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This is a short illustrated story from A Wild Elsewhere. Every reader has a TBR, short for To Be Read: the pile of books you bought with great intentions and swear you are getting to next. This is the story of one reader whose pile decided to do something about it.
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ACT I - THE DISAPPEARANCE
Scene 1 - The Pile
The TBR pile lived on the corner of her desk five books tall in the order she fully intended to read them. She had a system. The system was mostly decorative but it was hers.
On Monday morning the pile was four books tall.
She counted twice. She checked under the desk, behind the desk, and in the fridge, because once during a particularly bad book hangover, a paperback had spent two days beside the cheese. Nothing. Just the faint smell of a freshly printed book jacket where the top book used to be. The teal one with the gold vines, the one she had been saving for exactly the right rainy weekend, was gone entirely.
Every morning another book disappeared from her TBR pile. By Wednesday she was setting traps: a bookmark placed like a tripwire, a chair angled toward the desk when she went to bed. The traps caught nothing. The pile kept shrinking one book a night, polite as a librarian.
Scene 2 - The Returns
By Thursday they were returning with handwritten reviews.
The books came back before dawn, slid neatly into place. Each one carried a small cream card tucked inside the front cover. The handwriting was round, old-fashioned, and completely unbothered.
The first card read: “Lovely prose. Shame about chapter nine. We do not speak of chapter nine.”
The second: “The hero smoulders for six chapters and then apologizes for it. Cowardly. Three stars.”
She read both cards three times. Then she got up in the dark and went to the window, not to look at her own garden, but to check whether the neighbour’s light was still on.
It was. It was on most nights actually, well past midnight, in the tall house across the lane, and she had never once been so glad to see it. There is a particular comfort in knowing somebody else in the world is awake inside the same strange hour, even if they are only across the street with a book of their own.
Once she had seen him through that window asleep in his reading chair with a book open on his chest and she had thought: Well, at least somebody else reads like this too.
What she did not know, standing at her window with two book reviews in her hand, was who or what exactly had been borrowing her books. She only knew that it read quickly, wrote beautifully, and had no respect whatsoever for chapter nine.
ACT II - THE CRITIC
Scene 3 - Escalation
The reviews got bolder as the week went on.
“The plot twist is visible from space. I checked.”
“She should have chosen the pirate.”
“This one made me cry, and I do not have eyes. Not cool.”
Friday’s review read: “Stop falling for fictional men.”
She stood in the kitchen holding that card for a full minute. It was, she had to admit, the single most personal book review she had ever received. It was also technically accurate, which made it worse. Somewhere in the walls of her house, something with very round handwriting was reading her books, forming opinions, and developing a tone.
That night she made tea she did not drink. She put the good brass candlestick on the desk beside the fancy ink pot she never used. She arranged the remaining books like an offering. And then she waited in the dark in her deep plum dressing gown with her hair down and her chin up, the way you wait when you intend to catch something and also possibly, to get caught noticing it.
Scene 4 - Midnight
She did not have to wait long.
At midnight she caught a ghost pointing insistently at her handsome neighbour’s window.
The ghost was small, cream-coloured, and wearing a tiny gold crown at a very serious angle. It had one arm raised, pointing across the lane, where a single window burned gold against the dark. The ghost did not startle. The ghost did not vanish. The ghost looked at her the way editors look at authors who have missed a deadline: with patience and with notes.
“You took the teal one,” she said.
The ghost pointed harder.
“That is not an answer,” she said.
The ghost produced from absolutely nowhere one last cream card, and laid it on the desk with the care of a sommelier presenting a bougie wine list. The card read: “Ask him about the ending.”
Then the candle flame leaned sideways, though there was no wind, and the ghost was gone, leaving only the very distinct feeling of being set up.
ACT III - THE MATCHMAKER
Scene 5 - The Knock
The knock came at nine the next morning. On the doorstep stood the neighbour from the lit window, holding the teal book with the gold vines. It had one of the ghost’s cards still tucked inside the front cover.
“I found this,” he said. “On my doorstep this morning. With a note that said only: 'Ask her about the ending.' I have, um no idea what that means. But I finished reading it last night and I have thoughts about chapter nine, and I heard you might,too.”
Behind the door, where only she could see, a small cream ghost did a victory lap.
“What did you think,” she asked, “of the ending?”
Scene 6 - You're Welcome
They talked on the doorstep for an hour.
Then, somehow, they talked through lunch. The teal book sat between them on the table, full of little cream cards. And every time one of them read one out loud, they both laughed like people who had been conspiring for years instead of hours.
He had excellent thoughts about chapter nine. He thought she should have chosen the pirate too, but admitted the hero grew on him. He said, “Your ghost has impeccable taste,” as if this were a normal thing to say about a haunting. And she said, “It stole five books!" He said, “Yes. And it brought me to you. Technically. Eventually. After several felonies of book theft.”
She laughed so hard the ghost applauded, silently, from the top of her bookcase.
That evening, the ghost left a card on her desk. It read, in that round old-fashioned hand: “You’re welcome.”
She put the card in the front of the teal book where it belonged. Some hauntings take things. Hers had given her a reader. And, eventually, a co-conspirator with very strong opinions about chapter nine.
The End
The crowned ghost appears on the My TBR Has Ghosted Me tee, over in the Halloween Court, for readers whose piles have piles and whose reviewers have opinions: https://awildelsewhere.com/products/my-tbr-has-ghosted-me-tee
That is the end of their story. This note is a different kind of portal: if the night a long-awaited book finally lands is a small ceremony at your house too, the free Release Night Ritual Kit is waiting here: https://a-wild-elsewhere.kit.com/a60b72cf5d It is a little set of rituals for exactly that night.