The Ink-bound Society

It started with a letter sealed in crimson wax. It had no return address, just her name, Clara Wren in ink curled handwriting that looked like it had been scrawled with a quill. She opened it by candle light as if she instinctively knew that artificial light would somehow in some way offend the paper. Inside was a single sentence:

“Thursday at midnight bring your words and an open mind. The Inkbound Society Awaits.”

There was no location, only a second slip of parchment with an embossed map of the city which Clara had lived all of her life. But something was off. It showed alleyways and streets she didn’t recognize, buildings which had been demolished years ago had a circular stamp where the old public library should have been.

Clara was a writer, or trying to be one. She scribbled prose in her notebooks she carried around in carrier bags, typed clumsy chapters on her laptop and submitted stories to magazines that rarely responded. She had very few close friends and even fewer distractions. The invitation felt like destiny.

So on Thursday night at 11:57 she stood outside the old city library. It had been closed for over a decade. It was a cracked, barred reminder of another time but tonight the front doors were open and a silver and golden light was glowing from the inside.

Inside the dust was gone. The lamps flickered with amber and the smell of old paper and pine filled the air. A grandfather clock in the corner struck twelve as Clara stepped over the threshold. The doors creaked shut behind her.

A woman with long silver hair wearing a violet scarf around her neck appeared between the shelves.

“Clara Wren. Right on time.”

“You’re with the Inkbound Society?”

“We are.” She said. “And the keeper of stories. We meet every full moon to share what should not be forgotten or what has not yet happened.”

Clara hesitated. “What do you mean?”

The man sitting next to her with hollow cheeks and dark eyes, wearing a black cape said, “You’ll see. Read to us.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your story.” The girl with the ink-stained finger and hands said. “You brought one didn’t you?”

Clara pulled out her notebook from her bag. It was her latest short story about a woman who disappears in a mirror. She began reading the story aloud. Her voice was soft at first but got louder and steadier as she lost herself in the rhythm of the words.

When she finished the room was silent. Then an older woman in an orange shawl leaned forward. “You wrote this last week, yes?”

Clare nodded.

“Strange a woman did actually vanish just like in your story. She disappeared four days ago in a mirror shop downtown.”

Clare blinked. “What?”

“She matched your description in your story.” The man wearing the cape said. “Her name was Lila Marris. The cops think that she just left town. But you wrote her.”

Clara laughed nervously. “It must be just a coincidence.”

“Coincidences.” Mirabel said softly. “Has no members here.”

They handed her a book with blank pages and a rough cover. The book didn’t have a title.

“Write what you see. Write what you dream. Write what you fear. This book will remember it all.” Mirabel said.

Clara went home but she didn’t sleep.

The next month she returned and the month after that.

She read stories, strange stories about flooded cities that were suddenly on the news. Another story about a man who made glasses who died the same way she had imagined him. Each time the Society nodded with no surprise.

She tried to answer questions . Who were they? How was this possible?

She stopped writing for days. But it didn’t matter. The sentence had been written. The story was happening.

By the spring Clara's writing had sharpened and turned dark. She stopped submitting to magazines and only wrote in the ink bound book now. The more she wrote the more real her words had become. And not just on the pages.

She had dreams about a forest where the tree branches were made of bones. When she woke up she found branches outside of her windows scratching them although she lived on the sixth floor. She wrote a poem about a voice that whispered to her through the drain. A day later the kitchen sink started speaking to her in rhymes.

She stopped writing again for a week. At least she tried to.

The dreams changed. They became more strange. She saw things from the corner of her eyes. She saw silhouettes from the corner of her eyes which flickered just past the lights. The book would burn in her hands if she did not write in it.

Clare realized that the Society didn’t write stories. They summoned them.

When she confronted the Society she was both speechless and furious. Mirabel smiled.

It was Mirabel who explained the truth. Some of the truth.

“The first stories were spells. Words that reshaped the world that most forgot over time but we didn’t. We remember that fiction is just reality dressed up in a costume.”

“You said that you invited me because I could write.”

“No. We invited you because you believe.”

“The book listens. It remembers but it does not obey. If you do not write, it writes you.”

Clara went home and tried to burn the book in her fireplace. It reappeared on her nightstand the next morning. By summer Clara knew that she wasn’t writing stories any more. She was opening doors.

Sometimes her characters would visit her. They’d sit in the corner of her room and stare at her with the eyes she invented. One man named Hemet, whispered that he remembered being someone else before she wrote him. He cried in ink. Another character, a little girl from a story she had written and discarded clung to her ankles and demanded that she need to be “erased properly.” this time.

Clara returned to the Society on the next full moon night.

“What happens if we stop?”

“You can’t .” The girl with the ink stained fingers said. “Once you start the story the ending must come.”

“But what if it does not?”

Mirabel nodded. “Then you are trapped in the middle.”

Clara looked at all the faces at the table. They were all calm and composed and eerily quiet. That is when she realized none of them were writing anymore.

The next time Clara came to the library it was empty. Dust had returned to the shelves. The lights flickered weakly. One seat at the table remained. It was untouched and a blank book was there. A note was inside the book waiting.

“The end is yours to write. Be careful. Some endings don’t stay buried.”

She sat down and held the pen. She thought about a world without shadows and without voices or characters begging to be deleted. A world where stories were just stories.

She began to write: “ Clara Wren walked away. She turned her back on the library, the book and the Society. She lived a quiet life and forgot about the magic.”

The page resisted her. The ink bled upward and twisted and twisted until the letters rewrote themselves.

Clara tried to leave but her story was not finished. She tore out the page but it came back. As many times as she tore the same page out of the book it kept coming back

Now if you walk by the old library building on the night of a full moon you might see a faint light flickering behind the closed doors. And inside sitting at a round table a young woman who sits alone. Her eyes are tired and her hand moves slowly across the page. She writes because she is the story now and the stories written don’t let go.