The Book

• Xavier Hohnberg, Grade 6, Robertson State School
• Short Story
• 2018

Excellence Award in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition

School had just finished and John was overjoyed to get home. As he walked, he thought over what had happened that day, wondering who it was who had called to tell him to meet them before school the next day. The voice had seemed strangely familiar, but he just couldn’t place it. But now he was home, he stopped thinking about it, till that night when he stayed up late, wondering who that could have been. The next day, when he got to school, earlier than everyone else, at the time he had been told to come, nobody else was there. That afternoon, when he got home from school, he opened his bag and there was a massive book.
That night, he dreamt of a crowd outside of his house, piling wood around it, and emptying bottles of pitch onto the wood, some of them carrying torches, which they then threw onto the wood, burning the house to the ground, all the while chanting “Give us the book!” over and over. He sat up straight in his bed, covered in cold sweat. There he was, packing his bag, at 1am with everything he might need, deciding whether he should go now. But in the end, he decided against it. He would stay another day, see what happened.
The next day at school, people were asking strange questions, mostly if he knew where a book was. When he asked what book, they just said, “The Book.” That afternoon, he ran away to find whoever had given him the book. He had packed everything he might need and left. The first place he ran to was school, where he found the groundskeeper and his 12-year-old son. When the son spoke, the voice was that of the person who had told him to come to school early the day he found the book. John went up to him and said, “You have to help me destroy the book!”
“Sure”, he said, “I can help you destroy it. In my attic, where I found the book, after I gave it to you, I found another paper, showing how to destroy it. It says that to destroy the book you must burn it.”
“How are we going to do that?” John asked.
“We are going to become chimney cleaners.” The groundskeeper’s son said. So, they spent the afternoon getting everything they would need to do so, and walked around and eventually got the job, and dropped the book into the fire. Then, The Book was gone.