"Your turn"

Walking out of the coffee shop, still hazy and half-asleep. He had drunk too much over time for the caffeine to have any real effect, but the flavor was enough of a boost for him to at least open his eyes more fully. The man running towards him only half registering before his coffee was covering his chest.

A sharp gasp and a hushed apology were all he got in reply to the burning pain. He turned to yell at the unremarkable man, but he was already gone. Left at his feet, was a black notebook. A small leather-bound journal. In the end, what the journal said wouldn't matter. Neither would what would be written in it.

Picking up the book, he felt a small rush to his head, like maybe he had stood too quickly. He shook his head quickly and walked briskly away from the fevered man.

A few days passed uneventfully, but eventually the nightmares started. Like most things, they started off small. Serial killers, horror movie-esque scenes, and his own death were constant imaginings in those early days. But as the days went on, cosmic events and world-ending nightmares begin to whir endlessly in his mind. Eventually, they even began to play out in front of his eyes while he was awake.

Worried, his friends began to ask questions.

"Are you feeling okay? Have you been sleeping? Do you need some help, man? How are things at home?"

An endless parade of questions and nightmarish visions. Slow was the descent. And all the while, the book never left his hands. Never left his sight. He slept with it tucked beneath his pillow, and read from and scribbled in it at all hours of the day.

His nightmares became fear, became paranoia, became madness. A shell of his former self, the man raged and aged and grew bolder and bolder, until that dark, dark day.

Others tried to reach out to him, to help regain his grasp on reality, but reality is simply an experience. The book had altered the young man, put some sort of spell on him that no one could quite understand. The young man was young no longer, but an old, poor man fit for an asylum. He would scribble in his notebook, scream at specters (real or imagined--no one else could see them), and defend his precious book with all of the rage of a toddler backed by the strength of a man.

His madness ate at him, though it had only been a few short years since that fateful day on the corner of old and new. He decided to go back there, to the place it began.

He took off at a run, book still tucked tightly to his chest. Rounding the corner to his once favorite coffee shop, he collided with a rather familiar young man, and the book dropped from his clutch, landing at the younger mans feet.

"Your turn." the unremarkable man said quietly; more man than he had appeared in so long. And then he ran, ran as far as he could run.

After that is a strange moment. A sort of time that isn't meant to be remembered, merely mentioned.

A young man wakes from a rather ridiculous dream, of the world ending and a magic book that makes you insane. He stands, stretches languorously with a groan enough to wake the neighbors. A small smile graces his features, when he notices a small slip of paper beneath his pillow.

Curiously, he wonders what would have made him put paper under his pillow anyway.

He begins to look it over but freezes in place.

It's a check, a rather substantial check. Wondering endlessly at the possibilities laid out before them, he wonders who it could be from or what it could be for. He reads each line, but it has to be the most generic check he's ever seen. No sender to his knowledge and signed to him on the back but there, in the bottom left corner where the "for:" line is, it says two simple words.

"Your turn."

His blood runs cold. He turns, with a chuckle. Too much caffeine before bed, that must be it. Just too much caffeine before bed.