I want to tell you about the bookshop, but I’m going to stop for a moment and tell you more about the prison. Partly because it is a fascinating, old and rather creepy place, and partly because I want to try to keep you alive as long as possible.
(Yes, I know you don’t yet believe that if you stop reading, you die, but you will. And you are still reading, so somewhere deep inside, some part of your brain does believe. That’s what biologists call your survival instinct. That’s the part of your brain that wants to keep you alive. The same part that keeps you away from the edge of cliffs and lets you know instinctively to avoid venomous snakes and to hold your breath when you’re underwater.)
So the prison. It was built as a convict barracks in 1850 and closed in 1991. When our class toured the old cell blocks it seemed barbaric that they put human beings in such conditions back in the 1800s, let alone the 1990s. Tiny, stone-walled cells, barely big enough for a small mattress on a bed frame. A bucket in the corner. And the temperatures in Fremantle in summer soar into the 40s. Imagine being locked for most of the day in a stone cell two paces wide by three paces long with a small grille on the door for ventilation and a stinking bucket of something unmentionable festering in the corner.
The suicide rate at the old prison was so high they had to install a special net to stop prisoners from jumping off the roof.
After the tour of the prison we were allowed an hour of free time for lunch. Most of us wandered down to the shops or went for a walk along the wharves. I was shopping with my friends, Sprint and Juanita, but somehow got separated.
They’d ducked into a clothes shop and I went into a different shop and when I came out they were gone. I was wandering around looking for them when I came to the bookshop. A second-hand bookshop with walls overflowing, cascading with hardbacks and paperbacks, old and new.
I had a strong urge to enter, and trusted my intuition – which only goes to show how easily we can be fooled.
Something else was guiding me that warm afternoon, but in my vanity I didn’t recognise it for what it was.
I sometimes think that throughout history our great thinkers and scientists have always believed that they knew all there was to know about the world around them. And every time they’ve been wrong.
Now, today our scientists still believe they know everything there is to know. How arrogant is that? They’ve never been right before. It’s a safe bet that there’s a lot that scientists have yet to understand.
I entered the bookshop and nodded to the guy on the till. He was kind of good looking but spoilt it with huge (gross) silver ear stretchers the size of tennis balls. He was trying to look hipster with the short hair and the big beard, but the beard wasn’t really working for him. Kinda straggly, if you know what I mean.
He nodded and smiled at me, and asked if there was anything I was looking for.
I shook my head and told him that I was just browsing, although it wasn’t true. I was not wandering aimlessly. I was being led astray.
There were two long aisles, one to the left and one to the right, separated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, crammed with books of every age and flavour.
I chose the left. Not thinking, just allowing myself to be led.
The left wall of the shop was separated into alcoves by further bookshelves. Four alcoves in all. I meandered down the aisle, passing a wooden ladder, ‘For Staff Use Only’, and glanced up at the titles around me. The hectares of Harry Potters; well-thumbed copies of Andy Griffiths; the inevitable dystopian fiction shelves, groaning under the weight.
But I wasn’t interested in any of that. I would know when to stop. If I didn’t try too hard to force the feeling and out-think myself, I would stop exactly where I needed to be.
Where something needed me to be.
That turned out to be the third alcove. A young couple were in there looking at a shelf of Suzanne Collins books. She had a copy of The Hunger Games in her hands. He was busy telling her that that book was based on the movie.
I sighed quietly and waited for them to move out of the alcove to make room for me. There was room for us all in there, but I didn’t want the distraction.
They put the book back on the shelf (why read the book when you’ve already seen the original source material!) and wandered out, discussing whether Jennifer Lawrence was the best choice to play Katniss.
I entered and scanned the shelves. I had a bookshelf to my left, one to my right, and one on the wall in front of me.
I turned to my right. For no discernible reason. There were eight shelves in all, stretching up to the ceiling. The shelves were made of wood and looked old, as though they had been there forever (or at least since the early convict days) which was strange, considering that the shop had not existed less than a year ago.
I eventually settled on the very top shelf. The books up there looked old and dusty. I guess not many people bother climbing up to see what was there. I also guessed that the bookshop put stock that would not sell well up there, keeping the dystopian fiction and vampire romances as close to eye level as possible.
I returned to the main aisle to get the ladder, ignoring the warning that it was for staff use only.
If this was a horror story of course I would have gone to the sixth alcove, and taken the sixth book from the sixth shelf, but it wasn’t, and besides, there were only four alcoves.
I clipped the ladder onto a railing and climbed to the top shelf.
There would have easily been more than a hundred books up there, and rather than read all the titles, I just shut my eyes and reached up.
Something guided my hand unerringly to the book.
There never had been any choice, I guess. If I had taken the right aisle, or chosen a different alcove I suspect that when I reached out, that book would have been there.
It had no title. Or rather there was none on the front cover, which was a dusty olive colour. There may have been a name on the spine, but the spine was missing.
It was the book I had dreamt about. The exact same one!
I could have opened it to find out the title, but I didn’t need to. Whatever this book was, I was going to buy it.
This seemed like fun. Like going to the airport and getting on the next available flight to anywhere to see where it took you. Or spinning a bottle to decide which boy to kiss.
A faded yellow price sticker on the back cover, upper right corner, told me that the book was for sale for five dollars.
At that price, what did it matter if I ended up throwing it in the bin?
After returning the ladder to its proper place, I took the book to the counter where the guy with the barely there beard and the hula hoops in his ears told me that they were having a sale and that I could buy any other book in the shop for half price.
I glanced around, but nothing immediately caught my interest, so after handing over a few loose coins I had the book, in a plain brown recycled paper bag.
I opened it while I was walking. The first thing I learnt was that the book was in Latin.
I almost laughed. What a waste of money!
I put the book back in its bag and shoved it into my backpack. Just then I saw Sprint and Juanita and for the rest of the afternoon the book was forgotten.
That might have been the end of that. I might have got home, put the book on my shelf and forgotten about it. If I had, then none of this would have happened and you would get to live a long and hopefully fruitful life.
But of course I didn’t.
When I opened my backpack in my room after dinner, the book jumped out. I say jumped, of course I mean ‘fell’, but it did really seem as if it actually leapt out, tearing the paper bag as it did.
I picked up the dusty old thing and almost, very nearly, put it on my bookshelf. But my iPad was lying on my bed and I remembered that I had the Google Translate app.
I opened th
e app, selected the camera option and pointed it at the first page, which had the title of the book on it.
On the screen of my iPad the title turned instantly from Latin to English.
Stop Reading, You Die
Interested, captivated even, but not in the slightest bit concerned, I turned to the first actual page of text in the book.
I won’t bore you with the translation, but I can tell you that it was very similar in both content and style to the first few paragraphs of the story you are reading right now.
I laughed. Funny, I thought. A clever trick by the writer to make you want to read his book. But even while I was laughing a cold chill crept over me.
You know those email chain letters that say you have to pass them on within twenty-four hours or something bad will happen to you? They go straight to my junk mail folder. And those Facebook posts that insist you have to share them with all your friends get instantly deleted. I don’t buy into any of that stuff.
But there was something about this book. The age of it. The Latin text. The way I’d found it. Something unsettled me. A warning – from a deep part of my brain. What if this was true? Of course it wasn’t, I reasoned, but what if it was? What if, by stopping reading this book, I would die?
I wanted to just close the book. Throw it in the bin. But a part of my brain warned me not to.
I had started reading. I had to continue, or maybe die?
How long did I have? How long did it take before a pause became a stop?
I turned to the next page. By now the cold chill inside was growing into a real fear.
I’m not superstitious. I’m not afraid of black cats, ladders, Friday the 13th, or even having a black cat cross my path while I’m walking under a ladder on Friday the 13th after smashing a mirror. But now I was genuinely scared.
I read slowly on my iPad. I read every word, instead of skipping whole sentences as I sometimes do when I’m in a hurry to finish a book. I even read some sentences twice.
I must have been halfway through the book when I finally decided that I was being stupid. Stupid and superstitious.
I slammed the book shut and tossed it across the room, where it slid under my dresser. I could feel my heart beating, a thrumming in my ears. Just nerves. Just nerves. It was like going to a really scary horror movie.
I lay down on my bed and took some deep breaths to calm down.
That’s when I felt a sudden sharp pain in my chest, and a tingling in my left arm. Exactly what I imagined a heart attack would feel like, except I wasn’t a fat old man. There was no way I was at risk of a heart attack.
I took more deep breaths, waiting for the pain to ease. I was on the verge of calling out to Mum and Dad downstairs when the pain ramped up to a whole new level.
Now it felt like a knife had been plunged into my chest and I couldn’t feel my left arm at all. A numbness was spreading across my entire body. I drew in air to scream, but realised, right at that moment, that screaming would mean my death.
If I screamed, Mum and Dad would come running upstairs and they’d call an ambulance and take me to hospital. My only chance of survival lay under my dresser.
Any doctor, any sane person, would have said that it was a panic attack, or maybe even a real heart attack. But I knew better.
I grabbed my iPad and rolled off the bed, landing heavily on the floor on my left side, but feeling nothing.
I crawled across the floor like a slug, using my one good arm and leg. It was a metre or two, maybe three, no more. It seemed like a marathon.
Centimetre after centimetre I dragged myself towards the dresser until I was near enough to reach out. My hand closed on the book and I pulled it out and flipped it open. I didn’t care what page, but somehow it opened at the exact page I had been reading.
I aimed my iPad at the page. The Latin turned to English. To words I could read.
I lapped them up, devouring them like a starving dog with a bowl of raw bloody meat. The numbness eased. Feeling came back into the fingertips of my left hand and spread throughout my arm. The knives that were sticking out of my chest faded away. My breathing slowed and steadied.
I didn’t need medicine. I didn’t need an ambulance or a doctor. I needed to read.
I wasted no time.
It was getting dark and the camera wouldn’t work well in the dark. I put the book on my desk and turned on the lamp. I continued to read as slowly as I could, convinced that if I stopped, or fell asleep, or got to the end of the book, my parents would find me slumped over the desk in the morning, dead from a heart attack, a stroke, or a brain aneurism.
I plugged my iPad into its charger, just in case the battery ran out.
I read.
At one point during the night, it occurred to me that if I died, and someone else, like Mum or Dad, picked the book up, then they’d be in the same position I was in now. It even occurred to me to burn the book so nobody else could ever read it, and accept my fate, knowing that I had heroically saved humanity from evil.
But I guess I’m too chicken-shit to be a hero like that. I didn’t burn the book, I kept reading it, and sometime during the small hours of the morning I discovered the truth. That I didn’t have to die. That there was a way to pass on the curse and rid myself of it. All I had to do was to write a story. Just like this one. Exactly this one. By doing so, I’d divert the curse around me, like a rock in the middle of a creek diverts the water flow.
Yes, someone else would die, but it wouldn’t be me.
I’m not proud to say that that is the path I chose.
I spent the night writing and woke up in the morning still sitting at my desk, the story finished on the computer screen in front of me. I was alive.
The curse had passed from the old book into me. From me into these words.
Perhaps I could have deleted this story, wiped it off my hard drive, erased it from the world. But somehow I knew that if I did that, then the curse would revert to me. The only way to pass it on permanently was for someone to read the story I had written.
That person is you.
Stop reading this story, you will die.
I wish it was longer, because then your life would be longer. But a story can’t go on forever. There’s not enough paper in the world for that. There’s not enough ink. There are not enough words in my brain.
There’s no way out of this.
I’m sure you were a nice person. You don’t deserve this, but here it comes.
And I’m genuinely sorry about this.
The End
I Am Seventeen
Personally I don’t fear growing old. But I do fear growing infirm, either physically or mentally. This story, about an Alzheimer’s patient, scares me a lot. When I am old, I want to remember the things that happened. All we really have in life are our memories. Who are we when those are gone?
The patient in this story can remember his childhood so vividly that it seems like yesterday, but he can’t remember anything after that. This isn’t typical of Alzheimer’s sufferers. I created the symptoms to suit the story and blamed them on a car crash.
The use of first person present tense was deliberate in this story. First person puts the reader in the narrator’s shoes, and present tense gives an immediacy, as if the action is happening right now. This was especially important for this story as I wanted the reader to imagine what it would really be like to wake up in someone else’s body.
One of the difficulties I faced in writing this story was setting the ‘age’ of the thoughts and comments of the narrator. If the language used was too young, it wouldn’t be appropriate for someone who was a teenager in the 1940s. However, if the slang terms were too much of that era, then it would give away what the story was really about. The goal was to convince the reader that it really was a fantastical body-swap story, before revealing the tragic truth.
The Kiss
I actually wrote an alternative ending for this story.
In the other version, poor Samanthah has caught Marburg. So has Darren. They still kiss at the end, but the reason is different. As both of them are already infected, they are no longer a danger to each other. It was a sweet concept, but also very sad. I decided that was a bit too dark and I went with the happier ending.
For the point of view and tense, I chose third person past tense. Third person allowed me to introduce a lot of the background information as narration, which would have seemed odd and forced if it had been written in first person.
On the surface this story is about a viral epidemic; in reality it is about something else. We live in an increasingly germ-phobic society. We are so afraid of germs that we cover our hands in antibacterial gel and wipe down surfaces with sanitising sprays. Taken to the extreme, as in this story, we would have a world where boys and girls can’t even kiss each other.
The other underlying theme in this story is the increasing distrust of science in our society. Many people believe that vaccines cause autism, despite a wealth of scientific evidence proving that they do not. With fake news widely spread on the internet, people are more likely to believe hearsay than validated scientific evidence and research provided by experts. The anti-vaccination movement is largely responsible for outbreaks of diseases such as measles and mumps that were all but eradicated a few decades ago.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with me on these points or not. It doesn’t even matter whether I believe them. It is the point of view taken by the story. Sometimes stories reflect the opinions of the author, other times they do not. Sometimes an author might take a contrary point of view just to elicit a reaction from the audience. In one of my novels the main character is a fifteen-year-old boy in the year 1815. His attitude towards his mother reflects both his rebellious teenage attitude, and the general attitude towards women at the time. I was shocked when a reviewer criticized me for my sexist attitude towards women. Did they not understand the difference between a character’s point of view and the author’s?
Stubborn Seed of Hope Page 12
