FYI: I am not fluent in English, I’m trying to be at least. Sorry for the potentials mistakes. Feel free to correct me in the comment section.

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The need for a smoke came back stronger than ever before since he stopped smoking. He needed to blow off some steam.

Once again, he had to face this inner demon of temptation. After all, just one, to cool off. But this is the cliché excuse to get back to smoking.

He took a glass of water instead, risking drinking it from the sink, with those terrible drought that had been hitting California recently, there was a risk of infection drinking water from the tap. But, this was better to drink a potentially cancerous glass of liquid than to definitely inhale cancer right into his body.

He laid back in the bed, looking at the spot on the celling. He couldn’t see anymore animals in it. This was proof that his brain was tired.

Dosing off once again, he fell into a dream, a nightmare in fact.

He was back in the fancy hallway of the Monclar Hotel in Colorado. Alone, he could hear a scream, a women scream along with terrifying scritching noises.

The hallway was well lit by a big crystal chandelier hanging from the roof to a few inches above the floor. Jack T. was almost blinded by the flashing crystals lights marking his sight with purple spots on his retina.

He tried to yell his wife name, Clara, because the screams he could hear sounded like her voice. But the only sound coming out off his mouth was an animal like groaning. The more he tried to yell, the more the groaning was loud and disturbing. When he decided to put his hand in front of his eyes to stop the light from burning them, he realised that his hands had became those of a beast.

Long and thin fingers, with long and thick black nails, his skin was covered in dense black fur.

By reflex, he took a glance at his lower body part but nothing had changed.

He tried to move around, going up the set of stairs on his right, the one that leaded to his room. He moved pretty fast. Too fast even. He could not control his pace. When he finally managed to reach the top of the set of stairs, he took the direction of the corridor leading to his and his wife room. He ran so fast that he blew past the long corridor, pulverising the window of his bedroom, breaking the room’s window and ended up in the snow, outside of the hotel that suddenly exploded.

Jack woke up in sweat. Maybe because of the dream, but also because the TV was on fire. He got up of the bed, coughing from the poisonous fumes filling the room and ran to the door. Of course, it was locked. He remembered, for once, where he had put the hotel room key; on the TV stand. But the television and the stand where devoured by thick black and red flames. The key was definitely lost. He prompted himself to the window but he could not understand the mechanism for opening it. Why do hotel room as those complicated windows opening mechanism along with weird shower malfunctioning?

As he was thinking about this, he felt like writing it down on his notebook. His precious notebook! He didn’t really cared about his wallet and laptops nor his trousers. He didn’t want to have his precious notebook burn, with all these wisdom, thought and ideas going up in flames and destroyed forever, never to be recovered. Jack never trusted his memory, writers have a tendency to forget things pretty fast because they often think about the thousand of things they could write. Their brains are often on maximum overdrive, keeping them up at night, pushing them to daydream.

Even more interesting stuff that he had to write about on the pages of his beloved notebook that was just standing on the bedside table.

He quickly leaped next to the bed to pick it up. But the notebook was stuck, impossible to grab off the table, like it was glued to the wood.

The writer tried his best to lift it up, planting his nails on the woods, bleeding. The effort made him suffocate even more. He wouldn’t give up, nails were coming off the fingers, shards penetrating deeply in his fingertips.

He felt a hand on his shoulder yanking him.

He woke up, laying in his bed. The young hotel manager was seating next to him.

Jaskiers