The Reader put her hands on my shoulders. “He could be anywhere, 
—in any one of these books.”
“I just want to find him and go home,” I said.
We walked past the gluey walls and toward the crosshole. This time we took a left. Soon I heard a giant pounding: bm-bm; mb-bm; rm-tm; vm-bm.
“What is that?” I said.
dm-vm; mb-zm; bm-dm.
“Whatever it is, it’s big,” the Reader said.
When we pushed open the next bookwormhole cover we were on a strange page. All we saw were lines of words — row after row of them. None of the words were moving or making any sound.
“They’re all dead,” I said.
“Of course they are — it’s a graveyard,” said the Reader.
I looked around. I’d heard about these places — fields where people buried their deadwords — but I’d never actually seen one. I studied the words. “What language is this?” I said.
A wind blew across the page.
“It’s so sad,” I said. “All these words, with so much potential.”
“What do you mean? These words probably lived good lives.”
“They died too young,” I said.
“You didn’t even know them,” said the Reader.
“They could have been so much more,” I said. Then I lowered myself down into the bookwormhole. The Reader followed and closed the cover above us.
The Reader and I walked from story to story: into dramas, romances, science fictions, detective stories. Sometimes we were in a quiet scene — a praying river, a prison cell — but other times we climbed up right into the thick of the action. In one novel, I found myself sitting in a steel boat full of soldiers under fire. In another, I crawled into the story between two lovers in a steamy romantic scene. “I want you so badly,” said a gruffy man, and he pressed against me.
“Me?” I said.
He opened his eyes. “No,” he said. “Her.”
Somewhere in a story about 1930s France, though, I lost the Reader. One minute she was there with me, marching through a crowded city square, and the next minute she wasn’t. I thought she was following me, but when I turned around she was gone. I waited for the crowd to disperse and then retraced my steps, but she wasn’t anywhere. I looked for her all day; I prayed to her but received no response. Finally, I turned around and went back to the bookwormhole we’d come in from, on the altar of an old church in the corner of the city. When we’d arrived, we’d crawled out of the hole in the middle of a service; everyone had stood up, shocked. “ ‘I am.’?” I asked the parishioners. Then the Reader led me through a side exit and out onto the street.
As I was walking into the church, though, I saw a sentence hiding in the doorway. At first I thought it was just a nomadic phrase seeking alms. But no — that word wasn’t “alms”—it was “am.” “ ‘I am.’!” I said. He ran into my arms. Core he was so thin! But I was so happy to see him. I carried him into the dim sanctuary, through the empty pews and toward the dark altar.
I didn’t have any idea how to get home, but Sentence had a nose for pages; when we came to our first rotary-hole — five or six channels converging — he said, “I am left.”
“Left, you think?” I said.
“Left,” said “I am.”.
A few minutes later we hit a fork in the page. “I am right,” said the sentence.
I went right.
Soon I saw familiar textures, and then, two sets of footprints in the fiber. “I am.” must have been able to smell Appleseed, or hear it or something. “Thataboy,” I said. “Good sentence.”
After another ten pages or so, I saw the underside of words — words about the outskirts of town, sentences about Appleseed Mountain — and then, a bookwormhole. I shuffled to it, pushed Sentence out to the surface, and climbed up after him.
It was dark. A few hundred feet away, a wolf sat writing at a rolltop desk.
“I am Wolf Swamp,” said “I am.”. He looked up at me.
I took a breath of blighty air. “We’re home,” I said.
But something was different; I knew it from our very first moments back in Appleseed. There was a problem with the sky. It was dark out, but not night-dark. The sky was — how do I say this? Closed. Shut. It was like a lid had fallen over Appleseed.
Sentence saw it, too. He pointed up and said, “We’re confused.”
Everyone else seemed to be, too. On Wenonah, we passed a camel in a white T-shirt sitting on a five-gallon bucket and staring at the sky. He looked over at us as we passed. “What the fuck,” he said.
On the next street over, a hairperson was shouting to anyone who would listen. “Can you see?” she asked us. “Because I can’t even read the page!”
As we were walking up Ellipsis, though, I realized what was happening. It wasn’t as if the sky was closed. The sky was closed: you can’t have a book without a Reader.
“Oh. Shit,” I said.
“I am what,” shivered Sentence.
I didn’t answer him; I didn’t want to frighten him. Inside my brain, though, my thoughts were understanding: that wasn’t a lid over the sky, but a cover — the inside cover of the book itself.
Just then a prayer came in for me. “?” It was my mother.
I didn’t answer.
“Honey,” she prayed again.
I closed the prayer — I wanted nothing to do with her.
On Converse Street, all of the traffic had stopped behind an accident by Redfern. Some people stood outside their cars, talking to other drivers; others just stared up at the darkness and the inside cover. In the opposite lane, passing cars were switching on their headlights.
Another prayer came in — this one from my Dad at Muir Drop. “Hey, ,” he prayed. “Look at the sky, buddy. Something’s going on.”
In the margins, wild language began howling. I looked across the street in time to see two lunging, drooling sentences—“This is your fault, you piece of shit,” and “These are your sentences!”—step brazenly out of the treeline.
I picked up “I am.”, ran inside, and locked the door behind us.
EDWARD VII
The darkness was complete; it covered Appleseed like silence. For the first few days I just stayed inside, living off chips and melancholy, feeding Sentence scraps of time. Every half hour or so I heard sirens: people prayed about visibility problems, freak accidents, injuries or death. The TV told me that the hospital was full, that there were fires on far pages. “But no one knows where the fire trucks are,” said the TV. “The pages are burning out of control.”
Soon I lost track of time — it was difficult to know if it was day or night, when one day passed and the next day began. My Mom prayed to me frequently—“I’m concerned about you!” “Just let me know that you’re OK!” “You answer me this instant young man!”—but I shut down every one of her prayers. I didn’t want her help — she was someone else’s Mother now. I was almost eighteen by then, and old enough to know how to take care of myself — I knew all I needed to: where to buy the chips, what kinds of chips to buy, and in what order to eat them.
Once or twice, my father came by to check on me and drop off some meaning. The first time he didn’t even come inside — we just stood in the driveway talking for a few minutes. At one point he said, “This will all get better soon.”
“How do you figure?” I said.
He pointed up to the dark sky. “The Mothers are working on a way to lift up that cover,” he said. “Speaking of which — pray back to Mom, will you?”