As he climbed the stairs to his room to see who had incessantly called him during the morning hours, he had a sudden stab of melancholy. He mulled over the feeling, like a man rolling a misshapen rock in his hands, before realizing that Ellen might never climb these stairs with him again. He paused at the landing until the feeling became less poignant, and then entered his room.
When he turned his phone on, the list of missed text messages and phone calls filled the screen. Most of the numbers had a New York area code.
“E and effin’ F,” Lance murmured as he scrolled down the messages. There were two from Andy, both encouraging him in no uncertain words to call his publisher and basically set them straight, and five from Rashir Smith, the assistant to the executive publishing rights agent at Ellington & Field.
Lance threw the phone onto the bed and made his way back downstairs without answering a single request. As he strode purposefully in the direction of the basement with full intentions of putting himself through a grueling workout, something stopped him near the door to the study. Lance’s eyes narrowed as he listened to the silence of the house. He had heard something. Something like a word, a whisper in the air the second before as he stepped toward the stairway. He shook his head and began to move again, but paused when he noticed another sensation.
A slight pressure had begun to build in his head. It felt as if he were driving down a long hill toward the sea and the heaviness of the descent was pushing its unrestrained fingers at his eardrums. Lance stopped and turned toward the study. He half expected to see the room in shambles—the computer screen overturned, the books thrown from their shelves, and the knickknacks broken upon the floor. Instead, the room looked tidy, just as he had left it earlier that morning.
The pressure abruptly intensified.
The chair before his desk was turned toward the door, empty and inviting. Lance found himself sitting before he realized he had crossed the space from the dining room to the study. The black screen sat before him. He stared at it, dropping into the depths of the darkness that the pixels held. His hand reached up and moved the mouse on its pad. The screen blazed into the white light of a blank page. He didn’t remember leaving a Word document open. The cursor blinked mindlessly at him from the upper left corner of the page—a warning, a whisper, a curse, a hunger. His fingers touched the keyboard. He began to write.
Lance awoke, his hand and arm pressed against the top of the desk, his forehead lying firmly against his arm. He inhaled and looked, wide-eyed, around the room. His chest expanded and contracted like a giant heart pumping air instead of blood.
“What the hell?” he said to the spines of books on the shelves. When they didn’t respond, he swallowed and blinked at the afternoon rays that shone through the windows onto the desk before him. The computer screen was black again; the memory of sitting in the chair earlier drifted back to him. He reached forward and then froze, his hand hanging motionless over the mouse. He had dreamt it, certainly.
“Doesn’t hurt to check,” he said as he shoved the mouse across its pad.
The black Times New Roman text contrasted against the white of the page. The sight stopped Lance’s breath. Words. He hadn’t seen his own written words on this screen in over six weeks. They stunned him to the point that his eyes couldn’t focus on what they said. Instead, he saw a short rectangular paragraph, and it was beautiful in a way that he could barely describe. He was sure even a man dying of thirst and looking upon a sweating glass of water couldn’t have more desire than he did now staring at the words on the screen. His eyes finally started to recognize the words of the first sentence, and he began to read.