“Of course, Jules,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you need. But you must tell me what’s happening here. Whatever it is, you have to let me help.”
“I will do. I will. Just please take the book and put it away. Then I’ll tell you everything. As best I can make sense of it all anyway.”
I nodded my assent and did as he asked, picking up the book and slotting it into the rucksack I had resting under my chair. As I did so I took a quick glance over it. It was a paperback anthology of short horror stories. A dusty artefact of some old second hand bookstore or charity sale. The cover had a gaudy, colourful illustration of a screaming girl in a loose-fitting blouse. The corners were bashed, there was a thick fold cutting across the front and white crease lines ran up the spine so deeply that a handful of the yellowing, grimy pages from the middle of the book were in danger of coming loose and falling away.
At that first look, it seemed no different from any one of a hundred other books I’d seen cluttering up Jules house over the years. He was a collector of sorts, in a minor way at least, fond of trailing through second-hand bookshops or charity stalls for some forgotten, long out of print curiosity or other. Horror stories, science fiction stories were his thing, the older, the stranger, the more obscure the better. The rest of us, by which I mean all his friends, you can be sure mocked him horribly it, but Jules didn’t care. Give him a few drinks and he’d talk for hours, or at least as long as we’d allow him, about his latest discovery. Oliver Onions, Robert Bloch, Robert Chambers, Arthur Machen – these names he whispered to us like a liturgy, like a prayer. He was passionate about these stories, certainly, but nothing he’d spoken of before had ever affected him in the way this particular book had. And yet, to all appearances, there was nothing at all remarkable about it, so far as I could see. I slipped it away quickly out of sight, eager to hear the story he had to tell.
***
“I don’t remember when I bought it,” he began. “You know what I’m like. I pick these things up all over the place. I couldn’t tell you precisely where or when I found half of them. Sometimes they can lie in a pile for years before I get around to actually reading them, so that in itself is not unusual. Neither is it entirely unusual that, since reading it, I haven’t been able to find any other copies available for sale among any of the dealers I know of. A lot of these books are old and fragile. They were always ephemeral. They weren’t made to last and there may never have been all that many sold in the first place, so it’s not surprising that having found one copy it’s hard to locate another one.
“These things are not so unusual in themselves and I want to be clear about that from the start. There have been plenty of strange things happen to me in the past few days, so it’s important not to dwell on matters which may be far simpler to explain. And yet, at the same time, it is true to say that this book which has troubled me so much is one which I do not recall ever seeing until five days ago and for which I cannot find another copy anywhere in the world.
“It was Sunday afternoon when I started reading it. I’d had a quiet day, nursing a bad head left over from a dinner party I’d been at the previous evening. I sat down late in the afternoon with a coffee and an urge to lose myself in a book for while and this book, the one I just gave you, was the first upon which I laid my hand. There was nothing mysterious about the choice; it was simply the first book I picked up.
“It is an anthology, as you saw, but, I have to say, not a particularly good one. It has a few stories by authors I am fond of, but mostly it is full of second-rate pieces. Hackwork and filler items of the sort that bulked out most magazines back in the days these things were being published. Not a very distinguished collection all round and, I have to say, I wasn’t paying a great deal of close attention to it as I read. What with my aching head, the warmth of my living room and the slowly darkening afternoon sky I was, in truth, struggling to keep my eyes open after a while. Eventually I gave into the urge and did fall asleep, the last story I was reading remaining unfinished in my lap. Most of the collection left not much of an impression on me at all, but that last story I remember clearly. Not because it was particularly good, if anything it was precisely the opposite reaction that made it stick in my head.
“It was by a writer I’d never heard of before (and whose name I am now irritatingly unable to recall) who seemed obsessed with describing, in minute and painstaking detail every single thing his main character, a dull nonentity, did or saw or felt or touched. The entire story was a nothing but description of his every action, his every movement – getting out of bed, getting dressed, eating breakfast, cleaning a spot off his trousers, putting his tie on, going to work – on and on it went, a seemingly plotless, pointless description of a character going though a mundane, daily routine. Only at one point in the story did this narrative give way to anything approaching an injection of action or interest. Here’s how it happened:
“The character is walking through town, approaching a pedestrian crossing. As he waits to cross, he sees a friend over on the other side of the road. Again, all this is set out in vivid, meticulous detail – the colour of the dress the friend is wearing, the shop she is standing in front of, the way she pulls her hair to one side, the sound of a newspaper seller calling out to passers by, the sight of a small boy crying and being scolded by his mother as he drops his ice cream cone. When the crossing light shows, the man steps out into the road. At that moment there is a loud screech of brakes. He turns his and sees a bus, its driver having not noticed the signals change, race towards him. The driver brakes hard but too late. The bus crashes into the man as he stands helpless in the middle of the road, killing him stone dead. Or, at least, I presume he is dead. It is hard to think otherwise, but I cannot say for sure since that scene is the last thing I remember reading before I fell asleep. Crucially I remember it was not the end of the story. There were another ten pages or so still to go at the point at which I dropped the book. I could not read any longer though, my eyes were drooping too heavily, so I put it aside in favour of a nap with no particular intention to ever pick it up again.
“For the next day or so I can’t say I gave the story or the book a single moment’s thought. The book returned to a pile on a shelf and I went to work and got on with things just exactly as normal. Everything about the week began perfectly as I would have expected it to right up until Tuesday afternoon. That was the point at which things began to take a turn for the strange.
“I’d arranged to meet my friend Sophie for lunch and, after a fairly low key morning in the office, went out at around twelve-thirty. As I came close to the pub I arranged to meet her in, I spotted Sophie across on the other side of the road. She spotted me too and as I waited to cross the road towards her, she stopped and smiled. It was a windy day and her dress billowed slightly in the breeze, her free hand brushing the hair from out of her eyes as she waved to me with the other. Watching her, waiting for the crossing lights to change, I was overcome by a powerful sense of déjà vu on a scale far, far more profound than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I felt a shiver pass through me, my legs buckling as though the ground itself were shaking. For a moment I thought I might actually faint, so powerful and disorienting was this sensation. Everything around me, everything I could see and hear, I knew I had already seen before. At that very moment I realised where it was this remembrance came from. Everything described in the story was happening to me here. Sophie and her dress and her hair, the newspaper seller, the small boy and his ice cream - they were all here around me, just and exactly as they had been described in the story I’d read a few days before.
“This realisation came over me suddenly, and I was still shaken by it when the traffic lights changed and the crossing indicator came up. Just as I was about to cross however, I remembered the story again. I stopped and looked to my right just in time to see the bus slamming on its brakes, screeching past me, missing me by no more t
han a foot.
“How I got through the rest of that afternoon, I cannot say. Goodness only knows what Sophie thought of me, since I can’t have said more than two words at a time all the way through lunch. I left work early and ran home. All I could think about was getting to that story again. I wanted to find it, to make sure that what I thought I’d read was actually there, to make sure that I had not dreamt the whole thing. More than that, though, I had a horrible cold dread in my stomach at the thought of those last ten pages, the ending to the story which I had never read. What happened in those pages? Did the character – whom by now I could not help but think of as myself – die or did he survive somehow as I had? Either way I was sure that whatever happened in those pages was in some way also fated to happen to me. Either those pages held my future, or they held a version of my future which I had managed, perhaps only temporarily, to escape. Whatever was in them, I had to read it.
“I got home, straight away picked up the book and rifled through its pages. The story was not there. I double-checked to make sure it was the same book. It was. The other stories I’d read were all in place as I remembered them, the cover, the title page, these things were all as they should be, only the story I was looking for was missing. I checked the contents page, I checked to see if any pages could have fallen out, I even went through the whole book page by page to see if there were any inexplicable gaps in the numbering or ordering, but nothing helped. The story I was looking for, the story I knew I had read only a few days before, was no longer in the book.
“At this point, my friend, I’m not ashamed to say that I think I lost control of my mind for a while. Perhaps you think that an overreaction? Perhaps you might think that a grown man like myself should be able to shrug off an event like this, strange though it was, and carry on with the day nonetheless. You may be right. All I can say is that I could not. This thing, whatever it meant, affected me deeply in a way I find hard to explain. If I had not read that story, if I had not remembered it again at that precise moment, I know I would be a dead man now. That bus would have hit me. This much is certain. What is less explicable is the sense I had that night that somehow, somewhere I was a dead man. The bus had hit me. And what I was living now was nothing more than a dream, nothing more than the last flickering thoughts of a dying brain. Without the pages being there to give some sense of reality to this situation, I did not know what to do. I could not be sure of anything anymore.
“I do not remember much of what happened for the next day or so. I remember the nights passing and the mornings coming, but what I did with that time, I truly do not know. When my senses returned to me this morning I was sitting the in the middle of my living room. Every book on every shelf in my house had been pulled off and ripped apart. There were pages and covers strewn everywhere around me. The only book that remained untouched was the one I gave to you just now. I sat with it cradled in my arms like a child. At some point I had been crying. There were tears drying on my clothes and on my cheeks.
“Since that moment I have not wanted to open that book or to look inside it. If I opened it right now I do not know whether I would find the story I was looking for or not, but I think it best I do not find out. I have, as I say, made some inquiries as to the availability of other copies of the book or other printings of the story (the title of which I would rather not reveal to you, for fear you feel motivated to look into the matter yourself), but none have been forthcoming. So be it. I think the best way forward for me is to put the book aside, to try to forget it exists. This is what I need you for, old friend. Keep it away from me, but keep it safe. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t like the thought of it coming to any harm. I will be in your debt more than I can ever repay.”
***
All of this happened a little more than five weeks ago. Telling the story put a strain on Jules and it took almost all the energy he had left just to get through it. I promised to look after the book as he asked and this seemed to reassure him to some degree. We left each other’s company, promising to meet again soon, but as it turns out we have not. I was concerned for Jules and called him several times in the week following that meeting, but he never returned my messages. I didn’t exactly blame him. He had bared his heart to me that afternoon in a way that I could imagine would be uncomfortable for a proud, strong man like Jules to cope with. It would be difficult to keep up our friendship without referring directly to the story he’d told me, and yet to discuss it might well be the last thing he wanted at this time. Best to leave it for a while, I decided and waited for Jules to turn up on my doorstep again or for our paths to cross as they invariably did every few weeks.
As to his tale and the missing story he told me about, I confess I paid it no credence whatsoever. Even while Jules was telling it I had decided that he was suffering from a mental collapse of some sort. The book, I was sure, was no more than a yellowing, dusty bundle of paper and ink. There was nothing mysterious or magical about it and to think otherwise seemed ridiculous.
At least so I thought until yesterday evening.
I came home late from work and, finding nothing on television and nothing that grabbed my attention online, I searched around my flat for something to read that would take my mind off what had been an irritating day. Unlike Jules, I am not a great reader myself. I do not keep a great deal of books around the house and those I did have I had already read, all that is except for the book Jules had given me to look after. As I say, I did not accept that there was anything strange about the book so I did not think there anything wrong with me opening it and reading it. The idea that this might be dangerous in any way, reckless even, simply did not cross my mind.
So it was that I began reading. I don’t particularly share Jules’ tastes in literature and the stories I read in this collection did not do much, if anything, to change my opinion. As Jules had said, they seemed dull and obvious, their plots clumsy and stale, their shocks all too well telegraphed to have any impact at all and I read through them quickly and with half an eye on an early night. Only when I began reading the story Jules had described to me did my interest rise.
I didn’t realise what was happening at first. I was several pages into it when it suddenly struck me that this was the missing story, the one Jules had been so desperate to find again. A grim shiver passed through me, but I continued reading. I know I should have stopped. I should have stopped as soon as I realised, but I didn’t. Something about the strangeness of the story and the things Jules had told me about it made it impossible for me to put down. It was exactly as Jules had described – a detailed depiction of everyday mundanities in the life of a single character. Rather than being dull, though, rather than the character being a nonentity, there was a strange richness in the telling of the story. There was, to my mind, something almost hallucinatory about the level of detail the author had put in to his tale. More than that, the character at the centre of the story was clearly Jules himself. The resemblance was unmistakable and impossible to avoid, so much so that it seemed bizarre that Jules could have failed to notice it at his first reading.
As I read on, I came to the part of the story that Jules had described to me. Standing by the crossing. The girl across the street. The newspaper seller. The small boy. They were all there just as he described them. And just as he’d said, the scene ended with a bus running through the lights, ploughing into the main character, knocking him to the ground, killing him dead.
There was no ambiguity to the story as I read it. The character was dead, there was no way he could have survived an impact like that. When I turned the page, though, to see what happened next, I found there was not, as Jules had said, another ten pages of story to go. Rather, the next page in the book brought the beginning of the next story in the collection. I checked again, looking back at the contents page, at the sequence of page numbering, but there were no pages missing. The impact with the bus was the way Jul
es’ story ended. There were no missing pages, no mysterious ending for him to find.
I did not know quite what to think about this story – the very fact of its existence, the way Jules could not find it a second time, those missing pages that were not missing at all – but having read it, I felt I had to speak with Jules as soon as possible, for us to try and figure out together what to make of it all. But it was late by this point, well into the early hours of the morning and I thought it best to leave it till a more sociable hour.
I called his number this afternoon. The phone rang for a long time and when it was answered it was not Jules at the other end but his father. His voice was faint and cracked with a deep weariness that chilled me just to hear it. He told me what had happened as best he knew it. Jules took his own life yesterday evening. Just around the time, so far as I can figure it, that I first picked up the book he’d given me. He had not recovered, it seemed, from the shock of what happened to him that day. He’d been withdrawn and uncommunicative for weeks. He had been absent from work. He hadn’t been seeing anyone. He had been suffering quietly on his own and, eventually, decided to bring it all to an end.
I will not say for certain that my reading of the story and what he did were directly connected – I carry enough guilt with me, as do all his friends, for what I did and did not do for Jules without also taking that weight on board. All I know is that I have not opened the book again. I do not want to know whether his story is still in there or not. And I do not want to know how many pages it has.