The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 1 Read online

  Copyrights

  eBook First Published in 2013 by Autharium Publishing, London

  Copyright © Andy Ritchie 2013

  The moral right of Andy Ritchie to be asserted as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781780257334

  An Update

  235 people dead.

  And those are the ones James has told me about.

  235 deaths in the space of less than three months, and every single one of them a weight upon my conscience.

  After all, it was because of me that they knew about the Diary.

  Most of them, like my friends Martin Little, Sam Roberts and Shane Pashton, apparently died as a result of ‘previously undiagnosed medical conditions’ like heart attacks, seizures and aneurisms, or as a result of ‘bizarre accidents’ like falls down stairs in the middle of the night, or slips and trips in bathrooms and kitchens that resulted in drownings or fatal knife wounds.

  Others, like Danny Marsden, perished along with their families, and even their pets (the One making good on its threat) in car crashes, house fires and gas explosions.

  Some, like Penny McIntyre, were apparently the victims of muggings or ‘burglaries gone tragically wrong’.

  A few had simply disappeared.

  THEY came for me on the morning of January 11th.

  There were three of THEM waiting for me in my living room when I got home at about 3.30 p.m. They were dressed in dark suits and wore sunglasses. They had helped themselves to cups of coffee.

  They moved so quickly that I had no chance to get away. No sooner had I realised they were there than I found myself pinned down in my own armchair, a gag being roughly forced into my mouth.

  Only one of them spoke. His accent was Welsh.

  Bizarrely, he started off by commenting on how nice my house was. He said that it had lots of space.

  He then nodded to one of the other two men who were holding me, and that man grabbed hold of the little finger of my right hand and snapped it back like a twig.

  I know I screamed, and the scream was loud in spite of the gag.

  The Welshman smiled as he watched me scream, waiting patiently for the screaming to subside into wrenching sobs. That was when he said that that was to let me know that THEY were serious.

  He then asked me if I knew where Jethro Postlethwaite was.

  One of the other two (the one who hadn’t broken my finger) took the gag out of my mouth.

  I said I didn’t know.

  There was another nod, and the gag was shoved back into my mouth. At the same time, the man who had broken my little finger did the same to the fourth finger of my right hand.

  I screamed again.

  I began to cry.

  The Welshman said that that was to let me know that he didn’t like to be disappointed.

  He then pulled the footstool over to my armchair and sat down right in front of me. He took off his sunglasses and stared intently at my face. I remember that his eyes were a cold blue in colour and that he had a small scar on his left cheek.

  He gave a little sigh and then began to speak.

  He said that THEY had been trying to find Jethro for several months, but had been unsuccessful. Jethro was, he said, very careful.

  I, however, was not.

  He laughed at this point and then asked me if I was some kind of moron.

  I don’t think I answered him. I can only remember that this was where I wet my pants.

  He asked me, in a tone of voice that was incredulous, whether I had simply failed to understand the potential consequences of getting involved with Jethro.

  Did I not recognise, he asked, the inevitability of THEM finding out about the Diary? Did I not realise that, however many precautions I took (and I had taken so many!), THEY would eventually become aware of what I was doing?

  He stopped talking for a while at this point. He got up from the footstool, drank the last of his coffee and stared out of my living room window into the garden.

  I can remember how my heart was pounding in my chest.

  My broken fingers throbbed agonisingly.

  I was still sobbing.

  I wanted to be sick.

  When I saw him nod again, I know I was screaming even before the middle finger of my right hand was savagely snapped back. This hurt more than the others. I could feel the broken bones grating against each other when the man released my finger.

  That, he said, was for making him travel all the way to Darwen.

  He asked me where all the information I had used to put the Diary together was.

  When the gag was taken out of my mouth, I answered immediately, telling him that it was in my study, in the black holdall under my desk.

  The man who had been in charge of the gag duly left the living room, returning a couple of minutes with the holdall, the two hard copies of the Diary that I still had in my possession, plus my laptop and my hard-drive.

  The Welshman inspected the holdall, then flicked through one of the two hard copies of the Diary, reading several of the entries. I couldn’t be sure whether his expression was one of disdain or intrigue.

  He then handed the Diary back to the ‘gag-man’ and came and sat on the footstool again.

  He took a notebook from his jacket pocket.

  I felt the grip of the third-man tighten around the index finger of my right hand.

  I began to shake uncontrollably, waiting for the nod.

  This was when I shat in my trousers.

  ‘I want the names of everyone you have given the diary to, either electronically, or in hard-copy.’

  His voice was barely a whisper.

  To my eternal shame, I didn’t even hesitate before I told him. The names just tumbled from my quivering lips like a waterfall, the steady flow interrupted only by an occasional juddering sob.

  When I had finished, he patted me appreciatively on the shoulder as he placed the notebook back into his jacket pocket. Then he asked me if there were any more copies of the Diary, in any format, that I had not told him about.

  I desperately said that there weren’t.

  He seemed to think for a moment or two before moving very close to me.

  I could smell the coffee on his breath.

  There was a sudden chill in the air.

  ‘You realise,’ he said calmly, ‘that we cannot let you live...’

  and with that he pulled a small revolver from inside his jacket and pointed it straight at my head.

  I’m not exactly sure what happened next, primarily because at the sight of the gun I’d simply screwed up my eyes in fear and waited to be shot.

  The only two things I can remember were feeling the hot, damp sensation of my bowels evacuating further, and realising that I would never see my wife and the kids again.

  Beyond that, I just waited for the bang, for the impact of the bullet and for the blackness of death.

  But none of them eve
r came.

  Instead, there was the momentary scratch of a needle on my neck followed by the pleasant sensation of a warm blanket of darkness being pulled over me.

  When I awoke, the first things I saw were the faces of my wife and daughters.

  Their expressions were fearful and confused, though there was a hint of relief at knowing we were all together.

  I know I held them all tightly for a long, long time.

  All three of them had experienced the terror of being kidnapped, of being bundled into cars or vans whilst, at the same time, they were injected with something that put them to sleep.

  All three of them had experienced the relief of finding themselves, unharmed, in this place.

  All three of them demanded to be told what the hell was going on.

  It was hard to explain to them what had happened, partly because I didn’t fully understand it all myself, but I tried my best.

  I told them about the phone call from JP on that stormy night in October.

  I told them about the contents of the black holdall.

  I told them of the work I had done on the Diary.

  I told them of the people I had sent it to.

  I told them about the events of the previous day, when THEY had come to our home to interrogate me and to kill me.

  I even told them of the way I had so quickly spilled my guts to the Welshman with the cold blue eyes and the scar, and given him the names of the people to whom the Diary had been passed.

  No-one seemed to think any worse of me for that, especially when they saw my broken fingers, though my wife did call me a ‘fucking idiot’ for getting involved in the first place.

  And I know that she still hasn’t forgiven me because every morning I see the burning anger in her eyes.

  I can’t really blame her for feeling the way she does.

  It was about two hours after I came round, during which time we had explored both the house and some of its grounds, that James arrived. He is a charming young man who visits us every couple of days to bring groceries, newspapers, magazines, DVDs and even the odd X-Box game for the girls.

  He is also the only person we have spoken to in the last three months.

  When he first arrived, he met our barrage of questions with a calm assuredness, but with few answers.

  We were, he said, safe.

  We were also, he added, lucky.

  And we were, he concluded, under no circumstances whatsoever to attempt to leave this place or make any contact with anyone.

  At all.

  To do so would be to put us all in great danger.

  Not that we would be able to contact anyone. This place has no internet, no phone line and no mobile reception.

  James would not tell us where we were. Nor would he tell us who owned the house in which we were staying, or who had arranged for us to be rescued from THEM.

  In fact, all he did tell us, and all he has told us every time he has turned up with bread and milk and copies of the Daily Mail, are the names of those friends, colleagues, acquaintances and complete strangers whose deaths can be linked back to some kind of interaction with the Diary that I helped collate.

  235 deaths so far.

  How many more to come?

  Well, I guess that depends on what happens to the Diary next.

  Which brings us to today, the 11th of April, and James’ peculiar request for me to write an updated introduction to JP’s Diary.

  There may be, he has said, an opportunity to circulate the Diary on a scale which would make it impossible for THEM to continue to systematically eliminate everyone who has read it or heard of it.

  What is needed, he added, was an introduction that enabled anyone glancing at the first few pages of the Diary to truly appreciate its importance, and also understand THEIR savagery.

  Who better, he said, to provide such an introduction than the person who collated the Diary in the first place, and who has faced THEM at first hand and lived to tell the tale.

  So, here it is, my second Foreword to JP’s Diary, written with the hope that it will help expose the lie that is the existence of each and every one of us, and the hope that it does not result in the deaths of hundreds more innocent people.

  Andy

  -----

  The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read

  *

  Based on the Diary of Jethro Postlethwaite

  Collated by Andrew Ritchie

  *

  Foreword

  By Andrew Ritchie

  So, how did I get involved with Jethro Postlethwaite?

  Well, Jethro (or JP as I always knew him) was a very good friend of mine.

  I’d known him since we were at school together; we used to mate around a lot when we were kids; football, fishing, annoying the couple who lived at number 47, that sort of thing, you know. He was engaged to my sister, Valerie, for a while when we were in our early twenties, but that didn’t last, not least because (and I hope he won’t mind me saying this) JP was...complicated. He was genuinely clever, one of the brightest people I’ve known (though he always regarded himself as intellectually challenged), able to absorb facts like a sponge, which meant he was great at pub quizzes. He had a real passion for the visual, which is why I guess he was so into photography, as well as into films. But he was not in the least bit ambitious, didn’t have a huge amount of ‘get-up-and-go’, at least not when it came to things as mundane as work, and that was why he never really made much of himself, either academically or career-wise. I guess he was just content to drift along, doing just enough to be comfortable, but nothing more than that. Almost every time I met up with him, he’d have a new job, nothing exciting, just something different, earning enough to pay the bills.

  He was, even as a youngster, prone to mood swings (one of the reasons Val left him...amongst others); one day you’d struggle to get a word out of him, the next he’d be talking at a thousand miles an hour. He had that enviable ability to walk into a party and almost instantly become the centre of attention, but he quite often chose not to use that ability, keeping instead to the periphery, an outsider looking in.

  Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t a weirdo or anything like that. He was just a bit ‘off the wall’ — I guess you’ll understand what I mean a lot better once you’ve read the first few entries in his diary.

  You see, reading his diary is like a blind pic’n’mix — you simply don’t know what you will get from one page to the next. Funny, gritty, terrifying, shocking. It’s all here.

  Sometimes he writes as if the entire weight of the world is on his shoulders; his words are dark, humourless, written with the clinical narrative of a documentary on World War Two. At other times, he writes with enthusiasm and passion, the text punctuated with colourful adjectives and metaphors that breathe life into the image he is painting for us. I guess this is again a reflection of the man, sporadically brilliant, but lacking the drive or the intensity to maintain a consistency of approach.

  He always considered himself to have the potential to be a great writer (just as he considered himself to have the potential to be a great footballer, scholar, lover, etc) and he often ribbed me that he would, one day, write something that would be more successful than anything I had ever written...

  That was why he came to me, by the way, because of my writing.

  He’d always known that I had friends in the publishing business. A few of my short stories had made it into print and I contributed on a freelance basis to a few magazines, writing about outdoor sports, hillwalking, climbing, that sort of thing. I guess that was good enough for JP.

  It had been a few months since JP and I had been out for a drink. I’d e-mailed him, left a couple of messages on his mobile, the usual. He hadn’t gotten back in touch, but that hadn’t worried me too much, after all, there had been a couple of occasions when we had gone over six months without being in contact.

  Then, one evening, out of the blue, I got a call at home. It was from a phone-box, which I remem
bered because nowadays it’s quite unusual (for me at least) to get a call like that.

  The family was out, something on at school if I recall, so I answered.

  He spoke quickly. All he said was:

  ‘Andy. Say nothing. I need you to meet me. One hour, on the car park at the top end of Tockholes Road, beyond the Sunnyhurst.’

  And then he hung up.

  I knew it was JP...but somehow he sounded strange, different. It wasn’t just the odd things he had said, it was the way he had said them. His voice had sounded...drained, depressed almost, and I instantly found myself worrying that he had fallen into one of his darker moods and had somehow gotten himself into trouble.

  Little did I know.

  The weather that evening was foul, the windscreen of my car awash with the patterns formed as the lashing rain danced with the light from the passing cars and glowing street-lamps. Such was the rain’s ferocity that, even on double-speed, the wipers struggled to keep the view clear. Yet it wasn’t cold, for the air was heavy and moist, the storm that hung over the town having yet to unleash its full fury. It felt like a scene from a horror movie, the prelude to a gore-fest of blood and screams, and the whole situation filled me with a sense of dark foreboding.

  Exactly an hour after the phone call, I was on the deserted car park, waiting.

  Outside, the rain drummed incessantly on the roof of my car, its cacophony interspersed by the gentle whirr of motors as the wipers swept across the windscreen, vainly fighting their battle against the never ending tide of water which continued to fall from the leaden sky.

  For those of you unfamiliar with this particular location, it is a gloomy place. Dark and bereft of streetlights, it is surrounded by trees that, in autumn, stripped of their leaves, take on a harsh and unearthly appearance, arching above the narrow access road and the car park itself to form a kind of vaulted skeletal cathedral. Even at my age, the place somehow gives me the creeps.

  Suddenly, there was a flash of lightning and an almost instantaneous crack of thunder. For a moment, the car park was awash with watery light...and that was when I saw him. He was sheltering beneath the large sycamore tree that guarded the entrance to the woods, clothed darkly in a long raincoat and a broad-brimmed hat.