Short Scary Stories

Ubloo- Part3

I watched the white lines in the middle of the highway disappear one by one under the hood of my car as I sped down the interstate. If I watched them long enough they would eventually just bleed into one long hazy line of white in a sea of asphalt, and then I would snap out my stare, and they would be separate again.

I reached over to the passenger side seat and grabbed my pint of gin. It's sad how good I've gotten at twisting the cap off with one hand, while the other is on the wheel. I took a big swig and finished the bottle, then tossed it out my driver's side window and heard the glass shatter in a satisfying splash.

"It had to have been microsleep." I kept telling myself. I don't know if I was finally starting to lose it or if I'd already drunk too much by noon and was just rambling, but I had to somehow rationalize the fact that I'd seen Ubloo, and not heard him afterwards.

In the end I chalked it up to hallucinations brought on by the lack of sleep, and told myself that I would try to get at least 5 hours tonight. For the past few weeks I've been running on just about 4 hours a night, or however long I can stomach those terrifying nightmares.

In my rear-view mirror I checked on the box that housed Robert Jennings' things. Today was finally the day I would learn what that book meant. I can't tell you how long I compared this writing to samples on my laptop for, and it wasn't until a very blind stroke of luck that I figured out what it actually was.

I was sitting at a hotel bar in Pennsylvania when a man came and sat next to me. We made some small talk at first but I think he was scared off a bit by my disheveled appearance. We drank in silence for a few minutes and then he broke it abruptly.

"You can read that shit?" He said, all but gracefully.

"Unfortunately no." I sighed. "In fact I'm just trying to figure out what language it is to be completely honest."

"Oh." He looked down at his beer and started picking at the label. "Mind if I take a look?"

"Sure, just be very careful with it." I slid the book over to him carefully. He opened the front cover and flipped through the first couple pages.

"Well I tell you." He began. "It's some sort of African writing."

My ears perked up at this.

"African?" I asked hopefully.

"Yeah I used to be a security guard at the National History Museum over in New York City. I swear I saw some shit just like this in there."

I didn't even bother thanking the man. I grabbed the book from him and sprinted up to my hotel room to begin working. I must have wrote damn near 500 e-mails that night, with a small sample of the writing attached, to every African history professor, museum curator and African language translator I could find an address for.

That's how I met Eli.

Eli was a retired African history professor living in Natchez, Mississippi. The e-mail he sent back seemed a little surprised and excited all at once. He told me that this writing was an almost extinct language that he learned translating documents for a professor while studying for his doctorate. I told him that I would pay any sum of money should he help me translate this book, as long as I hand deliver it to him and he reads it directly to me. I couldn't risk losing this book in the mail, and besides, Natchez was right on my route to the Louisiana house.

I had finished reading Robert's Journal about two weeks ago. He wrote about the dreams, how hard the burden was to bear and how it was affecting his family life. Robert went knocking on one of his tenant's doors, after not hearing from him (or receiving the rent) for weeks. He let himself in and found him there, wrists slit in the bathtub. Apparently a pair of his old jeans were laying on the bathroom floor, and in a pocket Robert found a picture of the Louisiana house, with the address "hastily" scribbled on the back of it. I found it curious that he made no mention of where he found the other book though.