The Rolls:

Roll to Write Rolling Table

My friend and I used to meet up after school, when everyone had gone home for the night and the only lights on were the ones that never turned off. We found a way to open one of the library’s windows from the outside so that we can return and hang out in the night. They weren’t the coolest of sleepovers but we both loved being in the library and figured that it was less of a crime to break into the school library than the public library because we’re students. That doesn’t really hold water now we’re older, but we weren’t thinking too hard about it back then.

The library was old, one of the original buildings of the school back when it used to only have four classrooms. No one really had any idea why it’s so big if there weren’t that many students when it opened but some people said it was because it used to be a church and was remodelled after being abandoned. That theory caused a lot of arguments in the school. Some kids were adamant that it didn’t look like a church and you weren’t allowed to change churches after they were built but no one really ever looked up whether or not that was true. The fun was really in the conspiracies and the debates and arguments. If we knew the truth, then it wasn’t interesting anymore.

Anyway, so me and Poppy used to climb up to the second floor using the bricks and slide open one of the top windows that let us into the non-fiction section, opening up into the world of science, to be more precise. We’d both have our backpacks and a shared duffle bag with sleeping bags that were really just bundled blankets and a camp burner that we never used, too afraid to accidentally set fire to the library. But we liked having it on hand. It helped with the ambiance.

Neither Poppy nor I had parents that kept proper tabs on us and meals weren’t consistent and so there was no daily dinner at the dining table for people to notice us missing from. We usually just told our parents that we were staying at each other’s places. Well, I told my aunt that and Poppy told her dad that. As long as they weren’t getting calls saying we were wagging school, we were basically left to our own devices. Maybe they knew we were sneaking all along. Who knows.

Anyway, Poppy and I would have a sleepover at the school library twice a week during the school week and over the weekend every now and then. We decided it couldn’t be more than that because otherwise we’d probably get found out. Sometimes the teachers stay pretty late as well and during the beginning and ends of term, the cleaners spend most of the night still cleaning. Having to wait in the bushes for the cleaners to finish up their cleaning whenever we’d go for a sleepover made us realise how much time they actually spend cleaning up the mess of the kids during the day. Way more diligently than any of the other kids probably thought. We were already pretty tidy in the library during our sleepovers but it made us ensure that it was impossible for them to tell we were there. Both because we didn’t want to get caught, obviously, and also because we didn’t want the cleaners to feel sad if they found mess in the morning they’d already cleaned up.

During our sleepovers, we’d never go down to the ground floor, just staying up in the more “grown up” sections of the library. Windows were added to the bottom floor and so it was a lot easier to get spotted if you were walking around. We also weren’t interested in those books anyway. All of the older fantasy was up on the second floor and that’s what we were after. Poppy loved to flick through the collection of space and gardening magazines as well.

The last time we ever went for a library sleepover, we found a new book on the shelf. It wasn’t hard to tell that it was a new book because we’d memorised every book on the shelves in the sections we were constantly reading in and it was only once a month that the school would get in new books and we’d already read that one about two weeks before.

‘It doesn’t look new,’ Poppy said as she turned it over in her hand. ‘It must be someone’s and they left it on the shelf.’

‘Or maybe they left it on a table and a cleaner shelved it.’

‘Nah, no way Bridgette would leave a book laying around before the cleaners got here.’

‘Yeah, true.’ Bridgette’s nickname when we were there was “Brigade”, because people would joke that she was the entire team taking care of the library. Poppy and I didn’t call her that. Kids started calling her “Bigade” or “Big-Brigade” and creating weird drawings of her as a buff soldier with a mean mouth. They’d hide the jokes behind calling her “Big Bird”.

Bridgette didn’t have a mean mouth. She just cared more about the library than she did about bratty kid’s feelings and I didn’t blame her. Still don’t.

Poppy looked at me in the dim glow of the little lantern we would take with us. She was asking me if we should open it. After exhausting all of the fantasy fiction in the library, there were at least four books the pair of us had both read that contained situations where opening a random book had led to interesting circumstances. 

I shrugged. ‘Worse case scenario, we’re still in this town after we open it.’

She snorted a laugh and flicked open the book. I held the lantern up closer to it and the first thing that struck me was the construction of the book. It was obviously printed via a machine but it was stylised like a journal, with sketches throughout it. She shuffled closer to the light to read some of it, flicking back and forth before looking for a title on the cover again.

‘It looks like a collection of horror stories,’ she murmured. There was a wavering in her voice that made me want to tease her but she was also biting her lip. There was a difference between Poppy being bothered and being worried and that lip bite was the indicator. Well, it was really more of a chew. I’d seen her chew it bloody before.

‘I guess it’s supposed to look kinda creepy then?’ I offered. ‘It’s pretty cool. Maybe it’s a secret book or something that one of the librarian’s have hid?’ That had been done before. May had once hidden a signed copy of a poetry book in the library for kids to find. Neither of us found it and it was found almost a week after May had hid it. Maybe she thought the kids at the school were too dumb to find any more because she didn’t do it again. Actually, that was probably because the person who found it, Harrison from Year 11, sold it online.

Poppy held the book out to me and took the lantern. I let it go and took the little book. It felt like a bible almost. One of those soft cover ones with the thin pages, almost something of a leather cover. Inside, the paper felt more like thin parchment.

The drawings were graphic. I had to flick through them quickly and remark how cool I thought they were to stop my skin crawling. If we’d found it during the day it probably would have been easier to rest on the faces of monsters that all looked vaguely humanoid, but during the night it felt like I would let them out if I rested the page on them for too long.

‘No author,’ I murmured as I look on the inside of the covers and then back at the cover itself.

‘No publisher either,’ Poppy whispered. ‘But it looks printed, right?’

‘Yeah.’ The font was a bit older, sharper, than the fonts we were used to but it was definitely consistent, not handwriting at all. I looked over our shoulders but the library was as quiet as ever. There was some brushing of wind against the building but it was almost silent. I looked to Poppy. ‘Do you want to read it?’ She started biting her lip again, avoiding my gaze. ‘I guess we wanna finish F[R]iend,’ I said to her, starting to put the book back onto the shelf. ‘We can read this one if it’s still here tomorrow?’ She stopped biting her lip and nodded.

We left the book and grabbed F[R]iend to take back to our cosy set up in the science section. I planned on checking whether or not the book was still there the next day. The both of us were open to the idea of ghosts and whatnot, but Poppy sometimes had … experiences. If it was Lila Garrow or Jacob Rinser who told me those stories then I wouldn’t believe them, but Poppy told only me those stories. The fact that she wasn’t spreading them for attention made me sure they were true.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the book when we laid down to read F[R]iend together. I would never do it with anyone else but Poppy and I always read the book together, page by page. She must have also been thinking about the little book of horror stories because she was taking just as long as me to finished reading the spread. 

When we finished another two chapters of F[R]iend, Poppy called it quits, unable to focus on the book anymore. I was grateful for her calling it as I was ready to do so the chapter before. Whilst she broke into a leftover packet of Skittles from two days ago, I took F[R]iend back to the shelf, stopping to stare at the little black book of horror stories for a while longer. I hurried back to the sleeping area when the hairs on the back of my neck began standing up.

Lying down with Poppy, lantern off and the only light being the faint edges of the after-hours lights in the school and the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets on the roof above us, it felt like I had a blanket of protection over me, the unease fading away. She handed me a couple of Skittles before shutting off the lantern. They were salty.

‘Are you still thinking about the book?’ I asked, seeing her shadow moving it’s hands again.

‘Huh? Nah, not really.’

‘Then why’re you fidgeting so much?’

Her hands went still. She sat up so suddenly that I almost jumped up with her, and then she laid down again, rolling to face me. ‘Nate … maybe we should go home tonight? We can sleepover at place? Dad is out and so we don’t even need to be quiet getting in.’

I frowned. ‘Did the book scare you that much?’ I tried with a chuckle but she didn’t laugh. I smoothed my hair out of my face. Poppy’s house was almost a half-hour walk from the school. The reason we couldn’t go to my place instead was because my aunt’s house wasn’t safe for Poppy. The first time we got into a real fight was because I told her she wasn’t allowed to be at my house, ever. At first, Poppy pushed back, but after seeing how angry I got with her over it, she dropped it and never asked to stay over again.

She reached out and took my hands and this startled me more than her jerking up. Neither of us were afraid of touching each other but holding hands was something we only did when pulling each other up into the library window.

‘Okay, we can go,’ I sighed.

We got up and packed out things before making the quiet descent from the window and the side of the building, Poppy insisting on going after me. Bags down and window closed, we geared up and started the walk home.

The further we got away from the library, the more Poppy raised her head and the lower her shoulders sat. Her movements became more fluid and she stopped fidgeting with the straps of her bag.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked her.

She glanced at me before grabbing onto one of the straps and beginning to play with it again, mulling over her answer. ‘You might be too scared if I told you.’

My head pulled back before I laughed and bumped into her. ‘I think I’m more scared not knowing now,’ I told her.

She gripped both of the straps of her backpack and I copied her without thinking. She bit hard into her lip. ‘When … when you took the book from me … there was something behind you.’

Cold flushes through my body, as if my heart is pumping ice instead of blood. The hairs all over my body prick up like they had started doing when I was putting back the book we read. I almost stopped walking but settled for glancing over my shoulder as I realised that she was indeed walking faster than normal.

‘It told me to tell you to read the book,’ she whispered, walking close to me. 

I looked over my shoulder again but there was nothing behind us on the path. Despite that, I remember feeling like there was definitely something there. Like the air on my neck was hot from someone breathing down it. Poppy wouldn’t look over her shoulder, which only made the sharp sensation in the middle of my chest and along my shoulders more pronounced.

‘Why didn’t you tell me that when we were there?’

‘Because I wanted to pretend that I hadn’t seen it,’ she mumbled. ‘They … they get angry when you make it obvious you’ve seen them and then you ignore them.’

I reached out and took one of her hands, holding it tightly. My heart started to calm down and I resisted looking over my shoulder again. I had no reason not to believe her.

‘Do you think it will follow us?’

‘No. I’m pretty sure it’s tied to the book.’

I took a deep breath and tried to talk about more casual topics to ease the tension, but it never fully went away. It wasn’t until we were climbing through her bedroom window and avoiding the salt line that I realised why the Skittles tasted odd.

We dumped our bags and kicked off our shoes, getting into the bed. It felt like I’d been through a week of exams. A thought struck me before I could go to sleep.

‘Why didn’t it ask you to read it?’ I asked through the dark. ‘Why me?’

‘Because of my tattoo.’

‘Oh.’ For months I was sure that the tattoo on her back had been fake. It was a bunch of symbols and words in a language I didn’t recognise, looking like something from the cover of one of the books we’ve read.

Poppy bundled closer to me, close enough that it felt like a finger was being run up my spine. We were facing each other but I was on the edge of the bed and so it meant that she could see the window we’d climbed through. She had curtains, but there was a streetlamp directly outside of it so it was basically a shadow theatre.

I put an arm around her when I realised that I could see the shadow on the wall behind her. Whatever it was, it was tall. The tapping came after I noticed it. I closed my eyes and huddled closer to Poppy, remembering what she’d said about pretending not to see it.

The tapping became scratching and the scratching became knocking that then became banging. I didn’t even notice that I was crying until I started trying to muffle my hyperventilating.

Poppy’s door flew open and the lights slammed on. A scream lodged itself in my throat and I clung to her, moving over the top of her to shield her. When I heard a human speak, I turned over and saw her dad walking into the room, eyes bleary from drinking and mouth gruff as he started rifling through our bags.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he growled as he turned our bags over, finding the little black book of horror stories in there. He picked it up and ripped open the curtains and my body shook as one of the drawings from the book stood outside the window; a being stretched in a disgusting parody of a person, limbs oozing and crooked, mouth gaping wide enough that it could fit my entire head in it.

Poppy clamped her hands over my mouth, locking in a scream as she whimpered and cried behind me. We watched as her dad showed the book to the monster, brandishing it as if it was homework he’d found after someone had lied about its existence. He slapped the book against the glass, holding it there as he spoke in a language I didn’t know and I felt my body almost give up when the book and monster bursted into flames at the same time.

My mind teetered back to the present when he dropped the book, it smouldering into ashes over Poppy’s windowsill. He looked over at us, wringing his hand as he scowled.

He stormed over to the door and smacked his hand against the light-switch, stopping only to snap at us, ‘Keep it down,’ before heading off down the hall.

Post-Writing Notes

You can probably tell but where the story was headed changed halfway through me writing the piece. When I do a writing prompt, it’s a single-session piece. I try to clean up the grammar and glaring errors and whatnot but don’t re-draft it or change much about it. I probably won’t change that unless the piece becomes a writing project but I want to get into the habit of at least reflecting on the writing.