Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Sidney stared at her phone in disbelief as the line went dead. Sasha had said she opened the book and then…
It wasn’t like her sister to play stupid games. Sasha was a prankster, but she never played pranks on her. And never like this. Never when it involved believing someone could be hurt. Whatever this was, whatever was happening, it was real.
Tears streamed down Sidney’s cheeks. She quickly dialed Sasha back, but it went straight to voicemail. Wherever Sasha was, she didn’t have a signal. But that wasn’t possible. She had been at work—she was on Wi-Fi!!
She texted her sister.
Sash, call me! RIGHT NOW.
Her hands were shaking so badly she almost dropped her own phone. Backing up, she leaned against the dresser underneath the television in her hotel room, and tried not to panic. What was she supposed to do? What was happening? Should she call the cops?
She didn’t have a phone number for any of Sasha’s roommates.
She cursed herself for not having them. Damn it.
Her sister was such a fucking hermit. No friends she knew of that were local.
All her sister’s friends were online and lived scattered all over the world. That didn’t help her in the slightest.
Screw it, she was calling the police. Flipping over to the browser on her phone, she started searching for the Somerville, Massachusetts police phone number. They’d send someone over to break the door in and—
Movement out of the corner of her eye snapped her attention upwards.
The freaky-ass book on her bed had moved.
It was open.
Like a deer in the headlights, she froze in place, staring at it, wondering if it was about to murder her like whatever had happened to Sasha. But she didn’t have time to worry about that.
There was writing on the page. Big and black. Large enough that she could read it from across the room.
You can save your sister.
This had to be some kind of elaborate trick, right? Magnets? Special effects? She swallowed the rock in her throat. “This can’t be real.”
The page turned right before her eyes. Moaning in fear, she shook her head frantically. But it didn’t stop what she saw.
This is very real.
Another page turned.
We can save her, together. She’s in danger.
“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 the Alien movies 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 was standing 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—but a 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 into somewhere 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 woke up 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 just happened to her? Where was she? 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’t feel dead. 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. An enormous library.
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.
At the end of each aisle of books was a window, though it didn’t do any good to help her understand where she was.
Like the lamps, the windows were made of stained-glass.
It was night, judging by the pale light that was filtering in through the stained-glass windows, only giving enough illumination to just barely show the images they depicted.
It resembled a window in a church, the way it was made and painted—the way it glorified the figure in it.
But the first figure she saw was of Professor James Moriarty.
She blinked. Odd. Down the other aisle that was the mirror image of the first?
Mr. Hyde. Very odd. Turning, she peered around the corner, looking for anyone hiding in the shadows. No one.
“Hello?” she called again. No one answered.
Reaching for her phone, she sighed. She’d left it on the table. No dice.
Picking a direction in the massive library, she just started walking. There was nothing much else to do, besides just go. There had to be an exit. And people. And a phone. She needed to call for help. And an ambulance. Whatever drugs that book had been laced with had really done a number on her.
She was clearly tripping balls and had wedged herself somewhere in the library, and she had to hope one of her coworkers found her.
“Is anyone there? Hello?” And she needed to also call Sidney and tell her she was alive, and while she was coming down from whatever screwed up new form of LSD that the book had been covered in, she was—
“That depends entirely on how you define anyone.”
Sasha froze. The voice had come from behind her. She turned, but…no one was there. She recognized the voice—she’d heard it once before. It was the voice from when she touched the book.
It belonged to the man who had been playing the piano. Sharp. Dangerous. But with a low rumble to it that set the hair on the back of her neck standing up.
The man’s accent was decidedly British, and his tone had that twist of a smile to it that promised that whatever horrible thing he was about to do to her, he was going to enjoy it a great deal.
“Didn’t realize that was a word up for debate,” she muttered, half under her breath. Deciding she wanted nothing to do with whoever the voice belonged to, she turned to go in the direction she had been heading.
And walked right into someone.
Taking a quick, staggering step back, she rubbed her nose. It felt like she’d stepped right into a damn brick wall! “Sorry, I—”
The man chuckled. “Words are always up for debate. That is the joy of language. Ever changing. Ever evolving.”
Sasha stared.