You'd be intrigued too, if you saw it.

307.

30th July. Seven minutes past 3:00am. Seven pounds and three ounces. The number could have so many connotations, but those were the important ones. A date. A time. A weight.

My birth date.

My birth time.

My birth weight.

You'd probably assume I'd have recognised the links between those three important numbers. Three, zero (do you say zero or oh?), seven. They all circled the moment of my entry into this wide, wonderful world like vultures waiting for the chance to dive down and pick at my corpse.

Well, I didn't give them the satisfaction. I lived. I thrived. At least, that's what I thought of my life. It had been a good one, initiated by loving parents and supplemented by my own upbeat, positive attitude. I'd always sensed them, though. Those vultures. Circling. Waiting.

I enjoyed my job, one my colleagues found to be tedious. I loved the partners I'd been lucky enough to have love me, until they didn't, and we parted ways. Such was life, though. It couldn't all be rainbows and unicorns. With the light came the darkness, and I was fully accepting of that. So, I had dark times, but they only served to make the light times brighter.

It was during one of those dark times, when my optimism had been tainted by the breakup of another relationship, when I found the book.

I didn't often go to the library. I'd been a frequent visitor as a child but, over time, the large building became invisible, hiding behind the veil of familiarity. As I often did when my usual silver lining was obscured by a cloud, I read. Horror and science fiction were my preferred genres, but there were no books reaching out to entice me to venture into their pages and worlds.

My To Be Read pile had been completed and, on my way into the bookshop in town, I passed the library. It peeked out from behind its curtain, noticed my inner turmoil, and called out to me. I answered its summons and entered.

After a half hour's browsing, I found the book.

All of Us are Lying.

I don't know what it was about the title that gave me pause. The spine, shoved tightly between a pair of nondescript suspense novels, caught my attention by its absence of anything resembling decoration. The title was written in a basic font, printed on a plain, black cover. There was no author's name or publisher's logo. It looked as if it had been placed there by the writer, rather than been part of the library's actual stock.

It was distinctly out of place, a feeling I'd had throughout all of my youth and most of my adulthood. I, too, had been squeezed between nondescript others. They'd fitted in. They had their places on the shelf of Life.

So. A kinship with a book. OK...

I took All of Us are Lying down from the shelf. Without opening it, I could see it spoke some form of the truth. We did lie. Constantly and not always intentionally. Certainly not maliciously. But, we did. We lied about what we had for breakfast. About loving someone. About where we got the money for the expensive gift. About where we'd hidden the body.

Lies could be significant or trivial, but they were still wounds in the flesh of honesty. If discovered, even the most inconsequential could scar.

I opened the book and a slip of paper slid out and dropped lazily to the floor. I bent and picked it up. It was written in a doctor's scrawl, as if the ink had tried to escape the pen's nib and had taken an erratic path across the paper that just happened to resemble words.

"You can waste hours searching for me on the internet or come meet me for real."

There was no name or signature. And no location.

OK, great. An invitation to meet someone, but no indication of where they might be. Was the writer of the note the same author of the book itself? I flicked through the pages, thinking I'd read some of the passages, partially out of curiosity for the book's message regarding the untruths of the world, and partially for a clue.

Except, it was blank.

Each page was completely empty. Devoid of words.

If someone wanted to leave a message, why not just write it on one of the pages? There were plenty of prime candidates to choose from. That would be defacing it, though. That was something I would never contemplate doing myself, particularly to a book. They weren't sacred by any means, but they were valuable. Owning books made one rich in so many different ways.

Then I saw it.

My flicking stopped on a page three quarters of the way through. I'd almost missed it and, if my journey through its desert of text had been faster, I was certain I'd never find it. Yet, I had.

Printed, rather than handwritten, so an actual part of the book (the only part?) as opposed to having been added by a literary vandal, was the name of a hotel. Beneath it was three digit number. The room?

What else could it be?

And here I was. All foolishness and fear. I was in that hotel and standing in front of room 307, as instructed.

I knocked, feeling calmer than expected. Did I recognise this building? That door? They definitely seemed familiar. Perhaps my mind was lying to me to keep with the book's title.

There was no answer, so I tried the handle. Unlocked.

I pushed the handle down and the door open.

That's when the screams started.

Lying here, shackled to a table and bleeding from numerous wounds that hurt so much the pain from each has combined to blind me to its intensity, I can still hear those screams.

I think they might be my own.

This story was written for the excellent WattpadCreepypasta (brilliant profile) Micro Frights #19 All of Us Are Lying prompt. You know me. I start writing and don't know where it's going to end up. That's exactly what happened here. I hope your imaginations fill in what happens next!

UPDATE: I'm delighted to say I won the contest! Whoop! Thanks so much WattpadCreepypasta!!