Dark Romance

He turned off the lights and sat in the darkest corner of the room, laptop in hand. He plugged his headphones in and took a final glance at his phone before commencing his ritual. The first notes of Lateralus completed his cocoon, cutting him off from the world. All that existed in his universe was the empty screen staring at him and the haunting tune of the electric guitar. He lay his fingers on the keyboard, closed his eyes, took a breath and opened them again.

The white and brown of his eyes had been replaced by a deep inky black. His fingers started tapping the keys, his beetle-like gaze fixed on the screen. His breath caught as the first of the ghostly hands stretched from the floor towards the ceiling, fists opening and closing. They wrapped themselves around him, barely distinguishable from the well of darkness surrounding him. He could feel them holding him tightly. He was smothered completely. The wailing of a thousand souls filled his ears, drowning out the music. Only his fingers continued to skitter across the keyboard.

He was afloat in an ocean of darkness. The darkness without embraced him drawing out the darkness within him, his fingers dripping the same darkness into the screen with every calculated stroke. He had ceased to exist as a person. He was an extension of the darkness that permeated every living creature. All life had ceased to exist in his universe.

He was not a writer anymore. He wasn’t typing keys anymore; he didn’t need to. He was a conductor, waving his wand and directing the flow of words. They weren’t his words, he was merely guiding them, shaping them, structuring them into sentences and paragraphs. He was an artist, running his brush across his canvas, painting pictures craved to be painted.  Each line on the screen was more alive than he himself. He was nothing but a tool, a channel for the darkness encompassing his universe to rage and rant against the light.

His breath grew shallower as his fingers raced across the keys like a pack of spiders, scuttling to complete their purpose before the light could reach through. Darker and darker his words grew till they seemed powerful enough to swallow the entirety of the living world.

He pushed harder still. The darkness squeezed the breath out of his lungs and threatened to suffocate him. He couldn’t hear his own rattling breath over the riff playing in his ears. He continued to fill the white before him with words as black as sin, typing frantically as his vision grew hazy and his mind started clouding over. The song was nearly over, he could sense the end approaching.

  

With one last masterful exertion, he raised his wand as the music swelled. He swept his brush against the canvas: one last glorious stroke. As his consciousness faded, he registered the last few strokes of his fingers on the keyboard. His vision faded, his soul completely embracing the darkness he lay in.

He looked up at the bright young face smiling nervously at him as he signed his name on the inside cover.

“I really love your stories,” she sputtered, “No one can quite manage to write romance as you can.”

He smiled, a few dark spots still dancing in front of his eyes.