A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,17

my shoulder. She had brought the vegetables for lunch from the garden.

My fire was still a dry pile of crumpled white papers. Wads of pixie-light popcorn kindling over dead, cold coals.

It was not the first time she had caught me in that act, so I didn't bother denying it. “I can't help it,” I said. “All these words, to be burnt like they were never meant to speak.”

“A terrible shame,” she agreed. “Like most things, nowadays.”

“Do you suppose there will be any books left, when it's over?” I asked, running my fingers over the next cover in the stack. I was suddenly very aware of the soft little frame that pressed against my gut where I had stashed the diary away. It was a conspicuous lump jutting like a tumor, at least from my guilty perspective.

“I think the proper question is whether or not there might be people left to read them,” Letta gave her perspective, and suddenly a vision came to me of nothing stirring for miles and miles except the pages of lost books, fluttering in the wind. The rubble would have settled, the screams would have silenced, and the only breathing the world knew would be that breeze, combing through the open pages of a thousand strewn books.

Free books.

For perhaps that end for us would be their own desperate revenge, I thought, and we would have met with the poetic justice of choking on that very same wind, and the ashes of books past that we had burned, burned, and burned.

I would not put it past the books to be possessed with such a vengeance. Not when our city itself had overturned on its founders, its tenders, the very people that were its lifeblood.

I caressed the book a moment longer, tenderly, as if for a moment we understood each other, the book and I.

Then reality set back in, and I bared its first page and tore it asunder.

S e v e n –

A Stranger at the Door

That night, I read more from the diary. It was a haunting thing to read it, but it felt important that I connect to this voice. This lost voice of a woman who had disappeared off the record. It was as if my reading it anchored her somehow, paid tribute to her life as a person, rather than leaving her solely to the disgrace of the claiming rubble. I honored her memory by reading it. I raised her from the ghostly dust. I pieced her back together, word by word, from wherever she had been disassembled, crushed, snuffed.

It was clear that she had entertained her life near the beginning of when things began to sour in Darath. She was one of the first. One of the baffled. I tried to imagine what it would have been like back then, seeing the first phenomena, being struck by the first disasters. Rising from the first dominoes of tragedy into the eerie aftermath of what you surely began to suspect was frightfully more than coincidence. The days when the first patterns began to manifest in the settling dust. Who would be the first to notice?

Lady Sebastian began to speak of the brick walls that housed the courtyard of her complex. I followed her day-by-day account of their prospective demise, as with each day they appeared to have slouched more than before, growing somehow sloppy in the set mortar, until she began to question her sanity just a little bit. But she knew those brick walls. She had walked them as a child, trailing her fingers along the lines of mortar. Straight lines. Sturdy lines. Now, the walls were a jumble of pale red blocks, like a horridly made patchwork quilt, crudely stitched together, every square askew. Within a week, a total disarray.

Yet solid, still. The wall itself did not change proportion. It remained the sentry it always had. Its peak did not buckle. Its edges did not crumble. Its roots remained set in their stone.

But Lady Sebastian no longer felt protected. She came to feel trapped. And she was no longer set in her stone.

It started with wariness. Then suspicion. These things evolved into anxiety, until she would not go near this mutant wall. She wrote of it from her window, with a more agreeable wall between her and the decaying thing outside.

But how long until her boundaries constricted again, the walls of the very house catching this structural disease?

Lady Sebastian's handwriting grew more sloppy as her account went on. Three times she left