Annotations in the Dark

Sharon found the flyer tucked inside a secondhand copy of Ficciones.

It wasn’t printed — it was handwritten in precise block letters on thin vellum, slipped between Borges’ pages like a secret bookmark. The ink shimmered faintly, almost like it was still drying.

The Marginalia Society. A place for readers who read between the lines. Meet Thursday, midnight. Hinter & Rook Bookshop. Ring the bell twice, then once.

“Only the annotated endure.”

She turned it over. Nothing on the back. No contact, no address beyond the name of the shop, which she knew well — it had been boarded up since before she was born.

Which was impossible.

Because she’d been in that shop two nights ago.

The door to Hinter & Rook didn’t look boarded up at midnight. It looked shut. Old brass knocker, small iron bell hanging from a chain. Sharon hesitated, then knocked twice, paused, then once more.

Silence.

She was about to turn away when the door opened — not inward, but sideways, like a hidden panel in a magician’s cabinet.

A thin man in wire-frame glasses and a scarf too long for summer gave her a slow once-over.

“You annotated?”

“What?”

“You brought a book?”

Sharon nodded and pulled Borges from her bag.

He stepped aside.

Inside, the shop was larger than she remembered. Same ceiling fans and old oak shelves, but now there were rows of heavy armchairs. A fireplace. A spiral staircase. At least a dozen people sat reading, scribbling in the margins of yellowed pages, or arguing quietly.

The man in the scarf motioned her toward the back, where a small sign read-

THE SOCIETY CONVENES BELOW.

The basement smelled of leather and firewood. A long table stretched across the center, ringed by mismatched chairs and stranger faces.

A woman in a velvet jacket greeted her.

“Sharon, welcome.”

“How do you know my name?”

The woman smiled like that wasn’t the strangest part.

“We’re all readers here. Things tend to reveal themselves.”

She gestured toward the only empty seat. A battered hardback waited at the place setting, no cover or title on the spine. Sharon sat. The others nodded.

Someone lit a candle. The room fell quiet.

Then the woman spoke.

“Let’s begin. Chapter Seven.”

Everyone opened their books at once.

Sharon hesitated, then followed.

Her copy was filled with notes — but not hers. Small, frantic handwriting curled into the margins like ivy. Some pages were crossed out entirely. One had a sketch of a keyhole. Another had the phrase-

“The reader affects the text as much as the text affects the reader.”

“Read aloud, Sharon,” said the woman.

She looked up, startled.

“First paragraph, Chapter Seven.”

Sharon cleared her throat and began.

“The door was sealed with seven glyphs. Each bore a name lost to the tongue but known to the mind. Only by reading what was never written could the lock be undone.”

As she read, the others began annotating. Not with pens — but with small knives, pencils ground to nubs, quills dipped in something dark. They scribbled fast, frantically, on their pages, on Sharon's book, even on the table. Some underlined her words. One person scratched a sentence onto his forearm.

Sharon stopped reading.

“What is this?”

The woman in velvet answered calmly. “Interpretation. Active reading. We shape the book. The book shapes us.”

“This is insane.”

“You read your way here, didn’t you?”

The room was watching. The candles flared.

Sharon looked down.

The text had changed.

What had been about glyphs was now a description of her, reading aloud, sweating, doubting. It even mentioned the flicker of her left eye — something she’d only just noticed.

She slammed the book shut.

“Smart,” said a voice behind her.

It was the man in the scarf.

“You don’t want it writing too much of you in. Not before you learn the trick.”

He handed her a pencil.

“Annotations push back.”

She didn’t remember leaving that night.

But she woke up with the book in her bag and the phrase “Only the annotated endure” etched onto the inside cover.

She tried to forget it.

She couldn’t.

Because everything started changing.

The emails she sent arrived blank. Her reflection sometimes mouthed words she hadn’t spoken. Entire chapters of her thesis on postmodern narratives were rewritten in prose she swore she didn’t write. One morning, she opened The Trial and found the margins filled with names of people she hadn’t met yet.

At the next meeting, she didn’t hesitate.

By her third session, Sharon could alter text with a thought.

She wrote a single word — “unlock” — in the margin of a page describing a sealed chamber, and when the candle beside her flickered, the page fell open. Inside- more text. A hidden paragraph.

Others watched with a mix of envy and caution.

“You’re a natural,” said the woman in velvet.

But Sharon didn’t want compliments.

She wanted answers.

“What is this book? Is it magical?”

“It’s a palimpsest,” the woman said. “Reality written over reality.”

“And the Society?”

“We preserve it. Shape it. Guard against what’s underneath.”

“Underneath what?”

The woman said nothing.

Sharon looked around the table. The others were quiet. Listening. Waiting.

And for the first time, she noticed — some of them weren’t writing anymore.

They were fading.

One man’s face had blurred, like a smudged photo. Another’s voice sounded like static. One of the chairs was empty — but her memory insisted someone had been sitting there, hadn’t they?

“Where did they go?”

The woman finally answered.

“They failed to annotate. Failed to resist.”

“Resist what?”

The woman looked down at Sharon's book.

The page had turned.

“And then the reader understood- she was not reading the book. The book was reading her. Every doubt, every pause, every question — it wrote them in. And those who left blank pages were erased in turn.”

Sharon didn’t sleep that night.

She annotated everything — books, receipts, notebooks, her own dreams. She scrawled marginalia across every surface. She began to hear words before she read them, anticipate dialogue, predict the next line in movies. And the more she wrote, the more she remembered things she hadn’t known.

The Marginalia Society didn’t meet just Thursdays anymore.

Meetings moved.

Sometimes she’d find herself in an elevator with one of the members and suddenly the floor count would vanish, replaced with paragraphs.

Once, she opened her own journal and found a new chapter.

Chapter Nine- Sharon Learns the Real Story

It wasn’t a journal anymore.

It was the book.

Chapter Nine was mostly blank.

At the top of the page, a question was written in bold-

“Who wrote the first line?”

She asked the woman in velvet.

But this time, the woman just said-

“Don’t ask the page what it doesn’t want to answer.”

She asked the man in the scarf.

He said, “Every book has an author. But this one’s been co-authored too long.”

Sharon didn’t like that.

“By who?”

The man looked her in the eye.

“By readers who forgot they were reading.”

That night, she dreamed she was in the shop again, alone.

The shelves were empty. A single chair. A single book.

She opened it.

It was all margins.

The center was blank.

And on the inside cover, a message-

“If you’re not writing, you’re being written.”

She woke with ink on her fingers.

She stopped attending.

She stopped reading, writing, speaking.

She deleted her thesis, burned the books. Hid the Borges.

For weeks, the world flattened. Static and safe.

Until she heard scratching behind her walls. Whispered sentences.

One morning, her mirror read-

“You’re overdue, Sharon.”

The doorbell rang.

Three knocks.

Twice, then once.

The book was waiting.

The Marginalia Society was reconvened.

But the table was smaller now. Fewer chairs. The man in the scarf was gone.

Sharon sat.

She opened the book.

She didn’t read aloud.

Instead, she picked up a red pen, turned to Chapter Ten, and began to write-

“The reader who would not be erased wrote her own ending. And made it the beginning.”

And as she wrote, the others followed.

The book pulsed. Pages turned.

A new story began.