A Collection of True Evils Read online

  “Look,” Theo said. “Has anything happened to you since last night? Anything strange?”

  “No,” Alex lied, not sure why he was hiding the morning’s events from Theo.

  “We should meet at the library tonight,” Theo said. “We opened it together, so I think we both need to be there when we make any sort of decision about it.”

  “Theo, you sound crazy. Are you sure you’re—”

  “I have to go,” Theo interrupted. “But meet me there tonight, okay? Midnight.” And then without waiting for an answer, Theo hung up.

  Alex sat there for a moment, staring at his computer and the last paragraph of his speech. He tried typing some more but wasn’t able to keep focus. He left his office and went to his classroom almost half an hour before his students arrived. He made it through the two o’ clock class but ended up posting a cancellation notice on the door of his four o’ clock Gothic Studies class.

  As he drove home, he tried once again to logically do away with any connection between his utterance of the phrase that had been on his arm and the death of the bird on his windowsill. Naturally, there was a chance, no matter how slim, that the two things had been entirely coincidental. But then he also took into account that the instant he had spoken the words, the itch on his arm and the text itself had vanished.

  As Alex parked his car in front of his building, he felt a peculiar sensation on his shoulder. He wondered if a bug had bitten him, but only for a moment. As the sensation began to sink in and became more prominent, Alex knew what it signified. Getting out of his car, he quickened his pace when he realized that his shoulder was beginning to itch.

  ***

  He hurried into his apartment and was unbuttoning his shirt before the door closed behind him. He ran through his bedroom and into the adjoining bathroom where it still smelled like rubbing alcohol. He took his shirt off and stared at himself in the mirror. As he looked his body over, searching for whatever words might be there this time, his mind swayed from fear to excitement at a frantic pace.

  The itch seemed to worsen when it was exposed to the air and as he looked at himself in the mirror, Alex wasn’t at all surprised to see something written on his left shoulder. He read the words silently to himself and as he did, he thought he felt the itch beginning to subside.

  The words were written in the same faded tone and in the same script-like text that had been on his arm that morning. He ran his fingers across these new words and found that the skin was not raised; if this was done with some sort of spectral ink, it had sunk into the skin without disturbing the surface.

  With a guilty feeling in his stomach, Alex turned away from the mirror and walked into his bedroom. He looked out of the window, hoping to see another bird out there. But the ledge’s only occupant was the bird from this morning, stiff and motionless with its dead eyes pointed towards the street as if it were hoping to fall. Alex reached slowly out to the glass as if he intended to resurrect the bird and saw that his hands were trembling.

  Behind him, someone knocked on his front door. He gasped and jumped a bit, nearly falling onto his bed as he stumbled backwards. He then sighed in embarrassment, realizing that a simple knock on his door had just scared the hell out of him. Get a grip, he told himself as he walked into the living room and approached the door.

  He looked through the peephole, expecting to see Theo standing there. But it was only his landlord, coming to check up on the leaky pipes under the kitchen sink that Alex had reported last week, no doubt. Alex smiled wanly and reached out for the door knob.

  But then he stopped. As his shaking fingers grazed the doorknob, the itch on his shoulder seemed to intensify. He peered back out of the peephole at his landlord who stood there waiting with a look of impatience. As Alex watched, the man raised his hand and knocked again.

  Alex swallowed hard and leaned closer towards the door. He then opened his mouth and spoke the words that were etched across his shoulder. He spoke softly, whispering the words so quietly that he could hardly even hear them himself. His own voice managed to raise gooseflesh on his arms and as he listened to himself, he wondered if this was what the voice of a ghost might sound like. Thinking of ghosts made him think of Harold Nesmith and Agatha Redden. In that moment he felt certain that they were there with him, that their spirits had latched on to him when he and Theo had opened A Collection of True Evils. He could literally feel their dead eyes on him as he spied on his landlord through the peephole.

  Out in the hallway, the landlord did nothing except stand his ground and knock once more, louder this time. Frowning, Alex stepped closer to the door with his forehead now pressed against the wood. He spoke the words again, louder this time so that anyone on the other side of the door would hear.

  Almost instantly, a queer look came across the landlord’s face, as if he were trying to understand the words he had just heard. For Alex, watching everything through the peephole seemed to occur in slow-motion. He watched as his landlord’s face went through several expressions within the space of three seconds, none of them pleasant. The man then took a hesitant step away from Alex’s door and stumbled to his knees, clutching at the empty air around him for support as he fell.

  Alex watched intently, not sure if the man was having trouble breathing or if there was something wrong with his heart. The entire process took no more than ten seconds. When it was all done, the landlord was lying on his side and staring blankly towards the other end of the hall with dead, wide eyes.

  Alex stepped away from the door as the realization of what he had just done began to sink in. And while he felt morally ashamed of the ease in which he had killed the man, the fact still remained that once again, the reading of the words had resulted in the disappearance of the peculiar itch and the inscribed text that had caused it. Alex rubbed at the now blank spot where the words had been and then bit his bottom lip tenderly as he felt tears welling up in his eyes. But before the tears could take him, he picked up the phone and dialed 911. He then sat on his sofa and stared at the walls until he heard sirens approaching.

  ***

  Night took it’s time in claiming the world. Alex sat in his apartment after the paramedics had pronounced his landlord dead of severe cardiac arrest and waited for midnight to approach. He wondered if Theo was feeling this same anxiousness or if his insistence on meeting right away was due to Theo also experiencing some sort of weirdness since opening A Collection of True Evils. As he sat and waited, Alex feared that the itch would come again and that he would find more words written on his body. He had already killed a bird and a human being with the power that came with those ghost-phrases, so what else would he be capable of?

  The thought bothered him horribly. He tidied up his coffee table, checked his e-mail and watched some TV to help pass the time. He eventually found himself working on his speech for the horror convention and it was this work that seemed to speed the clock along.

  He left his house at 11:15 although the library was only a twenty minute trip from his house. He drove down darkened blocks, thinking of the bird, his landlord and the phrases he had spoken that had somehow ended their lives. It was baffling and even a bit ridiculous, but there was no denying that it was really happening. He thought about Agatha Redden and wondered what sort of hex she had placed on the inscriptions within the book. He also found himself thinking about Harold Nesmith, the author of A Collection of True Evils, and what sorts of dark talents he might have acquired in writing down such cursed material.

  Driving through the night as midnight approached, Alex truly felt afraid for the first time since discovering the phrase on his arm that morning. To somehow have found himself entwined in the horrors that Harold Nesmith had researched and written about made him feel cold and defenseless. Several times on the way to the library, Alex thought that he could feel itching sensations all over his body but these ended up being nothing more than tricks of his scrambling mind.

  He arrived at the library fifteen minutes early and saw no sign
of Theo. Alex circled the block twice, driving slowly and wondering exactly what they had gotten themselves into. As he made the circle around the block the second time, he saw that Theo had finally arrived. Usually, the first to arrive would retrieve the key and unlock the basement door but Theo remained in his car, electing to not wander into the darkness alone.

  Alex parked his car behind Theo’s and the two of them met on the sidewalk in front of the library. It seemed almost forbidden to be here again, less than twenty-four hours after cracking open A Collection of True Evils, creeping through the night like ghouls hiding from the inevitable dawn.

  As they came together on the sidewalk, Alex noticed that Theo was walking with his back arched at an awkward angle. Theo tried to nod and grin at him, but it was obvious that he was in pain.

  “Did you hurt your back today?” Alex asked him as they started towards the garden shed for they key.

  Theo snickered, a sound that came out like a mixture of a grunt and defeated laughter. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Alex didn’t say anything else although he desperately wanted to say something…to say anything. But to mention anything about the book in the open and dark spaces of the night seemed dangerous now. Alex slipped into the garden shed to retrieve the key and then they walked through the too-quiet night and into the library’s basement.

  ***

  They pulled A Collection of True Evils from its hiding place beneath the writing desk and set it on the large table in the center of the room. Alex took a seat at the table, as he had done countless times since he and Theo had started meeting here, but Theo remained on his feet. He leaned against the table, grimacing in pain.

  “You lied to me on the phone today,” Theo said. “I can see it in your face: something happened to you today. What was it?”

  “Well, what about you?” Alex asked. “Yes, something happened to me, but it’s obviously not as bad as whatever happened to you…you look like you’re in terrible pain.”

  “I am,” Theo said. “It’s mainly my stomach; it feels like there’s razorblades in there and every time I move, it gets worse. I’ve also been coughing up blood all day and I don’t know why. My back is killing me and the last two times I took a piss, there was blood in it.” As he spoke, a thin trickle of blood ran over his bottom lip. His voice was wavering and came in fragments, as if he were on the verge of tears.

  “What about you?” he asked Alex as he wiped the blood away from his mouth.

  Alex thought that it would be hard to convey what had happened to him but once he started talking, the course of events actually came out easy and he was relieved to find that Theo was nodding as he listened. If the stern look on his face was any indication, he didn’t doubt a word of it.

  “That settles it then,” Theo said when Alex was done. “We have to get rid of the book. And I don’t mean sell it off to someone else. I think we have to destroy it. We could burn it or send it through a wood chipper. Something…I don’t…I don’t know…”

  “Stop talking,” Alex said. “You’re getting pale. I really think you need to see a doctor.” This was an understatement; not only was Theo pale, he was also shaking and there was a glistening sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  Alex looked at the book, still sitting on the table as if it had always belonged there. With something very similar to anger in his voice, Alex said, “Let’s do it, then. We’ll take it outside right now and burn it.”

  Theo nodded, holding his stomach as he tried to stay upright against the table. Alex picked the book up from the table and as he did, he felt that familiar itching sensation crawling along his back. Only now it burned like fire and he nearly dropped the book on the floor in trying to scratch the itch. The sensation was so strong that it took his breath and he suddenly knew that the book and the powers that haunted it somehow knew what they intended to do.

  “We’ve got to be quick,” Alex said. “It knows something is up.”

  Theo only nodded again, not wanting to waste any breath on speaking. He hobbled to the door bent over in pain and he ended up having to lean on Alex as they left the basement and headed back out into the night.

  They made their way to the back of the library where a few picnic tables sat around a swing set for members of the children’s library.

  Theo fell to the ground with a grunt, still holding his stomach. As he sat up, he coughed up a thick gob of blood and mucus. He spat it to the ground in weary disgust and then looked to Alex. “There’s a lighter in my glove box. A Zippo.”

  Alex ran to Theo’s car in a hurry, opened the passenger side door and grabbed the lighter from its place among fast food napkins and registration forms. The night around him seemed intensely quiet, as if the night were anticipating something to happen. The streetlights seemed to be fading out and the solid structures of things around him seemed to waver in and out of focus. He blinked his eyes furiously, gripped Theo’s lighter as tightly as he could in order to anchor himself to reality, and headed back to the rear of the library.

  When he returned to the small picnic area behind the library, Theo looked even paler than he had in the basement. He was still coughing violently and as Alex knelt by him with the lighter, he saw that Theo had coughed up more blood while he had been gone. Alex had never seen so much blood and it would have taken him aback if he were not afflicted by the now aching itch that continued to spread across his back.

  Alex struggled with the lighter, surprised to find that he was also was shaking. He didn’t know if it was a result of frazzled nerves or the sudden fear that seemed to seize him. He could feel a thickness in the air, a weight that seemed to settle on to him like heat on a miserably humid day. He suddenly knew without a doubt that the supposed ghosts within the book were here with them now and they did not want to allow them to destroy their link to the world of the living. The painful itch across his back was proof of this, as was his pale and bleeding friend.

  Alex finally managed to get a flame from the lighter, a wavering flicker in the night with the tremors in his hands. Theo opened the book to a random page to expose the paper to the flame. This simple act had him gasping, still sprawled out on the ground and in pain.

  “Are you okay?” Alex asked as he put the flame to the page. It was then that he noticed that the page the book had been opened to was the same one he had touched last night, the page with Agatha Redden’s symbols scrawled along the center.

  Theo opened his mouth to respond but could only get out a wet moan. Finally, through a mouthful of blood, he was able to get out a few garbled words: “Go….get out of here…” His eyes appeared to be suddenly alarmed, as if he knew something Alex didn’t.

  Alex seemed confused at first because the pain at his back was now more than an unreachable itch, but a searing heat that seemed to boil his skin. But then he saw Theo bend into a fetal position as he let out a cry of pain that chilled Alex’s heart. Alex held the flame steady and could smell the smoke that wafted up from the burnt and curling corner of the exposed page.

  As he witnessed Theo’s pain, Alex lost his grip on the lighter for a split second. What he watched unfold was simply too much, and he momentarily lost control of his body.

  As the pages started to slowly catch fire, Theo seemed to freeze for a split second and then his face literally seemed to split in half. There was a wet ripping sound as something white was pushed through Theo’s mouth and, after a moment’s pause, the rest of his face. At first, Alex though the flecks of white among all of the blood were teeth, but as his friend’s face was folded open like some impatient flower in bloom, Alex realized what was happening.

  There was paper coming out of Theo’s mouth. Somehow, several pieces of paper were defying the laws of physics, pushing through his throat and tearing through bone and flesh. Alex knew that this could not be real, but there it was in front of him: Theo was convulsing on the ground with several sheets of paper sticking out of his head. Closer inspection revealed that the paper consisted of sheet
s of a manuscript and among them were Agatha Redden’s inscriptions. One of the pages had cut neatly through Theo’s left eye, its edge curled upwards toward the night sky. Another had torn through the top of his skull and pointed into the night like the horn of some ungodly unicorn.

  It was this last bit that shocked Alex’s body back into working order. The lighter went forgotten, lying on the ground two feet away from the book. The page that had caught fire for a brief moment stood on the thin threshold of being consumed or sputtering out. And as Alex slowly began to back away from the horrible scene, he did something that he didn’t fully understand, something that he would later realize had been influenced by the powers within the book.

  He darted forward and patted the flame down with his hand until it was fully extinguished. The heat that briefly engulfed his hand was nothing compared to the stinging that continued to spread across his back. With the small fire out and only the bottom edge of the page charred, Alex picked up the book and gave Theo a final look. If he was still alive, there were no clear signs and besides that, if he were still breathing, he surely wouldn’t be for much longer.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said, truly meaning it but unable to prevent his course of actions. He could feel himself being pulled away, guided by some unseen hand that seemed to wrap around the entire night. “I’m so sorry,” he said again as he left Theo and headed for his car with A Collection of True Evils tucked under his arm.

  ***

  By the time he had gotten back into his car, the itch across his back had started to die down. He threw the book into the back seat and drove home slowly. He felt as if he were dreaming and every movement he made felt as if he were moving underwater. When he unlocked his door and entered his dark apartment, he had been expecting Theo to be waiting for him there, torn face and all, waiting to snatch him away from this world and carry him into whatever hell had inspired Harold Nesmith’s work. And although there were no ghosts waiting in his apartment for him, there was a sense of tension in the air as he brought the book into his home.