The Next Chapter

I wish I could tell you there was something obviously wrong with the book when I found it. Blood on the pages. A warning scratched into the cover. Somebody else's frantic handwriting in the margins telling me to put it back. Any of the usual kindnesses horror stories give their protagonists before everything goes to shit.

There wasn't.

It looked like an ordinary book.

That's probably the part I resent most.

By the time it gave me a reason to be afraid of it, I'd already brought it home, carried it through my front door, set it on my coffee table, and given it exactly what it needed.

A reader.

I used to think that was passive.

You open a book. The story is already there. Whatever happens inside it has happened a thousand times before you arrive, and it will happen exactly the same way after you leave. You can hate an ending, skip a chapter, close the cover halfway through a sentence. None of it matters. The characters don't know you're there.

At least, they aren't supposed to.

I know that sounds obvious.

It should have stayed obvious.

There are things I would give almost anything to unknow now, but the worst is this: a story doesn't have to be finished when you start reading it.

Sometimes it only has to know that you're paying attention.

1.

I found The Next Chapter in one of those little free libraries people put at the ends of their driveways when they want everyone to know they read. This one belonged to a house three streets over from mine. I'd passed it a hundred times walking to the coffee shop. It was painted dark green with tiny gold stars around the glass door, and somebody regularly stocked it with actual good books instead of forty-seven James Patterson novels and someone's obsolete GRE study guide.

That morning, there was only one book inside.

Black hardcover. No dust jacket. No writing on the spine. I almost left it there, mostly because it looked strangely deliberate sitting by itself, like someone had cleared out everything around it so it would be the first thing the next person noticed.
This wasn’t uncommon in town. People would raid donation stations for anything of value to post on eBay or Mercari for whatever profit they could make without earning it.

I stifled a sigh, annoyed at capitalism.

Then I opened the door and saw the cover.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

A NOVEL

BY A. R. HOLLIS

There was an embossed picture beneath the title, subtle enough that I had to tilt the book toward the morning sun to make it out: a woman sitting in bed, reading. Behind her, something stood in the doorway.

It was the kind of cover I probably would have walked past in a bookstore, but out there, without a description or even a publisher's logo to tell me what I was looking at, it made me curious. I turned the book over, expecting a synopsis.

The back was blank.

That was enough to get me.

I decided to take it.

This is important: nobody made me. There was no supernatural compulsion. No whisper from the box. No inexplicable magnetism pulling my hand toward it. I saw a creepy book, I like creepy books, and I stole it from a neighborhood library like God intended.

That's all.

The first strange thing was that I couldn't find a copyright page. The title page was there—The Next Chapter. A. R. Hollis.—but then it went immediately into CHAPTER ONE. No publisher. No ISBN. No acknowledgments. No dedication.

I flipped to the back. Nothing about the author. The final page was blank. There wasn't even a price printed anywhere.

I considered putting it back.

Instead, I carried it home.

There are moments in your life when, afterward, you become obsessed with the version of yourself who made the other choice. The Taranee who left the book there. The Taranee who got coffee, walked home, did dishes, answered emails, watched garbage television until midnight and went to bed.

I think about her constantly.

I hope she's doing well.

2.

I didn't start reading until that night. I'd made pasta, poured a glass of wine, and curled up on the couch with the book balanced against my knees.

Chapter One began:

On Tuesday morning, Taranee Holloway found a book in a little green library three streets from her apartment.

I stopped chewing.

Read it again.

Then laughed.

Actually laughed, because what else do you do?

Taranee Holloway was my name. Exactly my name. Not close. Not a common first name paired with a different surname. Not one letter off. There wasn't even a middle initial I could use to bargain with myself.

Taranee Holloway.

Me.

I stared at the sentence until the letters stopped looking like language. Then I did what people do when confronted with something impossible and desperately wanting it to become mundane.

I kept reading.

The fictional Taranee lived alone. So did I. She was thirty-two. So was I. She worked from home doing medical billing; I did insurance coding. She had an older sister named Natalie.

Mine was Natalia.

There.

Different.

I latched onto that single letter like it had personally volunteered to save my life.

I took a picture of the page and texted it to my sister.

This is fucking weird.

She responded almost immediately.

Are you writing this?

No.

Did somebody you know write it?

No idea. Found it today.

Three dots appeared, disappeared, then appeared again.

Maybe put it back lol

I sent her a skull emoji and kept reading, because apparently every horror movie protagonist I've ever insulted was owed an apology.

Fictional Taranee took the book home. She made pasta. She drank red wine. She sat on a gray couch beneath a framed print of a heron standing in marsh grass.

I slowly lowered the book.

Across from me, above the television, hung a framed photograph of a great blue heron standing in reeds.

I stared at it, then at the book, then at my wine.

White.

Chardonnay.

"Ha," I said aloud. "Wrong."

The relief I felt was embarrassingly disproportionate. See? Coincidence. A deeply weird coincidence involving my exact name, age, family structure, profession, neighborhood, dinner, and decorating choices, sure. But coincidence.

Somebody could know me.

That was almost comforting.

Almost.

A person could be dealt with. A stalker could be reported. A prank could be explained. People had motives. People left fingerprints. People eventually fucked up.

I turned the page.

She told herself the wine mattered.

My smile disappeared.

It was white in her glass, although the book said red.

I stopped breathing.

The next sentence read:

This made her feel better.

I closed the book.

Not dramatically. I didn't throw it. I didn't scream. I just shut it carefully, set it on the coffee table, and stared at it for about five minutes while my brain attempted to construct an explanation sturdy enough to stand inside.

My phone buzzed.

Natalia.

Still alive?

I typed:

Unfortunately.

Then:

Weird book just described me noticing something it got wrong.

She called immediately.

"Wait," she said when I answered. "What do you mean it described you noticing?"

"I mean exactly that."

"Taranee, that's not a coincidence anymore."

"I know."

"Send me pictures. All of it."

I did. There was silence while she read them, long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

Then she said, "Taranee."

"I know."

"Did somebody make this for you?"

"Who?"

"I don't know. Some asshole."

"That's a lot of effort for an asshole."

"T, you've dated men."

Fair.

She made me photograph the cover, the binding, the first twenty pages. She reverse-image searched it, searched the title, searched the author.

Nothing.

A. R. Hollis didn't appear to exist.

Neither did the book.

"Put it outside," Natalia said.

I looked at it. The black cover caught the yellow light from the lamp, perfectly ordinary again now that it was closed.

"Yeah."

"Now."

"Okay."

"I'm serious."

"I said okay."

I carried it into the hallway and left it outside my apartment door. Then I locked the deadbolt, checked it twice, and went to bed.

I slept badly, but I slept.

In the morning, the book was still outside.

That mattered.

At least it obeyed doors.

3.

I should have thrown it away.

Instead, I brought it back inside.

I can explain this, although explaining it doesn't make it less stupid. Imagine somebody hands you a sealed envelope and tells you the exact time you're going to die is written inside.

Maybe you burn it. Maybe you're stronger than I am.

But most people?

They eventually open the fucking envelope.

Maybe not immediately. Maybe they wait a year. Maybe ten. But someday they're going to have a bad night. Someday somebody they love will get sick, or they'll nearly get hit by a car, or they'll turn fifty and realize fifty isn't remotely as old as it sounded when they were twenty.

And they'll remember the envelope.

Knowledge has gravity.

That's the problem.

By Wednesday night, I was reading again.

I skipped ahead.

That was my first real mistake.

Chapter Two described my Wednesday almost perfectly: work, a grocery delivery, Natalia calling during lunch, the neighbor upstairs dropping something heavy around three.

But there were discrepancies.

The fictional Taranee wore a green sweater. I had worn black. She ordered Thai food; I'd eaten leftover pasta. She cut her finger opening a package.

I hadn't.

I felt triumphant.

Until I realized Chapter Two wasn't finished.

There were twelve pages left.

I checked the clock.

9:13 p.m.

I read:

At 9:26, Taranee went into the kitchen for water.

I stared at the time.

No.

Absolutely not.

I stayed on the couch.

9:20.

9:23.

My mouth became dry.

That was funny enough to piss me off.

By 9:25, I was sitting with my arms folded, glaring at the book like it was another person in the room.

"Fuck you."

9:26 came.

I did not move.

Then 9:27.

Nothing happened.

At 9:28, I laughed.

There it was.

Proof.

Whatever this thing was, it could be wrong.

I reached for my wine and found the glass empty. My mouth was painfully dry, but I wasn't about to give a fucking book the satisfaction. I waited until 9:41 out of pure spite before finally going into the kitchen.

The moment I stepped onto the tile, my bare foot hit something sharp.

I jerked back.

A drinking glass had fallen from the drying rack and shattered beside the sink. I hadn't heard it break. One shard had sliced the side of my foot—not deep, just enough to bead red.

I stood there staring at it.

Then limped back to the couch.

The paragraph had changed.

At 9:41, Taranee went into the kitchen for water.

My stomach dropped.

Below it:

She believed waiting fifteen minutes had made a difference.

And beneath that:

It had.

I don't know why that sentence frightened me more than anything else.

Maybe because it suggested flexibility.

A prophecy is terrible.

A prophecy that adjusts is worse.

4.

Thursday morning, there was a stain on my bedroom ceiling.

Brownish yellow. About the size of my palm. I noticed it while getting dressed, and my first thought was upstairs plumbing.

My second thought was the book.

I ran into the living room.

Chapter Three.

I hadn't read it yet.

I found the beginning.

Thursday morning, Taranee discovered the stain.

I sat down on the floor.

The book trembled in my hands.

It had formed above her bed sometime during the night, directly over the place where her head rested.

I looked toward the bedroom.

No.

I kept reading.

At first she assumed it was water.

The next line had been printed alone.

It wasn't.

I closed the book and called maintenance.

A guy named Dennis came around noon carrying a ladder and a moisture meter. He climbed onto my mattress, pressed the device against the ceiling, frowned, moved it, tested again.

"Dry," he said.

"Then what's the stain?"

"Could be old."

"It wasn't there yesterday."

He shrugged. "Maybe you didn't notice it."

I hated him instantly.

He scraped a little paint away. The drywall beneath was dry. No pipe leak. No mold. No moisture.

"Could be something bleeding through the paint."

"What kind of something?"

Dennis looked at me. "Usually old water damage."

"But there's no water damage."

"Right."

"So?"

He shrugged again.

I briefly understood murder.

After he left, I stood beneath the stain for a long time. It looked darker now, though that could have been the exposed paint. There was something vaguely anatomical about its shape.

Not a face.

Thank God.

I think a face would have been easier.

A face gives you something to fear. Eyes. Teeth. Intention. This was worse because it looked like evidence: the shape left behind when something wet had been pressed against the ceiling.

Something roughly human-sized.

I slept on the couch that night.

5.

I stopped reading for two days.

Nothing happened.

That should have solved it.

It almost did.

Saturday morning, Natalia came over carrying coffee, bagels, and the particular expression older sisters use when they're trying not to tell you that you've lost your fucking mind.

"Show me."

I handed her the book.

She flipped through it. Her eyebrows furrowed.

"What?"

"Where's the weird stuff?"

"What do you mean?"

"The wine. The text changing."

"It's there."

She turned the book toward me.

The pages were blank.

Not empty exactly. There were chapter headings and page numbers, but no story between them.

I snatched it from her.

Words filled the page.

I nearly dropped it.

"What?"

"You seriously don't see that?"

"See what?"

I pointed. "That entire fucking paragraph."

"Taranee."

I held the book inches from her face.

"Read it."

"There's nothing there."

I looked.

Words.

She looked.

Nothing.

Natalia went quiet. The skeptical amusement left her face so completely that I almost wished she'd kept it. Then she reached for my hand.

"We should get rid of it."

This time I agreed.

We drove twenty minutes to the county landfill.

Not a trash can.

Not a dumpster.

The landfill.

I watched a man in a neon vest toss the book into a massive compactor with bags of household garbage, broken furniture, cardboard, mattresses. The machine swallowed everything. Metal teeth compressed the pile until the book disappeared beneath somebody's broken recliner and three black garbage bags.

Natalia squeezed my shoulder.

"There."

I started crying.

I hadn't realized how frightened I'd been until that moment.

We got lunch afterward. We went shopping. I bought a stupid candle that cost twenty-eight dollars because apparently financial irresponsibility is how capitalism teaches women to self-soothe.

For a few hours, I felt normal.

Then I went home.

The book wasn't on my bed.

It wasn't on the coffee table.

It wasn't waiting dramatically in front of my door.

It was gone.

Actually gone.

I slept in my bedroom.

At 3:17 in the morning, something hit me in the forehead.

I woke screaming.

The book lay open on my pillow.

It had fallen from the ceiling.

The stain above me was gone.

6.

I moved into Natalia's house that afternoon. She didn't argue. Her husband, Eric, did not love this development but wisely kept his opinions mostly confined to his eyebrows.

We put the book in a plastic storage bin in their garage, then put that bin inside another one and taped the whole thing shut. We didn't destroy it. I'd already learned what happened when we tried that.

I didn't want it returning.

More specifically, I didn't want to know where it would return from next.

For three days, nothing happened.

On the fourth night, I woke because Natalia was shaking me.

"Taranee."

I sat up. "What?"

Her face was pale.

"You need to come downstairs."

The book was on the kitchen table.

Open.

Eric stood ten feet away from it with his arms folded tightly across his chest.

"I didn't touch it," he said.

Nobody had accused him.

The book had opened to Chapter Seven.

I approached slowly.

"What does it say?" Natalia asked.

I read.

My throat tightened.

"What?"

I didn't answer.

"Taranee."

"It says I'm at your house."

Silence.

"It says you found the book on the kitchen table."

Natalia swore.

Eric said, "What's next?"

I looked at him.

"Nothing."

That was a lie.

The next paragraph began:

Eric was the first to understand that Taranee wasn't reading a story about herself.

I couldn't continue.

Natalia saw my face. "Read it."

"No."

"Read it."

"I don't want to."

"What happens to Eric?"

"I don't know."

"Then read it."

Eric stepped forward. "Nat."

"She needs to know."

"No, she doesn't."

I looked back down.

Eric was the first to understand that Taranee wasn't reading a story about herself.

The next sentence:

She was reading instructions.

My skin prickled.

The distinction mattered.

Then:

There are stories that describe what happens.

There are stories that decide.

I closed the book.

"No."

Natalia whispered, "What?"

"I'm not reading anymore."

7.

We locked it in the fireplace.

Not burned.

Locked.

Eric had installed a decorative iron screen when they'd bought the house. We looped a bicycle chain through it and padlocked the doors. It was absurd, but absurd had become relative.

I stayed awake until sunrise.

Nothing happened.

The next day passed normally. Then another. Then another.

The ceiling stain never returned. No glasses shattered. No impossible book appeared beside me. For the first time since I'd found it, my life became boring again, and I discovered how desperately I'd underestimated boring.

I began to understand.

Reading caused it.

The book didn't know my future.

It wrote one.

And I supplied the ink by looking.

Observation. Participation. Consent.

Maybe that was the mechanism. Maybe stories need readers the way fires need oxygen. Without me, it was just paper.

For eleven days, I didn't touch it.

On day twelve, Natalia disappeared.

Her car was in the driveway. Her purse was on the counter. Her shoes were beside the door. Her phone lay charging in the bedroom.

Eric called the police.

They searched the house. The neighborhood. Hospitals. Traffic cameras.

Nothing.

At 11:43 that night, I walked downstairs.

The fireplace chain was still locked. The book waited behind the iron screen exactly where we'd left it.

I sat in front of it.

"Fuck you."

The house remained silent.

I unlocked the screen and opened the book.

Chapter Eight.

For eleven days, Taranee refused to read.

My hands shook.

The book was patient.

I swallowed.

Every reader returns eventually.

"Where is she?"

The page didn't answer.

I turned it.

On the twelfth day, Natalia disappeared.

Another page.

This was necessary.

I screamed.

Actually screamed.

Then I ripped the page out.

The paper tore cleanly, and for one beautiful second I felt something like victory.

Words appeared on the exposed page beneath it.

She tore out the page.

I tore that one too.

She tore out another.

Again.

And another.

I started ripping handfuls now. Pages scattered across the floor around me, some landing in the ashes beneath the grate, others sliding beneath furniture.

She began to understand why the book had so many pages.

I stopped.

There were more pages than before.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

The spine should not have been able to contain them. The book had become thick in my hands, swollen into something grotesque and physically impossible.

Obscene.

I dropped it.

It landed open.

A sentence waited.

If Taranee wanted her sister back, she would have to continue.

I stared at it.

Then turned the page.

8.

Natalia was in the basement.

That was impossible because we'd searched the basement. Police had searched it. Dogs had searched it. Eric and I had gone down there three separate times because grief makes you repeat stupid things just in case reality changed while you weren't looking.

But the book told me to go downstairs.

So I did.

Behind the water heater was a door.

There had never been a door there.

It was narrow and painted the same beige as the concrete wall, as though somebody had gone to considerable effort to make an impossible thing look boring.

I opened it.

Darkness.

A staircase descended farther than the foundation should have allowed.

I almost laughed.

Of course.

At some point horror stops being frightening and becomes insulting. You start wanting to speak to a manager.

I turned on my phone flashlight and went down.

The staircase ended in a hallway covered in green wallpaper patterned with little gold stars.

The same pattern as the neighborhood library.

Doors lined both sides. Each had a brass number.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

I passed them.

At the end was a door labeled:

CURRENT DRAFT

I opened it.

Natalia sat at a desk.

She was alive.

She looked up at me.

Then started sobbing.

I ran to her.

There was a book in front of her.

Black hardcover.

No dust jacket.

"What happened?"

"I don't know." She clung to me. "I woke up here."

"Did you read it?"

She nodded.

My stomach dropped.

"What does yours say?"

She looked at the book.

"Not mine."

"What?"

"It's yours."

I approached the desk.

The title wasn't The Next Chapter anymore.

It read:

TARANEE HOLLOWAY

Beneath that:

A NOVEL

And beneath that:

BY NATALIA HOLLOWAY

I looked at my sister.

"I didn't write that," she whispered.

I opened it.

The first line:

My sister found a horror novel in a little free library and didn't realize she was reading about her own life.

I felt something inside me go cold.

Every event was there. The library. The wine. The ceiling. The landfill. Natalia disappearing. Us standing in this room.

Everything.

Then I reached the page describing the room itself.

The final paragraph ended:

Then Taranee turned the page.

I didn't.

Natalia grabbed my wrist.

"Don't."

"I need to know how we leave."

"No."

"We can't stay here."

"Taranee."

"I have to."

"That's what it wants."

I looked at her.

Neither of us knew what it meant. The book? The room? The author? The story itself?

Maybe there wasn't a difference anymore.

I turned the page.

There was only one sentence.

One of the sisters leaves.

Natalia started crying.

"No."

I turned another.

Only one.

Another.

The reader chooses.

"No."

Another.

Blank.

I flipped ahead.

Blank.

Every remaining page.

Blank.

"That's not a choice," I said.

Natalia stared at me, then at the book.

"Maybe it is."

"What?"

She touched the cover. "It only happens if you read it."

"We already read it."

"No. Think about it. Every time something happened, it was after you read it."

"Except you disappearing."

"You read that too."

"After."

"Did you?"

I froze.

"What?"

"Did you actually?"

I remembered Chapter Seven. The kitchen. Eric.

There are stories that decide.

Then I'd stopped.

Had there been something farther down the page? Something I glimpsed without consciously processing? A sentence at the bottom? The edge of the next paragraph?

The book didn't need comprehension.

Maybe it only needed sight.

Natalia closed it.

"So don't give it an ending."

I stared at her.

The room trembled.

Barely.

A vibration beneath our feet.

The overhead light flickered, and the book opened itself. Its pages began fluttering as though caught in a breeze neither of us could feel.

Natalia slammed it shut.

It opened again.

The pages turned faster.

Searching.

"No," she said.

The walls groaned.

Wallpaper began peeling away.

Behind it wasn't drywall.

There were pages.

Thousands of them.

Layer upon layer of paper covered in printed text. I recognized sentences before I consciously understood what I was seeing. Things I'd said. Things I'd thought. Memories.

My first day of school.

My father's funeral.

The time Natalia broke my wrist accidentally when we were children and lied about it because she thought she'd go to jail.

Things nobody knew.

Things I'd forgotten.

The entire room was made from me.

Natalia grabbed my face.

"Look at me."

The pages whipped violently around us.

"Don't read anything."

"How?"

"Eyes closed."

I shut them.

Darkness.

The room shook harder. Something heavy fell somewhere behind us. Paper lashed against my arms and face, but Natalia found my hand and squeezed.

"Walk."

"Where?"

"Back."

We moved blindly. I hit the wall with one shoulder, found the doorway, and followed Natalia into the hall.

I kept my eyes closed.

The book followed.

I could hear it.

Not footsteps.

Pages.

Fluttering behind us.

Keeping pace.

We reached the stairs and climbed. My shin struck a step hard enough to make me gasp, but Natalia pulled me upward.

"Almost."

Then my foot landed on concrete.

The familiar hum of the furnace surrounded us.

I opened my eyes.

The impossible door was gone.

Natalia stood beside me.

We were home.

For three seconds, neither of us moved. Then she laughed, and I laughed too—the horrible, breathless kind of laughter people make when they've survived something they will never successfully explain.

We hugged.

Upstairs, Eric shouted Natalia's name.

She pulled away and ran toward him.

I followed.

Halfway up the stairs, something bothered me.

Something tiny.

A detail.

Eric shouldn't have known she was back.

He hadn't seen her yet.

I stopped.

Natalia kept going.

"Taranee?"

I looked down.

There was a piece of paper stuck to my sock.

I shouldn't have read it.

But you've learned enough about me by now to know that I did.

Three words.

Almost, Taranee thought.

9.

The house changed.

Not dramatically.

That would have been easier.

The family photographs were different. In one, Natalia wore a dress she'd never owned. The kitchen cabinets had brass handles instead of silver.

Eric's eyes were brown.

They had always been blue.

I stared too long.

"Taranee?" Natalia said.

"What color are Eric's eyes?"

She looked at me strangely.

"Brown."

Eric laughed. "Should I be concerned?"

I smiled.

"No."

Upstairs, I checked my phone.

My apartment didn't exist.

The building did, but my unit belonged to someone named Allison Hollis.

A. R. Hollis.

I searched the name.

This time, I found her.

Allison Renee Hollis.

Author.

Six novels. All horror. All out of print.

Missing since 1987.

Her photograph loaded slowly.

I dropped the phone.

She looked like me.

Not exactly. Older. Maybe sixty. But there was my nose, my eyes, the little asymmetry in my upper lip I'd spent years correcting in photographs.

There was an article beneath the image.

LOCAL AUTHOR DISAPPEARS AFTER FINAL MANUSCRIPT

I read it.

I shouldn't have.

You know that.

I know that.

But we both know I did.

Allison Hollis had spent the final months before her disappearance insisting her newest novel was "writing backward." Friends described increasing paranoia. She claimed characters from unfinished manuscripts were appearing in her home. She claimed her memories were changing.

She claimed she had discovered something about fiction.

One quotation survived from her journal:

"A story does not need to be true when you begin reading it. It only needs you to continue."

Her final manuscript had never been recovered.

The title was The Next Chapter.

I stopped reading.

At the bottom of the article was a photograph.

Allison stood outside her house. Beside her was a little girl.

The caption read:

Hollis with daughter, Taranee, 1984.

I zoomed in.

The little girl was me.

I don't remember Allison Hollis.

I remember my mother.

Her name was Susan. She died nine years ago. Cancer. I remember holding her hand in the hospice room while Natalia slept in the chair beside the window. I remember what Mom's skin felt like. I remember the little paper cup of ice chips beside her bed. I remember the nurse turning off a machine after she died.

These weren't facts.

They were memories.

Mine.

But when I opened my photo gallery, there were pictures of Allison.

Birthdays.

Christmases.

Graduation.

My wedding.

I have never been married.

There were photographs of me standing beside a man whose face I didn't recognize, except the longer I stared at him, the more recognition began crawling into places it didn't belong.

There were pictures of children.

Two girls.

One missing a front tooth.

One holding a stuffed rabbit.

My daughters.

According to my phone.

I called Natalia.

The number wasn't in service.

I ran downstairs.

Her house was empty.

Not recently empty.

Abandoned.

Dust covered everything. The walls were water-damaged. The ceiling sagged. The kitchen where we'd stood minutes ago looked as though nobody had cooked there in twenty years.

I stood in the middle of it screaming her name.

No answer.

On the table was the book.

Of course.

It looked older now. The cover was cracked. The pages had yellowed.

I didn't touch it.

I backed away.

The book opened.

I looked at the ceiling. The wall. Anything else.

A page turned.

Then another.

I closed my eyes.

I heard paper moving.

I started toward the front door. Something slid across the table, hit the floor, and skated across the hardwood until it stopped against my shoe.

I kept my eyes shut.

I could leave.

I understood that now.

Walk outside. Never read another word.

Let the story starve.

I reached for the doorknob.

Behind me, a child began crying.

Not a voice from the book.

Not something pretending to be familiar.

A real child.

I turned.

There was a little girl standing in the kitchen.

Seven, maybe eight.

Missing a front tooth.

Holding a stuffed rabbit.

The girl from my phone.

She looked terrified.

"Mom?"

I couldn't breathe.

She ran to me, and I caught her automatically. Her body was warm. Real. She buried her face against my stomach and wrapped both arms around me.

"Where did you go?"

I looked at the book.

Open on the floor.

The page faced me.

I could read the sentence from across the room.

Now she had something worth continuing for.

That was when I understood the cruelty of it.

It wasn't forcing me to read.

It never had.

It was learning what would make me choose to.

Curiosity first.

Then fear.

Then Natalia.

Now love.

The book wasn't predicting my life. It wasn't even writing it.

It was negotiating with me.

One page at a time.

Offering me people. Memories. Histories. Punishing me when I stopped. Rewarding me when I continued.

Teaching me to participate in my own revision.

The little girl looked up.

"Where's Gemma?"

I swallowed.

"Who?"

Her face crumpled.

"My sister."

Of course.

There were two girls in the photographs.

I looked at the book.

The next page waited.

I knew what it would offer.

Gemma.

Maybe Natalia.

Maybe my mother.

Maybe everyone I'd ever lost.

All I had to do was continue.

And somewhere, buried beneath terror, something worse had begun growing.

Hope.

I sat down.

The girl climbed into my lap.

I picked up the book.

I turned the page.

10.

There are twenty-three chapters now.

I know because I counted.

I don't read ahead anymore. I've learned that much. You can survive if you go slowly.

Sometimes the book gives things back.

Sometimes it takes them.

Natalia exists again, although she lives in Oregon and insists she has always lived there. My mother is alive, but she doesn't recognize me.

I have two daughters.

Their father died three years ago.

I remember his funeral now. I remember loving him. I remember meeting him. I remember the stupid argument we had on our third date because he said Jurassic Park III was better than The Lost World. I remember the way he slept with one foot outside the blanket. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor with him when the pregnancy test turned positive.

I remember things that never happened.

That's the hardest part.

You think you'd know.

You think if somebody changed your life, there'd be seams.

There aren't.

Memory is very accommodating.

Give it enough details and it will build you a childhood. Give it photographs and it will manufacture nostalgia. Give it grief and it will swear something existed.

Sometimes I wonder whether Taranee Holloway was ever real.

Maybe Allison was.

Maybe I'm Allison.

Maybe Taranee was simply a character she wrote herself into. Maybe she found the book before me. Maybe somebody else found it before her.

There is no copyright page.

Remember?

No publication date.

No beginning except the one it gives you.

I reached Chapter Twenty-Two yesterday.

It described me sitting at my kitchen table.

Writing.

Not reading.

Writing.

That frightened me more than anything so far.

Because I wasn't writing.

Then.

But I am now.

The book told me I would write everything down, so I did. I told myself it was different because these were my words. My version. My warning.

That distinction felt important.

Until tonight.

Tonight, I reached Chapter Twenty-Three.

It was short.

One paragraph.

Eventually Taranee understood that the book had never needed to survive as a book.

I read the sentence six times.

Then the next.

Books are difficult to distribute.

My hands started shaking.

They can be burned.

Another sentence.

Thrown away.

Another.

Locked inside fireplaces.

I stopped.

But stopping is something I'm very bad at.

So are you, apparently.

Because you're still here.

The final lines said:

Stories are easier.

People carry stories willingly.

Sometimes they even give them away.

I closed the book.

For a long time, I sat alone.

Then I looked at everything I'd written.

This.

All of it.

I tried deleting the file.

It came back.

I disconnected the internet.

It didn't matter.

I smashed the laptop.

The document appeared on my phone.

I destroyed the phone.

This morning there was a printed copy on my kitchen table.

So I read through it.

Every word.

Looking for something I could change.

Some warning I could hide inside it.

Some loophole.

And I found one.

At least, I think I did.

The book only changes the life of whoever reads it.

That's what I believed.

That's what Allison believed.

But Allison made one mistake.

She assumed there could only be one reader.

I don't think that's true anymore.

Because the book is blank now.

Every page.

Even the cover.

No title.

No author.

Nothing.

As if it finished what it was doing.

Or moved somewhere else.

There is only one thing left inside.

Written on the first page in handwriting that looks exactly like mine:

Thank you for finishing the story.

And beneath it:

It belongs to you now.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know whether you're in danger.

I don't know if reading this was enough.

Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe you'll close this and go make dinner. Maybe tomorrow will be completely ordinary.

I hope it is.

I genuinely do.

But if you notice something strange, don't panic. Don't start looking for connections.

And whatever you do, don't come back here to check whether you remembered the story correctly.

Memory is very accommodating.

You know that now.

So close this.

Go do something else.

And if, sometime tomorrow morning, you happen to notice a small brownish-yellow stain on the ceiling above your bed—

please don't read the next chapter.