Dead Authors Don’t Talk Back

I found the typewriter at a car boot sale, half-buried under a moth-eaten tablecloth. The town was thick with fog that morning—sea mist curling through the cobbles like a living thing. Gulls screeched like rusty hinges overhead. The stall was at the end of a row, where the ground turned from gravel to wet grass, and the sellers stopped bothering to smile.

It was a Remington Portable No. 5. Black enamel chipped, the space bar yellowed with age. The ribbon was dry as a corpse’s tongue. Its keys clacked faintly when tapped, like the brittle knuckles of a pianist long past his prime. I wasn’t looking for a typewriter—I was only meant to be in Whitby for the goth weekend—but something about it drew me in. Maybe it was the smell: a strange mix of paper, rust, and something older. Something organic.

The woman behind the table looked like she’d come with the typewriter. Her scarf was crocheted from frayed wool, and her fingernails were the colour of old tea. When I asked about the machine, she said nothing at first. Just gave me a long, glassy stare like she was trying to remember what century we were in.

“It belonged to a writer,” she said eventually, with a voice like paper tearing. “One of the old ones. Never published his last book. But he wrote. Every night, even after the fever took him. He said it was using him in the end.”

I laughed, awkwardly.

She didn’t.

“He doesn’t talk back anymore,” she added.

I should’ve walked away. But I bought it—for a tenner and a handshake colder than the sea.

Back at my flat in Leeds, the typewriter sat like a black shrine on the corner of my desk, opposite my laptop. I told myself it was decoration. Something vintage to make me look more writerly. But I kept touching it. Cleaning it. Rolling fresh paper into its teeth like I was feeding something hungry.

I hadn’t written in weeks. The novel I was working on had withered into loose outlines and endless rewrites. I hoped—stupidly—that the novelty of the thing would kick-start my brain. Instead, it started writing for me.

The first sentence appeared just after midnight, when I was too tired to edit and too wired to sleep. I sat at the desk, fingertips resting on the keys, letting the tactile resistance of them distract me. I tapped one. Then another.

And then they moved.

My hands. Not mine. Like they were remembering something I’d never learned. They typed:

“The ink of the dead runs deeper than memory.”

I pulled my fingers back like I’d touched a hot plate.

The line just sat there, stark against the white page. I hadn’t planned it. I wasn’t even sure what it meant. It felt… wrong. Like an intrusion. Like someone else had whispered it through me.

I tore out the page and threw it in the bin.

But I didn’t sleep that night.

Things escalated quickly.

On the third night, I left the typewriter untouched, but still heard the keys clacking in the dark. A slow, deliberate rhythm. When I flicked on the light, there was nothing on the page. But the carriage had shifted—just slightly. As though it had been caught in the act and frozen mid-motion.

I laughed again, this time a little too loudly. I checked the locks. The windows. My own sanity. Told myself it was a mechanical twitch, residual tension in the springs.

But the next morning, something new was waiting:

“He walks behind your chair.”

Five words. Neatly typed. No smudges. No misaligned characters.

I live alone.

I buried myself in research, desperate to find a rational explanation. I traced the serial number stamped into the Remington’s side. Eventually, through a rabbit hole of forgotten library catalogues and half-digitised archives, I found the name: Felix Hargreaves.

He’d been a Gothic novelist in the 1940s, known for lurid, tangled prose and feverish plots. Never made it big. Cult following. One published book. A second started, never finished. Then: disappearance. Officially, he’d succumbed to illness, but there were rumours. Madness. Obsession. The kind of stuff that makes for good literary gossip but bad reality.

The manuscript he was working on at the time was missing.

But pages started appearing on my desk.

I didn’t write them. I swear I didn’t.

They were dense, labyrinthine passages. Descriptions of things that shouldn’t be seen: rotting abbeys whispering through stormlight, rituals carved into bone, characters who blinked too slowly and spoke in anagrams. One chapter ended with a priest pulling out his own tongue and feeding it to something behind the altar.

And every morning, a new page. Always typed. Always unsigned.

The real terror didn’t begin until I tried to stop it.

I locked the Remington in the wardrobe and buried the key in the garden. The next day, it was back on my desk. Key in place. Page typed.

“Don’t make me write you in.”

I began hearing things. Not just the typing—but humming. Low. Monotonous. Almost like someone was reciting text beneath their breath. At night, I’d wake to find my laptop open, the webcam light glowing. Once, I found a line from the typewritten pages transcribed into my own document—embedded mid-sentence, like a splinter in the flesh of my novel.

And I… I started dreaming of him.

A pale man with a ruined mouth. Eyes sewn shut. Sitting at a desk made of typewriters, feeding pages into a furnace shaped like a heart. And smiling. Always smiling.

I decided to destroy it.

One final night. I lit candles, not out of ritual but necessity—my electricity had begun flickering every time I tried to turn on the lamp by the desk. I held a hammer in one hand. And with the other, I fed the final sheet of paper into the Remington, daring it to move.

At midnight, it did.

No hands touched the keys. No wind stirred. But they pressed down, one at a time, each stroke echoing like a nail into my spine.

FINISH THE STORY. OR BECOME THE STORY.

I screamed and brought the hammer down.

Once. Twice.

Metal shrieked. Plastic shattered. I kept swinging until the body caved in and the keys lay like teeth on the carpet. The carriage hung limply, ribbon spilled like guts across the floor.

Silence.

The candle went out.

And the humming began again—closer this time.

I haven’t written a word in weeks.

But the typewriter’s back on my desk.

Whole.

Silent.

Watching.

And this morning, a manuscript appeared in its tray. All 312 pages. Bound with a red ribbon. The cover page says The Mourner’s Script by Felix Hargreaves—and me.

But I don’t remember writing any of it.

The last page ends with a description of a writer, sitting alone in a flat, trying to finish a story that isn’t his. The final line?

“Dead authors don’t talk back. But they still have stories to tell.”

I hear the keys clicking again.

I think it wants a sequel.

Please—

If you find this,

Don’t read it aloud.

Don’t type.

Don’t answer.

And above all—

Don’t write back.