The Journal

I’ve always been fascinated by journals, particularly old, leather-bound ones. But what if the journal didn’t want words?

He found the journal on the train.

It was a simple thing of soft, smooth, reddish-brown leather, no curlicues, or other designs, not even a word embossed upon its surface. It was slightly larger than your typical bible, and fat like an over-plump child, sitting in the stripe of sunlight that slipped through the window at the back of the train carriage. The young man picked it up, took its seat, and made himself snug in that corner of the nearly empty carriage. There was just one other person, at the opposite end of the space: a woman with hair the colour of basalt.

Within a few minutes, the train was rocking its way out of the station to start its long journey and the gentle swaying was making his eyelids flutter with promises of sleep. He yawned pre-emptively, shrugging out of his dark blue jacket as the train plunged towards the countryside; the sun spilling in was as warming as a fireplace. Quite absentmindedly, the young man thumbed open the squat journal perched on his lap. It screamed. A strong, piercing shriek like a siren.

He slammed it shut, bewildered, his eyebrows fled towards the safety of his wiry, mahogany-coloured hair. He flung the journal into the seat beside him and looked around the carriage. The woman seemed not to have heard a thing. She appeared to be asleep already, her head pillowed on a folded grey coat. There’s no way she wouldn’t have heard that noise. Perhaps it had been his imagination he wondered. Yes, indeed, it must have just been the train’s brakes, that’s all. Books don’t scream, what a ridiculous notion. He let loose a short puff of a chuckle and wiped sweat that was not there from his brow. The lack of sleep from the night before was taking its toll; he’d worked late into the night as he’d done for the last few years.

He wadded up his jacket against the window and closed his dark brown eyes. It didn’t take him long to decide that sleep was not coming. He stood, balancing as the train rocked, and extracted his briefcase from overhead. He pulled out a novel, Love in the Time of Cholera; on the first page it was signed in a flowery hand, ‘Love Marianne’. She had been pestering him to read it and now, when he met her at the Wein station in the evening, he’d at least be able to stay he started.

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” He read, and that was as far as he got before his eyes found themselves looking at the thick, leather-bound journal on the seat beside him. He cleared his throat.

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” He read the line again. “Dr Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before.”

Again, his eyes were pulled to the journal. He read the first two sentences four more times before he found himself holding the journal once more. Love in the Time of Cholera sat plaintively in the seat.

He peeled it open. The cover felt very warm under his fingers; the sun he supposed. There was no scream this time. Not that there had ever been a scream in the first place, he reminded himself, with an awkward laugh, looking around to see if the other passenger had heard him. She was still fast asleep with her head on the table in front of her.

The pages of the journal were thick and yellow like a stained tooth. It was old and fragile beneath his fingers, and he was afraid the paper would crack and fall away to dust. For the first few pages, there was nothing. Love in the Time of Cholera watched. Then, on the tenth page, slowly, slowly, words began to form in curling, old-fashion script. His eyes widened. His fingers warmed.

“Welcome,” appeared. “Something here awaits thine eyes. Something thou must know. Relinquish me not or thou will never know.”

His fingers were almost burning, but he could not pull away. He stared into the pages, eyes roving this way and that.

The journey to Wein Station was seven hours long. In those seven hours, the young man stared and stared, and the journal in his hands grew hotter and hotter. He saw nothing of the fields in bloom that streamed past the window by which he sat, covered in blankets of shocking yellow. The rivers that snaked their way alongside the train’s route, gleaming streaks of sapphire, went unnoticed, tethered as he was by whatever he saw in the journal’s pages. He didn’t even seem to notice as his hands began to glow. He stared on as his fingers started to disappear. Love in the Time of Cholera lay forgotten. The world lay forgotten.

The train had one stop to make before its final destination, in a small town called Grund. As the brakes squealed and the train juddered to a stop the young woman came awake with a start. She got up and stretched her legs, deciding that for the last stretch of the journey, she would sit in a different spot.

She went to the opposite end of the train. Surely, she had seen a man sitting by the window? There was no one there now, only a briefcase resting in the overhead compartment beside a blue jacket. She shrugged and sat across the aisle, but not before she noticed a fat, leather journal sitting in the seat by the window. As the train moved again, she stared at it. No one came to sit there, and so, looking quickly around, she went and grabbed it for no reason she could explain. The woman opened the cover and it screamed.

A warning.

© Stephanie Koathes. All rights reserved.