The Manuscript Exchange

In the spring of 1897, I received a letter sealed with red wax and no return address. The parchment within was written in a meticulous hand:

You are invited to participate in an experiment focused on literary realism. Your presence is requested at 17 Carfax Row, Mayfair, London, at eight o'clock sharp on the evening of March 31st. Come prepared to read, write, and understand."

At first, I suspected a hoax. I had been a struggling journalist with no notable publications to my name, scraping together florid reviews of theatrical farces and sensational murder trials for the Penny Courier. But the promise of mystery and intellectual camaraderie was too enticing. On the night in question, I dressed in my best coat (which still bore a wine stain from a past humiliation) and hailed a cab to the address.

The house at Carfax Row was unassuming, its exterior entirely ordinary—save for the door, which was made of black oak and bore no knocker. I had barely raised my fist to knock when the door swung open. A man with a bald pate and a pointed beard motioned silently for me to enter.

Inside, gas lamps burned low, casting long shadows across bookcases that stretched to the high ceilings. Ten others stood in the room, some sipping sherry, others leafing through thick manuscripts. They barely looked up at my entrance. At the head of the room stood a woman in a dark green dress, her presence commanding and her face unreadable. They called her the Curator.

"Mr. Elric Thane?" she asked. Her voice was low and certain.

"Yes," I said, startled that she knew my name.

"You are welcome to the Exchange. Tonight, you will read. If you read well, you may write. If you write truly, you may stay."

Before I could ask what she meant, a heavy ledger was placed in my hands.

Act One, Scene One: The Door in the Cellar.

I read aloud. The story was gothic—unapologetically so. A man discovers a trapdoor in the cellar of his ancestral home. He opens it, descends, and encounters... silence. The tale stopped mid-sentence. There was no conclusion.

As I finished reading, the man with the pointed beard handed me a key and whispered, "Basement."

What followed was not performance. It was inhabitation. I was led to the basement of Carfax Row. It had been transformed into the setting I had just read: stone walls slick with damp, the smell of earth and decay, and in the corner, a trapdoor.

"Open it," the Curator instructed.

I did. A ladder led into darkness.

"Descend."

I obeyed, half-expecting painted canvas and hidden stagehands. But when my feet hit the bottom and the trapdoor shut above, I was alone. Not in a room, but a world. The air was wrong—too cold, too real. There was moss on the stones, and the echo of something breathing further in.

I stumbled forward. My voice failed me. I clung to the wall until a light flared—a lantern held by a man I recognized from the gathering upstairs. But he was different now. He wore the rags of a prisoner; his face smeared with blood and soot.

"You're new," he said. "What did they write for you?"

When I was finally allowed out, my hands were shaking. The others watched me with mild interest, as if I had returned from a short stroll.

"You survived your reading," the Curator said. "Now you may write."

I was taken to a room of red velvet and black ink. Paper was provided. The instructions were simple: continue the story from where I left off.

But now I understood the implication. Whatever I wrote would be experienced by another. And in the experiencing, truth was produced.

So, I wrote cautiously at first:

The man followed the prisoner deeper into the catacombs. The air turned sweet, then sour. They found a stairwell winding down into an even older chamber...

When I stopped, the Curator took the page from me. A bell rang. Another member—a pale, bookish man—was summoned.

"You will read," she said.

The process was repeated. He descended. Hours passed. When he returned, his right arm was broken, and his hair had gone white. But he was smiling. A kind of mania had taken him.

Weeks went by. The Exchange met nightly. Each of us took turns reading and writing. The boundaries between fiction and reality blurred. I began to lose track of what I had imagined and what I had merely written.

Some wrote with cruelty, placing readers in scenarios of terror, mutilation, and despair. Others were gentler, but their works were dismissed. "Unrealistic," the Curator would say, tearing their pages in half. "No truth in it."

Eventually, it was my turn again. I decided to test the system. In my story, the protagonist ignored instructions, avoided the stairwell, burned the manuscript, and escaped.

But when the reader acted it out, the room collapsed on him. He was carried out barely breathing.

"Do not mock the Exchange," the Curator said, her voice like ice.

I resolved to leave. But my apartment was no longer mine. My belongings were gone, replaced with journals I had never written, and correspondence in my own hand that I had no memory of composing. The Penny Courier claimed to have never heard of me.

I was vanishing.

So I made my plan. I would write everything. Document the Exchange in total detail. I would mail the manuscript to my old friend, Dr. Hiram Welles, a professor of mechanical logic at Oxford. He was a skeptic, but he trusted me.

The manuscript was finished in three nights. I posted it secretly, walking five miles to a remote drop.

On the fourth night, the Curator handed me a new page to read.

The traitor Elric Thane believed he could escape truth. Believed he could send word to the outside. But truth is not what you send—it is what you become.

I dropped the paper. The room had grown cold. Every eye turned to me. The man with the broken arm barred the door.

"You wrote that," I whispered.

"We all wrote it," the Curator said. "We all read it. Now you must live it."

They forced me to the basement again. But the trapdoor no longer led to a cellar. It led to a corridor of ink and mirrors. I saw myself in every reflection—aging, weeping, raving. Words scrawled themselves across the glass:

You tried to leak the truth. But truth, like ink, bleeds inwards.

My own manuscript was there, pages hung like curtains. But the words had changed. I had never written about Welles. I had never written about escape. I had only written stories. Horrible stories.

And someone had read them all.

Dr. Welles found the manuscript weeks later. Or rather, he received a parcel of ashes and a letter in a hand he did not recognize:

*Dear Sir,

The experiment has concluded. Mr. Thane has found his truth. We thank you for your participation, however unknown. The Exchange is always reading.*

Welles tried to find 17 Carfax Row. The street ended at number 16. No black door. No woman. No trapdoor.

He published my story in a small anthology, treating it as a lost work of metafiction. It was well received. One reviewer called it "convincingly mad."

But sometimes, late at night, Welles swears he hears typing in his study. Pages turn by themselves. And once, in his own hand, he found a sentence he does not recall writing:

The reader becomes the writer. The writer becomes the story.