I didn’t want to write this. Please, if nothing else, at least believe that. And, of course, the pain. You need to understand how much this hurts. You are going to suffer, there is nothing you can do about that now, but that suffering is as nothing compared to this. I should have just accepted my fate, shouldn’t have fought it. I truly am sorry you are reading this, sorry I am having to write it, because…
…no, it won’t let me do this, it needs me to write my story.
I’m sorry.
*
They never found out what had left Christopher's body so ruined, so wasted and degraded. He was nineteen, a year younger than I, and yet the corpse they found… it could have been the decomposed remains of pensioner. What was left of his organs were riddled with cancer and showed signs of a lifetime’s worth of stress. His bones, according to the coroner’s report, access to which had been unreasonably difficult to secure, was a mess of arthritis and fractures barely begun healing. Christopher had still been listed as a missing person for the better part of a week after they found his body; it took the results of a DNA test before anyone even considered that this decrepit body could have been the young history student they had been searching for. For another two weeks the basement in which he had been found, and the shared house from which he had been missing for over a month, were quarantined. It must have been some strange new disease, or poison, they insisted. But nobody else got sick, and every conceivable test came back negative for pathogens and toxins.
So he was cremated, and his file closed. He had no family, nobody to push for more answers. He deserved better than to be burned and forgotten, his death brushed aside as unexplained but unimportant. He was my friend and he deserved better from me.
*
“He’s been dead for ages.” His housemates weren’t horrible people, but they could have been a little more thoughtful. “What did you want us to do? Were we supposed to turn his room into a shrine or something?”
“It wasn’t yours to throw away,” I yelled, as if unleashing my grief on these people was going to change anything. Christopher was dead, and everything he owned was now gone.
“Calm down,” the girl said. I don’t recall her name; there is so much that has been lost in the quagmire of my failing mind. Lucy? Louise? Maybe it was a guy. Louis? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyway.
“You had no right,” I went on.
“Look, we didn’t throw most of it away, we donated it.”
“It wasn’t yours.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s,” they countered. “You know he had no family, right?”
“Of course I do…”
“Then what were we supposed to do with all his stuff? It was bad enough paying the rent on a house we couldn’t use for two weeks. But we can’t afford to keep covering Christopher’s share. We have to get someone else into his room and we can’t do that with all his junk in there.”
“Junk?” I snapped.
“I didn’t mean that,” they said. “This has been a nightmare for us all. I know he was your friend, but you aren’t the only one this has affected.”
I sighed and bit back any more outbursts. What was the point. “Can I go up to his room?” I asked.
They nodded, unconvincingly, and waved me through the door. “If you think it will give you some kind of closure.”
A few awkward nods from the other housemates was all I got by way of a welcome and, before I was half way up the stairs, they had already turned their awful music up and their laughter hit me like a cold slap of disrespect. I shook my head and said nothing.
The room smelled of cheap beer and weed. It smelled of Christopher. I smiled a little at some memory of happier times, a memory now long since gone from my mind. It was probably of a drunken night out in town, or a marathon gaming session, or some other juvenile and inconsequential event we had shared. Inconsequential, but how I wish I could remember it now.
Where was I?
His room. Yes, that’s were I saw the box. Just a plain cardboard box, filled with text books and a few novels. All that was left of him in this bare room, apart from his scent.
“Someone from the University is coming over to pick them up later,” another of his housemates said from the doorway. “They look like they are all from the library.”
“Mind if I have a look through?” I asked, as if I needed her permission.
“Help yourself,” she said.
It was all a little dry. History text books, papers printed by the University press which nobody would have chosen to read had they not been compulsory. A novel about demons inhabiting family pets, if I remember correctly. Which I probably don’t. But I flicked through it all, smiling at the odd doodle in the margin or graphic and entirely inappropriate notes which had more to do with his classmates than it did the course. And then there was the book. Creased and pale leather was bound with frayed and darkly stained cord to contain two dozen pages of too-soft parchment. I read it all and then rushed to the bathroom to vomit. Twenty-four pages of…
Wait, what was it about? It was a story. I think. Wasn’t it? This is important, it explains… no, it’s gone. But it is central to all of this, you need to let me remember what was in the…
No, I have to keep going, the book did all of this but I don’t think it matter what was actually written, only that it was written and I read it.
I am so sorry. Please believe that.
*
It began when I got home. It was late, and it was dark. The power was out. Christopher had often macked me me for having my own place, my own front door and no housemates to cramp my style. He called me disgracefully wealthy for a student. But he never had to chose between eating or keeping the electric meter topped up with credit. I lit some candles, some cheap tealights which I scattered about the one room which served as kitchen, bedroom and living room. The flames brought a little warmth to the chilly apartment. I logged on to the Wi-Fi from the restaurant next door and found some mindless video to watch on my phone.
You should go for a walk. I want to see where you go.
I scrambled across the couch, away from the unexpected and icy voice, falling to the floor and knocking two candles onto the carpet, further confirming I would never be seeing any of the deposit I paid for the place. My night vision hopeless from staring at my phone’s bright screen, I could see nothing but the flames dotted about the room. Trembling hands struggled to use my phone but eventually found the torch icon.
Hello it said, a naked, sexless, faceless thing, sitting on the other end of the couch. I probably screamed. I don’t recall. Nobody came to help, it was not that kind of street.
“Who the Hell…” I began.
I said, you need to go for a walk. I want to see where you go.
It was standing, though I never saw it transition from sitting on the couch. It wasn’t tall, or particularly bulky, it certainly had no muscle definition across it pasty white body. And yet, it loomed huge as it approached, growing with every step closer to me, all the while staying the same size. It filled the room, filled my world. Its smooth elongated head, featureless and slightly out of focus, somehow grinned with a mouth it didn’t have. I blinked and it grew only larger. I closed my eyes and its grin was my entire reality.
“Go away,” I begged.
It did not, and I pissed myself.
*
This is where you go when you have been crying.
“How do you know that?” I whispered, my stomach twisting and my heart racing. I steadied myself against a familiar tree which stood at the edge of the small park.
Show me what makes you cry, it demanded.
“Please stop.”
No.
I wanted to imagine this thing had no real form, just a spectre, a horrible apparition with no power beyond its ability to terrify me. But long talons, like cold wet wood, tightened about my shoulder and my arm died a little.
Take me to the place you go before you come here. Show me what makes you cry.
“I’m tired,” I insisted. It wasn’t an excuse; I was exhausted. My knees ached and my knuckles burned with a deep pain. And I was breathless.
I know, it replied, the cold talons piercing my jacket and cutting into the skin. A bitterness washed across my tongue; the flavour, I imagined, of oblivion.
The drain cannot be stopped, or slowed. Show me what I need to see, while you are still able.
“The drain?”
You are wasting what time you have left.
“But…” I coughed, hard and painful, and amid a thin spray of blood came two of my teeth.
*
This place hurts you, it noted. And yet you came back time after time.
The past tense cut through my foggy mind to bring a painful clarity. Something tickled my neck and I reached back to pull a clump of my hair away.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked, my voice rasping and dry.
Why do you come here?
It was never going to give me any answers, and yet I was unable to defy its requests. “I come here to see her,” I replied, pointing a trembling finger through the café’s large window to a girl I can no longer remember. Why don’t I recall even her name? She had to have been important to me; I can feel that much at least. Is it withholding from my story her name and her face? Or has she just been lost, like too much else, to my failing mind?
The grin it could not have, on the mouth it never possessed, widened to momentarily conceal the café. She doesn’t even know you exist.
“We were at school together.”
You made a sacrifice, didn’t you?
I swallowed blood and clenched my fist, cracking a bone and bringing me to my knees.
Are you going to cry? It asks, no mocking tone to its soulless voice, just a sick exhilaration at my suffering.
“Shut up.”
Tell me what sacrifice you made.
“I followed her to the city,” I said through angry tears.
You gave up your place at a better University, so you could see her.
“She found someone else,” I muttered.
She flaunts him in front of you? Here?
“No,” I whispered. “I saw them together somewhere… else.”
You followed her to her house
I flushed with shame, my obsession uncovered, my vulgar and pathetic compulsion.
There she is.
“I want to go home,” I pleaded. “I am so tired. Why won’t you stop?”
Okay, it replied, stunning me for a moment.
“You’re letting me go?”
You have another night left in you, it explained. Tomorrow I will come for you and you will show me her home. You will watch her with her man and you will show me your pain.
*
I awoke late into the day, remembering coming home but not going to bed. Everything ached and there was blood and more teeth on my pillow, along with so much hair.
“Please,” I cried out in a weak and failing voice. “Why are you doing this to me.”
You read the book I commissioned, came the reply. Not spoken, not as near and present as it had been. The words echoed though the fog of my mind, reaching across the hours from the dark of the night before, or the night soon to come.
“The book,” I muttered, the texture of its peculiar leather fresh in my otherwise distorted memory.
It took the better part of thirty minutes to get out of my bed, every moment bringing a new and unfamiliar agony, but I finally made it to the bathroom, to the only mirror in my apartment. I was not surprised by the wrinkled and balding face which looked back at me, but the expectation did nothing at all to lessen the horror of seeing that stranger replace me.
“Please,” I mumbled through pitiful tears. “I need to know…”
If this is just cosmetic? If this is just a vision of your future? The faint reply crept into my awareness, distant and unreal.
“Please,” I begged again.
This is now you. Your years are spent, as lost as the time of any other aged soul.
“No!” I groaned, dropping to my knees, a spasm of agony shooting through my legs and back. “Those were my years. My life!” I wept, and I cursed and I pleaded with the absent fiend to take back what I knew would not, could not, be undone.
There was no reply. It would be back come the evening, and it would not be rushed. It would force me to see, one last time, the girl for whom I had wasted my life, force me to see her in the arms of another, and then I would die.
But I need not go so easily.
*
“Did they collect the box of books?” I asked whichever of Christopher’s housemates had answered the phone. I have no idea who it was now.
“Who’s this?” they asked, although I had already told them.
“Sorry,” I said, my voice broken and hoarse. “I have a sore throat; I think I’m coming down with something.”
“Oh, right,” they replied. “There’s a lot of that going about at the moment.”
I clenched the few teeth yet remaining in my dry mouth, and bit back my anger. Every moment wasted on this call was another tract of my life lost. “Yes,” I said. “So the box of books?”
“Yes, um, I think someone came to collect it yesterday evening. Wait, let me just ask…”
“No,” I hissed. “Just tell me where they would have taken the books.”
“Jesus,” they snapped back. “How about some manners?”
“Where did they take the damned books?”
“Wow.”
“I don’t have time for this!”
“You’re such a prick,” they said with an arrogant and humourless laugh. “They were library books, so where do you think they took them.”
*
The day was almost spent. Where had the hours gone? It was a short walk to the University, to its library, but my legs and my heart were not what they had been a day ago. I called for a cab, in my own name. I wasn’t going to get away with this, people were going to see, so what did it matter if the driver had my name? Sitting in the taxi, every bump in the road feeling as if it would shatter my spine, I turned my university ID card over and over in my hands. I wasn’t going to get into the Library with it; I looked nothing like my photo.
“Going to meet your grandchild?” the driver asked, and I just stared blankly at the rear-view mirror, into his friendly eyes for a moment.
“Yea,” I croaked.
The journey was over before I had to endure any more conversation. He helped me out of his taxi and over to one of the benches outside the library where I could sit a while. Setting my bag down beside me, he wished me a good evening and I gave him a sad smile.
The library looked to be quiet, through its massive glass wall. For a moment I thought of the café, seeing the object of my obsession. But it was a librarian, tidying away some books left on a desk.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I whispered.
You won’t. The presence was growing closer, as the sun reached for the horizon and darkness began to cloak the city. The building is safe, it has fire escapes and there are only a few people in there.
“You know what I’m going to do?”
Of course.
“Aren’t you going to stop me?”
I can’t. Not yet.
“You seem very calm about it.”
Why should I be worried?
“You can’t spread to anyone else without your book,” I said, hoping it was true.
It said nothing and I began the long and arduous mission of standing. The bag felt heavy, far heavier than it should have. Bottles rolled about inside, the shifting weight making it so much more difficult to hold. I knocked on the glass wall and waved to the librarian. She tapped at her wrist, to her watch, and shook her head. I knocked again and she rolled her eyes before coming to the door.
“Sorry,” she said. “We are closed to the general public. Students only for the night.”
“I know,” I whispered. “And I am sorry.” My hands shaking, both with adrenaline and the effects of what I suspect was Parkinson’s, I pulled an air pistol from my jacket pocket. This wasn’t America; she had probably never seen a real gun in her life. I certainly hadn’t. As cheap as the pistol was, it was convincing.
“Oh God,” she gasped. “What are you doing?”
“Just let me in,” I said. “And then you can go.”
She looked at me a while, shaking as much as I was, glancing past me, maybe toying with the idea of pushing past me and fleeing. I shook my head slowly and pushed the pistol to her stomach. “Let me in and you can be out of here in a few seconds.”
She stepped aside, eyes fixed on the weapon, and I walked past her. “Now go,” I said, and she ran. I reached to the wall, not to steady myself but to push my finger into the fire alarm, breaking the thin sheet of glass and setting a siren screeching.
A couple of people ran past me, and someone grabbed my arm. “You need to get out of here,” they shouted over the alarm, pulling gently. “Leave me the Hell alone,” I spat, raising the air pistol.
They said something I couldn’t hear and ran.
I didn’t have long. I took the bottles from my bag and tried to unscrew the lids. “Dammit!” I yelled, my weak and painful grip failing me. I dropped the pistol and took a pen from the closest desk jabbing at the side of the plastic bottle. Over and over I stabbed, finally piercing it. I squirted the liquid over the shelves and carpeted floor. Then the second bottle, and the third.
You need to hurry, it warned me. The police will probably be here before the fire brigade.
“Leave me alone,” I said, knowing it would do no such thing. I found my lighter in my pocket and took a sheet of paper from the desk.
You will burn in here.
I said nothing. I lit the paper and threw it to the floor, wincing at the sudden heat.
Come with me. It grew large, blotting out the flames, filling my world once more.
“No,” let me die here.
Cold bit into my arm. Not yet. Come with me, into the basement.
“Why?” I asked, walking where it guided me in spite of my protests.
The flames are going to consume the whole building, but the basement will last a little longer. And I need to get you away from the windows before the armed response units get here.
“What do you care?” I was already through the door and walking on trembling legs down the steps. “I’m dying tonight no matter what happens, and I can’t get out of here to show you what you wanted.”
There will be other actors. There will be more shows.
“Not without your book.”
The grin shifted to encircle a laptop on a desk, lit by emergency lighting. Through you I shall write my next book, it declared.
“I won’t write a single word for you,” I spat.
I said through you, it replied, and cold talons pierced both my shoulders, pulling me from both sides, pulling further than my sagging and wrinkled skin could endure. It did not tear, did not bleed, but stretched like dough. I screamed and more talons hooked at my lips and cheeks drawing me out further. My bones shifted and broke, they turned to dust and then to paste and yet more talons pierced all about me. I saw through eyes not my own, looked down on my deformed and ruined body, witnessed my flesh stretched out as a sheet and draped across the laptop, then wrapped around it tight.
A dozen talons poked and prodded in some parody of typing and, through my flesh, my tale found the keys.
I am so sorry.
The words of the story are unimportant. It matters only that you have read them. I don’t know why it has allowed the truth of my torment to be its new story; perhaps it doesn’t matter that you know what is to come. But know this: destroying its book did not save me. It did not even stop the fiend.
Don’t delete this story. You are going to die soon, you can do nothing to stop that, but I beg you to save yourself the incomprehensible pain of creating for it another tale. Every keystroke is a world of torment.
I feel the flames, so I suppose the tale can now end. It is time to upload the story.
Please forgive me for what you are about to endure.