The Elusive Book.

Somewhere in the world is a shelf of books. It might be a shelf in someone’s attic, untouched by light for decades. It might be in the basement of a library, kept in a hidden section that even the head librarian knows nothing about. For some reason, the shelf is somewhere different every time someone finds it.

The books on this shelf range from ancient, leather-bound tomes to spiral notebooks, from modern-day paperbacks to books dating from the fall of the Roman Empire. These books are all diaries, all kept by different people from different points in history.

These people have only one thing in common: they were all serial killers. You can read any of the diaries and watch as the writer, at first seemingly normal, slowly descends into madness with every entry and gains an unquenchable thirst for blood and murder. The last pages of these diaries are invariably unreadable – barely-legible scrawlings of murderous men and women who have gone completely insane and lost all grip on reality.

You can read as many of the diaries as you want, if you feel you can stomach the horrific tales of murders and acts of sadism recounted within. Many who have found these books have even read them and walked away, remaining healthy and normal, save for being completely unnerved.

One word of warning. If you stay at the shelf and read for too long, you may notice a book you didn’t see before, right at the very end of the shelf. If this happens, you should leave immediately and never return, nor never try to find the shelf again. Because if you open this book, you will find that only the first page has been written on. It is an entry describing how excited the author is to have started a new journal. And it is in your handwriting.

Night watchers.

Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your sleep. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cycle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object, until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room.

 
Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a scant second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame, mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face. Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don’t sleep for the rest of the evening.

The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn’t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house.

Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spending the day at a friend’s house and it’s time to use the bathroom. While you are in there the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You’re watching intently as words form:

“Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night.”