Dawn & the Fourth Wall

The knock at the door shatters into my consciousness like breaking glass, making me sit up fast and grope around with wide eyes like I'm a blind person being robbed.

“What the…?”

I hunch on my bed, disoriented, as my eyes adjust to the dark, and check the clock. It's 6 am. There is no one I know who'd be knocking on my door at this hour. It's still dark out, and this combined with the angry staccato of the knocks puts me in mind of all the true crime I fill my belly with before bed. Am I about to be on a 48 Hours episode of my own?

The knock comes a third time, even louder- just three sharp cracks against my apartment door, then silence. Whoever it is is not going to go away anytime soon, and the last thing I need is another noise complaint from my upstairs neighbor. I try to creep from my bedroom to the door but the floor creaks and I freeze like a hunted animal. In the lit crack under the door, I see two solid shadows shift, upending my hope forever that I'm only hallucinating someone standing out there.

The jig is up. I go the rest of the way to the door, not bothering to be silent this time, and, wishing more fervently than ever that I had a peephole or something, unbolt the lock and wrench it just a sliver open.

There's a man outside, dressed in colonial clothes, complete with a disheveled powdered wig. He has one hand raised like he was just about to go in for a fourth round of knocks.

"It's about time, Lex Hastings," he says in an aggrieved tone. His voice sounds loud as a foghorn in the still-slumbering hall. There's something about him that's eerily familiar to me, even though, to my knowledge, I've never known any weird civil war re-enactment enthusiasts. The more troubling part- he clearly knows me, as evidenced by his use of my full name.

"One customarily offers their guest some hospitality after a long travail," the mystery man says.

"I'm sorry," I respond, "But who are you?”

The man harrumphs in a wounded fashion.

"Oh that is rich!" he says. I hear movement from my neighbor's unit and wish he would keep his damn voice down. "Who am I? I lead the 87th battalion in the War of Souls, at your behest, madam, and you claim to not even know who I am?"

He rails on for a bit but I'm no longer listening. I know who he is, of course. It's just impossible.

"Colonel Muskgrave?"

"The very same!" He pushes through the door and I let him, stepping aside as it falls shut behind us in my darkened apartment. The sun is rising through the windows, but I turn on the lights all the same. I need all the illumination possible for this freak situation.

"Pretending to not know who I am," Muskgrave harrumphs again. He strolls around the perimeter of my living room, eyes wide as he takes everything in. "It's a strange world you live in, Lex Hastings," he says. Bent on whatever task he's given himself in his mind, he is completely oblivious to the fact that I am about to have a stroke. Which is fitting: I wrote him that way after all.

"Musk- ah, Colonel," I amend when he glares at me. "I'm having a little trouble with this-"

"Huh! You want to talk to me about trouble? I'm the one who's been stuck on Shady Bluff waiting for the time demons to attack for the past two years! One of my men is shot- he's been bleeding out for two damn years, waiting for aid. And you have the audacity to tell me you're having a-"

"YOU'RE NOT REAL!"

He turns to me, nostrils flared, lips thin.

"Excuse me?"

I clutch my head. "You're not real, I said. I'm sorry, but it's true. You're a character I wrote in some shitty historical fantasy I scrapped a couple years ago. Your friend, what was his name?"

"Jenkin Thoroughgood."

"Ohh." That’s right. Of the characters I'd written in Planes of a Crooked Earth, he'd been my favorite. Which meant, in true author fashion, that I'd put him through the most shit. I had been planning a nice romance for him and a mysterious man from the future, though. "Jenkin, of course. I'd forgot about him."

"Well, he sure as hell hasn't forgot about you. The bullet hole in his leg is a nice reminder."

I shake my head. "Look," I say, "I don't know what you're playing at but-"

Another knock sounds at the door. Both of us turn to look at it.

"Well, well, well," I hear Muskgrave gloat as I walk reluctantly to open it, feeling like there are lead weights strapped to my feet.

.

It’s like Muskgrave opened some sort of a veil and now they're all just pouring through, shoving their gripes at me as they come.

"I've been in the middle of the highway going to visit my niece for three years. I'm starting to suspect I'm on a fool's errand."

"Do you have any idea what it's like to be trapped in a poorly-written sex scene for a decade? He's still sucking my nipples. He'll probably always be sucking my nipples. They're raisins now. Sad, shriveled raisins."

"Lunch with the faery king was exciting about twelve years ago but now we hate each other and damsonberry scones."

"I've been in the middle of my speech about my evil plan for so long now I no longer want to take over Breckenweld."

"I've been on the toilet for FOUR. YEARS."

Finally, when it doesn't seem my cramped apartment can hold any more of my own disillusioned, angry characters, there is one final knock on the door. No, not a knock. A bark. I open it to find the most horrifying assembly of misshapen limbs and garish colors.

"Still looking for my booone," the anatomical nightmare of a dog I drew for my first-grade extra credit comic project moans. Needless to say, I never got that extra credit. The anatomical nightmare lumbers in on legs that are all different sizes, and I shut the door behind it.

"Okay," I say, leaning against the door and surveying the chaos before me. About a dozen different people from about half as many worlds are milling about my apartment, buzzing with low, discontented chatter like a swarm of angry bees. The second I speak, however, the buzzing dies down and they all turn to look at me, fixing me with eyes I wrote into existence. To say the feeling is surreal would be putting it mildly.

"Why are you here, exactly?” I ask them, running a hand over my face. “What do you want?”

"I think you know," a voice from the kitchen says. I peer in there to see Muskgrave holding my toaster upside down, staring into the slots. There are about a billion crumbs all over the floor at his feet.

"We want our stories finished," the teen protagonist of my one shot at middle grade says. "Also, I want my braces off."

"Okay," I say. "Okay. You all realize I've got limited time right?"

"Well, maybe don't start something you're not going to finish. An unfinished story is not a victimless crime," the sour lawyer from my attempted legal thriller points out, fiddling with my remote.

"That's a ridiculous ask. The fact is, most of you suck."

There's a mass intake of offended breath at the words, and I immediately feel a little bad, but I push through all the same.

"Your stories suck, at least, which I know is my fault. But I'm not about to spend my time finishing a dozen stories that won't sell."

"Maybe they'd sell if you listened to us," a morose elf on the couch comments.

"It doesn't matter," Colonel Muskgrave takes command of the room as he is wont to do. The others seem to cede to him as their natural leader. "You finish our stories, you do us justice, or we will not leave."

As terrifying as the idea of all these weirdos hanging out in my one-bedroom apartment indefinitely is, enough is enough.

"Look," I say. "I'm the author. And that means ultimately I've got the power. You'd all do well to stay on my good side. I can make your stories end, but it might not be in a way you like."

A chorus of hisses and whispers greets this announcement.

"She's going to kill us all!" the badly-drawn cartoon dog yelps, pissing a line of yellow marker all over my floor.

"Listen, I didn't say anything about anyone dying," I amend, though it definitely occurred to me. Writers are a sick bunch.

"You loved us once," the villain from my quarter-finished fantasy series says.

Well, for you it was more of a love-to-hate type deal, I think, but I'm touched all the same. He's right. All these people meant a lot to me at different points, and damn it if I don't miss them. Even some of the annoying ones.

Speaking of, Muskgrave steps forward. "I suggest we broker a deal posthaste."

I sigh. "Fine. Let's do it."

.

In the end, I have each of them write down their gripes and their hopes and dreams. The papers I collect are lengthy, and I realize that over the years of distance, these people have evolved to be more complex than I'd given them credit for in memory. In turn, I hand each of them a sticky note with a date on it, months apart, and make them promise not to come back until that date is past. Ideally, their stories will be resolved by then, and they won't come back at all. The cartoon dog cannot write anything down, but in the end, his request is the most simple: I draw him a bone on a sheet of paper and hand it to him. In his grateful mouth, it becomes more real, solid somehow. He leaves wagging his fucked up tail.

After everyone has filed out again, I fall back on my couch in a stupor. If it weren't for the stack of papers beside me, each covered in a distinct handwriting of its own, I would think I'd just had the most extended hallucination ever. Is it fucked up that in their sudden absence I feel almost lonely?

The phone rings, jerking me out of my thoughts.

"Hey," my friend Sam says when I pick up. "Just checking in. You know, accountability."

He says it almost shyly. Weeks ago, we'd optimistically agreed to check in with each other every morning to talk writing, but I'd come to regret it quickly as my writer's block showed no sign of abating (it doesn’t help that Sam is annoyingly prolific).

"Sam," I say, before I can think better of it. "You're not going to believe this. I hardly believe it. But my characters came to me this morning. Like literally, they were talking to me-"

"That's fantastic, Lex! The muse finally came knocking, huh?"

I stare at the scattered papers in front of me.

"Yeah," I say. "Something like that."