Jack Wilson had hit rock bottom. For the past five years, he had clawed through life as a struggling author, chasing the high of his first and only success. The bestseller had felt like a fluke—lightning in a bottle—and his subsequent attempts to recapture that magic had fallen flat. The rejections piled up on his desk like gravestones marking the burial sites of his ambitions. Bills were due. The electricity flickered. Even the fridge was beginning to give up on him, echoing the pitiful whir of his fading dreams.
It was a cloudy Saturday afternoon when Jack found himself wandering through the dusty lanes of a neighborhood garage sale. He had no intention of buying anything—he barely had enough to feed himself, let alone splurge on someone else’s discarded junk. But there was something oddly therapeutic about losing oneself among the debris of other people’s lives.
Amid the usual relics—faded furniture, chipped dinnerware, worn-out toys—Jack’s gaze fell upon a pile of books in a corner. Old, forgotten paperbacks and hardcover novels with cracked spines lined the table, a sad testament to their once-beloved status. And then, as if the universe was playing a cruel joke, something caught his eye: an old manuscript, yellowed with age, its pages fragile and fraying at the edges. No title, no author. Just a stack of typewritten pages, bound together with a brittle piece of twine.
Jack thumbed through the first few pages, intrigued. The manuscript was unfinished. Each page was meticulously typed, but the story ended abruptly in the middle of a sentence, as though the author had been interrupted mid-thought. It was a thriller, something about a man being haunted by forces beyond his understanding. The premise wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but there was something about the tone, the rhythm of the prose, that drew him in. It felt… personal.
“I’ll take this,” Jack said, handing the manuscript to the old woman running the sale.
Her eyes flickered briefly to the stack of papers, and her expression shifted—a look of recognition, quickly masked by indifference. “Take it,” she muttered, almost too quickly. “No charge.”
Jack hesitated, sensing something strange in her tone, but his curiosity got the better of him. He tucked the manuscript under his arm, thanked the woman, and headed home, unaware of the unraveling nightmare he had just set in motion.
Back in his cramped apartment, Jack set the manuscript on his desk, poured himself a glass of cheap whiskey, and began to read. The story followed a character not unlike himself—a struggling writer named Adam, down on his luck, dealing with rejection after rejection. As Jack read, he felt an eerie sense of déjà vu. It was as though the unnamed author had written about his life, his frustrations, his dreams. Adam’s thoughts mirrored his own, and the details of Adam’s apartment were unsettlingly similar to his own.
“Great,” Jack muttered. “Another story about a washed-up writer.”
But as he continued, the plot took a dark turn. Adam found himself haunted by strange occurrences—shadows that moved when they shouldn’t, whispers in the dead of night, objects in his apartment shifting ever so slightly. The story was incomplete, cutting off just as Adam began to lose his grip on reality.
Jack stared at the last half-finished sentence, his fingers itching to continue. What happened to Adam? The story demanded closure, and Jack, desperate for any creative spark, decided to finish what the original author had started.
He fetched his old typewriter from the closet—a relic from his past successes—and set it on the desk next to the manuscript. He couldn’t explain it, but something about the tactile nature of the typewriter felt right. The click-clack of the keys, the ink smudging slightly on the worn ribbon—it made him feel like a real writer again.
He poured another drink and began to write.
At first, the words came slowly. He extended Adam’s torment, describing how the shadows in his apartment grew darker, more oppressive. Strange noises—like footsteps on creaking floorboards—began to follow Adam wherever he went. Jack’s fingers moved faster, the typewriter clacking rhythmically, as if possessed by its own momentum. Adam would find strange messages written on his walls in smeared ink, cryptic phrases like “I see you” and “It’s too late.”
Then, without warning, there was a knock on Jack’s door. The sound startled him, his heart leaping into his throat. He wasn’t expecting anyone, especially not at this hour. The knock came again—three deliberate raps, slow and steady.
Jack stood up, his muscles tense, and moved cautiously toward the door. He peered through the peephole, expecting to see nothing but the dimly lit hallway outside. But to his surprise, there was a figure standing there. A man, dressed in a long coat, his face obscured by shadows.
For a moment, Jack thought about ignoring it, but something compelled him to open the door. When he did, the hallway was empty.
Jack’s pulse quickened. I’m imagining things, he told himself. Just too much whiskey and a creepy story. He shook his head and returned to his desk, determined to finish what he had started.
As the hours passed, Jack became more engrossed in the story. The more he wrote, the more vivid the details became—too vivid. At one point, Adam found a journal in his apartment, filled with entries he didn’t remember writing. The entries detailed every moment of his life, from the mundane to the terrifying. They described, in excruciating detail, the strange man who knocked on his door late at night and vanished without a trace.
Jack paused. His fingers hovered over the keys, a chill creeping down his spine. That’s just a coincidence, he thought. I wrote that.
But something about the journal felt too real, too familiar. Jack glanced nervously at the stack of papers beside him, feeling as though he had stumbled into something far more sinister than a mere manuscript.
Suddenly, the typewriter began to type on its own. The keys clattered loudly, each letter slamming into the paper with unnerving precision. Jack backed away, watching in horror as the words unfolded before his eyes.
I see you.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He turned around, his eyes scanning the dark corners of his apartment. The room was empty. Silent. Yet the sense of being watched was palpable.
Shaking, Jack ripped the page from the typewriter and threw it aside. He was done. This was too much. Whatever this manuscript was, it was messing with his mind. He needed to stop.
But as he reached for the original manuscript, he noticed something horrifying. The pages—the ones he had already read—had changed. His own handwriting, scrawled in the margins, now covered the typed text. And beneath his notes, new paragraphs had appeared, describing his exact movements—how he had stood, how he had hesitated, and how he had seen the figure outside his door.
Panicking, Jack flipped through the pages, but they were all the same. Every detail of his night had been recorded, right down to the glass of whiskey he had poured and the way he had paused before typing each sentence.
And then he saw it—the final page. The one he hadn’t written yet. His breath caught in his throat as he read the words.
He will turn around and see himself at the door.
Jack’s blood ran cold. His body moved before his mind could catch up, and slowly, mechanically, he turned toward the door.
Standing in the doorway, bathed in the dim light of the apartment, was another version of him—his doppelgänger. The figure smiled, a twisted reflection of Jack, eyes gleaming with malicious intent.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. The manuscript wasn’t just a story—it was a trap. A vicious cycle that repeated itself over and over. Jack wasn’t writing the story; he was living it. And the original author? It had always been him. A future version of him, who had tried and failed to break free from the nightmare.
But it was too late now. The doppelgänger stepped forward, reaching out a hand, and Jack knew, deep down, that this was how the story ended. No matter how many times he tried to rewrite it, no matter how many times he tried to escape, the manuscript always consumed him in the end.
The last thing Jack saw was his own face—twisted, malevolent, and final—as the darkness closed in around him.
And the typewriter continued to click.
The next morning, at a garage sale in a different neighborhood, a curious buyer picked up an old, unfinished manuscript. There was no title, no author, just a stack of yellowed pages, bound together with a brittle piece of twine.
And so, the story began again.
Want to read a bit more? Find some more of my writings here-
The Ultimate Collection of Knock Knock Jokes That’ll Crack You Up at Every Age
The Ghost in the Camera: An Eerie Ghost Tale
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