Exhaustion and magic writing, evidently

Oh, how Sean would like to sleep.

He spent every day, and really most nights, writing and writing. But no one read his works. Except for a certain twelve people whose names Sean could have sworn he had written into his books. He was writing a passage where his character was in the same room as he was now, changing the paintings around.

Sean did not notice that the paintings around him were moving. He also did not notice that some were backwards, upside down, or near imperceptibly crooked.

He would have loved to sleep.

But he did not get his wish.

The doorbell rang, and Sean groaned, and looked out the window.

A woman, couldn’t have been older than he himself, was standing in the fluorescent light spilling from the porch lamp, and as Sean examined her, he realized that she looked almost exactly like one of his lead characters in his previous completed novel, although the weird thing was, the only thing that was wrong, were her eyes.

He had written them to be blue as the bright midday sky, but this woman’s eyes were a gray, almost hazel color.

So Sean opened the door. “Uh… hello?” he said, for he could think of nothing else. He was so exhausted that if he hadn’t have been focusing on how much this girl looked like his character he would have keeled over.

“Hello.” Her voice sounded exactly like he’d described it to be, if only a pitch higher. Where he had written sadness and boredom, she seemed cheery and energetic.

“You seem… familiar. Who are you?”

“I’m Emily. You should know, you wrote me into existence last January.”

“Hmm. Isn’t that nice. Well, I really had ought to be getting back to work and-”

“No. You are going to explain why you can write things to exist in reality. Now.”

“I… didn’t even know that I had ever done such a thing. Then again, it’s hard to pick anything up when you haven’t slept for three nights on end. And besides, you aren’t how I wrote you.”

“…what do you mean?” The girl-‘Emily’- seemed confused and hurt.

“I mean, you were meant to be sorrowful and quiet, and even now you seem cheerful, even though I’ve clearly hurt your feelings. And your eyes. I wrote them to be sky blue. And they’re near-hazel.”

Now her cheery demeanor started to cool down. “So I’m not good enough to be your character?”

“I never said that.” Sean was starting to believe that he was hallucinating and that he really should be getting to bed now. “I only said you’re different from how I wrote you, if you really are my character.”

With that Sean climbed upstairs and climbed in bed and refused to open his eyes until finally he drifted off into dreams.

When he awoke the girl was gone, which Sean thought meant that he had been right. It had been a hallucination.

…that was until he found that the door was unlocked.

He had explicitly remembered to lock the house down before starting his three-day run.

Every single main character he had written in his career came to visit him over the next two weeks. All of them had something wrong with them, however. They had different hair, or builds, or faces, or demeanors. Every time one of these people showed up, Emily was with them. And each time Sean had to explain that he had no idea why they existed, but that they should leave him be and he could write them more friends into existence, apparently.

Emily was convinced he was lying.

Sean was determined that if she brought another one of his characters to his house, he’d grab his cat, run out the back door and adopt a new identity. The worst part was, they seemed to only visit in the middle of the night, and every time the sun came up, they vanished. So he came up with the idea that they must not exist. But only during the day. Somehow, they’d continually reappear but only at night.

He tested this with the paintings. He wrote them being rearranged again at 10 pm. They ended up crooked, backwards and upside-down again. When the sun came up, his vision went black for a split second, and the room was perfectly normal. This proved it.

So he did nothing for the day, and sure enough Emily came again. So Sean asked, “Where do you go when you leave?”

To which Emily smiled and replied: “Silly, I don’t go anywhere! Or, I go out to the yard. And then I fall asleep. I dream. And I wake up at sundown.”

“That’s what I thought. You aren’t here in daylight.”

“Nope. Never. I’ve never even seen the sun…”

Sean thought for a moment. “What if I wrote that you could go into the sun? That would be easy.”

“Can you try?”

“Yes.” Sean ran upstairs and wrote that Emily could in fact walk in the sun, grabbed her a blanket, and ran back down. He handed her the blanket, and then sprinted to his own bedroom and fell asleep.

When he woke up, she was still there, but she was quiet. Shaking.

“What’s wrong?” Sean asked. He felt worried.

“The sunlight is cold.”

“Cold?” Sean walked outside and felt the warm sunlight. It was perfectly nice.

He walked back in. Sean put his hand on her shoulder, and she said, “It was beautiful. But so, so cold. I felt like I was buried in ice. I felt like I couldn’t move. I don’t even know how I made it back outside. Can I… ask for something?”

“What?”

“Please. Write it so I vanish in the sun again. I will always reappear at night-time. I got to see the sun once. I don’t need to again. Please? Can you write it?”

“…sure. You’ve got it.” Sean walked back up to his office and shredded the page that said Emily could be in the sun, and when he came back down the stairs, Emily had vanished and her blanket sat empty.