by Barry Napier
He fell into his bed and was surprised to find that sleep came easily. He wasn’t plagued by guilt at leaving his friend behind in order to save the book, nor was he kept awake in trying to understand why he had felt the need to save the book at the last moment. Sleep claimed him swiftly, even when a growing itch began to spread along the course of his chest.
It was this itching that stirred him awake shortly after five o’ clock in the morning. He tore his shirt off and clicked on his bedside lamp. He glanced down to his chest and wasn’t at all surprised to see that there was writing there. This time the writing was small and incredibly neat. It was full of punctuation, indents and eerily symmetrical spacing. The writing started at his collarbones and made its way down to his hips. And from what he could tell, the writing wrapped around his ribs and carried on along his back.
It then occurred to him that he had not thought to check his back for writing when he had come home despite the fact that it had been causing him excruciating pain at the library. Alex got up in a panic, almost screaming. But by the time he was in the bathroom with the light on and standing in front of the mirror, he was surprisingly calm. He looked at himself in the mirror and slowly started to read the words that encircled his body. After a while, reading backwards in the reflection and squinting at the small words became too much and his head started to ache.
As the sun came up, Alex dug through his bedroom closet and found a camera that he had only used once. He stood in front of the mirror and took pictures of his bare chest and the words that covered it. He spent the better part of an hour doing this, taking pictures from every possible angle to make sure he didn’t miss a single word. He bent in awkward positions to get the words that danced across his back, not stopping until he knew he had captured every single word.
He called the university and cancelled his classes for the day. Then, over a bowl of cereal and cheese toast, he scanned the pictures into his computer. He pulled the first picture up, zoomed in on the text and started to jot the words down on a legal pad. By noon, he had managed to copy down the words from four of the pictures. His wrist was aching, but he didn’t care. All he knew was that the itch had stopped and there was something incredibly powerful working through him as he copied the words down from the photos onto paper.
This time, there were no short phrases. Now the words along his chest, ribs and back seemed to be telling a story. He sat there and wrote all day until he had finally copied down every last word that had covered his body. And as he wrote down the ghostly graffiti, the itching became gentle, almost soothing. By the time he was done, the words that had been spread across his body began to fade away.
***
Alex had been so intrigued by the story that he had found written upon his body that it consumed the rest of his week. He didn’t attend any of his classes, making up for his absences simply by putting his class assignments on the university’s website. Alex spent two days in his apartment, reading the eight legal pad pages over and over again. He was very careful to read the story silently because he still remembered what had happened to the bird, to his landlord and to Theo.
He found himself trying to forget about Theo and what had happened behind the library that night, but it did no good. But when he went to the book sitting on his bedside table and flipped through its cursed pages, the pain of leaving his friend behind was washed away. Alex would stare at A Collection of True Evils for several minutes on end, sometimes without even opening its cover. He would simply look at its cover and dream about the evil hands that had touched it and the remnants of the doomed souls that haunted its pages and any readers who set their eyes upon them.
He read the book slowly, taking it piece by piece. He wasn’t really reading it so much as studying it, getting familiar with Nesmith’s style and the tormented individuals he wrote about. Some of their philosophies made a sordid sort of sense and Alex began to think that there was some tidy coherence to evil and its misunderstood nature.
When Friday night came around, he had considered calling the people in charge of that weekend’s horror convention to regretfully cancel his appearance. In the end, he had decided not to. He had put too much work and thought into his speech and he’d most likely regret passing up the opportunity. So for the first time since bringing A Collection of True Evils into his home, Alex worked on something else. He spent three hours revising his speech on Friday night and then went to sleep feeling somewhat relieved that he had been able to set the book aside, even if for only a few hours.
He awoke Saturday morning with an itch at his back. He checked himself in the mirror but saw no signs of text or other ghostly manifestations anywhere on his skin. He took a shower and checked his body over once more, but still found nothing. The itch came and went throughout the morning and by the time he was at the convention, he assumed that it could be a reaction of his nervous mind to public speaking. He’d never been much on giving presentations and even standing in front of a class of twenty college students sometimes sent his guts aflutter.
He managed to get control of his nerves just before it was time for his speech. He had locked himself inside the men’s room and went over his speech one last time. Then, confident that he would do just fine, he returned to the convention and waited for his name to be called.
When the director of a new slasher flick called his name from the stage, a rather large roar of applause filled the room. Alex stood, smiling as politely as he could, and was very much aware of the weight of his speech as it rested in the pocket of his jacket. He walked to the stage, turned to the crowd and once again smiled out to the six hundred or so people in attendance.
He reached for the speech in his jacket pocket, but his hand froze as his fingers grazed the folded pages. As he stood in front of the crowd with a nervous smile on his face, the itch returned to his back. Then, just like the night behind the library where he had watched Theo die, Alex felt something tugging at him. He imagined the itch at his back as the places where the puppeteer had inserted the strings into his flesh. And now the hand that controlled him started to pull.
Alex dropped his hand from his jacket pocket, leaving his speech hidden there. The crowd before him waited, a bit impatiently now. “Sorry,” Alex said. “I’ve got a bit of stage fright, I suppose.”
A few muffled laughs sounded out from the audience. Alex cleared his throat and then thought of the book that sat on his bedside table. Then the hand that had been reaching into his jacket pocket for his speech dug into the left pocket of his pants.
He withdrew eight folded pieces of paper that had been torn from a legal pad in his apartment. He unfolded them and sat them on the podium. As he smoothed the pages out, he felt the itching at his back disappear. He looked down to his handwriting on the pages and smiled out to the crowd again.
The six hundred people in the audience continued to stare up at him, waiting for him to give his speech. Alex returned their gazes but all he could think of was the book on his bedside table, the bird at his window and watching his landlord die through a peephole.
His speech would have to wait for another day.
Today, he had a story to tell.
END
If you enjoyed this story, you can enjoy more of Barry Napier’s short fiction in his two short story collections:
Broken Nightlights: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004U7F68A
Tricks of Shadow and Light: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0067RJM6I
Barry Napier has had more than 40 short stories and poem appear in print and online. He is the author of The Everything Theory series, The Bleeding Room, The Hollows, and The Masks of Our Fathers. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his wife and three children.
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