This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ctmacnamara on 2023-07-09 14:50:16+00:00.

The first time I met my writing mentor, he was already dead. I'll call him W.D., short for writing daemon, but that wasn't his name in life. I just don't want to cause any trouble or be sued by W.D.'s estate or something. And besides, a writing daemon is what he came to be, my very own personal curse.

My friend Jim worked nights at a funeral home on the outskirts of , and that’s where poor old W.D. turned up, so recently deceased the embalming fluid was still being pumped into his veins.

“Guess who I’m chilling with tonight?” Jim said in his usual sardonic manner, his voice muffled by the cell phone.

“Elvis.”

“Even better—for you, anyway. W.D.” A pause because I didn’t immediately respond. “Isn’t he like, your favorite writer?”

I could only mouth the word “yes,” for W.D. was more than my favorite writer, he was an admitted obsession, the reason why I wanted to be a writer. I’m not saying that I would have broken his legs and forced him to write novels for my pet pig, but yes...I was quite a fan.

“You want to come over here?” Jim asked.

“And do what?”

“Necrophilia, obviously,” Jim said. He laughed his rough, sand-paper laugh, “Just kidding,” he continued, “I just figured maybe you’d want to pay your last respects or whatever. If it’s going to creep you out or something then forget I said anything.”

But Jim didn’t comprehend the reason for my hesitation: I wasn’t nervous or afraid, what tripped up my words was pure, juvenile excitement. I had been in a funk all day after learning of W.D.'s passing. I had hoped to meet the great author in person someday, to talk about writing craft, but now his heart-attack had ended that possibility. (Or so I thought.)

A month earlier I had buried my own father, with whom I had always maintained a cool relationship. It seemed to be a year of death, and it was only February. But more than that, W.D.'s passing meant that the world would never again see fresh material from that master of horror. Sure, maybe his publisher would sift through his personal notes and stitch together a posthumous work or two, but you know how that usually goes: junk, a mocking cherry on the sundae of a gifted author’s career.

An hour later I was outside the great old funeral home, which itself looked like the proper setting of an W.D. novel. It stood solitary in its own coffin-shaped outline, its face shrouded in a vail of screens and wire fencing, and its rigor mortis-stiff back abutting a motionless creek beset by groves of water-logged trees.

Jim greeted me at the front door with a feline smile. “He’s downstairs,” Jim said in a serious tone, the type he probably took with children of the deceased when pitching extra services.

I followed him through the carpeted first floor, then down unvarnished stares into the basement belly of the structure. Each stair creaked, and with each groan I felt a bit jumpy. I had a moment to think, and for the first time that evening a thought like guilt whimpered through my mind. W.D. meant everything to me—more than he could ever know, certainly, and yet to him I was just another faceless fan. I pondered what W.D. would think if he saw me stowing away like some thief in the night, just to get a glimpse of his chilled body at repose.

“Here he is,” Jim said, leading me into a dim room, one lit by horizontal strands of tired yellow lighting.

“This place is creepy,” I said to Jim.

“Yeah, it’s a funeral home,” Jim said evenly, apparently immune to fear from years of working the night shift in that lonely place.

“The lights seem kind of twitchy; I wonder if this house still uses fuses rather than a circuit breaker?”

“The electric’s fine,” Jim said in a cryptic manner, shaking his head and twisting his fingers together and apart like thorny brambles succumbing to an early frost. “So do you want to see your boy or not?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very much so.”

Jim stepped forward and removed a white sheet from the corpse.

“So, this guy was your hero?” Jim asked, pointing to the very old, very dead man. They had dressed W.D.'s body in a woolen charcoal suit, and freshly applied cadaver makeup already marked his features as false and dead.

“Yes,” I whispered, telling myself not to make a fuss, not to reach out and touch the body.

“I hope he wrote better than he looks.”

“He didn’t look like this while he was alive.”

“How do you know?”

“I actually saw him speak a couple of times.” Of course it was more like a dozen times, though I never had the guts to approach him, not even for a signature at a book signing.

“I’ll have to check out his work,” Jim said.

Of course you will, now, I thought. Why do we always find the dead more fascinating than the living? There's no better way to get an author's work to sell than death.

“Do you mind if I have a minute alone?” I asked.

“With—with the corpse?”

“Just a moment of silence type thing.”

Jim shook his head as though he were slowly grafting a smile onto his grim features. “I mean, I guess so….”

Then I was alone with W.D.; alone in the haunting serenity of that Victorian building.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I offered. No response, of course, for W.D. was dead.

“Your novel taught me so much about writing,” I whispered. “Someday I hope to be half as good as you are….were.”

I looked down at the blurry features, the broad riveted forehead that shined in the half-light of the old furnace lights, the serious nose—a writer’s nose, I thought. His eyes were drawn tight and shut, and I had to fight back the urge to open them. His ring finger was starkly empty, for W.D. never married. “I am married to my characters,” he said once at a lecture I attended in . “and if they could divorce me, I’m sure they would.”

I cursed myself for never approaching W.D. while I had the chance. I thought of all the times I could have raised my hand at a Q&A, or even approached the novelist at a signing, yet I didn’t because I feared making a fool of myself. Now W.D. was before me again, only this time I could bare his presence without fear of judgment. It no longer felt like I was approaching God.

His face drooped just a bit—death will change the features of a man—but he still looked infused with life. I half-expected him to rise up and to start speaking, to start flashing those wondrous, twinkling eyes, the ones that made everyone who watched him lecture feel warm inside, as though he was but the kindly neighbor next door, or the great uncle you just couldn’t wait to catch up with each Thanksgiving. But no, there was no movement, and both he and I remained very still for a long time.

“How did you do it?” I asked the corpse. “How did you breathe such life into your characters?” A dew-drop of a tear formed in the bottom corner of my right eye. “Everything I write seems so stiff and lifeless. But you, sir. Well...every word you wrote danced with the tattered edges of some great poetry.” After I said that, it almost appeared that the corpse’s jaw shifted ever so slightly, as though crinkling in its corners to cut a deeper smile.

“Dude, what are you doing in there?” Jim’s voice called from outside the heavy wooden doors. “Should I be concerned? I’d really like to keep my job.”

“Be right out!”

I was about to turn away from my hero when I felt a sudden compulsion. No, that doesn’t quite describe the sensation. I thought I heard someone whispering to me in the half-light of that room. At first I couldn’t distinguish a voice even—I just felt some light persuasive tickle in my ears. A percussive resonance, a ghost. Then I heard it again: “The extra button, take it.” This time there was little doubt I was encountering the familiar voice of my favorite author, living or dead.

“I don’t follow,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“The spare button in my pants’ pocket,” the voice said—a bit louder than before, so that I felt convinced I wasn’t just imagining it. When I studied the corpse, however, it remained motionless and stiff.

“Don’t you want my help?” the voice said. "Don't you want to learn how to be a great writer?"

“Dude…” Jim called again from outside.

“Coming—”

I reached into Erwin’s moth-licked old suit, and I rummaged through his trouser pockets until I found a spare button affixed to a strand of cloth. I tugged until it disconnected in my hand, and then I placed the tiny black button in my dress shirt pocket over my left breast.

“Sorry,” Jim said as he stumbled into the room, “sure hope I’m not interrupting anything. I thought the whole necrophilia thing was just an insensitive joke, but now I'm starting to wonder...”

“Fuck off,” I said. “But thank you so much for this most, um, interesting evening.”

Soon enough I was driving home, half-expecting the button, or perhaps even the cadaverous voice of W.D. to loosen lips. But nothing unusual occurred on the drive back home. I admit that I drove with reckless abandon that evening, with an excitement that bordered on delirium.

I returned around midnight to my little apartment, a third floor wreck of a place overlooking suburban flower shops and second-rate delis. The first thing I did was unearth the button from my pocket and hold it in the palm of my hand.

“Hey, sir,” I said to the button.

“Working on anything interesting?” a soft whisper asked. To this day I’ll never know from where that speech arose, or even if it could be heard on any temporal plane...

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/14v0gsl/where_my_writing_ideas_come_from/