text: It was a cold and wet afternoon, typical of January. The whole of her observation was washed out, gray and drab. As she walked down the street in her teal rain slicker, she kept her head down and studied her shoes. The way the water puddles splashed and rippled with her passing was pleasing to eye and ear, and it got her thinking about volumes and object displacement in water. She moved instinctively along, minding no street signs but instead strolling by an internal map of the town that was her whole life. She was born there, eighteen years and three hundred and sixty days to the day, and she knew that innately, too. Her parents were biblical folks and her name came from the Bible, though she herself had concluded the Christian God to be a lie by the age of eight. That was kept a secret, as well as the ritual in which she now partook, for they always insisted she not leave home unattended. Her name is Magdalene Pitcher. The town is New Canterbury, Illinois. The date is January the fifth, nineteen fifty. In five days she will be eighteen and in one hundred and eighty two days she will graduate high school at the top of her class. These were all dry facts that buzzed around her brain like flies, trapped and incessant. Knowing the numbers and the dates and the times unsettled most people she knew, and so she was left alone most days. That was fine, by her reckoning; It’s not that she couldn’t or wouldn’t like people, but all things considered she preferred solitude. She also despised ignorance, more specifically the willful kind, of which there was an abundance in her little world, and that made it easy to not open up too much. She came to her destination, a neat brick building of two stories that sat on a grassy incline. As she raised her head up to take to the concrete steps, her mind was inexplicably pulled to something well behind her. She turned, looking across the street, where there was a little place where her dad liked the coffee and a barbershop that he hated. It was just starting to rain, again. There was a gap between the two, a narrow little alley, and she got the unshakeable feeling of being watched from it. Of course, nobody could be seen and after a few long intense moments the feeling abated, and up the steps she went, not so much gripping the iron railing as she was running her hands down it to wipe off the rainwater. The town library was her castle, her paradise and her shelter, and the librarian Miss Ghariff silently greeted her with a nod as someone who knew Magdalene best. She returned the gesture with one of her own before strolling on, past the desk, into the rows, eager to get lost once again. The smell of stale paper was her perfume, the weathered spines of shelved books her rainbows. It was something of a personal quest to read every single book there, and she took it quite seriously. She was in the midst of Hemingway now, and reached gingerly for “Farewell to Arms”, when that feeling of eyes on her person crept in again. She was alone in the aisle, and nearly alone in the whole of the building, yet there it was, something wandering on the fringes of her peripherals. Was someone following her? Perhaps her parents were right, not that there was much to do about it now. She turned her head first left, then right, then twice more both ways. Nothing once again. It was at that time she spied something curious and unfamiliar. Atop the bookshelf poked the corner of a hardcover, just so that it could be seen only by an attentive eye. Someone had left a book up there, through carelessness or jest, most likely. That upset her, that choice to be rude to a woman that had done nothing to them by giving her extra work. It had to be corrected, and Magdalene quickly decided to do so herself. Thankfully, the shelves came with ladders, and she ascended up, already priming to read the title and author and determine its home through memory. When her eyes met the cover, however, she was suddenly transfixed. It was no book she’d ever spied before, not in the library or anywhere. It was a decently weighted tome, about nine hundred pages or so, by eye. The skin was thick and leather bound, tanned dark brown and rugged. The spine had bands of illuminated gold that ran around to the front, and the latter was like a thing onto itself. The cover was studded with little silver colored points like the heads of nails, forming the impressions of several dotted rectangular borders in a motley pattern. In these borders, at the center of that mystifying surface, was what looked to her a theater mask. It was alabaster white and milky in luster and the size of a large jeweled pendant, like the sort she’d seen in her mother’s catalogues. It had no eyes, a long slender nose and stout full lips, and when she curiously reached out with her fingers she found it raised like a bas reliefs few inches from everything else. It felt smooth like porcelain and absent of dust, and the latter fact intrigued her perhaps most of all. Reason dictated it to be some manner of artwork, personal and handcrafted, and to leave such a thing would be quite the personal coup. There was no lock or clasp to imply a private recollection like a journal or diary, and when she picked it up carefully to study it further, no mark of ownership or hint of a title could be found. Eagerly, she opened the cover, hoping perhaps to find a name stenciled in the margins. There was none, not even a dedication or foreword. Magdalene took the work down in her arms and weighed options. Such a thing had to be precious to whoever idly forgot it. She briskly made her way to the librarian, reasoning the best course of action would be to leave it to Miss Ghariff, but as she strode out of the aisle, she slowly froze. She looked the thing over, thumbing its surface. It was about the prettiest thing she had ever seen, a true work of art that set her mind ablaze with its craftsmanship. To leave such a masterpiece was criminal. Perhaps, at least, she might peer inside? Surely there was nothing wrong about just a peek. Satisfied with her own reasoning, she went to the nearest reading table and gently laid it down, sitting in front of it. She took a breath of anticipation, and, with one last look in both directions, opened it to a random page. A bitter confusion welled up as her eyes studied the contents. The paper was neatly handwritten in a script that was assuredly not English, or even of the alphabet. Approximately thirty or so crisp lines of black text, or what certainly seemed to be text, sat at the top of the page, and from the middle to the bottom was an illustration equally puzzling. It was an incomplete circle, basically full save for the very top. In the center of this non-circle was a dot and through the dot was a straight line segment that came to rest just outside the confines of the unfinished circle. The whole scrawling was done up in a deep red that evoked fresh ichor and the longer she looked the more it seemed to hypnotize with its inscrutable simplicity. Shakily, a hand reached up and the lead finger gently touched that central line and traced it. What pushed her mind to this act she couldn’t say, but something extraordinary occured when she did: The paper seemed to shift and brighten, like embers in a fire! So startling was this impossibility that she pushed the thing straight off the tabletop. The silence that followed was so palpable that she didn’t notice at first that she was trembling like a leaf. She blinked, broken from a trance, and slowly looked down. The book was on the floor, and seemed for all intents and purposes to be fine and ordinary.. Almost staggering, she knelt to scoop it up, and in that instant, she felt it again. That haunting, invisible gaze, and without thinking, she grabbed up the book, and ran, harder and faster than she ever had before. The journey home was a rainy blur. Her lungs felt stabbed and her heart pounded faster than thought. She was soaked too, with the book tucked up to her chest, and her first instinct upon entering her bedroom was to check it well. No obvious tears or water damage, but looking it over reminded her of what she’d just done to have it, and that made her put it down ever so slowly on the bed. Social ineptitude aside, she’d always been extremely well behaved; She spoke when obliged, opened doors for others, and avoided reckless behavior like the plague. Now she’d stolen, and more than likely had been noticed while doing so! This was of course compounded by whatever it was that the book had done, that impossible phenomenon when she instinctively traced the lines of that emblem. Magic was a thing of fiction, like the lands of Oz she’d been read about in her earliest recollections. It had to be a trick, some optical illusion, sparked perhaps by some trick of the ink used, and the sensation of fear naught but compounding bad luck. The deed was done, and she now had the ill-gotten prize, so why not take another look? Magdalene reached a hand down and gripped that fine cover and pulled it open. The pages were jaundiced and softened on the edges and corners. She leafed through the paper, seeing more inscrutable symbols and incomprehensible characters, and it struck her that the ink was inexplicably fresh-looking despite the apparent age of the medium on which it was printed. In places, whole pages were given to illustrations equally puzzling and disturbing. One in particular had her breathless and wide-eyed. It was illuminated in borders of that shiny fresh red flecked with a lustrous metallic she couldn’t name, and in its borders was a thing in the vague shape of a man’s torso. It was black as night, so tall it seemed constrained by the borders, and anorexic in build. Out of its abdomen sprouted no arms or legs, but long black tendrils that whipped in flailing shapes at the confines of the piece, like the latter was a cage. The head, too, had those strange appendages, but they were fewer and evoked the image of the Gorgons of Odyssey. It had no facial features, just a void where a face logically ought to be, and the whole of it was so black it reflected no light shined on it. The strike of thunder outside snapped her from viewing, and she quickly turned the page while her wits were freed. Nothing was right about the book, and it seemed the most logical course of action would be to return, apologize to Miss Ghariff, and hope for forgiveness. However, there was one more thing she hadn’t yet tried, and that reality dogged her. She flipped through the pages again until she found it, that incomplete circle with the dot in the center and the line crossing it. It couldn’t have been real, so she reckoned, yet the thought of repeating it to be sure was petrifying. There was no magic, no presence, just her mind being swayed by some eccentric’s artistic vision. The downpour outside was very loud now, and when she looked out the one small window in her room there was nothing but water and grey darkness. Long moments passed, until finally, she worked up the nerve. Her lead finger gently pointed and pressed to the old parchment, just as before, and slowly, certainly, she dragged it along that line. Just as before, the paper seemed to come alive, and in that instant, she noted that she could actually read the text. It was still in that cuneiform of unrecognizable origin, like it was something she’d forgotten and now suddenly recalled with perfect clarity. So, she moved back to the first page, and she began to read. The text was something akin to biblical teachings, history mixed with allegory and instruction, but it was far from that of King James. It presented the Earth as ancient, far older than anyone she knew believed, and man was but a relative newcomer. Indeed, it asserted that there were sentients much older than man and smarter too, and these beings in fact still lived, though not in the way humanity understood living. They were invisible, imperishable creatures, born from the swirling chaos of the cosmos and came to settle upon the Earth from ancient meteorites. These “Hidden Ones”, were beyond life and death, but craved the former, and so fed on life since life began. Even now they drifted through the halls of civilization, undetectable except to those sensitive few that could peer them in daydreams and visions, and taking as they pleased. Their victims seemed to simply wither and die, giving all appearance to some natural passing like their hearts had simply stopped beating. She rubbed her eyes, stupefied. It had to be nonsense, but something about it all inexplicably rang true. She read on. That mural from before was an attempt to capture one of these Hidden Ones in a comprehensible medium, but the book stated outright that to truly capture the horror of a Hidden One’s visage was impossible. Then came the next passage, and here she found herself near hyperventilating, for it told of telltale signs of a Hidden One stalking, and among them? - The sensation of being watched by something unseen and unheard. A knock on the door set her jumping from her bed with a fright. She looked to the window, and saw it had grown quite dark, and a familiar voice called from beyond the door. It was her father, fetching her for dinner. Thus suddenly snapped back into normalcy, she set the book down, and came to the door. He looked concerned, for while it was routine that she remain in her room for hours at a time, he told her plainly that she looked frightened out of her wits. She lied, assured him it was just a horror novel, and quickly made her way to the dinner table, where she did not touch a single edible thing. Her family talked, but it was like they were in another room, muffled and unimportant. She stared into space, unblinking, thinking about Them. Were They here, among them now? She felt nothing in her peripherals, but that did little to assuage the creeping paranoia. It was the brusque tone of her brother now that got her attention, and as they came into focus, she found them all staring, looks of worry on their faces. She quietly said she wasn’t hungry, and asked to excuse herself, getting up before permission was even granted. Back to her bedroom she fled, and with the door shut, she went immediately back to the book. There had to be more- answers, and perhaps, solutions. Why else would someone commit such information to a book that could be read by anyone with the instinctive compulsion to investigate its contents? Time and space melted away, just her and the book, page after page. Magdalene shot up from her bed, sweating and near blind in the utter darkness. Her vision darted about, and found the book still half-resting on her lap. She must have dozed off while reading, and it had to be very late. She stood up and came to the window, looking out for anything. Drenched blackness greeted her, not a star in the sky, and even The Moon was absent. It was in that umbral space, after a long moment of straining to parse any light at all, that her hair stood on ends. She felt it, that gaze, but now no particular direction beckoned. Her heart began to thump, and she turned all around, hoping to somehow dispel the fear by showing herself that none but her stood in that room. It was to no avail, and suddenly, a knock at the door. It couldn’t be anyone, not at this hour. It was a trick, it had to be. They knew that She knew, and that could not be abided. Another knock-knock-knocking. So urgent, and sharp, yet no audible call, though she dare not reciprocate a thing. What could she do? There were no weapons, as if mortal arms could harm Them. Knock-knock-knock. The book had no solutions, and had brought her into Their midst. Was it all a trap? A lure for sport? The knocking grew louder and louder, matching her heart. The window! She grabbed the book, for all the good it had done her, and raced back to that portal. No time to open it, she threw herself forward with the book in her face. All sound was deafened by a great crash, and then, nothing at all. The vanishing of Magdalene Pitcher was the talk of New Canterbury for years to come. Her family only heard the shattering of a window in the dead of the night, and when they came to the source, they found her gone. A neighbor swore that she saw the girl running barefoot and screaming in the rainy darkness as they were roused to their own window following the noise. The librarian too reported how the girl had left the library in a panicked sprint the day of her apparent flight. A search of two weeks proved fruitless, finding only a curious little pile of ashes in the nearby woods, warm from a fire. All that remained of whatever was burnt was a curious little stone, white like porcelain and shaped into a eyeless face. Even now, the locals speak of occasionally seeing a girl running in the dark, barefooted and shrieking of hidden beasts coming for them all. Few remain to tell of the actual event. Miss Ghariff, the neighbor, and indeed the entire Pitcher family passed over the decade, heart attacks, one and all.