A flip of a page. There were no strings she could see, even as she got closer.
I promise.
That time, there was even a little swirly underline, as if whoever had written it had put in a flourish under the sentence to emphasize it.
Far faster than she had hoped, she ran out of carpet, and wasstanding at the edge of the bed, only a few inches away from the terrifying book. She was shaking like a leaf. “Now what?”
The page turned.
And instead of a page with only a few words on it, she saw…
A window. Not a picture of a window—not a drawing of one—buta literal window. As though the book was no longer there, but a gate into another place. A hole through the bed and the floors beneath, somehow cut impossibly through that space and intosomewhere else.
Into somewhere that had rows and rows and rows of what looked like…books?
A library?
Furrowing her brow, she leaned closer in confusion. It had to be an optical illusion. A little miniature set, built into the bed, lit up really cleverly from inside. This was just some sort of wild forced perspective thingy, she knew?—
Gravity shifted.
The book seemed to grow.
A hand reached from inside the bed. Tanned, muscular, and firm. It grasped hers.
“I have you.”
It pulled.
Sidney screamed.
Sasha wokeup lying on her side on a marble floor. It took her a long moment to realize what she was looking at—the black and white checkered surface was definitely a far cry from the aged slatted wood floor of her shitty Somerville apartment.
Rubbing her eyes, she groaned. What the fuck had justhappenedto her? Wherewasshe? Everything was a blur. It took her a second to remember the last few moments.
It was funny how the brain tried to process the seemingly impossible or improbable.
One second, she’d been at work looking at a weird book some crazy guy had dropped onto her desk. And then, the book had…leaked ink everywhere, and then the ink had come alive and…eaten her.
Was she dead? Was this the afterlife? Sitting up, she rubbed her hands over her face, and found her glasses were still on, if a bit lopsided and smudged up. Cleaning them off on her black turtleneck sweater, she replaced them on her face.
She didn’tfeeldead. All right, fine, she had no idea what being dead felt like. But she was pretty sure she shouldn’t feel as though she had bumps and bruises from tripping over the chair and cracking her elbows on the floor.
The marble floor underneath her was cold to the touch. The stone tiles were huge, some four feet by four feet square.
Wherever she was, it was a library. Anenormouslibrary. Rows of bookshelves reached as far as she could see in both directions, stretching high overhead. They reminded her of the libraries she had visited in Europe on her trips there for her Masters degree. The old wood was polished and oiled to a deep, dark shine that seemed to absorb any light that touched it, turning it so dark brown that it was almost black.
Countless books and scrolls were stacked on the shelves, notebooks and scraps of paper shoved in anywhere they’d fit. Tables and chairs ran down the main aisle beside her for visitors, though there wasn’t anyone else in the library that she could see.
Shadows clung to every corner, obscuring what could be hiding in the darkness. Looking up, the building had three floors, and an arched, coffered wooden ceiling that she could barely make out in the dim light.
The whole place smelled exactly like she would expect a place filled with aging and antique books to smell—of dust and old leather. Picking herself up off the floor, she brushed herself off.
“Hello?”
Her voice echoed. Part of her expected an angry librarian ghost to shush her, but nobody answered.
The room was dimly lit from stained-glass fixtures that hung from the ceilings overhead, dangling on long chains. They cast the room in strange shadows of every color, but the dominant shading was mostly amber with shadows in an odd, unsettling shade of magenta-purple.
