Chapter 3 — Press Here

A door that wasn't there yesterday. A sound like rustling pages.

The train bridge at midnight was the last place any sensible person would go.

The iron supports were eaten through with rust. The wooden planks shifted underfoot in ways that didn't bear thinking about. Below, the river ran black and indifferent, not caring at all what fell into it.

Ellis was already there, perched on the railing like a crow who'd found a comfortable wire. Moonlight turned his strange hair silver.

"You actually came." He sounded surprised.

I held up the torn scrap. "What is the Candlelight Press?"

His ink-stained fingers twitched. He looked away, toward the river. "It's where they rewrite things. Where they make people forget what really happened."

Wind off the water. I thought about Mrs. Peabody's grocery list. The blank dictionary. A newspaper with no headline. "Who's 'they'?"

"The Librarian. The Mayor. The whole town, near as I can tell." His voice came out rough, like paper tearing. "They've been at it for years. Taking memories. Editing the past." He glanced at me, like he was deciding how much I could take. "Every story they eat keeps them young. Keeps them in charge. The Mayor's been Mayor for forty years, Mira. Nobody's ever voted him out because nobody remembers a time before him. That's the whole trick—you can't hold someone accountable for something you've been edited into forgetting. And now—"

He pulled something from his coat: a newspaper. Dated tomorrow.

The headline read: LOCAL GIRL DISAPPEARS.

Below it was my school photograph.

My throat went tight. "That's not possible."

"It is if they write it first." He pointed to the fine print at the bottom of the page. Published by the Candlelight Press.

The bridge creaked. Then footsteps—measured, unhurried—from the south end.

Ellis went rigid. "She found us."

Miss Wicker stood at the far end of the bridge. Her cardigan was gone. She wore a long black coat instead, and in her hands she carried a book bound in something I refused to name. Her face held the same patient expression she wore when you'd returned a book with a bent spine.

"Mira," she called sweetly. "You have something that belongs to me."

"Run," Ellis said, low and urgent.

We ran. Miss Wicker opened the book.

The wind that came out of it wasn't weather. It was memory—raw and uncontained, voices I half-recognised, a conversation I'd had in the third grade, my mother's laugh on a Tuesday afternoon. The pages of Ellis's newspaper peeled away in strips, flying toward the open book, the ink washing off them in black rivulets.

"Give me the scrap," Miss Wicker said calmly.

I pressed it behind my back. "What did you do to my mother?"

Her smile didn't change. "The same thing I'll do to you. Nothing, really. You'll simply stop being written."

Ellis tackled me sideways. We hit the railing together and then there was nothing under us—only cold air and the dark river rushing up—and then cold water swallowed everything.

When I surfaced, gasping, the bridge above burned with blue fire. Not orange, not yellow. Blue, the colour of a gas flame, the colour of something that shouldn't exist.

Ellis dragged me onto the far bank. His coat was gone. His arms were covered in moving text—words swimming beneath his skin the way fish move under ice.

He coughed up black water and looked at me. "Believe me now?"

On the burning bridge, Miss Wicker stood untouched. As we watched, she tore a page from her book and let it drop into the river.

I recognised my mother's handwriting before the current took it.