Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5012317-20140411035334

How should I start? I guess I should start from when the whole phenomena started. So I was walking to the bookstore. I don’t really read all that much, but I needed a cookbook, as there were guests coming over to my house tonight. It was a high school reunion party. At first, we were going to have it at the embassy, but they unexpectedly closed it down, no one knows why.

So when I got there, I was looking through the cookbook section.

"Do you need any help?" asked one of the store staff.

"Umm... no I am just looking for a good cookbook," I said with a smile. She smiled back.

"OK, I shall be at the counter if you find one that catches your interest," she replied.

So then she left. I was skimming the spines of all the cookbooks, and noticed one that looked really old. I took it out. It looked ancient, but in a way, it looked somewhat attractive. The cover had a picture of an obese chef, with large sparkling eyes, and a sweet, innocent smile on his face. It was titled: “The Chef”. There was no author labeled on it.

It caught my eye, so I took it to the counter.

"Oh, so you found one?" she said at the counter.

"Yes, I have. This one looks very interesting too," I said as I stared at the chef on the cover.

"Ok, goo..." she stopped.

"Umm... what’s the matter?" I said, in wonder. She was shaking.

"I've never seen this book before in here," she said, looking into it. "This book doesn't have a price-tag, or barcode on it anywhere," she added. I noticed this as well. Anyway, she let me have it for free since it wasn’t registered to the store's computer.

I took it home, and looked into it. There wasn’t anything unusual about it or anything. The book had all sorts of recipes. Risottos, pastas, tacos, and a lot more. But something was off. It took me a few minutes to realize it, but the recipes in the book weren't grouped into categories or anything, not even alphabetical. Some letters in the text of the book were in bold red, and the rest were black. Lazy writer and editor I guess. It didn’t bother me all that much as the recipes looked beautiful, and the pages weren't torn apart or anything. The text was still perfectly readable.

The guests were coming at seven. So I started cooking at five. I went to the first page, then the second, skimming the book. I wondered what they liked. I couldn’t remember. I made a huge pot of risotto, and about six tacos. There were not that many people coming over, and they do not eat much. I added some vegetables to the table, and left it covered, ten minutes before they were due to come. For the ten minutes, I stared at the book's cover. But something was a tad odd. It looked like the smile on his face slightly went down. After a few minutes, I just thought it was the light. Maybe it seemed like he had a slightly lower smile with the house light than the sunlight and vice versa.

So at seven, the guests came over, all five of them. They ate and complemented the food. Then we had drinks, played games, and they went home after that, not much said.

The next morning, on Saturday, I turned the TV on, as usual, to see what was on the news. I froze when I saw what was on. Reports on the unexpected deaths of five people, in Toronto, Canada. That is the city was in. But, it should have been a coincidence. One, two, three, four, five, I counted. Five people came to my house last night. It shouldn’t have been a coincidence. Was it the food from the new cookbook? Was it poisoned? If so, I should have ordered pizza. But, wait. It couldn’t have been. I ate the food as well, and I’m not dead. Yeah, it's probably a coincidence, I thought. Maybe the people on the news aren’t my friends.

I wanted to be sure of this, so later in the day, I gave one of them a call. I heard his voice. Thank goodness, I thought. A few seconds later, I realized it was a recorded message. All people I called, recorded message. Hmm, maybe they are all asleep. It was a long party last night, and it was Saturday. But to be 100 percent sure, I went to one of their houses, and surprisingly saw the police surrounding his house.

I was really scared now. So it was my friends. I went back home, just ignoring this. I went into the kitchen and got the cookbook out. The chef’s smile was now strait, emotionless. Everything else was normal about him. His eyes, his nose, his hair, and his ears. Nothing wrong.

Nothing much happened five days after this, but on the next Friday (the week after the night of my friends’ deaths), I took another look at the book, this time, a frown, and sad eyes, and… blood! Dripping from his eyes, looking like he is crying blood. Is this ever going to stop? Out of extreme curiosity, I kept the book with me. I also cooked some recipes from the book, and ate them, no problem.

The next day, strange things started to occur. The stoves in the kitchen started to turn on by themselves. Nothing that strange, unless you experience it of course. This really annoyed me more than it scared me, but I still found it strange.

On Monday, I turned on the tap in the kitchen sink to get a drink, water didn’t come out like usual. I waited for five minutes as I kept flicking the tap lever. Suddenly, there was a screech that sounded like it was coming from the pipes under the sink. I opened the doors, everything looked normal, but I still heard the screech. I found a hammer, and started hitting the pipes below, no luck. I then hammered the faucet where the water come out, no luck. I flicked the lever a few more times, and then something came out. It was red however. I thought it was just something wrong with the pipes, or someone put red food coloring in the pipes as a prank. But there was no end to the water being red. I wondered if it was water at all. I poured some of this in a cup, smelled it, no smell at all, just like water. It seemed redder than water mixed with food coloring. I tasted it… BLAH! It tasted like blood.

Wait a minute… blood on the chef, blood in the sink. I stopped dead now. I turned to the stove. I turned it on manually, just to see if I was seeing things or not and looked in horror. Just as I thought, blood. Yes, blood from a damn stove, and this was no gas leak or anything. I ran to the other end of the kitchen, got the cookbook, and looked at the picture. The chef’s face looked as it looked before. Blood tearing from his eyes. Sad face, sad eyes. Except, was the face now getting thinner? It looked that way. Hmm.

There were no other places paranormal activity occurred though. Just the kitchen, for obvious reasons. But still, I wanted to know what was going on. The next day, I found what looked like a human heart in the trash can. Okay, that was it. I decided that enough was enough. I wanted to call an exorcist or ghost busters or something, but I decided to investigate this myself.

I began my investigation by waiting each day for any changes to happen to the chef on the cover. It just kept getting thinner, and the fat on his neck was also trimming down as well. Still, same sad face though. I thought about the blood, and I began to think that the blood has something to do with something, I knew it. I did some heavy thinking about this.

Yes. I knew. I went to the cookbook and looked at all the red letters on each page. I wrote down each red letter in order of appearance. After a certain page, there were no more red letters. This was obviously for someone to decipher. I wrote each letter down, in order of appearance, gave it punctuation where necessary and I found this:

HELLO I AM CHEF DAVE NGUYEN. I WORK AT THE CANADIAN EMBASSY IN TORONTO, ONTARIO. I SIMPLY LOVE COOKING. THE EMBASSY HAS BEEN MY HEART HOME FOR YEARS, AND I CAN’T STOP COOKING THERE. I HAVE NOT BEEN HOME FOR YEARS. I THINK ABOUT MY FAMILY, WISHING TO SEE THEM, BUT I CAN’T, AND I DON’T KNOW WHY. SOMETHING IS STOPPING ME. I DON’T KNOW IF IT’S PASSION, OR IF SOMETHING IS HOLDING ME BACK. I CANNOT VISIT MY FAMILY, MY FAMILY CANNOT VISIT ME.

There were so many things in this text that seemed so familiar and creepy. Hmmm. The embassy has been closed down for a while, does this have anything to do with it? It seemed like he missed his family. What is going on here? I decided to do some internet research about both the embassy and Dave Nguyen and found a lot. It took me three days to put the pieces together, and here’s what I’ve got:

So, basically, Dave Nguyen, a Vietnamese chef, was obsessed with cooking. When he was alive, he worked at the now closed Canadian embassy at the time. He cooked for a living and loved the place. He also made a cookbook called: ‘The Chef’ (the book I have). One day, when he was cleaning everything up in the kitchen for the night, something happened. There was a gas leak coming from the stove, and when he was not looking, he turned off the lights when he was about to go home, and a fuse blew, breaking the glass, and a spark hit the gasoline and burned the kitchen, along with him. They hired a new chef that took his place, but his spirit still lived in the embassy. He tried to go home to his family, but the fact that it was physically impossible to go back home kept him from seeing his family, and the fact that his family knew about his death kept them from visiting him. They closed down the embassy after numerous reports of paranormal activity and reported sites of ghosts.

I wanted to see him in person. I had so many questions to ask him, but he remained dead so there was no point. I stopped looking or thinking about the cookbook, thinking it would stop this curse or whatever I have, but nothing changed. I now had to go back to ordering food like I used to.

I woke up one morning, and looked into the mirror. I was getting fatter. What the hell, was it the burger king I ordered last night? Anyway, I carried on with my life, ignoring anything else about the cookbook, Dave Nguyen, or even about my kitchen, which I kept locked. After two weeks, I went to work one day and before I left to go back home, one of my colleagues stopped me.

“Hey Limac, I’ve been noticing you’re getting fatter,” he said.

“Umm… yes I have noticed that as well,” I replied in wonder. After I said that, he froze, and stared at me.

“Hey, is that… is that blood? In your eyes?” he asked.

“What the…”.

I drove back home, went to the bathroom and looked into the mirror. I looked exactly like… like… Dave Nguyen! This was beginning to add up. It seemed like there was a curse, put on whoever owned this book.

I immediately unlocked the door of the kitchen and got his cookbook out, the face still being similar to when I last saw it. I built a fire-pit in the garden, lit it with a match and gasoline, and burned it. I did a small dance around the fire, chanting “It’s over! It’s over!”, or so I hoped. I sat down and watched it burn into the fire. I turned back to notice the lights in my house were still on. I thought I could spend an hour or two just sitting around the campfire. So I went inside and turned off the lights in the house.

I went back outside, sat down staring at the fire, then froze. It looked to me that the chef was sitting by the campfire. I saw him stare at the burning book, the cover still intact. As I was shivering. He turned his eyes to face me. I gulped. I could see his sad face, blood dripping from his eyes. He stood up and picked up the gasoline canister. I was paralyzed in fear. I tried to move, but couldn’t. He poured the gasoline all over me as I sat as still as a rock, and watched as he lead a path of gasoline towards the fire. I was looking in horror as I saw the fire getting closer to me.

I eventually burned down, my feet catching fire, then my legs, then my lower torso, waist, upper torso, chest, and eventually, my head and hair. I fell and landed face first towards the fire. This was a feeling like none other, this was worse than torture. I slowly burned to near death. The last thing I saw before my death, was a picture of me on the cover of the cookbook which read: “The Chef, by Limac McQuay”.  