There was a man I knew, an artist, he’s was always
drawing in his sketchbook every time I met with him. He drew out his pictures
in a simple black book until it went missing, then a week later I found him using
another one. It was unlike any sketch book I’d come across, it was a brown
leather book with signs of ware along its covers. On the spine were a series of
strange characters, none of which I knew of. I asked him where he got the book
and he told me a story about meeting a man beneath a bridge, there he was given
a key. The following night he encountered a stranger selling goods in the park,
it was here where he found the book and traded the key for it.
A rational person would take these claims as a joke,
but this would not be the first odd tale to turn true in this town. Regardless
of the story, the book was a strange thing. For starters, you could only draw in
it with a pen, pencils broke on contact. No pages could be torn out either, it
sounds strange but believe me I tried tearing a page and I also tried scissors,
neither worked. But by far the strangest of all things is that what occurred in
the drawings occurred in real life… Don’t give me those looks, I know what
you’re thinking, but all of this is true.
Not long after my friend had first taken the book, we
were chatting about nothing in particular, he was sketching the scenery in the park
we were sitting in. In front of us was a pond which he added to his drawing and
just to add his own touch of style he threw a whirlpool in the center of it. As
he did so, the water in the pond began to spin at a slow pace, but still
rapidly enough to see a spiral form in the water. This of course we regarded as
a coincidence, there was no way that a simple drawing could have caused such an
effect, that’s crazy talk… but it wouldn’t be the only oddity.
The following week we began to experiment, we went to
a spot with a view of the lighthouse and started drawing. Once he was near
finished, we decided to try a test to see if the oddity from the week prior was
actually a simple coincidence. So with the sky we drew another spiral, a very
detailed one at that, and we bent the tops of a few trees. Within seconds of
doing so, the tops of the painted trees were being pulled at, and clouds were
beginning to circle forming this strange pattern, they even began changing
color. It was… amazing, and scary, but the affect only lasted for a few minutes
before everything returned to normal. This was when we realized how powerful
the book we had was.
Within the duration of a few months the artist and I
thought to change our neighborhood, I would give him some ideas and he would
create them. It was a wonderful partnership that we had. We were the un-named
hero’s working without doing a thing, we changed people’s lives without ever
meeting them. It was nice… sometimes I wish it could have stayed like that.
We continued our cause for a year. At this point we
called the book, The Illustrators Tome due to the magic that was done. At this
time we had also gone through half of our pages and were taking a break. I was
walking down the street, looking for something that needed to be changed,
nothing really stood out on that day. On this street there was a gas a station.
On this particular day, there were large trucks nearby, seemed ordinary enough.
A full minute past and as I turned away to head off, the street was demolished
by an explosion, and that was the last thing I could remember before waking up
in a hospital
What had happened that day was unusual. A plane had
fallen out of the sky, crashing into the gas station and setting the
surrounding vehicles on fire. It was… horrific, impossible even, where we were
located was in a business district full of high rises, the plane would have
struck a higher building and then crash into its neighbor. There was only one
possible explanation and it disturbed me.
I ran over to my partner’s house after being
discharged from the hospital. I found the place with the front door open and
the rooms ransacked. The only trace of him was a note, saying that he didn’t
know what had come over him almost as though he was possessed, he apologized
over and over. Finally, he said he was taking the book and leaving, going away,
a place where he couldn’t do harm. I was shocked, and yet I knew he had to do
this, there was no way a drawing could connect him to causing the crash and
jail wasn’t where he belonged. If anything he would have ended up in a mental
ward if he had confessed.
It’s been five years since I last saw him, but I know
he is still around, some nights I can see spectacular images in the night’s
sky, people lives being changed in an instant. He’s still following our cause.
Yet in spite of these beautiful actions, once in a while there is an incident
of turmoil… cost verses effect I guess. They’re not as bad as the first one
though, no, never that level of destruction. Perhaps he’s gaining a grip on it…
or it’s learning to be like us, who knows?
