He sat alone in his study. Books lay along dusty shelves, forever ignored; a faded globe of the outside world sat in one corner still showing the same unvisited section of some distant land, and the only sound that scratched through the heavy air was that of a pen scraping in hurried motions across an increasingly important piece of paper.

The frenzied activity continued to stir the air above the desk, while nothing else in the dark room moved.

‘Perfect,’ muttered the hunched figure to himself. He reread the lines he had just written, the epic poem coalescing at the touch of his ink-stained fingertips. His mind was working so fast that the words spilled onto the page fevered and hot from the momentum. Another three lines written and the distant end was already forming at the back of his mind. He allowed himself no time to smile – he had to get it down onto paper first.

Overcast curtains covering the room’s single window served to deaden the afternoon sunlight. He did not feel the emptiness of the house or the clothes on his body, he only felt the indentations in his fingers, only smelt the wine-like perfume of the drying ink.

Another flawless verse finished, though he paused briefly to scrutinise each word, to reassess the placing of every character. One stood out from all the rest. The first uncertainty in days.

‘Connivance, connivance, connivance…’ the word rolled over and over. ‘What’s wrong with you,’ he hissed. ‘Why don’t you fit?’

He felt a presence in his room and waved a sharp hand over one shoulder. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘I’m busy.’ The word needed changing. ‘Connivance, collusion, conspiracy…’

The feeling was still there, sucking at his concentration. He turned to look, his movements secretive, but saw only the wooden frames of bookshelves and a closed door. He turned back. ‘Conspiracy, collusion – one of you might do…’

‘Might do?’ said a voice that was so quiet it mixed with his own thoughts. ‘Is that good enough?’

‘That’s not good enough,’ he said crossly to the words. ‘Conspiracy, collusion. Cabal perhaps?’

‘Scheme,’ said the voice drifting through his mind.

‘Scheme?’ he scoffed. ‘No, it needs to be a ‘c’ word. Cabal, that works.’

‘Beware being constrained by the structure of the poem,’ said the strange influence.

‘An amateur mistake,’ he said, the pen edging its way back to a deadly heroin. ‘Not one I would make.’ But his hand stopped and hovered, its craving unsatisfied, as he reconsidered.

‘Perhaps cabal is better.’ There was a humble quality to the utterance.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ he said. ‘A master is beyond limitations – cabal confines my skills.’ His mind raced through the possibilities. ‘Scheme is the word that I have to use.’

‘You truly are a master.’ The tone was heavier, the presence refined.

‘Of course I am,’ he said. The pen moved again, though it was slower now, and another doubt surfaced before the next verse closed. ‘Treacherous?’ he queried with a narrowing of sunken eyes. ‘Treacherous, deceitful, devious?’

‘Underhanded?’

Silence – through which not even time dared breathe its gentle caress. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s simpler, but it puts emphasis on the following phrase.’ He made the correction and continued with a critical eye. A few lines of uninterrupted virtuosity, and then he gripped the pen until the very ink inside it was warmed by the angry flow of his blood. This entire line grated against the feel of the section. He read and reread it, but no other way to phrase it came to mind. His frustration built. ‘Well?’

A moment of nothing. ‘Might it work better if the line was removed altogether?’ suggested the voice from close behind him.

A quick glance over his shoulder. No one. He looked back to the line. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maybe it would.’

The pen slowed its scrawl to a lethargic pace as he started second-guessing every word he wrote. ‘Completed?’ he asked. ‘Or finished?’

‘Done,’ was all he heard.

‘Done? A one-syllable word there?’ It was unconventional, but as he thought on it a little longer, he found he liked the idea. ‘Yes, done.’ The alteration was made, but as the pen returned to the paper to scratch its way to glory, the hand that held it froze. His mind had gone completely blank; the endless store of words and half-formed sentences had evaporated to leave nothing but a craving for renewal. He pulled his hand back, the pen feeling awkward against the tips of his fingers for the first time in decades. ‘No,’ he demanded of himself. ‘It was all there, ready, waiting.’ His eyes cast around for something – anything – to rekindle his lost inspiration, but everything he could see just looked dirty and abused; there was nothing that would ignite the flames once again.

‘Help me!’ he whispered harshly to the voice. Again, there was a pause before it replied, and now the humility was spent.

‘I have helped you,’ it said.

‘No,’ he cried softly. ‘I need more.’

‘More?’ It seemed to be judging. ‘Any more, and there will be a cost.’

‘Fine, whatever it takes,’ he said quickly, hunched protectively over the paper. ‘I need this.’

‘Then it will take everything.’

‘Yes, done!’ he said, thinking only of his precious work. ‘You can have it all, just give me this.’

There was no change in the room, no flash of red, no tainted breeze; all that happened was a single word from the unseen angel. ‘Agreed.’

In that instant a flood of understanding and knowledge broke his mind. The pen soared across the paper with unrivalled intensity, the heat building to a climax that burst to reveal sincere flames of orange and gold. He let go screams of laughter as the final words of the masterpiece were layered with splashes of melted skin.

*

As the last of the embers were being quenched by the local fire department – several hours later – it was noted as suspicious that the only thing to survive the inferno also seemed to be the point of origin. One of the men on the team picked up the unscathed pieces of paper and read a few lines. In the following investigation he had been asked about it, but all he could say was that it had started out as poetry, and had trailed off into a broken collection of random words. It was nothing important.