James Stevenson, talented children's author, wrote the delightful "Quick! Turn the Page!" whose title and key phrase I've borrowed for this story.

DISCLAIMER:

"OK, Chris, here's my two cents: The white boxers with the strategically placed glow-in-the-dark message 'Take me to your leader' are sheer genius. I can just see Mulder rushing in through the connecting door at 2 AM, gun drawn, and Scully falling out of bed laughing at the message emblazoned on his underwear. We've got to write that into season seven! However, one sticking point is that the glow-in-the-dark phospho-stuff is charged by light. So, is Mulder 'getting charged' by flashing the table lamp in his hotel room? And before some wise guy pipes up that Mulder has a light bulb in his pants and wants to tell me where he screws it in, let me simply say that I remain

He can read me like a book.

Some days I am like a treasured book from childhood: pen and ink drawings awash with bright watercolors, careful block letters, binding frayed and loose. I am a garish dead tree with missing leaves. He reads me with a pleasant forgetfulness, with a familiarity that glosses over passages and time. He reads me in hasty chapters interwoven with cliff-hanging turns of phrase.

Quick! Turn the page!

---

Other days I am like a paperback thriller: spare of plot and nuance but crowded with words enough to last from runway to cruising altitude to luggage carousel. He chooses me with as much care as the occasion permits, indecisive until the last moment, then flinging loose change across the counter as the voice of God commands his presence at the gate. He reads me two or three paragraphs at a time, pausing for in-flight peanuts or an expedition to the lavatory, marking my page with an empty pepper packet from his meal.

Turn the page.

---

Too infrequently I am his romance novel, secreted away only to be devoured in hot quick moments or endless days of lazy negligence. He is forever losing his place in me, skipping forward or back as his memory dictates. He reads my loneliness and in his mind's eye rewrites it as lust and longing. He reads me again and again, one day as virgin bride, another time as neon-lit whore. Although the plot of my story is tissue-thin and contrived, he takes me to heart passionately and indulges in the guilty pleasure of fashioning me to his desires.

With haste, Beloved, turn the page.

---

He consults me in the venetian-slatted shadows, perusing me like a dayplanner or a Bible. A chill wind scrapes in beneath the door, rattling it against the frame like a staccato heartbeat. What drips from the faucet is too thick and red to be water. This is what I am for him too often: a horror story. We live too close to this, to the danger, to imminent death, and yet he reads me. He reads me, as his mouth grows dry and his skin prickles and his heart slams against his chest. He reads me, as the rusted window hinge grinds itself to dust, as danger enters by way of the window, as the shadow stalks him, its arm upstretched as if to wield a weapon, its eyes embers of insanity. It moves closer--

Turn the page.

--and the floorboards groan slightly, and he is suddenly alert and straining to listen--

Turn the page now.

--but he does not turn, and the shadow comes nearer, and the creature within the shadow opens its maw--

Oh god, turn the page. Please turn the page

--and its breath is redolent with rotting flesh, its saliva threaded with strands of baby-fine hair and shreds of fingernails, and he turns but too late as the creature's saliva drips over his face and razor-sharp claws begin at his cheekbone and--

ohgod ohgod ohgod ohgod please god turn the page turn it now turn it damn you turn it turn it turn it now please god now before it's too

---

He holds me reverently as he tells me my story. The tale, told slowly, haltingly, is of an obsessed writer and the malevolence he authored. The writer took reality as his clean white sheet and pressed upon it letters of horror. Tap, tap, tap. The writer ended lives with the slice of a surgeon's fingers and left behind over-flowery phrases as wilting memorials. It ended when the author destroyed his work, sacrificing himself to save me from the perfect ending that evil had written.

He holds me close, my blood-soaked shirt blotting Rorschach images onto his. He looks at me with awe, because in his eyes my story tells of the triumph of good over evil, of a miracle, of the possibility of love.

He wants to believe.

That is the ending, Mulder. No need to continue.

No, don't turn the page.

---

He reads me like a book.

But I am not a children's book. Neither am I paperback thriller, horror novel, florid romance, or miracle fiction. Those are not my stories.

I am a photo album.

Look at me and see Padgett burning the pages he had written. He threw them into the fire not to spare my life but to complete his task, to destroy the last of the evidence. There it is, the image of the perfect crime.

And see? Naciamento throwing me to the floor, calling to Death, invoking the power of Death to rip away my heart and my life.

Death came to his summons, but Death did not see me. I closed my eyes, and Death did not see me.

Death claimed Padgett instead, turning the surgeon back upon his creator. It is a gruesome image of justice: Padgett, his body sprawled on the basement floor and his still-beating heart cradled in grasping fingers.

Look at me closely, and you will see it...Death. Fellig spent years trying to capture Death on film. I am living film. You need only look at me to know that Death has brushed by me, left me trembling in its wake.

He reads me like a book, but he does not know what to make of the images. I pressed my body to his, my nails flaying his back, and I cried, sobbing out my soul to him. He believes that the power of the word first invoked and then destroyed the evil that was Naciamento. He believes my tears are born of shock and relief, but he is wrong.

I cry because I finally have proof.

I am alive not because words and evil perished in the flames but because Death did not see me.

I am alive because a picture is worth a thousand words.