Ascension Script

The bell above the door of Rooke’s Antiquarian Book shop gave a nervous jingle as Thomas stepped inside, brushing rain from his coat. The shop was narrow, dimly lit, and smelled of dry paper and long forgotten things. Wooden shelves climbed the walls like ribs in a derilect cathedral, and tucked between them were creaking ladders that no one seemed to use anymore.

Behind the counter sat the owner a pale, hawk nosed man with ink stained fingertips and a stare that didn’t blink often enough. His name was Mr. Pell. No one knew his first name. He had supposedly run the place since the ‘60s, but he didn’t seem to age  just grew dustier. Thomas had come seeking something specific a book his late uncle had scribbled about in a journal “The Ladder Codex the one with the white ink. Rooke’s.” He assumed it was the ramblings of a man with advanced altzheimers. But grief does strange things, and he felt that he should search it out in respect to his uncle.

Mr. Pell didn’t ask questions. He simply tilted his head, as if listening to something faint in the walls, and disappeared into a narrow aisle labeled Unclassified.

Ten minutes passed.

Then twenty.

When Pell returned, he carried a canvas bound folio, about 30 cm square. Its cover was stained maroon, with ripples of blue and black like bruised skin. Across it, drawn in white ink or maybe paint were fine lines and impossible symbols, a vertical ladder, surrounded by chaotic marks that seemed to jitter even while still. “This is it,” Thomas whispered, although he hadn’t ever seen it before.

Pell said nothing. Just handed it over and retreated behind the counter, his eyes now fixed firmly on the back of the shop, on a ladder that led nowhere.

That night, Thomas sat in his flat, lights low, the Codex open across his lap. The symbols were asemic no language he recognized. Yet somehow they spoke. His eyes followed the ladder on the page, up and up, between clusters of glyphs that felt urgent, almost pleading. One symbol a small, house-like shape repeated at the base. The seed of something. The beginning of ascent.

The longer he looked, the more the white marks shimmered, as if still wet. At times he thought they moved  subtly shifting when he blinked. He told himself it was eye strain. But then he noticed something worse.There were new marks appearing. Each time he turned away and looked back, the glyphs had rearranged themselves. The ladder grew longer. The lines climbed higher. The house symbol at the base of the page grew smaller, receding into red and blue shadow.

That night, he dreampt of the bookshop. Of standing alone before a blackened wall where the painting hung  but it was alive, the symbols churning like insects beneath skin. He reached out to touch it, and the white lines crawled up his arm like vines, whispering meanings he didn’t want to understand.

Back at the shop the next morning, Rooke’s was shuttered. The windows, once smeared with grime, were now entirely blacked out — not with paper, but with something slick and organic-looking, like dried blood or mold. Thomas knocked, called out, even tried the handle. The brass knob was freezing.

Then he noticed the white chalk message, smeared on the glass in trembling strokes:

“THE SCRIPT WRITES YOU.

He turned to leave. But behind him, the street had vanished. There was no pavement, no city hum, no sky only darkness and the faint sound of pages turning somewhere above. The bell above the door jingled softly from the other side

The door creaked open by itself. Cold air spilled out, tinged with the sour scent of ink and rot. Inside, the bookshop had changed. The walls were pulsing. The shelves now twisted upward like vertebrae, bending toward a single point far above a gaping black void at the ceiling’s peak. The ladder from the painting was there. Real now.White and flickering. Waiting. Thomas stepped forward, as if pulled.

Behind him, the door slammed shut and disappeared into the wall. The symbols began to scrawl themselves across the floor and walls, faster and faster, bleeding white into the air like veins beneath skin. And then, in one final moment of clarity before the glyphs sealed his fate, Thomas realized:

The book wasn’t a codex. It was a trap.

The painting hadn’t been a record it was an invitation.

And now, he was part of it.

Written in. Forever.