MYSTober 2024

31 vignettes based on single-word prompts. One story.

31. Book

The King James Bible on the island began as an oversized, elegant book for sale in Brown's Book Shop in Madison, Wisconsin, in the year 1964. It was purchased for $3.70 by a thirty-six year old travelling shoe salesman named Liam Warchester as an anniversary gift for his wife.

He arrived home from that trip two days earlier than expected, to find his wife Tina in bed with his brother, Mark. Rather than give her the Bible he had purchased for her, he instead gave each of them three bullets in a fit of rage.

Ashamed of his actions, he took all the money and jewellery from his house and fled to a small town outside of Austin, Texas, where he had never visited and would not be recognized. He spent the next month reading and rereading the Bible he had purchased, wherein he found God. He then dedicated himself to the Church, becoming a Priest and living frugally to make up for his crimes.

While serving in the Ministry, he met Lucille. They fell in love and married, and had two sons: Jason and Isaac. On Jason's 18th birthday, Liam gave him the Bible he had purchased all those years earlier. Jason studied it for the next twenty years, eventually giving it to his own son, Thomas.

When Thomas turned thirty, he took his wife on a cruise around South America. They brought the Bible with them, because it was their most precious possession and they did not want to be without it. That cruise ship was sabotaged by one of the passengers, and all aboard it were marooned on an uncharted, unexplored island in the South Pacific.

Thomas quickly saw to the construction of a Church, so that he could use the Lord's words to provide comfort to those who had been stranded with him on the island. The Bible became the centrepiece of the Church – the fixture that merged the old world with the new.

Ninety-seven years later, Thomas' great-grandson Mordecai was chased through the Church by a man named Jacob, whom he had abused when Jacob was a child. Jacob had been exiled, imprisoned, and made to suffer throughout his life. He had now come seeking revenge.

He dragged Mordecai back into the nave and hurled him through the air, knocking a brazier off of the wall. Mordecai tried to scurry away, but Jacob was far too fast. He threw the Priest again, overturning the lectern that supported the Bible, causing it to tumble to the floor.

As the fire from the fallen brazier spread along the wall, Jacob sat astride Mordecai and beat him with his fists. He clawed at his face. He gouged at his eyes. The older man's blood sprayed across the room. Streaks of it splashed onto the open pages of the Bible as it lay there. As Mordecai's life was extinguished, and Jacob let out a triumphant roar, the flames reached the pages of the book, and then the book was no more.

MYSTober 2024

Table of Contents

31. Book