Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate—Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
What are you doing? Are you insane?! I’m warning you! Don’t make the same mistakes I made and quit reading. You’ve been warned.
I wish I could go back. I wish I could forget everything I learned, and maybe it would stop. Who am I kidding? There is no forgetting.
It was just an average Tuesday evening in July. I had decided to walk a few miles up the street to the local pizza shop, Angelo’s, to indulge in their delectable Grandma pizza, and I told myself that walking would at least help me burn some of it off. Who would have thought that laziness would have been a better choice?
As I walked back, belly full, and quite a bit more sluggish than the eager trip out to Angelo’s, something caught my eye in the window of the pawn shop. I can’t really remember the details of the shop, but I’ll never forget the glistening gold light that seemed to emanate from that book. On the featured display in the window, as if it were a cliche right out of a Hallmark movie, sat a large book that appeared to be producing as much light as it was absorbing from the bulb overhead. Before I knew it, the bell of the front door was ringing as I walked inside.
The store was completely empty except for a frail, nervous-looking man who immediately began approaching me from behind the counter. He appeared to be young enough, yet somehow it looked as though he was aging exponentially as each moment passed. “I—I—I see my book has caught your eye,” he stuttered softly. “I’m in a h—hurry, and it has been a slow day, so I’ll cut to the lowest price I can do: $500.” Without a second thought, I reached for my wallet and handed him my Discover card, and almost as if I had teleported, I found myself in my home study looking at the brown paper the shopkeeper had wrapped the book in.
Upon tearing the paper from the book, I was immediately filled with the anger one feels when they realized they’ve been scammed. I was convinced that something about the display and the lighting must have made the book look much more elegant than it actually was, or perhaps the shopkeeper did the ole bait and switch on me at the counter. Morbid curiosity overtook me as I began to inspect my new $500 paperweight. If nothing else, I had to give him that the book was pretty old, and if I were to guess it spanned about 3 feet tall and 1.5 feet wide and had to be at least 6 inches thick.
It should have dawned on me at this point that the book weighed a ton, yet I had no recollection of any struggle bringing it home. After all, the pawn shop was right near Angelo’s, so I would have walked nearly 3 miles with a large, 100lb book in my hands. Instead, I peeled back the heavy leather cover, and there it was in large dark red ink… almost as if it was written in ancient blood:
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.
At first, I couldn’t even tell you what language the book was written in and simply assumed it was Latin, but it didn’t matter really since I had never bothered to learn a language other than English. The more I think back, the more I am disappointed with myself for not seeing all of the warning signs or even heading the blatant, written warning. With every passing moment I stared at the letters on the page, they began to come into focus more and more until they morphed into something familiar:
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
I sat there, confused for a few moments as I questioned whether I actually saw the words in another language or if the food coma from Angelo’s pizza was hitting me harder than I expected. Pushing the thought from my mind, I foolishly turned the page. Even thinking about the image for the sake of this story sends chills down my spine, but spanning across both gargantuan pages in ink as black as the void was a single, inhuman eye. It didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t do anything supernatural in that sense, but somehow it felt as if the page was staring right through me. In a quick reaction simply to make it go away, I turned the page to find the words:
As I speak these words, heed my call.
Give me knowledge, grant it all.
Remove my ignorance, take my innocence.
Break the covenant, take this recompense.
While pondering the meaning of that strange phrase, I gave up and reached forward to turn the page:
As I speak these words, heed my call.
Give me knowledge, grant it all.
Remove my ignorance, take my innocence.
Break the covenant, take this recompense.
This struck me as odd. Why would someone write the same small phrase on such large, old paper? I continued to turn page after page, but at this point, they all said the same thing. Except, I wasn’t getting any further through the book. It was as if I was turning the same page each time, and it became clear to me somehow that I needed to read the passage aloud. And so, I did. As an ignorant fool, I read it aloud. You, dear reader, have already gone too far. Don’t you dare read it aloud—at least not until you learn of the consequences. To be fair, even with my newfound wealth of knowledge, I do not know if reading it aloud makes any difference. It may already be too late.
Upon finishing the final words of that godforsaken phrase, the words began to fade away from the page, and in their place, the dark eye began to bleed into view. I found myself no longer able to blink, unable to look away as it looked at me. My own eyes began to burn as I stared even onward, and it felt as if at any moment flames were going to burst from my eye sockets. The pain was so unbearable I began to wish my eyes would burn from their sockets just to relieve the pain. Finally, the pain began to subside with everything fading to black—black as the void.
I awoke the next day, at least I think it was the next day, on the floor of my office with a pile of half-digested pizza about a foot from my face. As the memories came flooding back, my heart began to race, and I jumped to my feet looking towards my desk. Odd, there was no book, no paper wrapping, just my empty desk. Thinking to myself that food poisoning could certainly lead to some lucid nightmares, I made my way to the kitchen for a drink to clear the awful taste from my mouth. While browsing Reddit to pass the time as I slowly sipped some flavored water, my heart began to pound again. The news section had an article discussing a stolen religious artifact, and the picture exactly matched the glistening, golden book from my nightmare. How was that possible? Did I somehow stumble upon that article last night before I passed out on the floor?!
That was the first time I heard them. It was faint at first, like a whisper in the wind that is easily dismissed. But it got louder, and quickly bellowed into a white-hot scream of a horrid voice covering a spectrum of multiple pitches, “I accept your sacrifice. There is no turning back now. You will find the knowledge you seek in the unending darkness. Do not fight it, for you will only prolong your suffering.” The words pieced my mind with the fire of a thousand suns as time stood still, but in the next instant, it was gone.
At least, the voice and the searing pain were gone. However, the world outside my windows had gone dark, and it was as if someone painted my windows with the blackest paint science could muster. I looked at my phone to double-check the time but immediately threw it across the room. In place of the usual iPhone lock screen was that horrifying eye as dark as the void. All throughout the house, it was on every screen of every device—is on every screen of every device.
Ironic for a techie, but I don’t have any TVs, screens, or fancy electronics of any kind in my bedroom, save for the iPhone I chucked in the kitchen some time ago. Not knowing what to do, I ran for my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and flicked on the lights. The secure feeling of my secluded bedroom was incredibly short-lived as I began to notice a dark shadow creeping in from all edges of the room. In a stroke of desperation, I ran to my dresser and dug for the flashlights I had stashed for any random power outages, and as luck would have it, they all had fresh batteries. I shined the brightest one I had at the edge of the room, and… it helped, but it was clear that I was only delaying the inevitable—am delaying the inevitable. In a panic, I turned on the lantern along with all the flashlights and jumped onto my bed in the center of the room where I am now.
The skeptics among you may be wondering, “Wait, how did he write all of this if the ‘horrifying eye’ was on every screen in the house?” Well, it’s rather simple really. As the darkness gets ever closer to consuming me, or at least that’s what I assume will happen, I gain more and more unknowable knowledge. I can see through space and time, manipulate electromagnetic waves with my mind, and even manipulate the matter surrounding me at a quantum level. But all of that does me no good, because whatever it was that I spoke to by reading that passage is unaffected by any of this. No matter how far through space and time my mind wanders, no matter how much of a defense I try to build around myself, the darkness grows ever closer.