I strode down the street, my backpack flapping against my back. It was a windy day in Newgate, and I was in no mood to have to stand in the cold any longer then I had to. Directly ahead of me I saw the great stone building that was my destination, The Newgate Public Library. Quickly hurrying inside of the building, I dumped my books into the appropriate bin and moved towards the YA section. Turning the corner I saw my friend, James, standing in the corner of the alcove that housed the YA section, with his nose buried in a book. “Hi, James,” I said, “have you found anything good?”
Turning, James looked startled to see me there. “Hi, Adam, I thought you had swimming practice at this time. If you had let me known (what), I could have scheduled something.”
“Yeah, sorry,” I replied, “It was canceled at the last minute, something about risk of storm. I should have called, we could have scheduled something”
I went over to the bookshelf and began to browse as James stood there, seeming to forget that anything existed outside of the story that he was reading. I continued to look through the books, carefully avoiding anything with a one-word title. Of course I knew the whole “don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover” deal, but in my experience looking at the title was one of the most important methods of gauging a book’s potential. I slowly moved down the aisle, sometimes adding promising books to my stack, when I came across the strangest book I had ever seen. It was a large black tome, with leather binding. Despite the fact that the spine of the book was facing out, I was unable to find a title. I removed the book, and upon turning it over discovered that it had been bound on the wrong side. On the cover of the book, in words that looked like they had branded onto the cover, the title was simply, “The Book of the Forgotten King”. Interested, I set the book down on the table and opened it. The writing began on the first page, and was in a strange language that I had never seen before. I called James over to help me examine it.
“I’ve never seen any writing that looks even vaguely like this,” said James. Though with most people, this would have carried almost no weight, both of James’s parents were archeologists and James himself loved to study languages. “Do you want my parents to look at it.”
I replied that I could just check it out at home and, upon finding no form of identification , smuggled it out of the library in my backpack.
When I got home, finding no one there, I ran upstairs to my bedroom to study the book. In the privacy of the area directly below my raised bed, I began flipping through the book to see if there was anything that I could understand in the book, even if it was just a picture. Unfortunately, my wish was granted as I found several pictures apparently detailing the life of a man. The picture mainly showed him passing judgement upon some group of people, but the last image showed him being tricked into an ornate cage,, with the cage in the center of a ornate, old key. The picture also had a heading, which I seemed to be perpetually on the verge of understanding. Running my finger along the bottom of the words in an attempt to focus my thoughts, I found an unexpected bump along the picture of the key. Feeling along where the picture of key was, I discovered that the key seemed to be real and three-dimensional, though I still saw it as flat. I pulled the key out of the page, and the illusion broke, allowing my eyes to see it as it truly was, about 250 centimeters long and made out of iron. I stared at the key, then back down at the page. For a moment, the page seemed to flicker between the original image (but without the key encircling the cage), and on the man, still in the cage, but now smiling a terrible, nightmarish smile.
I bolted down the stairs, the key still in my hand and called James from the phone in our kitchen. Thankfully, James had arrived home in time to answer my call.
“Hello, this is James.” said James when he answered the phone.
“J-James,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “Would you come over right now?”
James replied with a touch of concern in his voice, “I’m coming. Is everything okay?”
“Yea…, maybe I don’t really know” I replied, sucking in huge breaths of air to calm down my heart.
When James arrived, about ten minutes later, I explained what had happened and showed him the key. As James stood there, slowly turning over the key so as to examine it from all sides, I ran upstairs to bring him the book, but when I arrived, a surprise greeted me. The book still was still where I had left it, but now the binding was cracked and worn, and the paper was yellowed and old. As I watched, the book continued to decay, and eventually collapsed underneath its own weight.
I ran downstairs to see James standing directly before a pair of gates, looking at them in wonder. The gates were tall, black and appeared to be standing with no form of support. We stood in front of the gates, looking intermittently between each other and the gates. As one, we reached forward and pushed open the gates. Beyond them, somehow stretching far past the length of the kitchen was a huge, dark hall. At the far end of the hall, about fifty meters away from where we were, there was a raised plinth with a man-sized statue on it. The hall itself had clearly once been resplendent, but time had worn it down. There were great tapestries on the wall, they must have once been alive and full of color, but they were now faded and moth-eaten.
Together, we stepped through the gates. I couldn’t feel anything strange about the passage, except for the sudden coolness of the air around me.We continued walking through the hall, stopping now and then to get a closer look at a tapestry or candleholder. Whoever had done the decoration of this place had a taste for the macabre. The tapestry’s looked like they had been copied off of by Dante and the candlesticks were all of men being crushed under the weight of the candles. Even the candles themselves were strange, they, though now no more than stubs, were several inches wide and were of a black that seemed to suck in all the light around them.
We continued to progress until we reached the plinth. Stepping up onto the platform, we began to examine the statue. It was about two meters long and seemed to be made out of flint. Despite the horrors all throughout the hall, the statue was by far the worst. Patterned on it’s surface were images of huge demons running amok over the land, sowing chaos and carnage wherever they went. In the very center of the carving was a man, bestriding a horse. The man held a chain connected to a hook, which he used to catch and impale men and woman on, in one hand and a great flaming sword in the other. Despite his horse facing off to the left, the man himself stared directly at us, almost as if he was actually alive, instead of simply a carving.
The statue was so terrifying that I lurched back in disgust, my stomach flipping and my heart beating violently. James, however, appeared to find no problem with the horror of the carving. “What my parents wouldn’t give to get their hands on something like this,” he muttered to himself, running his hand along the carving, “this looks ancient.” As his probing fingers reached the man in the center of the statue, he suddenly recoiled, as if shocked by static electricity. His legs gave way beneath him, and he collapsed to the ground.
As I ran over to help him, he started convulsing wildly, limbs and head slapping the ground. I forced his head down onto the ground, to prevent further injury, and looked around for something soft I could lay him on. Though the tapestries looked almost ideal, they were clearly far too large for me to drag over, so I was forced to simply stay where I was, trying to hold as many of his limbs as I could in check.
Slowly, bit by bit, his convulsions slowed and his limbs started to relax. As he lay there, apparently unconscious, his breathing calming down, I tried to figure out what had happened. He had never done anything like this before. Then again, I had never gone through a magic portal before, so today was a day of great surprises. Suddenly, his eyes flashed open. I fell back, startled, and saw what was likely the most terrifying in that room. James’s eyes were glowing with a strange, green light. His pupils had been transformed into slowly rotating circles comprised out of strange runes like those in the book.
Suddenly, he leapt up and charged at me, roaring. He slapped me with strength far beyond that of any human, and sent me flying into the wall. I lay where I had landed, my body refusing to do what I told it, and watched as pulled out the key and slowly moved towards the statue. As the key drew nearer to the statue, it started changing shape, as though trying to fit any other lock than the one it was approaching. The moment the key touched the material of the statute, however, the key stilled and began slowly sinking into the flint, as though it was jello. A sense of foreboding came over me, almost as though I were in a movie, and dramatic, screechy music had just began to play.
Despite their exhaustion, I forced my weary muscles to begin movement, raising me off the ground, onto my feet. With a great effort, I began to run towards the platform. I stumbled up onto the platform and, tensing my muscles for more power, charged at the thing that was occupying James’s body.
I hit him hard, both of us tumbling to the ground. In some respects, I was incredibly lucky, James had always been the bigger of the two of us and with his newfound strength, he would have crushed me, but his head smacked against the floor, and by the time I got up, he was out cold.
I began pulling over the candle holders, piling them on top of him in man attempt to hold him if he awoke, and then moved over to the plinth. The key remained in the statute, the point where metal and flint collided glowing with a pulsing, green light. I began pulling out the key the ver stone seeming to be attempting to resist. Nonetheless, I slowly pulled out the key, the iron looking new from where it had gone into the statue. About halfway through the process, whispering filled my ears, demanding that I push the key farther in. Nevertheless, I gritted my teeth and continued pulling out the key. The moment the key was pulled fully out, a great pulse of wind echoed through the chamber, the great tapestries on the walls began to blow, and the cobwebs that hung from the ceiling of the hall were knocked down, pieces of silk fluttering to the ground. I turned back to the statue to find the demons of the carving slowly moving in from the background as if to catch me. For a moment, I found myself laughing at the utter absurdity of the situation, until a miniature claw, extended from the frontmost demon, poked through the surface slowly groping out at me.
A sudden crashing behind me revealed James’s, or at least James’s body, return to consciousness. Backing away from the statue, I quickly glanced behind me, to see James’s condition. Two pieces of luck hit me just then, the first was that James’s eyes were back to normal, and the second was that my make-shift barricade had massively failed, so James was already back on his feet.
I jumped off the platform, just as the first of the miniature demons escaped from the statue. Interestingly, I noted, the man in the center still sat on top of his horse, a look of hatred distorting his features.
Grabbing James by his shirt, I began running towards the gateway, terror fueling my strides. About halfway across the hall, I stumbled and almost fell, but James pulled me back up, his momentum jerking me forward back into my stride. By this point, some of the winged demons had taken flight, their wings quickly propelling them towards us. We fell through the gate, crashing to the floor of my kitchen. As we scrambled to get up, the lead demon came streaking out of the hall into the kitchen.
Grabbing a nearby stool, I swung it towards the demon. The stool made direct contact, sending the demon into a nearby wall, one of its wing in tatters where the stool leg broke through the membrane. I jumped onto my feet and slammed the great gates, pressing my back to them in a desperate attempt to keep them closed. As soon as the gates were fully shut, they disappeared, leaving nothing behind.
The moment the gate disappeared, the demon in the corner froze, its face contorted in fury. Touching the now inert demon, I discovered that it had become a statue, with no signs of life.
Hearing a car pull up into the driveway, James and I ran up to my room to plan what to do next. As we sat on my bed, both of us still shaking from the encounter, we decided that there was only one reasonable course of action.
“The only reasonable course of action is to bury the key and demon,” I said, “We clearly didn’t destroy the thing in that statute, only set it back. We can’t risk anyone letting it free.”
The debate settled, we went out to the backyard of my house, and started digging until we had dug a pit almost 2 meters deep.We tossed the key and demon into the pit and began to re-fill the hole. Within the course of 30 minutes, the hole was filled. Thankfully, there was no grass in this part of our yard, only leaves, so no trace of where the key was buried remained anywhere except in our minds. Nodding in a silent agreement, James and I decided never to talk about what had happened, less someone repeated our folly, and in doing so concluded that chapter of our lives.