A Book for a Bookkeeper - The First Page
Oscar knew what was going to happen as he sat at his small cubicle in the medium sized accountancy firm he worked at. It was Wednesday afternoon and Oscar knew his manager, Nicola, was going to make him get a big job done by Friday. He looked up and saw Nicola at his colleague, Jo, desk, no doubt piling work onto her as well. He saw her then turn to come over.
"Oscar, we're going to need the payroll reports for the Ruther's Hardware account generated and checked by close of business on Friday. It's a big one so I'm going to need some overtime from you."
As Nicola strolled back to her office at the end of the corridor, Oscar resigned himself to the stress and workload he'd be putting himself through for the next three days. Oscar hated his job. He'd been working here for almost three years and had stayed in the same bookkeeper role the entire time. He didn't get enough money for the amount of work he did. The work was repetitive and boring. He hated his various bosses and the demands they made. He should have quit to move somewhere else but the effort required to find a new job kept him here.
After working through to 7pm that night, Oscar was finally getting home. He lived in a small one-bedroom flat in a big block of flats. He was usually drained at the end of the day and normally had just enough energy to eat some dinner and then would fall asleep after watching some TV or surfing the internet for a bit. His social life involved going to the pub for a beer or two once every couple of months with the few friends he'd held on to from university and school.
"Hi Oscar," said Sierra, Oscar's neighbour, "how are you?" Sierra had moved in six months ago. She was in the flat one away from Oscar and lived alone as well. Sierra and Oscar had run into each other enough that they'd gotten to know each other a little bit. Sierra was a young teacher and was a knock-out beauty. She had a fit, athletic build and was always going for runs or going to the gym. Oscar loved seeing her bounce past in short shorts that showed off her tanned and toned legs or the small sports tops she wore exercising that put her boobs on display. She had shiny blonde hair that she normally wore in a ponytail that would flick around when she moved.
"Hey, I'm okay. Work sucks but it always does. How about you? How's school?"
"It's really good. I've got a great class at the moment. It's really fun being there. Anyway, I'm heading for a run. I'll see you around, neighbour."
Sierra bounced past and strode down to the stairwell of the flats to leave the building. Oscar spent a few moments taking in the view of Sierra's perfectly round ass. He then let himself into his flat, saw that there was no mail and mentally prepared himself for another boring evening. He just wished something would happen to bring some excitement into his life. He knew he should go out and make something happen but he was just so drained all the time.
The following day, Oscar had spent the morning busting his ass to get this work for his manager done. He'd been inputting data and getting everything done. He'd finally gotten a first draft of everything and was ready to get it okayed to then produce the final report. He gathered everything he had and went to Nicola's office.
"Come in," Nicola said in response to Oscar's knock. Nicola had started in the same role as Oscar but a year ago she'd been moved into the manager position. Oscar knew she wasn't a better worker than him. To him, it seemed like a classic case of 'failing upwards'. She wasn't a good manager either. She would regularly fall behind with things and then snap at the team to get them to make up for her failing.
"Hi Nicola, I've got the draft report for Ruther's. Can you take a look and okay for finalising it?" He handed over the documents. Nicola took them and flipped a few pages.
"Hmmm," Nicola said, looking at the file, "I thought I'd said that we were using the alternate payroll format. These will need to be redone with the data re-input. It's got to be done by tomorrow, so bring me the draft tomorrow morning."
Oscar was angry but wasn't showing it. He knew he was going to need to redo the work and he knew full well that he hadn't been given any information that what he'd just done would be useless.
"Okay, I'll get it done," he said, resigned to redoing all the work. Another late night.
"Be quick with it and don't mess it up." Nicola shooed him out of her office with a wave.
As Oscar was leaving, he heard Nicola on the phone already, "Hi Jane... Yes, it should get done. Oscar messed it up but I've shown him what's correct." Jane was the senior manager, Nicola's boss. Oscar didn't have much to do with her and she was based at another location.
Oscar was fuming all afternoon as he worked to do all the work again. This was the latest in a long line of Nicola screwing him over. He remembered when a job had failed an audit. Similar to now, it was entirely Nicola's fault - she'd failed to complete a crucial section. She lied and blamed it on one of Oscar's colleagues and got him fired. He also remembered a time when she had taken a week off work during the busy end-of-financial-year period. She came back and took credit for a bunch of work that was done while she was on holiday. Basically, Oscar hated her.
It was an even later evening in the office for Oscar. He eventually got home. He slumped through his front door with a McDonald's takeaway bag he'd picked up on the way home. He noticed there was something in his letterbox. It was a scrappy leatherbound book. The rough leather covering it made it look like something out of a fantasy movie. Oscar was puzzled but brought it though to his living area. He suspected it must have been intended for one of his neighbours but had ended up through the wrong door. He was hoping he could find out who without needing to ask around.
Oscar sat down on his couch to investigate the book. Before even opening it, it was obvious that a lot of the pages had been torn out. He opened the thick leather cover of the book. The first page was weathered and brown. It had scribbly dark ink writing in a language that Oscar didn't recognise. It was normal English letters with a few unusual characters that looked like they could have come from Russian or something but none of the words made any sense. The next page was even more confusing. It was still in dark hand-written ink, but this page was letters that didn't look like anything, all straight lines intersecting at right angles. The next page was more of the same script. Oscar flipped through a few pages and saw different ink and writing styles and languages - nothing that even looked like a recognisable language. After about 30 pages of different scripts and symbols, he hit a place where a large number of pages had been ripped out. Following the removed pages, there were some pages that were blank. They had the same browning. There were five blank pages and then a number more torn out.
Oscar was perplexed and thumbed back to the pages that had writing on them. The backs of the pages also had writing on them. One of them caught his eye. He had found a page that had English writing. It was in a dark green ink. Oscar started to read:
CEREBROCARTUS
This book came to me.
This is the Book of the Mind
This is a Magick Book.
