The Ink Feast
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The Ink Feast
Ava Locke hadn’t slept properly in weeks. What began as mild insomnia had decayed into something else—something malignant. Sleep no longer felt like rest; it was an abyss. Every time she closed her eyes, she fell into dreams that flickered and popped like damaged film reels, punctuated by jagged silhouettes convulsing in impossible rhythms. Each morning, she woke with her arms curled around her sketchbook as if in defense. Her hands were always black, fingers stained up to the knuckles with ink that never quite washed away.
Ava lived alone in a crumbling brownstone on Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. The building was the sort of place that seemed to rot from the inside out: wallpaper curling like dying leaves, windowpanes forever dusted in grime, pipes that wheezed in the walls like arthritic lungs. Sometimes, late at night, she would lie awake listening to the house sigh. She tried to tell herself it was settling. Everyone said old houses did that.
But lately, the noises had changed.
They had become deliberate.
I. The sketches
Ava made her living as an illustrator. Children’s books, playful logos, murals for pediatricians’ offices — bright, buoyant images that danced with color and cheer. Her agent adored her work. “You’ve got such a light touch,” he’d told her once. “Like you’ve never had a nightmare in your life.”
That was a lie.
The nightmares had always been there. They just hadn’t clawed their way onto the page until recently.
The first drawing appeared a month ago. She found it folded neatly in the center of her main sketchbook, a book she hadn’t touched in weeks. It depicted a humanoid figure, stretched nearly twice the proportions of an average person. Its limbs were thin as reeds, terminating in spidery hands that ended in dark nibs. Its face was a blank oval of wrinkled, waterlogged skin, from which two cavernous eye sockets dripped viscous trails of black.
Across its chest, dozens of tiny mouths gaped in silent horror, each stitched crudely shut with what looked like barbed thread. Ink welled from the stitches, pooling at the bottom of the page, soaking through three sheets beneath it.
Ava stared at it for nearly an hour. Trying to recall if she had drawn it. Surely she must have. Who else could have? But she felt nothing of herself in the lines. It was a foreign hand — crueler, more precise.
II. The escalation
She tried to laugh it off. Sleep deprivation. Stress. Artists sometimes channeled strange things.
But the drawings multiplied. Each morning she woke to find her sketchbook flipped open to fresh nightmares. Anatomies that shouldn’t exist: ribcages that looped into spirals, limbs branching off into forests of quills, heads with ink-filled sacs that burst and poured language she couldn’t read across the page.
The figures never stood passively. They leaned forward. They reached out. Their hollow gazes seemed to follow her even when the book was snapped shut.
In the third week, it changed again.
She woke to find her hands actively sketching, even though she was conscious and fully aware of her exhaustion. Her knuckles cracked from the pressure she applied, gouging deep lines that carved into the paper so hard the nibs sometimes broke off. Her wrist moved on its own, propelled by impulses she didn’t command. When she tried to drop the pen, her fingers clamped tighter.
She bit down on her tongue so hard it bled, just to distract herself, but her hand continued its feverish work. When it finally stopped hours later, she stared down at the result: a creature twice the size of her other sketches, its body a chaotic network of living scrolls that writhed and unfurled. Its throat was a pit from which smaller faces emerged, each one bearing her eyes.
She vomited into the sink.
III. The house conspires
At night, the building betrayed her.
The lights flickered and died, even after new bulbs were screwed in. The hallway outside her apartment door developed a smell like scorched paper and rotten milk. One evening, she stepped barefoot into something cold and viscous in the bathroom. When she flipped on her phone flashlight, she found a trail of inky footprints leading from the tub to the doorway. Tiny. Childlike.
Scratching began behind her bedroom walls. At first gentle, exploratory, like a pencil tip seeking purchase. Then more frantic. Scritch-scritch-scritch-scratch, racing along the baseboards and up toward the ceiling. She pressed her ear against the wall once, desperate to convince herself it was rats.
A voice answered her.
A wet, bubbling whisper that seeped directly into her skull:
“You drew us. Now we draw you.”
She reeled back so hard she cracked her head on her dresser.
IV. The first feeding
Two days later, she heard screams from the apartment above. Mrs. Krauss, her neighbor, an elderly woman who always offered unsolicited advice and slightly stale sugar cookies. Ava ran upstairs, banging on the door until it swung open with a splintered groan.
The apartment was empty.
Utterly.
Furniture gone. No pictures on the walls. Even the dust was missing, as if the place had been newly constructed. All that remained was a single sheet of paper nailed to the wall with what looked like a black quill.
Ava approached it slowly, hand trembling.
It was a drawing of Mrs. Krauss — but torn open, her skin peeled into delicate scrolls upon which ran endless columns of tiny, perfect script. Her eyes had been replaced by fountain pen nibs that wept fresh ink. Her mouth was wide and hollow, a dark aperture that seemed to breathe.
Ava staggered back, gagging on the sour air.
V. The failed purging
Back home, panic overtook her. She tore every sketchbook from her shelves, every loose page, every commission draft. She built a bonfire in her sink, dousing it with lighter fluid, chanting, “Burn, burn, burn—”
The match flared bright, caught the paper—then sputtered out.
The ink bubbled, hissed, released a chorus of high-pitched squeals like piglets being slaughtered. It turned itself liquid, ran up the sides of the stainless steel basin, and dripped onto the floor, forming dark words she couldn’t read that sizzled into the linoleum.
VI. The final emergence
That night, she barricaded her bedroom with a bureau, stacked heavy boxes against the door. She taped every seam along the walls and windows with duct tape, stuffed towels under the door. Sat on the bed with a carving knife and a bottle of whiskey.
The scratching returned around midnight.
Not in the walls.
In her skin.
Tiny tickles just beneath the surface, like insect legs. Her veins darkened. Letters pressed outward from under her forearms, spelling things she couldn’t bear to say. Her breath fogged the air even though it was summer, each exhale carrying the faint scent of spoiled parchment.
The far wall bulged outward.
It split with a quiet, slick tear. From the rupture poured coils of moving script that formed a torso, arms too long, ending in dripping quills. The creature’s head resolved last—her own face, skin paper-thin, blank eyes leaking rivers of ink that scalded the carpet.
It didn’t speak.
It opened its chest.
Inside was a library of mouths. Each one moaned in unison, a chorus of her voice twisted by a thousand others:
“MAKE MORE.”
“FEED US.”
“IN INK, YOU LIVE.”
She lunged with the knife. It slid through the apparition harmlessly. Ink sprayed onto her face, into her eyes, flooding her vision with black until she saw only writhing letters, felt only hands guiding hers, moving her arms like a marionette.
VII. The aftermath
They found Ava two months later. Naked, curled in a fetal position in the building’s stairwell, surrounded by thousands of pages that radiated outward in complex mandalas. Each page was an atrocity—humans rewritten, organs replaced by calligraphic curls, faces stretched into smudged ellipses of text. Some pages twitched when touched.
She would not speak. When doctors pried open her mouth, they found it crudely sewn shut with black, fibrous thread that no one could identify.
In her padded cell, caretakers reported hearing whispering at night. When they entered, they found new drawings scrawled directly on the walls in black fluid that refused to wash away.
The last day of Ava’s life, a nurse peeked in and screamed. Ava stood against the far wall, mouth split open impossibly wide, a torrent of black quills spilling from her throat. Her eyes were blank hollows. The ink from her mouth traced thousands of words across the room, each letter alive, crawling over the floor like insects.
When the staff finally dared enter, Ava was dead. Her body hollow, skin collapsed around a nest of writing instruments still twitching as if trying to form new lines.
VIII. Legacy
Weeks later, demolition crews arrived to raze the building. They found every surface covered in text. The walls. The ceilings. Even the plumbing bore neat rows of cramped, alien script.
No one could translate it. Some workers claimed that if they stared too long, they could hear a woman whispering behind them.
At night, passersby say the structure still stands in silhouette, even though it was demolished. A trick of the light. A smudge on the lens of reality. If you get too close, sometimes you’ll find footprints leading inside—small, delicate, tracked in ink.
And if you listen closely by the broken stoop, you might hear a pen scratching.
Writing.
Still writing.
The End
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I like that the building was still “there” - even though demolished. Poor Ava! I thought she was going to beat it.
Absolutely beautiful. I wished Ava would have made it though :/ Can't get enough of these