The Note and the Number
December 22nd, 1989. In the morning earlier, she had found a partially crumpled old note on the bank of the creek that ran beneath the string of barren trees that dotted the undeveloped strip behind her house. It was unsurprising, given that location, that the paper on which it had been written had gotten wet and the writing begun to smudge, making the note difficult, if not impossible in parts, for her to make heads or tails of. Other parts, nevertheless, could be made out legibly and soon upon finding the note she found that it became an object of great intrigue to her, one which seemed to demand her utmost attention and led her to ignoring the errands she had intended to run that day. In truth, some part of her, of course, suspected that it was bound to be extraordinarily mundane and contain nothing of importance, nor, of course, could she expect that any of it would be her business; indeed, she couldn't say what it was about this note that so piqued her interest, beyond the most basic sense of mystery, but knowing that didn't make the mystery any less compelling. So for hours she sat in the study in the warmth of her old Victorian home; for hours at an antique desk beneath a ratty table lamp, examining every inch of the note, pouring over the page desperate to unlock the secrets, whatever they might be, which it held. On immediate inspection, there were a few things which leapt out at her: in particular, there was the clear indication of telephone number written in a large hand which drew her attention, but she could only make out the final three digits. 636. Six three six.
There was something strangely familiar about that number to her, and, though she felt silly even considering it, since, after all, there was no reason to assume the note bore any relation to her or her life, she searched her memory for any telephone numbers she knew which ended in those three digits. When she couldn't think of any, not ready or willing to abandon that line of inquiry, she hunted up her little black book to determine whether there might be one which she had simply forgotten. She had no such luck; so she set aside the number for the time being to see what she could make of the body of the text. Somewhere toward the top, perhaps only a few sentences in, was something clear to her, a simple sentence: "It's not as simple as that." With a bit more effort, a few scattered words might be discerned, she thought, a "No" here, a "possibly" there, and, in one particular spot, finally the least bit more substantive, the phrase "false and empty". As she paused a moment, a sense of fruitlessness gnawing at her, she found her gaze naturally falling to one obscure passage. At first she could make nothing of it, but soon it seemed almost of itself to become clear: "And when she saw the consequences of her desire..." But the rest of the sentence remained hazy and uncertain, the writing too degraded by the elements to read. She pondered the phrase before her, "And when she saw the consequences of her desire...", a sudden notion of familiarity coming over her in waves as though if she thought but a moment she would be able to fill in the blanks. And with that sensation of impending epiphany, her attention was pulled back to 636. She stared at the number on the page, the sense like a name on the tip of the tongue growing in deeply uneasy intensity, ominous, almost burning, until it was all but overpowering her, but still nothing came. She remained as lost as when she found the note.