Chapter Six: The Page That Wasn't There
That night, I didn't sleep.
Not because of the whispers hiding behind the walls,
Nor the message that appeared on the mirror, like a breath evaporated from within me—
But because I woke up… and the page was gone.
Yes—
The page.
The one I had been avoiding, watching as if it were a landmine.
The one that said:
"What you did in the basement will be written against your will."
It was no longer on the table.
Not on the floor.
Not under the pillow.
Not among the torn pages I tried to throw away every night—only to find them returned by morning.
As if the text keeps rewriting itself.
As if I live in a room that refuses to forget.
I sat before the table, eyes scanning for a single sentence—
Anything to prove I wasn't alone in this madness.
But there was nothing.
Except a broken pen.
And a small slip of paper I'd never seen before.
It wasn't written in my handwriting.
Nor in the style of the novel.
It simply read:
> "You are not the writer. You are the written."
No period at the end.
As if the sentence wasn't finished…
Or perhaps hadn't even begun.
I read it more than ten times.
Rearranged the letters in my head.
Searched for symbols—anything to tell me who had written it.
But all it held was the truth.
And I was terrified to believe it.
Since this novel began, I've felt as if I wasn't holding the pen—
But the pen was holding me.
That I wasn't writing…
I was being written.
That I wasn't living…
But my life was being rearranged to fit a plot I didn't understand.
I went to the drawer.
Searched through it.
Looked for the old drafts of the story I used to write… with Rayan.
But the papers were all clean.
Empty.
As if I'd never written a single word.
As if everything had been erased—
Even me.
Even our only photo…
It was gone.
I swear I remember every detail of it:
We were standing in front of the basement door, laughing.
He was wearing my shirt.
And the clock behind us read 3:13.
But now… it's just a blank sheet.
I returned to the table, feeling as if time was being written in a language I couldn't read.
As if everything was shifting—without moving.
As if my life was being printed in invisible ink, only visible when something is lost.
And just before I turned off the light—
I saw the page again.
The page.
Back on the table.
As if it had never left.
As if it had been watching me search the world like a fool.
But something had changed.
The sentence on it… was different.
It now read:
> "If you read page 73, everything will stop."
Page 73?
But the novel… is only at the beginning.
And that's when I realized what truly terrifies me:
That the number of pages in the novel increases the more afraid I become.
And that the ending…
Will never be written
Until I believe I was part of it from the very beginning.