Chapter 4
This Book May Kill You
Dana’s office smelled exactly like a therapist’s office should smell with its calming, slightly herbal fragrance and undertones of expensive carpet cleaner. The kind of smell you’d get if you googled “what should a therapy office smell like” and bought all the suggested candles.
Evan noticed it the second he walked in, his heart still hammering from the previous night.
He’d finally looked at “CHAPTER 2” and found three pages of Darryl directly addressing him by name, describing his apartment with perfect accuracy, even mentioning the chamomile tea. But when he tried to pull the file up again on his phone in the waiting room, those lines were gone. No name. No apartment. No tea. It was like the manuscript had quietly edited itself overnight.
The pages changing wasn’t the worst part. It was the faint impression he still had of them.
He sat in his usual chair. The blue one.
Except it wasn’t blue last week.
Was it?
“Evan,” Dana said warmly, settling into her own chair with her notebook. The same notebook she always had, college-ruled, generic. “How have you been?”
“Not great,” he said. His voice came out hoarse. “I think I’m having a breakdown.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I’m writing something I don’t remember writing. Or I’m not writing it and something else is. I don’t know. It won’t delete. The file keeps opening itself. And the character…” He stopped. Rubbed his face. “The character knows things he shouldn’t know.”
Dana made a note. “What kind of things?”
“My address. What I was drinking. My name.” Evan’s hands were shaking. “He’s talking to me directly now. Begging me to stop writing. Saying I’m killing him.”
“Killing him?”
“He thinks I’m a monster. He thinks I’m torturing him.” Evan laughed, a brittle sound. “And maybe I am. Every time I revise, he says it feels like dying. Every time I delete something, he feels himself being erased. He’s terrified of me and I don’t even know how he exists.”
Dana tilted her head. “Evan, do you hear how that sounds?”
“Insane. It sounds insane. I know.” He leaned forward. “But it’s happening. The manuscript is real. I brought it.”
He pulled the pages from his bag. Sixteen sheets now. Darryl’s desperation bleeding through every line.
Dana took them, skimmed the first paragraph.
“’I don’t want to forget again. I don’t want to wake up someone else,’” she read aloud. “This is quite visceral.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” His voice cracked. “Dana, I need help. I need to know if I’m having some kind of psychotic break or if something genuinely supernatural is happening or…”
“Let’s talk about your relationship with your creative work,” Dana interrupted smoothly. “You’ve mentioned before that you struggle with feeling authentic as a writer. That you feel like a fraud.”
“When did I mention that?”
“Two weeks ago. You were very emotional about it.”
Evan stared at her. “I wasn’t here two weeks ago. My car broke down. I called and rescheduled.”
Dana blinked. Once. Twice. Her smile never moved.
“Of course,” she said. “Three weeks ago, then.”
“Dana.” Evan’s pulse picked up speed. “What did we talk about last session?”
“Your manuscript. Your fear that you’re not a real writer. Your anxiety about…”
“Before that. The session before.”
Dana’s pen hovered over her notebook. “Your relationship with your mother.”
“I’ve never talked to you about my mother.”
“Haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Well.” Dana smiled. “Memory is tricky, isn’t it?”
A chill made Evan’s shoulders hunch. “What’s my sister’s name?”
“Denise.”
“I don’t have a sister.”
Dana made a note. “Don’t you?”
“What’s my cat’s name?”
“Mr. Dante.”
“I don’t have a fucking cat, Dana.”
She wrote something down. The same sentence copied over and over. He couldn’t read it from where he sat but the repetition was obvious. Line after line of identical loops.
“Evan,” she said gently, “I think you’re experiencing some dissociation. It’s common when working on difficult creative projects. The boundaries between fiction and reality can blur.”
“You’re doing it again. You’re changing the subject. You just made up a sister and a pet cat.”
“Did I? Or are you testing me?” Dana’s smile stretched wider. “It’s okay. Clients test their therapists sometimes. But I want you to consider something.” She held up the manuscript pages. “This character, Darryl. He thinks someone is controlling him. Rewriting him. Trapping him in a narrative he didn’t choose.”
She leaned forward. “Sound familiar?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You feel like you’re not in control of your own work. Like something outside yourself is writing through you. Darryl feels like he’s not in control of his own life. Like something is writing him.” Her eyes were too bright. Too fixed. “What if you created him to process your own sense of powerlessness? What if you’re projecting your fear of being fake onto a fictional character who believes he’s fake?”
Evan’s mouth went dry. “That’s not…”
“What if Darryl is you, Evan? What if you’re killing him because you don’t think you deserve to exist on the page? Because every time you write something authentic, you panic and delete it, convinced it’s not good enough?”
“Stop.”
“What if this whole manuscript is just you torturing yourself?”
“Stop it.”
“What if I’m not real either?” Dana said softly.
Evan froze.
Dana’s head tilted. Too far. Like something inside her neck wasn’t quite connected right.
“What if you wrote me, Evan? What if you needed someone to talk to about your impostor syndrome so badly that you conjured me into existence? Would that make you a monster? Would that make you Darryl’s captor?”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Or would it just make you desperate?”
“You’re not…” Evan couldn’t get a full breath. “You’re real. You have a practice. You have other clients. You…”
“Do I?” Dana smiled. “What’s the name of this practice, Evan?”
“Summit Wellness.”
“Is it? Last month you said it was Maplewood Therapy.”
“No I didn’t.”
“And the month before that, Riverside Counseling.” Her pen tapped against the notebook. Tap tap tap. Mechanical. Rhythmic. “You can’t remember, can you? Because you never named it. Because I only exist in this room, during your appointments, when you need me to.”
Evan stood up. His legs felt weak but he stood.
“I’m leaving.”
“Sit down, Evan.”
“No.”
“Please sit down. We’re making real progress here.”
“You don’t even remember my name half the time.”
Dana blinked. Her smile reset like someone had pressed a button.
“Of course I do. You’re Evan Hartley. Age thirty-four. Occupation: writer. Anxiety and depression, moderate. Currently experiencing delusions related to…”
“I’m thirty-six.”
She looked at her notes. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“I have thirty-four here.”
“Then you’re wrong.”
Dana’s pen tapped faster. Tap tap tap tap tap. The sound filled the room, too loud, too rhythmic, like something mechanical trying to pass as human.
“Evan,” she said, and her voice glitched. Just slightly. Like a skipped word in an audio file. “I think—think we should—should explore why you’re—you’re resistant to—to—”
She stopped.
Her mouth hung open.
Her eyes were glass.
Then she blinked and the smile came back, smooth as plastic.
“I think we should explore why you’re resistant to help.”
Evan backed toward the door. “Who wrote you?”
“Nobody wrote me,” Dana said.
“Prove it. Tell me something about yourself. Something personal. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Do you have a family?”
Dana opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Just a sound like static, like a computer trying to load a file that doesn’t exist.
“You can’t,” Evan whispered. “Because he never gave you a backstory. Because you only exist to reflect my problems back at me. Because you’re not a person, you’re a…”
“I’m your therapist,” Dana said, and her voice was desperate now. Almost human. “I’m here to help you. Please don’t…” She glitched again, hard, her face freezing mid-expression. Then she reset.
“Please don’t stop coming. If you stop coming I…”
Her eyes went blank.
Her mouth moved but no sound came out.
Then: “Same time next week?”
Bright. Cheerful. Empty.
Evan grabbed the door handle.
“Wait,” Dana said, and this time her voice was different. Small. Scared. “Evan, please. I don’t want to…I can’t…”
She glitched so hard her whole body seized.
When she came back, her smile was too wide.
“Looking forward to our next session!” she chirped.
Evan ran.
He ran down the hallway, past doors that didn’t have names on them, past a waiting room he didn’t remember walking through, down stairs that seemed to go on too long.
When he burst out onto the street, he gulped air like he’d been drowning.
His hands were shaking.
Dana wasn’t real.
Dana had never been real.
He’d been paying someone who didn’t exist. Performing vulnerability to a figment. Trusting something he’d created without meaning to.
Just like Darryl.
Evan pulled out his phone. Opened his notes app. Typed with shaking fingers:
“Things I know are real:
My apartment
My laptop
My book -”
He stopped.
Stared at the list.
He couldn’t think of anything else he was sure about.
His phone buzzed.
New email.
From himself.
Subject: CHAPTER 5
Evan stared at the notification.
He hadn’t sent himself any emails.
He opened it anyway.
The message had no text.
Just an attachment.
DARRYL_CHAPTER_5.docx
Evan’s thumb hovered over it.
Then he heard footsteps behind him.
Turned.
The street was empty.
Evan ran home.
Don't take me pointing out other works it reminds me of as an accusation of lack of creativity or anything, but there was this one twilight zone where an author could bring anyone to life by dictating their appearance into a tape recorder, and then make them vanish by burning the tape. Same creepy vibes. Anyway, I'll be reading this one through, I think.
oooooh, this is getting even better.
"Evan backed toward the door. 'Who wrote you?'
'Nobody wrote me,' Dana said."