Upon Viewing

Urban legends have little basis in concrete facts, statistics or evidence. That’s why I dislike them. Almost all urban legends rely on purely anecdotal evidence, and anecdotal evidence is, in my eyes as a statistician, one of the most impure forms of data collection that exists, and urban legends rely almost purely on them. I work in numbers, concrete, true or false. There is no supposing with numbers. Numbers are the closest we come to truth.

But people love urban legends. I suppose urban legends for the most part have become our modern day ghost stories; no longer told with campfires or tents but rather huddled around our computer screens, closing the blinds for fear of what could be. More often than not, these stories are complete fabrications or embellishments of things we witnessed as children. As a child, everything has limitless killing potential, it becomes a legend of our past.

I didn’t believe in any sort of urban legend, not even though all of high school when most people start taking interest in the occult. Girls go through that wiccan phase, lighting incense and using Ouija boards; guys plunder web forums for scary stories. But I never had any belief in that partly because belief in those sort of things requires a suspension of disbelief that I lacked in any capacity. Even when walking home late at night, walking fast through the dark streets to home, I knew that anything out there on the streets that could kill me was not an urban legend; only man.

It was only when I entered university that I believed in one urban legend simply because the group of us who found it could never found a concrete, factual explanation for what we witnessed. But unlike other Urban Legends, which almost always must be capitalised to distinguish them, I will provide you with all the facts so you may go there yourself. I will not deny you details.

Melbourne University, 2009. I’m studying statistics, although I suspect you’d have gathered as much from my statement above. I’d made a small tight knit group of friends at university but I hadn’t joined any clubs. I liked drinking as much as the next man but none of this half-baked social interaction pleases me at all. The Baillieu Library is an odd building, a mix of 1970’s paneled wood with modern looking computers; at some point people thought the future was paneled lacquer, a strange thought. I had my head buried in a laptop, nursing a copy of IBM SPSS statistics, numerous tables open, slotting in numbers. Data entry was the worst part of those days so I was semi-grateful when one of my closest friends, Scott, spies me at a desk and runs over

“You have to read this!” he said loudly, shaking a copy of Interpretation for Dummies. You know those books, the ones with yellow and black, and a stupid, 90’s era cartoon scribble? It was one of those, I was surprised by this. Scott was an accomplished reader, he was one of the few people I’d met who’d been able to finish Atlas Shrugged instead of falling dead to its 90 page speech

“What? This?” and Scott nodded frantically. He gestured it towards me.

“You gotta read it man” and I sighed, anything to get him off my case about this.

“Fine, leave it here” but he frowned.

“You promise you’ll read it?”

“Yes Scott, get out of here, I have an exam next week, and I gotta make up that week I missed when I was sick” and Scott slunk away, looking back not at me, but at the book. I was glad to see him but I really needed to put the nose to grindstone.

When my study was finished, I decided to check out this book of the library, and as I sat on a tram going down Swanston Street, I opened it up. The first thing I noticed was it wasn’t called ‘Interpretation for Dummies’ but rather in rather old almost 1940’s typeset it read ‘The Book of Interpretation’ which struck you as strange from the start.

As I read, it detailed a fictional civilization called the zephyr, who worshipped a mountain. They prayed to the mountain for prosperity and lived a simple live. It details the downfall of their civilization when the white man appeared and the zephyr were scattered to the winds which blew through the valley. It was simply written tale, barely two hundred pages long but richly detailed and it sucked me in for the weekend I read it. I relayed the story to Scott on the Monday and he shook his head

“No man, you didn’t read it!”

“Yes I did, The Book of Interpretation right?”

“Yeah?”

“The one about the zephyr and their crumbling world and the mountain that speaks in fire?’

“I don’t know what book you read, but I read a book about survivors of a boat crash, travelling from island to island, unhinged in time and stuff”

We both looked at each other. I grabbed the book from my bag and showed it to him.

“Look Scott….here, right here ‘The zephyr didn’t know why the mountain would not answer their cries for help’, page…155. See?"

“No man, it’s page 388, and the thing you’re pointing at is different”

I looked at him like he was insane. We skipped the lecture that morning and set about figuring out what the book was about. It didn’t take us long, we were both fairly bright honours students and the only conclusion we could come to, much to my chagrin, was one of the supernatural type: the book was different for everyone who read it.

The underlying story was the same; a life changing journey. Whether it was the journey of the tribe of the zephyr through 10,000 years or the journey of a thinning group of surviving pirates, the journey remained the same. The interpreting was the hard part. Everyone who read it saw something different.

Scott and I spent the better part of a week trying to collect stories from a few of our friends, but we realized there was a potentially limitless source of stories within The Book of Interpretation. Fiction, non-fiction, thrillers, biographies, recounts, essays, journals, short stories, novellas, science fiction, fantasy, guidebooks, we found many of these and attempted to collect them all. We figured we could sell them, become famous authors but then Scott and I just sort of lost interest. The plans never eventuated. You deal with something strange enough for long enough and it’s no longer strange. Just ordinary.

During the end of my honour year of 2009, a small university club formed around the book and immediately after that, a group formed in opposition. Both had happened upon the same book, same story but what differed this time were crucial events.

One group insisted the story ended like this, another tried to disprove their view. What started as friendly debate spilled into violence and soon the university was split. I hear their groups have become larger than anyone could have imagined, the stories resonating with people all across the globe. The group doesn’t know that the book appears different to everyone else. Partly because the book disappeared from shelves after graduation. I checked where it had been in the library stacks and it was gone.

It is present day as I write. The groups have written down their stories from memory now, both have become something akin to religion, both diametrically opposed to the other. But they never know that the title of the book, “The Book of Interpretation” was the biggest clue Scott and I found to the mystery of the book. The Book of Interpretation was a strange oddity among the stacks of ordinary books not because whoever reads the book insists it is life changing, world-view altering and perception enhancing. It was because the book is different for everyone who reads it, but I think Scott and I realized that although the stories remain the same, it was interpretation that changed them.

#supernatural #literature #bizarre #fiction #mystery #fictions #writing #perception