The Notepad

If you look hard enough in any used bookstore, you may find a peculiar sort of notepad. Occasionally, it'll be in with the rest of the books, usually in with books on local history or tucked between two thick autobiographies, but normally you'll find it in the seldom-visited corner that holds the handwritten works. It's a small notepad, about the size of a dollar bill, and a stubby pencil with no eraser is jammed through the spiral binding along its top edge. Embossed on its back side is a nondescript company logo and "80 Pages, Single Rule;" by no means does it appear unique. All in all, it looks like the type of thing an old-time newspaper reporter might have used, a notion reinforced by the single word scrawled messily across its faded blue cover in red pen: 'Stories'. The pages will be empty, but buy it anyway; the shopkeeper won't charge you more than a few dollars for it.

Once you've taken it outside the shop, keep it with you as often as possible; it tends to get lost rather easily. A purse or backpack will work, but you'll probably want it somewhere on your person, like a breast pocket or the back pocket of your pants. That's because whenever you talk to someone, you'll feel it grow heavier in its hiding place, and the urge will come over you to take it out. You can, of course, resist that urge; no harm will come to you for doing so, and it will go away as soon as you stop talking to the person. You may as well take it out, though; the person you're talking to won't notice or make any remark about it. In fact, you'll probably have to wave it in front of their face a few times to get them to realize it's there at all, and even then, it'll fall out of their attention once again after a few moments.

This isn't its most interesting quality, however. Slide the pencil out of the binding, flip it open to any page, and ask the person you're talking to about anything; you'll find your conversation partner to be much more open than they might usually be. Ask a mother of three about her family, and in place of tales of Girl Scout camp and soccer practice, she'll tell you how she's not sure if her youngest son is her husband's or if he's from that one-night stand with that guy from her high school reunion. Ask a white-collar worker how things are at the job, and he'll tell you about the $100,000 that fell off the books last week and where he thinks the money's really going. Ask the young newlyweds how their night went, and they'll tell you about the prostitute they picked up and what the three of them did together in graphic detail, all the way up to where the two of them hid the body afterward.

There's no guarantee that all your questions will get answered truthfully, of course; a few lucky people have the ability to lie to anyone, and a few unlucky people have secrets so dark that they can't help but lie. Either way, listen to the stories they tell you, and take them down in your notepad. Shorthand is fine; you don't have to transcribe them word for word. In fact, you don't really need to think about what you're writing much at all; once the pencil is in your hand, you'll find that the notes tend to write themselves. The questions, too, will come automatically after a few minutes, from somewhere in your subconscious that can tell when a person is trying to talk their way around a secret and pierce to the heart of the matter. I advise caution in using the notepad around those you love or respect, or you may find yourself recording something that brings their worthiness of those feelings into question.

Once you're done, close the notepad and put it back in your pocket. Your victim will have no memory of what they've just told you, and will probably pick the conversation back up where it left off before you took the notepad out. Be sure you've found out everything you want to know before you close it, though; using the notepad on someone seems to give them temporary immunity to its powers for a few weeks.

The notepad has eighty pages, but you won't ever need to use them all. At the end of the day, before 11:00 PM local time, put the notepad somewhere out of sight, preferably a drawer or cupboard with a lock, and leave it there overnight. Leave your notes in the binding, and don't remove any blank pages, either; if you damage the notepad, or try to retrieve it between the time you shut it in and 6:00 AM the following morning, it won't be there, and the odds of finding it again in the another used bookstore are rather low. If you go to get it after 6:00 AM, though, you'll find it right where you left it, all of its pages returned to blankness.

You'll also find two things that weren't there when you left it, sandwiched between the front cover and the first page. One is a clean, crisp $10 bill, legal tender for all debts, public and private. Despite the absence of any wear and tear, the bill will be at least 10 years old, and tends to be much older, usually having been minted in the mid-1960s. All the bills you get like this are real, with valid serial numbers, but be sure to check the date and series of each one; a 1933 $10 silver certificate is worth a bit more than $10 nowadays.

The money isn't the most valuable thing you'll get, though. The other item left in your notepad will be a news clipping: a full story cut out of a newspaper, headline and all, and stapled together in cases where it spans multiple pages. You should recognize it as one of the stories you took down the day before, formatted to fit the style of an actual newspaper article. Your name will be in the byline, but you didn't write this article; if anything, this is the article you would have written, had you taken the time to convert your notes into a full story. Squeezed into one of the margins, you'll find a few critical words about the story written by a firm hand in black pen: "too much human-interest" and "less detail, more big-picture" are common remarks, with an occasional "pure shit; published it anyway" or the even rarer "good work" popping up as well. The comments are signed simply "Ed.", with no indication of the identity of the commenter, date of the clipping, or the name of the newspaper. The only identifying mark to be found is the newspaper's motto, left in clippings that make the front page headline: "At the length, truth will out." Good for padding your portfolio if you're a journalist, perhaps, but not of much use to you; all that's in the article are things you already know.

But newspapers print on both sides of the page. Flip the clipping over and read what you can of the story on the other side. What you see depends on what section of the paper your story ended up in. If your story was human-interest, the opposite side will probably say something about the local farmer's market, or the new play coming to town. If your story was about financial scandal, you might get part of the stock prices, or an announcement of a big corporate merger. If you managed to make the front page, you're likely to get the continuation of the stories about murders, sex scandals, and terrorism that usually make the front page these days. You won't be able to see the full story, of course; newspapers don't take care to line up their features like that.

No, you'll get the full story exactly a week later, when it appears in your local paper, verbatim. It won't be running on the opposite side of your article this time, of course, but it'll be precisely the same in every other regard, from the first letter of the headline to the last full stop.

From this point on, the choices are yours. So long as you write enough notes for at least one story every day, the notepad will remain in your possession. Skip more than a few days, and the notepad will get itself lost, but the only curses you'll be left with are the ones hastily scrawled on a angry note about the print deadline that you'll find in your pocket. You can play the market with a week's foreknowledge, use the notepad's powers to dig up dirty laundry, or just find out when the orchestra's coming to town before anyone else does, with virtually no consequences.

Unless, of course, you count your stories.

They appear in print, too, you see. Not all of them, of course, and not right away, but they do appear eventually, and with the power of the notepad to compel you to search out scandal, they tend to appear in rather high-profile places. They won't have your byline any more, but you'll still recognize them by headline, especially when that headline is two inches high and on the cover of USA Today.

Of course, you can try to use this to your advantage, restricting your 'interviews' to public figures like politicians and celebrities, those who have lost the right to having skeletons in their closet, but you tread a dangerously thin line. Who's to say that the public ought to know about a killing in self-defense, kept one man's secret until the day he met you? And do you believe that a presidential candidate deserves to lose the election due to an infidelity to his wife that you wrote about twenty years ago?

But I assume too much. Perhaps you don't see any problem with those scenarios. Be warned, then, that when a person's secrets are published, the first action they take will probably be to try to remember who they confided in and exact revenge. It's true that with its ability to alter its victim's memories of itself and its user, the notepad is a powerful tool, but the same could be said of the human mind, and in a contest between the two, your odds may not be altogether favorable.

Oh, and what I wrote earlier about the urge to use the notepad with everyone you encounter? It's true that you can resist it -- at first. But have you ever met a smoker that smoked one cigarette a day? You'll find ways of convincing yourself, of talking to just one more person, and before you know it you'll have one more shocking exposé ready for the presses.

The choices, as I said, are yours. One last piece of advice, though: I wouldn't look too deeply into who your editor is. Not that you wouldn't be able to find him; in fact, with the power of the notepad to get the truth out of the right people, you may well be the only person who could. No, it's just that they always say that the best editors were good reporters, too, and with all the things you'll have done, all the lives you'll have ruined...

Well, you wouldn't want to end up in the papers, would you?