The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet–a Grotesque Trinity

This story is by Barton K Mann and was part of our 2022 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Jason clicked on the link that entered his name into the writing contest. He had no idea what he was going to write, but just making the commitment to write something, anything, made his day.
So what if the $30 entry fee would spank his pathetic bank account? He was a writer, wasn’t he? Writers write. The decision to go for it was easy. Making it work wasn’t. He’d have to cut back on some essentials for a while. That meant drinking less Angel’s Envy bourbon. He doubted Bukowski needed high-quality octane to produce high-quality writing, so why should he? Old Grand-dad it would be.
The real problem was the sudden appearance of that hideous demon called the blank page. This was always the most terrifying moment of the battle. And this time, he had no weaponry or armor to speak of. That was because the theme of the contest was haunted, something Jason had little experience with. Plunging forward with not even a seed of an idea was horrifying. And the deadline for the final draft was only ten days away. Hell, the first draft needed to be posted in three days so it could be workshopped. The pressure was on.
Sitting in front of the glaring white screen, something didn’t feel right. His hands hovered over the keyboard. His fingertips brushed the keys lightly, not applying enough pressure to engage them. Imposter syndrome was breathing down his neck. He was a writer, wasn’t he?
Then a voice popped into his head and said, “Write it by hand.” The voice sounded like shattering glass and chimes. He didn’t recognize it. And as a writer with a lifelong depression, there were plenty of voices to hear. Most of them were familiar, negative, and vicious. The granddaddy of them all being the inner critic.
“Write it by hand,” repeated the foreign voice, over and over. Each repetition became more adamant as the minutes ticked along. Every minute bringing the deadline closer.
“If you do that, you won’t be able to read your own handwriting!” This time it was the inner critic speaking. Prompt and disruptive as usual, it sounded like a combination of an old crone and his father. Ironically, hearing its objection gave him the impetus to consider doing it. Screw the critic.
He glanced at a luxurious fountain pen laying on the credenza to his right. “There! Write it with that!” the foreign voice insisted. He had bought the pen recently at a nearby estate sale. Some thousand-year-old bitty had passed. She turned out to be Bethany Manlove, an obscure and somewhat infamous horror writer from the ‘20’s. This had been her favorite pen, rumored to be a rare single-issue Mont Blanc, commissioned by Aleister Crowley.
Staring at the pen, he acknowledged that his handwriting was atrocious. It would be almost impossible to transcribe. He knew he’d be crazy to try it. Yet the thought was strangely enthralling.
“Write it with that and you will win,” the foreign voice said. Jason, who was not above falling for a seductive pledge, began to give the foreign voice a little currency.
Considering the contest’s theme, maybe using the pen of a dead horror writer was a way into developing a story idea. Google revealed that she never had much success, but still had a bit of a following due to the notoriety of her work. Her writing was sexually occult in nature, dwelling somewhere in a neighborhood east of de Sade and south of Lovecraft.
Reading some of it, he found it completely wicked and more than a little disconcerting. He couldn’t tell if it was good or not, it being so far out of his wheelhouse. He was strictly vanilla, a hard science fiction man himself.
But he admired that she had written dozens of novels despite a lack of acclaim. He knew it took a lot to keep writing without external validation. Personally, he craved it. It made winning this contest a big deal for him.
He thought he might honor her bravery by using her pen to write a piece of horror for the contest.
“Yeah, now you’re getting it. Let’s write some freaky good stuff, just me, you and her pen!” the foreign voice said.
He reached over and picked the instrument up. It was a thing of genuine splendor, with an exquisitely engineered, perfectly balanced body. Its beautifully executed appointments included an onyx barrel with inlaid sliver styling and a finely etched gold nib. There was a sensuality to it he felt immediately. It spurred him to think of Manlove as a young woman holding it between long, slender fingers of white alabaster skin, writing out some of the most self-indulgent, gorge inducing, filthy tongued prose of its time.
He had never considered working in the horror erotica genre before. It always made him uncomfortable to read it. Not because he was uptight or a prude or anything, but because it seemed too visceral. And it married sex and violence as if they went together like tea and honey. As if their bonding was something natural and inevitable. It wasn’t, was it?
He worried it was too big a leap for him to take so close to deadline. He could chum out a tight space opera fairly quickly. But this, this he didn’t know.
“Don’t be ridiculous, boy. I’ve been there with you in the sweat dampened sheets you dream in. You have this in you. Now grab yourself a beaker of giggle juice, peel a ream for a sheet or two and get going,” the foreign voice said.
Now Jason knew something was wrong. Those words weren’t something he would ever think, much less say to himself. And what the hell was giggle juice?
The pen was growing warm in his hand. He felt those cool fingers of Manlove’s wrapping around his, urging him forward. He took a breath and clamored anxiously for somewhere to begin. He started thinking about what the story’s structure should be.
“Don’t tell me you’re a plotter?” the foreign voice said.
He was. He always drew a map for his stories to follow.
Suddenly everything he knew about story telling became scrambled intellectual eggs. “But what about uh, Freytag’s Pyramid, or the three-act structure, and character development and, and, the final denouement?” he cried.
“Write now!” demanded the foreign voice.
Like an obedient schoolboy, Jason pushed his iMac aside and pulled a blank piece of paper in front of him. To his surprise, he penned a title out of thin air, “The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet–a Grotesque Trinity,” and then started writing. And he wrote. And wrote. One hour later, he was still writing. He wanted to stop, but couldn’t. He knew he had passed the 1500-word count, but that didn’t slow him down. Most of what he had put down so far was probably preliminary brain storming. First draft miasma to be trimmed down in editing. At least, that’s what he hoped.
The fact was, he had no idea what he had written. Someone or something else was driving this train. It was like he had become a vestigial appendage connected limply to the body of his writing hand.
He watched as the pen’s tip danced across the page, trailing ink in its wake. Words congealed out of an underground river of thought and came together in breathtaking and obscene shape. He watched himself describing horribly raw and intense acts committed by a cast of gorgeous and insolent characters. There was a story extricating itself and somehow he knew that even as the loquacious first pass revealed itself, a perfectly shaped, edited version would follow.
He watched his words painting pictures with de Sade’s palette, where pleasure and pain tied together in the interacting dopamine and opioid systems of the brain. His own brain’s nucleus accumbens, pallidum, and amygdala were all lighting up like napalm drenched forests in Vietnam.
He thought if he kept writing, he might reach a point of no return.
“You can’t stop now, you pathetic fool! We have a contest to win!” the foreign voice screamed.
When he actually tried to stop, the lines of inlaid silver in the pen suddenly flicked outward and imbedded themselves in his flesh. The pain was considerable and bright. For seconds, he couldn’t catch his breath. But he didn’t stop writing.
He looked at the page. His blood had replaced the ink flowing from the pen.
“Now you’re putting yourself into it!” cried the foreign voice. “Let’s bring it home!”
Then a moment came when he was able to let go of the pen and stop writing. His head drooped down until his forehead hit the desk.
Under his breath, Jason thanked God for sparing him further torture.
“Don’t go thanking the Lord. He had nothing to do with it.” the foreign voice said. “We only stopped because, well, we always have a hard time coming up with an ending.”