They'll Find Me ... Eventually (Fragment)

(Thesis: What if you discovered a horrible plot/secret religion/conspiracy, were warned of your personal danger and saw the telltale signs of 'them' all around you and so you ran... but no one ever came after you?)

Rapidly congealing breakfast goo gleamed dully under the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. The faint aroma of chemical cleaners mingled with the bitter steam slowly climbing from the rim of a chipped coffee cup. Faint muzak drifted listlessly from ancient overhead speakers. A dingy clock mounted over the grill/griddle read 3:24 am. At this hour, the only patrons in this particular roadside greasy-spoon were a grizzled trucker with an ugly facial scar and a bespectacled young man with deeply tired eyes. The trucker sat at the counter, several emptied serving plates stacked next to him, mug clutched protectively in his beefy hand. The young man was seated at the farthest table from the door, his back to the wall, picking slowly at his food. Only canned music and the constant buzz of the lights disturbed the silence in the diner.

Mable, pulling double duty as waitress and short-order cook tonight since everyone else managed to get the night off, thought they boy might be in trouble. Not being chased or anything, since he didn't seem nervous or jumpy, but trouble nonetheless. There was a beaten, defeated air about him. Something in the set of the shoulders that spoke of long sleepless nights and unpleasant days. When he first sat, he threw his long coat over a small brown satchel in the chair next to him. Every so often his hand would stray, seemingly unconsciously, to rest on the coat as he ate.

Had she asked, he might just have told her how close to the truth she actually was. Hell, even knowing how dangerous it would be, he might have told her the whole story. Dangerous... what an understatement that was, but at the moment he didn't care. The aspects of his situation wore on him more than he could easily explain; the secretive silence, the constant nomadic roving, the fear of being awake that paled to nothing compared to the fear of sleeping. How long had he been dragged along this path? How many dingy diners had he stopped in to rest, always so briefly? Sleep deprivation had blurred the edges of his memories, warping his sense of time and perspective to (in some cases) nearly impossible proportions.

Sometimes it seemed like he'd been on the move for years. Other times that day felt like only a handful of weeks ago. As far as he was concerned it might have been another lifetime, the gulf between then and now as deep and disturbing as the circumstances that created it. They say that knowledge is power, that books can change your life. Whoever they are, they're right.

He'd been working in a book store, a hole in the wall cellar store in downtown Boston. The pay was terrible, but he was provided with a much more esoteric benefit. Since very early childhood he had been drawn to book repositories, most notably libraries. The knowledge that he was surrounded by millions upon millions of words, thoughts and ideas was always of great comfort. Little had changed by the time he found his way to that basement on H street, and he spent his hours there relishing the opportunity to seek out books he had never heard of and learn what they had to offer.

So it was that one day while sorting a crate of new arrivals he came across a thin green leather volume bound closed with thick twine. No title, no distinguishing marks on cover or binding. Curiosity won out over work ethic, and it was there on the spot that he pried the slim diary open and involuntarily rescinded his old life. In old stories of books bearing doom, they are filled with convoluted ancient languages and obscure arcane diagrams. This failed to be the case here, and as he poured over the text he found only well articulated descriptions and grammatically correct English. The subject of the descriptions however, were straight out of a horror story.

The first thing he noticed was the absence of the first two pages, torn out as close to the binding as possible. Aside from that the pages were in remarkably good shape. The journal described in vivid detail occult ceremonies involving sacrifices, both human and animal. It contained extensive information about cultist activities and beliefs, and the connections and agreements with law enforcement that allow them to continue. This extended even to naming names in local and national government who facilitated or even participated in these acts. It also included dictation of interviews with people who believed they communed with dangerously volatile gods and their mortal vassals. All in all, he viewed it as truly fascinating reading.

That is, until two slips of paper fluttered to the floor, folded and placed between a pair of pages containing a list of addresses and locations where terrible rites were preformed in secret. The loose papers were the twin first pages, and bore on them a clear, concise warning about the danger of reading the secrets contained therein. In addition to this, scrawled quickly across the back of the second page, was a desperate warning: They are coming for me, and if you've read this, you are in more danger than you could possibly understand.

Logically, no one could know that he had read the book, hidden as he was by stacks of shelves and the fact that he was in a basement with no windows. So, at first he blamed the paranoia of having read the warning when he started to notice strange faces in familiar places. It became quickly apparent, however, that someone was keeping tabs on him. He was being followed wherever he went, being watched wherever he ate, and physically running into a disproportionate number of strangers in his tenement building. It is little surprise then, that he decided to pack up what little he had and made a run for it.