Chapter Text
Before
In a space behind space, something realized it was conscious.
It attempted to open its eyes, couldn’t find them, and decided it didn’t miss them. It stretched its awareness to take stock of itself and discovered it couldn’t define what shape it was. What it could tell was that it was a small mass attached to something larger, or multiple somethings, and they were not good things.
No—that wasn’t entirely true. One of the things it was attached to was good. Good, despite everything. The first consciousness reached out for the other, and the two of them intertwined.
“Jon?” the first thing asked.
“Yes,” Jon said, and while he too was a shapeless, disembodied thing, he was also a person. “Martin?”
“Yes,” said the first thing, who was relieved to be reminded that he was Martin. “Where are we?” he asked. He gestured with a pseudopod of consciousness at their amorphous forms. “What are we?”
“I don’t know,” Jon said, with the annoyance of someone who was out of practice at not knowing things.
“These things we’re attached to, they’re—?”
“The Fears, yes.”
Martin was quiet as he opened up his awareness to the space around him, feeling where his existence flowed into the yawning emptiness of the Lonely on one side. The Lonely definitely wasn’t him—you wouldn’t mistake one for the other—but he was attached to it, like two different colors of clay that had been twisted together until they began to blend. On another side he could feel the Beholding, and on another, the Web, and beyond that more connections to other parts of the Fear-mass that weren’t so easily defined. “We went with them,” he said. “When I—when we—I mean, when we flushed them out of our world. We went with them. We didn’t die!”
“It would appear so.”
They both digested this new development in silence. Both felt that there were probably things they should say to each other, about everything that had happened, but it didn’t feel like the right time for that. It felt like no time at all, actually.
Martin spoke up first. “Right. We should probably figure out where we are, then. I can’t see anything—I don’t think that’s my sort of thing, anymore. Can you…?”
“Of course. Let me just—” Jon had no eyes of his own, but there were plenty within reach, in the Beholding next to him. He leaned over to open a few and immediately made a strangling, gagged sound.
“Jon?”
There was a long, sickening pause. Then, in a small voice, Jon said, “Shit.”
Now
On a world that had only just begun to fear, there was a man named Jon, and a book that wanted to meet him.
It had to find Jon five times before he was finally persuaded to pick it up. It wasn’t Jon’s sort of book. It was the sort of smug, inoffensive volume one might find stored next to an elderly person’s toilet, the kind that would be titled something twee like Life’s Little Instruction Manual or Daily Inspiration for a Year of Smiles—the sort of book that might advise you to improve your social life by chatting with strangers on the bus. This particular book, when it first crossed Jon’s vision, was sitting on the desk opposite his in the office. It caught his attention just long enough for him to raise a brief, judgmental eyebrow and conclude that his officemate had bad taste in literature, after which he forgot about it and moved on with his day.
The second time he saw the book was on the tube, where it sat in a damp spot under his seat. He scarcely took the time to register it as the same title. The third time, he tripped over it on the sidewalk and concluded it must be some faddish new bestseller. The fourth time, it hit him violently in the head as he walked past a row of apartments. When this happened Jon muttered a series of obscenities addressed to whomever must have dropped it out the window above him, but he didn’t take the time to notice that it had hit him at far too low an angle to have been dropped from above.
The fifth time Jon saw the book, it was nestled comfortably on his pillow, on his bed. He picked it up.
His knuckles whitened on the cover as he went to double-check the locks on his doors and windows. They looked untouched, as did all of his valuables. There was no sign of intrusion in his home except for the book left lovingly in his bedroom. Returning to the side of his bed, Jon swore aloud, several times, and wondered what the smart thing to do in this situation was. He could, he supposed, call the police, although he was at a loss for what to tell them—that he had experienced the opposite of a burglary, and now owned a new book? He was certain he would sound crazy. He briefly considered reporting it as evidence of a stalker, except he was pretty sure stalking by definition had to include more than one event, and in any case he didn’t consider himself a very stalkable person. He looked back down at the book in his hands, where the pads of his fingers were indenting the soft cover, and realized belatedly that by putting his prints all over it he was torpedoing its value as evidence, anyway.
He made a low groan of frustration, sat down on his bed, and took a proper look at the book.
In friendly white letters on a plain grey background, the words Advice to Survive By took up most of the cover. The title hadn’t struck Jon as odd the other times he’d seen it, but now the word “survive” stuck out to him, like seeing a deer on a city street. That word didn’t usually live in books like these.
There was no other text on the cover, not even an author name. The back cover was blank except for a dingy brown water stain. When Jon opened to the first page, he found a dedication, not unlike any other dedication, except that the words there made Jon briefly forget to breathe:
To Jon. Sorry it took 45 15 100 12 so many years. Hope it isn’t too late.
Jon’s heart thudded against his ribs like a sparrow trying to escape a birdcage, even as he told himself not to be stupid. The world was, after all, lousy with “Jon”s. You couldn’t throw a rock in London without hitting a Jon, and when that Jon called the police because you had assaulted him with a rock, the officer who showed up to arrest you would also be named “Jon”. They weren’t exactly an endangered species.
He turned the page and found that there was no copyright information or table of contents. Instead, the text began immediately with a numbered list:
- Love
Mwefniovs someone. Having more people in your life that you love is better, obviously, but you need to love at least one person.
Jon peered at the second word. It looked like the spot had been typed over several times, like you could do on a typewriter. There was too much ink to make out what any of it might have said, but at the beginning he could just make out a capitalized “M”. That was, Jon decided, a little weird, but not worrying. He kept reading.
- Get access to a cement mixer as soon as possible. If whatever is threatening you is trying to do you physical harm, then a physical solution usually works, and cement is a very effective physical solution.
He let the book briefly fall to his lap as his eyes unfocused and his eyebrows pressed together. Adrenaline kicked through his system, which he told himself was an overreaction. He picked the book back up and reread the second entry, hoping that maybe he’d misunderstood it. He hadn’t.
The sole excuse remaining in Jon’s mind, which he now clung to for comfort, was that this was all a prank. It was theoretically possible that if a book showed up at his house out of nowhere and made allusions to physical threats, it was all a big joke at Jon’s expense. The first problem with that theory was that nothing about this situation was funny. The second problem was that Jon had no friends at all, let alone ones who might pull pranks on him, but he didn’t like thinking about that.
There was another thought he didn’t like having, too, a thought that said books didn’t just come out of nowhere except when they did. That thought threatened to grip Jon like a vice and squeeze all the air from his lungs, digging out old horrors he had long tried to put away, so he did not allow himself to think it. He told himself that this wasn’t that kind of book. It hadn’t done a thing to him since he’d picked it up. It wasn’t sinking scrabbling little claws into the edges of his brain, forcing him to keep reading. He could set it down and walk away, any time he wanted, and to prove that to himself he decided to put the book on his nightstand and leave the room.
When he reached the kitchen, he shook himself all over, the nervous energy escaping him in a full-body shudder. He told himself he felt much better now that he had stepped back from the whole situation, and wasn’t it a little absurd when you thought about it? He would relax with a cup of tea for a bit before returning to the book with a clear head, and certainly the mystery would prove to be something mundane, even boring. With luck, he would even have time left in the day to review those grant applications he’d been assigned. Maybe he’d even get them done tonight and impress his boss for once.
Once the kettle was on, he reached for his phone to check his email, only to realize the book was still in his hand.
He could not have reacted with more alarm if he’d suddenly found himself holding a severed head. He jumped and dropped the book, which hit the linoleum with an innocent thud.
Jon’s heart thudded back into a panic he could hear in his skull. He knew he’d set the book down—or, he knew he’d decided to set it down. Now that he thought back on it, he had no memory of actually letting go of the book. He had decided to put it down and then left the room, apparently with it still in his hand. It was the sort of thing a person might absentmindedly do, except that Jon was absolutely sure it was not a thing he had absentmindedly done.
He told himself to be rational. There was no cause for alarm, yet. Nothing happening here was dangerous, or even definitively supernatural. He would destroy the book, and then, whatever the hell was happening here, it would be over.
He grabbed a paper towel to pick up the book and carried it to his front door, gingerly, like it really was a severed head. Out in his building’s garden he gathered a pile of dried sticks as kindling, although being as he was not in the habit of burning books, he had to guess at how much he would need. He focused with his whole attention when he set the book on his makeshift pyre. He repeated out loud, several times, that he had let go of it and it was still sitting there. Nothing seemed out of place, but his hands shook on the lighter anyway when he started the blaze.
As the fire went up, Jon watched with grim satisfaction and a twinge of regret that he would never unravel whatever mystery this book represented. These thoughts wrapped him up so completely that it took him almost a full minute to notice that the book wasn’t in the fire. It was tucked securely in the back pocket of his pants, unburnt and unbothered.
He patted the pocket twice, just to be sure, before sitting down hard right where he was. He couldn’t feel himself breathing, but he could hear himself sucking in shaky gasps. He told himself over and over that he wasn’t a child anymore, that there was no spider here, no door, and no one else here to get hurt. If this book was teleporting, or controlling him, then there was no evidence that it was doing so with any evil intent, and just because it made him violently flash back to A Guest for Mr. Spider didn’t mean they were the same kind of book.
The fire chewed through his kindling and snuffed itself out. The sun sank in the sky, unimpressed by Jon’s histrionics. Out of the corner of his eye Jon could see a ground floor neighbor peering out their window at him like they were trying to decide if he needed help.
He made himself stand up and put on an unbothered expression. It wasn’t a terribly convincing effort, but it seemed to appease the neighbor, who closed their blinds. Jon didn’t take the book out of his pocket as he walked back up to his flat. He told himself he wasn’t in danger. He had heard lots of stories of the supernatural at the various places he’d worked, and if they didn’t tend to be positive stories, there were at least plenty that were neutral, and not all of those were definitely fake.
Jon stopped short as he thought about work. He had first seen the book—either the same book or another of its kind—on his officemate’s desk. She might, he thought, be another victim, who might help explain what was happening—or, more worryingly, she might have left the book there on purpose, for him to find.
He pulled out his phone and flicked through his contacts. Before he could wonder if he was doing something stupid, Jon pressed the call button and put the phone to his ear.
It felt like the ringing went on for a small eternity before a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”
“Sasha? I have a question about the book you left on your desk today.”