The Black Ledger

No one remembered when the Black Ledger was written, only that it was never meant to be found.

Hidden for decades in the crumbling cellar of an abandoned estate in Bavaria, it was bound in blackened leather that felt strangely warm to the touch. The pages, thick and grainy, exhaled the scent of smoke and old blood. It was not a book of accounting, though it bore the name. It was something older, deeper—a catalog of choices made in shadow, histories unspoken, and pacts inked in silence.

And now, it was in the hands of Simon Virelli.

Simon had been many things in his life—antiquities smuggler, historian, occasional forger—but even he hadn’t believed the ledger was real. He’d followed rumors, spent years chasing whispers through half-burnt documents and encoded letters. The trail had cost him friends, money, and nearly his sanity. But there it was, resting in his duffel bag as he sat alone in his Paris apartment, the blinds drawn tight against the night.

He didn’t dare open it for hours.

When he finally did, it was worse than he imagined.

There were no dates. No chapter titles. Just names.

Some were crossed out in red ink. Some were underlined. Some had symbols beside them—triangles, hourglasses, serpents devouring their own tails. Simon didn’t understand them at first. Then he saw a name he recognized.

Giovanni Zappa – his old mentor. A historian who vanished under suspicious circumstances in 2009. Next to Zappa’s name: a black circle. Below it, a phrase in Latin.

“Silere est regnare.”

To be silent is to rule.

Simon flipped the page, heart racing. Politicians. Business moguls. War criminals. Some names had never appeared in headlines, yet their fingerprints were on the world’s most pivotal events.

But then he saw something even more chilling.

Simon Virelli – underlined twice. No symbol. No explanation.

He slammed the book shut.

That night, his phone rang at 2:17 a.m. No number. No caller ID. Just static, and then a voice:

“You opened it.”

Simon said nothing.

“There are only two outcomes now. You write in it. Or you become part of it.”

The call disconnected.

---

The days that followed were a blur of paranoia. Simon stopped going outside. He moved apartments twice. But the ledger never left his side. Something about it pulled at him. He would wake up in the middle of the night to find it open on his table, even though he swore he’d locked it away. Pages turned themselves. Names he didn’t recognize appeared where blank paper once was.

Then the dreams began.

A long hallway of black doors. Whispers behind each one. And at the end, a table. The ledger resting on it. An empty page with a pen waiting.

In the real world, strange things began to happen. A man in a gray coat followed him through a metro station, then vanished. His emails were wiped. His bank account frozen. It was as if the world had begun to erase him—slowly, methodically.

He called an old contact in Berlin, a woman named Elsa Grimm who dealt in forbidden texts.

“I know what you have,” she said without prompting. “And I know what it wants.”

“It’s a book,” Simon replied. “It can’t want anything.”

Elsa laughed. It was a dry, hopeless sound. “That’s what Zappa said.”

“Zappa’s dead.”

“No,” she said. “He wrote his name in the ledger. That’s not the same thing.”

She hung up.

---

Simon didn’t sleep that night. At dawn, he took the ledger and went to the old cemetery behind the Montparnasse Tower. It was empty, save for the crows and the faint sound of morning traffic.

He knelt beside an unmarked grave and opened the book one last time.

His name was gone.

In its place, a blank line.

A pen appeared in his hand.

He stared at it, heart thudding. The choice was clear: write someone else’s name—or let the ledger write his.

Was that how it worked? A ledger of debts, of trades? A balance must always be kept?

He thought of Zappa. Of Elsa. Of the man in the gray coat. All of them had looked into this abyss. Some had made a deal. Some had not.

Simon dipped the pen.

He hesitated for a long time.

Then, slowly, he wrote:

Nikolai Androvich.

The name of the man who had ordered a museum bombing in Kyiv. A name Simon had longed to expose, but never could.

As he wrote it, the ink sank into the paper like water into dry earth. The page warmed. The air grew still.

And somewhere, halfway across the world, a man in a tower clutching a brandy glass fell dead to the floor, eyes wide with fear.

Simon closed the book.

It hummed quietly in his hands, as though purring.

He stood and walked away, the weight of it still heavy in his satchel.

The ledger had taken its due.

And it would hunger again.