CHAPTER 4:
He lasted until dawn.
When the pale light returned he was back at the desk, pen in hand, the inkwell open. The level had dropped further.
He wrote nothing. He simply waited.
The pen twitched. Lifted. Began.
This is the story of Jonah Blackthorn, who owned this house in 1923.
Jonah was a writer of weird tales for the pulp magazines. He came here seeking solitude after his wife and daughter drowned in a boating accident on the reservoir. Grief made him cruel. He drank. He beat the dog. He wrote stories in which women and children suffered elaborately.
One winter night he found the inkwell in the attic, wrapped in oilcloth. The pen was already inside it.
His first story with the new ink sold for the highest sum he had ever earned. The editor wrote: "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it. This one made my skin crawl."
Jonah wrote three more. Each darker. Each more successful.
Then the dreams began. His dead wife standing at the foot of the bed, mouth sewn shut with black thread. His daughter crawling across the ceiling leaving wet handprints.
He tried to stop writing. The pen would not allow it. It moved in his sleep, filling pages he found in the morning—stories about himself, about the things he feared most.
In the final story he wrote that he would hang himself from the banister on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve 1923 the postman found him swinging there, tongue black, eyes wide. In his pocket was a single page:
The ink is satisfied for now.
It waits for the next hand.
Elias read until the end. The handwriting shifted halfway through—Jonah's loose scrawl giving way to Lydia's tight angles, then to something neither of them, letters sharp as broken glass.
When the story finished, the pen rested.
Elias noticed his own hand ached. He had been gripping the barrel so hard the ebony had left dents in his skin.
He turned the page. Blank.
For now.