The Bibliophagist

A Halloween Tale of Stories Stolen and Souls Saved

For the thirteen nights leading up to Halloween, I’ll be sharing a story each evening. Little hauntings, strange encounters, and moments that don’t quite stay on the page once you’ve read them.

Some will be eerie. Some will be tender. All of them are October at heart.

So settle in with a drink, a blanket, or a brave heart, whatever helps. The nights are getting longer, and the stories are waiting.

Today

I am feeling a little experimental today. I looked up at our bookshelves during a zoom meeting and found my Poe Reader. It gave me an idea. I had a Halloweenish tale in my head and I thought why not try to write like Poe. I’ve always enjoyed his moodiness.

The Bibliophagist: A Tale of Digital Dread

In the Manner of Edgar Allan Poe

True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am. But why will you say that I am mad? The October rain, that dreary, unceasing rain, beat its dolorous tattoo upon my chamber window whilst I sat transfixed before the luminous rectangle of my computing apparatus. My coffee had grown cold as a sepulcher’s stone, forgotten in the grip of a horror I shall now endeavor to relate.

It was upon the eighteenth evening of that most melancholic month when I, Lena Graves, joined with two hundred and eighty-seven souls in a congregation most peculiar to our modern age. We were a gathering of scribes and chroniclers, united not in flesh but through the spectral medium of the Zoom. That cursed technological necromancy permits the living to assemble as phantoms in illuminated squares.

Our assembly had been convened to receive the wisdom of one Vivienne Ashworth, MBE. She was a creature of such literary renown that her very name was spoken with reverential trembling among those who pursue the craft of letters. Twenty-five volumes she had authored! Three prizes of considerable eminence adorned her mantelpiece! And there she sat, framed in her digital window like a portrait of benevolence itself. Margaret Chen, our coordinator, plied her with questions in tones of fawning admiration. Even then, yes, even then, some nameless unease fluttered in the darkest chambers of my heart.

“Your productivity is truly remarkable,” quoth Margaret. “Pray tell, what secret do you harbor?”

And the reply came forth like honey poured upon a corpse. “Oh, I simply listen. Stories are everywhere, you know. You just have to be receptive.”

Receptive! That word, that terrible, pregnant word, would echo in my mind’s corridors like the beating of a hideous heart beneath the floorboards of reason!

I observed the tally of participants: 287. I marked the names scrolling past in that infernal chat window. BookwormAnnie, ChristaWrites, DaveTheScribe. Each appellation represented a soul, each soul a repository of dreams and midnight labors.

Then BookwormAnnie was no more.

Not departed. Not withdrawn. But erased, as though she had never existed in this digital firmament. The number shifted with the inexorability of fate itself: 286.

I felt the cold fingers of dread upon my spine. Perhaps, thought I, some terrestrial explanation might suffice. A failure of the internetwork, a collapse of electronic communion. But even as this rational voice whispered its feeble consolations, ChristaWrites vanished into the void. 285. Then DaveTheScribe. 284.

The pattern revealed itself with methodical precision. They were disappearing in alphabetical sequence whilst Vivienne Ashworth continued her mellifluous discourse upon the collective unconscious and other such philosophical vapors designed to entrance the unwary.

283

My gaze fixed itself upon the background of Ashworth’s transmission. Some irresistible magnetic horror drew me to that study with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I now perceived them with a clarity born of terror. Those shelves! At the commencement of our gathering, they had been barren, naked of volumes. Yet now, now, books were manifesting upon them like tombstones rising from cursed ground. Their spines materialized with spectral deliberation.

I leaned forward. My pulse beat a funeral march in my ears. I read the titles:

The Andromeda Effect by Vivienne Ashworth.

Beneath the Cherry Moon by Vivienne Ashworth.

Clockwork Hearts by Vivienne Ashworth.

“No,” I whispered into the sepulchral darkness of my chamber.

For I knew these titles! The Andromeda Effect was the creation of Annie Bradshaw. Three years of her life’s blood had been spilled upon those pages! Beneath the Cherry Moon belonged to Christa Yang! Clockwork Hearts was Dave Morrison’s steampunk romance, his firstborn literary child!

Had been.

More volumes appeared with the relentless advance of a cataleptic nightmare. The participant count plummeted. 267. 253. 241.

And still Ashworth spoke. Her words now possessed a rhythmic, hypnotic quality that weighed upon my eyelids like leaden coins upon the eyes of the dead. “The key is to remain open,” she intoned. “To let the stories flow through you. To become a vessel.”

A vessel! A receptacle! A tomb for the creative souls of the unwary!

The books continued their alphabetical procession toward my own doom. When Lisa Beaumont, my dear writing companion, vanished from the participant roster, I beheld with mounting hysteria the appearance of Letters to the Living by Vivienne Ashworth upon that accursed shelf. Lisa’s memoir! Her mother’s death chronicled in prose both beautiful and terrible! Now claimed by this thing that wore the face of literary respectability!

My cursor trembled above the red telephone icon. That singular means of escape beckoned. Every fiber of my being shrieked for flight, for I knew with prophetic certainty that soon would come my turn. I knew that The Long Way Home, my novel, my five years of Sisyphean labor, would manifest upon Ashworth’s shelf as another trophy of her unspeakable harvest.

But who would bear witness if I fled? Who would sound the alarm?

“Margaret!” I cried, unmuting myself with fingers that shook like autumn leaves. “Margaret, people are disappearing! Observe the count!”

Margaret stirred from her trance with the languor of one emerging from opium dreams. “Lena? I’m certain they’re merely…”

“The shelves behind her! For the love of all that is holy, look at the shelves!”

For one crystalline instant of terrible clarity, Margaret’s gaze focused upon Ashworth’s background. I watched the color drain from her countenance like life fleeing a dying man. She recognized among the volumes her own The Mapmaker’s Daughter.

Then Ashworth’s smile transformed. The benevolence bled away like blood from an opened vein. It was replaced by something ancient, something hungry, something that should have remained buried in whatever lightless pit had spawned it.

“Oh, dear,” she said with the softness of a serpent’s hiss. “You’ve noticed.”

What followed was a desperate gambit born of terror and cunning combined. I had observed her method. Alphabetical order. That immutable sequence bound even her eldritch power. She could not simply leap to claim me. She must proceed through the roster with the plodding patience of a plague.

With trembling hands, I opened my manuscript. The Long Way Home by Lena Graves. Five years of my soul compressed into binary code. I renamed it with feverish haste: Zinnia’s Requiem by Zinnia Zzyzx.

Thus did I cast myself to the very end of the alphabet. I was buying time, buying precious moments for salvation or damnation.

“Margaret!” I shrieked. “End the call! Use your host privileges!”

The Zoom window collapsed into darkness.

I sat in the sudden, deafening silence. My heart beat like a war drum in the cavity of my chest. Around me, the October rain continued its mournful percussion. Beyond my window, the jack-o’-lanterns grinned their idiot grins. Their candles flickered like the souls of the nearly damned.

The writers had survived. They were confused, violated, diminished by the theft of their manuscript files, but alive. And I, Lena Graves, had purchased their salvation with cunning and a writer’s knowledge that stories are never truly finished while the teller yet draws breath.

That very night, I began to write this account. I wrote it as fiction, for truth so strange requires the garb of fantasy to be believed. I wrote of the thing that calls itself Vivienne Ashworth. That bibliophagist who feeds upon the creative souls of writers. That incorporeal vampire who drains not blood but stories, leaving empty husks where once burned the sacred flame of imagination.

I have posted this narrative upon every digital forum that would receive it. Some dismiss it as the fevered imaginings of an unbalanced mind. But others, others recognize the warning. They see the pattern. They know now to watch for the signs: the too-productive author, the mysterious background, the alphabetical disappearances.

And somewhere in the darkness, I know she reads these words. Vivienne Ashworth, or whatever name she next assumes, seethes with fury that her feast was interrupted. She will hunt again. She will harvest again. The world is filled with writing groups, with conferences, with gatherings of hopeful scribes who never imagine that their greatest danger comes not from rejection but from a literary predator who wears success as a disguise.

But I am watching. We are watching. And though she can steal our manuscripts, our files, our years of labor, she cannot steal the ability to create anew. She cannot steal our power to rise from defeat, to write again.

I have reopened my novel. The Long Way Home, Draft 2. The story remains mine. The words may be stolen, but the wellspring from which they flow is eternal and unconquerable.

Let her come again. Let her try to feast. She will find no easy prey, no stupefied victims lulled by her honeyed voice. For I have told the tale, and in the telling, I have armed my fellow writers with the only weapon that matters: awareness.

And as I write these final words in the gray light of October’s dawn, I feel neither triumph nor terror, but rather a grim determination. She is the thief. I am the witness. And this story, this warning, this testimony, this record of the impossible, shall stand as a monument to all who were consumed and a beacon to all who yet create.

The rain has ceased. The jack-o’-lanterns have guttered out. But my vigil continues, and shall continue, until either she is unmasked or I am silenced.

Yet even then, even in that ultimate darkness, the story will survive. For stories, once released into the world, cannot be truly killed. They multiply. They evolve. They persist.

And Vivienne Ashworth, whatever she may be, should remember this: writers are not merely vessels to be drained.

We are witnesses.

We are chroniclers.

We are immortal in our words.

And we do not forget.

Lena Graves, October 18th, in the year of our Lord 2025