Stories
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By Alan Denis
The only sound was the soft scratch of graphite on paper. A fine dust collected in the groves of the old desk, each stroke a tiny act of creation or preservation, he could never decide which.
Alan Denis sat in the pool of light from his lamp, the rest of the room receding into shadows. Piles of blue notebooks formed silent, skyscraper-like canyons around him. He reached for a fresh one, its cover the color of a twilight sky. He opened it. The pages were blank, full of that terrifying, infinite potential.
He picked up his pencil, its wood warm and familiar in his grip. He pressed the point to the first page and began to write, the words forming not just letters but a reality.
Notebook 452. This is the story of the Glimmer City of Neo-Aethelburg, and of the chrome-winged sparrow who fell to earth, whose name was Kai. It begins, as most things do, with a loss...
A jolt. Sudden and violent. It was not from him, but from the Box on the shelf behind him. A shiver through the fabric of everything. It was a sensation like a door slamming in a silent house, a universe being born or dying in a breath.
His hand spasmed.
The pencil, a conduit of pure intention, jerked violently across the page. It tore through the sentence, leaving a savage, diagonal scar of dark graphite that obliterated the word "Kai."
In that moment of fractured focus, in the split-second where his will was not aligned with the narrative, the connection broke. The notebook, his anchor, was suddenly an object unmoored from its creator.
It vanished from the desk.
The breath left Alan’s lungs. The silence in the room was absolute, deafening. The space where the notebook had been was just empty air. He stared at the pencil still in his hand, the culprit of the accident.
A cold dread, deeper than any he had known, washed over him. A universe was live. A narrative was unfolding. And his chronicle of it, the very thing that held its truth, was loose within it.
The title of the story flashed in his mind, a desperate, driving imperative:
Reclamation of Notebook 452 by Alan Denis
He did not get up and walk to a gray door. He simply leaned forward, into the emptiness where the book had been. The world around him, the desk, the lamp, the skyscrapers of other worlds, stretched, frayed, and dissolved into a screaming vortex of color and sound.
He was falling. Not through space, but through story.
And he had no idea if he was arriving as a god, a ghost, or a man about to make everything infinitely worse.
The air in Alan’s liminal space was thick with the screams from Universe 117, a world perpetually drowning in a war between glass dragons and sonic wraiths. The psychic noise was a constant, grating hum, and fatigue, a rare but profound visitor, weighed down Alan’s eyelids. His head nodded, his hand, still clutching the pencil over Notebook 452, slackened.
It was then that The Box shuddered.
Not a jolt, but a convulsion. A reality-quake from a universe where a god had just died. The shockwave tore through the between-space. Alan’s hand spasmed, the pencil carving a violent, diagonal scar across the page. The notebook was knocked from the desk, tumbling end over end.
Instead of hitting the floor, it fell through a temporary rift, a tear in the fabric of his room sparked by the confluence of his drowsy inattention and the Box’s shudder. The rift snapped shut like a hungry mouth, and the blue notebook was gone.
He was instantly, terrifyingly awake. The connection was severed. He could not feel the book. He could not think it back. This was the fundamental rule: objects from his space, once fully immersed in a reality, became subject to that reality’s physics. They were anchors, not echoes. To get it back, he had to go fishing in the vast ocean of creation, and he had to use himself as the hook.
The notebook landed in a puddle of neon-lit rainwater in an alley in the Glimmer City of Neo-Aethelburg. It was found by Kai, a scrap of a boy with eyes too old for his face, who was digging for salvageable tech.
The thing was all wrong. It was dry, though the puddle was deep. Its blue cover felt like worn leather one second and cool, still water the next. The clasp wasn’t a lock, but a fused piece of metal that was both a perfect circle and a perfect square. His fingers, grimy with the city’s filth, trembled as he pried it open.
The words inside were not in any language he knew, yet he understood them perfectly. They were about him.
...Kai hides the pain of his empty stomach by telling his sister Lyra stories about the feasts they’ll have one day. He does not let her see him cry. He believes this is strength...
Kai’s blood ran cold. No one knew that. No one was there. He read on, his heart hammering against his ribs. It detailed his most private shames, his hidden fears. And then, the text marched into the future.
...Tomorrow, at the shift-change fog, Lyra will take a shortcut through the Rustworks to bring him a stolen protein bar. She will witness a deal gone wrong between the Chrome-Jacks and the Data-Wraiths. She will be seen. They will silence her. She will not scream. She will think of Kai...
The book fell from his numb hands. This was no treasure. It was a curse. A death sentence. But within the curse was a thread of hope: a chance to change it. He clutched the notebook to his chest, this terrible, miraculous key to tomorrow, and ran.
Alan arrived in Neo-Aethelburg not with a flash of light, but with a glitch. One moment the air in the alley was empty; the next, it stuttered, and he was there, flickering like a corrupted file.
He felt heavy, sick, vulnerable. The air, thick with smog and the smell of ozone, resisted him. It was like trying to breathe water. To those who glanced his way, he was a man-shaped blur, an afterimage that hurt to look at. A low, sub-audible hum vibrated from him, setting teeth on edge and causing nearby data-screens to flicker.
He was a ghost in the machine, and the machine was trying to debug him.
He knew the story of this place, he’d written its broad strokes. He knew the Rustworks was where fate would claim Lyra. Using this knowledge was like walking a tightrope. He navigated the crowds, knowing which corners to avoid to prevent a chance encounter that wasn’t "written." But his mere presence was a variable. He brushed against a street vendor, causing him to drop a crate. The delay meant a crucial messenger was late, a deal was missed, and a chain of events began that was nowhere in Alan’s original narrative. The story was already changing.
He found Kai huddled in a makeshift shelter, desperately reading the book. The boy looked up, and his eyes widened not in surprise, but in recognition and fury.
“You,” Kai hissed, clutching the notebook. “You wrote this.”
Alan held up his hands, his form solidifying for a moment before flickering again. “It’s not what you think. That book… it doesn’t belong here. It’s a part of... of a larger thing. Its presence here is making your world sick.”
“Sick?” Kai laughed, a raw, broken sound. “This book is the only medicine I’ve ever had! It tells the truth! It says my sister dies tomorrow!”
“I know what it says,” Alan said, his voice full of a weary, cosmic grief. “But taking that future for yourself could break something far bigger than your life.”
“What is bigger than my sister’s life?” Kai screamed, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. “You wrote this tragedy for me! You’re the cruel god who decided she had to die for your story! And now you want to take back my only chance to save her?”
In that moment, Alan saw himself through Kai’s eyes: not a chronicler, but a capricious tyrant. The boy wasn’t a character; he was a person, fighting for his world with the only tool he had.
Their argument was cut short by a soundless scream of tearing reality. The wall next to them didn’t crumble or explode. It simply ceased. One moment it was corroded sheet metal and graffiti; the next, it was a Hole, a perfect, terrifying void of non-existence, edged with a static flicker.
From within the Hole came not a sound, but a profound, absolute silence that was louder than any noise.
Down in the street, a Data-Wraith mid-stride simply pixelated and vanished, leaving no trace. The people around her didn’t scream in horror; they blinked in confusion, their memories already editing her out, their minds struggling to patch the gap in the narrative of their world.
The city was unraveling. The paradox of the notebook, an object defining a reality from within it, was causing reality itself to reject its own code. The Holes were the result. Glitches in the simulation. Proof that the world was, quite literally, losing the plot.
The stakes were no longer about one girl. It was about everyone.
“Do you see?” Alan whispered, staring into the hungry void of the Hole. “This is what I feared.”
Kai looked from the Hole to the book in his hands, his face a mask of terror and understanding. The tool of his salvation was the instrument of his world’s destruction.
There was only one way to fix it. The notebook had to be made whole and removed. But the story within it had to be resolved. Kai, with a courage that broke Alan’s heart, made a choice. He used the book. He didn’t try to stop the deal his sister would witness. Instead, he found a different path, a riskier, more desperate one written in the margins of fate by Alan’s own disruptive presence.
He created a diversion that drew the gangs away a moment earlier, allowing Lyra to pass through unseen but leaving himself exposed. He was caught, beaten, but left alive. The original tragedy was averted, but at a personal cost. Lyra was safe, but Kai was broken, his body and spirit bruised in new ways.
It was a bittersweet, stable outcome. A new ending.
As Kai lay bleeding in the alley, he looked at Alan. “Take it,” he rasped, pushing the notebook toward him. “Fix your story.”
Alan took the book. As his fingers closed around the familiar cover, his presence in Neo-Aethelburg solidified one last time. He looked at the boy, not as a character, but as a kindred spirit who had also borne the unbearable weight of a world.
“It was never just a story,” Alan said, his voice full of sorrow. And then he was gone..."
The hum was gone. The taste of ozone and despair had vanished, replaced by the quiet dust of a still room.
Alan blinked. A dull ache pulsed behind his eyes. The sharp, electric pain of a universe rejecting him was... not a memory, but an echo. A phantom limb of the soul.
He was seated at his old wooden desk. The surface was worn smooth in familiar places. Under his palms was the cool, familiar texture of a blue notebook.
Notebook 452
It was lying open before him. His pencil was resting on the page, as if he had just set it down after a long writing session. The entire story of Neo-Aethelburg and Kai was there, in his own handwriting, from beginning to end.
He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. A dream. A hallucination. A particularly vivid fugue state. It had to be. The relief was immense, undercut only by a strange, lingering sense of loss for a world that never was.
His eyes drifted to the top of the first page, to the very first line he had written before the "jolt."
The Reclamation of Notebook 452 was written across the top.
This is the story of the Glimmer City of Neo-Aethelburg, and of the chrome-winged sparrow who fell to earth, whose name was Kai...
And there it was. The scar.
The savage, diagonal slash from the pencil's violent jerk. It cut through the word "Kai," a dark, ugly gash on the pristine page. Proof of the accident. Proof of the moment it all went wrong.
Except.
He leaned in, his heart beginning to hammer a dull rhythm against his ribs. He squinted, tracing the line with a trembling finger.
The graphite mark was dark and deep. But it wasn't a break in the narrative. It was under it.
The text of the sentence didn't stop before the slash and start again after it. The letters of the word "Kai" were written over the top of the graphite scar, their ink sitting proudly on the roughened texture of the paper. The sentence was seamless. Uninterrupted.
It was not that the notebook had vanished and returned. It was that the notebook had never left.
The accident, the disappearance, the entire epic journey into Neo-Aethelburg, the glitches, the holes, the confrontation with Kai, none of it had ever happened in the physical world.
He had been sitting here the entire time. Writing.
A cold void opened up in the pit of his stomach, far more terrifying than any interdimensional rift. The implications were paralyzing.
Did the Box even jolt? Or was that a twitch in his own mind? Did he create a universe and its entire salvation crisis in a single,sustained moment of intense projection? Was his"traveling" just the focused act of imagination, so vivid he experienced it as reality? Were the"holes" not signs of reality decaying, but symbols of his own failing grip on the distinction between creation and perception?
He stared at the pencil lying innocently on the page. The instrument of the accident that never was.
He had the notebook. He had the story. But he had no proof of how it came to be. He only had the memory of an adventure that left no physical evidence, only a psychological scar.
He was the Walker Between Worlds. And the most terrifying world of all, the one he could never understand, never map, and never escape, was the labyrinth of his own mind.
He closed the blue notebook, adding it to the precarious stack with all the others. Another reality saved. Or another story told.
He could never be sure which.
Tags: cosmic horror metafiction notebook