It started with an accident. In one of his many visits to the gigantic library that existed at the hills of the mountains, he found the book. A thick tome, written on parchment and bound with leather from some heretofore unknown animal. Inside the book were reams of esoteric symbols and words in several languages neither he, nor anyone else could translate. And that is where the accident ended and deliberate steps started.
Of course, it isnt entirely fair to say thats where it started. For example, why did he spend so much time in the library? What chain of events led to him finding the book? Was it the dissolution of his family, driving him to anger and eventually a simmering hate? Was it the wrong direction that his world was taking, making him feel unwanted and left behind in his own culture? Was it simply a desire to learn what he could, to find a way to fix both of those things?
You can rewind further and further and you would still not find the true beginning. The book, therefore, isnt a true beginning. But it marks a significant change. His aimlessness at an end, he had a new goal. A new purpose. He would translate the book and learn from whatever it had to teach him.
Years passed and the man grew old. He had travelled the world time and time again, each time visiting somewhere new. Finding some new clue, some new lead, that would send him on this loop again. Some parts of the book were known to him. It was like a test. You had to master the early stages before you could understand everything. You had to prove yourself worthy. If you couldnt, or you werent, then the mysteries would remain unknown. Locked away behind a script that puzzled even the most talent linguists. But he didnt give up; he couldnt. This was all he had left. He had locked his anger and fear away behind the symbols and strange ink that the book held. Giving up meant returning to all that. Reclaiming the anger his father had instilled in him and the fear that came with a world he couldnt understand anymore. Each time he felt like the book was too much, he reminded himself what the alternative was and he just kept going.
Each lap around the world revealed more of the book. Each year that passed increased his zeal to learn the rest. Learning what was inside the book was the only goal. His family, the world around him, they werent forgotten, but they were just a memory. Like a show he had seen years before. They almost werent real. The book was real, the words and the things inside were real. They just needed to be revealed.
The purpose of the book was revealed in the deepest heart of the jungle. In the heat, and the giant insects, he communed with witch doctors and men of a faith that scared him. That stayed with him long after he left. A faith in something so alien, so unknowable, that he dreamed of it. Dreamed of the void, the darkness in the sky and two eyes opening and looking straight at him.
The book told of this faith. Told of the dreamlike entities that existed beyond. Told of their demise and how they were banished to their new realm.
But the witch doctors were but men. They knew a lot, but they didnt know everything and teaching him was their final act. A curse, they said. The knowledge could not be forgotten and the man would live with it. Suffer through it. And one day, should he be so lucky, he would find someone to pass it on to. If he didnt, so they said, his life would last as long as the entities that had been imprisoned. An eternity of being watched from beyond anything he could possibly know.
But knowing the purpose of something and knowing how to use it, or what it all means, are two different things and the man was forced to press on. While the witch doctors told him much, they didnt know the languages. They didnt understand the symbols. And, to his great despair, they could not point him to anyone who could help. For the first time since the book had passed to him, he was at a dead end.
Here, then, could be another beginning. Another point in his life where you could start the story or, more accurately, mark an important change in his life. The knowledge could not be forgotten. Everywhere he went, he thought what he wasnt supposed to. Knew what he shouldnt. He understood that this was the curse of the witch doctors, the same curse they had been afflicted with. The voice of someone else inside his head.
It was this voice now that drove his actions. Because he would have never chosen to go home at this juncture. Yet, six months after his meeting with the witch doctors he found himself at a familiar door. The door to the family home. The door behind which sat his father, whittling a stick, flicking slivers of wood at him and his three sisters. A jug of the worse booze a man could stomach and a small, cold fire in the hearth.
As he stared at this door, the same red as his childhood he held onto those memories. Kept them, as painful as they were, in the front of his mind. They were his and while he thought his own thoughts, had his own memories, the other would slumber. Not sleep; it never slept. But every now and then it would rest. Now was one of those times and he could not predict when it would end and that soft, quiet voice full of some emotion he was too small to understand, would start to move him again. To make him travel in a way he did not want to.
The book scared him now. He was afraid of it. He wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, from his case where it was wrapped in old rags and sealed with belts, he could feel it. He would always know where it was. And it would always follow him. Even if he threw it into the ocean, it would reappear somewhere and someone would claim it and bring it back to him, as he had done to the witch doctors.
He had been at the door for almost ten minutes now. Staring at it. He raised a hand and clasped the knocker, sending a hollow, empty echo down the corridor. He knew that noise and as a small child he could think of nothing more terrifying as that echo. Immediately he heard sharp, deliberate footsteps. They were not the steps of his father, a man too dazed by the drink and herb to walk without shuffling. It was not the footsteps of any of his sisters who walked slowly, as if they had no idea where they were or where they were going. This was someone new. Someone he didnt recognise. For a moment, he wondered if his family, such that was left of it, no longer lived here.
The door opened and standing before him was a brute of a woman. She was bigger in every dimension that he was, her face was a map of sternness and she was dressed in a crisp, albeit slightly wrinkled nurses uniform. Something clicked into place in both of their brains immediately. She was his fathers nurse. She had always been severe. A woman who brooked no foolishness, who disagreed with everything that ran counter to her mission of ensuring his father lived as long as possible.
Without a word she turned and let him inside. He left his case in the front room and eyed her carefully. Could she feel the power he had brought here? Could she understand what was now mere feet from her? But her face did not change a bit. She scowled, but she always scowled. She walked her quick pace to the back of the house and out of habit, he followed.
The father lay, eyes closed, breathing shallow and irregular, on the same bed he had slept in for his entire adult life. The nurse stood at the door and watched as he tried to speak to the man. But there was no response.
Over a cup of something he had not drunk in many years, she told him that he was close to death. That his sisters had split and never looked back. She could not say anymore about them. His mother was long dead, as he had suspected. At the mans hands. Also as he had suspected.
He thanked the nurse who did not seem to care. He did not thank the father. In fact, he did not see him again. He spent several hours in the front room reading, or trying to read the book by candlelight. The words and symbols flicked into his head and out again just as quickly. But there was something there now, some flicker of understanding. The longer he read, the more he thought he could read. A strange thought, one that he could not tell was his or not, arose in his mind. It wasnt a big thought. But he pushed it away, and in that pushing, he felt more in control. More awake. But the thought would not stay buried for long and with it came understanding. And in that understanding he knew what to do.
The man left the nurse, left the father, left the house. It was all so familiar yet so alien. Like everything had been changed, but in a way that made it look like there had been no change.
He left the town. He dragged the carcass of the chest behind him. Everything except the book had been emptied from it and was either back at the house or scattered on the road. He mumbled something unknown as he walked, and everyone veered away from him. Even people he knew he recognised, people he might have called friends in another life left him alone. He had goals. A destination.
A horrible place exists in every world. A place where atrocities happened and salted the earth, in a literal sense, but also in a very psychological sense. If you came to this place, even without the knowledge of what happened there, you would feel it. Usually accompanied by the everpresence of death, these places do not get built on. No one visits them. The emptiness, however, aids in certain rites.
The book was history, as he had learned from those accursed witch doctors. They knew more than they said, but they kept it from him. He still didnt know. They were the ones who wrote the book. They were the ones who made themselves forget what it meant. They were clever. Oh so clever. They learned how to open and close the gates. To seal them. They were the ones that made the book so hard to navigate. But they had failed and this puny human, this ant crawling through the mud of reality dragging the case behind him like it was the only thing keeping him from realising just how insane he had become, had done the unthinkable, and in so doing had achieved the unforgiveable. The screams of what was left of his sanity echo through the void. A small part of him knew and understood.
And locked away in the back of his subconscious, alert and aware, all he could do was scream.