“Shit. Shit, shit,shit!”Pressing her hands over her eyes, she wailed. This wasn’t fair! She wasn’t cut out for this. Whatever this was! When she lowered her hands, the page had turned.
She doesn’t have much time. Hurry!
“H—how?” She was talking to a book. The book was answering her, somehow. Maybe it was a projector mounted in the ceiling? Whatever crazy production company was pulling this off was incredible. She was going to sue the shit out of whoever was behind this when it was all over and they revealed whatever TV show this was being filmed for.
The page turned.
Come closer.
“Is it…are you going to hurt me?”
A page.
No.
With a whimper, she stepped closer slowly, edging inch by inch across the carpet toward the bed. The book didn’t move. She half expected it to sprout teeth and launch through the air to attach to her face like those monsters from theAlienmovies that Sasha made her watch.
“You promise…?” She winced, waiting for it to start laughing, go “psych!”and eat her kidney or something.
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.
