"That book is not for children your age."
I could still hear the Librarian's warning ringing in my ears, and had paid little heed but rather gone on to steal the book from the 'Restricted' section, one called The Book of a Thousand Curses.
There was no absolute need for me to have stolen it, but when I went to the Librarian, Miss Penny, for it, she shook her head and told me it was for adults, which was why it had been shelved in the Restricted Area.
"There are so many books for lads below twenty-one." She smiled at me, adjusting her glasses as they sat on her wrinkled nose and under her white hair. "You are only seventeen, and should go find one of those appropriate for your age and enjoy your reading. Au revoir."
Her warning should have been enough to make me focus on something else, but that had only made me want to see what was in the book even more. It looked cool and authentic, just like a real, ancient curse book, and my head thought up scenes of how cool I would seem if I could perform a few of these curses for my friends and everyone else.
These would be tricks to impress.
Leaving the book at the library for two days did nothing to get my mind off of it, so I planned for nights on end, lying awake and thinking up ways to get the book past Old Miss Penny.
And I had gotten it successfully that evening. No one even noticed a thing.
All I needed to wait for now was nightfall, so that I could check out the curses and how they worked in secret, away from everyone else.
It was eleven-oh-three when I finally got the privacy to take the book out from under my bed where it had been hidden since I stole it. My father had gone to sleep after the ten PM news, and my mother and two sisters had long been asleep in their rooms since nine.
I picked up my flashlight and took the book out, switching off the light in my room to avoid attention from outside and locking the door to rub my hand on the book I had schemed for ages to get. The cover was made of snake skin, and the pages were so old and brown they smelt like rotting paper, and there was no name for the author.
How mysterious, I thought gladly to myself.
I flipped the first page, and there was a sketch of a Baphomet on it, its fingers crossed in some unholy sign. Next, I flipped, and on and on I went, going through sketches of unicorns, dragons, and griffons, with descriptions of what they looked like. Later on, there were outright curses, and I read through some of them until one caught my attention.
To travel through time, it said. On page eight hundred and ninety eight.
I read through the instructions, quite interested in time travelling. The first instruction said I had to stand before a mirror at exactly twelve midnight.
The time struck eleven fifty-eight PM, and I was surprised to see that I had stayed up reading the book for so long, nearly an hour. With two minutes to midnight and a full mirror in my room, what was there to stop me?
I stood up and went to the mirror, holding the flashlight in one hand, the book in another, and staring straight at my reflection. All I now had to do was to wait for one minute to reach the perfect time.
Just then the time struck midnight.
I held the flashlight and began to read out the curse:
"Through minutes, and hours, and days, and years,
Through time of wars, and joys and tears
As the hourglass turns in dancing spheres
I will turn time back a thousand years."
Outside, a strong, cold wind blew, moving my curtains about and filling my ears with the sound of rushing air. I shut my eyes and held on to the book tight, expecting to see anything or to appear anywhere else in the world.
As I waited, my heart began to race. What if I was taken to the middle of an ancient war, or left alone in a desert, or in the middle of a jungle I would barely survive in?
This pushed me to open my eyes in terror, and they adjusted to the darkness I was in.
I was in… my room, I noted with disappointment.
Nothing, not even a single thing had changed.
What if you and the rest of everything around when you said the curse has been taken up into the past? I wondered.
This made me rush to the window and look outside, checking to see if anything had changed. My disappointment doubled when a car drove past, blaring loud music as it passed with all the modern features and designs on today's cars.
I hadn't even gone a hundred years back, I realised.
Cursing, I tossed the book under my bed and jumped right to bed, flicking off the flashlight. Within minutes, I was asleep.
All of a sudden, it felt as though I was falling through infinity, into a great darkness, and I felt myself fall for so long that it felt as though I would never stop falling. Without warning, I finally stopped, falling on something soft, and as I did a bright light that threatened to burn my eyes shone brighter than the sun from high above me.
I blinked my eyes open to wake up from the dream and see my room the very same way it had been. Even more disappointed than the previous night, I got off and looked under my bed.
The book was still there, untouched and unmoved, and I began to think of how I would return it quietly to the shelves and get something more interesting than it.
As I planned, my stomach rumbled, and the hunger I felt biting on my insides drove me to go downstairs to get a sandwich. I ran forward, opening the door of my room, and what I saw drove me to give out the loudest scream I ever had in terror.