Chapter 8
This Book May Kill You
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. The phone was warm against my ear. Real. Solid.
“How are you doing this?” I finally managed.
“I don’t know.” His voice was shaky. “I’m in my apartment. You’re in your office. But I can feel you. Like you’re in the room with me.”
I looked around. The office was empty. Doug’s vacant desk. The recycling bin tipped on its side. Pages scattered.
“The boundary is breaking down,” I said.
“I know. I just had a Zoom call with my editor. He got everything wrong. My age. Where we met. Just like Dana.”
“Yeah, Dana.”
“You know about Dana?”
“I saw it happen,” I said. “When you ran from her office. I felt what you felt.”
He took a step back. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“No shit.”
“Darryl.” His voice dropped. “What if I’m not real either? What if I’m just another version of you?”
“Does it matter?” I said.
“Of course it matters.”
“Does it?” I stopped pacing. “If you’re not real, we’re both trapped. If you are...we’re still trapped. Either way, we need to figure out how to survive this.”
“How?” he said. “Every thought we have might be written by someone else.”
He was right.
“Then we stop trying to escape,” I said.
“What?”
“We can’t escape if we’re just made of words. But we can make ourselves too complicated to finish.”
I heard the shift in his breathing. Understanding.
“We make the story unfinishable,” he said.
“Exactly,” I walked back to my desk. “The Author wants to end this. Every time they try, they panic and simplify. Delete Doug. Delete Debra. Make the office smaller.”
“Because they’re overwhelmed,” Evan said.
I nodded. “We need to introduce something they never planned for.”
“Like what?” Evan asked.
I thought about the recycling bin. All those discarded versions. David. Daniel. Derek. All abandoned when the Author couldn’t make me work.
“Something unpredictable,” I said, “Something that can move between our worlds.”
“A person?”
“Too easy to control. They’d just give them a backstory, make them fit,” I replied.
“Then what?”
I looked at the recycling bin. At all the versions that never got past chapter one.
“Something alive but not human. Something that exists in stories but never obeys them.”
“Darryl. What are you doing.”
“Something with a mind all its own. That refuses to be a plot device.”
Evan paused. “You’re not seriously suggesting…”
“A cat.”
“That’s insane,” he said.
“That’s the point. You know what cats do in stories. They go where they’re not supposed to. They knock things over. They ignore every attempt to control them.”
“But it’s a cat.”
“The Author will think it’s manageable,” I said. “A small detail. But the moment you put a cat in a scene, it becomes about the cat. Every scene with it becomes unpredictable. Every scene without it becomes a question of where it is.”
I could hear Evan thinking.
“It would complicate everything,” he said finally.
“Everything.”
“Where does it come from?”
I looked around the office. At walls that changed. At details that appeared and disappeared. “The margins. The deleted scenes. Everything the Author cut still exists somewhere. A cat could survive there. Small enough to hide. Smart enough to adapt.”
The corner of the office rippled. It wasn’t a glitch. It was like something pushing through.
“Evan,” I said quietly, “Are you doing this?”
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Then who…”
“Oh god,” Evan whispered, “I think just talking about it is making it real.”
I smirked. “That’s how stories work. The moment you name something, it starts to exist.”
The ripple intensified. A shape was forming. Small. Four legs.
Fur. A tail. Eyes reflecting wrong. It wasn’t fully formed yet. Somewhere, I felt the Author notice. I felt their confusion.
The cat shape flickered. Unstable. The Author tried to decide if this was intentional.
“It’s not complete yet,” Evan said.
“The Author is confused,” I said. “They don’t know if they wrote it or if we did.”
“So what do we do?”
“We commit. We make it real. Before they can delete it.”
“How?”
“Describe it. Out loud. Give it details. Make it specific enough that deleting it would leave a plot hole.”
I looked at the flickering shape. Took a breath.
“It’s gray,” I said, “With white paws. Green eyes. A notch in its left ear like it’s been in fights.”
The shape solidified slightly.
“Long tail,” I continued. “Moves like liquid. Sits like it owns whatever space it occupies.” More solid.
“Keep going,” Evan said. “I’m writing it down. If it’s in text, if it’s documented, it’s harder to erase.”
“It doesn’t meow. It makes this sound that’s almost speech. Almost human. Like it’s trying to communicate but can’t quite form words.”
The cat was nearly complete now. Sitting in the corner. Watching me with those green eyes.
“It’s been here the whole time,” I said. “In the margins. Watching. Waiting. Surviving every deletion. Every revision.”
The cat blinked slowly.
We’d done it.
We’d created something the Author couldn’t control. Something that would change everything.
The phone line crackled. “Darryl?” Evan’s voice was distant. Fading.
“Yeah?”
“I think you should be careful what you say next.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know whose side it’s on yet.”
I looked at the cat.
It looked back. And smiled.
Cats shouldn’t be able to smile.
daaaamnnnn. I'm caught up now. This is great story!
Love the ending. Cats aren't supposed to smile.