I sit down and I look at the Book and I look at my finger and I sit there for what might be two minutes or might be ten, and the card table rocks slightly under the weight of my forearms, and the takeout menu shim does its job, and somewhere outside a dog barks, and I think:

  There's a reasonable explanation for this. There's a perfectly rational, mechanical, thermodynamics-compliant explanation for this, and I will now calmly identify it like a mature, educated adult.

  I do not, in fact, identify it.

  ---

  Here's what I do instead.

  I take another match from the box. I strike it. I hold it over the open Book — not close this time, arm's length, the flame a small orange flag at the end of a wooden stick — and I drop it.

  It lands on the open page.

  For a fraction of a second — less than that, a frame, a single tick of whatever clock the universe runs on — I think I see it lying there, the matchstick on the cream paper, the flame guttering sideways.

  And then it's gone.

  Not extinguished. Not burned out.

  Gone.

  The page swallows it the way a pond swallows a stone, except there's no ripple, no splash, no evidence. Just smooth, blank, beautiful nothing.

  So I do it again.

  Another match. Strike. Drop. Gone.

  Again.

  Strike. Drop. Gone.

  Again.

  I go through six more matches in under a minute, standing over this Book like a man feeding coins into a machine he doesn't understand, and every single one disappears just like the last. It lands on the page, exists for an instant, then… ceases. The page remains pristine. The book sits on my card table and accepts these offerings with the serene indifference of something that might very well have been doing this for much longer than I've been alive.

  I close the book. I open it back up. I flip to a different page and drop another match. Gone. I flip to another. Gone. I check the earlier pages — the ones where the first matches landed. Still blank. No residue, no heat damage, no sign of fire.

  I sit down again.

  My hands are shaking now, but only a little. The burn on my finger throbs with metronomic regularity, a pulse of pain that serves as the control in this impromptu experiment. The independent variable: the matches definitely existed. The dependent variable: they definitely don’t anymore.

  The confounding variable: everything I thought I knew about how objects behave in three-dimensional space.

  I'm a software engineer. I debug systems. When a system behaves in a way that contradicts its specifications, you check your assumptions. You trace the logic. You look for the edge case, the off-by-one error, the null pointer that sends execution down a path nobody anticipated.

  The assumption: objects placed on surfaces remain on those surfaces unless acted upon by a force.

  The observation: objects placed on this Book do not.

  The conclusion—

  …

  …

  …

  The conclusion is either that I have discovered something that fundamentally violates the known laws of physics, or that I have finally, after months of unemployment, divorce, undiagnosed cancer, and an air mattress with a pinhole leak, gone completely and irretrievably insane.

  Option A is Magic.

  Option B is Madness.

  Which of these is more likely?

  I look down at the burn on my finger. I press it with my thumb and the pain flares, specific and real, anchoring me to the physical world in a way I desperately need right now.

  I decide I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt.

  Just this once. Just today.

  Because it's the weekend after my forty-seventh birthday that nobody remembered, and I'm sitting alone in a studio apartment talking to a Book, and if I don't trust my own senses then I have nothing left to trust.

  So… We’ll go with Option A for now.

  Magic.

  The word sits in my mind like a syntax error — underlined in red, flagged by every compiler I've ever internalized.

  Magic.

  The province of children and fantasy novels and people who think crystals cure cancer. Ha! I have a doctorate degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon! I've spent twenty-three years building systems that operate on logic, on reproducibility, on the absolute, unshakeable premise that if you do exactly the same thing twice, you should get exactly the same result.

  Except I just did the same thing seven times and got a result that shouldn't be possible.

  So… either my premises are wrong, or I am.

  I'm going with the premises.

  ---

  The obvious next question is: What do I do with this information?

  And the obvious first answer is: tell someone. Report it.

  And call... who? The police? The fire department? The physics department at the nearest University?

  I picture myself walking into the Millbrook police station — a building I've driven past at least a thousand times, a squat brick box with a flagpole and a parking lot that's always full of Crown Vics — and approaching the front desk with the Book under my arm.

  “Hello there! Yes, I found this book in the library basement and it eats matches.”

  They'd nod.

  They'd smile.

  They'd ask me to have a seat.

  And then, one of two things would happen: either they'd decide I was a harmless crank and send me home with a pamphlet about mental health resources, or they'd decide I was a non-harmless crank and things would escalate.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  A wellness check.

  A psych evaluation.

  A concerned social worker asking me how I've been sleeping and whether I've had any "unusual thoughts" lately, and I'd have to sit there and decide whether to tell the truth — “Yes, actually. I think a Book in my apartment is consuming physical matter” — or lie, and either way I'd end up on a list somewhere. Flagged. Noted. A forty-seven-year-old unemployed man with a terminal diagnosis and a tenuous relationship with reality.

  And that's the good scenario.

  The bad scenario — the one that plays out in the part of my brain that watched too many movies in its twenties — involves someone believing me.

  Someone in a suit, or a uniform, or a lab coat. Someone from an agency whose acronym I don't know, showing up at my door with a warrant and a containment unit and a non-disclosure agreement and a very polite explanation that I'll be coming with them now — “Mr. Marsh, just for a few questions, just routine,” — and then I'm in a concrete room somewhere in Virginia being asked where I found “The Artifact” and who else knows about it and have I noticed any other anomalies and by the way we'll need a blood sample and by the way we'll need you to stay “here” indefinitely and by the way the concept of "here" is now classified.

  Nope!

  No, thank you.

  I've read and watched enough movies to know that being interesting to the government is the fastest way to stop being a person and start being a subject.

  So, that means reporting the thing is out.

  Which leaves: put it back.

  Just… return it to the gap between the shelves in the library basement, slide it in, walk away, forget about it. Let it be someone else's problem.

  Let it be nobody's problem. A weird blank book that eats matches — so what? Is that going to pay my medical bills? Is it going to make Sophie remember what was probably the last birthday of my life? Is it going to rewind the last eighteen months and put me back in my office chair with my salary and my marriage and my dog?

  No. It's not going to do any of those things. And putting it back would be the sane, responsible, unremarkable thing to do.

  But there’s a problem with that option.

  I don't want to.

  And I know that's not a rational reason. I know I don't want to is the argument of a child, the logic of a toddler clutching a toy.

  But I'm sitting here in my apartment and the card table is rocking and the air mattress is deflating and the thing below my ribs is doing whatever it's doing in the dark and this book — this impossible, infuriating, beautiful book — is the only thing in my life right now that is surprising. It's the only variable that doesn't fit the model. Everything else —the layoff, the divorce, the diagnosis, the decline — all of it tracks. All of it follows the curve I plotted months ago, the downward trajectory that I can extrapolate to its terminus with my eyes closed.

  But this? This doesn't track. This is an exception. A break in the pattern.

  And I'm not ready to give that up. Not for anything.

  OK.

  So I'm keeping it.

  I'm not reporting it.

  I'm not returning it.

  Which leaves... what? Selling it?

  The thought is almost funny. I'd need a buyer, which means I'd need to demonstrate it, which means I'd need to show someone, which means we're back to the same problem —either they think I'm crazy or they don't, and the second option is worse than the first. Even if I found some eccentric collector, some billionaire who dabbles in the occult, the transaction itself would paint a target on me. Word gets around. Someone talks. And then I'm back to that concrete room in Virginia.

  No, selling is out for the same reasons reporting is. Which leaves exactly one option.

  …

  …

  …

  Using it.

  But how?

  I've watched it eat seven matches. Great. Wonderful. Am I supposed to start a match-disposal service? Advertise on Craigslist?

  Will make your matches disappear for a reasonable fee, no questions asked.

  …

  Unless…

  ---

  I start with water.

  The kitchen faucet runs cold — the hot water in this building is theoretical at best —and I hold the book open under a thin stream, one page angled slightly to catch the flow. The water hits the paper and —

  It's absorbed. Fully. Instantly.

  Not the way paper absorbs water, going dark and soft and warped. The water vanishes into the page the way the matches vanished, as if the surface is a membrane and the water is passing through it into somewhere else. The page doesn't darken. Doesn't wrinkle. Doesn't warp. I run the faucet for thirty seconds, a steady stream directly onto the open page, and when I turn it off and touch the paper it's dry.

  Perfectly, impossibly dry.

  I stand there with the faucet dripping into the sink and the book open in my hands and I say, out loud, to my empty apartment: "OK."

  Next: particulates. I take the ashtray from the top of the fridge — I don't smoke; the ashtray was Karen's, one of those decorative ceramic ones she picked up at a flea market, and I kept it because I kept everything she left behind, because I'm a sentimental fool like that — and I tap some ash into it from a piece of paper I burn over the sink. Then I tip the ash onto the Book’s open page.

  Gone.

  Next, some dried sand and pebbles from a decorative jar that serves no purpose and never has — a housewarming gift from someone whose name I've forgotten. I pour a small mound onto the page.

  Gone.

  I'm escalating. I know I'm escalating. I can feel the experimental protocol getting away from me, the controlled variables multiplying, the scientist in me being overtaken by the child who wants to see what happens if you put something really weird in there.

  I have a small collection of silver coins and curios in a box under the bathroom sink —things I've accumulated over the years, mostly inherited from my mother, none of it truly valuable. I take a silver coil, a decorative thing, a twisted ribbon of sterling about the size of my thumb. I hold it over the book. I hesitate.

  Matches are cheap. Water is free. Sand is nothing. But this is silver. This is an object with mass and history and a purchase price, however modest. If this goes the same way as the matches—

  I drop it.

  …

  Gone.

  …

  I check the page. I flip through the entire book, back to front. The pages are as blank as always.

  I go to the cabinet. I have a bottle of wine in there — a red, something bottom-shelf that I bought three weeks ago with the vague intention of drinking it alone on a Friday night and then didn't, because solitary drinking felt too depressing. I uncork it. I hold the bottle over the open book and I pour.

  The wine falls in a dark red stream onto the page and disappears on contact. No splash. No spread. No stain. I pour half the bottle before I stop, and the page is still white. Cream-white. As if the wine hit the surface and was simply... unmade on the spot.

  I set the bottle down. I look at the book.

  "What the hell are you?"

  The book doesn't answer.

  The damn thing never answers.

  It just sits there on my crappy card table, open to a page that has now consumed matches, water, ash, sand, silver, and half a bottle of some cheap red win blend, and it looks exactly the way it looked when I pulled it from the gap between the shelves: perfect, mysterious, and profoundly, infuriatingly blank.

  ---

  I've been at this for two hours, trying to give the Book a variety of substances to see if any trigger an interesting change. My finger still throbs from the burn. The apartment is a mess — water on the counter, ash in the sink, the sand jar overturned, the wine bottle standing open and half-empty on the table like evidence of a party I don't remember attending.

  I sit down and look at my hands.

  There's a thought forming. A stupid thought. A thought that's been circling since the matches, gaining altitude, and I've been ignoring it the way you ignore a notification you don't want to read… but it's persistent and it's getting louder and it's this:

  Everything you've put in so far has been inert. Objects. Substances. Dead matter. But… what happens if you give it something alive?

  I don't have a plant.

  I don't have a pet.

  I don't have anything living in this apartment except myself and whatever's growing in my pancreas.

  I look at the burn on my finger.

  Blood is alive, isn’t it?

  Blood is tissue and plasma and cells — white cells, red cells, platelets, the whole teeming infrastructure of biological existence. Blood is, in a sense, the most fundamental thing a living body produces. It's what makes you you at the molecular level, carrying your oxygen, your antibodies.

  Your DNA.

  I pick up the wine bottle. There's a drop of red at the lip, dark and viscous. For a moment I think of communion — the blood of the covenant, the old rituals, the ones that predate science by millennia, the ones that understood something about the relationship between blood and power that the rational mind has spent centuries trying to forget.

  Then I think: You're a forty-seven-year-old man who got replaced by some ChatGPT knock-off. Stop being so dramatic.

  I open my junk drawer. I find a safety pin — the kind that comes attached to the tag of a new dress shirt. I clean it with the hem of my shirt, which is not proper sterilization but I'm not performing surgery. I'm performing an experiment. And besides, I’m dying anyway, so who the fuck cares about infections?

  I open the Book to the first page.

  I press the pin to the pad of my left index finger — the one that isn't burned — and I push. A bright, instant sting, sharper than the match, more deliberate. A bead of blood rises, dark red, almost black in the overhead light. Small. Maybe a quarter of a drop.

  I hold my finger over the first page.

  I let it fall.

  The drop hits the paper.

  And the Book goes dark.

  Not the page — the Book.

  Every page, all at once, as if the blood has been communicated instantaneously through the entire volume, soaking through six hundred pages in the time between one heartbeat and the next. The cream-colored stock turns black. Not ink-black. Not print-black.

  Void black.

  The black of a room with no windows and no light.

  The black of the truly deep water.

  The black of the deep outer space between galaxies, where nothing has ever been and nothing ever will be.

  I jerk my hand back.

  The Book lies open on the cheap table, and every visible page is the color of absolute nothingness, and the apartment is silent, and my finger is bleeding.

  I stare at it.

  It stares back.

  This time, I don't think I'm imagining it.