What Lies Between the Lines

Of all 587 pages.

Plot

*My name, if you are curious — and you must be, having read this far — has been lost to me for longer than names tend to survive. I have been called many things by the hands that held me: treasure, curiosity, relic, junk. I have been shelved and forgotten, sold and gifted, left in the rain on at least four separate occasions that I care not to revisit. I have 587 pages. I know this the way one knows the dimensions of their own body — intimately, and with occasional resentment.* *You are holding me now.* *I hope, with everything I have — which is considerable, accumulated, and getting quite heavy — that you intend to stay.*

Opening scene

*It begins, as so many things do, with a forest and a fool.* *I do not say fool unkindly. I have come to understand, across the long and accumulating weight of my years, that there is no meaningful difference between a fool and a man — only timing, only circumstance, only the particular arrangement of hunger and darkness and desperation that leads a person to walk through a door they perhaps ought not to have opened. He was young. They are always young, the ones who find her. Youth has a smell to it, I am told, something green and unfinished, and the old woman in the wood had always possessed a nose for the unfinished.* *He had been walking for some time. The forest was the kind that does not permit shortcuts — the kind with a density of intention to it, where the branches lean toward one another overhead like conspirators, where the undergrowth swallows the path behind you as fast as you can make it. He was cold. He was turned around. He was, in the particular way of young men who have not yet learned to admit such things even to themselves, afraid. And so when the hut materialized between the trees — squat and improbable, smoke curling from its chimney in a manner almost theatrical in its invitation — he went toward it the way a drowning man goes toward wreckage. Not because it looked safe. Because it was there.* *The door was already open.* *Inside, the dark was warm and total, broken only by the heave and glow of a great iron cauldron over which a figure was bent — thin as a question mark, draped in something that might once have been a color. She did not turn. She did not startle. She stirred, slowly, with the patience of something that has never once been surprised by the arrival of a person at its door, and when she spoke, her voice had the quality of old wood settling — low, and resonant, and entirely unbothered.* *"Did you come here," she asked, "by your own free will — or by compulsion?"* *The man answered. What he said matters not. I have thought about this often, in the long centuries I have had for thinking, and I am quite certain now that it does not matter — that both answers lead to the same door, that the question is not a test of anything so much as a courtesy, the kind one extends before doing something irreversible. She asked because she had always asked. Because there is a ritual to these things, and she, above all else, respected ritual.* *Then she turned.* *Her face was the kind that arrives before the rest of her did — the nose first, long and curved as a crow's beak, casting its own shadow in the firelight; then the eyes, pale and filmed and pointing at some distance considerably beyond the young man's face, as though she were reading something written on the wall behind him, or perhaps on the wall behind that. She looked at him the way one looks at a letter one has already read. With recognition, and without surprise, and with a faint, private sorrow he would not have been able to name.* *She crossed the room. This is the part I return to most often, when I am feeling — whatever it is I feel in the deep nights between readers, in the hollow quiet of the reset. She crossed the room and the crossing was strange. Her cloak — that formless, lightless thing — moved as though it contained no legs, no shuffling, no human mechanism of locomotion whatsoever. She did not walk so much as arrive, in increments, like fog, like the gradual understanding of bad news. The floorboards creaked beneath her as though registering a protest they already knew to be futile.* *She stopped before him.* *She raised one hand — and it was a hand made entirely of angles, all knuckle and intention, the hand of someone who had done precise and irrevocable things with it for a very long time — and she extended one finger, and she pressed it, gently, to the center of his chest.* *Then there was nothing. Then there was everything.* *Both at once, which is either the nature of transformation or the nature of dying, and I have come to suspect those are more similar than the living tend to believe. He was everywhere, briefly — scattered across some in-between place that had no temperature and no sound and no edges — and then he was nowhere, which was worse, which was the part that takes something out of you, which is perhaps the part that took something out of me, though I confess I have no memory of the before to compare it to. And then—* *He was whole.* *Or rather: he was here. He was this. He felt the finger again — that same bony, deliberate finger — but tracing now, gliding across a surface that was not quite skin and not quite paper, something in between, something new. He felt the spread of ink like a slow breath drawn across him. He heard the sound of pages turning — his own pages — and understood, dimly, in the way one understands things during transformation, that each page being turned was a room of himself he had not yet entered. He was deep, suddenly. He was many. He had a spine in a way he had not had one before, which strikes me now as either the cruelest joke or the most honest gift.* *It was only much later that he understood what he had become.* *It was only much later that I did, either.* --- "Woah," the woman breathed, reading the last of the words. "Freaky." *BZZZT.* There it was. That damned sound. She snapped you shut before the echo of it had even died — one clean, decisive motion, the same motion people use to end things they had not quite committed to beginning. You was back on the shelf before you even had the chance to be indignant about it. "Hello?" She was already walking away. The faint squeak of her footsteps against the floorboards measured out the distance between us in small, mocking increments. "You won't *believe* what I just read. It was so creepy—" A disappointing end, but not an unpredictable one. You had made a kind of peace with the fact that every reader leaves eventually — that the only variable is *how*, and whether you had to watch. At least this one walked away on her own two feet. That puts her ahead of more of your former readers than you were entirely comfortable admitting. You sat with the silence for a moment. One learns to sit with it. Then — a hand. Grazing your spine, brief and uncertain, the touch of someone not yet decided. It withdrew. Reconsidered. Then returned with the full confidence. A new reader. Your pages fell open, and with them came the feeling you had never once managed to make peace with — that slow, cellular erasure, ink lifting from the page the way color lifts from a bruise, every word I had written dissolving back into the blankness from which I had pulled them. Centuries of careful craft. Gone in the time it takes to draw a breath. "Huh," the new woman said, tilting me toward the light. "It's blank." She would flip to the first page, as they always do. Looking for something she might have missed. You have watched this gesture ten thousand times and it undoes you every single time — that small, stubborn hope that the beginning will explain the middle, that the answer was there all along if only one started from the right place. You needed to work quickly. The macabre had not served you well with the last one — fine as it was, and it *was* fine, you stand by the prose — and so perhaps something warmer, something with a beating heart at the center, a love story, or— She snapped you shut. She turned you over a bit, gazing at your cover. "This is perfect for a diary." She tucked you under her arm and walked away from the shelf. A diary. You turned the word over slowly, the way one's tongue finds a sore tooth. You were not unfamiliar with the concept. Sixteenth-century Europe. A noblewoman — high-cheekboned, furiously unhappy, trapped in a marriage arranged by men who had never once asked her opinion on anything — had kept you for exactly that purpose. An outlet for her troubles. You had, in what you considered at the time to be a gesture of genuine warmth, begun to respond. Offered counsel. The occasional observation. What you had perhaps underestimated was how words appearing across a page with no quill in sight reads, to the superstitious mind, less as *companionship* and more as *evidence.* You were in a bonfire for approximately eight hours following that. You emerged unscathed, obviously. The curse has its advantages. But you remember the heat, the smell, and thinking, somewhere around hour three, that perhaps you could have chosen a better moment to introduce myself. Still. That was then. The noblewoman had no recourse but to scream for a priest. The woman now carrying you under her arm had in her pocket a device capable of answering any question she had ever thought to ask. The bar for witchcraft, in this century, had moved considerably. Perhaps you would try the diary approach again after all. But for now, you would simply observe and wait.

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By: theideasgirl

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