2019-10-25 - Corrupted Imagination

Dante does some of his best thinking in the shower. It's also badly needed after hours hunched over his laptop, tapping out the shape of his next book. He really should be working on his nonfiction research, but something about the town has pushed him back to the manuscript he's been prodding away at since he finished his last novel.

The showers at Bayside are suitably luxurious and perfect for draining away the aches of bad posture and furious typing. He has a regimen, as anyone who knows him wouldn't be surprised to learn, that includes several high-end personal care products with rich scents.

So he's suitably relaxed, at least in body, when he emerges from the ensuite. His mind still churns over a particularly brutal scene he was working on before he got in the shower. He moves to the bookshelf - the only personal touch in the otherwise generic show suite that is much as it was when Byron first rented it to him. He pulls out a copy of his own book, New Forest Dark - his latest, and pages through until he finds a particularly brutal scene that he spent more than a month perfecting.

Sometimes he finds inspiration in his past successes. He spends an hour or so going back and forth over the prose of that scene, analyzing and critiquing his own writing, examining imagery and pacing. Eventually he sets the book aside and lies face down on fresh sheets. In moments, he's asleep.

Or so he thinks.

The bed beneath him suddenly feels cold and damp and smells earthy. rolls over and sits up, finding himself in the middle of the rolling moors of England - the kind of perpetually mist-covered hollows and crags that make up the fabric of his books. It's twilight, or perhaps dusk - it's difficult to tell. It's bright enough to make out shapes, but dark enough that anything could be lurking in the shadows. A chill creaks through his bones, chasing away the warm comfort the shower. With neither glasses nor contacts, his eyes fight to pick out shapes.
But something is moving. Something is scrabbling in the darkness.

Dante's breath quickens and he stumbles backwards, stepping on the sharp point of a rock. He lets out a grunt of pain and moves over another step, ending up ankle deep in cold, dark mud.

That's when something dashes out of the shadows and he feels a cold slice of pain across his leg. He doubles forward, scanning the darkness. Another hits, and then again. Each strike is shallow and stinging, but no worse than brambles in the wood. It's still painful enough and terrifying enough that Dante tries to scramble further away. His hand clutches a wound on his arm. Dark red oozes out, along with ink-black. Far more than should be coming from those cuts starts to coat his fingers in black and red.

A larger dark shape looms from a nearby tree, its shape barely humanoid. Dante scrambles backward, body slick with dirt and blood and whatever the black taint is that seeps from the shallow wounds. He manages to get to his feet, to sprint away from the looming figure. His bare foot catches on an exposed, gnarled tree root and he topples forward, over the edge of a cliff...

...and he lands, face-first on an impossibly soft bed, autumnal early morning sun streaming in through the window. For a blissful moment, he allows his heartbeat to calm, his breath to slow.

Just a nightmare.

He rolls over, pushes himself up and raises a hand to his face - a hand caked with blood and muck and grass. He looks down at himself, at the white comforter of his bed that is covered in mud, at his bloody toe and a dozen shallow scratches across his body. His breath suddenly quickens, his heartbeat thundering in his ear, a myriad of aches and pains flooding through his body. He stares unblinking at the copy of his own book that lies on the floor, pages bent and open to the scene he was reading.