The Book

You picked the book up because it looked interesting. Not the book itself, it was rather a plain thing, just a plain green book. You assumed it was old and you assumed it had once been covered with a dust-jacket. You were right on one count but wrong on the other. It never had a dust-jacket.

So it wasn't the cover that made it interesting. Was it the title?  Or lack of one rather. There had been a title there at one point, but the lettering had all been rubbed off,  just a few imprints of lines and curves remaining. Not enough to truly decipher.

No,  it wasn't the book itself, but where you found it. If it had been on a shelf somewhere, in a neglected section of the library, or a seldom dusted shelf in a pub alcove, you wouldn't have looked twice; such books blend into the background, become scenery. And if it had been in a box of secondhand books at a car boot sale,  you again wouldn't have looked at it twice, your attention diverted by flashy covers of newer books.

But no, this book was in none of those places. This book had been on the roof of your car.

You can't remember where you had been, and that's not even important now. You do remember stopping a few feet away, your car keys in your hand, and just staring. Such an odd thing to find. You remember how the olive green of the book stood out, clashed against the cherry red of the car. You remember thinking of apples and strawberries, of some bad pun about leaves.

You picked it up and glanced down the street. There was no-one about. It could not have fallen there, it must have been carefully placed, and you can think of no good reason why.

Eventually you stopped wondering why, and simply flipped the book open. Perhaps you were looking for a name on the inside. This book belongs to ... whoever. Perhaps you were curious to see how bad a book has to be before a person loses enough interest in it and abandons it mid-journey. It probably occured to you that maybe one person had dropped it and another presumed it was yours and placed it on the roof. None of that matters now.

The book's pages were yellowed and faded. For the first time you realised your initial estimate of 'old' was being kind. The book was ancient. And not even in English. It looked like Latin, but you weren't sure. Then you began to wonder if such a book may be worth something.

You made a few phonecalls, perhaps called into a couple of bookshops. Your enquiries were vague, because greed had gotten to you a little bit and you were then almost convinced it was worth money, perhaps a lot of money.

And then you had the idea to use google translate and see what it was all about.

You decided not to start at the beginning, but chose a block of text under a badly drawn illustration . It took you half an hour to type the paragraphs into the tiny text box, checking the spelling of the unfamilar words every minute or so. You wanted to get a decent chunk of it in there, enough to get a proper grasp of what it was. As you typed, you tried to read it aloud, slowly and probably with terrible pronunciation.

Then you clicked 'translate' and waited. You didn't have to wait very long. Google could not translate it.

Some people would have given up at that point, but you didn't. You took to reading large portions of the book to yourself. It became almost a form of poetry, perhaps you found the nonsense words soothing, a mantra to clear your mind. Maybe your initial curiousity had bloomed into a raging thirst to know, to comprehend.

You began to dream of the book. Especially the large, intricately drawn first letters of each chapter.

You found yourself doodling the lettering.

And then finally you found an answer. You had no idea what the main text read, but those lovely little illustrated capitals spelt out a message.

It said if you kept the book, you would die. Unless you gave it to someone else, and they read it.

You tried to sell the book on ebay, but took it down after thinking that selling was not giving. You walked into a charity shop with the express intention of donating it, but you knew that the book would go unchosen, upstaged by the flashy new books already on the shelf.

You got the feeling time was running out.

You considered leaving it on the roof of someone else's car, but it was such a gamble. They may just throw it away. They may flick through it and see it was not in English and give up.  If you just had to give it away, that would be easy, no, the hard part was getting the person to read it.

Then you thought about the young woman in the bookshop, the one who'd laughingly told you, as she looked up from a book almost as old, that she never gave up on a book, that she had a special interest in the arcane. And you were tempted to give it to her. So ridiculously tempted.

But you decided you couldn't do that.

And so now you sit, like you have so many nights lately, with the book in your hands, reciting the words, waiting for death. You're almost certain it's coming soon.  You've stopped going out, stopped getting dressed. In the last week you've barely eaten.

And as you read the book for perhaps the final time, you run your fingers down the spine and your wasted fingers spell out the title. You think it may have been called 'Self Fulfilling Prophecy'.