Pam Swanson had spent the last six months staring at a blinking cursor, willing words to materialize. His deadline loomed like an executioner’s axe, and his editor had stopped sending passive-aggressive emails and switched to outright threats. If he didn’t submit a manuscript soon, he’d have to return the advance. And Pam Swanson did not have the advance.
Desperate, he did what any self-respecting, critically-acclaimed-but-currently-broke author would do—he hired a ghostwriter. The cheapest one he could find. The deal was simple: a mysterious freelancer named “M. Specter” would write, Pam would polish, and no one would be the wiser.
The first red flag should have been the fact that M. Specter refused to meet in person. The second? The way manuscripts magically appeared on Pam’s laptop at 3:13 AM, no email or document transfer required. The third—and arguably most alarming—was when the stories started happening in real life.
The first one was harmless enough: Pam’s protagonist, an out-of-work journalist, found a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. The next day, Pam’s neighbor, Annie, an out-of-work journalist, found a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. Annie promptly moved to Bermuda and never spoke to him again.
The next story involved a city-wide blackout. Two days later, New York went dark for six hours, and Pam’s editor accused him of hacking the power grid as a publicity stunt. By the time a minor character in chapter five tripped and broke their ankle, only for Pam’s barista to do the same thing an hour later, he knew something was deeply, horribly wrong.
Pam decided he needed answers. That night, at 3:12 AM, he set an alarm, downed a questionable amount of espresso, and waited. Sure enough, at exactly 3:13 AM, the words began appearing on his screen:
“You need me. You are nothing without me.”
Pam, shaking, typed back: “Who are you?”
A pause. Then, “Your ghostwriter.”
“Why are your stories coming true?”
“Because they must.”
Pam’s stomach clenched. “What happens if I stop?”
Silence. Then, a single line appeared: “You don’t want to know.”
Heart hammering, Pam scrolled through the unfinished manuscript. His breath caught in his throat as he read the next chapter’s title: “The Writer Who Disappeared”.
“Nope. Absolutely not.” Pam slammed his laptop shut. He grabbed his coat, ran out the door, and marched to the nearest church, where he aggressively doused his laptop in holy water (and possibly some espresso for good measure). That night, he slept in his bathtub with a wooden spoon, convinced it was an adequate weapon.
The next morning, he opened his laptop with extreme caution. The manuscript was gone. So was any trace of M. Specter. Pam never heard from the ghostwriter again.
But, to this day, when the clock strikes 3:13 AM, his laptop sometimes flickers. And every now and then, a single word appears on the screen before vanishing into the ether:
“Write.”