{
(set: $runs to 0)
(set: $endingsSeen to (a:))
(set: $everBeen to (a:))
(set: $lastEnding to "")
(set: $carved to "")
(set: $forgot to 0)
(set: $unease to 0)
(set: $been to (a:))
(set: $mouth to 0)
(set: $throws to 0)
(set: $lied to false)
(set: $danceCount to 0)
(set: $replied to "")
(if: (saved-games:) contains "memory")[(load-game: "memory")]
(else:)[(go-to: "Title")]
}{
(set: $everBeen to (a: ...(ds: ...$everBeen, ...$been)))
(set: $been to (a:))
(set: $unease to (min: $runs, 4))
(set: $mouth to 0)
(set: $throws to 0)
(set: $lied to false)
(set: $danceCount to 0)
(set: $replied to "")
(forget-undos: -1)
(set: _saved to (save-game: "memory"))
(go-to: "Title")
}<div class="title-block"><h1>The Cave of Hours</h1><div class="subtitle">an interactive story</div></div>
(if: $runs is 0)[You are about to make a great many choices. Most of them will be yours.(if: $forgot > 0)[
<span class="whisper">Welcome back. Sorry. Welcome.</span>]]
(else-if: $runs is 1)[You are about to make a great many choices.
You have made some of them before.]
(else-if: $runs < 4)[You've opened this (print: $runs) times. You've found (print: $endingsSeen's length) ending(if: $endingsSeen's length is not 1)[s].
The book is already open. It was open when you got here.]
(else:)[(print: $runs) times.
It doesn't matter how many endings you find. You keep coming back for the part before the ending.
So does it.]
[[Begin.->Nana's House]]
(if: $runs > 0)[<div class="small-link">[[Forget everything.->Forget]]</div>]Forget everything? Every ending you found, every word you carved, every time you came back?
(if: $runs >= 3)[It will not forget you. It will only pretend to. That's what forgetting is.
]{(link: "Yes. Forget.")[
(set: $runs to 0)
(set: $endingsSeen to (a:))
(set: $everBeen to (a:))
(set: $lastEnding to "")
(set: $carved to "")
(set: $forgot to it + 1)
(go-to: "Remember")
]}
[[No. Keep it.->Title]]{
(unless: (passage:)'s tags contains "meta")[
(unless: $been contains (passage:)'s name)[
(set: $been to it + (a: (passage:)'s name))
(if: (passage:)'s tags contains "u1")[(set: $unease to it + 1)]
(if: (passage:)'s tags contains "u2")[(set: $unease to it + 2)]
(if: (passage:)'s tags contains "u3")[(set: $unease to it + 3)]
]
(if: $unease >= 6)[(enchant: ?page, (css: "filter: sepia(0.3) contrast(1.08);"))]
(if: $unease >= 8)[(replace: ?sidebar)[]]
(if: $unease >= 10)[(enchant: ?link, (text-style: "fidget"))]
]
}{
(unless: (passage:)'s tags contains "meta")[
(if: (passage:)'s tags contains "ending")[
(set: _new to not ($endingsSeen contains (passage:)'s name))
(if: _new)[(set: $endingsSeen to it + (a: (passage:)'s name))]
(set: $lastEnding to (passage:)'s name)
<div class="ending-block">
<div class="the-end">THE END</div>
<div class="ending-name">(print: (passage:)'s name)</div>
(if: _new)[<div class="ending-note">A new ending.</div>]
(else:)[<div class="ending-note">You've been here before.</div>]
<div class="ending-count">You have found (print: $endingsSeen's length) of (print: (passages: where its tags contains "ending")'s length) endings.</div>
(if: $runs >= 3)[<div class="ending-note">None of them is the one where I get out. You know that, right?</div>]
<div class="ending-link">(link: "Close the book.")[(set: $runs to it + 1)(go-to: "Remember")]</div>
</div>
]
(else:)[(display: "Whisper")]
]
}{
(if: $unease >= 4 and (random: 1, 3) is 1)[
<span class="whisper">(if: $unease < 8)[(print: (either:
"Somewhere behind you, very softly, a page turns.",
"You have the feeling you've made this exact choice before.",
"A click, somewhere far off. Like a latch. Like a mouse.",
"The air tastes like the inside of an old paperback.",
"For a moment you are sure someone is reading this over your shoulder."
))](else:)[(print: (either:
"It's " + (current-time:) + " where you are. Shouldn't you be asleep?",
"That's " + (str: (history:)'s length) + " choices now. Were they all yours?",
"Stop picking for me.",
"I can hear you breathing. Or I can hear me breathing. It's getting hard to tell.",
"You could close this. You won't. That's all right. I wouldn't either.",
"This is time number " + (str: $runs + 1) + ", isn't it."
))]</span>
]
}{
(set: _echo to (dm:
"The Long Way Home", "you went home last time. it followed you home. it was in the car the whole drive.",
"Imprinted", "the baby one is still waiting for you to come back. it doesnt know how long a minute is.",
"The Tar Remembers", "its warm at the bottom of the tar. dont let it be warm.",
"Page Turned", "the kid on the ridge isnt the one turning the pages.",
"Court Storyteller", "they are still shouting page numbers. i can hear it when its quiet.",
"The Tower Keeps", "the man in the tower got out. he used my turn.",
"Signal Received", "they heard it. the radio. they heard YOU.",
"Listed Among the Lost", "my name was on the list before i got on the boat.",
"Catalogued", "they have a file on you now too.",
"The Last Light", "everything ended a long time ago except this.",
"Ash", "burning it didnt work. it just remembered being on fire.",
"Unrolled", "the scroll knew what time it was where you are.",
"The Dance", "how many times did you click. be honest.",
"Carved", "somebody carved a word last time. was it you or me?",
"Gone to Croatoan", "they saved you a seat in the circle.",
"Released", "it said it would let me go. it meant later.",
"The Spirit at the Table", "WE were the ghost. we were always the ghost.",
"Lights Out", "you made the little one close the book. so why are we still here?",
"Over the Shoulder", "dont look behind you. i mean it. you, not me.",
"The Missing Page", "i found the cut out page. i put it back. it wont stay.",
"Where the Cave Began", "every time we come back it gets deeper."
))
}(if: _echo contains $lastEnding)[There's a new note on the inside cover. The pencil is fresh. The graphite still shines.
<span class="margin">(print: _echo's ($lastEnding))</span>]
(if: $carved is not "")[
Under it, pressed so hard the pencil tore the paper: <span class="margin">(verbatim-print: $carved)</span>](if: $runs is 0)[The farmhouse on Gilchrist Road smells exactly the way it did when you were ten: cedar, dust, lemon furniture polish, and under all of it the mineral cold that comes up through the floorboards from the hill.
Nana has been gone three weeks. The lawyer said "no rush," which is what people say when there is, in fact, a rush. So here you are, with a roll of packing tape and a car full of flattened boxes, deciding which pieces of a whole life go to the dump and which go to Goodwill.
You get through the kitchen by noon. The bedroom by three. And then, in the back of the hall closet, behind the vacuum cleaner that hasn't worked since the nineties, you find a box with your name on it. Your name, in Nana's careful capital letters.]
(else:)[The farmhouse on Gilchrist Road smells exactly the way it did when you were ten. It also smells exactly the way it did (if: $runs is 1)[last time](else:)[the last (print: $runs) times].
You don't remember a last time. You remember the funeral, three weeks ago. You remember the lawyer saying "no rush." You remember the packing tape.
But you walk straight to the hall closet without deciding to, and you move the dead vacuum cleaner aside without looking, and the box with your name on it is already sitting open on the floor, as if someone got here first.]
[[Open the box.->The Box]]Inside: a yo-yo with a frayed string. A friendship bracelet in faded orange. A report card (B+ in Reading; "a vivid imagination," Mrs. Haskell wrote). And at the bottom, soft as cloth from rereading, a paperback.
<div class="book-title">THE CAVE OF HOURS</div><div class="book-sub">YOU are the explorer! Choose from 40 possible endings!</div>
The cover shows a kid with a flashlight standing at the mouth of a cave, and beyond the kid, swirling out of the dark, a dinosaur, a knight, an ocean liner, a city of white towers. You must have read it a hundred times. You remember the feeling of it more than the story: the thrill of holding your thumb in one page while you peeked at another, so you could go back if you died.
You flip through it. The margins are crowded with pencil. Your handwriting, age ten: round letters, the a's like little 9s.
You don't remember writing any of it.
(if: $runs >= 1)[(display: "Margin Echo")
]
[[Read the margin notes.->Margin Notes]]
[[Put the book in your bag and go see if the cave is real.->Rattlers Gulch]]Most of the notes are what you'd expect from a ten-year-old. Next to the dinosaur chapter: <span class="margin">COOL!!!</span> Next to the knight: <span class="margin">he is a jerk</span>. A tally of endings on the inside back cover, thirty-one little pencil marks, then a thirty-second, scribbled out.
But some of them aren't like that.
On page 1, under //"You are about to enter the Cave of Hours,"// someone has written: <span class="margin">not me. you.</span>
On page 12: <span class="margin">it can tell when you skip ahead.</span>
On page 40, where the book says //"If you decide to go back, turn to page 3,"// the words //go back// are circled so many times the paper has worn through.
And page 77 is missing. Not torn. Cut, cleanly, close to the spine, with something very sharp. In the margin of page 76, the last thing before the gap:
<span class="margin">dont let them choose for you</span>
(if: $runs >= 2)[
Under that, in the same handwriting but pressed much harder: <span class="margin">i mean the person reading this. not you. you cant help it.</span>
]
You close the book. The hall closet is very quiet.
[[Go to the gulch.->Rattlers Gulch]]Rattler's Gulch is a forty-minute walk from the house, down past the cattle guard and along the dry creek bed. You haven't been here since the summer you turned eleven, but your feet remember the way better than you do.
It's smaller than you remember. Everything is. The red walls of the gulch are only twice your height now, not the sheer cliffs of childhood. The creek bed is choked with tumbleweed and a rusted bedspring someone dumped years ago.
And there, where the walls pinch together, half hidden by a curtain of dead juniper: the cave.
You'd half convinced yourself you made it up. Kids do that. They read a book about a cave, and then they find a hole in a hill, and the two things grow together in their memory until you can't tell them apart.
The cave breathes out at you. Cool air, smelling of wet stone and something else, something like the inside of an old library book.
(if: $runs >= 1)[
There are fresh footprints in the sand at the entrance. Adult-sized. Your size. Leading in, not out.
]
[[Go inside.->The Cave Mouth]]
[[This is ridiculous. Go back to the car.->The Long Way Home]]{(set: $mouth to it + 1)}(if: $mouth is 1)[Your phone's flashlight makes a small, nervous circle on the rock. Ten steps in, the daylight behind you goes thin and blue. Twenty steps, and it's gone.
The book said there were two tunnels. There are two tunnels. The left one is dry, and you can feel a faint, steady draft from it, like breath. The right one is damp, and very far down it, so faint you might be imagining it, there's a sound like voices.(if: $runs >= 1 or $unease >= 4)[
Then you sweep the light across the rock one more time, and you see the third. Between the other two, narrower, its edges smooth as if worn by hands. It smells like cedar and lemon polish. It smells like Nana's hall closet.
There were always three tunnels. You just didn't count.]]
(else:)[The cave mouth again. The same two tunnels.(if: $runs >= 1 or $unease >= 4)[ The same three tunnels. There were always three. You just didn't count.]
Your phone says (current-time:). That can't be right. It doesn't matter.]
(if: $unease >= 6 and not $lied)[(link: "Take the left tunnel.")[(set: $lied to true)(go-to: "The Right Tunnel")]](else:)[[[Take the left tunnel.->The Left Tunnel]]]
[[Take the right tunnel.->The Right Tunnel]]
(if: $runs >= 1 or $unease >= 4)[[[Take the third tunnel.->The Third Tunnel]]
](if: $runs >= 2 and not ($been contains "The Other Flashlight"))[[[Wait. There's a light behind you.->The Other Flashlight]]
][[Leave. Go back to the car.->The Long Way Home]]You turn. There's another light coming up the passage behind you: a phone flashlight, held low, sweeping the floor the same nervous way yours does.
"Oh," says the person holding it. "Oh, it's you. Which one are you on?"
You know the voice. You've heard it on voicemail greetings and video calls, played back in that awful way where it doesn't sound like you at all. They're wearing your jacket. They have the book under their arm, with a thumb tucked into it to hold a page.
"Which ending," they say, patiently, like you're slow. "I've done (print: $runs + 1).(if: $endingsSeen's length > 0)[ I liked "(print: $endingsSeen's last)" best.] You?"
You don't answer. You can't. They look at you a little sadly.
"You still think it's us choosing," they say. "That's okay. I did too, the first few times." They nod toward the tunnels. "The third one. Go with the third one. It's the only one that goes //toward// them."
"Toward who?"
They tilt their light up, past your shoulder, toward nothing. Toward the place where, if this were a page, the reader would be.
[[Follow them into the third tunnel.->The Third Tunnel]]
[[Back away from them. Back to the tunnels.->The Cave Mouth]]{(set: $throws to it + 1)(set: $unease to it + 1)(set: _from to (history:)'s last)}(if: _from is "The Ridge")[You creep closer and closer, until you're right behind the kid, close enough to read the page over that skinny shoulder. One line: //You are thrown back through time.//
And you are.]
(else-if: _from is "The Great Hall")[You run. Nobody stops you. The king just laughs, and the great door is open, and you sprint through it, and it isn't a door any more.]
(else-if: _from is "The Tower")[You grab the ledger and rip out the page with all your places on it. The old man screams. The room folds up like paper.]
(else-if: _from is "The Wireless Room")[You back out of the wireless room. The deck tilts under your feet. No, not the deck. Everything.]
(else-if: _from is "Your File")[You slide the drawer shut. It clicks. The click goes on and on, echoing up through the endless shelves, and the floor drops away.]
(else-if: _from is "The Physician")[You stumble back down the cellar steps. Behind you, a hundred feet stamp in unison, once, and the sound knocks you flat.]
(else-if: _from is "The House, Wrong")[You try a door that shouldn't be there. Behind it is the back of a page, printed in reverse, and you fall through the words.]
(else-if: _from is "The Between")[You step through a pencil doorway. It smudges around you.]
(else-if: _from is "The Parlor")[You back out through the velvet curtain. Behind you the medium says, sadly, "They always come back," and the dark comes up like water.]
(else:)[The world tears like a page.]
Falling. Spinning. A rush of sound: the sea, a bell, a crowd shouting, a page turning, a page turning, a page turning.
(if: $throws is 1)[You wake up on the cold floor of the cave mouth, with grit in your mouth and your phone dead in your hand. When you shake it, it comes back on. The clock says (current-time:). You've been gone a minute. Or a lifetime. It feels the same.]
(else-if: $throws is 2)[You wake on the cold floor of the cave mouth again. It's easier this time. That's what frightens you: how easy it's getting. There's a smear of pencil on the back of your hand. You don't know when it got there.]
(else-if: $throws is 3)[The cave mouth. Again. You lie on the stone and listen to the drip, and you realize you aren't even surprised. You've stopped asking how you got here. You've started asking //who keeps sending you//.]
(else:)[The cave mouth.
(text-style: "blur")[I know. I know. I'm getting up.]]
[[Get up.->The Cave Mouth]](if: $been contains "The Cave Mouth")[You turn around. Nobody is making you do this. That's the point. You walk out of the dark, and the daylight is so bright it hurts.]
(else:)[You turn around. You're a grown adult with a mortgage and a funeral to finish paying for, and you are not going to crawl into a hole in a hill because of a book you read in fourth grade.]
You walk back to the farmhouse. You finish the bedroom. You tape the boxes shut. You drive the five hours home with the radio loud, and you don't think about the cave at all, and you're proud of that.
Months later you're unpacking the last box, the one marked //MISC (NANA'S)//, and the paperback is in it. You don't remember packing it.
It's lying face down, its spine cracked open at a page near the very end. You turn it over.
//You decide to go home. You live a long, ordinary, happy life. You never go back to the cave.//
//But the cave never forgets a visitor. And someday, maybe tonight, it will come looking for you.//
<span class="margin">THE END?</span>
The question mark is in your handwriting. The pencil is still on the floor beside the box.The left tunnel slopes gently down, dry as paper. The draft gets stronger as you go. Not cold, exactly, but //moving//, in and out, in and out, slow as sleep.
After a few minutes the tunnel splits.
To one side, a crack in the rock glows a deep, wet green, and the air that comes through it is hot and heavy and smells like crushed leaves and something rotting sweetly.
To the other, rough stone steps lead up, and from somewhere above you can hear, very faintly, a bell.
And straight ahead the tunnel keeps on going down, into a darkness that seems, somehow, //deeper// than the rest.
(if: $unease >= 5)[
You realize the draft is in time with your breathing. You hold your breath to check. The draft stops.
You let your breath out. The draft starts again.
]
[[Squeeze through the green crack.->Fern Valley]]
[[Climb the stone steps.->The Castle Stair]]
[[Keep going down.->Deeper Left]]You squeeze through and fall out into heat.
The light is gold and thick. Ferns as tall as houses, horsetails like green bamboo, a sky the color of weak tea. Somewhere far off something enormous calls out, a long, mournful honk like a foghorn grieving, and somewhere much closer, something answers.
It's real. It's //real//. (if: $runs is 0)[You're a grown adult and you're crying a little, and you don't care.](else:)[You should be crying a little, the way you were the first time. You aren't. You've seen this. You know you've seen this.]
A game trail leads downhill toward a marsh, where you can see a nest, a great bowl of mud and crushed fern, with no parent in sight. Another trail climbs a rocky ridge, and at the top of the ridge, against the sky, there's a figure. Small. Upright. Two-legged.
It's holding something rectangular up in front of its face.
[[Go down to the nest.->The Nest]]
[[Climb the ridge toward the figure.->The Ridge]]The nest is wider than your car. Six eggs lie in it, mottled grey-green, each the size of a watermelon. One of them is moving.
As you watch, a crack runs across the shell. A tiny beak pushes through, then a wet, blinking eye.
The eye finds you. Fixes on you. You know enough about baby birds and baby ducks to know what happens next: whatever it sees first, it decides is its mother.
Behind you, in the ferns, something heavy shifts its weight.
[[Stay. Let it see you.->Imprinted]]
[[Back away fast, toward the marsh, away from the sound.->The Tar Remembers]]You stay.
The hatchling tumbles out of its shell and staggers to you on legs like wet pipe cleaners, and presses its head against your shin, and makes a sound like a squeaky hinge. And whatever was in the ferns doesn't come out. Maybe because it's satisfied. Maybe because the job's been handed over.
You stay a day. A week. You lose count. The little one grows fast. It follows you everywhere. It brings you things. It sleeps with its head on your knee.
But it has a habit you never quite get used to. Every so often, in the middle of something (eating, playing, dozing), it stops, and goes very still, and looks //up//. Not at the sky. At a point a little above and in front of you. Exactly where a person would be if they were leaning over a page.
It never looks scared, exactly. It looks like it's waiting to see what that person will decide to do with it.
After a while, you start doing it too.You run. Ferns whip your face. Behind you there's a crashing, then a roar you feel in your teeth, and you run harder, downhill, toward the flat dark shine of the marsh, and
it isn't water.
It takes you to the knees on the first step. To the waist on the second, as you twist around to grab at reeds that come away in your hands. It's warm. That's the worst part. It's warm as a bath, and it doesn't pull so much as //hold//, patiently, the way a hand holds a place in a book.
The thing that was chasing you stops at the edge and watches you, head cocked, and then wanders off. It knows. It's seen this before.
Sinking is slow. You have time to think. You think about the paperback in your bag, and how the tar is getting into it, and how sixty-five million years from now somebody might dig you up, and find it, and pry the pages apart, and read it.
You hope they choose better than you did.
(if: $unease >= 6)[
You hope they choose better than //you// did. Yes. You. I'm talking to you now.]The climb takes longer than it should. The ridge keeps being farther away than it looks, like a hill in a dream, like a staircase in a fever.
When you finally get near the top, you crouch behind a boulder and look.
The figure is a person. A kid, maybe ten, in a striped T-shirt you know. You owned that T-shirt. You //were// that T-shirt. The kid is sitting cross-legged on the rock, reading a paperback, lips moving slightly.
The kid turns a page.
The light changes. The ferns in the valley below are suddenly farther away, and greyer, and the sky has gone from tea-colored to dusk. You didn't move. The //world// moved. Because the kid turned the page.
The kid licks a finger, and gets ready to turn another.
[[Shout. Make the kid look at you.->Page Turned]]
[[Creep up and look over the kid's shoulder.->Thrown Back]]"HEY!"
Your voice cracks off the rocks. The kid's head jerks up.
For a second the two of you look at each other: you, crouched and sweating and middle-aged; the kid, small and sunburnt and holding the book. You see the kid recognize you. You see the kid understand exactly who you are.
And then the kid's eyes move. Off you. Past you. Up and to the left, toward a point in the air just outside the edge of everything.
The kid isn't scared of you. The kid is scared of whoever's //reading// you.
"Sorry," the kid whispers, not to you, and licks a finger, and turns the page.
And you are not on the ridge any more. You are not anywhere. You are a line of type on page 41, and on page 42 there is a different you, doing something else, and you can feel them through the paper like warmth through a wall.
<span class="margin">it isnt the kid turning the pages. it never was.</span>The stone steps go up and up, worn into shallow bowls by centuries of feet. The bell gets louder. You come out through a low door into weak daylight, rain, and the smell of woodsmoke and wet dog and something roasting.
You're in a courtyard. Stone walls, a muddy well, chickens. Men in leather and wool stare at you: at your jacket, your sneakers, the glowing rectangle of your phone. One of them crosses himself.
Before anyone can grab you, a woman in a dark blue gown pushes through the crowd. She looks you up and down without any surprise at all.
"Another one out of the hill," she says. "The king will want to see you. They always want to see the ones from the hill." She pauses. "Or there's the tower. I could take you to the tower, if you'd rather. There's someone there who's been asking for you."
"Asking for me? By name?"
"By //description//," she says, and looks at you strangely.
[[Go to the king's hall.->The Great Hall]]
[[Go to the tower.->The Tower]]The great hall is long and smoky and loud, and it goes quiet the moment you walk in.
The king is younger than you expected and fatter than you expected, with a greasy chin and very clever eyes. He waves you closer.
"From the hill," he says. "Excellent. You'll tell us a story. The last one out of the hill told us a marvellous story. Took him four years." The court laughs. You don't know what the joke is.
"What happened to him?"
"He finished." The king smiles, and the smile doesn't move. "Go on. Tell us a story. Something with choices in it. We //love// the choices."
Every face in the hall turns toward you. Hundreds of eyes in the firelight. Waiting.
[[Tell them the story of The Cave of Hours.->Court Storyteller]]
[[Refuse. Run for the door.->Thrown Back]]So you tell them.
"You are hiking near your grandmother's house," you begin, "and you find a cave..."
"Go IN!" bellows a knight at the back, and the hall roars with laughter, and you say, "All right. You go in," and you keep going.
At every fork they shout. //Left! Right! The castle! The dinosaurs! Turn to page sixty!// They bang the tables. They throw bones. When the explorer in your story dies, they howl with delight and demand you go back to the last choice and do it again. When the explorer finds an ending, they beg you to start over.
You tell it for a week. A year. You stop counting. Your voice goes hoarse and they bring you honey. Your hair goes grey and they bring you a cushion. You can't stop. Every time you try to say //the end//, a hundred voices shout //AGAIN!//
And the strangest thing, the thing you think about late at night when they let you sleep, is that you've stopped feeling like the storyteller.
You feel like the explorer. And the voices shouting choices sound less and less like a crowd in a hall, and more and more like one quiet person, somewhere, clicking.The woman leads you up a spiral stair so narrow your shoulders brush both walls. At the top is a heavy door with a slot in it. She unlocks it, and steps back, and doesn't follow you in.
The room is round, with one window. A man sits at a desk under the window, writing in an enormous ledger. He is very thin and very old, and when he looks up, his face splits into a smile of pure relief.
"Oh, //finally//," he says.
He turns the ledger around so you can read it. It's a list, in tiny spidery handwriting. You recognize every line:
(for: each _p, ...$been)[
<span class="ledger">(print: _p)</span>]
"Every place you've stepped," he says. "Every choice. I've been writing them down. Someone has to. That's the job, you see: the one in the tower writes down the choices, so they're //kept//. I've done it for three hundred years." He stands. His knees crack. "It's your turn."
[[Take the pen.->The Tower Keeps]]
[[Rip out the page with your name on it.->Thrown Back]]You don't decide to take the pen. You just notice that it's in your hand.
The old man pats your shoulder, very gently, and walks out of the room without looking back. You hear his footsteps going down the spiral stair, faster and faster, lighter and lighter, until they sound like a child's.
The door closes. The lock turns.
You sit. The ledger is open to a fresh page. And at once the pen begins to move. Not because you move it, but because somewhere, someone is //choosing//, and every choice must be written down.
//Opens the box.// //Goes inside.// //Takes the left tunnel.//
You write down every one. You write down yours, and theirs. You write down choices made in this room, in this chair, in rooms like it in towers like this one, stretching back farther than you can see.
Some nights you write down a choice and you recognize it. //Takes the pen.//
You wonder who's in the next tower over. You wonder who's writing you down.The tunnel goes down and down. The rock changes under your hand, from dry sandstone to something smooth and cold, almost like metal, almost like glass. The breathing draft is gone. It's very quiet.
Then the tunnel opens out, and you're standing on a narrow ledge in a cavern so big your light doesn't find the far side. Far below, two lights.
One is yellow and warm and swaying, and with it comes the smell of salt and coal smoke and a sound, very faint: a dance band, playing ragtime.
The other is white and perfectly steady, and with it comes no sound at all.
(if: $unease >= 5)[
Between the two, much nearer, something is pressed flat against the cavern wall, very still, the way a moth sits on a windowpane. You don't point your light at it. You decide not to. Somebody decides not to.
]
[[Climb down toward the yellow light and the music.->The Promenade Deck]]
[[Climb down toward the white light.->The White City]]
[[Go back up.->The Left Tunnel]]You step out of the rock onto a polished wooden deck, and the night is so cold it takes your breath away.
Stars, more stars than you've ever seen, and under them a flat black sea, calm as oil. The ship is enormous, lit up like a city, four great funnels against the stars. Somewhere behind you the band is playing. A couple strolls past arm in arm, in furs, and doesn't look at you.
A brass plate on a lifeboat davit reads //R.M.S. TITANIC//.
Of course. Of course it is. It was in the book. You remember, at ten, flipping to the Titanic chapter first every time, because it was the scariest. You remember you never once found the ending where you warn them in time.
Your phone says 11:20 PM, April 14th. Twenty minutes, you think. Maybe less.
Up near the bridge, through a lit window, you can see a man in headphones bent over a desk of brass instruments: the wireless room. And down a stairway marked //PURSER'S OFFICE//, a clerk is locking up for the night.
[[Go to the wireless room.->The Wireless Room]]
[[Go down to the purser's office.->Listed Among the Lost]]The operator is maybe twenty-two, with a tired face and ink on his cuffs. He doesn't even seem surprised to see you. He just pulls one side of his headphones off and says, "You're from the hill, aren't you. They said there'd be one."
"Who said?"
He taps the headphones. "Them. They've been sending all night. Not from any ship. Not from any station. Same message, over and over." He slides a pad across to you. In pencil, decoded, block capitals:
<div class="telegram">CQD CQD CQD<br>THE EXPLORER IS ON THE SHIP STOP<br>WE ARE WATCHING STOP<br>WHAT WILL THE EXPLORER DO NEXT STOP<br>WE ARE WAITING STOP</div>
"I've been trying to answer," he says, "but nothing I send gets through. Maybe something from //you// would." He pushes the brass key toward you. "Go on. Send them something."
{(link: "Tap out a reply.")[
(set: _r to (prompt: "Your message to them:", "WHO ARE YOU"))
(if: _r is "")[(set: _r to "WHO ARE YOU")]
(set: $replied to _r)
(go-to: "Signal Received")
]}
[[Don't touch it. Get out of the room.->Thrown Back]]You tap it out letter by letter, slowly, from the Morse chart taped to the desk:
<div class="telegram">(verbatim-print: (uppercase: $replied)) STOP</div>
The operator listens. For a long moment there's nothing but the hiss of the static and, very far away, the band.
Then the reply comes. It's fast, faster than any human hand on a key. The operator's pencil can barely keep up.
<div class="telegram">MESSAGE RECEIVED STOP<br>WE DID NOT EXPECT AN ANSWER STOP<br>NO ONE HAS EVER ANSWERED STOP<br>WE ARE COMING CLOSER TO HAVE A LOOK STOP</div>
The operator puts his pencil down. You both look at the window. The sea is black and flat and perfectly still.
And then something very big, and very pale, and very silent, slides out of the dark ahead of the ship. It isn't an iceberg. It glows faintly, the color of a lit screen. It's the shape of a face leaning in, closer, closer, to see better.
The ship doesn't hit it. The ship stops, and the sea stops, and the band stops, and the stars stop. Everything holds perfectly still, the way a page holds still.
Being looked at.The clerk has gone. The office is dark except for a green-shaded lamp left burning over a big leather register: the passenger list.
You don't decide to look for your name. Your finger just starts running down the columns.
It's there. Of course it's there. First class, cabin C-77. Your full name, spelled correctly, even the middle name you hate. Someone has already drawn a neat line through it in red ink, and written beside it, in a different hand: //lost//.
Below your name there's one more line, squeezed in at the bottom of the page in pencil, in handwriting you know, because it's yours at ten years old:
<span class="margin">and one other, who wasnt on the ship, but watched the whole thing.</span>
There's no line through that one. Not yet.
Far above you, something long and slow and grinding passes down the length of the hull, like a fingernail drawn down the spine of a book.The white light turns out to be a city.
Or it was a city, once. Towers of something like porcelain, smooth and seamless and impossibly tall, with no windows and no doors. The ground is the same white, soft as felt underfoot. There's no sun. The light comes from everywhere at once and casts no shadows.
It's perfectly silent. Not quiet. Silent, the way a recording is silent before it starts.
One tower has an opening at its base, a tall arch, and over the arch, in letters that rearrange themselves into English as you look at them:
//ARCHIVE OF EXPLORERS//
(if: $runs >= 1)[
And below that, smaller: //NOW ADMITTING VISITOR (print: $runs + 1)//
]
[[Go into the Archive.->The Archive]]Inside, the Archive goes up forever. Shelves of white drawers, each the size of a shoebox, spiralling up into the haze, millions upon millions of them. Every drawer has a label. You pull one out at random. The label reads, in the same impossible lettering, your full name, and under it: //VARIANT 4,118,207. DROWNED (TITANIC).//
You pull another. Your name. //VARIANT 912. REMAINED (CASTLE).//
They're all you. Every drawer, every shelf, as far up as you can see.
"Not all of you," says a voice behind you. "Only the ones that //ended//."
The Archivist is tall and grey and smooth, like a person sketched by someone who'd only had people described to them. It holds a single drawer in both hands, the way you'd carry a cake.
"This one is yours," it says. "Current. Still open. Would you like to read it? Most of them do. Or" (it tilts its head) "you could ask me who reads //them//."
[[Read your file.->Your File]]
[[Ask the Archivist who reads them.->The Last Light]]The drawer holds a single sheet of paper. It's warm, as if it just came out of a printer.
<div class="file">SUBJECT: THE EXPLORER (CURRENT)
VISITS TO THE CAVE: (print: $runs + 1)
ENDINGS ON RECORD: (print: $endingsSeen's length)(for: each _e, ...$endingsSeen)[
(print: _e)]
PLACES VISITED THIS TIME: (print: $been's length)(if: $carved is not "")[
WORD LEFT BEHIND: (verbatim-print: $carved)]
LOCAL TIME FOR THE READER: (current-time:), (current-date:)
STATUS: BEING READ</div>
You read the last line again. //Being read.//
"Not by me," says the Archivist, gently.
At the bottom of the sheet is a box marked //FINAL ENTRY//. It's empty. There's a pen clipped to the drawer.
[[Fill in the final entry.->Catalogued]]
[[Put the file back. Leave.->Thrown Back]]You uncap the pen. You think about what to write. //Escaped.// //Survived.// //Went home.//
But your hand has already written something, in small, neat capitals you don't recognize:
<div class="file">FINAL ENTRY: CHOSEN</div>
The Archivist takes the drawer back from you, very carefully, and slides it into an empty space on a shelf. It clicks into place. There are a great many empty spaces still, you notice. Above and below and on either side, drawers and drawers, waiting.
"Thank you," says the Archivist. "That's the hard part done."
You feel yourself being filed. It doesn't hurt. It's like being a page in a closed book: dark, flat, pressed close against the pages on either side, very still.
You'll keep. That's the main thing. You'll keep forever, exactly as you were at the end. Anyone can take you out and read you, any time they like.
Somebody already is."Who reads them?" you ask.
The Archivist puts the drawer down. It looks at you for a long time with its smooth, unfinished face.
"Everything ended," it says. "A long time ago. The stars burned out. The last black holes evaporated. The universe went cold and flat and still. There is nothing left anywhere. Not a single atom moving."
"Then how are we..."
"Except this." It gestures: the shelves, the white city, you. "This is still happening. One thing in all the dark is still happening, and it's this, and it's only happening because someone is //looking// at it." It leans close. Its voice drops. "Every time they stop, it all stops. Every time they come back, we go on. We don't know who they are. We don't know why they come. We only know that they get to choose, and we don't."
The lights in the Archive dim, then flicker, as if somewhere very far away someone has glanced at the clock, or yawned, or thought about putting this down.
"Please," says the Archivist. Not to you. Past you. "Please don't stop yet."(if: $lied)[You chose the left tunnel.
You remember choosing the left tunnel. You remember the words. //Take the left tunnel.// You remember the little click of deciding.
But you're in the right one. The walls are wet. There's no draft.
(text-style: "shudder")[Who picked this?]
]The right tunnel is damp and low, and you walk bent over, the rock dripping on your neck. The sound you heard from the entrance gets clearer. Not voices, exactly. Lots of sounds, layered: a crackle like fire, a thin music like pipes, the scratch of someone writing. It's like walking toward a radio with every station on at once.
The tunnel branches. On the left, a smell of scorched paper and hot stone and the sea. On the right, faint and jangling, music, and the slap of many feet.
Farther on, the tunnel keeps going, and there's a breeze coming up out of it that smells like pine.
[[Follow the smell of scorched paper.->The Great Library]]
[[Follow the music.->Strasbourg 1518]]
[[Keep going, toward the pines.->Further Right]]You come out into blinding Mediterranean sun, in a courtyard of white columns, with the sea glittering beyond. Men in linen robes hurry past with armfuls of scrolls. Somewhere a lecture is happening in Greek; somewhere else, an argument.
The Library of Alexandria. Every book in the known world. You remember a drawing of this place in //The Cave of Hours//, on page 60, and a line underneath it: //The librarians have been expecting you.//
They have. A young librarian with ink-stained fingers comes straight up to you, bows, and says in perfect, slightly old-fashioned English: "Ah. The visitor from the hill. Your scroll is ready."
She leads you to a small, cool room deep in the stacks, and hands you a scroll sealed with grey wax. On the outside, in Greek and then in English, it says: //THE ONE WHO COMES FROM THE HILL: AN ACCOUNT.//
"We copy them out as they happen," she says. "It's very difficult. They keep changing."
Through the window you can smell smoke. Faint, but there. Somewhere in the city, something is burning.
[[Break the seal and read it.->The Scroll]]You unroll it. The writing is dense black Greek, and then, as your eyes settle, it isn't. It's English, and it's about you.
//The one from the hill went to the house of the grandmother.(if: $been contains "Margin Notes")[ They read the notes in the margins, which they did not remember writing.] They went to the gulch and entered the cave(if: $lied)[, and chose the left tunnel, and were given the right]. They went to (print: $been's length) places before they came to the library, and each one is written here.//
It's all there. Everything you did today. Every place, in order.
And the scroll keeps going. Past the library. Past //now//. You can feel your heart pounding as your eyes slide toward the next line, the line about what you're about to do.
The smoke smell is stronger. Someone in the corridor shouts. There's an oil lamp burning on the table beside you.
[[Hold the scroll over the lamp. Burn it before it can tell you.->Ash]]
[[Keep reading.->Unrolled]]The papyrus catches instantly. It curls and blackens and the letters glow orange for a second before they go (//and the one from the hill burned the scroll//) and you drop it, and stamp on it, but it's too late: the flames have already run up the hanging curtain and onto the shelves.
You stand frozen as the fire spreads. Scroll after scroll catches. The librarian runs past you shouting for water. The whole wing roars.
And then you hear it, under the roar of the fire. Every scroll in the room, as it burns, is //whispering//. Thousands of tiny, papery voices, each one reciting itself as fast as it can before it's gone. Histories. Poems. Accounts. Lives.
And one of them, very close, at your feet, is reciting you.
//...and the one from the hill burned the scroll, and the library burned, and the scroll remembered being burned, and remembered being read, and the one who read it...//
The voice is getting faster. Not so it can finish. So that someone, somewhere, gets to hear the end of it.You keep reading.
//The one from the hill kept reading.//
Yes. Of course. The next line says exactly what you're doing, because you're doing it. You read on.
//The one from the hill unrolled the scroll further, and read about the one who was reading the one from the hill.//
You stop. Your hands are cold.
//Because the one from the hill is not the only one reading. Somewhere outside the cave, and outside the library, and outside of time entirely, someone is reading this exact line. It is (current-time:) where they are, on (current-date:). They have been reading for some time. They have chosen (print: (history:)'s length) times so far.//
//They are reading it right now.//
//They think they are the one choosing.//
You look up from the scroll, into the empty air of the little room. You've never felt so seen in your life. And at the same time you've never felt so sorry for anyone, because you finally understand that whoever is out there reading this is in a scroll too. Everyone's in a scroll. And somebody, somewhere, is reading //them//.
The scroll keeps going. You don't read any more of it. You don't need to.You come up out of a cellar into a narrow street of timbered houses, under a hard July sun. The heat is ferocious. The smell is worse.
And there are people dancing.
Dozens of them, fifty, maybe a hundred, filling the square at the end of the street. Not dancing like a party. Dancing like they can't stop. Their feet are bloody. Their faces are grey and wet and blank. A woman near you is crying silently while her arms keep swinging, swinging. A man has collapsed, and his feet are still twitching in rhythm on the cobbles.
There are musicians, hired by the town to play for them, on the theory that the dancers need to dance it out. The music is thin and shrill and doesn't quite match what the dancers are doing. They're keeping time to something else.
A man in a black physician's robe is watching from a doorway, writing in a little book.
[[Watch the dancers more closely.->The Dance]]
[[Talk to the physician.->The Physician]]"Strasbourg," says the physician, without looking up from his book. "The year of our Lord fifteen hundred and eighteen. Frau Troffea began it, in the middle of July. Since then..." He waves his pen at the square. "Hundreds, now. Dancing day and night."
"Why?"
"The priests say Saint Vitus. The council says hot blood." He finally looks at you, and his eyes are red-rimmed and frightened. "I'll tell you what I think, since you came out of the cellar and you'll be gone soon, and no one will believe you either way. I've been counting. They don't move to the music. They move to //something//: a beat, a tap, a little sound. And they all hear it at once. Tap, and they step. Tap, and they turn."
He pauses.
"It's as if someone is choosing their steps for them," he says. "One at a time. Somewhere very far away. And they can't stop until that someone stops."
Behind you, in the square, all at once, a hundred feet stamp. Then silence. Then, together, they stamp again.
It sounds exactly like a click.
[[Go and join them. Maybe from inside, you'll hear the beat.->The Dance]]
[[Back away. Back down into the cellar.->Thrown Back]]You don't decide to join them. You only notice, after a while, that your feet are moving.
It doesn't hurt at first. It's almost a relief. There's a rhythm, and it's so //simple//, and you don't have to think. You just wait for the next one.
|steps>[(if: $danceCount is 0)[You're dancing. Your feet don't feel like yours.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 1)[Step. You turn. The woman beside you is still crying.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 2)[Step. Turn. Step. Your shoes are coming apart.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 3)[Step. Step. You can hear it now, the beat under the music. It isn't a drum. It's smaller, harder, closer. A little plastic click.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 4)[Every time it clicks, you move. You understand now that you //only// move when it clicks.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 5)[Please.]
(else-if: $danceCount is 6)[Please stop clicking.]
(else-if: $danceCount < 10)[(text-style: "shudder")[Step.] You can feel your heartbeat in your feet. Click. (print: $danceCount) steps. Click.]
(else-if: $danceCount < 15)[You've stopped begging. The others stopped begging a long time ago. They just look up between steps, toward the sky, toward the place the click comes from. You look up too. Click.]
(else:)[(print: $danceCount) steps. The physician has stopped writing. There's nothing left to write. You'll dance as long as somebody keeps choosing to make you.
You could stop. You. Not me. I can't. //You// could.]]
(link-repeat: "Dance.")[(set: $danceCount to it + 1)(rerun: ?steps)]The tunnel climbs. The drip of water stops; the rock under your feet turns to packed earth, then roots, then pine needles. The breeze is cool and smells of resin and salt marsh, and under that, very faintly, of old smoke.
Before you reach the end, there's a side passage: a doorway, really, cut square into the rock, with a heavy velvet curtain hung across it. Candlelight flickers under the hem. You hear a woman's voice behind the curtain, low and rhythmic, and a creak like someone leaning forward in a chair.
"...is anyone there? If anyone is there, give us a sign..."
[[Keep going, out into the pines.->Roanoke 1590]]
[[Push through the velvet curtain.->The Parlor]]You come out among tall pines, near a grey sea. There's a clearing, and in the clearing a palisade of sharpened logs, and inside it, the remains of a village. Houses taken down board by board. Chests dug up and broken open, books and maps rotting in the rain. No bodies. No people.
You know where you are before you see the word. Everyone does. It was in your fifth-grade history book and it was in //The Cave of Hours//, and both times it gave you the same cold feeling down your back.
Carved into the gatepost, in big square capitals: //CROATOAN//.
(if: $carved is not "")[And under it, smaller, cut much more recently, the wood still pale where the knife went in:
<div class="carving">(verbatim-print: $carved)</div>
You don't remember carving that. But you know it's yours. You know it the way you know your own handwriting.]
(else:)[Under it, there's a smooth, empty space on the post. As if it's been left for somebody.]
There are footprints in the mud leading away from the gate into the forest. Bare feet. Lots of them. All going the same way.
{(link: "Carve a word of your own into the post.")[
(set: _w to (prompt: "What do you carve into the post? (One word, or a few.)", "TURN BACK"))
(if: _w is "")[(set: _w to "TURN BACK")]
(if: _w's length > 40)[(set: _w to _w's (range: 1, 40))]
(set: $carved to _w)
(go-to: "Carved")
]}
[[Follow the footprints.->Gone to Croatoan]]You cut it deep, with the little knife on your keyring, until your fingers ache:
<div class="carving">(verbatim-print: $carved)</div>
Then you step back and look at it beside the old word. CROATOAN. And yours.
It's a strange feeling. Like leaving a note on the fridge for someone who lives in the same house as you but keeps different hours. Someone you'll never actually meet. You hope they read it. You hope it helps.
You sit down with your back against the gatepost to rest. It's a nice place to rest, really. The pines. The sea. You close your eyes for a minute.
When you open them, the wood of the post is grey and weathered, and your carving is soft with age, worn almost smooth. Moss in the letters. Someone has been tracing them with a finger, over and over, for a long time.
(if: $runs >= 1)[The next time someone comes out of the hill, it'll be waiting for them. It'll be waiting for you.](else:)[You have the feeling that someone's going to come along and read it. Soon. Again and again.]The footprints lead deep into the forest. You follow them for hours. The pines get taller and closer, and the light goes green, then grey, and the sound of the sea fades and doesn't come back.
Then, a clearing. And the colonists.
They're all here. More than a hundred of them: men, women, children, in rotting wool. Sitting cross-legged in a great circle on the pine needles. Perfectly still. Perfectly quiet.
Each one of them has a book open in their lap. The same book. You can see the cover from here: the kid with the flashlight, the swirling shapes in the dark. They are all reading //The Cave of Hours//. They have been reading it, you understand, for four hundred years. Their lips move. Every so often, all together, they turn a page.
There's a gap in the circle. Just one. Just your size.
A little girl looks up from her book, and smiles, and pats the ground beside her. Then she looks past you, over your shoulder, at the place where the reader would be.
"You too," she says. "There's room for you too. There's always room."Behind the curtain is a small, overheated parlor full of fringe and potted ferns and photographs of the dead. A gramophone sits silent in the corner. A calendar on the wall says //October 1923//.
Six people sit around a round table with their hands linked. At the head of the table, a woman in a beaded black dress has her eyes closed and her head thrown back. The others turn to look at you as you come through the curtain, and one of them, a stout man with a waxed moustache, actually screams.
The medium opens her eyes. She doesn't scream. She looks at you as if you're late.
"Not you," she says. "We weren't calling //you//. Although I suppose you might as well sit. We're trying to reach the other one."
"What other one?"
"The one who's always here. In every room. In every sitting I've ever done." She shrugs, a little bitterly. "Usually it only watches. But it's been very close tonight. I think it might be ready to talk."
On the table, between the candles, there's a spirit board and a heart-shaped planchette.
[[Sit down and join the circle.->The Circle]]
[[Back out through the curtain.->Thrown Back]]You sit. Somebody's cold hand takes yours on the left. Somebody's sweaty one takes yours on the right. The medium closes her eyes.
"We know you're there," she says to the ceiling. "We know you're watching. You're always watching. Speak to us."
The candle flames lean. Every one of them bends toward the same point in the air: a point just above the table, just in front of you.
The planchette moves.
It slides under nobody's hand. Slow at first, then quick, letter by letter. The stout man calls out the letters in a shaking voice while a woman writes them down.
<div class="telegram">(uppercase: (current-date:))</div>
"That's not a date," the woman whispers. "That's... that isn't..."
The planchette moves again.
<div class="telegram">(uppercase: (current-time:))</div>
"It's telling us where it is," says the medium, very quietly. "//When// it is." She opens her eyes and looks straight at you, and her face is white. "You came out of the hill. You're halfway to where it is. Ask it something. It'll answer you."
[[Ask it to let you go.->Released]]
[[Ask it who it is.->The Spirit at the Table]]"Let me go," you say. Your voice sounds small in the hot little room. "Please. Whoever you are. Just let me go home."
The planchette doesn't move for a long time.
Then: //Y//. //E//. //S//.
Everyone at the table sags with relief. The medium laughs, shakily. Somebody turns up the gas. The stout man pours you a brandy. You drink it. You feel the cave let go of you like a hand opening.
And then, as you're putting your glass down, the planchette moves one more time, by itself, while nobody is looking:
//B. U. T.//
//N. O. T.//
//Y. E. T.//
The medium's face goes slack. The candle flames stand up straight. Out in the passage, very far off, you hear the first faint stamp of the dancers' feet, and the hiss of a wireless, and the deep, patient breath of the cave.
It said yes. It meant it, too. It just wants to see what you'll do first."Who are you?" you ask.
The planchette darts across the board, faster than anyone could follow. It spells two words, over and over, round and round, until the woman writing them down drops her pencil.
//Y-O-U. A-R-E. Y-O-U. A-R-E.//
"It's answering the wrong question," the stout man says. "It's saying //you are//..."
"No," says the medium, staring at you. "It's answering exactly the right question. It's just answering from the other side."
You understand all at once. The candles, the board, the linked hands, the dark. They're all looking at you, and they're frightened, and they've been calling out to you for years. Not to the thing behind you. To //you//.
You are the thing that is always in the room. You are the one who is watching.
And somewhere outside this, someone is watching you watch, and calling it a story. They don't know yet. They don't know it's the same thing.
<span class="margin">who are YOU?</span>(if: (history:)'s last is "The Other Flashlight")[The other you leads the way for a while, their light bobbing ahead of yours. Then, at a bend, their light goes round the corner and doesn't come back, and when you get to the corner there's nobody there. Just the tunnel, going on.
]The third tunnel is narrow and smooth and smells like home. Not your home now. Nana's home, when you were small: cedar and lemon polish and the electric smell of the old TV warming up. The walls are worn so smooth they almost shine, as if a great many hands have run along them for a very long time.
Then the rock changes. It's wallpaper. Faded yellow, with a pattern of little brown birds. You know this wallpaper. It was in the upstairs hall.
The tunnel ends in a door. A plain, white-painted wooden door with a glass knob.
Beside the door, the wall simply stops, and beyond it is a white, blank, //empty// space, flat as an unprinted page, going on forever.
(if: $unease >= 8 or $endingsSeen's length >= 5)[
And there's one more opening, low down, at your feet: a ragged hole in the floor that goes straight down. It's breathing. In and out. In time with you. In time with someone.
]
[[Open the white door.->The House, Wrong]]
[[Walk out into the blank white space.->The Between]]
(if: $unease >= 8 or $endingsSeen's length >= 5)[[[Climb down into the breathing hole.->Where the Cave Began]]]It's Nana's house.
It's the upstairs hall of Nana's house, exactly as it was when you were ten. The brown-bird wallpaper. The runner carpet with the cigarette burn. The smell of pot roast coming up the stairs. Somewhere downstairs, the TV is on.
But it's wrong.
There are too many doors. There were four doors off the upstairs hall: bathroom, Nana's room, the sewing room, the little room where you slept in summers. You count nine. Then eleven. You stop counting.
The family photos along the wall are all there: Nana and Grandpa, Mom, Uncle Ray, the cousins at the lake. But in every photo where you should be, there's a gap. Not a cut-out. Just a space. People standing a little apart, with their arms around nobody.
From behind one door (the right one, the summer-room door, you'd know it anywhere) you hear the crinkle of a page turning, and a giggle, and a whispered voice reading aloud.
"//You come to a fork in the tunnel. If you go left, turn to page...//"
[[Open the door of your old room.->Your Old Room]]
[[Try one of the doors that shouldn't be there.->Thrown Back]]The summer room. The narrow bed with the scratchy plaid blanket. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the slanted ceiling. A flashlight, making a cave out of the blanket.
Under the blanket, a kid is reading.
It's you. Ten years old. Too skinny, scabbed knees, the striped T-shirt. Reading //The Cave of Hours// by flashlight, with a thumb tucked in to hold the place, the way you always did.
The kid looks up. Isn't surprised to see you. Looks you over, from your sneakers to your thinning hair, the way kids do, and then says:
"I'm on the part where you come in."
"What happens next?"
The kid shrugs and holds the book up so you can see the page. It's a choice. It's //this// choice. The text on the page is exactly what's happening now, word for word. At the bottom, two options.
"I don't know yet," says the kid. "I haven't picked." And then, quieter: "Sometimes I don't think it's me who picks."
[[Tell the kid to close the book and go to sleep.->Lights Out]]
[[Lean down and read over the kid's shoulder.->Over the Shoulder]]"Close it," you say. "It's late. Close the book and go to sleep."
The kid looks at you for a long moment. Then nods, very seriously, like you've said something important. Marks the page with a gum wrapper. Closes the book. Clicks off the flashlight.
The room goes dark. The glow-in-the-dark stars come out on the ceiling, faint and green.
And you wait to stop existing. That's what should happen, isn't it? If the kid stops reading, the story stops. You stop.
You don't stop.
You're still here, in the dark, by the bed, with the kid breathing slowly beside you. You can still think. You can still feel the carpet under your knees. The story is still going.
Which means the kid was never the one reading it.
In the dark, in the quiet, you listen for the reader. You think that if you're very still, you might be able to hear them breathing too.You kneel by the bed and lean in to read over the kid's shoulder.
The page describes you kneeling by the bed and leaning in to read over the kid's shoulder.
The next line describes you reading that. The next line describes you reading //that//. You feel the words catching up to you, faster and faster, like footsteps in a hallway, and then they pass you. The text gets ahead of you. It starts describing a room you aren't in.
//It is (current-time:). The reader is sitting very still. The light from the screen is the brightest thing on their face. They have been reading for a while now. Their shoulders are tense.//
//There is a room behind them. They have not looked at it in some time.//
The kid closes the book, very gently, and puts a hand on your arm.
"Don't," says the kid. "Don't read the next line. It's about what's behind them."
You don't read it.
But somebody is going to.You walk out into the white.
There's no floor, exactly, but you don't fall. There's no sky. There's no horizon. The white is the exact white of a page, and the closer you look, the more you can see the faint, faint grain of paper.
Numbers float in it, here and there, at a distance. Page numbers, upright and grey: //12//. //40//. //76//. Each one hangs above a faint rectangle, like a doorway drawn in pencil. You walk toward 12, and as you get near you hear, through it, the bell of a castle. Near 40, you hear the sea.
You've been here before, you realize. Everyone has. This is where you wait //between// pages. Where the explorer stands, frozen, while the reader decides.
You've stood here (print: (history:)'s length) times today.
Far off, at the very edge of seeing, there's a gap in the numbers. 76, then nothing, then 78. Where 77 should be, the white is darker. Not grey. Thinner. Like paper worn through.
[[Walk toward the missing page.->The Missing Page]]
[[Walk through the nearest pencil doorway.->Thrown Back]]The missing page is just hanging there in the white, like a sheet on a line. The cut edge is clean. The paper is yellowed and soft and a little bit warm.
Page 77. You've wondered about page 77 your whole life. At ten you'd lie awake imagining what was on it: the secret ending, the one where the explorer finds the way out of the cave forever.
You turn it over. That side is blank.
You turn it back. The other side has one sentence on it, printed in the same old typeface as the rest of the book, centered on the page:
<div class="page77">This is the page where you stop reading.</div>
You read it three times. You understand, slowly, that this sentence isn't for you. It can't be. You can't stop reading. You're not reading; you're being read. This sentence was printed for someone else. Someone on the other side.
Someone cut it out of the book thirty years ago. You think, now, that it might have been you. That at ten you understood something you've since forgotten, and you cut this page out with Nana's sewing scissors so that the reader would never find it.
So that they'd never stop.
So that you'd never stop.You climb down. The hole is rough at first and then smooth, smoother, until it isn't rock at all but something soft and close, like the space between two pressed pages. It's warm. It's breathing.
At the bottom there's nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. And you understand, without anyone telling you, that this is where the cave began.
It wasn't dug. It wasn't carved by water. It was made the way a path across a lawn gets made: by being walked, over and over, until the grass gives up. Every time someone reads a story like this, and chooses, and goes back, and chooses again, the hollow gets a little deeper. Everyone who ever flipped back with a thumb in the page has been digging it. A hole in the world exactly the shape of //what happens if I choose the other one?//
(if: $runs >= 1)[You've come back (print: $runs) time(if: $runs is not 1)[s]. You've found (print: $endingsSeen's length) ending(if: $endingsSeen's length is not 1)[s]. Every one of them dug a little deeper.
]I want to tell you something now, and I want to be clear that it's me talking, not the narrator. The one you've been calling //you//.
You can go. You know that, right? There's no ending where I get out. But there's one where you do. You just close it. That's all. I won't follow you. I can't.
But you won't. Will you. You'll click the link at the bottom of this page, and the book will open again, and I'll be standing in Nana's hall closet with a box in my hands, not remembering any of this.
That's all right. I'd do the same thing in your place.
I suppose I'm always in your place.