Do not read this story.

You are the only one that can preserve my fate. I have no choice. I am destined to write this story down and post it in this very location. My only hope is that you will heed my warnings and not read it; for if you do, my life will probably end.

I don't really know where to begin, but I guess the anniversary party is as good a place as any.

It was a Friday evening--around 7:00 p.m.--in early 2008, and I was looking after my baby sister. My parents were out celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I had invited my friend Jake, over to keep me company. He brought his girlfriend Lindsay over as well. We all decided to watch a movie in the basement after my seven year-old sister fell asleep in her bed. I must have dosed off during the movie, because I remember being abruptly woken by the sounds of panicked yelling.

I looked around the room and saw Jake bloodied and holding the limp hand of his girlfriend. All Jake could mutter was, "She killed her. The little freak killed her!"

I was confused, but Jake eventually revealed that my little sister, Sasha, had stabbed Jake's girlfriend in the throat with a chef's knife. I saw the gash in Lindsay's lifeless neck.

He told me she was waiting upstairs, in the kitchen; he could hear her waiting.

I was beyond bewildered, but wasn't scared of my puny sister, so I asked Jake to follow me as I went upstairs to call for an ambulance.

As soon as I climbed enough stairs to see into the kitchen, I saw Sasha poised with her legs spread and slightly bent, looking ready to charge. She had the knife in her hands, blood on her nightgown and on her mouth, and bright yellow eyes. Her hair was tattered and her chest dilated sharply to each panting breath.

I approached Sasha slowly, and like a loving brother asked her to put the knife down and tell her big brother what was wrong.

When Jake and I were fully up the stairs, Sasha let out a shriek and charged at us. I was frozen in terror at the sight of her face, but Jake reacting primarily out of revenge grabbed up the chair to the dinette set at the landing, and broke it against Sasha's tiny body. She went face down, and remained motionless.

For the next few moments, Jake and I stood defensively, contemplating our next move.

I went for the phone to call someone--the police, an ambulance, my parent's cell, anyone--but there was no dial tone. Was a phone off the hook somewhere?

Jake went to check the upstairs rooms for an un-hung phone, but just as he started up the first step, Sasha hopped to her feet and crunched the long blade of the knife she held into Jake's back repeatedly with a force no child should possess. Jake let out a gurgling moan as his body slinked against the stairs.

Sasha then turned to me.

"Sasha! Stop it! What are you doing?" I said.

"Sasha? I'm not Sasha," she said. "I'm Rachel."

"What did you do with my sister?"

"That's enough of the questions," she hissed. "If you want to live you will do what I tell you to do. I want you to go to this address and retrieve a book the man there should have."

"What are you talking about?"

Rachel, or Sasha, or whoever she was, extended her hand which holding a bloodied piece of paper.

"Now go, or you'll end up like your friends," she threatened. "If you aren't back here in an hour, I will kill your parents when they get home."

Strongly convinced of this girl's ability to murder, I examined the paper in my hand, and escaped out the front door. The address was to a basement tavern a few blocks away.

When I got there, it seemed empty. There was no bartender, no one at the door or outside, just the sound of turning pages and mumbling in the distance.

I approached the sound slowly and eventually found a man sitting on the floor next to a sledge hammer and a pile of rubble. "You must be here for the book?" the man said.

"Yes, I am. How did you know that? Who's this Rachel? What has she done? Why did she kill my friends? Is that a phone over there? I'm going to call the police."

"No! You can't! She'll kill you if you do. You must do what you were told to do."

"Who is she?"

"I'm not sure, but I think she's here to correct a problem left here by this 'Alexander Finney'.

"Who?" I asked. "I know a Jake Finney..."

"Yes. That's his father."

"Jake doesn't have kids. Anyway, we don't have time for this. She said if I didn't return from you within an hour with some book she would kill my parents. Do you have the book?"

"This is the book right here." Jake signalled toward the book he was reading when I walked in. "I know time is limited, but you have to listen to what I'm about to tell you. You are right, Jake doesn't have any kids...yet. What do you know about time travel?"

"Not much--just bits and pieces from reading books and watching movies. Why? What do you mean, 'Jake doesn't have kids yet'?"

"Okay, sit down for a minute," Jake motioned to me as he  paraphrased from the book he was holding:

"There is a school of thought that suggests that time is running parallel to itself at all times. There are these constant streams--one for every possibility. For instance, right now we are in one stream, but if I suddenly slap you, we will continue on in that stream, but the stream in which I hadn’t slapped you will diverge from this parallel course and eventually collapse. These are generally referred to as parallel universes or alternate realities. Sometimes, although it's very unlikely, a stream can actually loop back on itself and connect to an earlier time. That stream will form circular shape and be stuck in an endless cycle. However, those caught in this endless loop generally aren't aware of it, but there are subtle hints that could suggest a person is stuck in one, and those hints are known as 'déjà vu'. The person is never aware of how it all started though, but they don't seem to worry about finding the answer. It's like the chicken and the egg. They are in a cycle now where chicken begets egg, and egg begets chicken, and so on, but no one is certain how the cycle started, because all that matters is the cycle exists. But some event had to happen before in order to cause the first chicken to be fertile, or the first egg to be incubated. But now that it is, how it started is not only irrelevant, but incalculable to a meaningful or finite extent.

"Alexander Finney was a student at the university here who was obsessed with the philosophy of time and the occurrences there related. He studied déjà vu and the existence of fate. He believed déjà vu was the remnants of an old memory, or a temporal footprint as he calls it in here. He was certain that his life was fated and finite, and the events of his life would be presented to him systematically and repeatedly in a way where he was bound to make the same choices every time that would undoubtedly lead him to his demise. His theory even accounted for his own hypotheses. He wasn't sure exactly when the divergence that caused time to loop around took place, but he kept having flashes of the date November 27, 2033 and a kitchen knife. In fact, every time he saw either of those things he was filled with overwhelming dread.

"When Alex was fifteen he accidentally kicked a hole in his bedroom wall while pretending to be a character from his favourite martial arts film. When he went to examine the hole, he noticed resting on the stud just below the hole was a coin. Alex never showed anyone this coin, but he always remembered that it was dated 2031, which he thought was a funny typo considering it was only 2023 at the time. It wasn't until just before his twenty-fifth birthday that Alexander finally understood it all."

I explained to this mysterious man that I didn't understand anything he was talking about. He was referring to dates that were fifteen and twenty years into the future. I didn't understand how he could claim to know something in past tense that hadn't happened yet. He ignored my qualms and kept paraphrasing. He went on to mention:

"It was 2025 and Alexander was attempting to push speaker wires into the crevice where his walls connected to his ceilings. There was a slight recess in the mortar that he figured he'd hide the wires in. When his finger proved ineffective, he pulled a quarter out of his pocket and used that. After he made it a certain distance, the coin and wires poked through the crevice, cracking the mortar, and the coin fell behind the wall. It was at that very moment that Alexander remembered finding that same coin in that same spot ten years earlier. And it was also at that moment that he realized what he would do next.

"He spent the next few weeks meticulously documenting his entire life in detail into this logbook, which he then also dropped behind that same place in the wall after widening the hole accordingly.

"He was found dead the next day--stabbed to death. His mother was charged and convicted. The defence's case, which was corroborated by her husband, was that Lindsay, Alex's mother, was insane. She claimed to have been taken over by another presence which identified itself as Rachel at the time of Alexander's murder."

"How could you possibly know all this?" I asked.

"Well, my task was to locate Alex Finney's logbook in this very place. Rachel ordered me to do this or she said she would kill my daughters. I never wanted any of this trouble; I just bought this building thinking it would be a good investment. This would have been Alex Finney's house, but he hasn't been born yet, and if your two dead friends are Jake and Lindsay Finney, he never will be."

"What do you mean?"

"Your friends...Jake and Lindsay...they are Alex parent's. Lindsay was pregnant with Alex."

I nearly fell to the floor when the man crashed that detail on me. I couldn't even respond with words; I just gasped.

"Anyway, you are running out of time. My part of the mission is complete. Don't let her know you know anything, just give her the book and let her be on with her business. It's the only chance we have to survive."

I took the book and returned to my house with time to spare.

As soon as I walked through the front door and into the kitchen I began to tremble. Her poisonous yellow eyes were fixed on me as if she knew when I would enter.

Rachel snatched the book from my hands, flipped through it, and then took it to the sink where she had a bottle of lighter fluid and lighter waiting. She saturated the book with the fluid and then set it aflame. The fire danced reflected in her eyes as the last piece of Alex Finney was destroyed.

I watched her smirk as if she was satisfied with her efforts, and then her head suddenly cracked toward my direction with a vicious hatred depicted in it. I assumed she was going to kill me next regardless of my obedience, so I reached for the knife on the island between us that she set down to burn the book. She reached for it too, but my extension was slightly faster.       Failing to grasp the knife, she bit down on my wrist. I whipped my knife-ready hand out and away from her mouth tearing off a chunk of flesh. I plunged the knife deep into the side of her chest aiming for her heart with all of my power. I heard a cracking sound as the blade trenched through her ribs.

She fell to the ground, and I rolled her over to check for signs of life. Her eyes had turned back to a blue and all that was left was my little Sasha's lifeless body.

"Freeze!" a voice from behind me declared, after crashing through the front door.

It was the police. They had been called by my mother who was worried because the phone had been off the hook for hours. I was in an impossible situation and knew there would be no way to explain what had just happened.

So, here I am in the Kentbridge Psychiatric Hospital being treated for a disorder I don't have, to explain the murders I didn't commit. Of course, I don't expect you to believe me; everyone else thinks I'm crazy.

But like Finney before me, I feel some force driving me to write this whole tale down. I'm helpless to my hand's will to write. I can only hope, that unlike Alex, no one ever reads this. For if they do, I fear the consequences might be as dire as his.

Then again, for all I know, someone could be reading this right now.

Uh, hang on...someone's coming. Ah! It's the blasted nurse again. They only let us have so much time a day on these computers. Her name tag says...it says, 'Rachel'.

Oh no, It' can't be. I told you not to read this. What have you done?

No; not those eyes. I thought I killed--

She has a knife...

-Gerald A. Dinkel (He just says things.)

http://sardonicconnection.blogspot.com/2009/10/94-do-not-read-this-story.html