The Book That Wasn't

Mark never meant for anyone to read it.

He called it The Echo and the Sock: A Nonlinear Treatise on Perception and Choice. A joke title, for a joke book, written in a haze of caffeine, bourbon, and sleep-deprivation. It was a fever dream of metaphors and contradictions - a stream-of-consciousness wreckage filled with sentences like:

"All clocks are liars, except the one in your belly button."

"To become truly free, one must first befriend a duck and rename it Harold."

"Hope is a sandwich left on a windowsill during a thunderstorm."

He self-published it out of spite, uploaded it at 3 a.m. with a single tag: nonsense. Then he forgot about it.

Until the emails started.

At first, they trickled in. People thanking him. Saying it changed their lives. One claimed it cured his insomnia. Another called it a "sacred text for the modern confusion." A third swore it spoke in tongues when read backward under a full moon.

Mark laughed it off. But the messages kept coming. Fan art. Essays. Entire forums dedicated to decoding the "Revealed Pastrami Doctrine."

About a month after publishing, Mark met up with his best friend, Jay, a barista-turned-podcaster who now claimed to be 'post-employment.' They grabbed coffee at the same hole-in-the-wall café they always had, and for a while, things felt normal.

Mark showed him the rising sales. Jay leaned back in his chair, hoodie bunched at the elbows, and sipped his coffee like it was jet fuel. He grinned beneath scruffy stubble, the kind that looked intentional but wasn’t.

Jay was thrilled.

"Dude, you're a prophet. Unwilling, but legit."

Mark rolled his eyes. "It's nonsense. I wrote it in a fog. I don't even remember typing half the chapters."

Jay shrugged. "Doesn’t matter. People are into it. It's like... anti-meaning. Which is kind of genius in a weird way."

Then - almost offhandedly — Jay added:

"You heard about the cult yet?"

Mark blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Yeah. There's this group online — they wear socks and chant lines from your book. Some guy posted a video of himself doing the 'spin of revelation.' It’s wild. I think they meet in person now. You’ve got followers, man."

Mark laughed. Uneasily.

Jay went on talking, but the words blurred. Mark stared at his coffee. A pit was forming in his stomach.

Then came the invitation.

He opened the door, still in pajama pants, blinking in the afternoon light. The man stood stiffly on the welcome mat that said “Do Not Disturb Reality.”

The man’s posture was unnaturally rigid, like his limbs were arranged by someone unfamiliar with bones. His smile didn’t quite fit his face. He handed Mark a card embossed with gold filigree and a tiny sock.

You are cordially invited to the Ceremony of the Door. Your words have fed the hungry. It is time.

Curious — and maybe a little unnerved — Mark went.

The party was held in a rented hall decorated like a mix between a TED Talk, a Renaissance fair, and a silent rave. People wore robes made of mismatched socks. They bowed to him. Spun in circles. Crowed like roosters.

"Bow, spin, and crow!"

"All hail the Author of the Door!"

At first, Mark played along. Smiled. Laughed nervously.

Then the compliments began.

For a moment, he tried to enjoy it — to let the praise feel good. But it didn’t. It stuck in his throat like syrup and static.

People told him the book had saved them. Opened their eyes. Pulled them back from the brink. He nodded, murmured thanks, chuckled when appropriate. But inside, something began to itch.

It wasn’t guilt.

It was irritation.

Because the more they praised his words, the more he realized they believed them. Every surreal line. Every nonsense metaphor. Not as a joke — but as scripture.

He tried to deflect. Tried to tell one man that the quote about “cabbage justice” was just a riff on a grocery list.

The man wept, said he’d tattooed it on his chest.

Mark excused himself to the refreshment table, brushing past a sock-robed man who bowed too low and stayed there. The punch was bright green and fizzing. The cookies were shaped like abstract concepts — triangles, spirals, and one that looked eerily like regret.

He stood there for a long while, watching the sock-robed guests dance and crow, and felt something sour build in his gut.

Then they asked him to perform the opening ceremony. To recite the rites.

Mark blinked. "The what?"

They pressed in. Dozens of them. Some trembling. Some wide-eyed. One bounced on the balls of her feet like a child who couldn’t wait. A woman with tear-streaked makeup knelt and held his hand.

"Please," she whispered. "It saved me. You saved me. We need to hear you say it."

Mark felt his heart pound. He took a small step back, bumping into the edge of the table behind him.

He told them honestly, loudly, desperately: the book was never meant to be read.

They didn’t flinch. They nodded. They pressed harder. They begged.

“Please, just once. Just read it. Just say the words.”

Finally, exhausted, overwhelmed, and increasingly disturbed, Mark sighed.

“Fine. Sure. You want a reading?”

His hands were clammy. The book felt heavier than it should’ve — as if it knew.

He grabbed the book — his book — and opened it with exaggerated flair to the page marked with a silk ribbon.

“Here we go,” he muttered. “Let’s hear from the gospel of garbage.”

The cover was creased and coffee-stained. The title, embossed in cheap gold foil, had started to flake.

He began reading in a booming, sarcastic tone.

“The cabbage sees all, but chooses silence.”

A light appeared.

Seven feet off the floor. A pinpoint. Bright. Real.

Mark stopped.

The crowd gasped.

"Keep reading!"

He did.

"Embrace the left sock — the right one is too proud."

The light widened. Stretched. Became a door.

Seven feet high. Four feet wide.

"The Promised Land! The Author has brought us home!"

The light holds — humming with a frequency that tastes like copper and static.

The door is complete now.

Seven feet tall. Four feet wide. Made of light that folds inward like cloth underwater.

The writer lowers the book. No one moves.

Then, from behind him — a soft, synchronized chorus:

“Bow, spin, and crow…”

The cultists begin to move. One by one, they bow deeply, then pirouette, and then caw like birds.

“For thus the Great One is shown respect,” intones a man near the front, quoting from Chapter 12, which the writer vaguely recalls was just a drunken riff on interpretive dance and crow mating calls.

“Bow, spin, and crow,” they chanted, over and over.

The writer stares, slack-jawed, book still warm in his trembling hands.

“What the actual hell…” he mutters.

But his feet are already moving. Drawn forward.

He steps to the threshold. Peers inside.

What He Sees: The sky is purple, swirling with thick violet clouds shaped like melting teacups. The ground is soft, springy, absurdly perfect for jumping. Like someone engineered it for trampoline-based enlightenment.

In the distance, he sees horse-sized bunnies nibbling on trees that sway like seaweed. Above them, bagels — real bagels — fly in lazy circles, held aloft by hummingbird wings, trailing cream cheese vapor.

The air smells like birthday cake and ozone.

Mark’s jaw drops.

The cultists cheer.

“The Promised Land! The Author has brought us home!”

They file through the door in single file. Bowing. Spinning. Crowing.

Mark stands stunned, still flipping through the pages.

“What the hell is going on...?”

And the light receded.

He froze.

Then, panicked, flipped back and kept reading. The light expanded again.

The book burned in his hands — hot, like it might erupt in flame — but he kept going.

Then he stopped flipping.

A line on the page froze him cold. His breath caught. The words seemed to pulse beneath his fingers. He looked out over the crowd, saw the last few cultists performing their bow-spin-crow routine, eyes alight with rapture.

Panic slammed through his chest.

“Stop! Please — you’re going to die!”

His voice cracked. No one even paused.

“I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean any of it!”

He stepped forward, shaking, waving his arms like a man trying to redirect a stampede.

“It was just a joke! Don’t go in there!”

They didn’t stop.

One cultist turned back and smiled at him, serene and shining, like she was stepping into heaven.

And then… the thelytriculks arrived.

Tiny. Iridescent. No bigger than soda cans. Three-legged. Too many teeth. Demons that fed on hope.

The cultists cooed. Picked them up.

Then the first one leapt — and slurped a woman up like a smoothie. Mark lurched forward instinctively, reaching for her, but he was too far away. She vanished before his hand could even graze her sleeve. One gulp. Gone.

Mark screamed.

“No! No! Get out!”

But they didn’t listen. One by one, they were consumed. Cheerfully. Horribly.

He shouted. Pleaded. Screamed that it was all a joke — the book was never meant to be read. That it wasn’t real.

They didn’t care.

Mouth dry. Hands numb.

The book dangles uselessly at his side, spine half-scorched, pages fluttering like dead leaves.

On the other side of the door — silence.

No more spinning. No more crowing. No more joyful gasps.

Just the twitching, undulating swarm of thelytriculks, bloated now. Their iridescent skin pulsing with faint echoes of the lives they just devoured.

One by one, the small, grotesque things pad forward.

They stop directly in front of the glowing threshold. Just inches from him.

Their wide, syrup-slick mouths open, too many teeth glinting inside.

They can't come through.

But they don't try.

Instead — in perfect, mocking unison:

"Thanks for the meal."

Then, with little bows — mockingly gentle — they turn and disappear into the purple haze of their world, trailing the faint scent of frosting and ash.

The writer is left alone.

Just a man with a wild halo of bedhead, still in pajama pants, holding a joke book.

Staring at a door he opened.

That only closes when the story ends.

The writer doesn’t breathe.

He stares at the space where a dozen human beings had stood, laughed, danced.

Now gone. Consumed like candy.

The book in his hand trembles, still hot — pulsing faintly in his hand.

He looks down at it.

I didn’t mean to.

His fingers go slack.

The book falls.

It hits the floor with a muffled thump, pages splaying wide — then curling inward.

And as the cover swings shut—

The door closes.

Somewhere in the silence, he thought he heard... something. Not pages. Not words. Just a shape of thought, retreating.

Not with a bang. Not with a flash.

Just gone.

The light vanished.

The air is still.

The party room is empty now, except for folding chairs, half-eaten cake, and the man who opened a door he never wrote.