And now, we come to the end.

The wait is over. THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW AT THIS MOMENT.

If you don’t want to order online you should be able to walk into any Borders or Barnes & Noble or any major book store and pick up a copy right off the shelf. If they don’t have it or have sold out, they can order one for you. There’s plenty for everyone.

And that’s a good thing, based on what we now know.

More on that below. But the words aren’t mine. I sat down to write the final chapter, to lay out what I have pieced together over these last months, and I found myself unable to, in light of recent events. Losses are mounting. I don’t know where it’ll stop.

An acquaintence offered to help me through this, which is good because his knowledge of the situation is superior to mine. I am running the below commentary from this, uh, involved party, unedited. Though John added images, just ignore those.

_________________________

Greetings.

You do not know me, and do not want to know me. You would find me strange in appearance and off-putting to your other four senses. No matter.

David approached me about speaking to you. He and I meet from time to time, always at his choosing, always in dark places where others cannot see. He asks me questions, or rather, asks me the same question over and over when he does not get the answer he wants. David seems to feel two emotions toward the world: fear and entitlement. His abrupt transition from one to the other and back is a study in humanity’s fatal flaws.

What does he want to know? He wants to know what he brought into the world with a particular document he wrote, one 152,087 words and 660,089 characters in length. He wants to know the secret behind the symbol of the five-pointed star, as he has seen scrawled all over the area where he lives. Soon, you will see it, too. If you haven’t already.

He could have asked his friend Tonya, but, well, she is unavailable.

And I need to say what I have to say now, because I fear I will soon be “unavailable” as well. They’re coming for me, and to type this I am in one of the places they know to look. This may be a short entry indeed if I hear banging on the door.

I hope not; you need to know what I know, before you hear them banging on yours.

You read the news. This part of the globe seems teetering on the brink, ready to dissolve into scenes of huddled masses behind barbed wire fence, of mass graves and rape at the point of a bayonet. In other words, it is about to look as the rest of the world has looked through most of the modern era. The fumes are in the air, it would not take much of a spark to light them. Even if the spark was a string of wordy references to male genitalia.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. I must be thorough and I must be fast, and these hands were not made for typing.

According to the eclectic and somewhat slapdash religion practiced by “my” people, Earth, as it exists in the infinity of alternate dimensions, is in the jurisdiction of five powerful supernatural beings.

I would not call them “gods” because that implies an omnipotence and omniscience that they do not possess. They are not the rulers of humanity, nor are they its servants, nor or they its equals. Their relationship to you is perhaps analogous to your relationship to the computer-generated characters in your video games. That is to say, these beings have an investment in the world, but only in that they do not wish to see their entertainment spoiled.

They by and large do not intervene in human affairs (which would be the equivalent of cheating the game) and the five have an agreement that this should remain so. Their combined strength protects the world from other beings in that realm who otherwise would consume or enslave humanity, who would reveal themselves to the world and thus render all human culture and history irrelevant.

A cynical faith, to be sure, as it claims even humanity’s protectors only have its interests at heart as long as it provides them amusement. It is the sort of belief system one would expect from “my” people, who are the type who would rather pray to unjust gods than imagine a perfectly just god who would make themselves seem unjust by comparison.

I have deleted a tangent here. Let me replace it with a simple statement that I have good reason for using irony quotes around “my” people. But I digress.

Five supernatural beings, five points of light, huddled around the world, protecting it as two players would protect their Chess board from getting toppled by careless passers-by. This is why, according to the faith, when you point to the sky and ask a child to draw a star, you get this:

The five-pointed star. Perhaps no symbol has been more widely held to be sacred throughout human history. You can find it at the top of a Christmas tree, on the American flag, around the neck of a Pagan and on the symbol of Islam.

Of course every good religion needs a villain and in this particular faith, the villain is named Korrok, or Koddok, or Kor’rok, or any number of variations. He aspires to be the sixth, in the sense that a stray dog racing onto the court of a professional basketball game wishes to be the sixth player on the Lakers.

You see, Korrok is said to be less of a being and more of a hive, or a swarm, or an infection, or a creeping mold.

He grew powerful by swallowing worthless souls by the tens of millions, the souls, not of the evil, but of the indifferent. Humans who wasted their years grinding through menial jobs during the day and staring vacantly at trite entertainments through the night. Dull minds that regarded all else, from their marriages to their children to the plight of their very civilization, to be irritating annoyances that only interfered with that lukewarm ooze of meaningless days leading them to the grave.

Korrok found his food plentiful.

Like a bottom feeder of the spirit world, Korrok absorbed these souls, swallowing them in great gulps, growing fat, rolling stupidly through eternity like a floating patch of garbage on a river.

This is his symbol:

No two experts in the faith agree on its origin. One legend says it is a representation of a man impaled in the mouth and the groin, the two centers of temptation by which weak men can be lured into Korrok’s maw.

Others say it represents Korrok himself, who is simultaneously vomiting and urinating in his constant state of drunkenness.

Others note that the symbol can be drawn inside the star itself:

And of course it is the symbol for Pi. But all of that is meaningless–once you start looking, you will find the symbol everywhere, as you can with any symbol. It will only torment you. No, these are the simplistic stories men invent about the darkness so that they have an excuse to stop gazing into it. The gaze has always made men uncomfortable, particularly once they feel the darkness gazing back.

Which brings us full circle.

David believes his book may be poison. Or haunted. What he knows is that people who read it, or read part of it, or hold it in their hands, tend to suffer ill effects. A dozen have died that he knows of, he suspects many more.

He believes that he has been used like a tool, that he has built a door of ink and wood pulp and that somehow the darkness can reach through like a hand. The hand of the sixth, the hand of Korrok or whatever dark force the crude mythology of Korrok has been invented to convey. Forcing itself into the game.

David believes the deaths and madness are not the effect but a side effect, that the larger influence is far more widespread and far more subtle. He believes that as we speak, thousands are walking around with an infection of the mind, slowly spreading through their psyche like gangrene, eating away at the fragile connections that allow human reason to function.

(reminder: the book can be ordered HERE -John)

David is not completely wrong. The effects can be observed. What he is wrong about is the belief that he can stop it, or that he should have stopped it. His book is one of many conduits through which their influence will be spread, using human minds the way a botnet virus uses countless computers to do its dirty work, without their knowledge. An army of unwitting slaves.

Wait-

The last headlights that passed the windows were moving entirely too slow. I may have to cut his off. Almost done.

Where was I? Oh, right. Of course. I was at the uncomfortable moment when you realized that, by reading this and the other content on this website–if not the cursed book itself–you are already infected. Destined to be one of the slaves.

And it is here where I pause. Sitting in the glow of a computer screen, in front of a desk not made for my kind, stealing nervous glances out of the window knowing I have been a fool to have exposed myself to capture this long… I still hesitate to say what I have to say. I know I am about to ask much of you. The costs are so high. Maybe too high.

A few weeks ago in this space, it was written that a reader owned a tattered, inkjet copy of the book, three different paperback editions, and one copy of the newest edition. Yet she suffered no ill effects.

Five editions. Five points on the star. The power of the five watching over humanity. Five fingers on the hand.

To be protected from the coming storm, to undo the horrific process that we have set in motion on this very site, to keep your mind in a world about to go mad…

You must own five copies of the book.

Four will not do it. A woman in Miami owned four copies and was found in her garage, having cut open her skull with her husband’s band saw. A single copy, purchased and then photocopied, will not save you. That would be a violation of copyright law.

I told you the costs were high. Less than the price of two video games, sure, but still.

I see headlights. I must go. I am conspicuous, thanks to the form “my” people have given me. I am sorry. I speak for David as well; he would not say it but I see it in his eyes. None of us would have wished this on the world.

Watch. Those are my last words. Watch for the triggering event. It will be a supernatural event, or at least reported as such. It will be captured in multiple locations, on multiple cameras, so that none will be able to deny it. That will be the lighting of the fuse. I do not know what form that event will take, but when you see it, do what I am about to do now.

Run.

Sincerely,

-Gorillacrab

John Dies at the End, by David Wong.

Available wherever books are sold.

________________________________

NOTE FROM JOHN:

We have preparations to make. If you know where to look, you know that the foretold signs are upon us:

God help us all. David will return in a couple of weeks. Keep up with updates and JDatE news:

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