Jack-in-the-book (3)

I had a sudden inspiration the other day, in the form of an amazing character in a not-so-amazing movie. Anyone heard of Mr. Teatime? Well he reminded me of paper-ink-man, and I thought, why not try my hand at Jack-in-the-book again? Here's part three, though I'm not sure if I like it or not. No nitpicks, please!

I opened my mouth to say something, to break the yucky silence that sat on my tongue like old cookies left in the dog-house a couple weeks, but there wasn’t anything to say. Nothing, nothing at all. I was so amazingly lost for words, I wasn’t sure I’d ever remember how to speak again.

“Shut your mouth before you start attracting vultures,” he snapped, and catapulted suddenly to his feet. The abrupt movement startled me as pretty much everything else he’d done, and I knocked my head against the thick door with a dull thonk. “Haha,” he said, but it wasn’t really a laugh at all. “Funny, Katie. Very funny.”

“What do you want?” I whispered, and as he got closer and closer I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, as if the very basest of my instincts warned against this otherworldly…thing.

“D’you know,” he said, smiling awfully, “I can’t think. First I thought it might be fun to just kill the idjits who got themselves locked in the library, and then I thought, But wouldn’t it be nice to have a bumbling human to take back home with me? And that seemed like a great idea. But then I saw you two, pathetic little children, and wondered if maybe I should just light the library on fire and watch you burn.” The smile widened, and he offered me one of his thin, pale hands—it rustled like old paper as it laced its way through my fingers.

“So then, was that the – the verdict?” I gulped, making a phenomenal effort merely to form coherent words. I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, dammit, someone wake me up!

“Nah,” he sighed, pulling me up to my feet. Even then I was nearly a head and a half shorter than he was, and something about that made the entire situation that much more incongruent. “If I burn down the library, I’ll ruin all the books I love to read and make fun of so much, and that wouldn’t do. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I already got rid of the phone. He won’t be able to call anyone, girlie. Butterscotch?” He offered me one of this little hard candies, and when I shook my head he simply popped it into his thin-lipped mouth, paper and all. Crunch, crunch. It was almost funny, how every time I thought the situation could no longer get any freakier, any more hopeless, he told me something that ruined everything all over again.

“You’re supposed to suck on them.” He looked down at me when I said that, like I was totally crazy, and then proceeded to say absolutely nothing in reply.

We went once around the library in silence, but I knew he was looking for Jaden. By the time we’d been through it again, I wondered if he was trying to drive me mad. All these moldy-smelling books, all this odd ethereal light, so many miles, it seemed, of dirty old carpet—it was a wonder no one had gone crazy here before.

“Jaden,” he called suddenly, and my brother seemed to come from nowhere, as though he jumped out of a book himself. There was a look in his frightened eyes, like he’d been somewhere else and he didn’t quite know how he’d gotten to where he was now. I shivered a little, and the ink-man squeezed my hand, which, in what a normal human being’s case would’ve been comforting, only served to scare me more. “Jaden, you’re a good boy, right?”

Jaden looked at me, confused, but nodded to the ink-man, and I could see he, too, was shivering slightly. “Yes.”

“Yes, sir,” the ink-man corrected.

“Yes, sir,” Jaden said, and his voice was barely more than a croaky whisper.

“Now listen, little boy. I need you to carry out a very important mission. D’you think you can do it?” Jaden nodded again, still shivering. The ink-man waved his free hand and a dagger appeared in it—he tucked this into his jacket before Jaden saw it, but I did, and my stomach lurched horribly. Crazy guy plus knife never equaled anything good. “Go to the door and turn the knob; it’ll open, I promise. Go out to the policemen and tell them that there is a scary man doing very bad things to your sister, understand? And then come straight back and you can take Miss Katie with you, and you’ll never see me again. We’ll all win.” Again Jaden looked at me, but I was frozen entirely now, the increased pressure of the ink-man’s hand in mine telling me what Jaden didn’t know.

The door wouldn’t be unlocked when he came back.

There was a long silence after Jaden scurried off, a long silence only broken by the sound of the library door swinging open, then shut again. I heard the sound of a lock clicking into place, and could nearly feel my joints fusing together, my brain freezing up and shattering into a pile of ice, bits of gooey nothingness.

“Very bad things?” My voice was shaky, a hoarse choking sound, like someone who’d been drinking too much sherry.

“Well I couldn’t be explicit in front of a little innocent like him, could I?” the ink-man chuckled, and his thumb ran idly across the back of my hand, making that whispering paper sound again. I gulped, closing my eyes, trying to calm down even the slightest. “Do you dislike knives very much?”

So much for calming down. “It depends on where they are,” I said.

“If one was, say, pinning your hand to a table so you wouldn’t try to run away while I went to get a book, how much would it bother you?” he said, as if he was asking if I liked vanilla or chocolate ice cream better.

I was trying to articulate a reply to that when there was a swishing sound, just the way it sounds before you realize you have a paper cut, and then my hand was hurting like hell, and there was a little laugh as the ink-man released the hand that wasn’t…wasn’t…

Oh shit shit shit shit was all that was going through my head, my eyes stuck to the knife going straight through my right hand, to the thin line of blood trickling down the table leg, the supersensitive feeling of the polished wood against my skin. Little black dots fluttered around in front of my eyes and I thought I might die, no, I was sure I was going to, in the back of this library, suffocating, bleeding, with the smell of moldy paper clogging my throat until I couldn’t breathe at all.

“Oh stop crying, it’s just a knife, you silly child,” snorted that inky voice, and snapped me out of my drowning reverie. I watched as his fingers curled around the simple black hilt, couldn’t quite gather the energy to scream as the steel retreated from the center of my hand. He licked the dark red blood from the blade in a revoltingly businesslike fashion, and returned it to some hidden pocket in his cloak-jacket.

He was humming.

I fell to the floor, black dots still dancing before my eyes, cradling the remnants of my right hand and trying not to realize that I was crying, hot tears that tasted like fear trickling down my face, dripping down the front of my new shirt. I knew if I looked up the ink-man would be sitting quietly in one of the armchairs, eyes moving quickly across the pages of his wretched book. He chuckled a little, whether at me or not, I didn’t want to guess.

There were loud voices, calling out from behind the library door, but I knew that even if they set dynamite off on the other side, they couldn’t get in, not unless the ink-man wanted them to. So I sat there, bleeding quietly, crying in the silence.

But I didn’t know--he was only getting started.

No italics, I know. Sorry 'bout that.