A group of librarians in possession of a book that can make characters come to life decide to have a big Halloween party and in true literary fashion, everything goes wrong.
“Not every detail of a plan unfolds as expected, librarian. That is a lesson you are about to learn tonight.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Katie Haines said with an eye roll to the magical book that transmitted its voice. “Just don’t crash the party before the murder mystery game starts.”
“This young adult librarian, currently shimmering in a purple glitter fairy costume, felt a thrum of pure joy for her love of Halloween—even with the holiday falling on a dreary, rain-soaked Wednesday. The mid-week gloom wouldn’t diminish her determination. This year would be the best Halloween ever, all thanks to an extraordinary, leather-bound artifact.”
“Damn right,” Katie Haines murmured, her voice hushed with reverence. She stalked down the fantasy aisle, the book held tightly in both hands. The heavy, black leather cover felt cold, contrasting with the mystical sparkle of its gold-leaf title: Unbound Words. “Now, describe me.”
“Katie was an ideal candidate for reaching the highest shelves, possessing a height slightly above average for a woman. Her wide mouth held slightly protruding canines, giving her smile a mischievous cast, and her eyes were an unusual, bright shade of topaz. With her freckle-dusted face framed by a short, pixie haircut, she gave the impression of a plotting fairy—a look her costume matched perfectly.”
“Not bad,” Katie complimented tonight’s narrator, a slight smirk playing on her lips. She paused, grabbing a few hardbacks of classic Halloween stories.
Clutching the Unbound Words volume, Katie opened the novels she gathered. A violent, silent tornado of words and ink-black letters gushed from the pages. The spinning vortex coalesced, popping several fictional characters into the aisle, smelling faintly of old paper and fresh ink.
“Welcome to the Halloween Party of the Century!” Katie greeted them with a dramatic bow, her plastic wings wobbling. “We have food and drinks in the main lobby, courtesy of the Friends of the Library bake sale, along with a DJ. A murder mystery game happens later tonight, so be sure to put your name in the hat by the punch bowl if you wish to play. Have fun!”
As Katie made her way to the main lobby, the book’s voice spoke, its tone musing and loud enough for only her to hear. “A fine party, librarian. But a story requires conflict. You’ve been using my magic for simple parlor tricks. It’s time for a new chapter.”
“What does that mean?” Katie muttered, giving the book a nervous glance. “Don’t you dare.”
Her boots squeaked on the polished floor as she performed a random, skipping dance, trying to shake off the ominous words.
The 19,000-square-foot library thrummed with the DJ’s bass and the overlapping chatter of the dozen librarians. Earlier, the fire department reprimanded the staff for exceeding the building’s capacity. Patrons had come from all over for the library’s extravagant character photo-op session, blissfully oblivious that the staff had pulled these costumed figures directly from their source material.
Only the librarians knew the truth, a secret they guarded even from their families. When they discovered the Unbound Words book in the donations bin a few weeks ago, they swore an oath of silence. The staff passed off the fictional characters as exceptionally dedicated cosplayers, a ruse that worked without any problems. The book’s magic had two specific rules: none of the characters could leave the library, and they were incapable of harming real people.
One observation, however, left the staff baffled: many characters acted bizarrely uncharacteristically. They had witnessed Dracula politely discussing blood orange recipes and Sherlock Holmes seeming utterly baffled by a simple riddle. None of the staff had any explanations for the glitch, but the mismatched personalities only happened occasionally. When Katie had asked the book about it, its only reply was, “You call it a ‘glitch,’ I call it an edit. If a character is merely words, why not rearrange them?”
Katie reached the lobby, where the rest of the library staff gathered around a snack table groaning under the weight of pumpkin-shaped cookies and bubbling cauldron punch.
The Mad Hatter, summoned from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, commanded the DJ booth, dropping a surprisingly heavy bass line. His grin seemed wider and more fixed than usual, and Katie noticed his fingers were already tapping restlessly on the record’s reverse switch.
The lobby clock chimed 9:15 p.m. The last patron had left, the doors were locked, and the staff’s private party had begun.
Katie stuffed her face with a large piece of chocolate cake as the branch manager, Chuck Barkley, strolled up to her. He was a large man squeezed into a Worf costume from Star Trek.
“I must admit, I’ve been rather impressed with how you’ve handled the unbound book,” Chuck praised, his voice booming. “Other than the fire department’s scorn earlier, there haven’t been any problems. Your creativity has kept everything in check and massively increased patron satisfaction.”
“Thanks, Chuck. Does that mean I’m getting a raise in the spring?”
Chuck laughed, a deep, hearty sound. “Provided the budget allows and nothing goes wrong.”
“The key phrase had been spoken,” the book’s voice announced.
“The what the what now?” Katie mumbled through a mouthful of frosting.
“Whenever everything seems perfect, chaos must inevitably intervene,” the book announced. “Such is a fundamental rule of storytelling.”
“The narrator has a point,” Chuck agreed, suddenly looking nervous.
Katie whined, a high-pitched sound of frustration. “But this is a party! Nothing has to go wrong!”
As if cued by her protest, the music scratched to a deafening halt. A heavy silence fell, and only the drip of the rain against the tall windows broke it.
“Let’s all get mad now!” the Mad Hatter cackled, his voice unnaturally sharp. He grabbed a record and slammed the needle down, spinning the vinyl backward.
A sound screeched from the speakers—not music, but a high-pitched, layered whine that felt like needles crawling into their ears. A wave of psychic pressure washed over the room.
“A ‘spell,’ as you might call it,” the book’s voice announced to the room, its tone delighted. “The Hatter was so gloriously suggestible! Now, let’s see how you handle a real plot twist, librarians.”
All the fictional characters clutched their heads, their faces contorting. The demonic, reversed noise burrowed deep into their minds.
The laughter started first. A single, sharp bark from Mr. Darcy. Then a giggle from Dracula. The laughter spread. Mr. Darcy’s sharp bark became a high-pitched giggle, which in turn fractured into a painful, shrieking howl that held no humor. The sound became a chorus of shrieks, sobs, and howls.
Elizabeth Bennet, her eyes wide and vacant, walked to a bookshelf and began methodically tearing pages from a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Paddington Bear let out a guttural roar and hurled the punch bowl through a plate-glass window, sending sticky red liquid and shattered glass across the carpet.
Dracula, the “nice guy” from moments before, bared his fangs. His eyes, now burning with red madness, fixed on Ben, the trembling cataloger who had stumbled out from behind the snack table. Dracula hissed and lunged, his claws outstretched not for a book, but for Ben’s throat.
Ben screamed and threw his arms up, but a foot before the claws made contact, a shimmer of gold light—the same color as the Unbound Words’ title—flared in the air. Dracula slammed into the invisible barrier as if hitting a solid wall, recoiling with a snarl of frustrated rage.
“He… he can’t touch us!” Ben yelled, a wave of relief washing over him.
“Don’t get comfortable!” Chuck roared. The repelled Dracula, in his fury, grabbed the tall “New Arrivals” bookshelf and heaved it over. “The rule only stops direct harm!”
The massive shelf crashed down where Ben had been standing a second before. The librarians screamed again, this time with a new, sharp understanding. The characters couldn’t touch them, but the entire library was now a weapon.
Chuck grabbed Ben and Amy, diving behind the immovable circulation desk.
“How do we get them to stop?” Ben asked their group as Katie joined them.
“If any character makes contact with the unbound book, they disappear!” another librarian, Amy, reminded everyone, her voice tight with panic.
“But there’s too many of them!” Chuck remarked, peeking over the top. “We need a way to stop them all at once.”
“We can’t risk summoning another character to fight them!” Ben said. “What if the book glitches and we get a Gandalf who only casts fireballs? The risk is too high!”
Katie’s mind raced. Ben was right. A glitched Gandalf could burn the whole library down; a hero was too much of a gamble. But what about an author? Her eyes landed on the “New Arrivals” stand, where a biography of George R. R. Martin sat.
“How about we get a writer known for killing off characters?” she said.
“That might work!” Amy said, her eyes widening. “We’ve never tried summoning non-fictional characters from a biography before.”
With Unbound Words clutched to her chest, Katie bolted from behind the desk. She ducked and ran, adrenaline screaming through her veins. A flying chair, likely thrown by Frankenstein’s Monster, shattered against the wall where her head had been a second before. She narrowly avoided the rampaging Paddington, who now seemed intent on disemboweling a stuffed armchair. She grabbed the biography, the glossy cover photo of the author feeling slick beneath her trembling fingers.
She cracked open the book. In a swirling storm of typed words, George R. R. Martin came to life.
But something was deeply wrong. While Katie wasn’t a super-fan, she knew this fabrication wasn’t him. This was a bad stunt-double. He was thin, wore a bright red suspender-and-bowtie combination, and had a manic, fixed grin plastered on his face.
“Golly gee willikers, we got ourselves a real mess here!” the fake George spoke, his voice a reedy, high-pitched squeak.
Katie slapped her forehead, the impact stinging her palm. “Of course. The book glitches out now of all times. This is just perfect. At least the music’s maddening effect is over.”
“It’s not a ‘glitch,’ it’s an AUTHORIAL choice!” the book snapped, its voice laced with smug satisfaction. “Why summon the actual, boring man when a more whimsical version will do? A story should never let reality get in the way of a good solution. You’ve learned a new way to use me!”
“Hey, there! Words can hurt, you know!” the facsimile sneered, striking a pose reminiscent of Robin from the 1960s live-action Batman series. “I might be different, but my purpose is clear!”
“Then can you kill off all these characters?” Chuck yelled from behind the barricade.
“Can I kill all these characters?” the fake George mockingly laughed. He pulled a tiny DOS computer, a device the size of a smartphone, from his pants pocket. He finger-poked a paragraph’s worth of keys in a second with one hand, his grin never faltering. “Behold this digital miracle!”
Dozens of white blobs erupted from the floor, like summoning circles made of liquid paper. They pulsed, taking the shape of glistening, white-out-white dragons, each holding baseball-bat-sized paintbrushes in their slithering tentacles.
The dragons flowed toward the unruly fictional characters, not attacking with violence, but with a horrifying, absolute erasure. They charged at the snarling Dracula, who, mid-lunge at a cowering librarian, only for three broad, wet strokes of a paintbrush to meet him mid-lunge, dissolving his elegant cape, then his pale, aristocratic features, leaving only a faint shimmer in the air.
A sizzle, like water on a hot pan, filled the air as the brushes made contact, wiping the characters from existence, their screams cutting off abruptly, as though their voices themselves had been smudged out.
A frantic, giggling Pennywise, attempting to float a balloon filled with blood towards a terrified Cthulhu (who was himself shrieking at the sight of a houseplant), found his grin fading into nothingness as a dragon swiftly painted over his malevolent eyes. Further across the room, a hulking Frankenstein’s Monster, roaring and tearing apart a historical atlas, watched his stitched flesh unravel into smears of white before he could even register the threat. Even the seemingly innocuous—a poltergeist from The Haunting of Hill House that had been gleefully shattering lightbulbs—was swept away as the white-out brushes painted over the very air where its translucent form had flickered.
When the dragons wiped away the last frantic character—a shrieking Juliet Capulet, still clutching a shard of the broken punch bowl—they turned on each other, a flurry of white wings and brushes, cleaning themselves out of reality, leaving behind nothing but the stark, chaotic aftermath of the party.
Silence, profound and heavy, returned to the library.
“Thank you,” Katie said, her voice shaking.
She then promptly bopped the fake George on the head with the Unbound Words book. He dissolved, disintegrating back into a cascade of letters that vanished before they hit the floor.
Amy stood up, pushing her glasses back onto her nose as she surveyed the utter devastation. Broken glass, overturned shelves, shredded books, and a sea of punch-soaked cake littered the lobby.
“How are we going to clean all this up?” Amy grumbled, her voice flat with exhaustion.
Katie scanned the debris. A copy of Cinderella, which had serendipitously managed to get tossed into the lobby during the chaos, lay near her feet.
She picked the picture book up, a genuine, plotting-fairy smile returning to her face. “That’s what Fairy Godmothers are for.”
A moment later, a tiny, glittering woman appeared. She wore a Captain Kirk costume over her ballgown and holding a tiny, glittering phaser.
“Alright, starlight,” the glitched godmother chirped. “Set phasers to ‘clean!’”
Katie sighed. It was going to be a very long night.
This short story was vaguely inspired by the writing prompt: “There are some fictional characters you absolutely detest. You’ve even gone and made a list of them. Now all you have to do is hire the most ruthless killer of fictional characters you know: George R. R. Martin.”
As you can tell, I basically had George save the day by killing a bunch of fictional characters to keep it in line with my fictional universe.
Love this story? I’m working on a book staring Katie and the Unbound Words book, which has her deal with an enormous problem the book causes. Also, in case you didn’t know, I wrote a short prequel story about Chuck in antoehr story, Moral Compass.
Want a printed or digital copy for your personal library? This story is included in my horror anthology, Doors Open Both Ways.
Thank you for your support and for reading my short story!