The need for a smoke came back stronger than ever. He literally needed to blow off some steam.

Once again, he had to face this inner demons 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, their was a significant health risk of drinking water from the tap. But, this was better to drink a potentially cancerous glass of liquid than to definitely inhaling cancer right into his body.

He laid back in the bed, looking at the spot on the celling. He couldn’t see anymore animals nor anything close to what he had saw earlier on it. This was proof that his brain was tired.

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

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

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

He tried to yell his wife name, Clara, 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. 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 become those of a beast.

Long thin finger, with long and thick black nails, and 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 right set of stairs, the one that leaded to his room. He moved pretty fast. Too fast even. He could 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 at the end of the hallway 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 from 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. 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 all have those complicated windows opening mechanism along with those complicated showers fonction?

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

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 his fingers, shards penetrating deeply in his fingertips.

He felt a hand on his shoulder yanking him.

Jaskiers