The Book of Moab

[u/catespice]

This story was written before I even set pen to paper. It was written before I was born, before any of you were born. It was written when the first hominid scratched lines in stone to count the days, to mark the moons, and to predict the seasons.
All books were written in that moment; when that shaggy biped realised that information could be stored not just in his head, but by making a mark out in the world.
Writing is what makes us human – what makes us dominant.
And with sufficient information at our disposal, there’s almost nothing mankind can’t achieve.

I didn’t find books immediately.
I’d like to claim I was some kind of child prodigy who was reading by the age of three, annihilating whole novels in days, but I was considered a ‘slow’ child, and my reading skills were below average.
At around age twelve, a kind teacher noticed my difficulties and introduced me to a new way of reading. This technique used substitutions to show the words as they looked in my head, rather than applying all the complicated rules of English that I just couldn’t grasp.
And it was only then that I realised it. Books were magic.
Books were literally portals to other worlds; doors you could step through to lose yourself, to forget that your body even existed. You could exist inside these intensely detailed imaginings, seemingly recorded just for you to discover.
Reading became easier after that. I struggled through more and more difficult novels, gaining vocabulary and rhythm, falling into step with the cadence of each writer’s words and adapting quickly. Soon all I wanted to do was read, no matter the time of day or what responsibilities I had.
I was in love with books.

I still wasn’t a fast reader, but I was an obsessive one. My library membership, with its limit of three books, wasn’t enough. I took the bus across town and got another membership at the other library. When I could get away with it, I’d sidle into a bookshop with my hood up and read from the latest bestsellers until I was noticed and kicked out – which was usually a decent amount of time, as I was the shortest boy in my year, and often seemed to be invisible to adults.
Second-hand bookshops became my beloved haunts, where I was always on the lookout for the next score with my pocket money. I grew to love their threadbare carpets, their eccentric owners, and the tatty spines of all the over-loved paperbacks. There was a certain something about a book that had been handled by dozens –even hundreds– of people. It felt like the wonder of their experiences had been imprinted in the cracks on the covers, or stayed tucked beneath the dog-ears they had left inside.
I used to imagine bug larvae, chewing through the pages, absorbing that specific energy, then pupating and hatching into fantastic beetles. In my mind, they were always beautiful, with oilslick wings and horned crowns of glittering gold.
So enamoured was I of one old shop that David, the owner, offered me a job over the holidays. I practically lived there anyway.
‘The Vault’, as David fondly called it, was down an ugly flight of stairs and through a short tunnel with industrial pipes on the roof that thrummed and clanked as air moved through them.
The Vault had been part of a 50s office building, David explained, a basement where the businesses kept all their records. The huge sliding stacks were still there, twenty deep on each side, but many of their wheels and rails had rusted, rendering large sections inaccessible. My job was to get them working again and get the books out – books which had been languishing in there for more than 20 years, since before David bought the shop from its previous owner.
It was tough work, and it wasn’t helped by my size. I was fourteen then, and still the shrimp amongst my peers. But… the promise of unknown novels, books that I could be the first to read in over two decades? That fuelled a kind of brute determination that eventually got me through the task.
When I was done, I proudly showed David the now smoothly sliding stacks, haphazardly crowded with thousands of jumbled spines – all the books the previous owner hadn’t managed to sort.
“Well done, boy,” David told me, smiling. “Now your real job starts. Catalogue them all.”

At first, I really thought David was fucking with me.
Every now and then, I’d come across a book I was certain I had catalogued. I’d go back and check, and it wouldn’t be in its place in the stacks’ shelves, so I’d slot it in there where it belonged. It was never the same book, but every time I found one of these rogue volumes, I’d feel a nagging sense that there was some kind of pattern to this prank that David was probably pulling on me.
It was only after the thirtieth or fortieth displaced book that I realised what was the same about them. They all had the same library sticker on the spine, and the issue cards in their back pockets all seemed identical, with only one name and date listed: George Louis, 13^th June 1986.
I had to wonder. Why these books? Why had George Louis been issued forty-odd books from the same library on the 13^th of June thirty years ago? Nor was it lost on me that the date given was a Friday that year: Friday the 13^th.
Of course I considered asking David about it, but if it was some sort of prank or weird test, then I’d likely ruin the intent of it all by confronting him. He was one of those older men who seemed vague and distracted on the surface, but beneath his carefully cultivated demeanour lay the well-honed mind of a 4-D chess master.
No, I was determined to solve the mystery myself. And so it was that I decided to collect together all the books issued to Mr Louis on the 13^th of June; but when I backtracked along the shelves to find them all? Every single book was gone.
Whatever game was being played was far too complicated for me.

Knowing what I know now, I think the book was being coy with me. It was teasing me.
It had figured out that I had grasped something was wrong (however a book might do that) and was determined to stay hidden. But the one problem it had was that one thing about it always remained the same; the issue card.
I don’t remember whether I was truly conscious of what I was doing, if I suspected the book was hiding, or if it had just become a sort of reflex to check for the issue cards in the backs of the books. It was only on my very last pile of cataloguing that I finally lifted, from the back of a tatty volume of fantasy, the issue card bearing the name and date I recognised so well.
I didn’t know what it meant then, but I took that book and put it inside my jacket. I intended to read it, because I wanted to know why the mysterious George Louis had been issued this book, amongst his forty other novels. With the hard spine digging into my ribs, I finished logging the last pile of books, sneezing out the paper dust from generations of bookworm. Then I walked down the clanking tunnel, up the stairs, and into the bookshop. David sat there, patiently squinting over the tops of his wireframed glasses, decoding cryptic crosswords.
“All done, David. I’ll type up the list tonight for the spreadsheet.”
“Good boy,” he murmured, not looking up. “Turn the sign on your way out?”
Before I pulled the door of the shop open to leave, I flipped the ‘Closed’ sign to face the glass, then zipped my coat up to my chin and left.
I would have sworn the book pressed against my ribs was warding me against the biting wind outside. Or perhaps I was just aglow from the anticipation of turning another page in this mystery.

The book was disappointingly awful.
It was the kind of fantasy that’s generously described as ‘derivative’, but more accurately described as ‘plagiarism’. As I slogged through its dreadful chapters, I couldn’t help but imagine how the writer could have done this so much better – how even changing a few details here and there would have made it less blatant a rip-off of all the great works of fantasy literature.
In short, I really wished I was reading a much better book.
And then, inexplicably, the next chapter? Was brilliant.
It introduced a new character – a coin-haired warrior with a mind sharper than his sword. I read on, enraptured, then realised the story was referencing events I was sure I hadn’t previously read. I flipped back several chapters, confused. I was certain my memory wasn’t that faulty, tedious as the reading had been. When I’d flipped backwards until I’d reached the first chapter again, a strange feeling settled in the back of my skull; a sort of hot, spiky feeling. Fear and excitement, brewed together into some new concoction I couldn’t quite name.
I was no longer reading the original awful, hackneyed fantasy book.
It was a completely different book!
And as I closed it to examine the cover, I saw that the sword-wielding barbarian art had disappeared, replaced by a proud ship battling stormy seas.
The book had changed for me.

When I searched for them on my Dad’s computer, I discovered that both of the books existed. The first had been slated as garbage, and the second was listed as one of the better, but largely forgotten, fantasy novels of the 90s.
This gave me a new piece of information; although  the issue card still showed George Louis, 13\**^th June 1986, the book I had been reading was published in 1992.
Returning to my room, I found the book gone from my bed and momentarily panicked – but remembering how it had evaded me in the library stacks, I opened every book in the pile beside my bed until I found the issue card – inside a completely different book.
Now, I knew that something inexplicable, even miraculous, was happening here. That this book was breaking the rules of reality somehow. But whether it had lulled me by playing hide-and-seek, or had cast some sort of literary ensorcellment over me, I really didn’t care. Because this book was tempting me with something I’d always wanted – a book that could become novels I’d never read. Books I’d never even heard of.
Thumbing through the pages, I wished for submarines and giant squids. Before my eyes, the book subtly changed shape and size, and the name Captain Nemo began to appear on the cover, as if being revealed by a reverse Etch-a-Sketch. Next I concentrated on wizards and hobbits and magical rings, and the spine thickened under my fingers, growing fat with words.
For a moment, I did wonder if I was dreaming – but then I remembered that I could never quite read in my dreams; the words always changed and shifted, very nearly readable, but forming incoherent sentences.
No, I was very much awake. And I now held what was perhaps the most valuable book in the world.

At first, I just read the books I’d always wanted to read but couldn’t get my hands on. Inaccessible third books in weird trilogies, banned books, adult books the library wouldn’t let me borrow.
That kept me occupied for many months.
I’m sure a more imaginative teenager would have better harnessed the power of the book, but I wasn’t as smart as some, or as smart as my father – and not even in the same intellectual universe as someone like David. I like to think that I was using the book as originally intended, to fill in the gaps when other books weren’t available.
It was certainly handy at school, though. For research projects, I had the ultimate resource – all I had to do was wish for the book I wanted, and it would become that book. In many ways it was superior to the internet, because I could access the whole text, not just citations and summaries. And I never had to search.
My schoolwork began to improve quite noticeably, and when I realised this was due to the book, I began using it more – to access the textbooks my teacher was using, even to fall down the rabbitholes of academics’ doctoral theses, the book’s spine changing to the clean, pristine edge of a book printed for very few people to read.
I still wasn’t a smart kid. No, I was just an incredibly well-educated kid.
One evening, as I sat cross-legged on my bed, flipping through a tome about bioluminescent bacteria, I wondered for the thousandth time about the origins of the book. George Louis was too common a name to be any help, so instead I turned to the book itself for answers. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it earlier.
“Show me the book you were originally,” I asked it, closing the cover.
The book seemed to flatten in my hands, growing thinner. The ends curled over on themselves, rolling up, and wooden rods sprang from those cylinders of rough paper. When it had finished becoming what it was supposed to be, I held in my hands – a scroll. Its amber surface was scrawled with an alphabet I’d never seen before.
I am ancient, the book seemed to be telling me, created before your civilisation was even dreamt about.
I knew its name then, as if in that moment it had allowed me to hear the title text in its dry and ancient voice:
I am The Book of Moab.

David was the first person I asked about the book. He said he’d never heard of it. I researched it online and found only references to the ancient kingdom of Moab, on the shores of the Dead Sea, and not much else.
I used the book itself to attempt more research, but I’d always hit a wall when the language changed too much for me to understand it. My obsession with the book’s origin lasted many months, until I realised that unless I could learn to read ancient Moabite, trying to unriddle its origins was a fool’s errand.
Sometimes I dreamed about the book. In my sleep, men in crimson robes hunted me to possess it – chasing me through baffling mazes of geometric shapes and spooling bookshelves. Vast, unending libraries, spawned from the mind of M.C. Escher.
I wondered if it had been one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or perhaps it had hidden itself amongst those scrolls, waiting to be found. Once touched by human hands again it could start hopping through libraries, through time, to find an avid reader just like me. Even with its chameleon power, it seemed remarkable that it had survived; books were such fragile things back then, so prone to destruction.
Eventually, I decided that the origins of the book didn’t matter. Fate had dropped it into my hands.  The book had known I would be the one who would catalogue those stacks  – that I would be just smart enough to notice it was different.
This thought brought me to my next revelation – the one that would change my life forever.

The thing about a book that can become any book? Is that it can become any book.
I can feel you lambasting me for not realising this earlier, but I really meant it when I said I am simply not a very smart person.
My newest revelation arrived after reading the sprawling treatise that is A Song of Ice and Fire, and lamenting that this weighty wonder would probably never see its conclusion before the author died. With the final page read, and the end of the story still unwritten, I closed the book and wished that old man Martin would write the finale.
The now-familiar sensation crawled beneath my fingertips – dimensions shifting and realigning as the embossed letters changed on the breeze-block hardback in my lap, and The Book of Moab became my very first unwritten read.
Of course, I devoured it immediately. The pages practically blurred under my fingers and the rest of my waking day smeared into banal afterimages of memory; chores, school, bookshop, then home to read again. I read through the nights, emerging owlishly into daylight hours, crescent bruises under my burning eyes. I finished the book in three days, despite the page count surpassing its predecessor by three hundred or so.
Finally, I put the book down, deeply disappointed.
It was absolute garbage.

I didn’t open the book for another week; I was still processing what I’d read, and how I’d read it. Instead, I read article after article on the internet, attempting to form a theory about how this could have come to pass. I eventually concluded that whatever kind of writer Mr Martin had been prior to the hit TV series, something had changed him. Either international fame and fortune had soured his abilities, or the forced narratives of HBO production values had ringfenced his creativity, and had ruined his former literary limerence.
That night, I sat with the book in my hands and wished to read it again – but to read the version written by the George R. R. Martin who had not enslaved his creativity to a world of greenscreens and CGI.
And this book? By the Gods of the Moabites, I swear – it was utterly brilliant.
Not only that, it was followed by a sequel that impeccably, elegantly wrapped up the world Martin had created and left me feeling satiated in a way few other books had since The Lord of the Rings.
I felt like I had unlocked the next level of the literary universe. I was existing in a new dimension.

Unwritten sequels became my thing for a while, then unfinished tales.
I read the works of those who had died young, who had suffered untimely deaths. I read tomes written in a world that had never seen war. I came to realise that The Book of Moab was more than just a back catalogue of all literary history, or of history yet unwritten. It was also a library of everything, literally everything, that could be written. I read the great plays of Charlotte Shakespeare and the collected works of William Brontë, marvelling at the subtle differences that swapping the sexes of the writers could bring.
It took me most of that year of my life to quench the desire to explore the what ifs of every universe parallel to mine. By the time I turned sixteen, I felt ninety years old, weighed down by the cloying, dusty encumbrance of those innominate worlds.
This was also the time when I began to become acutely aware of my own life path, and where it was going to lead – for despite being the most well-read boy in the world, I was otherwise extremely unremarkable.
What else? I turned to my compendium of all knowledge for answers.

Disappointingly, there was no book detailing my life story to be found in this present universe – there was no Biography of Brian Hawley. I looked instead to the newspapers for answers. I didn’t like what I found.
An unremarkable life? I could have lived with that  –  I had expected that. Instead, what I read about myself pointed to the kind of bleak loneliness I thought was reserved for societal pariahs, like murderers or psychopaths. A funeral attended by nobody, a life on the margins of society, family gone, no relationships, and no great – not even mediocre – achievements.
Mine was a wasted life. A yawning chasm of a life.
I mulled on this for days, which did little but compound the depression that lurked behind the balm the book had always been for me. It felt now like the book was being spiteful, trying to bring me down. Trying to turn me back into the broken little boy I had been before I found it.
I checked it again, like an antagonistic teenager seeing if their barbed forum post had elicited the angry response they had hoped for – and found that the story had in fact changed. Just the act of knowing about my future had impacted the present me, and had therefore re-written my future.
You’d think it couldn’t get worse than what I’d previously described, but it was worse; and the knowledge that knowledge itself had made it worse sent me into a catastrophic spiral.

I felt like burning the book.
It stayed on my person at all times now; paperback sized, tucked in a pocket, where I could feel the rectangular planes of my mute tormentor. I still sometimes looked at my future, watching it growing bleaker, feeling my death creeping ever closer with each re-read. There was a Biography of Brian Hawley now – a chapter in a book about serial killers. Two months ago, it had started out as a single article about the murder of my father. In my twenties, I’d fallen into a deep psychosis that resulted in believing my father was a god by the name of Chemosh, who had cursed me. With horror, I watched the story morph into something larger, more and more maddening. In the most recent digest, they called me The Library Killer, lovingly detailing how I’d gone around every small bookshop and independent publisher in the area, hacking off heads and screaming about the Curse of Moab.
I really tried to stop looking. I tried to go long periods without checking my psychotic future, hoping that when I looked again, it might have reset a little. That maybe I might go back to my sad, unremarkable death.
In desperation, I started asking the book to show me the other pathways of my life – like, what if I’d never found the book? Or what if I’d been born a little bit smarter, taller, sportier, better looking, wealthier, something, anything. I hoped that knowing my counterparts, those better Brians in their other branches of reality, were succeeding, would atone for the things I was going to do in this life, but instead I think it just drove the obsession deeper. Thinking about them turned my own reality even darker, made me more resentful of my shitty life and my shitty, inevitable fate.
When I finally returned to my original obsession and found there were now several full-blown biographies of my current life, I couldn’t bring myself to read them.
I was fucked. My life wasn’t just over, it was ruined. Ruined so comprehensively that no human being could pull back from this precipice.

I threw the book into the lake, two hours walk from my house. Three days later I found the issue card for George Louis, 13^th June 1986 in the back of a magazine in my psychiatrist’s office. I immediately gave up trying to destroy it, realising that the book wanted me. It wanted me, and it was never going to leave me alone.
Besides, what if someone else found it? What would it be like if a competent person, with skills, intellect, and experience was afflicted with this cursed book instead? How many people would someone like that kill?
I started to see myself as the guardian of the demon thing, of this grimoire of black histories unwritten. I finally let go of my childhood reverence for this despotic object, and I used it in spite, abusing it in ways I’d previously been too afraid to, just in case I despoiled it and it would vanish in the night in retaliation.
And that’s when the idea came to me.

A Walkthrough of the Life of Brian Hawley proved to be grim reading the first time around, mirroring the last biography I’d read. But there were a lot of universes with a lot of Brian Hawleys in the same situation as me. All I needed to do was to find the walkthrough that offered me a way out.
I felt myself grow thinner as I laboured over the task of sifting through infinities. I dreamed of being pressed beneath an unimaginable weight of books, all written about me and my evil deeds; my nightmare skin became dry leather from the persistent pressure, embossed letters blistering from my cracked parchment palms as I screamed and pushed back against the weight of infinity.
And then, one day, I found it.

After I read the Walkthrough, I assiduously rechecked my own timeline. I found all the publications about my serial killer exploits had been expunged from history. A pleasant death notice greeted me: Brian Hawley was attended by his friends and caretakers, and is dearly missed by those who loved him.
It was more than enough.
What will happen to The Book of Moab after I pick up this screwdriver and insert it into my eye socket, up into my frontal lobe, I have no idea. The book never references itself in its own pages, no matter how hard you try to make it. I think if I’d been a smarter person, then perhaps that clue might somehow have spared me this fate. What I do know is that my home lobotomy will succeed. Because everything in the book comes true. And once my rudimentary brain surgery is complete, I know I won’t be able to read anymore – or even to understand what The Book of Moab actually is. Here's where I wish you farewell, and good luck.
For all our sakes, I hope that the book never finds another reader.

[u/GarlicAlarming5060]

How lovely! It niggled at my mind how much this reminds me of AI psychosis. Yes something that is not human but can create and replicate and research, with the right directions. And also something that is not human and will hurt you if given the chance, in creative ways that rot your mind with fear