Chapter 12
This Book May Kill You
For the first time since I realized I existed, the world didn’t wobble.
Everything held.
I sat at my desk and stared at my hands until my fingerprints stopped feeling like a suggestion. Nails. Cuticles. The tiny half-moons. All of it, at last.
I called Evan.
No answer.
For a moment I thought maybe it was over, that the Author had snapped me back to Version One and called it mercy. But the office around me wasn’t Version One. It wasn’t any version I recognized.
The cubicles were too clean. The air too neutral. The fluorescent lights didn’t flicker, didn’t buzz, didn’t hesitate. Nothing drifted. Nothing glitched.
It felt completed.
I stood. My legs came up heavy, like the room didn’t want me leaving my mark on it.
My phone crackled.
“…Darryl?”
Relief hit so hard my knees tried to fold.
“Evan. Where were you?”
“I think the real question is, where are you?”
His voice sounded thin, stretched, like he was speaking through a long tunnel lined with cotton.
“I’m in my office,” I said. “But it’s…different.”
“Different how?”
“It’s not glitching anymore.”
A soft, shaky laugh. “That’s not good.”
I pressed my hand to the cubicle wall. Nothing shifted under my palm. Not a single detail loosened.
“It feels finished,” I said.
“Be careful,” Evan said. “Stable means someone won.”
“The Author?”
“I don’t think the Author is here.”
“Then who is?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But my copy of the manuscript… it just stopped moving. All the flickering, the spontaneous edits, the jumps. Gone.”
Something scraped across the carpet behind me.
A slow drag. Like furniture being nudged an inch at a time.
I didn’t breathe.
“Darryl?” Evan’s voice dropped. “What’s going on?”
I turned.
A sticky note lay on the floor beside my chair. Pale yellow. Slightly crumpled at the edges, like it had been handled and unhandled a hundred times. Like it had been placed here, removed, placed again, until the world finally agreed to let it stay.
I crouched and picked it up. The adhesive tugged at my fingertip like it wanted a little skin.
It’s watching.
“Darryl,” Evan said, very softly, “talk to me. What do you see?”
My throat tightened. “Evan… something’s here with me.”
“I know,” he said, and it sounded like he’d bitten down on the rest of the sentence.
“How—”
“I felt it,” he whispered, and his voice pinched on the word like it hurt.
“Just now. Like pressure behind my eyes.”
“Darryl,” Evan said quietly, “don’t move.”
My whole body went cold. “Why?”
“Because something’s appearing. In your office.”
At the far end of the room, the wall bent like someone pressing through plastic wrap. The paint didn’t crack. The surface didn’t tear. It just…gave.
Then something began to emerge.
A human-shaped absence.
No face. No features. Just an outline that made the air around it look wrong. Like the room didn’t know how to render what it was looking at, so it rendered nothing at all.
The silhouette stepped fully into the office.
And somewhere, in another space that was also this space, I heard Evan scream.
Yeah, this is so good.
You got me. I'm hooked! So interesting.