The curtain went up.

And despite his ignominious performance during dress rehearsal the night before, Gareth took a deep breath and prepared to deliver the best triangle solo in the history of the Huey Long Middle School 9th Grade Concert Band.

We all have.

Probably when you were ten, eleven.

You wake up in the night, for no reason. You’re not scared, but something feels, just… wrong.

And then you notice him.

He’s standing at the foot of your bed.

First you see just the shape. You want to scream out, but you can’t. Your arms won’t move and your legs won’t move and your mouth dries up and nothing comes out.

Then you see his face. And he’s just standing there, grinning at you. It’s the widest, most malevolent grin you’ve ever seen and all you can do is lie there and panic while he stares at you and grins.

Eventually you fall asleep again, and you never remember the “dream”. But something sticks with you. Something about his face. Something that haunts and disturbs you when you don’t expect it.

Because deep down, you know he’s coming back. That shadowy grinning man is coming back to visit you again.

Sleep tight.

Let’s say you’re on an airplane, and the old man sitting next to you starts chatting. Normally, you don’t like smalltalk with strangers. Or any talk with strangers, especially when you’re strapped into a tiny coach seat on an aging 737. But he’s elderly, so you listen respectfully as he tells you all about himself.

Let’s go on to say that because you’ve shown polite interest in the man, he begins telling you a story. You do a little mental eye-roll, but the old man is a veteran, and when a veteran tells you a story, you shut your damn mouth and you listen.

Two hours later, and the man has finished telling you one of the strangest stories you’ve ever heard. And you know it’s just a story, because it was too bizarre. It was unreal. It just couldn’t have happened the way it was told. But you’re fascinated, so you ask the old man some questions. And he won’t answer you. He shakes his head and changes the subject, acting like he’s uncomfortable that he told you the story in the first place.

Upon landing, the man apologizes for not asking you enough about yourself, so you hand him a business card and give him the ten second highlights of what you do, and you write his name and address in one of your notebooks.

When you get home, you find that his story is still stuck in your head. What parts, if any, were real? Was he just old and confused? He’d told the story with too much conviction and too much detail for it to be entirely fabricated. So you write him a letter, and ask him to tell you more.

But you get nothing in return. Maybe the poor guy died, you think. You forget about the old man and his crazy story, and go on with your life.

Then several months later, to your complete surprise, a thick envelope shows up in the mail. There’s a letter from the old man, telling you some of what you wanted to know. The envelope is full of papers and materials that corroborate a large amount of what he told you in his story.

So now you are completely freaked out, because if he lied about what happened, then so did the other men who were with him.

And the whole thing is just too fucking eerie to believe. But you don’t have a choice.

He found it hard to stay calm on the gurney and wanted to rip apart the rough institutional sheets and scream and cry but ended up laughing instead because the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP sounds from across the hallway made him feel like he was an extra in some trauma scene in a TV medical drama.

The absurdity of it all soothed him until the nice nurse came in and gave him a sedative and complimented his watch and he looked at her sideways and shook his head and said “I should be dead now,” and she just smiled and left and all he could do was look at the green ceiling and laugh through his tears when the BEEP BEEP BEEP started up again.

Which is why you can find all of the answers if you know where to look.

There is a book. A thick, weighty tome with handwritten vellum pages, bound with a leather that was originally a bright blue but has since faded to dull gray.

The book rests on a high shelf, in a dim corner of a public reading room within the Richelieu Library building of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

It sits among similar-looking volumes, untouched and unexplored for decades or more. Just another morocco spine in a vast sea of anonymous folios.

If you look hard enough, and find that book, you can know everything. And you will understand why everything you know about the modern world is a lie.

That is, of course, if you know Latin. And can read Jacobean secretary script.

And that douchebag Hamilton. Can you freaking believe that guy? Jesus, he’s always ‘strong central governement’ this, and ‘national bank’ that. And Washington’s always like ‘Oh, just leave him alone, Jim,’ and he never takes my side. Dick.

-James Madison, from a letter to his friend Derek, 1793.