Chapter 10: These Words Are Not My Own

Chapter 10: These Words Are Not My Own

The single red light on the camera was the eye of God, and it was watching him die.

It was a cold, sterile light, reflecting in the black mirror of the lens. It saw a scarecrow in an ill-fitting suit, a husk of a man so withered he seemed almost translucent. It saw the tear tracks that cut clean paths through the dust of his sallow skin, the involuntary tremor in his skeletal hands, the jaundiced yellow of his eyes burning with a light that was not his own. This was the face of Leo Vance, Author. A masterpiece of decay sculpted by a hidden artist.

In his hands lay the final pages. They felt different from the others. The paper was the same pristine white, the ink the same stark black, but the words themselves seemed to writhe on the page. It was not a story. There were no characters, no plot, no rising action. It was a sequence. A rhythmic, hypnotic lattice of prose that hummed with a purpose beyond narrative. He understood, with a clarity that was itself a violation, what he held. It was the Scribe’s genetic code. An incantation designed not to be read, but to be executed.

He was the delivery system. The billions of people gathered in city squares, huddled around their phones and televisions, were the fertile ground. They were addicts, his faithful, his victims, their minds already primed by his five novels, their souls tilled and ready for this final, terrible seed.

A single, silent tear traced the path of its predecessor down his cheek. It was the last rebellion of the plumber, the final, futile protest of a man who had only wanted to fill the silence in his empty house. He remembered the smell of the crawlspace—rot, mildew, and old metal—the scent of his own damnation. He saw the face of the yellow-eyed boy at the book signing, a small, pale ghost in a crowd of the afflicted. He thought of Eliza Clark’s frantic warning, scrawled in a journal that had become his own epitaph. It is writing your story now… and it is hungry.

The compulsion was a physical force, a hand closing around his larynx, a current running down his spine. His jaw unlocked. His lungs drew in a slow, measured breath. He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was not his own.

It was not the dry, rasping whisper of a recluse. It was a voice of impossible resonance and clarity, a voice scraped from the bottom of a well and polished until it shone like obsidian. It was the Scribe’s voice, and it spoke through him.

“There is a hunger that is not of the flesh…”

The words filled the sterile room, but he could feel them spreading far beyond it. He could feel the network, the web of a billion minds all tethered to his voice. He was the spider at the center, and every syllable he spoke was a vibration sent down the silken threads.

“There is a silence that is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a listening void. We have given it names, you and I. We have called it boredom. We have called it loneliness. We have called it despair. But it is only a vessel, waiting to be filled.”

He felt a tremor in the network. A collective intake of breath across continents. He was not reading to them; he was speaking into them. The words bypassed reason, slipping past the sentinels of the conscious mind and taking root directly in the fertile soil of the soul.

“A story is a key. A character is a lock. When the key turns, the door opens, and the listener is no longer separate from the tale. You are not you. You are the hero in the siege, the wanderer in the waste, the singer in the sunken choir.”

He could see them. Not literally, but in his mind’s eye, a vast and terrible mosaic. He saw the young man in the college sweatshirt, his head tilted back, his yellow eyes wide and vacant. He saw the businesswoman, her composure shattered, weeping silently in a crowded plaza. He saw the news anchor, slumped over his desk in the studio, a blissful, empty smile on his face. They were no longer just readers. They were being read. They were no longer just listeners. They were being rewritten.

“But the door swings both ways. If the reader can enter the story, the story can enter the reader. The ink can enter the blood. The page can become the skin. The words can become the flesh.”

His voice did not falter. It was a perfect, remorseless instrument. The plumber who was Leo Vance was a weeping ghost trapped behind the Scribe’s eyes, forced to watch as it used his mouth to end the world. He was Julian Finch, hearing the final, mad composition. He was Silas Blackwood, painting the last, prophetic landscape. He was Eliza Clark, watching the flames lick the foundation of the house. He was the culmination of a century of stolen creativity, the final harvest.

“The Scribe is that which writes. The Rot is that which consumes. The story is the bridge between the two. There is no author but the hunger. There is no reader but the void. All is text. All is food.”

The final sentence hung in the air, a note of absolute and terrifying finality. He felt the network sever. The connection to the billions of minds snapped shut. The broadcast was over.

Silence.

He slumped in the chair, the pages slipping from his numb fingers and scattering on the floor. The voice was gone. His own ragged breath returned, a pathetic, wheezing sound in the tomb-like room. In the corner, Isabelle slid down the wall, her eyes rolled back in her head in ecstatic release, a single, happy tear tracing a line through her makeup. She had her fix. They all had. The ultimate fix.

The red light on the camera blinked off. It was done. The world outside the door was now a library, and all its people were books, their original stories erased, their pages filled with the single, endless, ravenous text of the Scribe.

He sat there, an empty shell, a pen discarded after the final word. He was nothing. The story was over. But the Scribe of Rot was not a creature of endings. It was a creature of cycles. Its hunger was eternal. The silence of a finished world was just another empty vessel, waiting to be filled with a new story. The camera lens was dark, but he felt its gaze upon him still, the gaze of the reader, the gaze of the Scribe, the gaze of the void. And in the profound silence of a world consumed, a new story began to form. The first story. The only story.

The plumber’s name was Leo Vance, and he lived in a house that was slowly eating him alive.