About a month ago, I noticed that one of my books had a chunk missing from it. There was a triangle-shaped hole roughly the size of my palm right in the middle. The cuts around it were so precise that I figured whoever had made them must have been quite dedicated to the task. I didn’t think too much of it at the time. I had gotten the book in question in an encyclopedia bundle at a yard sale, boxed up with around twelve others. I hadn’t inspected all of the books in the bunch beforehand so it was quite plausible I’d accidentally purchased the previous owner’s art project. The book was sadly completely unreadable due to the damage so I really didn’t have a lot of use for it, but I decided against throwing it out. It was sort of fancy after all.
I placed it on top of my shelf for decorative purposes.
A week or so later, I was sitting at my desk in the office sorting through paperwork when I saw that random documents had triangle-shaped bits cut out from them. There were multiple emails I’d printed out and stapled together with these little incisions right below the name of the sender, a vacation request rendered incomprehensible by the large triangular hole in the upper half and even a copy of one of the company’s subscribed magazines with a similarly shaped chunk missing at the bottom left corner. The missing pieces of paper were nowhere to be found. I asked around the office if this was some kind of prank but nobody seemed to know anything about it.
I threw the yard sale book in the trash that same day the moment I got home.
Two days later, I found a triangular hole in one of my plates when I was making breakfast, so I took the book out of the trash and burned it in my backyard. For almost two weeks, there were no new holes.
Then one day, I woke up to find an enormous, triangular patch missing from the wallpaper right next to my bed. Unlike the holes I’d found before, this one looked to be burnt into the wall’s surface, baring the dark layer beneath it. At that point, I was scared enough to try and reach out to the guy who’d hosted the yard sale. For some reason though, I couldn’t remember the address, or even the neighborhood, and when I asked the friend who I’d gone there with, they said they had no idea what I meant.
When I was at work today, I suddenly felt an intense pain in my left knee. I got up and limped over to the bathroom where I dropped my pants to find a completely scalded spot in the skin there. It was roughly the size of a fingernail.
So here I am now. I’m terrified. I mean, of course I am. What am I gonna do, huh? Where’s the next burn gonna be? And how deep?