in the desert - easy to destroy, given the right amount of indifference. They would ask – every time they would see him - When is the next book coming Farhan? What’s it going to be about? It made him ground his teeth in frustration but he always managed a sly smile and said soon.

Truth be told, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know and every time they asked, he felt a thin sliver of poison accrete inside him, growing bigger and bigger like a cancerous pearl.

It had been 2 years, 10 months and twenty seven days since he had last written anything which didn’t make him feel as though he should take a gun to his mouth and end the whole charade. At first, he thought it was momentary fluke – the kind of inability to write, which passes by like a storm in summer – but as the days stretched into weeks that feeling didn’t go away. He tried writing again – god knows he did – but whatever came out was as artful as the drawings of a 1 year old. It possessed no life, nothing which made him smile and he felt a sliver of disquiet start to grow in his mind. The characters were as flat as the paper they were written on and each new attempt made him feel as though he was nothing. He felt disconnected from the font of stories that he had had access to ever since he was a child and now that he was alone, he was drifting.

The box was too big for it to be a book – he would get those in the mail sometimes – finished printed copies of books by friends he had helped edit with a burning envy in his heart. They would send him their books with a note thanking him for his help in making the book better and he hated them for it. The silver packaging that it came in was also strange – it reminded him of gifts at Bangladeshi weddings.

He fumbled with the keys which unlocked the outer door of his little house which had been left to him by his father. The outer gate lead to a small garage, on one side of which there was an untended garden and, strangely the silver package was in front of the inside gate of his house, at the other end of the garage.

Am I seeing things? He thought to himself. He had a blinding headache and the roof of his mouth felt as though it was lined in fur. The sickly taste of puke was almost all he could taste. He vaguely remembered last night – somewhere; it was perhaps in some girl’s house or in the bar he went to every night next to her place. Anita. For a moment, he couldn’t remember her name even though he had spent the majority of the last one month in her bed.

When he reached the box, he looked at it with trepidation. It sat there like an idol atop a mountain, drawing all gazes towards it. It seemed to be looking at him, as though daring him to open it, and for the life of him, he couldn’t explain why he didn’t want to. There was no return address. Aside from a few dents here and there, there were no other marks or imperfections upon it. It glittered like a jewel in the early morning sun. He bent down to examine it closer, lifting it to see if there was a name written on it or not.

As he touched it, with only the tips of his fingers, he felt himself shocked with a strange kind of electricity. His mouth filled with the taste of copper and then it was gone as suddenly as it had come. He pulled his hand back, looking at it, expecting his fingertips to be black and smoking but saw nothing.

What if it’s a bomb? He thought to himself and laughed aloud. The sound echoed in the little garage and sank into nothingness. Who would want to kill him? He had written three books over the past seven years but nothing worth killing him over. He was too careful to be the kind of writer who was killed for his words.

He touched it again, this time a bit more carefully, waiting for the first shock of that secret electricity. It didn’t come. The box was an ordinary box and he was just a drunk, stumbling home and seeing and feeling things that weren’t there.

The box was heavy and big as well. A foot long on each side, it had to have weighed at least ten kilos but he lifted it up easily. The only thing he had left to do to while away the days was to watch TV, fiddle with his computer and lift weights. Sometimes, his mother would call and they would chit chat and that would be it. She never came to visit and that was a good thing. He didn’t want her to see how sorry his life had become.

He took the box and left it in his study, his library-cum office which was lined with books and alcohol. What every wordsmith needed to work properly. He imagined it would be a place many of his fans would pay an arm and a leg to enter.

Fuck the fans, he thought to himself. Bunch of parasites –- he had been entertaining such thoughts in his head for the past year and at first, he felt a little guilt but that had been replaced by an inevitable fear that he might never write again.
Farhan didn’t bother changing or even opening his shoes. When he fell on the bed, he dropped off into a deep and unquiet slumber.

When Farhan woke up, his headache was better –- the light was coming in from the west now and the fiery radiance of the day had lessened. He guessed it to be maybe four or five in the afternoon. He fixed himself some food – nothing fancy, a bowl of cornflakes paired with a flat beer to set the edge off and went downstairs.

He hoped today was going to be the day that he would finally start writing again. It was there where he had left it. The silver box sitting expectantly on his doorstep had a story like quality to it and he wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing until he had seen it again with his own eyes.

Part of him didn’t want to open it but there is no stronger urge in the human mind than curiosity. The box contained, amidst a festoon of confetti and small bits of Styrofoam – a typewriter.

He stared for the longest time at the type writer, slack jawed. It was old; archaic even but it was undeniably beautiful – the red metal body, with two orange notches in the top to show the margins of the rollers and a set of silver hammers, just waiting expectantly to beat the paper with inky tattoos. It was a Valentino – he vaguely remembered his father talking about an old Valentino typewriter he had when he was writing in America and thought it must be the same brand. Its keys were set in the familiar QWERTY format but there was something both unsettling and charming as well about the way the keys themselves looked. If you looked at it from above, the keys seemed to be an open mouth – a mad grin, the two orange buckles looking like the eyes of a rabid dog.

He shook his head – waking himself up and studied the typewriter again. He held it – splayed his fingers across the keyboard, touching the keys to see how they felt. Right – they felt right somehow.

He dashed off –- going into the next room, which used to be the kitchen but was a store room now for his office supplies and found a ream of paper. He felt a touch, a whisper of that ineffable spirit that powers all those who pursue a creative line of work and he wanted to see if he was right or not.

Farhan felt hopeful for the first time in a long time.

He put a sheet of paper in the typewriter – the scene echoing how it had been when he had done so the first time in his life. He was five and his father was in his study as well – writing something. His father always wrote in the mornings, before the day became warm and the house came alive with the murmurings of the servants and the roars of Farhan’s mother. That particular morning, his father had gone downstairs and Farhan snuck in, moving through the musty study to the typewriter. He had never used one before but he saw the little keys and somehow he knew what to do.

For the longest time, he was completely oblivious to the world around, feeling freer and more alive than ever before. It was as though someone had switched on a light bulb in his mind and everything magic was starting to come out – words flowed out of him like a flash flood and his small fingers had difficulty keeping up with the tide.

He wrote a story – probably his first ever, about a boy who found a magic lamp that granted wishes. The boy wished for a lot of candy and he wished for more toys and he got that as well but he saw that whenever he got a gift, someone else had lost theirs as well. So he wished the genie away. He had no idea where that story came from when he started writing it and, even today, almost 25 years later, he still didn’t know. They just came.

When he stopped writing that first story, after what might have been a minute or an hour, he couldn’t tell, his father was standing behind him.

“What were you doing?” his father asked.

His voice wasn’t angry – which was how it usually was but Farhan was still afraid. He turned around, expecting to be punished but there was no scowl on his father’s face. Rather, he looked at Farhan with rapt fascination.

Farhan still didn’t answer – just watched his father looking down at him. He hung his head down, expecting to be reprimanded but after maybe a few moments, his father spoke again, his voice unsteady but warm.

“Let’s see what you’ve written.” They went over the little four page story that Farhan had written in a frenzy, his father laughing and enjoying it. After finishing, his father patted Farhan on the head and told him ‘that was good work. I expect to see more.’ That was the happiest day in his life – nothing else even came close to that day. Not the time when his agent Afrida called and told him that his first novel had completely sold out or, a few months later, when she told him that he was going to be awarded with a prestigious award. None of that compared.

After that, it felt as though a secret fire had been lit in his chest that had to be extinguished through his fingertips. He wrote as much as he possibly could – his brothers and his sister didn’t understand what he was doing and made fun of him for not playing with them but to Farhan, the world only mattered in the little library where his father worked. As he grew older, he knew that most of his earlier stories were terrible. He also knew that his father was aware of this yet had said nothing – encouraged him even though, his stories at first were unoriginal and riddled with grammatical errors. Still he continued, mostly due to his father’s encouragement and everything turned out for the best. For a time anyway.

Back in the present, he placed his fingers, first on the paper and then splayed them out against the keys. His fingers felt rigid and unwilling, bound by an inertia caused by inactivity. He imagined that musicians who haven’t played their instruments in a while felt the same way. He looked at the blank paper, his mind looking at the whiteness and reeling back in on itself. He sat there for a while, too nervous to even move his fingers. The words weren’t coming – not today. He felt a piercing ache in his heart and he felt like he would cry. Those who have never written before are unable to understand what the inability to write truly is because that is all they have known. Farhan would describe what he was feeling as being separated from something divine – the font where his stories seemed to come from – a secret subconscious world that the creative can tap into and transcribe. That’s how it felt when you were writing a story and your fingers weren’t fast enough to keep up with the words that are being beamed into your head. You felt like a man who had just landed on a crazed tiger shark and is trying to hold on for dear life. That’s how it felt when you were filled with that white hot heat of creation – you forgot about time, you forgot about place and responsibilities and the only thing that mattered was the story, the only music you hear is the clickety clak of the keys as your fingers work their secret magic over them.

He got up, almost in tears. It still wasn’t back – that connection. The worst thing about it was how alone it made him feel – this was not something that he could easily share with people. If he talked about it with his non-writer friends, they would shrug, offer to buy him a beer and then tell him that ‘it would come back so don’t worry.’ From his writer friends, he got similar reactions – the pithy ‘there, there it will all come back’ but what was worse was the look of pity that he could see in their eyes as they appraised him. He could even hear what they were thinking – I’m lucky it’s not me. I am lucky I can still write. Whenever he saw that reaction, he wanted to wipe that smug of their faces with a hard slap but he restrained himself. He felt like a fallen star – he had the talent and the skill to change the world but was now cut off.

What he wouldn’t give to write one more story again. What he wouldn’t sacrifice to feel that white heat in his mind again, to watch the words flow from his fingers like blood flowing onto sand.

There were tears in his eyes now and he welcomed them. The thin rays of hope that he had allowed himself to feel were gone now and he felt dejected and helpless. He turned away from the typewriter and the study when he heard it. Clang.

The silvery sound seemed to travel throughout the lonely silence of his house like a stone falling into a deep lake.

Then another. Clang. Click. Clang.

He turned around – not sure of what he was going to find and stifled a gasp. Printed clearly on the paper was one word. STAY

He didn’t want to – he felt as though he had made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in one of his stories. Moving closer to the typewriter, he saw that the word was real – he could see the indelible letters on the ribbon of the typewriter and felt a wave of fear wash over him. What the fuck was going on, Farhan asked himself.

The typewriter seemed to hear this. Unbidden, it started typing again, the clicking of its keys sounding more like gunfire than anything. Each key seemed like a shot in the dark and he felt that black fear grab hold of him again – a primal part of his brain, which had evolved long before the son of man was even a concept in God’s mind, told him to run – to get out of the house but he didn’t.

If asked why he didn’t move, it was the words which rooted him.

Let me help you write.

He sat back down again, his breathing returning to normal and looked again at the Valentino typewriter with its keys set out to resemble a dead person’s grin.

He touched the keys again and felt it again –like being struck by a ball of lightning, his mind was set afire, burning with possibilities. He started typing again – the keys and the typewriter becoming extensions of his body and his will. The house came alive with the sound of music – the clacking of the keys, the aperiodic ding when the roller reached the end of the line and had to be returned to its original position, the heavy sound of breathing and, once or twice, a queer kind of laughter.

When he stopped, his shirt was soaked with sweat, his head was pounding and his fingers were cracked and callused, the way a guitar player’s would be after playing for a very long time. He had lost all track of time, all sense of self, immersed in the story that he had been writing. It was like riding a bicycle, he said to himself, as he surveyed the 25 pages of manuscript that were perched on one side of the Valentino. He could almost see thin wisps of smoke rising up of the hammers.

Night had fallen on Dhaka city while he was writing – he didn’t keep any clocks in his house and his phone was upstairs, idle and losing its charge. His fingers ached – his wrists ached and it felt as though he had just run a marathon yet he felt happier than he had in the longest time. His mind felt clearer – as though he had just returned to being himself again.

He coughed. It sounded like a gunshot going off in his chest and he clutched a hand to his heart. A sharp flare of pain went through him and he coughed again. Three times. Then nothing. He checked his palm which he had used to cup his mouth and saw flecks of ruby in mixed with the phlegm.

Farhan put it out of mind – he went back upstairs to sleep. He checked his phone before falling asleep – there were a few missed calls from Anita, the girl whose house he had been last night. He put the phone under his pillow and went back to sleep.

When he woke up, he did so without memory, without thought. His phone was blaring and he had to shut it off if he wanted to get any work done that day. It was Afrida this time, his agent – she had been calling on and off for the past two days.

“Hello?”

“Farhan. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Don’t bother me.”

“What’s wrong with you? I thought you had died.”

“I just woke up. I don’t have time for your shit this early in the morning.”

“Fuck you Farhan. As if you have anything better to do.”

“I do actually. I am writing.”

“You are? What’s it about? How far along are you with it? Can you send me a few pages so that I can show it to the Daily Star? They have an anthology coming up and…”

“Afrida listen. I don’t have time for this. I have to go back to work. I’m leaving the phone up here as well so don’t call me.”

“Farhan I really think….”

He cut it off – her voice was starting to get on his nerves. He skipped breakfast – his cough from yesterday was gone now but he still had a slight headache – residual effects of the drinking he supposed.

When he got downstairs with a mug of instant coffee in his hand, there was a little note in waiting for him in the typewriter.

Good morning. :)

Something about that smiley unnerved him but he let it slide. Consciously or not, the messages that he was receiving from the typewriter were not registering in his mind as it should have. There was work to be done and he remembered his father’s words, how a man sometimes has to put his fears and his worries behind him and get on with the job at hand.

He had to write and he had to do it soon before that tenuous thread connecting him to the story frayed away – it was like a portal to another world that only he could glimpse into. He also knew that it was a short lived one. There were hundreds of stories which he had been offered the glimpse into but only so many he could finish before that mad spurt of creative energy ran itself out. He had four unfinished books, mostly because that initial excitement had run out. He touched his fingers lightly on the keys again – a bit fearful, like how a child would touch something he suspects might be hot.

The keys felt right again – the typewriter smiled its manic smile and sucked him in. The doorbell rang. It was night. His head was pounding – his fingers felt like the tips had been toasted off and his back was screaming a silent requiem of agony.

He went over to the door, amazed at how much his head and the rest of his body hurt. That’s what sitting in a chair for ten hours straight will do to you, he thought to himself. A woman was there and in the dark, he couldn’t recognize her.

“Open up.” She said.

He heard the words but they didn’t register in his mind. He squinted out through the darkness outside, half expecting some sort of monster to pop out but saw only the silhouette of a woman.

“Who is it?”

“Oh now you don’t know who I am you son of a bitch?” she said.

He blindly groped for the light switch. He touched the hard muscled body of a gecko and recoiled. The night was dark and somehow deep – there were no street lights near his house and all he could see was the pale glow of the moon shining through isolated holes in the trees and reflecting off the asphalt. There was a slight sheen on the ground. It had rained – an isolated thought rose up from his mind, followed by when? When did it rain and how did I not notice?
The light flickered once briefly before turning on.

It was a woman – vaguely familiar. She was pretty but that was running toward becoming something of the past. Her face had the indistinguishable marks of hard living on them – cheeks were lined and there were crow’s feet under her eyes that could have been from an ostrich. Her face had too much make up and she wore clothes that left very little to the imagination. The smell of cheap whiskey followed her like a loyal dog.

“Who are you?”

His face was in shadow so she didn’t know where to aim when she spit at him. Farhan’s mind was in a fog – it felt as though he had just woken up from a thousand year old nap. He kept thinking back to his study, to getting back to work, to finishing what he started.

The sticky globule of spit flew through the air and hit the wall with a loud splat.

“You fucker. You leave me hanging out to dry. You were supposed to help me pay the rent you bastard.”

Anita – that was her name. The typewriter swam into his mind, calling him again. Come back, its voice seemed to whisper.

“Anita stop. What’s going on? Stop yelling you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.” “Don’t tell me what to do. I let you into my bed every night and you don’t call me for five fucking days. What the hell Farhan?”

“Five days? Wha..? Come inside. It’s okay. I’ve just been busy that’s all.” Get her out of here. A metallic voice seemed to say from behind him.

“With whom?”

“Baby come inside. It’s okay I am really sorry.” He didn’t really know why he was saying this – he wasn’t particularly sorry about not seeing her but something about what she had said struck him as odd. He also knew that he wanted to bring her into the house, to his study, to the typewriter so that he could show it to her.

Bring her here. We can use her.

They sat down in the study – the only room in the house which was presentable enough to bring people to.

“Wow is this it? Is this your study? Is this where you wrote ‘Startup Dhaka?” And …. Oh my god, that typewriter – that has to be what you used to write it right?”

His eyes followed hers to the typewriter and it was on the tip of his tongue to say that the typewriter was new actually when he saw that it had changed somehow. He didn’t want her touching the typewriter yet he wanted to as well. He was starting to get an awful ache in his head – it felt like someone had hammered a massive iron spike there. The dull taste of gunmetal filled his mouth.

Rest. Let us take care of you.

It looked angry. That’s what the Valentino typewriter seemed to be - he could almost feel it; a steady pulse of dark heat radiating from the typewriter like a miniature sun.

Yet, it also seemed to be inviting him closer, a friend signaling him to whisper something in secret. He looked at the manuscript lying next to it, a large pile of paper stretching six inches high. His head still hurt and his mind seemed unbelievably weary – it felt as though the inside of his head was filled with peals of laughter.

“Farhan, are you alright?” she asked, her voice a tremulous imitation of her former bolster. He could hear the wind rushing through the trees outside, making them sing. Perhaps, he could also hear the first silent taps of rain falling on this tormented city but all of his attention was focused on the Valentino.

It seemed to be speaking to him, with the soulful cadences of a lover, whispering unspeakable things to him.

He moved into the light and Anita could see that he had changed somehow in the past week. Outside it was too dark to make out details but, under the dim glow of tungsten lightbulbs, he looked on the verge of dying.

His gait was different. He moved as though his weight was a tremendous burden on himself and that he was in a great deal of pain as well. His hair was thinning, she could see naked patches of his scalp reflecting the dim glow and could even make out how some of the hairs had gone white. There were boils on his face – some newly formed while others looked old and gangrenous; they looked like mushrooms growing out of his face crowned with dried over pus and his arms. They looked like an occupying army, trying to eat him.

She felt like throwing up. For the first time since arriving, she registered the smell in the room – it was ancient, foul, smelling like how rotten fruit buried underground for millennia would smell. Why she hadn’t smelled it before, she asked herself. The room seemed to be filling up with a thin smoke and everything in it was in a strange perspective – what was straight looked slanted and what was not, felt stretched to impossible dimension. A shrill voice in the back of her head warned her to leave but she was unable to. Manacles of fear rooted her to the floor. Soon her eyes followed his and landed on the typewriter as well. It seemed to be smiling.

She heard the clickety clack of keys and felt dark panic choke her heart. Farhan was standing in front of the typewriter and she could clearly see his hands. The typewriter was typing on it’s own.

The words looked as though written in blood.

The quick brown DIE fox BLOOD jumped over MURDER the MURDER KILL DIEEEEEEE

She screamed but only in her mind – her teeth were chattering so hard that she felt as though they would shatter into a million pieces at any moment. The memories of the previous night – of the landlord coming over to demand her rent, her unable to pay for it and offering him something else in exchange and being rebuked; coming here, all of it had taken the eldritch sensational quality of a dream and she desperately searched for the moment when she might have fallen asleep, as though doing so would make it easier for her to wake up.

She stood there transfixed when Farhan came at her. She saw him dart at her, out of the corner of her eye, wielding something black and alien looking in his right hand.

For a man who looked as though he had one foot in the grave, he moved with a frightening speed. He closed the distance between them in a flash, swung his arm with the black artifact – a paperweight, it was a paperweight – and tried to hit her on the head.

She ducked – in the nick of time, she could hear the whoosh as his arm went swinging by and then a loud crash as it hit the bookshelf behind her, sending splinters flying.

Farhan screamed in agony and the sound was like an auger drilling into Anita’s head. She lurched forward, trying to put as much distance between her and him as possible. He turned around, dropping the paper weight amidst the ruin of the bookshelf and she could see his eyes – his eyes. She didn’t think she would ever be able to forget those eyes glowing like red hot embers. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE.” He said, though the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere around her. It sounded broken – dusty and old.

“Please don’t kill me. I am sorry. I will leave.”

“SILENCE. You’ve come to keep me away from my work – to make sure that I would never write again. I cannot let you do that. “

He rushed towards her – there was maybe ten or twenty feet of distance between them but he made that distance so fast that she had to move out of the way out of pure reflex. Her years on the soccer team at school coming back to her.

“PLEASE STOP. FARHAN STOP.”

There was no registration in his face as she screamed his name – his face had the dead look of a person doing his taxes.

But she noticed something strange. As she ducked out of the way, she glimpsed him rushing towards the typewriter on the table. He swerved out of the way and he hit the wall instead, hurting himself a lot more than he would have if he had hit the typewriter. It continued typing without direction – the silvery sounds falling through the room – a soundtrack of murder.

He was hurt – she could see that. He was gripping his right shoulder and she could see it had become misshaped, his arm bending the wrong way. Farhan was breathing heavily as well – the boils that were covering his arms and his legs had burst, covering him with gelatinous white pus.

He bared his teeth. He had bitten his tongue as well – she could see part of it lying on the floor, flopping in madness. The front of his face was covered with his dark red blood. “You won’t stop me from finishing my work you bitch. Your saccharine cunt will not ensnare me you whore.”

The typewriter sang its insane tune.

This was no nightmare and with a startling clarity, she realized that there was a very real chance that she was going to die here tonight. With his injuries, she could maybe outrun him – maybe. She had to keep him talking – buy herself some time to figure out how to escape him. “I don’t want to stop you from writing Farhan. You are a great writer.”

“All you want is to do that. That’s what you have your cunt for isn’t it? To keep me from writing – to keep me from being free. Throughout history it has always been the proclivity of lesser minds to hamper and retard the development of the genius and it is morally sound for the human race for the great to overcome the strong.” He shouted.

She was sure someone outside would hear this and would call for help, maybe rush over and try to rescue her but how long could she wait? Those bared teeth looked incredibly sharp – they looked like a row of yellowing spikes.

“Tell me what you are writing about. I would like to help.” She tried to keep her voice calm, to keep the pleading out of it but she wasn’t sure how she was doing. Perhaps Farhan could be reasoned with but in the otherworldly light of that room, he no longer even looked human. The typewriter had stopped its chattering. Farhan turned to it, like a slave waiting for instructions from his master.

That was the key. She had to destroy it but, to her dismay, she saw that getting to it would entail getting past Farhan. His every movement circumscribed a protective ring around the typewriter. She saw a pile of pages next to him, gently blowing in the breeze coming in from the open window. The window was barred so no escape there.

Whatever instruction he was getting, she didn’t want him to get it.

“Farhan. You suck as a writer.”

His eyes seemed to blaze fire and he let out a mad, rabid scream. The typewriter started clanking again, sounding like a locomotive. Anita thought that she would go mad with the sound. KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

She couldn’t see the words this time but she could feel them being typed into her mind, a psychic link meant to disarm her. In normal circumstances, Anita would have folded and given up and yet, this was a fight for survival and she was still in the fight.

Farhan opened a drawer, thrust his hand inside it and pulled out a pair of scissors. The silvery blades gleamed with malice. This time he didn’t rush towards her – she could see the pain in his face as each step became heavier.

Her purse was nearby – it had fallen when she had ducked out of the way and its contents were strewn out on the carpeted floor like spilled entrails. She saw the canister almost at once. The can of pepper spray her sister had gotten her and she hadn’t had occasion to use.

She ducked, feigning that she was going to charge him – the spray was five feet away and Farhan ten. Farhan moved closer, bracing himself for the impact but she stooped down on the path forward and took the pepper spray in her hand, hoping that he hadn’t noticed.

He hadn’t. His eyes kept darting back and forth between her and the typewriter. His clothes seemed to be smoking as well and she could smell the acrid undercurrent of burning hair and skin.

He rushed forward again, pointing the scissors towards her as a makeshift knife. It descended in an arc aimed at her breast.

It almost hit her – she sidestepped out of the way but she could feel the blade tangling up in her orna and cutting it loose. She let him have it. Pointing the canister at his face, she sprayed his burning eyes with the pepper spray. The pepper spray made a hissing sound like a mad snake. Farhan screamed, his eyes burning.

She backed away. Farhan was flailing about now, the scissors dropped, his arms over his eyes and his mouth open in a constant scream. He bumped into the table and the chair but still, he didn’t come close to the typewriter sitting there.

Unearthly groans came from Farhan and looking at him she felt like throwing up. The typewriter started typing again and she couldn’t see the words clearly this time but she could intuit the malice spewing forth from it.

This was her only chance – Farhan had fallen on the floor and was clutching at his eyes, debilitated by the pain. She moved forward, found a bottle of gin on a shelf, the semblances of an idea in her head. She acted on it. She poured the gin on the manuscript and the typewriter both – the orange eyes of the Valentino open with fear and panic. She lit a match with her shaking hands, the room blooming with the smell of the gin as it vaporized in the air and it fell on the manuscript and the typewriter both.

A violent explosion of sound came from behind her and she turned, her heart in her throat. What she saw then, she would never be able to forget for the rest of her life. Farhan, or what had been Farhan had taken his fists and gouged out his eyes, the eye balls resting on the carpet. He made one last blind desperate lurch – he was close, so close that he could almost reach out and grab her but he didn’t. She was the least of his concerns now – the bleeding holes where his eyes used to be were only focused on the typewriter burning in a wild conflagration of flames. Now or never, Anita said to herself. She ran out of the house, hearing from behind her, the sound of muffled cries of pain and sadness and the desperate flapping of paper to extinguish the fire.

Looking back on all of these eventIt came as a gift – wrapped in silver paper, in a little box with small dents on the side, evidence of too much rough handing. The box –- big, shiny, almost foreboding sat on his front step with a smug self-awareness as he wound his way home from another night of inebriation.

His head was pounding –- each unsteady footstep sent cannonades of pain thorough his mind and his vision was doubled. Farhan had to make sure by touch that the gate he was touching was, in fact, real.

When people saw him, he wasn’t immediately recognized. Farhan thought that as both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because it afforded him a level of privacy and a sense of normality to his life which his celebrity status shouldn’t otherwise have provided and a curse because, on the few times that people did recognize him, from the grainy pictures of his book jackets, they would immediately crowd him and ask him when the next book was due and what was it going to be about.

When he first started out, Farhan Ahmed, who was born with a love of words etched into his bones, loved that attention. People would come up to him, take pictures with him, take out battered copies of his novel (at the time, there had been only one – a book about three friends who started a company together) and ask him to autograph it. Incredulously, he would do so, not quite believing that this was happening to him and that people were actually reading what he had written.

However, sometime after the death of his father, something had changed - had curdled inside him. It wasn’t a sudden change as well – a far more gradual descent, a loss of momentum similar to how a car will coast before stopping after its engine has stalled. Farhan started to hate making public appearances on the off chance that people would recognize him. When going out with his friends, he would only agree to meet when the restaurants would be at their most empty which was very late at night. His friends protested from time to time but eventually they came to accept it – that was one of the perks of being a creative individual; your weird idiosyncrasies were just your artistic quirks and easily forgiven.

Eventually though, his friends dwindled or rather, when those bridges started burning, he chose to let them. Friendship, or any relationship for that matter, is a tenuous connection at best, a sapling in the desert - easy to destroy, given the right amount of indifference. They would ask – every time they would see him - When is the next book coming Farhan? What’s it going to be about? It made him ground his teeth in frustration but he always managed a sly smile and said soon.

Truth be told, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know and every time they asked, he felt a thin sliver of poison accrete inside him, growing bigger and bigger like a cancerous pearl.
It had been 2 years, 10 months and twenty seven days since he had last written anything which didn’t make him feel as though he should take a gun to his mouth and end the whole charade. At first, he thought it was momentary fluke – the kind of inability to write, which passes by like a storm in summer – but as the days stretched into weeks that feeling didn’t go away. He tried writing again – god knows he did – but whatever came out was as artful as the drawings of a 1 year old. It possessed no life, nothing which made him smile and he felt a sliver of disquiet start to grow in his mind. The characters were as flat as the paper they were written on and each new attempt made him feel as though he was nothing. He felt disconnected from the font of stories that he had had access to ever since he was a child and now that he was alone, he was drifting.

The box was too big for it to be a book – he would get those in the mail sometimes – finished printed copies of books by friends he had helped edit with a burning envy in his heart. They would send him their books with a note thanking him for his help in making the book better and he hated them for it. The silver packaging that it came in was also strange – it reminded him of gifts at Bangladeshi weddings.

He fumbled with the keys which unlocked the outer door of his little house which had been left to him by his father. The outer gate lead to a small garage, on one side of which there was an untended garden and, strangely the silver package was in front of the inside gate of his house, at the other end of the garage.

Am I seeing things? He thought to himself. He had a blinding headache and the roof of his mouth felt as though it was lined in fur. The sickly taste of puke was almost all he could taste. He vaguely remembered last night – somewhere; it was perhaps in some girl’s house or in the bar he went to every night next to her place. Anita. For a moment, he couldn’t remember her name even though he had spent the majority of the last one month in her bed.

When he reached the box, he looked at it with trepidation. It sat there like an idol atop a mountain, drawing all gazes towards it. It seemed to be looking at him, as though daring him to open it, and for the life of him, he couldn’t explain why he didn’t want to. There was no return address. Aside from a few dents here and there, there were no other marks or imperfections upon it. It glittered like a jewel in the early morning sun. He bent down to examine it closer, lifting it to see if there was a name written on it or not.

As he touched it, with only the tips of his fingers, he felt himself shocked with a strange kind of electricity. His mouth filled with the taste of copper and then it was gone as suddenly as it had come. He pulled his hand back, looking at it, expecting his fingertips to be black and smoking but saw nothing.

What if it’s a bomb? He thought to himself and laughed aloud. The sound echoed in the little garage and sank into nothingness. Who would want to kill him? He had written three books over the past seven years but nothing worth killing him over. He was too careful to be the kind of writer who was killed for his words.

He touched it again, this time a bit more carefully, waiting for the first shock of that secret electricity. It didn’t come. The box was an ordinary box and he was just a drunk, stumbling home and seeing and feeling things that weren’t there.

The box was heavy and big as well. A foot long on each side, it had to have weighed at least ten kilos but he lifted it up easily. The only thing he had left to do to while away the days was to watch TV, fiddle with his computer and lift weights. Sometimes, his mother would call and they would chit chat and that would be it. She never came to visit and that was a good thing. He didn’t want her to see how sorry his life had become.

He took the box and left it in his study, his library-cum office which was lined with books and alcohol. What every wordsmith needed to work properly. He imagined it would be a place many of his fans would pay an arm and a leg to enter.

Fuck the fans, he thought to himself. Bunch of parasites –- he had been entertaining such thoughts in his head for the past year and at first, he felt a little guilt but that had been replaced by an inevitable fear that he might never write again.

Farhan didn’t bother changing or even opening his shoes. When he fell on the bed, he dropped off into a deep and unquiet slumber.

When Farhan woke up, his headache was better –- the light was coming in from the west now and the fiery radiance of the day had lessened. He guessed it to be maybe four or five in the afternoon. He fixed himself some food – nothing fancy, a bowl of cornflakes paired with a flat beer to set the edge off and went downstairs.

He hoped today was going to be the day that he would finally start writing again. It was there where he had left it. The silver box sitting expectantly on his doorstep had a story like quality to it and he wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing until he had seen it again with his own eyes.

Part of him didn’t want to open it but there is no stronger urge in the human mind than curiosity. The box contained, amidst a festoon of confetti and small bits of Styrofoam – a typewriter.

He stared for the longest time at the type writer, slack jawed. It was old; archaic even but it was undeniably beautiful – the red metal body, with two orange notches in the top to show the margins of the rollers and a set of silver hammers, just waiting expectantly to beat the paper with inky tattoos. It was a Valentino – he vaguely remembered his father talking about an old Valentino typewriter he had when he was writing in America and thought it must be the same brand. Its keys were set in the familiar QWERTY format but there was something both unsettling and charming as well about the way the keys themselves looked. If you looked at it from above, the keys seemed to be an open mouth – a mad grin, the two orange buckles looking like the eyes of a rabid dog.

He shook his head – waking himself up and studied the typewriter again. He held it – splayed his fingers across the keyboard, touching the keys to see how they felt. Right – they felt right somehow.

He dashed off –- going into the next room, which used to be the kitchen but was a store room now for his office supplies and found a ream of paper. He felt a touch, a whisper of that ineffable spirit that powers all those who pursue a creative line of work and he wanted to see if he was right or not.

Farhan felt hopeful for the first time in a long time.

He put a sheet of paper in the typewriter – the scene echoing how it had been when he had done so the first time in his life. He was five and his father was in his study as well – writing something. His father always wrote in the mornings, before the day became warm and the house came alive with the murmurings of the servants and the roars of Farhan’s mother. That particular morning, his father had gone downstairs and Farhan snuck in, moving through the musty study to the typewriter. He had never used one before but he saw the little keys and somehow he knew what to do.

For the longest time, he was completely oblivious to the world around, feeling freer and more alive than ever before. It was as though someone had switched on a light bulb in his mind and everything magic was starting to come out – words flowed out of him like a flash flood and his small fingers had difficulty keeping up with the tide.

He wrote a story – probably his first ever, about a boy who found a magic lamp that granted wishes. The boy wished for a lot of candy and he wished for more toys and he got that as well but he saw that whenever he got a gift, someone else had lost theirs as well. So he wished the genie away. He had no idea where that story came from when he started writing it and, even today, almost 25 years later, he still didn’t know. They just came.

When he stopped writing that first story, after what might have been a minute or an hour, he couldn’t tell, his father was standing behind him.

“What were you doing?” his father asked.

His voice wasn’t angry – which was how it usually was but Farhan was still afraid. He turned around, expecting to be punished but there was no scowl on his father’s face. Rather, he looked at Farhan with rapt fascination.

Farhan still didn’t answer – just watched his father looking down at him. He hung his head down, expecting to be reprimanded but after maybe a few moments, his father spoke again, his voice unsteady but warm.

“Let’s see what you’ve written.” They went over the little four page story that Farhan had written in a frenzy, his father laughing and enjoying it. After finishing, his father patted Farhan on the head and told him ‘that was good work. I expect to see more.’ That was the happiest day in his life – nothing else even came close to that day. Not the time when his agent Afrida called and told him that his first novel had completely sold out or, a few months later, when she told him that he was going to be awarded with a prestigious award. None of that compared.

After that, it felt as though a secret fire had been lit in his chest that had to be extinguished through his fingertips. He wrote as much as he possibly could – his brothers and his sister didn’t understand what he was doing and made fun of him for not playing with them but to Farhan, the world only mattered in the little library where his father worked. As he grew older, he knew that most of his earlier stories were terrible. He also knew that his father was aware of this yet had said nothing – encouraged him even though, his stories at first were unoriginal and riddled with grammatical errors. Still he continued, mostly due to his father’s encouragement and everything turned out for the best. For a time anyway.

Back in the present, he placed his fingers, first on the paper and then splayed them out against the keys. His fingers felt rigid and unwilling, bound by an inertia caused by inactivity. He imagined that musicians who haven’t played their instruments in a while felt the same way. He looked at the blank paper, his mind looking at the whiteness and reeling back in on itself. He sat there for a while, too nervous to even move his fingers. The words weren’t coming – not today. He felt a piercing ache in his heart and he felt like he would cry. Those who have never written before are unable to understand what the inability to write truly is because that is all they have known. Farhan would describe what he was feeling as being separated from something divine – the font where his stories seemed to come from – a secret subconscious world that the creative can tap into and transcribe. That’s how it felt when you were writing a story and your fingers weren’t fast enough to keep up with the words that are being beamed into your head. You felt like a man who had just landed on a crazed tiger shark and is trying to hold on for dear life. That’s how it felt when you were filled with that white hot heat of creation – you forgot about time, you forgot about place and responsibilities and the only thing that mattered was the story, the only music you hear is the clickety clak of the keys as your fingers work their secret magic over them.

He got up, almost in tears. It still wasn’t back – that connection. The worst thing about it was how alone it made him feel – this was not something that he could easily share with people. If he talked about it with his non-writer friends, they would shrug, offer to buy him a beer and then tell him that ‘it would come back so don’t worry.’ From his writer friends, he got similar reactions – the pithy ‘there, there it will all come back’ but what was worse was the look of pity that he could see in their eyes as they appraised him. He could even hear what they were thinking – I’m lucky it’s not me. I am lucky I can still write. Whenever he saw that reaction, he wanted to wipe that smug of their faces with a hard slap but he restrained himself. He felt like a fallen star – he had the talent and the skill to change the world but was now cut off.

What he wouldn’t give to write one more story again. What he wouldn’t sacrifice to feel that white heat in his mind again, to watch the words flow from his fingers like blood flowing onto sand.

There were tears in his eyes now and he welcomed them. The thin rays of hope that he had allowed himself to feel were gone now and he felt dejected and helpless. He turned away from the typewriter and the study when he heard it. Clang.

The silvery sound seemed to travel throughout the lonely silence of his house like a stone falling into a deep lake.

Then another. Clang. Click. Clang.

He turned around – not sure of what he was going to find and stifled a gasp. Printed clearly on the paper was one word.

STAY

He didn’t want to – he felt as though he had made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in one of his stories. Moving closer to the typewriter, he saw that the word was real – he could see the indelible letters on the ribbon of the typewriter and felt a wave of fear wash over him. What the fuck was going on, Farhan asked himself.

The typewriter seemed to hear this. Unbidden, it started typing again, the clicking of its keys sounding more like gunfire than anything. Each key seemed like a shot in the dark and he felt that black fear grab hold of him again – a primal part of his brain, which had evolved long before the son of man was even a concept in God’s mind, told him to run – to get out of the house but he didn’t.

If asked why he didn’t move, it was the words which rooted him.

Let me help you write.

He sat back down again, his breathing returning to normal and looked again at the Valentino typewriter with its keys set out to resemble a dead person’s grin.

He touched the keys again and felt it again –like being struck by a ball of lightning, his mind was set afire, burning with possibilities. He started typing again – the keys and the typewriter becoming extensions of his body and his will. The house came alive with the sound of music – the clacking of the keys, the aperiodic ding when the roller reached the end of the line and had to be returned to its original position, the heavy sound of breathing and, once or twice, a queer kind of laughter.

When he stopped, his shirt was soaked with sweat, his head was pounding and his fingers were cracked and callused, the way a guitar player’s would be after playing for a very long time. He had lost all track of time, all sense of self, immersed in the story that he had been writing. It was like riding a bicycle, he said to himself, as he surveyed the 25 pages of manuscript that were perched on one side of the Valentino. He could almost see thin wisps of smoke rising up of the hammers.

Night had fallen on Dhaka city while he was writing – he didn’t keep any clocks in his house and his phone was upstairs, idle and losing its charge. His fingers ached – his wrists ached and it felt as though he had just run a marathon yet he felt happier than he had in the longest time. His mind felt clearer – as though he had just returned to being himself again.

He coughed. It sounded like a gunshot going off in his chest and he clutched a hand to his heart. A sharp flare of pain went through him and he coughed again. Three times. Then nothing. He checked his palm which he had used to cup his mouth and saw flecks of ruby in mixed with the phlegm.

Farhan put it out of mind – he went back upstairs to sleep. He checked his phone before falling asleep – there were a few missed calls from Anita, the girl whose house he had been last night. He put the phone under his pillow and went back to sleep. When he woke up, he did so without memory, without thought. His phone was blaring and he had to shut it off if he wanted to get any work done that day. It was Afrida this time, his agent – she had been calling on and off for the past two days.

“Hello?”

“Farhan. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Don’t bother me.”

“What’s wrong with you? I thought you had died.”

“I just woke up. I don’t have time for your shit this early in the morning.” “Fuck you Farhan. As if you have anything better to do.”

“I do actually. I am writing.”

“You are? What’s it about? How far along are you with it? Can you send me a few pages so that I can show it to the Daily Star? They have an anthology coming up and…” “Afrida listen. I don’t have time for this. I have to go back to work. I’m leaving the phone up here as well so don’t call me.”

“Farhan I really think….”

He cut it off – her voice was starting to get on his nerves. He skipped breakfast – his cough from yesterday was gone now but he still had a slight headache – residual effects of the drinking he supposed.

When he got downstairs with a mug of instant coffee in his hand, there was a little note in waiting for him in the typewriter.

Good morning.

Something about that smiley unnerved him but he let it slide. Consciously or not, the messages that he was receiving from the typewriter were not registering in his mind as it should have. There was work to be done and he remembered his father’s words, how a man sometimes has to put his fears and his worries behind him and get on with the job at hand.

He had to write and he had to do it soon before that tenuous thread connecting him to the story frayed away – it was like a portal to another world that only he could glimpse into. He also knew that it was a short lived one. There were hundreds of stories which he had been offered the glimpse into but only so many he could finish before that mad spurt of creative energy ran itself out. He had four unfinished books, mostly because that initial excitement had run out. He touched his fingers lightly on the keys again – a bit fearful, like how a child would touch something he suspects might be hot.

The keys felt right again – the typewriter smiled its manic smile and sucked him in. The doorbell rang. It was night. His head was pounding – his fingers felt like the tips had been toasted off and his back was screaming a silent requiem of agony.

He went over to the door, amazed at how much his head and the rest of his body hurt. That’s what sitting in a chair for ten hours straight will do to you, he thought to himself. A woman was there and in the dark, he couldn’t recognize her. “Open up.” She said.

He heard the words but they didn’t register in his mind. He squinted out through the darkness outside, half expecting some sort of monster to pop out but saw only the silhouette of a woman. “Who is it?”

“Oh now you don’t know who I am you son of a bitch?” she said.

He blindly groped for the light switch. He touched the hard muscled body of a gecko and recoiled. The night was dark and somehow deep – there were no street lights near his house and all he could see was the pale glow of the moon shining through isolated holes in the trees and reflecting off the asphalt. There was a slight sheen on the ground. It had rained – an isolated thought rose up from his mind, followed by when? When did it rain and how did I not notice?
The light flickered once briefly before turning on.

It was a woman – vaguely familiar. She was pretty but that was running toward becoming something of the past. Her face had the indistinguishable marks of hard living on them – cheeks were lined and there were crow’s feet under her eyes that could have been from an ostrich. Her face had too much make up and she wore clothes that left very little to the imagination. The smell of cheap whiskey followed her like a loyal dog.

“Who are you?”

His face was in shadow so she didn’t know where to aim when she spit at him. Farhan’s mind was in a fog – it felt as though he had just woken up from a thousand year old nap. He kept thinking back to his study, to getting back to work, to finishing what he started.

The sticky globule of spit flew through the air and hit the wall with a loud splat. “You fucker. You leave me hanging out to dry. You were supposed to help me pay the rent you bastard.”

Anita – that was her name. The typewriter swam into his mind, calling him again. Come back, its voice seemed to whisper.

“Anita stop. What’s going on? Stop yelling you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.” “Don’t tell me what to do. I let you into my bed every night and you don’t call me for five fucking days. What the hell Farhan?”

“Five days? Wha..? Come inside. It’s okay. I’ve just been busy that’s all.” Get her out of here. A metallic voice seemed to say from behind him.

“With whom?”

“Baby come inside. It’s okay I am really sorry.” He didn’t really know why he was saying this – he wasn’t particularly sorry about not seeing her but something about what she had said struck him as odd. He also knew that he wanted to bring her into the house, to his study, to the typewriter so that he could show it to her.
Bring her here. We can use her.

They sat down in the study – the only room in the house which was presentable enough to bring people to.

“Wow is this it? Is this your study? Is this where you wrote ‘Startup Dhaka?” And …. Oh my god, that typewriter – that has to be what you used to write it right?”

His eyes followed hers to the typewriter and it was on the tip of his tongue to say that the typewriter was new actually when he saw that it had changed somehow. He didn’t want her touching the typewriter yet he wanted to as well. He was starting to get an awful ache in his head – it felt like someone had hammered a massive iron spike there. The dull taste of gunmetal filled his mouth.

Rest. Let us take care of you.

It looked angry. That’s what the Valentino typewriter seemed to be - he could almost feel it; a steady pulse of dark heat radiating from the typewriter like a miniature sun. Yet, it also seemed to be inviting him closer, a friend signaling him to whisper something in secret. He looked at the manuscript lying next to it, a large pile of paper stretching six inches high. His head still hurt and his mind seemed unbelievably weary – it felt as though the inside of his head was filled with peals of laughter.

“Farhan, are you alright?” she asked, her voice a tremulous imitation of her former bolster. He could hear the wind rushing through the trees outside, making them sing. Perhaps, he could also hear the first silent taps of rain falling on this tormented city but all of his attention was focused on the Valentino.

It seemed to be speaking to him, with the soulful cadences of a lover, whispering unspeakable things to him.

He moved into the light and Anita could see that he had changed somehow in the past week. Outside it was too dark to make out details but, under the dim glow of tungsten lightbulbs, he looked on the verge of dying.

His gait was different. He moved as though his weight was a tremendous burden on himself and that he was in a great deal of pain as well. His hair was thinning, she could see naked patches of his scalp reflecting the dim glow and could even make out how some of the hairs had gone white. There were boils on his face – some newly formed while others looked old and gangrenous; they looked like mushrooms growing out of his face crowned with dried over pus and his arms. They looked like an occupying army, trying to eat him.

She felt like throwing up. For the first time since arriving, she registered the smell in the room – it was ancient, foul, smelling like how rotten fruit buried underground for millennia would smell. Why she hadn’t smelled it before, she asked herself. The room seemed to be filling up with a thin smoke and everything in it was in a strange perspective – what was straight looked slanted and what was not, felt stretched to impossible dimension. A shrill voice in the back of her head warned her to leave but she was unable to. Manacles of fear rooted her to the floor. Soon her eyes followed his and landed on the typewriter as well. It seemed to be smiling.

She heard the clickety clack of keys and felt dark panic choke her heart. Farhan was standing in front of the typewriter and she could clearly see his hands. The typewriter was typing on it’s own.

The words looked as though written in blood.

The quick brown DIE fox BLOOD jumped over MURDER the MURDER KILL DIEEEEEEE She screamed but only in her mind – her teeth were chattering so hard that she felt as though they would shatter into a million pieces at any moment. The memories of the previous night – of the landlord coming over to demand her rent, her unable to pay for it and offering him something else in exchange and being rebuked; coming here, all of it had taken the eldritch sensational quality of a dream and she desperately searched for the moment when she might have fallen asleep, as though doing so would make it easier for her to wake up.

She stood there transfixed when Farhan came at her. She saw him dart at her, out of the corner of her eye, wielding something black and alien looking in his right hand.

For a man who looked as though he had one foot in the grave, he moved with a frightening speed. He closed the distance between them in a flash, swung his arm with the black artifact – a paperweight, it was a paperweight – and tried to hit her on the head.

She ducked – in the nick of time, she could hear the whoosh as his arm went swinging by and then a loud crash as it hit the bookshelf behind her, sending splinters flying.

Farhan screamed in agony and the sound was like an auger drilling into Anita’s head. She lurched forward, trying to put as much distance between her and him as possible. He turned around, dropping the paper weight amidst the ruin of the bookshelf and she could see his eyes – his eyes. She didn’t think she would ever be able to forget those eyes glowing like red hot embers. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE.” He said, though the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere around her. It sounded broken – dusty and old.

“Please don’t kill me. I am sorry. I will leave.”

“SILENCE. You’ve come to keep me away from my work – to make sure that I would never write again. I cannot let you do that. “

He rushed towards her – there was maybe ten or twenty feet of distance between them but he made that distance so fast that she had to move out of the way out of pure reflex. Her years on the soccer team at school coming back to her.

“PLEASE STOP. FARHAN STOP.”

There was no registration in his face as she screamed his name – his face had the dead look of a person doing his taxes.

But she noticed something strange. As she ducked out of the way, she glimpsed him rushing towards the typewriter on the table. He swerved out of the way and he hit the wall instead, hurting himself a lot more than he would have if he had hit the typewriter. It continued typing without direction – the silvery sounds falling through the room – a soundtrack of murder.

He was hurt – she could see that. He was gripping his right shoulder and she could see it had become misshaped, his arm bending the wrong way. Farhan was breathing heavily as well – the boils that were covering his arms and his legs had burst, covering him with gelatinous white pus.

He bared his teeth. He had bitten his tongue as well – she could see part of it lying on the floor, flopping in madness. The front of his face was covered with his dark red blood. “You won’t stop me from finishing my work you bitch. Your saccharine cunt will not ensnare me you whore.”

The typewriter sang its insane tune.

This was no nightmare and with a startling clarity, she realized that there was a very real chance that she was going to die here tonight. With his injuries, she could maybe outrun him – maybe. She had to keep him talking – buy herself some time to figure out how to escape him. “I don’t want to stop you from writing Farhan. You are a great writer.”

“All you want is to do that. That’s what you have your cunt for isn’t it? To keep me from writing – to keep me from being free. Throughout history it has always been the proclivity of lesser minds to hamper and retard the development of the genius and it is morally sound for the human race for the great to overcome the strong.” He shouted.

She was sure someone outside would hear this and would call for help, maybe rush over and try to rescue her but how long could she wait? Those bared teeth looked incredibly sharp – they looked like a row of yellowing spikes.

“Tell me what you are writing about. I would like to help.” She tried to keep her voice calm, to keep the pleading out of it but she wasn’t sure how she was doing. Perhaps Farhan could be reasoned with but in the otherworldly light of that room, he no longer even looked human. The typewriter had stopped its chattering. Farhan turned to it, like a slave waiting for instructions from his master.

That was the key. She had to destroy it but, to her dismay, she saw that getting to it would entail getting past Farhan. His every movement circumscribed a protective ring around the typewriter. She saw a pile of pages next to him, gently blowing in the breeze coming in from the open window. The window was barred so no escape there.

Whatever instruction he was getting, she didn’t want him to get it. “Farhan. You suck as a writer. And your dick is small.”

His eyes seemed to blaze fire and he let out a mad, rabid scream. The typewriter started clanking again, sounding like a locomotive. Anita thought that she would go mad with the sound. KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL

She couldn’t see the words this time but she could feel them being typed into her mind, a psychic link meant to disarm her. In normal circumstances, Anita would have folded and given up and yet, this was a fight for survival and she was still in the fight.

Farhan opened a drawer, thrust his hand inside it and pulled out a pair of scissors. The silvery blades gleamed with malice. This time he didn’t rush towards her – she could see the pain in his face as each step became heavier.

Her purse was nearby – it had fallen when she had ducked out of the way and its contents were strewn out on the carpeted floor like spilled entrails. She saw the canister almost at once. The can of pepper spray her sister had gotten her and she hadn’t had occasion to use.

She ducked, feigning that she was going to charge him – the spray was five feet away and Farhan ten. Farhan moved closer, bracing himself for the impact but she stooped down on the path forward and took the pepper spray in her hand, hoping that he hadn’t noticed.

He hadn’t. His eyes kept darting back and forth between her and the typewriter. His clothes seemed to be smoking as well and she could smell the acrid undercurrent of burning hair and skin.

He rushed forward again, pointing the scissors towards her as a makeshift knife. It descended in an arc aimed at her breast.

It almost hit her – she sidestepped out of the way but she could feel the blade tangling up in her orna and cutting it loose. She let him have it. Pointing the canister at his face, she sprayed his burning eyes with the pepper spray. The pepper spray made a hissing sound like a mad snake. Farhan screamed, his eyes burning.

She backed away. Farhan was flailing about now, the scissors dropped, his arms over his eyes and his mouth open in a constant scream. He bumped into the table and the chair but still, he didn’t come close to the typewriter sitting there.

Unearthly groans came from Farhan and looking at him she felt like throwing up. The typewriter started typing again and she couldn’t see the words clearly this time but she could intuit the malice spewing forth from it.

This was her only chance – Farhan had fallen on the floor and was clutching at his eyes, debilitated by the pain. She moved forward, found a bottle of gin on a shelf, the semblances of an idea in her head. She acted on it. She poured the gin on the manuscript and the typewriter both – the orange eyes of the Valentino open with fear and panic. She lit a match with her shaking hands, the room blooming with the smell of the gin as it vaporized in the air and it fell on the manuscript and the typewriter both.

A violent explosion of sound came from behind her and she turned, her heart in her throat. What she saw then, she would never be able to forget for the rest of her life. Farhan, or what had been Farhan had taken his fists and gouged out his eyes, the eye balls resting on the carpet. He made one last blind desperate lurch – he was close, so close that he could almost reach out and grab her but he didn’t. She was the least of his concerns now – the bleeding holes where his eyes used to be were only focused on the typewriter burning in a wild conflagration of flames. Now or never, Anita said to herself. She ran out of the house, hearing from behind her, the sound of muffled cries of pain and sadness and the desperate flapping of paper to extinguish the fire.

Looking back on all of these events months later, in another city, in another country, Anita didn’t believe that it had happened to her or that she had escaped. Each day that passed, she remembered the past differently, slight modifications to the story to mask the sheer unreality of the situation. She had tried therapy but found that trying to talk about, to express the sheer horror that she had been through was enough to make her mute. Instead, she took long walks – walks beside the languid canals and picturesque cobblestones of Venice to outrun the smell of roasting flesh and old gin.

On one such day, after having walked for what seemed like days but which was only a few short hours, she came home to find a box.

A silver box lying on her doorstep.

She wondered who could have sent it. ned to her or that she had escaped. Each day that passed, she remembered the past differently, slight modifications to the story to mask the sheer unreality of the situation. She had tried therapy but found that trying to talk about, to express the sheer horror that she had been through was enough to make her mute. Instead, she took long walks – walks beside the languid canals and picturesque cobblestones of Venice to outrun the smell of roasting flesh and old gin.

On one such day, after having walked for what seemed like days but which was only a few short hours, she came home to find a box.

A silver box lying on her doorstep.

She wondered who could have sent it.