The Cronicles

AN: would love some reviews, so let me know what you think.


We should be careful of the books we read, as the company we keep.
The dead very often have more power than the living.
- Tryon Edwards

We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
- Henry Fielding

It could be said that I am and ever was of a superstitious nature, though the cause of that could only be prescribed from the horrors I experienced which I am about to relay. It appeared a simple leather bound volume; nothing more. And yet about it hung the strange air of mystery, which I myself found intriguing. The manuscript was untitled, and contained in its gilded pages all the documentation of incubi and succubi, necromancers and lycanths, the demons any God fearing Christian should eschew without question, though my perturbed thoughts drew me to it.

It was discovered in the back room of an antiquated library, among many mouldering novels of forgotten years. It had no markings save for those within its dust-riddled pages, and it was with little discomfort that I stowed it beneath my waistcoat. It was the premiere entry that had drawn my soul, as it were, to be entwined with the words so writ on the page. It said thus;
Mortis est veritas. [Death is truth]

It enticed, invigorated and controlled my thoughts. On nights where all that lit the sky were sparse, pale stars, I immersed myself in its pages, becoming one with its tale. As I became more and more absorbed by the mysterious antics of its sequestered anonymous caractère principale, the book maintained its death-like grip on me, pulling me into further seclusion and loneliness. I was at one with its master. I was possessed by some fiend of incredible force, and the novel became more than a fanciful narrative. It was my truth.

It began on October the 24th, 18--, and it is with great abhorrence that I do recall the trepidation of my discourse. The evening was chill, and a foreboding mist filled every crevasse with its moisture, that I was found assimilated in the novel, a bottle of aqua vitae by my side, its tale becoming my own. It spoke of murder, of decomposed corpses in precarious places within the mansion, and the voices of lost souls forcing their bidding into a disconcerted mind. It was enthralling to behold. Somehow it took hold of me, like Satan tightening his grip upon the vagrant blasphemer. Then came the voices. They seemed to echo as though far away, and yet resounded within my unstable mind. I felt compelled to push my way through the darkened streets, with none but the leather-bound history held tightly to my bosom to keep me sane. My steps carried me to the graveyard, and in the shadow of the quiet evening the many erected stones of patrimony loomed as watchers over those lifeless in the soil. The voices continued, for how long I was not aware, and I was thrown into a choleric frenzy - though whether provoked by the drunken stupor of the liquor or by the persistence of the utterances within my mind, I could not be sure. The voices were now rising from the ground below me. I threw myself to the ground in repudiation of their soulless requests, but the monotony of their pleas grew more violent and more tenacious, causing the blood throbbing within my veins to run cold, and, for a moment, to stop its steadfast flow altogether.

It took great effort on my part to raise my voice in a scream, my only rebuttal. But, alas, they took hold of me. Good God, they took hold of me! And I tore at the earth with fervor and resolution, feeling it tremble beneath me. “To be free” – over and over it chorused within me – “To be free” was all they coveted. A harsh wind hampered my work, scattering the soil to and fro, and fluttering the pages of my unhallowed bible, but my spirit was fixed on the Godless task. When at last my fingers found the oaken lid of a casket, I fell back from the sepulcher with a smile of grim satisfaction across my lips. It shuddered tremulously, and yet I lingered. What drove me to pry the nails from the cover? What drove me to force that sacred resting place of the cadaver to the light of the waning moon? The voices chanted their perpetual appeal, and without wavering, I pulled back the wooden cover and gazed within.

I flew from the corpse; flew from the horror, and was overcome by a fit of convulsions, the voices still ceaseless in their report. The book lay open before me. My heart trembled in my bosom as I gazed into its pages, which had so easily overtaken my world. It was at this precise moment that the voices stopped. I stood in the quietude, with the carcass at my feet, and the novel again pressed to my breast. The page had displayed one simple sentence; “His conversion began with the disentombing of the corpse.” I had begun my initiation into the world of mortis.

In the still of the night, I returned to my abode, having properly returned the body to its resting place, with the novel still grasped tightly to my breast. On my return to the building, I lit the lamps, and saturated myself with the chronicle’s ill-favored doings. Its description of the central individual became more familial and intimate, and his life became so entwined with my own that I scarce had need to peruse its pages to apperceive his precarious situations. My musings were arrested with visions of terror, and still it seemed impossible for me to be severed from my new preposition. As the world of the tales master was foreshadowed in the pages, I grew rapacious for more of the horrors, more of the Godless nights of blood and lust, until I reached the finale de l’histoire. The ink was still wet, as if it had been recently penned by a damnable hand, and it stated thus;

“What has chanced in this account, it can be said, is veridical and forsooth the true events of my life. It is within these pages that I have sealed my evanescent soul.”

It was with consternation that I forced myself to read the signature that superceded that lurid paragraph, and was filled with the uneasy sensation of dissolution. For the intricate, gently slanted penmanship which so graced the page, and was followed thus by the date 1600, was more familiar than the hand that had given it life.

It was the last page of the manuscript which gave the author vitas in my eyes. His signature was in fact my own.