Anonymous Letters

“The Locked Drawer”

Letter found in the desk of Professor Edgar Laughton after his disappearance. No signature. No date.

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To whoever dares open this drawer,

I don’t know your name, and I don’t want to. Names give shape to things. Let mine be lost with the others.

This desk belonged to Professor Laughton. I doubt you knew him well. No one truly did. He taught folklore, but his real interest was the Threshold Manuscripts—a series of 17th-century documents banned, burned, and banished from every institution that once held them. All but one.

There was a page missing. Page 73. He believed it was still out there, misfiled, or hidden deliberately. He searched for decades, until he stopped speaking about it. Until he stopped speaking at all.

When I first found the page, it didn’t look like much. A brittle leaf with ink faded nearly to dust. But once I touched it, once I read it, the ink bled black again. Like veins returning to a corpse.

I burned the page. I did.

But it didn’t stay burned.

Three nights later, it returned. Folded neatly on my pillow. The same words, only now they moved when I looked away. Letters sliding like insects across parchment.

I stopped sleeping.

Professor Laughton came to see me one last time. His eyes had changed. Not just tired—dilated, too wide, like his pupils were trying to swallow the light. He asked me a question I didn’t understand until now:

“When did you last blink?”

The moment you read page 73, you become part of it. The text is a mirror and a door. And the door doesn’t lead out.

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If you’re still reading this, I’m sorry.

You’ll find the page folded inside the left compartment.

Don’t open it.

Don’t read it aloud.

And above all, when you start to feel watched—don’t blink.

That’s how it finds the next one.

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ARCHIVE NOTES:

Desk recovered from faculty offices after a fire in 1998. Drawer was sealed shut. The note was folded inside a leather-bound journal containing one loose, unmarked page. Three archivists have since reported severe ocular migraines and waking dreams involving “ink spiders.” The page is now missing.