It is Saturday morning. The book is on the kitchen table.

  And I say "kitchen table" generously. It's a card table I bought at Goodwill for twelve dollars, the kind with the padded vinyl top and the folding metal legs that lock into place with a confidence they don't deserve. One of the legs is slightly shorter than the others, so the whole thing rocks if you lean on it wrong. I've shimmed it with a folded takeout menu from a Thai place that closed two months ago. That menu might be the most structurally important object in my apartment right now.

  The book sits on this table, and I sit across from it, and we regard each other like strangers in a bar who've made eye contact for a bit longer than is typical and now have to decide how we feel about that.

  I've had the thing for two days.

  Thursday night, I set it on the passenger seat and drove home and brought it inside and put it on the table and looked at it for a while and then went to bed.

  Friday I worked my shift — returns, shelving, that damn fluorescent bulb — and came home and looked at it again. I opened it. Closed it. Opened it again. Smelled it. Ran my fingers along the pages. Held it up to the window and angled the pages against the light, looking for impressions, indentations, anything at all.

  But I found nothing. I put it down. I ate leftover rice from a frozen container of questionable provenance, then went to bed.

  Now it's Saturday and I've made coffee and I'm sitting here and I'm going to deal with this properly, because I'm an engineer — was an engineer, anyway — and engineers don't just stare at things. They investigate.

  So. The Book.

  It’s pretty large, measuring roughly twelve by eleven inches and is about four and a half inches thick. I don't have calipers. I used a ruler I found in the junk drawer (which currently contains a ruler, three half-dead batteries, a soy sauce packet, and a key that doesn't actually open anything in this apartment). The pages number somewhere around six hundred — I counted twice and got to 652, and then 647, which I’m guessing is user error but which I'm choosing not to think about at the moment.

  The paper – if you can call it that – is heavy, almost cardstock, with a texture that's closer to cloth than pulp. Cream-colored. No watermarks, no ruling, no grid.

  The binding is the interesting part.

  It's leather — I'm fairly sure it's leather — but it doesn't match anything I can identify. I spent an hour last night going down an internet rabbit hole: cowhide, goatskin, pigskin, lambskin, the various exotics — ostrich, crocodile, stingray. None of them look right. This material has a grain that's almost too fine, too regular, like something manufactured to resemble leather but then overshot the mark and ended up even more real than the real thing!

  The color continues to be… variable. In direct light it's a deep cordovan. In shadow it goes almost fully black. At certain angles, when the light from the window hits it obliquely, I swear there's a reddish undertone, like… embers seen through smoke.

  It doesn't smell like leather either. It doesn't smell like anything, really. No tannins, no chemicals, no age, no must. Just… absence.

  No title. No author. No publishing information. No library markings. We’ve established all this. What I haven't been able to establish is why this thing was in the basement of the Millbrook Public Library, wedged into a gap between two shelving units like it was hiding.

  Or… like it was placed there by someone who wanted it found, but only by the right person at the right time.

  That's the kind of thinking I need to stop doing. That's “Main Character” delusion. That's the narrative instinct that makes people see patterns in static and faces in clouds and divine purpose in coincidence. But I know there is no mysterious higher purpose. I'm just a man who found a weird book in a basement.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  That's all.

  I flip it open again. Page one. Blank. Beautiful, heavy, and aggressively blank.

  Here's the thing, though. Blank books definitely exist. Journals. Sketchbooks. Notebooks. In fact, there's a whole industry dedicated to selling people empty pages at a premium. Moleskine built a brand on it.

  But… those books have branding. They have UPCs and ISBNs and prominent Made in China stamps and elastic closure bands. This book has none of that. This book has the unmarked, self-contained quality of something that was made by hand, for a purpose, by someone who never intended for it to be sold in a store.

  Which brings me to my next thought, and I want to be clear that I feel absolutely stupid even entertaining it.

  …

  …

  …

  Invisible ink.

  …

  …

  …

  I know.

  I know.

  But hear me out, OK?

  Or don't. After all, I'm talking to myself in an apartment that smells like stale rice, so I imagine the audience is limited.

  Invisible ink is a real thing.

  Not just lemon juice and spy movies! Iron gall ink fades to near-invisibility over time. Certain chemical compounds are only visible under UV light. And some — the oldest, simplest kind — are heat-activated. You write with a diluted acid solution, the paper dries clear, and the message only appears when you hold it near a flame. I remember this from a documentary. Or maybe from a children's book. The provenance of the knowledge is irrelevant. The point is this: it's a real phenomenon, and this is a mysterious book with pages that look blank… but maybe they're not.

  I don't own a UV light. I don't own much of anything anymore.

  But I do have matches.

  They're in the cabinet above the stove, a box of Diamond Strike-Anywhere kitchen matches that I bought eighteen months ago when I was briefly, paranoically convinced that the power grid was going to fail during a winter storm. Disaster preparedness, Karen called it, in the same tone she used for my other enthusiasms — composting, homebrewing — gentle indulgence shading into gentle concern. The storm I was worried about never came. Karen left. The matches stayed.

  And those matches are still here for me. There's a loyalty joke in there somewhere.

  I take the box down.

  I open the book to a page near the middle — not the first page, because if there is a hidden message I don't want to risk damaging the beginning.

  I strike a match.

  The flame is small and orange and painfully ordinary.

  I hold it above the page, maybe three inches away, angling my hand so the heat drifts downward. I move it slowly, left to right, the way you'd scan a flashlight across a dark room.

  The paper warms. I can feel it radiating back at me, a faint thermal reply. I watch for discoloration, for the ghost-image of letters appearing, for anything.

  …

  Nothing.

  …

  I move the match closer.

  Two inches.

  One.

  The flame licks sideways in some draft I can't feel and I adjust my grip and—

  The match bites me.

  That's what it feels like — a sharp, precise sting at the tip of my index finger, the flame having apparently decided to jump the gap between the matchstick and my skin with an enthusiasm I was not prepared for.

  I flinch.

  To my shame as a man, it is not a small flinch, but a full, involuntary, whole-arm jerk, the kind that happens before your rational mind has any say in the matter. Just… pure spinal-cord veto, and the match leaves my fingers.

  I watch it fall.

  It falls the way all matches fall — tumbling, the flame trailing like a tiny comet — and it lands on the open page of the book. I lunge for it, and I'm already seeing it in my mind: the page catching aflame, the old paper going up, six hundred pages of whatever-this-is turned to ash on my twelve-dollar card table because I decided it was a good idea to play detective with a box of kitchen matches like a complete and total—

  …

  …

  …

  The match is gone.

  I'm standing over the book with my hand outstretched, fingers still shaped around the grab I was about to make, but the match is not there.

  Not on the page.

  Not on the table.

  Not even on the floor.

  I check — physically get down on my hands and knees and check, because objects don't just vanish, because I know I dropped it, because I watched it fall and land and then—

  But it’s not there.

  I sweep my hand across the carpet.

  I look under the table, under the chair, behind the shimming takeout menu. There is Nothing there. No match. No scorch mark. No ash or singed paper.

  I stand up. I look at the Book.

  The page looks perfect. Cream-colored, heavy, immaculate. There’s not a mark on it. As if nothing touched it. As if nothing happened.

  I look at my finger.

  There's definitely a burn. A small, bright ellipse of red on the pad of my index finger, already starting to blister. Real. Definite. Stinging with the unmistakable specificity of a thermal injury that actually occurred, in the real world, to a real finger, just moments ago.

  Apparently, I just burned my finger on a match that no longer exists.

  ...

  I sit down.