The parcel was waiting on my doorstep when I came home, though I had watched the road all evening from the upstairs window. No courier had stopped. No footsteps crossed the gravel. Still, there it was: a narrow brown box, damp at the corners, addressed in my own handwriting.
Inside lay a book bound in black cloth. Its cover carried no title, only a shallow impression where letters might once have been. The pages smelled of dust and rain. On the first page, someone had written: Read this before you remember writing it.
I laughed because the alternative was to call someone. There was no one to call. My sister had been dead for six years, my friends had grown tired of my silences, and the house had learned to hold its breath whenever I entered a room.
The book contained a story about a man who lived alone at the edge of a town. It described his kitchen, the crack in the blue mug, the loose hinge on the back door. It even described the small scar beneath his left thumb, which I had received that morning while opening a tin of peaches.
I read until midnight. The final sentence stopped halfway across the page.
Tomorrow, he will find the missing chapter beneath the floorboards.
In the morning, the floorboard beneath my bed was raised.
There was no chapter beneath it. There was only a brass key and a second parcel, smaller than the first. My hands shook as I opened it. Inside was a photograph of the abandoned library on the hill, a place closed before I was born. In the window, barely visible behind the glass, stood a man holding a book.
He had my face.
I walked to the library before sunrise. The key opened the front door. Dust covered everything except a single stone lectern in the centre of the reading room. The black book waited there, open to a fresh page.
This time, the sentence was complete.
He has come to collect the ending.
Behind me, the door clicked shut. In the dark window, my reflection lifted its hand.
I did not.
Six Questions About the Story
1. Is the book supernatural?
The story leaves the book’s nature uncertain, but it clearly records events before they happen and seems connected to the narrator’s identity.
2. Why is the book connected to the library?
The library functions as the story’s hidden centre: a forgotten place where the narrator’s past and future appear to overlap.
3. Did the narrator write the book?
The opening message suggests that the narrator may have written it without remembering, though the ending leaves that possibility unresolved.
4. What does the reflection represent?
The reflection suggests a divided self, showing that the narrator may no longer be the only presence inhabiting his body or story.
5. Why does the story end at the beginning of a new chapter?
The unfinished ending reinforces the idea that the narrator has entered a repeating cycle rather than reached a final resolution.
6. What is the central fear in the story?
Its central fear is losing ownership of your own life and discovering that someone else has already written every choice you thought was yours.
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