The scream was not a human sound.
It was a structural failure. A jagged tear in the fabric of the evening, vibrating through the thin, overpriced walls of the apartment complex. It didn't sound like terror; it sounded like a sudden, violent realization.
I stood frozen, the 'Enter' key still warm beneath my fingertip.
Beside me, Mika was a statue of ivory and fear. Her eyes were fixed on the door, her breath hitched in her throat. She looked like she was waiting for the walls to bleed.
"Ryo," she whispered, her voice barely a thread. "That was... that was Mrs. Sato."
Mrs. Sato.
The woman from 402. A widow who spent her days watering plastic ferns and complaining about the smell of my tobacco. She was a background character. A piece of set dressing in the boring play that was my life before Nox arrived.
"She's part of the draft now," Nox said.
The demon was draped over my shoulders like a heavy, freezing cloak. I could feel his grin—not with my eyes, but with the coldness in my marrow. He was vibrating with a sickening, rhythmic frequency.
"Did you do it?" I asked him, my voice a hollow rasp.
"I am the Muse, Ryo. I provide the spark. But the hand... the hand is always human."
I looked at my hands. They were clean. Bandaged. Empty.
I looked at Mika.
"Stay here," I commanded.
"No! Ryo, don't go out there. We should call... we should call..."
"Call who, Mika? The detective who's waiting for a reason to tear this room apart? The police who will find your DNA on that kitchen knife?"
I grabbed her shoulders, my grip perhaps a bit too tight. I could feel the thinness of her bones. She was becoming as fragile as the paper I used to write on.
"We are in the middle of a scene," I said, my eyes boring into hers. "You don't walk off the stage until the curtain falls. Do you understand?"
She nodded, a slow, jerky movement. She was no longer an editor. She was a captive audience.
I walked to the door and stepped into the hallway.
The air outside my apartment was different. It didn't smell like bleach or vanilla. it smelled like old dust and iron. It was the scent of a story moving forward without its author's permission.
The door to 402 was slightly ajar.
A thin strip of yellow light spilled onto the carpet, illuminating a trail of damp footprints that led away from the door and toward the emergency stairs. They weren't blood. They were water.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
The sound of a leaking faucet echoed from within the neighbor's apartment.
I pushed the door open.
The living room was exactly as I remembered it from the one time I'd been asked to help her move a cabinet. Doilies on every surface. The smell of mothballs and stale tea. A television set flickering with silent, grey static.
Mrs. Sato was in the kitchen.
She wasn't on the floor. She was sitting at her small, circular table, her back to me. Her head was bowed as if she were deep in prayer, or perhaps reading a very engaging book.
I walked closer.
My heart was beating in a slow, heavy cadence—the meter of a funeral march.
I reached the table.
Mrs. Sato's throat had been opened with surgical precision. The blood hadn't sprayed; it had flowed, a dark, viscous river that had pooled in the center of the table, drenching a stack of white napkins.
But it wasn't the wound that stopped my breath.
It was the pen.
A fountain pen—my fountain pen, the one I had lost three months ago—was gripped in her dead, stiffening fingers. Her hand had been guided across the napkins, scrawling a message in her own blood.
The handwriting was mine.
*A masterpiece requires a witness,* the napkins read. *But a god requires a sacrifice.*
Underneath the text, there was a page number.
*Page 84.*
I felt a cold sweat break across my forehead. Page 84 was the exact point in my current manuscript where the protagonist realizes he is being watched by a shadow he cannot name.
I wasn't the only writer in this building.
I heard a floorboard creak behind me.
I spun around, my hand reaching for the heavy glass bowl on the counter—another potential paperweight, another weapon.
There was no one there.
Only the kitchen window, wide open to the Tokyo night. The curtains fluttered in the wind like the wings of a dying moth.
"He's fast," Nox whispered, his voice coming from the shadows beneath the table. "And he's a perfectionist. He didn't just kill her, Ryo. He edited her. He took a boring, peripheral character and gave her a purpose. You should be flattered."
"Who is he?" I hissed.
"He is the Reader," Nox said, emerging from the dark, his eyes glowing with a frenzied light. "The one who takes the words and makes them flesh. You write the thought, Ryo. He writes the consequence."
I looked back at Mrs. Sato. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing. In the grey light of the television, she looked like a wax figure.
I realized then that the anonymous email hadn't been a threat. It had been a pitch.
The ending of Chapter Six didn't belong to me anymore. It belonged to the man who had just used my neighbor as a canvas.
I heard footsteps in the hallway. Heavy. Deliberate.
Hartmann.
He hadn't left the building. He had been waiting for the scream. He had been waiting for the moment the "acting" became reality.
I had ten seconds.
I grabbed the napkins. The blood was still wet, warm against my skin. I shoved them into my pocket, the copper scent filling my nostrils.
I looked at the pen. I couldn't take it—it was covered in her blood, and my fingerprints were already on it from months ago. If I took it, I'd leave a smear. If I left it, it was a direct link to my desk.
I did the only thing a writer could do.
I changed the context.
I grabbed a knife from the counter—not the one used to kill her, but a bread knife. I placed it in her other hand, making it look like a struggle. Then I knocked over a chair.
"Ryo?" Mika's voice drifted from the hallway.
"Get back in the apartment!" I yelled.
But it was too late.
Detective Hartmann appeared in the doorway of 402. He looked at me, standing over the body of a murdered woman, my hands stained red, a frantic look in my eyes.
He didn't draw his gun. He didn't shout.
He just sighed, a long, weary sound of a man who had finally found the missing piece of a puzzle he hated.
"Mr. Kanzaki," he said, his voice as cold as the wind from the window. "That's a very vivid scene you've constructed."
"I heard the scream, Detective," I said. My voice was trembling, and for once, I didn't have to act. "I came in to help. I found her like this."
Hartmann walked into the kitchen. He didn't look at the body first. He looked at me. He looked at the blood on my bandaged shoulder, which was starting to seep through the fresh gauze Mika had applied.
"You're a very unlucky man, Ryo," Hartmann said. He knelt beside Mrs. Sato, his eyes scanning the table, the pen, the blood. "Everywhere you go, the prose seems to turn into a crime scene."
He looked at the pen in her hand. He didn't touch it.
"Is this yours?" he asked.
"I... I lost a pen like that months ago. I didn't know she had it."
"She didn't have it," Hartmann said, standing up. He stepped closer to me, his presence suffocating. "Someone put it here. Someone wanted me to see it. Someone is telling a story, Ryo. Is it you? Or is it the shadow you're trying to hide?"
I felt the napkins in my pocket. They felt like they were burning through the fabric of my pants.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"I think you do. I think you've found something that gives you the words you've been missing. But blood is a messy ink, Ryo. It never dries the way you want it to."
Hartmann turned to the hallway, where Mika was standing, her face a mask of pure, unadulterated horror.
"Ms. Aoyama," Hartmann said. "I suggest you find a very good lawyer. Not for him. For yourself. Because in this story, the editor is always the first one to go to jail for the author's sins."
He pulled out his radio.
"This is Hartmann. I need a forensics team and backup at the Himawari Apartments, Room 402. We have a homicide. And I have two persons of interest on site."
He looked back at me, a grim smile touching his lips.
"Chapter Six is over, Ryo. Let's see if you can survive the interrogation in Chapter Seven."
I looked at Nox.
The demon was gone.
I was alone in a room with a dead woman and a detective who could see through my skin.
But as the police sirens began to wail in the distance, I felt a strange sensation in my chest.
It wasn't fear.
It was a sentence.
*The protagonist realizes that the prison cell is just another room with white walls,* my mind whispered. *And every wall is a page waiting to be filled.*
I looked at the blood on my hands.
The story wasn't over.
The Reader had given me a gift. He had given me the one thing every great thriller needs.
An impossible escape.
"Detective," I said, my voice suddenly calm, suddenly cold.
Hartmann paused, his hand on his radio. "Yes?"
"You're wrong about one thing."
"Oh?"
"The blood doesn't need to dry," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "It just needs to be read."
I reached into my pocket and felt the wet napkins.
I knew then what I had to do.
I wasn't going to jail.
I was going to the ending.
And if I had to burn the whole city to write it, I would.
The first police officer burst into the room.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness take the lead.
*Chapter Seven: The Sound of a Dying Metaphor.*
*The author enters the belly of the beast. But he isn't afraid. For the beast is made of words, and he is the one who knows how to break them.*
The light of the flashbulbs began to pop, capturing my shame in high-definition.
And in the static of the television, I saw the face of the man who had killed Mrs. Sato.
He was smiling.
And he looked exactly like me.