I Found the Book of The Dead in My Grandpa's Attic

I was cleaning out my grandfather’s attic when I found the book.

It was ancient-looking, the pages dusty, cracked and worn at the edges. The cover looked to be made of old skin and resembled a cracked, leathery face captured mid-scream. Instead of a title, there were eyes at the top - just black empty sockets. It reminded me of the Necronomicon, the book of the dead from that great campy horror movie - The Evil Dead.

When I opened it up, I thought the paper would disintegrate into dust. All of it stayed together, though. The sheets were suddenly blown around in the nonexistent breeze of the attic. Like the thin pages of a bible they turned easily in the wind. It opened up to one page in particular and settled there. The spidery cursive looked handwritten - and not in black ink, but a deep crimson beginning to turn brown in its advanced age.

Why would my grandfather have something like this, I wondered. The words inside were all written in an ancient language and I couldn’t understand a single sentence of it. A few words looked familiar, but I was no linguist. And my grandfather was no academic, he had sold life insurance!

Unable to figure out this odd relic, I did what any of us do these days when faced with a question - I took some pics of the thing and put them up online.

I Tweeted and Insta’d, then I Snapchatted and TikTok’d it all, reading the words aloud sometimes to the camera and other times just taking pictures and throwing random filters on them. In one I gave the dead face on the cover of the book some dog ears and made it stick out its tongue. That one was marginally popular.

Anyways, eventually other people started reading the captions for themselves. They started commenting on the videos I had posted with their own experiences. I hadn’t noticed anything strange yet, but then I had been inside all day with the curtains drawn.

The occasional screams from outside were getting slightly disconcerting, I'll admit.

I read some of the comments:

Kermie1992: No idea what these words mean but I just read them out loud and now my dead cat is walking around in the backyard. We just buried him yesterday and the dirt is all dug up around where his grave was. He’s emitting a low growl and doesn’t seem to recognize us when we approach him. Thanks alot! Don’t read this passage, people! The vet bills are going to be ridiculous once we finally get him corralled into a crate - this ancient text is nothing but trouble. UNLIKED! UNSUBSCRIBED!

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CannedCheez22: I started reading the first few lines and all of a sudden the room got ice cold and I could see my breath. Now I’m seeing things in the shadows and I can’t get warm again. Would not recommend trying to translate this text or reading it aloud. YOU SHOULD REALLY REMOVE THIS FROM THE INTERNET - I FEAR THAT IT IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!

Edit: I woke up and found myself shivering at my desk reading the words aloud again. This time I couldn’t stop. I was almost at the end and I couldn’t get myself to stop. I can hear them outside. They’re breaking down the door. They’re inside the house... God help us all. What have I done?

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RedEyes420: I got high and read this shit out loud and now I’m hearing doorknobs rattling all around my apartment and footsteps from outside my door and there’s something scratching the glass of my windows with their fingernails. I’m paranoid enough already from that super skunk. I don't need this right now.

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After reading through all of these I realized one thing…

I hadn’t smoked a joint all day! It was almost sunset and I had been sober since I had gotten up two hours prior. The only problem was I was out of rolling papers and… Well, I guess this is where things start to get a little bit weird.

The paper in the book of the dead looked so perfectly thin and identical to the consistency of my usual Zig-Zags. I couldn’t help but think they would work perfectly for rolling a joint. And I certainly wasn’t going outside at that moment - what with all the blood-curdling screams and all. I still hadn’t looked out there yet, to be honest. But I was getting a bad feeling that when I did, my fears would all be real and there would be no going back. That terrified me more than anything. I was Schrodinger’s cat in my comfortable little box and I wanted to keep it that way for the time being.

That meant I couldn’t leave to go down to the corner store for more rolling papers. I was in my deceased grandpa’s old house so it wasn’t like he had anything to smoke out of.

So, I did it… I tore a paper from the book. It came out easily enough. Although there was strangely a fair bit of blood.

I managed to straighten out the page and got it flat and filled it with some Halloween Special from the dispensary down the road, then rolled it into a cone. I lit up and smoked it, trying to ignore the fact that the joint was made using a page from the Book of the Dead. The faint wailing sounds it made when I inhaled made that slightly difficult.

Shortly after that I heard the front window of the house break. I was upstairs in a hotboxed room and I heard the sounds of shuffling feet and groaning zombies filling the house.

“It’s not real,” I told myself. “You don’t hear that.”

They began to climb the stairs and I suddenly realized that I may have attracted them with the smell of the book’s burning pages. Why did I have to make that damn joint so big??

Their lumbering steps continued to grow louder as they came closer, banging their bloodied, grave-soil-dirty hands on the door as they wailed and moaned. I pulled the dead-bolt closed and held the door with the weight of my body, my sock feet slipping on the hardwood floor trying to gain purchase.

The hinges creaked and I saw them begin to break from their fastenings. The door bulged inwards like a dam about to break as the wood splintered and heaved. I backed away, realizing there was no hope of keeping them out.

The door collapsed inward with a loud CRACK!

Zombies began to shuffle into the room, moving towards me with their filthy hands outstretched.

My pounding heart picked up and went into overdrive as the undead horde filled the room. They were covered in black soil and their flesh was swelling and waterlogged, maggots falling from holes in their faces and beetles crawling from the cuffs of their rotting suits and from the bottoms of their funeral dresses. Millipedes peered out from the hollows where their eyes had once been, watching the scene unfold curiously.

There was a window behind me on the wall furthest from the door. I felt for it with my hands, terrified to turn my back on them. Finally I found it with my fingers and opened it quickly, then knocked the screen out with one swift kick. I was on the second floor and there was a long way down but an awning covered the front porch which I could jump down onto.

I pushed the zombies away from me desperately as they lunged at me, their broken teeth snapping in my face like wild, diseased animals. Once I had a bit of space, I threw myself out the open window and lowered myself down from the ledge. I was almost clear from them when something had caught my arm. I looked up to see one of them with my bleeding wrist crushed between their teeth, pulling at my flesh like a dog with a juicy bone.

“AAAAAHHHH! STOP!” I screamed, terrified. And strangely, the zombie did just that.

His white-yellow eyes widened with what looked like fear or respect and he backed away comically, his hands held up in the air as if to say, “my bad.”

I was still hanging out of the window and a crowd of zombies were gathered by my feet, waiting for me to fall now, after hearing my screams. The road was slowly filling up with them, pouring out from a nearby graveyard in droves.

“Get away from me!” I yelled at them. And they did. They backed away with that same strange look of apology.

“What the hell…”

I couldn’t understand what was happening. That was, until I thought about the book. I had read from the pages of the book of the dead, I had shared them online with others who had done the same. None of them had gained the ability to command the zombies, though, at least as far as I knew.

But I had also smoked a fatty using that same page with the spell on it. Maybe that was what was causing this reaction. Could I now control them with my words? Had I unwittingly become a necromancer somehow?

“Hey, you! Go back to your grave and go to sleep!” I yelled at one of the zombies, testing my new powers.

He shrugged and started walking away, shuffling off towards the cemetery.

"Holy shit."

I wish I could say things turned around after my encounter - that I managed to fix it all and convince the dead to return to their slumber. Unfortunately, as you likely already know if you're reading this, I failed.

Sure, I know what to do to reverse the damage I’ve caused. I could try to stop them. I SHOULD try to stop them. But it’s already too late. I’ve been bit and I’m changing by the minute - turning into one of THEM. As we all will soon. They're everywhere. They're coming for all of us.

I’ve never been so afraid in all my life, seeing what I’m going to become. What the world is going to become…

The rotten, sloughing flesh of the faces all around me moan and groan and seem to sing a chorus together. A melancholy symphony of death. They watch as I change into one of them, smiling at me. Waiting.

But there are still pages left in the book. And I’ve got plenty left from the dispensary.

I’ll die scared. But at least I won’t die sober.