Today was the muggy kind of spring day, and I found myself picking through craggy bits of sidewalk trying to avoid mud puddles. I would have laid down my slicker in some places to try and protect my shoes, but it was also drizzling. Not to mention all the worms. I couldn’t just leave them there to dry out when the sun came back, so it took me three times as long to get home from school. 

I thought about getting out my umbrella as a preventative measure but decided it was too much work to fish it from my bag. I’d be home soon anyway. 

I paused in the middle of this train of thought, my hand frozen in the middle of a worm-filled puddle. 

Something was humming.

It was the sort of sound that you don’t notice at first, but when you hear it, you realize you’ve been hearing it for a while. I strained my ears to try and find the source of the muted song. 

My hand drifted to my pocket knife. It was small and dull, but better than nothing. To tell the truth, I wasn’t supposed to have it with me. But the bag checks they run at school are little more than theater. I figured that out after accidentally leaving a container of painkillers in my backpack. 

I looked around. The street was totally empty. My eyes flickered to the cars and bags of trash lying out on the sidewalk. My only other companion was a small collarless cat hunched under a dented Toyota. 

I cleared my throat and deepened my voice slightly. “Hello?” The humming continued, irreverent. “Who’s there?”

Receiving no reply, I pulled out the knife. It was probably nothing. Even so, I squared my shoulders. The less vulnerable I looked, the better. 

I inclined my head, attempting to pinpoint the source. My braids brushed my shoulders with the motion, tickling slightly.

It was coming from across the street. I stood for a moment, momentarily paralyzed by two battling impulses. My fingers twitched. 

“Amara Colano, I know you are not about to go investigate the creepy humming,” I muttered to myself. 

Then I directly contradicted every sensible impulse and crossed the road to try and see more, burning with curiosity. The humming got louder as I carefully approached, until at last I was looking down at yet another puddle nestled into the shaded hollow of a sidewalk pit. Something glinted inside. 

Some kind of waterproof device? I grabbed a stick and poked the thing out of the puddle. It was a book. A singing book. 

Weird. 

I picked it up. It was unpleasantly wet but other than that, the condition was good. It was heavy, bound in a deep blue leather with eggshell curlicues in an archaic pattern licking up the rounded spine. 

Attached to it were three white satin ribbon bookmarks that weren’t marking anything just yet. A dainty gunmetal lock adorned the cover and its accompanying strap was left open and splayed out rather invitingly. The pages glinted- they were the kind that had their edges dipped in silver because the bookbinder was just that ostentatious. Painted on the front in transparent jewel tones was a detailed picture, but it had a splotch of mud on it. I quickly brushed it off and wiped my hand on my pants.

When I did so, a tree rendered in bone-aching crimson became visible, its roots twirling off into a kind of mist at the base. Tiny pastel houses were etched in on the branches. Every leaf was painstakingly placed, the veins practically microscopic but visible if one was determined enough. In the back, there were deep shadows, but whatever they denoted was unclear. I stared. The book hummed louder. 

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Jesus,” I muttered, running my index finger over the buttery leather. There was no title. Was it a diary? I looked around once more, at any moment expecting to be caught and hollered at. No one. So I opened it.

The flyleaf was a simple striated gray- I skipped it quickly, looking for a name or copyright date. The next page was creamy-white with a single sentence emblazoned in the middle. 

This book belongs to: Amara Colano

My name was written clearly, in neat handwriting that was not my own. The book slipped out of my fingers and landed back on the concrete with a muted thud.

“Is this some kind of a joke?” I asked, purposefully raising my voice. I squinted at the bushes, trying to see if there were kids behind them waiting to jump me. The shrubbery remained quite still. I swallowed and picked up the book again. It was still humming, and I could feel it buzz slightly in my hands. I opened it once more.

This book belongs to: Amara Colano

Take a peek, young one. 

That had not been there before. I was one hundred percent certain of that. Creepy. I looked around in a kind of helpless confusion. The cat padded closer with its tail crooked into a question mark. 

I elected to ignore the impossibility of it all and turned the page. 

“Is that Latin?” 

There was no discernible punctuation. Instead, the writer had seemingly opted for an unbreaking line of strange and stilted text. I managed to pick out a few repeating words. Ea, Mors, Nihil. Unreadable. I flipped the page. 

I couldn’t actually decipher what language was on the next page. It didn’t use remotely the same alphabet. My best guess was a very hesitant Arabic, but that didn’t seem right either. The script wasn’t as flowy.

Frustrated, I opened the book to the middle where the thick thread bound the signatures together. There was a sentence emblazoned in stark black ink across the center of the page. 

Come inside.

The humming stopped, and I paused, unsure. Evidently, it was an impatient book because the ink sank back into the pages almost immediately. Then it bled back up through the grain of the paper and began to flit about in a sort of dance. The darkness ghosted to the spine and formed the shape of an ornately carved door. Leftover spirals of ink made themselves a home in a gargoyle perched over top. It waited. 

I could do nothing but ask. “Am I dreaming?”

Do you want to be?

“No.” Let it be real, please let it be real. 

Good. 

The word lay there, trembling slightly as I stared. It seemed to be awaiting a response. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to give this some thought. When I opened them again, the message had changed once more. 

Do you want to take a look?

It was odd. I sensed no presence from it. No eagerness, no hesitation. It simply asked me its questions and awaited my reply. I considered. 

“Depends. What am I going to see?” I had no idea if the response I received would actually do anything to unseat the conviction I’d accrued, but it felt an important question to ask regardless. 

Something new, Amara.

A non-answer. Did it not know, or was it being cagey? Or perhaps it knew that was all the information I cared to hear. 

“I…” I gripped the edges of the book tightly in my hands. It felt heavy. “I won’t just pretend this never happened. Show me.”

And, just in case- “Please.”

The ink ran together and hastily formed the door again. And let it never be said I cannot see an invitation. I placed my index finger on the drawing.

White spots crawled across my vision in a manner languidly reminiscent of a burning film reel as it winds down to an end.