January 15th 2018

In my line of work, searching for the next great story is like finding a needle in a haystack. I'm constantly looking at some random writers work, reviewing and imagining their concepts. They always come up with the same old kind of stories, just with a different feel. It's like some of them don't even want to put the effort into making something new. They probably figure since this idea already makes money, why can't I do it just in a different way. They would write these two-hundred page plus manuscripts, and I’m stuck to review them and send them to my bosses. Most of these manuscripts get rejected and never make it past a concept. Others get shelved for a later time, only to likely never be published. I was once the best man in my job. I used to be able to get multiple books published, and I made good money out of it. Now, those days are long gone and I am hard-pressed to find anything worth publishing. My name is Matthew; I work in a publishing company as an editor/author in Chicago. This isn't my first time with a major company. I started in New York City, and then went to Los Angeles. Now my job has brought me to the windy city. I've been working for a little over a decade publishing work. You can name every genre under the sun; I've published at least one work for each of them. However, the last two years have seen my publishing output Spiral into a decline. Work I've approved to be published is now overridden by my bosses, or put away never to be published. Nothing that I approve is getting published. I need things to change for me, or else I risk being fired.

 January 22nd 2018

Something happened within the last week, something that could possibly alter my situation for the better.  I was trying to make my way home one day until I got lost. I wasn't used to the streets of downtown Chicago. For a good ten minutes, I was left wandering around like a lost tourist. I wandered and wandered until I found a small bookshop. It reminded me of one of those bookshops you find in a small town.  The books inside for the most part looked up to date, at least in the front of the store. Once you got to the back, it was like the books haven't been sold in years. As if that part of the store was frozen in time. Most of the pages were tinted yellow, the old leather on some of them started to chip away. I kept looking until something caught my eye. It was a book, but something about it struck a nerve in me. I removed it from the shelf to find a mostly black hardcover leather book. There were no fancy designs on it, no color, no picture, just a plain black book. I opened the book and found nothing inside of it. That's odd, why have a book with nothing in it I wondered. I turned to the first page and there was some writing. It was a prologue taking up only the first page. What it said left me with a burning curiosity.

“You may be wondering why this book has is empty. Why there is nothing but this inside of it. This book is more than just a book. This book is my tie to the physical world. People before you have written in this book before. However, you won't find a single trace in this book. You'll see those stories in your world. On the outside, I may look like an ordinary book. On the inside, I yield no form. With the exception of this text, this book is devoid of any text or markings. I have the power to make something for myself. I can make the story or world that I live in. however, I choose not to use that power. I choose to let people create the story for me. People are quite imaginative when it comes to making a story. It never ceases to amaze me on what kinds of ideas regular people can come up with. A man once wrote about a couple united in love and united in death. Another wrote about a fox outsmarting three farmers to help his family. Whatever you create will become my new life. You can take as long as you want remember, you can't rush creation. I shall become the main protagonist in your story, the one you lead to a happy ending or to their ultimate demise. Though I have given you the power to create, don't let that power get to you. I still have power of my own; I will change the story if needed. Otherwise, I have high hopes for your idea. I trust that you will be able to make something great”.

 February 3rd 2018

A lot has happened in the last few weeks, a lot of change had happened. This book that I found, it's not like any book that I've ever seen in my life. It's alive, not living and breathing but in a sense it can speak to me. I've been writing in it, figured if the stories I approve weren't successful, then I will make one that will be published. Of course my job is now in jeopardy as well, seeing as that I've been given an ultimatum from my boss. “Write me something that can be published within the next six months or you're fired”, he said.  I'll show him, I'll show him exactly what I can do. They all want to doubt my abilities; they don't know what I'm capable of creating. Who are they to look down upon me as if I was incapable of doing such a thing? Before I started my story, I “talked” to the book. I wrote questions into the book, they would disappear, and then the book would write back. It's weird to describe this without sounding crazy; I don't think there is any other way though.

 March 1st 2018

I'm slipping, I can feel it. Slowly, but I'm slipping enough to know that I'm losing myself. I can feel my mind disconnect from myself, I'm not the man that I used to be. Something is draining the life out of me. My deadline has been cut by two months, time is now of the essence. I hardly even see my office anymore; I've just been inside the confines of my own house. Since my last journal entry, it has been the same routine over and over; Get up, eat, write for five or six hours and then sleep for a few hours. The story itself has been going along at a good pace; working those long hours has been a good thing time wise. I could see letters become words, then the words becoming sentences. Those sentences soon became paragraphs; it wasn't long before those paragraphs became the first chapter in my story. The book is wise; it’s guiding me through a lot of it. It`s telling me grammar errors, plot holes, what could happen next. From what the book has told me, it has been around for eons. Passed around though hundreds of civilizations and constantly been a vessel of story work. However, it didn't tell me what book it was before it came for me. All it told me was that it had been almost 50 years since being written in.

April 13th 2018

I can feel the time slip away from me like sand cascading from my fingers. Today is my 31st birthday, yet I can't even relax and enjoy my day. All I can think about is this fucking book. Day in and day out has been writing, and writing constantly. It's driving me to the point of no return. My boss keeps calling me, constantly badgering me about my due date. “Matthew, you need to pick up the pace or else your deadline will be cut again”, said my boss. The last six weeks, I've been inside my apartment. I haven't seen the sun, haven't breathed fresh air, hell, I haven't cooked anything in that time.  Everything has been delivered to me, constantly eating out from almost every food place in Chicago I knew. In my time of isolation, I found out something about the book. The book will always come back if you destroy it if it's unfinished. About a week ago, I set that son of a bitch on fire. I watched it burn away into a pile of wolf-grey ashes. All that hard worked burned away right before my eyes, it felt satisfying to me. As if I was free from some unseen shackles that were placed on me. However, when I woke up the next morning, the book was on my nightstand. It somehow came back, all the text that I had written inside before looked as if I just written those very words. Over the course of that week I tried so hard to get rid of that Goddamn book. I burned it again, left it on the train, chucked it as hard as I could into Lake Michigan, anything I did to get rid of it worked at first; but the book would still return the next morning.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

April 26th 2018

I'm so weak; I can't keep doing this any longer. This book has drained too much out of me. Seeing my journal entries here, I haven't even discussed what exactly I wrote. I never even mentioned the kind of story that I wrote in that God awful book. Basically, I poured myself into it. I took all my emotions and created a story in which the main character claws and fights his way to the top of the food chain; Constantly killing, lying, doing anything to get to the top. After countless bloodshed and enemies, he would finally make it. Looking back, it makes me laugh so hysterically, you would thing I really was a psychopath. Finding humor in bloodshed and mass murder, it makes other people sick but makes me laugh. There has been constant knocking at my front door, probably my landlord trying to get rent out of me. Somtimes, I would be staring outside my front door hole and there would be no one there, but the knocking would continue. I really am losing my mind, I am probably past the pointo of no return. There is no way that I can somehow mentally fix myself; even if I come close, I would never be the same person that I once was.

May 8th 2018

There’s something here with me, I can sense it. I know it’s here with me in my house. I can never leave now, for I no longer fit with the outside world. No one can see the shell of my former self that I've become. There is no return from the abyss my mind has entered. I think… I think I snapped. I think whatever sanity I had left is completely gone. Thinking about it now makes me laugh; it makes me want to laugh until my lungs collapse. My house is disheveled, and whatever is left lies scattered about; mostly due to my fits of anger that have been growing ever so frequently. The blood of my body painted on the walls, my nails scratched away from trying to claw out my doors. My head in constant agony from the frequent blows I suffer, trying in vain to get the voices out of there. They talk to me, tantalizing me as if I was a little kid in middle school again. “Oh, poor Matthew can’t get us out of his mind”, one would tease. “If only he hit his head harder”, the other voice would say. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HEAD”!!! I would yell in a loud shrill yell before knocking myself out. Every time that happens, the voices would laugh at me just before I slipped out of consciousness. They would just laugh like a pack of hyenas, mocking me for my failures. I think it’s this damm book that made me this way; I lost everything because of it. I need to destroy it. I don’t care if it’s not done, there has to be some way that I can rid the world of this evil. No one should have to experience what I went through.

May 10th 2018

I shall die here, hiding in fear under my bed. Hiding away from the evil that has manifested before me; the evil that I created.  The book is alive, but not in the sense that it was before. It’s now a physical, living being. There is no part of me that doubts the fact that I will not survive what's coming for me. This is all my fault, all I wanted was that book to be destroyed. Now I've brought forth an evil in which the likes the world has never seen before. The book became the main character of my story. I tried to destroy it, but I guess it was the last straw for the book. The book enveloped itself into a thick black smoke. Out of it came a being, but it took the form of me. It looked exactly like me, I don't know how the book would know how I looked. It was an exact replica of me, everything was the same, our hair, skin tone, height. The only difference came when it finally opened its eyes, to my horror they were pitch black with only a slight outline of red. I knew I had to run, this thing was going to kill me. I quickly locked myself into my room and barricaded with everything I had left inside. Now, I lay here trying to keep as much silence as possible. It's toying with me, it knows I'm here. Every five minutes or so, I would get a knock on the door. They've been getting progressively louder as time has when on. The last time, it sounded like police were trying to get inside my room. Please if there is a God now, forgive me for my sins, and forgive me of all my wrongdoings in my life. My time is almost out, I have no time to write a will or to do anything else. What I will say is, if you find that book and you'll know when you see it, don't take it for all that is holy. I can hear it coming back now, the slamming on the door getting louder and louder, slamming like the drums of war, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. He's here, he is in the room with me. He is just standing there, waiting for the inevitable to happen. To whoever finds this, thank you for reading this, the last thing that anyone will ever know about me; The last written trace of my existance.

Epilogue

“Matt, this is one hell of a story”, “I'm the board is definitely pleased with the result”, said my boss. “Thank you sir, although it has been a stressful time writing that”, I said.  “ I must say, the fact that you pulled this in such short time off it amazing”. “I don't know why I doubted you in the first place”. “If I may, what drove you to write something like this”? “Well, I wanted to write something that would be brand new”. “I wanted to make something that no one has seen before, believe me it wasn't easy”. “I like how what you read is never really what was going on, it was a story within a story”. “I must admit, something like that is extremely ambitious, but you executed the idea with perfection”, said my boss. “Thanks again sir, I've always wanted to try something like that. "Makes me think that maybe we're all just part of a story that someone writes, every thought, every event, every action is written by someone”. “Maybe my story is written by some high school kid, writing a short story out of curiosity of whether he could do it or not”. “It could be some random idea manifested and taking form until it became something new”. “Dude, I want you to take some time off, maybe get some therapy, perhaps I worked you a little too hard with this book, said my boss with a face of concern”. “I'll make sure that your work is published ASAP". "You will be notified when everything is set and done and receive the very first copy". “Thank you once again for everything, take care of yourself”, said my boss. “I'll see you soon, and I'll be back with more”, I said, shaking my boss's hand and leaving his office.

What? Did you really think that I went through that crazy escapade of losing my mind? What you just read was nothing more than just a condensed form of the story I really wrote. None of that was real; none of what you're reading is real. Hell, even I’m not real, I'm just twenty-six letters mixed together to form the idea of me. I'm just a manifestation of an idea from the author's mind. To think I've existed inside his mind for a year, and this is just one form I take. I could have been much different, but for the sake of this piece the author modified me to fit this form. I don't know if I will have another form, but at least I have been seen by more than just the eyes of my creator. Now, I am digital; anyone can see me now. I am now free to anyone on the planet to see me, and it is all thanks to my creator. "I do wonder though, was this done well" ? "Was this whole reveal executed well"? I hope it was, but hoping can only get you so far.