The World in Words
by Lane Robins

Noah Hathaway pulled the rental car into the driveway, one day too late for his father's funeral, and one hour late for his appointment with the family lawyer. Pearson waited, a shadowy figure on the screened porch. His lawyer. Noah was the last of the family, now.

"What was it this time?" Pearson said by way of greeting. Pearson's usual patience was ragged around the edges. Noah felt the irritation radiating from the man, saw it in the quick tap of foot against the wood, forcibly stilled, and in the rigid line of Pearson's mouth.

"I missed my flight," Noah said. "I'm sorry."

"This is the soonest you could get another one?" Pearson asked.

"Yes," Noah said, shut his mouth on further explanation. Best to leave it there rather than admit he had mixed up his days, arriving at the airport this morning and had had to buy a new ticket. He might have blamed his subconscious—he and his father had been estranged these past years—but he couldn't make it stick. Noah had always been at odds with the rush and bustle of the modern world.

He sank onto the porch swing, stared at the great air-plant laden oaks that had wrapped the house for a century. But even they showed change; truncated branches made way for a tangled nest of satellite dishes and cable. He closed his eyes. "How was the funeral?"

"Well-attended. A lot of collectors showed up, ostensibly to pay regrets, but also to get their bids in first."

"Then it's as well I wasn't there," Noah said. "I don't know what Dad's collections entailed. Except for the books."

"Well, come on in, and we'll talk about it."

"Now?" Noah paused in his swinging. He didn't want to think about interest and taxes, death duties and probate. . . . Things were better organized in past centuries, when there would have been men of business to do all that for him. But in this day and age, men were supposed to take a hands-on approach.

Noah touched his coat pocket, felt the reassuring bulge of the book he'd borrowed from the college's library. As a part of their archival collection, it wasn't supposed to leave. No one checked books out of the Hathaway rare book room—no one except Noah Hathaway. The scent of the book's pages, steeped in years, called to him, an imaginary line between his pocket and his brain.

"Noah," Pearson said, holding out his hand. "I want your undivided attention."

"Be careful with it," Noah said, handing the book over out of habit.

"I'm not confiscating it," Pearson said, handing it back and using his outstretched hand to tug Noah to his feet. "I'm not your father. And I promise not to overwhelm you today. I just want to get a start on things. You can't ignore the real world forever."

Noah let Pearson usher him back into the empty house. Scrupulously clean, it felt dusty to Noah, a smothering dust of disappointment and irritation, directed at him.

Pearson shifted his grip to Noah's elbow and steered him into the library. Noah balked. "What's that? "

"That is your father's PC. He found it easier to keep his records on it after his holdings reached a certain point. I agreed."

"Do I have to use it?" Noah found it hard enough to interact with people—computers were far worse, yoking the self interest of a person with the stubborn literal sense of a small child. There was no room for nuance, for expression, for elegance.

"Relax, Noah. I won't make you touch it today. But some time soon, we're going to have lessons. Your father may have washed his hands of you, but I haven't. I know you're not stupid. Despite your grades. You just have to make decisions and act on them, instead of drifting."

Noah shrugged like a sullen teenager, his heart sinking. He didn't want to be taken in hand, didn't want anything more than he already had—the time and the excuse to read classic literature, old poetry, and anything else that struck his wandering eye.

His father had started him on the path, giving Noah free rein of the first book collection he'd bought, encouraging him to appreciate it, only to later express disapproval when Noah's interest never broadened. Their one point of common interest became a sore spot. Even with all that, returning to this room still felt like returning to his first friends, his father's lingering disapproval overwhelmed by the massed books.

"Are those new?" Noah asked, pointing at the shelves nearest the door which he remembered as holding children's classics. Now, they held a tattered heap of stacked books gently falling back into their component pieces of leather and gilt and vellum. Age-spotted, edges foxed, paper soft and brown, they smelled of dark rooms and nights lit by candles. Drawn, Noah drifted over and picked up the topmost book.

"Oh, those," Pearson said, looking up from the computer screen. "Your father got suckered on those. They're not worth anything at all, much less what he paid for them."

Noah opened the book with a delicate, practiced touch, squinting. Even with his glasses on, the fine, crabbed text was hard to read. Bestiary, the words unscrambled themselves, the booke of fantastickal creatures. In pleasant anticipation, he turned past the title page. "It's blank."

"Most of them from that collection are. Your father was livid. But he decided he'd rather take the loss than admit he'd been rooked. It soured him on books, though. He was planning to sell them all."

"No," Noah said. "Not the books."

"As a collection, it's not much. Most of the books are not valuable, just old and obscure. Failed poets, first novelists who never made a name for themselves, nonsensical natural histories, and popular epics. Nothing special—"

"No," Noah repeated. "These were my first books."

"They've been defaced," Pearson said. "I'm not sure they're readable anymore, Noah."

"What?"

"After your father fired his last housekeeper—she spent some hours getting creative with magic marker."

"Why the books?" Noah touched the shelves with shaking fingers. "They're not even things my father particularly valued."

"Convenient, I guess," Pearson said. "And she was probably afraid to damage something he'd notice right away. It took him nearly a month to find the graffiti. He filed charges, but dropped them soon after. He meant to sell the ruined books to some atiquarian who might use the parts for repair projects."

"I'm not selling them," Noah said.

"They're valueless."

"Not to me."

"It's your decision," Pearson said. "But look at the damage first."

"I'll look," Noah said, grudgingly, stroking the smooth-grained leather binding of a nearby book as if he were apologizing for its mistreatment. It fell open to a familiar page. He bent his head to the open leaf, ran his fingers over the text. "'With grains of sand, with spiderweb floss, I will craft our filigree bridge that love must cross.'"

Pearson squeezed Noah's shoulder. "Read later. Work now."

Noah shrugged the touch off. "'and delicate our steps must be and sure. . . ." He let his breath out in a hiss as the words disappeared from one page to the next. The continuance, the overleaf, was blank—a smooth, age-spotted expanse. "What's this?"

"More of her handiwork." Pearson sat down. "Does it matter?"

"It's blank, not defaced," Noah said. He brought the volume towards the stronger light on the desk. He set the book down, turned the lamp's beam to fall directly on the page. No ink remained, only the faint indentation where the press had marked the page.

Lifting the book to his nose, Noah smelled only musty paper, no hint of chemicals, no bleach. What would it take to erase the ink without tearing the fragile paper? How long would it have taken? He couldn't imagine anyone toiling at such a complicated task. It didn't make sense. She wouldn't have had the time. But print didn't just erase itself, either. "Are the other books like this?"

"About two-thirds of them are either erased or scribbled on. She was a very busy girl," Pearson said. "Noah, I'm sorry."

"Two-thirds?" Noah's voice cracked. He returned to the shelves and began flipping through pages, assessing the damage with tears lurking in his throat.

The books from the first tier of shelves all had blank pages, one or more per book. The second tier was the same, but the last book on the shelf had both a blank page and a scribble on the facing page. Noah looked at it for a long time, sliding his glasses around to get them more comfortably placed along his nose. His dismay shifted into reluctant curiosity.

Pearson had said marker, and that's what 'scribble' suggested to Noah, but this had the graceful sweep of quill work; the ink feathered and faded to sepia as if it had faced time and wear. And it had a shape, a sense of purpose. "Look at this, Mr. Pearson."

"It's Matt, okay? And it's just like the others," Pearson said, looking up briefly from the screen. "Meaningless, shapeless graffiti."

"It may be graffiti, but it's not shapeless. It's a foot, or at least part of one; toes, part of the sole. It's weird. And it doesn't look like marker at all," Noah said. A funny tickle started in his belly, a shiver of excitement. He knew everything books had to offer, but this—this was different.

"Hell, maybe it's the housekeeper's self portrait," Pearson said. Despite his dismissive words, he took the book from Noah, studying the lines with careful attention.

Noah took a book from the next shelf. "Look—I was right. Maybe you were right, too." The picture continued, the rest of the foot, the curved heel and delicate arch of ankle. The completed foot was life size and there were a group of strange, curved lines near the heel that Pearson beat him to the punch on.

"Fingers?"

"Yeah," Noah said. "What is this?" He whispered it, but Pearson answered him anyway.

"I don't know. Let's take pictures of it."

Pearson flattened the book onto a glassy tray on the desk and Noah said, "Hey—don't!"

"I'm not hurting it, Noah, just scanning it in. Then we can juggle the images on screen."

"Or we could lay the books on the rug." Noah took the book back, stroking his fingers over the page to assure himself that the scanner had done no damage. "And use our eyes."

Pearson smiled at him. "You're decisive enough in your own way, aren't you? Your father should have paid more attention."

Noah shrugged, laid the book down on the rich burgundy and gold of the rug, followed it with the other two. They looked adrift there by themselves, adrift and very strange. Pearson's breath caught, and when Noah reached for the shelves again, Pearson was there helping him search.

The image grew quickly once they realized that the scribbles were confined to that third section of shelving and one row within it, dipping slightly into the row below. They crawled over the floor, testing linkage of lines. Noah beat Pearson to the joint of wrist and hand and laughed at him, then laughed again when Pearson, grinning, made an effort and set the next three books in place.

The last book, containing a piece of closed eye and ear, slotted into place, and Noah's puzzle high faded into awe. Pages fluttered on the floor in the faint respiration of the air conditioning, the books laid out four wide in sections, ten long. And there she was. A woman, curled—near contorted—created in sepia brushstrokes, pillowed in her nest of letters and poetry.

Noah's hand hovered over the pages, tracing the sinuous curve of her spine, each vertebra defined, the upturned palm, fingertips brushing her right foot, one knee hidden by a thigh, the other bent. The play of muscle in shoulder and neck, her face turned, half exposed, curled in a web of hair and shielding arm. The closed eyes, the lips parted in restful sleep. Faint stands of hair strewed her face like blown wisps of ink.

"She's beautiful," Noah said.

"She's weird," Pearson said. "It sure isn't the housekeeper. I know you don't like tech, but I want to get some pictures of this."

Noah shrugged, watched Pearson snapping pictures of the whole, the light strobing in the dim room.

His breath caught in his throat, catching his startled cry and muting it. She had been sleeping, hadn't she? The eyes closed, the lashes dark on the cheek. She was looking at him now.

"Noah?" Pearson turned.

The eye was open, the iris delicately faceted, deep. Aware. The lashes swept downward like falling leaves, veiling her eye, then uncovering it again.

"Did you see?" Noah whispered.

"Our eyes playing tricks on us. That's all," Pearson said, his voice rough. "The camera's done downloading. We can compare the pictures. You'll see."

"I don't need to," Noah said, watching the lips part further, then close, the fingers twitch. He knelt and touched the picture's hand. "'impossible it seems and yet what are dreams. . .'"

"Not time for poetry—" Pearson said, then fell silent.

Near the mouth of the creature, on the blank, smooth page, there were figures forming, letters swimming out of the paper like seepage. "' but sweet impossibles we believe to be true. '"

Noah shuddered in amazement, in awe, in wonder, reaching his hand out again. "Who is she? Where did she come from? Did Dad know about her?"

"I don't know. I don't know." Pearson said, his voice strained. For the first time, Noah realized that Pearson wasn't just some old family retainer bereft of personality, but a young man and frightened, as far out of his element as Noah usually felt.

"It's okay," Noah said. The woman dove into the deeper pages like a dolphin, slid down in a wash of brown-edged lines and resurfaced, lolling on her back, facing them.

Noah's blush heated his face. Gingerly, he reached out, hesitated, then closed the books that comprised the woman's breasts and thighs, intersecting paper flesh with burnished leather covers.

"God, that's almost worse," Pearson said. "What the hell is she?"

"I don't know," Noah echoed Pearson's earlier comment. He touched her fingers with his own, watched them move against the page.

"Don't do that," Pearson said.

"I'm not hurting her," Noah said, without looking away from her slow, curling lips.

"I'm not worried about her."

She pressed her hand up against his own and Noah's fingers slid into the page as if it were a pool the creature so blithely swam in. It felt warm, a little dusty, soft like feathers; his skin tingled and burned. He let his hand sink to the second knuckles, and something touched him back, a whisper of contact, her fingers meeting his.

"Noah!"

Noah yanked his hand out. His fingertips were frosty white; the blood seeped slowly back into them. On the page below, a faint imprint of his fingertips lingered, pale brown circles, spreading and fading like ripples in a pond.

"Don't do that."

"It didn't hurt. Not a lot, anyway," Noah said, his mind lingering on that kiss of fingertips against his own.

Pearson knelt, tapped the pages near the woman's face with the tip of a pen. Noah pushed him off. "Don't."

"Who are you?" Pearson asked. "Can you hear me? Or do you only respond to poetry?"

She rolled her head, closed her eyes, shoulders shifting in a sigh. Then words welled up, more slowly than they had before; each word rolled up in a different font, as if she were cribbing from different books.

"I am filigree. I am floss. I am the bridge between words and dreams. I hight the book wyrm. "

Noah let his breath out in a shivering gust. Of course. He reached out again, and Pearson's hand closed on his arm, restraining him.

Reluctantly, more words welled up, like the thin lines of blood on rosethorn scratches. "I am hunger. I am alone. "

"No," Noah said. "You're not alone. I'm here now, and I'll take care of you."

The creature's eyes opened, her lips smiled up at him, her hand raised to the surface near him. Pearson intercepted his hand again.

"Noah, please. Don't do that. Not until we know more."

"What more is there to know? She lives inside of books—I can't imagine anything more wonderful." Noah shook Pearson's grip off, laid his hands against the closed covers. "Living within a million worlds, free of the petty stupidities of this one; no one jeering at you because you're too slow to catch a ball or win at the arcade, no one getting angry because you've lost time while reading and missed class. You'd never be lonely there."

"She is," Pearson said, his words hushed as if they were in an avalanche zone. "And you can find friends outside of books, Noah."

Noah felt hot squirming embarrassment in his belly, but at a distance, everything muted by the sheer wonder of her presence. "That doesn't matter now. Do you think Dad knew about her? He couldn't have. Not and be willing to sell the collection for parts. Why wouldn't he tell me?" Noah said, "How could he hide something like this from me?"

Pearson sank down into the desk chair with a heavy sigh. "I think he was trying to protect you."

"She's not dangerous. She's hungry." Noah raised his head. "What do I feed her?" He stroked the edges of the books, fingers riffling the rough papers. The creature crept closer to his hand, but after a sliding glance towards Pearson made no effort to touch Noah's skin.

"Words, I guess." Pearson picked up the newspaper and set it down a little space away from the books. The wyrm flowed up, pressed her fingers to the cut edges of the pages in obvious frustration.

"Don't tease her," Noah said, taking the newspaper and dropping it on top of the books. She coiled around it, moved into it, her body condensing awkwardly in the shallow depths of pages on the floor. After a moment, Noah took the paper away.

There were words missing from random pages, but not the devoured blankness left in the other books. "Guess she didn't like it. I'll find something better for her," Noah said. The book in his pocket nudged his attention, and he spread it over her pages. A faint sound erupted, more felt than heard, like the thrumming purr of a great cat. Noah smiled.

"Noah," Pearson said, "You can't just keep feeding her library books. You need to sit down and think —"

"Noah." The ink swirled up on the page, repeated itself. "Noah."

He knelt. "Yes?"

"In the darkness I am alone."

"I'll—"

Pearson tugged him to his feet. "We're all alone in the dark, Noah. Don't let her talk you into something."

"Into what?" Noah said, pushing away. "What do you think she can talk me into?"

"I just don't want you making any rash decisions," Pearson said, frowning as if he wrestled with some nameless concern.

Sweet impossibles, Noah thought. "You wanted me to make decisions." Noah sat on the floor again.

"Noah," Pearson said.

"You needed me to sign some papers, didn't you? Let's do that now. I'm tired." Noah kept his eyes turned away from Pearson, away from the bookwyrm, afraid that to look at either would betray his pounding heart.

"All right," Pearson said. "All right."

He gestured to the chair, and once Noah had sat himself in it, showed him where to sign in near silence. When the paperwork disappeared into Pearson's briefcase, Pearson hesitated.

"I'll see you in the morning?"

"Yeah," Noah said. "More paperwork, right? Decisions to be made and all that."

"It won't be bad. I'll even bring lunch and a take-out book for your—for her."

"Almost like friends," Noah said.

"We'll figure out what to do with your book collection first, how's that?" Pearson said, smiling. "Make sure that she's okay. Not parts."

"Great," Noah said. He walked Pearson out and darted back to the library. The bookwyrm was pressed against the edges of the book nearest the doorway, looking forlorn. He touched her fingers, let the page ingest them for a moment. Her fingers curled around his, pulling.

"Noah," she said. "Dreams."

He smiled, and picked up the library book from the floor, flipped past the blank pages, and read the next poem aloud. Then he set it down for her to devour, and she, smiling, read it back. As the hours progressed, and his throat dried, he stopped reading to her, let her read to him instead. He lay beside the books, dozing, dreaming, trailing his hand into the pages, pulling away when the tingling heat grew too much, dipping back in once the color returned to his flesh.

At dawn he woke, and knew it was time. Stiffly, he got up from the floor, and sat at the desk, searching for pen and paper, but there was none. Frowning, he braved the computer, poking out the letters one by one, leaving their transitory marks.

"Pearson," he started, then added, "Matt—" after all, they could have been friends. He didn't know how to erase the first part, and so left it, trying to compose his tangled thoughts. He was better with paper than with people, but he'd never tried to explain himself before.

Finally, at the end, he just left it simple. "Matt—you're a friend, and you'd be a willing bridge between me and the rest of the world, but it's a world I don't want to be a part of. Heaven's in a book, wrapped in the world within words. Forgive me. Take care of us." Finding no way to print the screen, he gave up, and added his name in careful typeface, hating the informality of it. "Noah Hathaway."

Then he stood, and after judging the space of the books—he didn't want to crowd her—he pulled more books from the shelves, widening the stacks until they covered the rug completely. He sat down then, on the books themselves and reached for her. His hand sank in, stopped at the wrist. She tugged; he stayed out, his cuff resisting the new world. He stripped, leaving only his glasses, and then waded in to meet her. The pages rolled over him like a dry surf, tugging, tumbling him head over heels. His skin grew tight and sere; he imagined it withering to paper and closed his eyes, gritting his teeth.

When he opened his eyes, she was smiling at him, her arms reaching out to enclose him. "Noah." Within the books, he could hear her voice, a shaped breeze in a silent world, carrying the flavors of every book she'd ever tasted. She rolled him over, showed him the texture and tang of words, the way they drifted over his skin like fragrant smoke or delicate butterflies. Noah laughed and settled down beside her, tangling himself in her arms. He fell asleep to the gentle, rocking wavelets of words.

Sometime after that, a ruffling of air disturbed their peaceful current and he drifted closer, curious to see what it was. A presence in the room and a voice, sinking down towards them like spilled ink, shaking into droplets.

"Noah?"

Noah rolled upwards, touched Pearson's shaking fingers, smiled. The presence receded, and then a banquet opened above them, a book splayed out, its words open to them, and they rose to feast.

The End

Story copyright Lane Robins, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com