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If you are reading this note, do not open the book it was left inside.
I’ve always loved books. They aren’t given enough credit for what they do, giving their information away free to whoever bothers to listen. There’s no shortage of good stories, either. People seem to like writing their thoughts and feelings down, ideas that outlive generations of human beings. Libraries carry the weight of thousands of worlds lurking in written pages, each one only unravelling as a person took the book off the shelf. Even the majesty of knowledge tucked in those shelves cannot compare to the smell , the beautiful scent of old paper that fumigates the room. For many years, I worked in a library in East Yorkshire, where, unless you lived there, the spoken word wasn’t exactly the most easily discernible thing. They like to make up words, people in heavily accented areas of Britain, so most of the time, people turned to books for a bit of legible comfort.
The book that terminated my employment there was one nearly identical to the one you’re holding. It’s called Seraphim, isn’t it? One of my co-workers at the time, Ruth, had told me that a seraph was an angel that sat by the throne of God, the highest order of archangels. The book in question was returned to the library among five other books under the guise of a separate book sleeve. It was a hardback, slipped into the cover of a copy of Lewis Carrol’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’. Once the sleeve was removed, the book was proven to be a black, leather-bound tome with the word Seraphim pressed into the spine in faded gold lettering. It looked well-kept enough that we decided not to bin it, but rather to have me read it and decide whether or not to shelve it.
Well, I did. I read every last word, and it was almost exactly what I expected. The story began with a young woman, left injured on a street corner by a group of teenage boys. Thankfully, they hadn’t done any major damage, just some bruising. The girl got her due, though, when a black book entitled Seraphim fell from one of the boy’s bags as they’d scampered off. She had cleaned and bandaged her wounds and went about her life. She had soldiered on as normal until one morning a few weeks after her attack, she’d seen a vaguely reddish blob fly through her peripherals. She’d thought nothing of it and continued her days until another week passed when it happened again. This time, her view of the thing was full frontal. It was a large creature, mostly white, with three sets of white-feathered wings surrounding it. She wasn’t scared, even if the entity appeared to be on fire . Human-like blue eyes lined the wings' bones, the pupils of which followed her every move. Still, she was unafraid. She felt safe in the creature's presence. From that moment forward, the thing made a point of following her wherever she went, sometimes unseen at a distance, sometimes trailing blatantly after her. Magically, nobody else ever noticed it, even when it was in direct view.
The story after that was a bit repetitive, I’d say. There was barely any plot other than the appearance of the seraph, but dutifully, I read on. I couldn’t categorize the book until I’d read it the full way through, lest I mark it wrong. The ending was boring and relatively predictable; the group of boys came back, assumingly to finish what they started, but the seraph protected the woman and “they all lived happily ever after under the watch of the Lord.” The only really attention-grabbing thing about the story’s close was the bible verse scrawled on a scrap of paper that somebody had pasted to the back cover.
Corinthians 11:14, “and no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light”. Religion was central enough to the story that I didn’t think much of it, at the time. I gave it to Ruth, told her to put it in the religious texts section and moved on. I’d completely forgotten about it when the… thing, had shown up. At the time, I hadn’t wanted to call it a seraph just in case I was right. It had made my blood run cold when I’d seen it, and I hadn’t even gotten a good look at it. It was almost exactly as Seraphim had described the angel, with six wings as white as snow, eyes all over the place and the illusion of flames engulfing the creature. At the time, I hadn’t slept for a couple of days, so I put it down to overtiredness causing hallucinations, but then it rocked up again, just like in my book. The whole situation seemed to be a carbon copy of the book; the only difference I noticed was the fear . The woman in the story was entirely comfortable with the seraph. I was not. I’d knocked over a table lamp in my terror the first time I’d seen it and had run to get Ruth the second time. She had told me where I could stick my supposed seraph , because, of course, she couldn’t see it. Just like my book, only I knew of the entity, blazing in the corner of my library.
I tried to burn the book, but the pages wouldn’t light. It was almost as if the seraph was actively preventing me from destroying it. I couldn’t comprehend the obvious wrongness of the angel’s existence in our world. I didn’t follow religion, even to this day I still don’t, so I didn’t see this as a sign from God or anything like that. My seraph seemed… sinister, somehow. Almost as if it wasn’t an angel at all. It would… stare at me, sometimes for hours at a time. It never did anything else, just stared , but there is something undeniably malicious about the gaze of more than two eyes at once.
I didn’t see it for a while after that, and I thought it had gone away until we got a second copy of Seraphim , again slipped into a separate book sleeve. It looked exactly like the first, and the only difference I found was the words inside. I’d been the one to check it in, so I was the first and, thankfully, last person to read it. The story began with a young man, working in a library. He’d found a book bound in black leather with just the word Seraphim printed on it. I’d skimmed it out of curiosity and was sickened by the words on the page, spinning a tale of what I knew to be lies. Just like the original, the story detailed how at ease I was with the seraph and I began to wonder just how many vile, lying copies of Seraphim there were. I threw both mine and the original in the paper shredder, resigning myself to the telling-off I’d get from Ruth immediately after. I’d endured a million lectures about how destroying a book was like destroying a soul, but Seraphim was destroying my soul. I couldn’t let anybody else be subjected to the constant paranoia that I’d had thrust into my mind, but even the shredder couldn’t save me. The books had resurrected themselves, both copies sitting neatly on the counter completely unscathed. I’d watched them be ripped apart until they were practically unrecognisable, but there they were, taunting me with their existence. I’d quit barely a week later, a feeble attempt to escape my tormenter. It didn’t work, as you can probably tell by this letter.
I’m writing this to you as a warning. I think, now, I understand why the first Seraphim had warned me of the Devil. The story of my life had ended with another ‘happily ever after under the watch of the Lord,’ but even now, as I pen this to you, I can feel its eyes on my back. I don’t think I have much time left; the look it's giving me right now definitely doesn’t insinuate that I’ll die of old age.