Chapter 1: The Book’s Cruel Answer
The single bulb above Clyde’s desk flickered, throwing long, dancing shadows over the chaos of his life. Textbooks on abnormal psychology and 19th-century literature were piled like defensive walls. A half-empty mug of cold coffee sat beside a framed photo of Main Street in Dripping Springs, Texas—quiet, sun-baked, and a million miles away. The air smelled of stale popcorn and the sandalwood incense he’d burned earlier in a futile attempt to calm his nerves.
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The book in his lap was all wrong. It was too warm, like skin. The leather was supple and dark, but it wasn’t any animal he could name. He’d found it last week at a dusty occult shop downtown, shoved behind a bust of Artemis. The old woman behind the counter hadn’t even looked up from her crossword. “Twenty bucks,” she’d said, and he’d practically thrown the money at her.
Now, he stared at the open page. His own handwriting, rushed and jagged with hope, stared back.
Bryce Stanton falls in love with me.
Underneath, the book had responded. It hadn’t been there when he’d closed it. The new text was in a smooth, looping script that made his stomach clench.
Subject: Bryce Stanton. Directive: Adoration.
Method: Reduction.
Procedure: Isolate the subject. Introduce the catalyst (your presence). Apply consistent pressure of longing. The unnecessary components—pride, ambition, social connections, independent will—will slough away. The purified core, now entirely dependent on the source of its conditioning (you), will interpret this dependence as love.
Note: The process is irreversible. Commence?
He’d tried to write other things before. A better grade on his philosophy midterm. The courage to speak up in his seminar. Each time, the book gave him a method, but it was always like this—a lateral, unsettling solution that felt less like magic and more like surgery. He’d never gone through with any of them.
But tonight, Bryce had posted a picture. Bryce at some roof party, his arm around a girl from the sorority, both of them laughing. Bryce, who was all easy confidence and sun-bleached hair and a laugh that echoed in Clyde’s head for hours. Bryce, who’d clapped him on the shoulder after study group and said, “You’re a smart guy, Abernathy,” and left Clyde feeling like he’d been touched by a star.
The want was a physical ache, a hollowed-out space beneath his ribs.
“Just do it,” he whispered to the empty apartment. His finger traced the words Commence?
The page hummed. A warmth pulsed up through his fingertips, into his wrists. It wasn’t pleasant. It felt like a low-grade fever, a biological wrongness. The flickering light buzzed in time with it.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, yes. Commence.”
The heat spiked, sharp for just a second, then vanished. The page went cool and inert. The writing was gone. Only his original desperate sentence remained, and now it looked pathetic, a child’s wish scrawled on a bathroom stall.
Nothing happened.
A wave of shame washed over him, hot and immediate. He was an idiot. He’d spent twenty bucks on a weird blank book and some performative weirdness because he was too pathetic to just…
His phone buzzed on the desk. A text notification lit up the screen.
Bryce Stanton: hey
Clyde’s heart stuttered. He’d had Bryce’s number for months, from a group project. They’d never texted. Not once.
He picked up the phone, his thumbs slick.
Clyde: Hey? What’s up?
The three dots appeared. They bounced. Stopped. Started again.
Bryce Stanton: not much. just thinking. party got loud.
Clyde: Yeah, looked like it.
Shit. Too eager. He’d referenced the photo.
Bryce Stanton: yeah. it was kinda lame. everyone’s so fake here sometimes u know?
Clyde blinked. That wasn’t Bryce’s brand. Bryce was the center of the fake crowd, the one who made it look real.
Clyde: I guess. You okay?
Bryce Stanton: feels weird. lonely i guess. ur always so quiet but u seem real.
The words were a jolt of electricity. He looked from the phone to the book, its cover dark and silent.
Clyde: I don’t know about that.
Bryce Stanton: i do. can i come over?
Clyde almost dropped the phone. He looked around his apartment—the clutter, the peeling wallpaper by the window, the palpable loneliness. This wasn’t where people like Bryce Stanton came.
Clyde: Right now? It’s past midnight.
Bryce Stanton: yeah. if thats cool. i just dont wanna be alone.
Twenty minutes later, a soft knock. Clyde opened the door, and there he was, backlit by the dingy hallway light. He was wearing the same shirt from the photo, but it was wrinkled now. His smile was there, but it was softer, unmoored.
“Hey, man,” Bryce said, stepping inside without being asked. He rubbed his arms like he was cold. “Thanks for this. I just… had to get out of there.”
“No problem,” Clyde said, closing the door. The air in the room changed, charged with a new energy. Bryce smelled like beer and expensive cologne and something else—a sharp, metallic scent, like ozone after a lightning strike.
Bryce didn’t sit. He wandered over to Clyde’s desk, picked up the photo of Dripping Springs. “This where you’re from?”
“Yeah.”
“Looks quiet.”
“It is.”
Bryce put the frame down, his fingers lingering on the edge of the desk. He was close now. Too close. Clyde could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the tired creases at the corners of his eyes. This wasn’t the Bryce from the party. This was something else.
“Everyone talks all the time,” Bryce said, his voice low. “But they don’t say anything. You don’t talk much. But when you do, it means something. I notice that.”
The words were perfect. They were the words Clyde had dreamt of hearing. So why did they feel like ice down his spine?
“You’re not yourself tonight,” Clyde said.
Bryce turned to look at him fully. His eyes, usually a bright, dismissive blue, looked deeper, darker. Hungry. “I feel more myself than I have in a long time. It’s like… all the other crap is just fading out. Static. You’re the only clear signal.”
He took a step forward. Clyde took an involuntary step back, his calves hitting the edge of his bed.
“I shouldn’t have written that,” Clyde muttered, more to himself than to Bryce.
“Written what?” Bryce asked, but there was a vacant curiosity in his tone, like he was only asking because he knew he should.
The process. Apply consistent pressure of longing. Was he the pressure? Was his own desperate want the catalyst?
Bryce reached out. His hand, which had always been so quick to slap a back or shake a hand, came up slowly, almost reverently. He cupped the side of Clyde’s face. His palm was shockingly warm.
“You’re shaking,” Bryce said.
“I’m scared.”
“Don’t be.” Bryce’s thumb stroked Clyde’s cheekbone. The gesture was intimate, profound, and completely hollow. It was a thing done because it was the logical next step in the script, not because Bryce had any idea why he was doing it. “It’s simple now. It’s just you. Everything else is so far away.”
Clyde looked into those darkened eyes and saw it. The reduction. The pride, the ambition, the complex web of a life—sloughing away. What was left in the room with him was a purified core, a focused beam of attention that had nowhere else to go. It interpreted its own existence as devotion. It called that love.
This was it. This was what he’d wanted.
Bryce leaned in, his breath hot on Clyde’s mouth.
Clyde turned his head at the last second. The kiss landed on his cheek, wet and misplaced.
“You should go,” Clyde heard himself say, his voice strangled.
Bryce didn’t get angry. He didn’t get confused. He just straightened up, his hand dropping. The devotion in his eyes didn’t flicker. It was a fixed state. “Okay,” he said softly. “If you want. I’ll be right outside, though. In case you change your mind.”
“What?”
“I’ll just wait. In the hall. Or in my car. It’s fine. I don’t have anywhere else I need to be.” He said it plainly, as a fact. All his plans, his friends, his life—unnecessary components. Static.
He gave Clyde one more look, that awful, tender look, and then he turned and walked out, closing the door quietly behind him.
Clyde stood frozen in the center of his room. The silence was deafening. He could feel Bryce out there, a patient, quiet presence on the other side of the door. Waiting. Reducing.
He stumbled to his desk, grabbing the book. It felt cold now. Dead. He flung it open, searching for the pages, for a reversal, for an undo command.
The pages were blank. Every single one. A smooth, unbroken expanse of impossible leather.
From the hallway, through the thin door, he heard it: the soft, steady sound of Bryce Stanton sitting down on the floor, settling in to wait.
Suddenly he heard Bryce call out. Something was wrong. He opened the door to see bryces clothes laying on the floor. Then he saw something moving under his shirt. It was small and was moving swiftly. Then he saw Bryce, he emerged from underneath the cloth, in shock and dismay. His naked body trembled in the cool air. The hallway light cast long shadows across his skin, highlighting the way his muscles tensed. Clyde’s breath caught in his throat. He didn’t know what to do.
Bryce was on his knees, his chest heaving, his hands clutching at the fabric of his shirt like it was the only thing keeping him grounded. His eyes were wide, unblinking, and for the first time since he’d walked in, they weren’t fixed on Clyde.
“What the hell is *that*?” Bryce whispered, his voice breaking.
Clyde’s gaze followed his line of sight. Under Bryce’s shirt, something was moving.
Not a shadow, not a trick of the light—something *alive*. A writhing, segmented thing, like a spider but wrong, its body slick and dark as wet oil. It pulsed faintly, its many legs clicking against the concrete floor in a rhythm that made Clyde’s stomach clench. It was too big to be a spider. Too *wrong*.
Bryce’s hands trembled as he pulled his shirt away, revealing the creature crawling out from under his ribs. It was black, glossy, and seemed to shift shape slightly, like it was made of liquid shadow. Its many eyes—dozens of them—gleamed in the dim hallway light, reflecting back at Clyde with something like hunger.