The Writer's Friend

Story # 5 in 'Tales of Blood and Sulphur' by J.G Clay

The black patch on the lawn smelt foul and there was something sticking out of it. Daryl wiped his finger and his jeans, regretting the decision within seconds. The rotten stench would now follow him around for the rest of the day. He cursed under his breath and went back inside to wash his hands. As he scrubbed with an eagerness that nearly scrubbed his hands clean of skin, he contemplated the strange stain that had appeared overnight. It wasn’t there the day before. He’d have noticed. He’d been pacing around the small garden too many times in the last few days not to notice.

Drying his hands he went back out, curious about the patch and how it had come to be. It had also gotten bigger over the last month, creating an unsightly bald patch of earth smack bang in the middle of his immaculate garden. Yet another thing to piss him off. As if the writer’s block wasn’t enough.

He stood over the patch, hands on hips and let the warm sun embrace him, closing his eyes for a moment. It was supposed to be a good summer this year.  Knowing the vagaries of the British weather, he really ought to make the most of it. The weather was rarely predictable these days.

He stretched languidly, murmuring with pleasure, his back clicking and creaking. Too many hours had been spent hunched over a keyboard trying to string words together into coherent sentences only for the coherency to fall apart.

Daryl Dekker, up and coming horror writer, winner of Best newcomer in the Saturn Awards, and the hot tip to take over from the Master - Stephen King – had writer’s block. Not just a block. It was a veritable Great Wall of China, imposing, frightening and impossible to scale. Cthulhu Tower, his first novel had been a tough book to put together, but he had managed to pull together the plot strands, ride it out and turn a mess into a coherent story.

Even Clive Barker liked it according to an interview with a well- known horror magazine. ‘Raw, intense and imaginative’, a good quote to have on your next novel, especially by someone as well respected in the genre as Mr Barker.

The roller coaster had started from there. He quit his day job in a call centre- an experience that he never wanted to repeat- and began writing full time, his mind going into creative overdrive. His next two novels, Death’s Benefactors-a darkly comic tale of two demonic gangsters, and Silently Wishing for Death, had stormed the e-book bestsellers list. The money was rolling, the invitations to conventions and university speaking gigs were pouring in. In those quiet moments of clarity, he sat behind his desk, chin resting on clasped hands, and thanked whatever forces governed the universe.

Now he cursed them. For whatever reason, the new novel just wasn’t happening. The idea was good – A man trekking around world on a sightseeing tour of the world’s darkest and most haunted places-but it just didn’t seem to be hanging together. Three chapters in, and he felt the whole thing slipping away from him. His character, Benson Green, was evolving in to a thoroughly unlikable, the supporting characters were two dimensional and about a clichéd as you could get, and nearly all the locations he had picked, he’d never visited. He had no idea what the swamps of Louisiana smelt like or how big Stull Township was.

He was not going to give in though. No matter how difficult it was to coax out the words, you had to keep chipping away. It was a matter of professional pride. Dekker hated the thought of being defeated by his own imagination. Somehow, he was going to chain the little bastard up and make it work double time.

Now for this stain. He crouched down, not wanting to touch it again. The smell was indescribable – that would be down to the writer’s block again-and when he’d poked the dark brown patch of earth, it had felt hot to the touch. He was sure it wasn’t from the sun. The heat felt different, like the forehead of fever victim, clammy and soft. The grass around the patch had withered and died, leaving a bald patch of earth two feet wide. Even the colour was a bit off-a reddish brown like blood-no the normal light grey soil of home. The strange object that had been sticking out was now gone. If he hadn’t known better he would have said that it was a frog’s leg. Maybe a passing bird had swooped in and taken it as a snack. In the back of his mind, an alarm bell went off.