Waiting - for Thousandth
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junetideTitle: Waiting
Gift for: Thousandth
By: [to be revealed]
Gift type: Fiction
Word Count: 555
Genre: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warnings: Creepiness?
Summary: Somewhere in the world, there’s a book sitting on a bookshelf, waiting.
Giftcreator's notes: Thanks for beta'ing, Kelly. A treat for this prompt: A story about a book that eats people or steals souls. As literal as you like! I'd like a horror story, or a ghost story, as creepy as it can be.
Somewhere in the world, there’s a book sitting on a bookshelf, waiting.
This book is not an ordinary book. It only looks the part, disguised as a battered old paperback or a hardcover with a broken spine that’s been repaired too many times, maybe an almanac or a dating how-to. It shifts into whatever it needs to be, zeroing in on the perfect deception as soon as it’s in your possession, becoming comforting, reassuring, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect. It can read you better than you could ever read it, having been traded or lost or bought or stolen or bartered many times over the years, learning, searching, preying. It picks up on habits and behaviors, and it thinks. It knows.
It needs to fade into the background, you see. It needs you to pick it up and put it on the shelf and forget all about it. It needs to become nothing more than that strangely well-read edition of Odysseus or 1984 or Inherit the Wind that your eyes slide over from time to time, that book you have but can never quite remember when or how you got it. It needs you to forget about that each and every time you think it, and you do.
Because this book has already ensnared you, and it needs to keep you ensnared. It needs to feed on your energy, your lifesource, your essence, your very soul, while the days and nights pass and slip away, turning into distant memories as you live your life, unaware that anything is wrong. Everything will seem normal, familiar, and if you ever think you feel something off when you glance at your bookshelf, that worry will be rushed away, dismissed as too little sleep and an overactive imagination.
Then the day will arrive, unbidden: the day this book is no longer waiting.
You won’t know that. You won’t know that it’s ready for you to walk into your bedroom or your library or your computer room where you haphazardly stack books around your desk, ready for you to pick it up—on a whim, you think, it’s a been awhile since I’ve read this, I should take a look at it again. You won’t know that the second you open it, your fate is sealed.
This part, at least, will be quick. As for what comes after…
Your friends and family will find no trace of you, of course. You’ll have vanished into thin air, become a ghost, no one having any clue where to look for you, no leads for the police to follow. Your case will run cold and you’ll remain a missing person, presumed dead, and your friends and family will grieve for you, mourn for you, remember you.
They’ll go through your things and sort them, gathering up your collection of books to separate into ‘donate’ or ‘keep for themselves’, and the book will be among them, appearing innocent as ever, and no one will notice it, no one will look at it closely enough to see the dark green gleam emanating from the pages. It will get passed down and traded and sorted into a pile, and eventually, someday, it will end up back on a bookshelf, waiting.
You and all its other victims will be waiting right along with it.
Gift for: Thousandth
By: [to be revealed]
Gift type: Fiction
Word Count: 555
Genre: Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warnings: Creepiness?
Summary: Somewhere in the world, there’s a book sitting on a bookshelf, waiting.
Giftcreator's notes: Thanks for beta'ing, Kelly. A treat for this prompt: A story about a book that eats people or steals souls. As literal as you like! I'd like a horror story, or a ghost story, as creepy as it can be.
Somewhere in the world, there’s a book sitting on a bookshelf, waiting.
This book is not an ordinary book. It only looks the part, disguised as a battered old paperback or a hardcover with a broken spine that’s been repaired too many times, maybe an almanac or a dating how-to. It shifts into whatever it needs to be, zeroing in on the perfect deception as soon as it’s in your possession, becoming comforting, reassuring, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect. It can read you better than you could ever read it, having been traded or lost or bought or stolen or bartered many times over the years, learning, searching, preying. It picks up on habits and behaviors, and it thinks. It knows.
It needs to fade into the background, you see. It needs you to pick it up and put it on the shelf and forget all about it. It needs to become nothing more than that strangely well-read edition of Odysseus or 1984 or Inherit the Wind that your eyes slide over from time to time, that book you have but can never quite remember when or how you got it. It needs you to forget about that each and every time you think it, and you do.
Because this book has already ensnared you, and it needs to keep you ensnared. It needs to feed on your energy, your lifesource, your essence, your very soul, while the days and nights pass and slip away, turning into distant memories as you live your life, unaware that anything is wrong. Everything will seem normal, familiar, and if you ever think you feel something off when you glance at your bookshelf, that worry will be rushed away, dismissed as too little sleep and an overactive imagination.
Then the day will arrive, unbidden: the day this book is no longer waiting.
You won’t know that. You won’t know that it’s ready for you to walk into your bedroom or your library or your computer room where you haphazardly stack books around your desk, ready for you to pick it up—on a whim, you think, it’s a been awhile since I’ve read this, I should take a look at it again. You won’t know that the second you open it, your fate is sealed.
This part, at least, will be quick. As for what comes after…
Your friends and family will find no trace of you, of course. You’ll have vanished into thin air, become a ghost, no one having any clue where to look for you, no leads for the police to follow. Your case will run cold and you’ll remain a missing person, presumed dead, and your friends and family will grieve for you, mourn for you, remember you.
They’ll go through your things and sort them, gathering up your collection of books to separate into ‘donate’ or ‘keep for themselves’, and the book will be among them, appearing innocent as ever, and no one will notice it, no one will look at it closely enough to see the dark green gleam emanating from the pages. It will get passed down and traded and sorted into a pile, and eventually, someday, it will end up back on a bookshelf, waiting.
You and all its other victims will be waiting right along with it.
Poll #11438 Waiting
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 7
I enjoyed this!
Yes
7 (100.0%)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-13 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-16 04:40 pm (UTC)and I totally do have a well-read copy of 1984 of unknown origin....