five o'clock

THE BOOK OF THE KEY AND THE LOCK also known as THE BOOK OF LUCIFER or THE BOOK OF LOKIThis compilation highlights some of the years best weird fiction short stories and horror flash fiction told on 4chan's /x/paranormal board (as voted by regulars).Out of chance, or perhaps fate, the four stories all have a common thread that can be found by the observant reader. That is, all stories contain within: some vague, indirect link to the urban legend surrounding a mythical book known by many names including 'The book of Lucifer' or 'The book of lock and key'. This book has no actual historic record but is spoken about in early European folklore, Norse mythology and some East Asian mythology where it is known as 'The book of Leng'. …. Even more frequently it is known in lore and creepy pasta, on web forums,… in rumour and speculation on the internet. The legends of the book vary in descriptions about its many fabled contents, and has been spoke of, among other things - as holding the very secrets to the universe, granting fame and fortune and even immortality (of a kind) to the owner of the book, and more terrible applications still. Does the book actually exist? Perhaps the answer is somewhere within the stories to follow.To introduce our tale here is an excerpt from one of the four stories, from the words of the late Ellis Vanderson, a clue to the location of that alluring book may lie somewhere even within these words, if you are foolish enough to read on……'Know this, dear reader, insanity is a contagion, spread not by some mistake of nature, or medical anomaly, but by understanding only that which is immediately obvious. Could damnation be more readily scrawled in huge yellow letters on the walls of the human labyrinth about us? Or more often be spoke of in soft maddening words every night on thenews? Could it be less displayed in every book and work of art of human creation, in our myths and religions, inside EVEN our own minds? The most instinctual sensation we have about this putrid and absurd existence which we have the audacity to call 'life' is correct, though we try for the most part to suppress it. And.. for my part I vouch, that whosoever is bold enough to avoid all warnings to the curious and perceive the grand cosmic cipher, which will be found in the correct arrangement of certain keys of human understanding. The unlocking of that cruel and unusual malady which has plagued humanity since time immemorial will come upon you as some hideous banshee leaping upon a weary or aged victim of sleep paralysis, pulling you down at last into an unwinnable struggle of maddening dementia, which you will one day surrender to, and sink into numbing darkness… until the final blackness of death.'AT THE GATES OF ANXIETY'If you should read the articles attached within, I don't doubt that some lurking madness or fear WILL strike you, where upon, what had once been called sanity, will appear all the more insane to you for its simplistic will to ignorance and preoccupation with minor and trivial daily events. Perhaps most horrifically, the state of understanding this disgusting trauma brings on will be known unto the seeker, only in complete truth when laughter and screams of terror become blurred into the one spasmodic sensation of sole ecstatic relief from knowledge of those horrors unfathomable, which once learned, cannot be unlearned. Every pessimistic impulse that a natural disaster inspires within us, a suicide, or a car accident, a lone weary groan from a dementia patient in an old persons home, is only the tip of that host of unholy terror which waits to strike us at some future moment, like a lion stalking its volatile prey with cunning and malificient joy, if only to toy with us, like that feline species toys with its food, to strike finally when we are alone in our death beds, and savour our unheard prayers and vain hopes for deliverance and redemption.'THE RED CURSE'Whats more, the doorway to this insane understanding is not in some forbidden crypt, demons purse, or warlocks castle, but readily available in the most common utility of this new dark millennium. The internet, this dreaded oracle, this precious shrine to all human knowledge, deserves the worship and fearful reverence our ancestors gave to the very elements, great olympian mountains or underworld caves, not merely treated with the apathy of some social utility. Even now it is laid out like some exalted puzzle or labyrinth, a chasm of unknowable depths and horizons, viewable only in a vague interconnecting web of broken crystal shards of human knowledge, which were once kept in sacred vaults. Shards which, only when connected can we make sense of our world and human existence. Now its cracked glass ceiling stands like a mausoleum at the funeral of mankinds self progress and his very quest for knowledge. This rooftop which will one day bring on this fated and wretched day of apocalyptic human ignorance to some new darkness more powerful than man, talk of singularities or nuclear armageddons, I know not why. What comes down in the form of what scientists call 'entropy', must surely be the same black chasm that all human apocalyptic prophecy that had any merit, had warned of, if we were only smart enough to perceive it, or remember it, when the time is most important. 'PLAYER 65'If we were wise, that apple on the back of our laptops and phones ought to be burnt into the very retina of our mind's eye, as the apple of Eden's…. and its forbidden knowledge, or the fruit of the norse tree Ygg Drasil which was burned in our mythical forbears, nay we should be wearier of even darker fruits from even darker days of ne-anderthals, apes, dinosaurs and blast knows what other creatures spawned by the thrawling blind chaos of our past, and know that the future holds the same catastrophic and chaotic journey onwards, forever headlong into the abyss. 'Ere into the future as into the past. Here even now the archetype of the old tree of knowledge seems becoming more like some dark web of an unknown evil spider who lurks amidst all things, waiting to strike, a mechanical vault of some future machine god already too vast for any humans too correlate the darkness that lies within it. That fruit of knowledge, whatever tree it is picked from will still turn acrid and putrid in our mouths like chunks of milk drunk past the blessed life force the cow bestowed on it. And that which nature upon its own will, turns into a foul abomination capable, only, of revolting the very senses and ones faculties for appreciation, such that we vomit in our throats at the very sense of it. This is the true fruit of the summit of all human knowledge. Decay. Misery fated. Death. Ends of ages.'THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT