One day, author Gregory T. Penhaligon woke up in his own fantasy horror novel, which was, to say the least, a bit weird. For a start off, his bed, a handsome piece of mattress and mahogany, had vanished, replaced by something that felt suspiciously like damp straw and leaking farmyard animals. His dressing gown was gone too, replaced by a jerkin made of something which may have been leather and that creaked ominously whenever he moved. The wallpaper had transformed into stone walls. And the air smelled faintly of mildew and backstory. It was all a bit ‘Oh Dear!’ All a bit medieval.

Gregory sat up and looked around blearily. “Well,” he muttered. “This is new.”

And the rest of his house wasn’t much better. It seemed as though it’d transmogrified into what could only be described as Gothic Manor Chic, complete with rotting tapestries, whispering shadows, and a large mirror that actively tried to avoid showing his reflection.

Now, Gregory, being a writer, was naturally predisposed to flights of imagination, in between vats of good strong tea. His claim to fame was that he could name twelve types of despair. But still, there were limits. He was not in need of further stimulation and he had written the Chronicles of Dreadmere mostly because he had a mortgage and an unusually judgmental cat. What he definitely did not need was what he now seemed to be stuck with. Now, Dreadmere was real.

He stumbled to the grimy window. Below, a crooked village loomed, with peasants (or possibly actors playing peasants; hard to tell these days) scuttling from door to door under the ominous gaze of the Barrow Hill, upon which perched a ruined keep that had regret carved into its stones.

In the courtyard below stood a goat. It stared at him with knowing eyes.

Gregory’s breath caught in his throat. “Oh no. The Goat of Gloaming. I wrote you.”

The goat nodded. Its knowing, goat eyes, dark slits of unpleasantness.

To any writer worth his or her salt or non-sodium alternative, all of this could only mean one thing. An entity was waking. And in Gregory T Penhaligon’s literary backyard, this could only refer to the great horror he had created in Book Three, The Crawling Author of Nightmares. He had written a creature made entirely of ink, teeth, and outright nastiness. In the ’The Crawling Author of Nightmares’, the ‘entity’ was bound by one thing only: narrative logic.

Which, frankly, was not as logical as it sounded. That’s the thing about writing: being God of all the story is all well and good, but whatever you write has to leap the barrier of realism to live in the readers’ imagination.

Gregory clutched his temples. “Right. Think, Penhaligon, think. How did we defeat it again? Page 347… Ah! Yes. It can only be vanquished by someone who knows the end of the story before it happens!”

Fortunately, he was the author. If anyone did, he, the writer, knew the end.

Unfortunately…

…he had never finished writing it.

He’d got distracted halfway through chapter seventeen by a documentary on cheese and then somehow ended up writing three novellas about crime-fighting monks in space instead.

This meant the entity was loose.

Rampaging, untrammelled, frenzied, riotous, and… unproofread.

A distant scream curled through the house like a dropped ladle on a large tin tray.

“Well,” said Gregory, “no time like the present, I suppose. Although… although…” His writer’s mind raced from implausible story to improbable tale. He remembered the reason he’d gone on to the novellas. His old friend, Prevaricate.

He hadn’t worked out the ending. Which was a bit of a worry. He’d happily created the monster to fit his evolving plot line, but failed on the basics. He’d failed to answer the ‘and then what?’

Bugger. It never normally mattered. Most of his stories lay slowly dying, their endings unknown, their middle chapters flabby with typos and half-refined ideas. Some died in the ‘Traps of Implausibility’, some in the ’Too Clever’, some in the ‘Too Stupid,’ but most in the ‘Can’t be Arsed’ pile. This one was in the ‘I’m buggered if I know’ pile.

He descended the spiralling staircase, which at least in his head played a few dramatic chords as he did so. At the bottom was a hall lined with portraits of people he didn’t really know. Ill-formed, flat characters from stories long left to die.

Gregory ignored them. Critics, even in oil painting form, were not what he needed right now.

Out the door, through the village (where he was offered a turnip by a very confused woman named Kevin), and up the twisting path to the Keep of Regret, where the fog, which lurked through the village like a watery soup, grew thicker, the air colder, and the sky more, well, foggy.

At the summit of the Motte, the gate stood ajar, which, Gerald was aware, in any horror novel, was equivalent to a big flashing sign reading Come in, we’ve got soul-sucking horror specially for you.

He pushed it open. Inside, ink dripped from the walls. Pages fluttered by with fragmented sentences: ‘the beast stirred’, ‘flesh like forgotten letters’, ‘he tasted of ellipses…’, ‘a dead nun’s nipple…’,

And then, it appeared.

The Entity rose from the darkness like a vast grey tarpaulin unfurling in a stiff breeze, its body a shifting mass of letters, limbs made of paragraphs, eyes formed from overused similes. It hissed in semi-colons and advanced both metaphorically and in space.

Gregory raised a trembling hand. “I created you!”

“

Y“YES,” it said. “ “AND YOU GAVE ME AN OPENING PARAGRAPH I COULD NEVER ESCAPE.”

Gregory gulped. “I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for more!”

The Entity swirled with fury. “ “MENTAL BANDWIDTH? CALL YOURSELF A WRITER? YOU PROMISED ME AN ARC. CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. A SATISFYING CLIMAX.”

Gregory blinked, suddenly feeling sympathy for the creature’s plight. “Ah! But I can! I can finish it now! Right here. Right now!”

“

“IT IS TOO LATE FOR RETCONS,” the creature growled.

“Wait,” said Gregory, pulling a fountain pen from his belt (because every protagonist in a fantasy horror realm ends up with a useful object from their old life, and his happened to be Montblanc). “Let me just…”

And he began to write.

He wrote. Not a shockingly unbelievable and implausible retroactive continuity trick, but he wrote about the Entity realising it had its own purpose, a story that didn’t need to end in teeth and screaming. He wrote about redemption, and the catharsis of letting go, and a scene involving the goat from earlier who was secretly a retired librarian’s assistant with a dark past.

The Entity paused. The air shimmered.

“

“GIVE ME… RESOLUTION?” it whispered.

Gregory nodded. “And a spin-off series, if you’re good with that?”

The Entity paused, then slowly began to unravel, threads of ink twisting into new shapes: a story about learning, forgiveness, and probably a wizard with a gambling addiction.

Gregory stood, breathless, as the last echoes faded into punctuation.

The fog cleared. The sky softened.

And then… he was home.

His desk was back. So was the chipped mug that said Plot Happens, and the framed rejection letter from Fantasy Monthly (“Too strange, too British, and too many goats”). His laptop screen flickered as a new file appeared, titled:

Chapter One: Goat’s Last Stand

He blinked, then grinned. “Well. That’s… not terrible.”

But as he sat down, something creaked behind him.

On the windowsill sat a leather-bound book that hadn’t been there before. Its title shimmered in tooled gold leaf:

The Crawling Author of Nightmares – Second Edition

Gregory stared. It was not his name on the cover.

By The Entity (with a forward by Gregory T. Penhaligon), it said.

The book rustled.

A page turned.

And the next chapter begins.