The Book

         I placed the heavy book down on the table before me, and took a deep breath. I knew what was to follow, and I feared it with all my heart, but curiosity overtook me as it had so many times before, I was so susceptible to intrigue. I took another deep breath, wiping my soaked forehead with my sleeve, and then reached forward in a clumsy motion, afraid that if I did it more slowly I would stop myself.
         I clasped the book by the spine with my left hand, feeling the loose leather crease and wrinkle under my fingers, and stroked the rim of the other side gently with my right hand, at the final stop before making the decision to carry out what I had been warned not to do. The end of the leather cover had a thick rim, which felt strange on my skin- as though there were some kind of lumpy objects lining the inside. Pressing my fingers on tighter, I tried to feel what they were.
         I let out a gasp and pulled my hand up to my face as I realised that the small objects lining the inside of the cover were teeth. On strange instinct, I ran my fingers across my teeth, and felt that they were the same shape, the same texture. These were human teeth. I shuddered, and refused to consider whether or not the leathery cover was in fact skin.
         Ignoring the sick feeling that I got from this revelation, I returned my hands to either side of the book, determined not to give in to fear. I had to find out what the big fuss was about; I had to investigate this book. Summing up my courage, I flipped over the cover violently, slamming the front cover down on the other side of the spine. I felt a shudder run up my back, electrically jolting through my shoulders and causing my hair to stand on end, goose bumps rising on my arms and shivers running through my hands.
         Holding my breath and staring in anticipation at the book before me, I expected something terrible, some kind of supernatural experience to encompass me and change me for life. But nothing happened. The room stood still, the air as motionless as earlier, the silence and emptiness of the dank room still undisturbed. I stayed there, staring at the book between my hands resting on the table, wondering what was to happen. Why had I been warned so strongly against opening this book? What was so secretive?
         After about a minute’s silence I let out a big breath of air that I had been holding. I giggled a stifled laugh, and mused at the silence, the lack of reaction.
          “Evil book, my a…” I began, and was interrupted by a strong gust of wind. It couldn’t have come from anywhere; there was no way for the wind to get into the room. However the strong gale blasted against my face, sending my hair wild and making it difficult to keep my eyes open. I tried to shout out, but the strong wind wouldn’t allow me to breathe through my mouth.
         I struggled, and managed to open my eyes, to see a bright light emanating from the book, brighter than I had ever seen. Mist was rising around it, while the near-blinding light kept me fixated in terror. The beam of light narrowed onto a point on the ceiling above me, and like a tower there before me stood for a few seconds, before retreating back into the book. The wind stopped, my hair fell back into place, and finally I could breathe again.
         The pages of the book now displayed words, words that hadn’t been there before. I leant in closer warily, afraid to read them. As my wide eyes focused on the first word, the ink itself rippled. I watched in fascination as each word rippled and turned red in turn, all of the black ink becoming a deep rouge, a crimson. As though narrating the words, which I was too afraid to comprehend, the colour changing followed the page, all the way across until it met the middle, speeding up and eliminating any black from the page.
         Totally bewildered and engrossed, I watched hypnotically. By the time it reached the end of the page, the ink began to ripple again. The words distorted, a strange ripple of concentric rings from the centre of the page. Then, starting with the large title, the words themselves, the ink letters, began to leak red- or were they bleeding? I couldn’t move: cemented there to my seat.
         As the words bled, a horrible wailing could be heard, and a soft wind began to encircle the table and I, sending loose items swirling majestically, while I sat there staring at the book. Totally engrossed, and unable to look in other directions, I watched as the gurgling book began to spew the red liquid more and more readily, leaking onto the table and onto my hands, which though I felt the warm substance I did not move. Fear had totally gripped me.
         As a finale to the grotesque and terrifying show, the book shook there, thudding up and down against the wooden table, and the light beam once again burst from it. Around the bottom of it, surrounding the book as it sat there, was a huge cloud of mist, in which I could see a world I had never imagined. Mist representations of people, shaped in the smoke, stared up at me with gaping mouths, eyes wide with fear, screaming for help as fire engulfed them. Burning and screaming, more and more people materialised in the smoke, reaching out to me from the cloud.
         My attention was brought back to the beam of light, which flickered. Snaking around it in a horrible mist was a ghostly figure- a faded face with hollow eyes and a gaping mouth, descending into a faded, mist-like body of ectoplasm with outreached arms, pointed fingers and malformed, excessively thin wrists. Where the torso would have been, rather than a solid body and legs, it descended into a trail of mist that lead, coiling around the beam of light and twisting its way into the centre of the book.
         Its hollow eye sockets stared in my direction all the time it circled the light beam, never fixing its horrific gaze elsewhere. A sinister sneer spread across its semi-physical face and it began to slow itself, coming to a stop somewhere near the ceiling, still looking into my eyes as I sat paralysed in fear. After staring for what seemed like the most terrifying moments of my life, it dove forwards, letting out a chilling moan which shook the walls and had a similar effect to the wind of earlier, this time barrelling into my eardrums and filling my head with the sounds of death and misery that the ghost had experienced. As it reached my head, I closed my eyes and felt myself taken over by its presence, passing through me with a freezing wave, and snatching away with it a part of my soul as it left.
         In a moment of sudden movement, I snapped my hand forward, slamming the book shut heavily. The sound echoed through the room, and the moaning finished. The light was trapped inside the book, and the fading mist disappeared quickly. The blood that had leaked across the table retreated eerily into the pages, seeping past the cover and disappearing from view. I breathed a sigh of relief, and threw the book across the room, wanting it to be as far away from me as possible. It was true, I should never have been so curious; I should never have inspected the book.
         Shifting the chair, I stood tiredly- still shaking from my experience. I darted quickly for the door, passing one last glance at the book before reaching for the door handle. However I froze as I took hold of the handle. There ahead of me in the darkness, at the corner of the room in the shadows, the face of the ghost could be seen vaguely. He still stared threateningly in my direction, refusing to move.
         Slowly he faded, and I slammed the door behind me and ascended the stairs out of my basement. I would have to tell my brother that I had opened the book, despite his advice not to. Any reaction from him though could never scare me as much as that which I had just seen.
         His words echoed through my head: “if you see it, it will follow you wherever you go. Whenever there is darkness, or a shadow, it will be there looking on at you, staring. It will haunt you forever.”