Максим Князев – The white door (страница 2)

this relic of a house at a price that was too good to

be true.

There's a reason it's cheap, Tom, his realtor had said,

her eyes darting toward the basement door. Folks say

it feels… watched.

Tom had laughed it off. He was a horror writer, for

Christ's sake. He made his living from things that felt

watched. He'd written fourteen novels, seven of

which had hit the New York Times bestseller list. But

that was five years ago. Now, his last book, The

Graveyard Shift, had sold barely fifteen thousand

copies. The reviews called it "tired" and "derivative."

One particularly vicious blogger compared his prose

to "wet cardboard left out in the rain."

So here he was. Forty-seven years old. Divorced.

Broke. And staring at a blizzard that looked like it

wanted to eat the world.

He checked his phone. No signal. The landline was

dead too—the wires were probably down somewhere

between here and town. He was cut off. Stranded.

Alone.Just like in one of your stories, he thought, and

grimaced. The irony was so thick you could choke on

it.

He turned away from the window and looked at his

desk. It was a massive oak thing, scarred with ink

stains and cigarette burns from some previous owner.

On it sat his new acquisition: the Royal E-6000.

He sat down heavily in his chair. The springs creaked.

He flexed his fingers, cracked his knuckles, and

placed them on the keys. The plastic was cold

against his skin.

"Okay, Tommy," he muttered to himself. "Just one

sentence. Just one fucking sentence. That's all you

need to get the ball rolling."

He took a breath and typed:

The house was quiet, too quiet, and Henry knew

something was terribly wrong.

He stared at the words. They were… fine. Generic.

The kind of opening you'd expect from a first-time

writer who'd just discovered the genre. But it was a

start.

He was about to type the second sentence when the

screen flickered. He frowned. The power was still on,

albeit flickering with the storm. But this wasn't a

power flicker. The screen blinked black, then white

again.

And there, underneath his sentence, was another

one.

Tom looked at the window, but he couldn't see

anything except the whirling white death outside.He leaned back. A chill went up his spine that had

nothing to do with the draft from the window. That

was… weird. The E-6000 had a word-prediction

feature, he knew that. But it usually suggested single

words, not entire sentences. And it certainly didn't

type them in for you. He'd turned that feature off.

He chalked it up to a glitch. Maybe the storm was

affecting the internal circuits.

He typed another sentence:

Henry didn't want to go down into the basement, but

he knew he had to.

He waited.

The screen flickered again, longer this time. The

cursor jumped.

Thomas Keene didn't want to go down into the

basement either, but he knew he had to eventually.