Stacy woke up when she heard a voice. “Huh? Mark, is that you?” She sat up and looked around the darkened room. Mark was not in bed next to her. She remembered that Mark had left for Germany, earlier that day. Stacy turned on the light next to the bed.
There was no one else in the room. She let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Stacy slowly shook her head, thinking that she must have been dreaming. She turned off the light, eased back under the covers, and tried to fall back to sleep.
“Hey! Why do I have to die in the last chapter?”
Stacy jolted up. Now, she knew she wasn’t dreaming. Someone was in the room with her. She switched the light back on and stared deeply into the shadows. “I have a gun!” She didn’t, but she was hoping that statement would be enough to scare the intruder away.
“Oh, so you just like to murder off your characters, do you?”
“Huh?!?”
“Is that your overriding theme in all of your novels? The main character falls in love, and then dies in some horrible way. Oh! The tragedy of it all! It will just pierce the heart of the reader, is that it?”
“What the eff are you talking about?!? And who the hell are you?!?”
“You still haven’t figured it out, yet? I’m Jonathon.”
Jonathon? she wondered. Jonathon was the name of the main character in her newest manuscript. “That’s impossible.” She stopped herself before she said anything else. Some madman was hiding in her bedroom and, by some weird coincidence, had the same name as her latest character.
“Yes. I AM that Jonathon. Why do you think you can’t see me? I don’t really exist, at least not in the same way that you exist. In a way, I am a figment of your imagination. But, you’ve brought me to life. I exist in the three hundred and twenty pages of your manuscript. And, more importantly, I want to continue to exist to the very end of your manuscript, and possibly in to some sequels. I’ve written out some ideas of how the story can be rewritten. I’ll set them down here.”
She watched as three sheets of paper floated down to the bed. Stacy grasped the blankets as the room began to spin. Her vision blurred and she felt herself falling back onto the mattress.
Stacy did not wake up until the sun shone through the window. She blinked, trying to focus on the room. Her head hurt. She remembered that she blacked out last night. ‘What a weird dream.” Stacy sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. That was when she noticed three sheets of paper that moved with her. She picked up the sheets. On one of the pages, at the bottom, was the name ‘Jonathon’.
Written with inspiration from Fandango’s One-Word Challenge and the Ragtag Daily Prompt.
yvensong 