Chapter 9: The Final Reading

Chapter 9: The Final Reading

The universe had collapsed into a single, recursive nightmare. Leo sat on his sofa, a prisoner in a cell made of paper and ink, forced to read the blueprint of his own damnation. Time no longer flowed; it was spoon-fed to him in perfectly constructed paragraphs.

He would sit for what felt like an eternity, the pages in his lap a mirror reflecting his own paralysis. His body, a frail and forgotten thing, would ache with a hunger that had transcended the physical. The desire for the next word was now indistinguishable from the will to live, a corrupted instinct that drove him only toward his own end.

He read the words, and he lived them. His stomach was a hollow knot. His head throbbed. He was a ghost trapped inside a dying body, watching it perform the motions dictated by an unseen author. He tried to rebel, to throw the manuscript across the room, but he couldn't. His hands wouldn't obey. The compulsion to know what happened next—to know what he did next—was absolute. It was a chain forged in his very soul.

The phone on the end table would ring precisely at noon. It would be Isabelle, her voice a brittle facsimile of professional excitement, the sound of glass shards trying to mimic a melody. She would not ask how he was. The health of the pen is of no concern to the one who moves it.

The silence in the room was thick, suffocating. He stared at the old landline, a relic he’d kept for reasons he no longer remembered. His eyes darted between the words on the page and the black plastic of the phone. The second hand on the wall clock swept upwards. Ten seconds to noon. Five. Three. Two…

The phone shrieked, the sound so sharp and violent it felt like a physical blow. His hand, moving with a will of its own, reached out and lifted the receiver.

"Leo," Isabelle’s voice crackled through the line. "It's time. The world is ready for you."

"Ready for what, Isabelle?" he whispered, the question futile. He already knew the answer. It was on the next page.

"The Final Reading," she said, her voice dropping with manufactured reverence. "Your faithful have organized everything. It's an unprecedented global engagement event. We're bypassing traditional networks. This will be streamed everywhere, on every platform, simultaneously. Screens in Times Square, in Shibuya, in Trafalgar Square. They’ve built a network for you, Leo. A pulpit from which you can deliver your sermon to the entire planet."

He could hear the tremor in her voice, the frantic, yellow-eyed hunger. She wasn't his agent; she was the Scribe’s event coordinator.

He would end the call without another word and, as instructed by a sudden, irresistible urge, he would turn on the television. The news would confirm the madness.

He hung up the phone. His thumb found the remote control. The screen flickered to life, showing a news anchor whose professional smile couldn't quite conceal the jaundiced tint in the whites of his eyes. Behind the anchor, split-screen footage showed scenes from across the globe. Thousands of people were gathering in city squares, their faces upturned toward massive, newly erected screens. They were not a crowd; they were a congregation. Their expressions were rapt, their bodies tense with anticipation. They clutched copies of his books, their bibles, and their eyes—Leo could see it even in the grainy broadcast footage—burned with the same sickly light as his own.

“What began as a grassroots movement by fans of the reclusive literary genius Leo Vance,” the anchor intoned, “has culminated in what is being called ‘The Final Reading,’ a global live-streamed event promising the author’s first-ever public reading and a special announcement. Organizers, a fan collective now incorporated as the ‘Veridian Trust,’ have ensured the broadcast will reach an estimated audience of over three billion people.”

Three billion. The Scribe wasn't aiming for a bestseller list. It was aiming for the species.

He turned the television off, the anchor’s voice dissolving into the house's menacing whispers. The manuscript in his lap detailed the next few hours with chilling, mundane precision.

A black sedan would arrive at dusk. A suit, tailored for a body much healthier than his own, would have been delivered that afternoon. He would dress, not as himself, but as the character of ‘Leo Vance, Author.’ He would be a scarecrow dressed for his own funeral.

And so it happened. A box arrived. The suit inside fit his emaciated frame like a shroud. He put it on, his fingers fumbling with the buttons. He looked at his reflection in the darkened living room window: a hollow-eyed spectre, a withered husk animated by a story that was racing towards its conclusion. The face of Silas Blackwood. The face of Julian Finch. The face of Eliza Clark. He was wearing all of their deaths on his own gaunt face.

The car arrived as the sun bled out on the horizon. He walked to it, each step an act of surrender. The driver was silent, his eyes fixed forward. Leo sank into the leather seat and watched his house—his tomb, his temple, the Scribe's incubation chamber—recede into the twilight.

He expected to be taken to a stadium, or a television studio. The manuscript told him otherwise.

The destination was not a place of entertainment, but a place of transmission. A sterile, white room in an unmarked building, soundproofed and windowless. It was a broadcast node, a digital plague vector. There would be a single chair. A single camera with a broadcast-grade teleprompter. The network it connected to was not a network of television stations, but a peer-to-peer viral codec, designed for maximum, unstoppable propagation. The words, once spoken, could not be taken back. They could not be shut down.

They arrived. He was led through silent, antiseptic corridors to a room that was exactly as the Scribe had described it. It felt like a laboratory clean room, or an execution chamber. A single black chair faced a camera lens that stared at him like a cyclops's unblinking eye.

Isabelle was there, a shadow in the corner. "They're waiting for you, Leo," she whispered, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.

He sat in the chair. It was cold. A technician he hadn't noticed adjusted a microphone on his lapel. Leo's manuscript, the story of his own life, ended on the previous page with him sitting down. His script had run out.

For a single, wild second, he felt a surge of hope. Was this it? Was he free?

Then, a side door opened. A young acolyte, a woman in a sharp suit with the same unnervingly devoted, yellow-eyed gaze as all the others, walked in. She carried a slim stack of freshly printed pages. She placed them reverently on a small table beside Leo's chair and retreated without a word.

The final pages.

He knew what they were. The manuscript had told him what was coming, if not the exact words. This was not the next chapter of his life. This was the content for the broadcast. This wasn't a story. It was a payload. An infectious code woven into perfect, irresistible prose that would consume the minds of all who heard it.

The camera's single red light blinked on. A billion screens across the planet lit up with his face.

He looked down at the new pages. The compulsion, the absolute, undeniable need to read, to know, surged through him. It was the Scribe's final command. With tears streaming down his ruined face, a final, silent protest from a body that was no longer his to command, his hand reached out and took the first page. He lifted it, opened his mouth, and prepared to read the end of the world, one perfect sentence at a time.