Final Entry

The book came to me the way rot does.

Quiet. Patient. Already working before I noticed the smell.

It was waiting on my kitchen table when I got home from work, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. No return address. No postage marks. Just my name written in ink that looked too dark, almost bruised into the paper.

I stood in the doorway for a long time, keys still in my hand. I lived alone. The landlord did inspections, sure, but he never left gifts. I considered the obvious options. Prank.

Mistake. A friend I’d forgotten.

I told myself to stop being dramatic. That was the first lie the book taught me to tell.

The paper peeled away easily. Underneath was a hardbound book with no title on the cover. The leather was black, but not clean black. It had texture, like skin that had healed wrong. When I touched it, it was warm. Not warm from sunlight. Warm like a body.

I should have put it down.

Inside the front cover, a single sentence was written in careful, slanted handwriting.

This book is yours because it knows you.

I laughed out loud then, sharp and nervous.

I’d always laughed at things that scared me. It made me feel taller than them.

The pages were thin and yellowed, filled with tight blocks of text. No chapter titles. No page numbers. I flipped to a random page.

The words described my kitchen.

Not a general kitchen. Mine. The chipped mug in the sink. The loose tile by the fridge.

The way the overhead light flickered twice before settling. Details no one else would bother to write down.

I turned the page.

It described me standing there, holding the book, heart starting to beat faster than I wanted it to.

I dropped it. The book hit the floor with a dull sound, like a closed mouth.

I didn’t sleep that night. I kept the bedroom light on and the door locked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw lines of text scrolling across the inside of my skull.

By morning, I’d convinced myself it was some elaborate joke. A sick one, sure, but nothing supernatural. There had to be an explanation. Hidden cameras. A script written by someone who knew me well.

I picked the book up again.

The warmth was still there.

I turned to the last page. It was blank.

That felt important.

The next day at work, I couldn’t focus. I work in records, digitizing old files for a city office. Births. Deaths. Permits. The past neatly boxed and labeled. It had always comforted me, the idea that everything important eventually got written down.

Around noon, my phone buzzed. A notification from my building’s maintenance system. Water leak reported in my unit.

I stared at the screen, then at the book in my bag. Slowly, like I was lowering my hand into something that might bite, I opened it.

New text had appeared.

At 12:47 p.m., water will begin to drip from the ceiling above the kitchen sink.

My phone buzzed again. A timestamp. 12:47.

I ran home.

The drip had already started by the time I got there. Slow. Steady. Each drop hitting the metal basin with a sound that felt deliberate.

I fixed the leak that evening with the landlord’s help. A cracked pipe upstairs.

Normal. Boring. Explainable.

The book stayed silent for three days after that.

I should have thrown it away. Burned it. Left it on a bus seat and never looked back.

Instead, I tested it.

I didn’t start with anything dramatic. I asked the kind of questions you ask when you don’t want to admit you’re afraid.

I wrote- What happens if I call in sick tomorrow?

The next morning, I woke up choking on the taste of pennies. My throat felt scraped raw, like I’d swallowed something sharp in my sleep. When I coughed, my vision spotted at the edges. By the time I sat up, the room tilted hard enough that I had to grab the mattress. The book lay on the nightstand, warm, open to the answer. Fever. Acute.

Unavoidable. I didn’t have to fake a thing.

That should have been enough.

I tried strangers next. Low-stakes people.

People whose lives only brushed mine and would never notice the contact.

The man at the bus stop who always stood too close, staring at the transit map like it might apologize to him. The woman across the hall who never met my eyes and smelled faintly of oranges and bleach.

I didn’t ask for their futures. I asked for details.

The book told me the man counted cracks in the sidewalk because standing still made him feel like he was falling. It told me the woman practiced smiling in her bathroom mirror and always chose the wrong version before leaving.

I started noticing things.

The man’s lips moved as he waited, barely there, numbers slipping out between breaths.

The woman paused outside her door each morning, keys already in her hand, rearranging her face like furniture.

One morning at the bus stop, I realized I was watching the man instead of the street.

He looked up.

Not a glance. Not coincidence. He met my eyes and held them. His counting stopped.

His mouth closed.

“You can see it too,” he said, quietly, like we were already in the middle of a conversation.

My chest tightened. “See what?”

“The gaps,” he said. “Where things drop out.”

The bus pulled up then, air brakes screaming, people shifting forward. When I looked back, he had stepped away from the curb, farther than necessary, his shoulders hunched like he’d been caught doing something shameful.

The book was warm in my bag. Hotter than it had ever been.

I didn’t read it until I was at work, locked in a bathroom stall with my feet lifted off the tile like that might keep something from reaching me.

There was a new line waiting. He will not speak to you again. He knows when he is being read. That was the second lie the book taught me.

That I was in control.

The entries grew longer. More detailed. It stopped just recording what would happen and started explaining why. It showed me how thin the lines were between people and how easy they were to cross.

One night, I found a passage about my father.

He’d died ten years ago. Heart attack in his sleep. Clean. Sudden. That was the story.

The book told a different one.

It described the argument we’d had the night before he died. The words I’d chosen because I knew where they would land. The way he’d sat down afterward, hand pressed to his chest, breathing hard, too proud to ask for help.

I slammed the book shut and screamed until my throat hurt.

The next morning, the book was open on the table.

It showed me the blank last page again.

Below it, new words had been written.

When you are ready, write.

I didn’t touch it for weeks. I tried to live without it. I failed.

Life felt thin without the book. Unfocused.

Like trying to read without my glasses.

Every bad thing felt random again, and randomness scared me more than truth ever had.

The first thing I wrote was small.

I wrote that my supervisor would forget to submit a report.

He did.

I wrote that the neighbor who played music at three in the morning would move out.

She was gone by the end of the month.

Each time, the book warmed a little more under my hands.

Each time, the last page crept closer.

The final thing I wrote was not meant to be cruel. I told myself that, anyway.

I wrote that I would never be alone again.

The book did not tremble this time. It simply absorbed the ink. The warmth faded to something steadier, heavier, like a weight settling where it belonged.

That night, nothing happened.

No voices. No shadows. No sudden fullness of the apartment. I slept for the first time in weeks and woke up disappointed.

It took days to understand what I’d done.

People stopped leaving.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. Small failures at first. Appointments that didn’t end.

Conversations that stretched past their natural close. The woman at work who lingered in my doorway, unsure how to excuse herself. The neighbor who knocked to complain about the pipes and never quite found the right moment to go back across the hall.

They weren’t trapped. They could still leave.

They just didn’t.

When they spoke, it was careful. When they looked at me, it was with the same attention I’d once given the book. Waiting.

Expectant. As if I might fill in the next line.

I tried to write again. To undo it.

The last page was gone.

In its place was a list.

Names I recognized. Names I didn’t. Dates without explanations. Margins already crowded, already claimed. I found my own name among them, written earlier than it should have been.

The book no longer describes what will happen.

It records what is kept.

The apartment is full now. Not with echoes.

Not with ghosts. With people who stay because staying feels easier than leaving.

With lives that no longer move unless I do first.

They call me by my name. They wait for me to speak.

The book rests on the table, cool at last.

It doesn’t need me to write anymore.

It knows I understand the cost.