Chapter 10: The Pen That Bites. The Horror Thriller Web Novel - IT’S ME, MOM—LET ME IN by Abrar Nayeem Chowdhury

Chapter 10: The Pen That Bites

The parchment under your feet shifted.

Not paper anymore.

Not ink.

Skin.

You were standing on something alive, breathing. Remembering you.

And it was whispering.

"One choice makes the story... another unmakes it."

The air shivered.

Ahead, two doors appeared — stitched together by words that hadn’t been written yet.

One door was white.
One door was black.
Both pulsed in and out of focus, as if the story couldn’t decide which version of you it wanted to keep.

 “Which way?” you asked.

But no answer came from your mouth.

The answer came from behind you.

"Depends," said a voice. "On whether you want to read… or be read."

You turned.

Debra was there.

Sort of.

Her skin was made of punctuation scars. Her left eye had been replaced by a spinning ellipsis (...).

“Debra?” you croaked.

“I’m the draft that got thrown away,” she said, smiling with cracked lips. “The version where I survived.”

"Then help me!" you snapped.

"Can't," she said, stepping closer. "Because you’re the story now."

"I’m not a story—"

"You’re the ink that didn’t dry in time."

Daniel slithered from the shadows next.

Older. Taller. Broken.

His arms unfolded like a question mark.

“Pick the wrong door, and you’ll stay between pages forever.”

“Pick the right one?” you asked.

He grinned, showing a mouth full of quotation marks instead of teeth.

“There is no right one. Only a shorter way to bleed.”

You stared at the doors.

They pulsed faster.

Above them, new words appeared — written not in ink, but in your own reflection.

“Choose what you fear more: memory or imagination.”

“I don’t fear either,” you lied.

Debra laughed — a dry, scraping sound.

“Everyone’s afraid of something. Even authors. Especially authors.”

“I didn’t write this,” you insisted.

Daniel leaned close, breath cold.

“You did the second you kept reading.”

The black door buzzed, vibrating like a swarm of dying insects.

The white door bled — a slow, lazy drip of light pouring down its sides.

Both doors knew your name.

Not the name you tell strangers.
The real one.

The name you barely whisper inside yourself when you're breaking.

“Step through,” Debra said. “Before the story finishes, you instead.”

“What happens if I don’t?” you asked.

Daniel cocked his head.

“Then the Book decides.”

“And the Book,” Debra whispered, “only writes tragedies for those who hesitate.”

You moved forward.

The white door pulsed, promising a forgotten memory you'd rather not relive.

The black door throbbed, offering a new nightmare you'd never imagined.

Your hand reached out.

The Book laughed behind the walls.

And somewhere, far beyond the Library, a second you opened their eyes for the first time.

Because of the real horror?

There’s always been more than one Reader.

The doors waited.

You hesitated.

And that tiny, trembling pause—
That split-second of human doubt—
Was enough.

The Book seized it.

The ground beneath you ripped, and before you could choose, before you could even think, you were dragged sideways into a crack between chapters.

 “You didn’t pick fast enough,” Debra’s voice hissed, but it wasn’t her anymore.

“Now it’ll pick for you,” Daniel’s laughter twisted above your head, echoing off the folds of blank, raw page.

"Where am I?!" you shouted into the spinning dark.

"Inside," a voice croaked back. "Inside the Ink."

You landed hard.

The world around you looked stitched together from other people's nightmares.

Fragmented streets made of broken letters.

Streetlamps built from question marks.

A sky dripping black ink like acid rain.

And crawling up from the cracks were things.

Things that weren’t born.

Things that were written — then abandoned.

The Inkborn.

One slithered toward you.

Its body was a mess of half-formed words, looping sentences that started and ended with teeth. It had no eyes. No ears. Only a chest cavity pulsing with unfinished sentences.

"It’s... sniffing me," you said, backing up.

"No," said Stuart’s voice, faint, coming from everywhere. "It’s reading you."

"Reading me?!"

"Your fears. Your regrets. Your worst draft of yourself."

The Inkborn’s chest opened.

Inside, a scroll unrolled, revealing every lie you ever told yourself at 3:00 A.M.

• "I’ll change tomorrow."

• "I’m fine."

• "They’ll never find out."

The creature hissed, tasting your failures like wine.

Another Inkborn joined it. This one was skeletal, thin, bleeding commas from the tips of its fingers.

"What do they want from me?!" you screamed.

"Not want," whispered Debra's broken voice. "They need you to finish their story."

"I’m not writing anything!"

"You already did," Daniel sneered. "When you choose to keep reading."

The Inkborns surrounded you.

Their mouths opened — not wide, but deep — and you could hear sentences falling into black holes inside them.

One reached out a dripping hand.

The air warped around its fingers.

It wasn’t pulling you toward it.

It was pulling your memories toward them.

Every face you ever loved.

Every place you ever felt safe.

Every moment you thought you were real.

Slurping into their stomachs.

Becoming their bones.

You dropped to your knees.

The parchment beneath you shivered.

You looked up, desperate.

Above the twisted skyline, something enormous moved:
A Book so massive it blotted out the stars.
A Book with pages made of screaming faces.
A Book that breathed in readers and breathed out Inkborn.

 

"There’s still one way out," Stuart whispered, bleeding from his hands, barely recognizable.

"How?!"

"You write your ending."

"I don’t know how!"

"Then fake it," Debra croaked. "Make it fast. Before they write you inside them."

The Inkborn lunged.

Your hand spasmed.

A pen — broken, bloodstained — fell into your grasp from nowhere.

And the parchment before you opened, begging for a word, a phrase, a desperate plea.

Only one thing mattered now:

Write something real.

Or die unread.

The pen in your hand twitched.

Not a metaphor.
It literally twitched — as if something inside the barrel wanted out.

The Inkborn circled tighter, their chests still open scrolls bleeding every secret you didn’t want written.

You dropped to your knees.

The parchment ground beneath you pulsed with expectation.

"Write," Debra’s voice moaned from the crumbling edges of reality.

"Write anything!" Stuart howled, his voice stitched to the wind.

"But not a lie," Daniel whispered, right next to your ear. "It bites."

Your hand moved on its own.

One trembling word appeared on the blank ground:

ESCAPE.

The ground shuddered.

A doorway began to open — not clean, not sharp — but alive, its edges drooling thick ink.

The Inkborn snarled, recoiling.

You staggered toward the doorway.

"Faster!" Debra cried. "Before they rethink you!"

"I’m trying!" you gasped, dragging yourself across the heaving parchment.

One Inkborn, braver than the rest, lunged.

Its tongue, made of footnotes and broken sentences, wrapped around your ankle.

"WRITE SOMETHING ELSE!" Stuart screamed.

You stabbed the pen at the creature.

The tip sank into its chest—
And instead of bleeding ink,
It bled possibility.

The world blurred.

Your mind reeled.

Because you saw it:

Every ending you could ever write.

• One where you die screaming.

• One where you live but forget yourself.

• One where you turn into an Inkborn, doomed to eat readers forever.

The pen buzzed violently.

A second word scrawled itself from your shaking fingers:

FREEDOM.

The doorway pulsed wider, and something crawled out of it.

Not you.

Not anything you’d imagined.

Something worse.

Something you wrote when you were six years old and forgot about.
Something from the first nightmare you ever had.

It had waited, buried in your brain.
Waiting for a crack in the story.

Now, it was loose.

The thing stood seven feet tall, stitched from birthday cards, broken crayons, and children's wishes that went wrong.

Its eyes were made of rusted coins.

Its mouth was a zipper that laughed.

"You called," it said, voice slick with saliva.

"No," you whispered, stumbling back. "I didn’t—"

"You wrote me," it corrected. "You just didn’t remember."

Behind you, the Inkborn backed away in terror.

Even they feared this thing.

"What is that?!" Debra’s voice screeched.

"The first thing he was ever afraid of," Daniel said.

"You can’t fight it," Stuart murmured. "It’s older than you."

The creature licked its stitched fingers.

"Let’s play," it said, tilting its stitched head sideways.

You ran.

But the story — your story — had already decided:

The monster knows your name now. And it doesn’t forget.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Chapter 9: https://storylinespectrum.blogspot.com/2025/04/chapter-9-door-reader-chose-horror.html

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