It took weeks of searching, but I finally found the last pink page for the “linking book” I’d been trying to complete. I didn’t know why someone had trapped Catherine in the prison realm the book linked to, but she’d promised me wealth beyond my wildest dreams and an intimidate relationship with her if I helped her escape and get revenge on the man who’d trapped her, and that was good enough reason for me.

The pages had been hidden in weird places - the top of a treehouse village, inside a telescope, tied around the anchor of a pirate ship - and this last one, underneath the control panel of a power station. None were impossible to find, just difficult enough that it would take someone searching days of dedicated effort to find them, and my effort hadn’t been the most dedicated as I tried to find clues in each area as to who exactly I was dealing with. Oddly, there was nothing - like whoever had hidden the pages wanted to erase all evidence of Catherine’s existence apart from the pink pages themselves.

I went into the abandoned library and opened the glowing pink tome, hopefully for the last time. The moving illustration of Catherine spoke, just as it had the other times I’d looked in the book, looking more and more realistic with each page added. Her eyes grew wide and eager as she noticed me on the other side of the page she was trapped in. “Do you have the last page? Put it in now! Help me out of this prison, and to your final reward!” She fixed her gaze not on me, but on the pink page, as though she’d been dying of thirst and I carried a whole lake with me.

I placed the pink page in the book, felt the same crackle of energy I’d felt with each page I’d added, and then…

It was cold and dark. I looked around to see that the library had disappeared around me, replaced by a cavern with no apparent exit. One edge of the cavern featured a pile of gold and jewels taller than I was. Another had a writing desk upon which was piled books in various colors - yellow, orange, purple - covered in the style of the pink book but lacking its distinct glow.

And in one wall of the cavern, I saw a window which looked out into… the domed ceiling of a library? I tilted my head, trying to resolve the matter of perspective, and a lock of blond hair fell in front of my eyes. I absentmindedly brought up my hand to move my hair behind my ears, and I froze when it came within my field of vision.

It was a woman’s hand. Decorated with the same red nail polish and ruby and sapphire rings I’d admired on Catherine’s hand. The same rings she’d used to demonstrate proof of her wealth.

I heard a man cackling with laughter, and suddenly my window was filled with a man’s face I knew well - my own. It wore a sneer I’d never seen in the mirror, but had seen more than once of the illustrated face of a woman in a pink book.

The man spoke with my voice, touched with the icy chill of a long time prisoner. “I have to thank you, Robert - or, should I say, Catherine - for being greedy and lusty enough to free me. The last two men who found my oubliette left me here, and I was starting to worry that I was sounding too desperate.” Some of my hair fell into his eyes, and he grabbed it and stared at it. “Huh. Ginger. I’ll have to get used to that.” A hand reached toward the window, and pulled away holding a pink page. The view shook, then started to blur. After stealing my body, this villainess sought to deny me a means to escape myself!

“No!” I shrieked, ignoring in my urgency the higher pitch my voice now carried. “Catherine, you bitch, you broke our deal! You promised me wealth and a woman’s touch!”

“Oh my, such language is unbefitting a lady like you, Catherine,” the pilferer mocked, removing another page. “And I kept our deal.” The window blurred further. “You have wealth beyond imagination in that cave, and any time you wish a woman’s touch…” The blurring increased. “… you can simply touch yourself.”

“But don’t worry, my dear,” I heard my former voice say as the window started to grow dark, “someday a foolish man will find this library, and you can use him to escape the same way I used you…”

———————————————————-

Robert shut the ghastly pink book and considered his next move. His original body was probably long gone - after all, that was the point of hiding the pages behind asinine puzzles, wasn’t it? To allow the former Catherine enough time to get away before the body’s original owner could catch up?

He looked at the pink pages in his hand, then at the pink book, and then at the torch that Catherine-formerly-Robert had placed in a nearby stand.

He tilted his head, smiling when, for the first time in months, no blond hair fell in front of his eyes.

Why, he mused, should I keep the game playing and have a small chance that I might be pursued when I could instead make sure there is no chance?