Chapter 13

This Book May Kill You

Feb 13, 2026

The thing that came through the wall wasn’t a monster.

It was You.

Not Evan. Not the Author. Not the Cat.

You. Reading this. Right now.

And that was worse.

You didn’t walk.

You arrived. The way a thought arrives. A silhouette cut out of the air. A person-shaped void sucking the light inward. No face. No features. Just an outline filled with shimmering, oily static.

The fluorescent lights above me didn’t flicker. They dimmed, like they were trying to look away.

I had never seen anything so empty.

And so complete.

The Cat perched on my desk and let out a deep purr. It sat tall. Shoulders back. It watched You.

I tightened my grip on the phone. My hand shook against the plastic.

“Evan,” I whispered. I didn’t have much breath left. “It’s here.”

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s in the room?”

“It’s…” My mouth didn’t want the word. My throat tried to edit it out. “Them.”

I looked at the void.

“What do you want?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a prayer.

You didn’t look at me. You didn’t look at the Cat. You moved toward my hand.

Toward the phone.

Of course You did. You weren’t here for me.

You were here for the story.

Your shadow-hand rose. Five perfect fingers, too clean to be human. When they reached the phone, the air around them went thin. My ears popped. The office smelled briefly of hot plastic and cold paper.

You touched the phone.

The world didn’t explode. It didn’t shatter.

It simplified.

The office folded like a document being closed. Walls bent, corrected, snapped into cleaner angles. The carpet pattern sharpened into something generic. A bookshelf appeared against my filing cabinet. A coffee mug materialized on my desk beside mine, already ringed with a perfect brown circle like it had always been there.

My chest tightened.

Because the worst part wasn’t the new objects.

It was what disappeared to make room for them.

For half a second, I tried to think of my last name.

The thought slid off like grease.

I tried again, harder, like effort could make me real.

Nothing.

Just ACK… like the beginning of a file name you’d never bothered to finish.

Then Evan was there. Standing three cubicles over. Pale. Shaking like he’d been dropped into the scene mid-sentence.

“Darryl?” His eyes were wild. “What just happened?”

“They brought us together,” I said. And hearing my own voice say it made me want to vomit. Like I’d just read a line that wasn’t mine.

The Cat appeared on the nearest desk. Tail lashing.