The Little Black Book

A pair of pale colorless fingertips grazed the coarse gravel hanging down towards the ground as if they were reaching for it. Swaying like boneless twigs in the wind back and forth as gravity pulled on their weight mimicking dull but lively movement, the persons head hung similarly. The quiet strokes the persons hair made as they also tickled the ground soon became sludges as each strand absorbed like a sponge the flaring color of many alarming warning signs. The color of a siren racing to put out a fire, the color of a fatal accident on the road, the color of once clear bags filled up through needles and tubes in hospitals.

Slung over a shoulder like a bag, the body itself looked merely like an accessory, especially in the way the girl carried it with a still indifference etched into every feature of her face. The only thing you’d be able to tell about this girl is that she looked like she’d watched every night from dusk til dawn without batting an eyelid. The shapes under her eyes themselves looked like darkened crescent moons.

The girls foot steps merged from brittle crunches on the gravel to echoing hollowed paces.

Silence caressed its way down the walls as the sound of her steps came to a halt right before the very back of the cave. What was before her many would not have seen disguised in the dark.

Large and twice her size, she herself standing at 161 centimeters, nestled in the stone was the front of a leather-bound book perfectly camouflaged by the dark due to its ebony charcoal coloring.

Reaching steadily forward the girl touched the lock of the book. Swiftly in a motion so quick you’d blink and miss it, ashy smoke seeped out smothering the two figures and sucking them into the book through the lock hole.

The smell of pine and rusty iron doused the atmosphere of the chapter in the book the girl had entered. Dragging the body from the feet, a circle was drawn appearing like red paint from the head of a paint brush.

Dropping the body without a flinch or care in the center of the circle the girl stepped back out of it.

A rustling of leaves that could not be seen arose, getting louder like the hum heard when a hoard of bees is approaching from the distance.

Without flinching, a gust of icy wind shot past her body, slicing her with invisible papercuts and making the cold infiltrate under her skin. This arctic wind brought with it the sound of the rustling leaves which seemed to belong to a flock of shadowy monsters with Luna eclipse eyes.

They hovered around the body, some outstretching and tying themselves to the body like a rope and hanging it in the air from the ankles.

As one would imagine a school of carnivorous piranhas attacking their meal, the shadows dove at the body devouring it. At the same time all the blood from the circle, and that which was left bottled in the corpse, began to absorb into the school of shadows.

When the shadows cleared all that was left was a watering can made from bone and inside 4 liters of blood.

The shadows flew off taking the dark of the paged walls with them, and soon the setting of the chapter was an empty forest bed with cleared soil. In the sky a crimson full moon highlighted the watering can as the girl kneeled down next to it, her eyes glazed and reflective of the color before her.

Disinterested and idly she held out her right palm until a smaller version of the book she’d entered was summoned and placed itself in her hand.

She opened to Chapter Six in the book, and there on the title page of the chapter read the scribed instructions, “Chapter Six: How to grow money trees. Step one: Rip out the 30 pages from this chapter, scrunch them up and plant them in the ground.

Step two: Kill a person you hate. Someone you despised in your past, who made life unrightfully cruel for you. Someone who you feel your life would’ve been better without.

Step three: water the seeds with their blood and watch as a forest of your own money trees grow and bloom each year on this exact date.

A WORD OF CAUTION: If you refuse to kill, we will kill the one you cherish most and their blood shall be the blood you feed the seeds with.”

Flipping to the next page the girl began ripping out the pages, scrunching them into balls like she used to do with handwritten assignments that weren’t up to standard.

Spacing them apart by about the length of the body she’d dragged there, her hands met the soil and became even dirtier than they already were as she planted a chapter’s worth of paper back to the ground from whence it came.

Feeling the weight mostly in her knees and shoulders, the girl carried the watering can and began feeding the seeded pages with the blood of the girl she’d killed. Cunning Shelbee Braxton who had made her feel so worthless in high school was now truly reaping what she’d sown, and soon Rae would be, all the more, anything but worthless. If anything, she was being repaid all the worth that Shelbee had stolen from her, so it was fine.

It was fine.

Better to kill a tactless bully then have someone she cared for suffer.

Each hole where the blood had been shed began to glow like a spotlight of red, and up from each sprung trees with bark the same color as what they’d been watered with.

Reaching three times higher than Rae, they grew and bloomed out in green leaves. Green leaves shaped in rectangles each with 100-dollar value printed onto them and each tree had about 350 leaves.

Rae looked up as one leaf fell from the trees and floated down into her palm weightlessly.

The price of her sin was, in comparison, much lighter in her hand than the body she’d carried.

Dropping the money onto the ground, Rae burst out in the most emotion she’d displayed all night, and it was rage. She kicked the bone watering can and let it smash against the trunk of a tree. The shadow monsters gathered around it once again like a hoard of hungry leeches and devoured it.

As per her decided ritual, Rae scathed her index finger so that it’d bleed and used her own blood to cross out the title of the chapter and replace it with her own.

It read: “Chapter Six: I became a murderer.”

Rae’s life was never ideal, but she’d never imagined it’d turn out like this.

She’d made a deal and she was trapped in it now, at least for a year, that’s all she had to endure it for, after that she would be free and financially set for the rest of her life.

Be careful when you scream out in agony to nothing and no one, because more than likely there’s something listening somewhere. Rae had screamed. She had screamed out with a pain in her heart so bewildering she had contemplated leaving life behind.

Life was cruel, people were horrible, and she had failed so many times and lost so much.

All she wanted was to make a life for herself where she could support herself, her struggling Mum and younger sister and feel free, and perhaps someday… happy.

It was in her weakened mind that her name was called.

She had closed her eyes to see only dark, curled up on the cold floor until a smell lingered where her nose almost touched the ground as the left side of her body felt something shift beneath. Earthy and fresh. It was a smell that took her back to childhood. Fresh pages from a new book.

Clean, brimming with the wonder of a journey about to be taken.

This was the bait, and she took it.

Jolting her eyes open Rae could see she was in a darkened room with the only light coming from above like a spotlight on the large book she had been laying on.

The sensation coursing through her empty body was warmth like that of a fire blazing in the wild of night, it was comfort, and the book was a flame of its own regard. A beacon luring the lost to it.

The books pages were opened to the introductory page and as Rae began to question what the title of the book might be, howling sounds of the screams that had left her lips moments before she had closed her eyes began echoing all around her like a tornado, making the still of the darkness that surrounded the book move like shadows.

Instantly her eyes were drawn to the large title page she stood on as it began to write in black ink on its own the following words, “We hear your pain, and we can help. We can give you the one thing that will make life easier for you. Infinite riches. You and your Mum could live comfortably, and you could repay those you’ve borrowed from. But… in order to do so, we need a body to manifest physical materials such as worldly riches. Will you link your soul to our pages so that we may connect to the physical world through your body?”

With a furrow of her brow Rae had one piercing question, “What do you get out of it?”

“Content for our empty pages” is all the book replied, “we too are empty and need to feel fulfilled.”

Having not long ago considered ending her life, Rae had nothing to lose, and agreed to lend her soul to the black book.

The silky ribbon bookmark reached out on its own and wrapped itself around Rae’s ankle. As if all the blood from her body was trickling down towards her feet, damp and uncomfortable, black ink seeped out from her body and ran down, absorbing into the paper of the book.

Soon all the paper was colored black. A red handwritten note began writing itself on the pages, “The deal is etched.”

Waking the next morning back in her own bed, the black book was in Rae’s hands, but smaller now.

The foreword read as such “Feed us accordingly each day to complete the exchange– you will find our menu inside the chapters of these pages. 12 chapters, 365 pages. Complete the daily menu and reap your riches. Fail to, and we eat away at your soul as compensation. If it gets to the point there’s nothing left of it, you shall perish. If your soul is still intact, be it whole or partially devoured by the end of the book, you can keep the riches and retrieve your soul, but we shall keep the parts that used to weigh it down and you can live a free life.”

Rae turned to the first Chapter of the book.

It was on the first day that she realized the severity of what she’d gotten herself into.

The first page required her to inflict pain upon herself by tearing the page out and continuously paper-cutting herself all over her body.

The second page stole all the words from her mouth that she would say and manipulate them into insults and curses so that anything she tried to say all day came out callous and sharp.

With each day she fed the book whatever it requested she would be rewarded with a large sum of money.

Rae was rich, and would keep getting richer. That was, so long as she played by the book’s rules.

It was clear that she had to complete all the instructions the book demanded, no questions asked. None at all.

Except one.

All of this would be worth it, wouldn’t it?