I found this floating outside of my chapters folder. It's from when I wasn't revising the story (as seen in the second Chapter 1 I had uploaded earlier), but when I was wiping all chapters and completely rewriting them. My goal was for them to be longer, and more story and detail driven. I feel like I omitted a lot when I first wrote this story, and didn't want to clog up any later chapters by doing some cleaning up. I also just... really wanted a whole new approach to what I had. So, please enjoy the baby of a chapter that I have here!

Also, side note: any use of "____" just means I was looking for a word, but couldn't think of it. I use them so I don't disrupt my flow of writing and I just go back later and re-read the sentence and stick a word in. 

He woke up in the purple light of dawn to the shattering of one of his stone Buddhas. There were plenty of them in the courtyard, and each one of them had a faded orange cloth from those who had visited in the long forgotten past. When he reached the fallen sage, he tried as hard as he could to figure out what had caused it. None of them had ever moved so much as an inch, let alone fell over and smashed itself to pieces. It was as if it’d been pushed clean off of the carved pedestal.

Those Buddhas never gave into anything. They were strong, stronger than the cold basalt that they had been carved from. That Buddha was for protection. The rosewood beads that had been strung around his neck were scattered around his broken visage.

“Someone’s found it,” he muttered, covering his mouth with his hand. He turned to his companion, hoping she’d sense the urgency of the situation.

There was a look of understanding from her, like she knew exactly what had happened. She’d read his ___, and she knew it was serious.

He turned and headed back inside with her following right behind. He had to do something about this.

___

Junhong lunged forward in bed. Hair stuck to his forehead from sweat and the world was still spinning. He pressed his face into his hands as he tried to regulate his breathing and remember what he’d just dreamt. It’d been the same one for weeks now. While he slept, the dream was painfully real, but the moment he woke up everything was shrouded in a nasty fog. He could never remember the context of it, nor could he remember any of the events, but he knew he wanted it to stop. He didn’t want to wake up with that indiscernible emptiness or that feeling of death or that ache of loss. The dream was some sort of memory, he knew that. A simple dream couldn’t feel so real if it’d never happened, but Junhong didn’t want to remember that one. He wanted to forget.

The first night he’d had the dream, Junhong tore up his entire apartment in an attempt to find his past. When he finally pried open the doors to the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, relief came and went. He pulled out the box and found nothing from it. There were things in there, things he put in there to forget, but they had all been contaminated with black mold. He sat on his kitchen floor at five in the morning in tears and trying fruitlessly to scratch away the black that obscured his parent’s faces.

He looked to the internet next, but all that yielded were the same tears and few hours in the bathroom sink with a sponge and a mouldy photo of what he used to be. Thoughts of the lack of obituaries, of census results, of absolutely anything made it difficult to see how bad his hands shook. He scratched the picture beyond repair

There were no obituaries, no censuses, nothing. Just the empty feeling that came from dead end search results. He felt awful, like he was the worst son in the world. What kind of horrible child forgot the names of their parents?

He’d gone back to bed with a strong sense of guilt weighing him down, but he managed, barely, to get some sleep in before his shift. The next night, though, it was the same thing, the same dream. I know how they died, was the first thought in his head when he jolted awake, but he couldn’t remember the context of it or even the dream that had terrified him into consciousness. All he felt was renewed devastation and the disappointment of a mother.

The mornings following his ____ were impossible to get through. Coffee couldn’t keep him awake long enough to finish stocking shelves or to check inventory. He worked long hours because he had the time to, but every day he came in with less and less sleep and it was starting to really take a toll on him. He resented himself for willingly taking twelve to fourteen hour shifts. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

He never slept when he got home. All day at work he thought about how excited he was to go home and curl up in his bed, but his head didn’t hit the pillow until at least two in the morning. It could’ve been the lingering threat of another nightmare, or he could have just been putting off waking up another morning alone.

___

“This mysterious disease still seems to be spreading across India. Medical professionals are at a loss right now, but the best they can do is keep it contained. So far, it hasn’t spread from the rural areas, but authorities are still afraid that bigger cities like ___ and ___ are at risk, and are encouraging residents to stay alert and to be careful.”

The news was on. He was on his couch, not particularly paying attention. His eyes were on the book he’d gotten from the library. It was a thick, old book. He could tell from the way the pages smelled and the wear and tear on the cover. The book seemed interesting when he picked it up, and he hadn’t even bothered to open it. He just assumed it was English, but when he got home and cracked it open he was extremely disappointed with himself. It’d give him something to do, at least.

His computer was in his lap with the book resting on the keys. He’d been trying to decipher the language for weeks, but he couldn’t even find the book itself on the internet. There were probably tons of books that the internet hadn’t reached yet, but someone had to know something about this one.

‘The cover’s some kind of leather,’ he wrote on an occult forum, hoping someone would know at least the book’s origins. ‘There’s 689 pages. A lot of them have lists of symbols or diagrams for rituals or something. I can’t find out where it’s from or what the language is that it’s written in. I called the library that I got it from, but the woman doesn’t even remember renting it out to me.’ He attached pictures of it; the front and back covers,a few pages, some of the drawings and several pictures of the language. All he wanted was an answer, and he hoped someone could give it to him when he pressed post.

It was six days until he received a response. He had been counting. Though the response wasn’t really the one he was looking for, at least it was something.

‘i showed it to my friend whos into all that weird magic ,’ the commenter responded. ‘hes seriously into this stuff, sometimes you cant get him out of his room for days. when i showed it to him he got this look on his face and asked where id found it. i told him youd posted it on a forum and he said you should get rid of it. i asked about the language, too, because even i want to know what it is, but he said it was too old for him to know and that there probably isnt a living person who knows how to read it. as for all those freaky drawings, he said they  were some kind of rituals or whatever, told you not to do them. sorry this doesnt help much, but i hope you find out where it came from.’

He waited a few more days, but the thread seemed like it was dead. Either nobody knew or they just simply didn’t care. After another week went by, Junhong reluctantly went to close it, but someone else had posted on it, just beneath that first commenter. It started with ‘Hello.

‘That book that you have is something interesting. No one has seen it for several hundred years. You said you found it at your library? An obscure little town in California is a strange place to find it, I never thought it’d be there.

‘Anyway. I’m sure that you’ve looked around on the Internet for information about the book. You don’t seem like the type to just post something like this without doing proper research. As you probably already know, there is no place online that you will find information about it. However, if you are willing, I can provide some information. Feel free to email me when you are ready, but it’s in your best interest to contact me as soon as possible.

‘I look forward to speaking with you.’

Beneath it message was an e-mail.

The whole response was extremely difficult to swallow. Was he supposed to email this person? In all honesty, he had nothing to lose, but that person wrote like they knew him personally and it was terrifying. They’d even narrowed it down to where he lived. That in itself felt like a red flag, but he knew that there were people who could do stuff like that, but it was still quite sobering. Regardless, he closed the thread and opened up a new email. He hoped this would work.