Day 0: The tome finally showed up today. It was found in a mass grave, just outside of what is now Rome, preserved perfectly. Archeologists thought it was a early Christian religious text at first, but more careful consideration revealed some peculiar details: proto-Germanic text hundreds of miles from that region. They've sent it to us for some analysis. First up, carbon dating!

Day 25: The (first) dating finished up last week and the whole lab was shocked. It was at least 500 years older than it should've been. Paper isn't supposed to hold up for that long, nothing traveled that far back in those days without a record, and the dialect is somehow subtly wrong. We're running it again and the linguistics team is doing a retranslation. Oh yeah, we've got a linguistics team now. The university got funding from an anonymous donor, explicitly for this project. Weird part is, we haven't publicized anything about it yet. Still, gift horse, mouth, and all that jazz.

Day 70: More money, more team members, more shocking discoveries. Carbon dating reconfirmed that weird date and somebody found a reference to a similar book in some nearly forgotten archive. Didn't say what it was, but we've got one confirmed sighting at the right time, so that's good news. Linguistics team is having a blast. Apparently it's not proto-Germanic, but some new language that predates it. Similar enough at first glance, but the original read as a religious text seems wrong now. It does reference biblical concepts quite often however. Lots on Lucifer and the devil. Newest team is a few materials scientists. Apparently, it's not printed on paper. Some kind of animal skin.

Day 107: We're getting shut down soon. Lots of 3 letters and men in black started becoming very interested in what we were doing, and now everything will be gone soon. It doesn't make any sense! The book was just some grimoire filled with gibberish rituals and "spells". Why would the government care? They've got enough demons without summoning more. They can't even legally keep it. Mats team got some results and it's a piece of anthropodermic bibliopegy: human skin bound books. We were supposed to send it back to Italy, since it's a "cultural artifact" now, but we just needed a few more days to finish translating. They should be receiving a fake any day now. They don't deserve it. It's ours to study.

Day 234: All the data's been stolen from me. They swept the lab, top to bottom, then took the server racks whole. They didn't search quite well enough. I made another copy. I let them have it, but I've got the book. It's mine. They can't take it from me. It was translated just before we got disbanded. All the other professors got transferred. Supposedly at new universities, but I know the truth. They betrayed me. They tried to take the book away. They can't do that. It's mine. They tried to steal my book and go work on it themselves. They failed. I've got the rituals here. Fascinating, really. Chemical reagents centuries ahead of their time, impossible processes for back then. And death. Now we know why it was found in a mass grave. Whoever had it before me tried to use it and failed. I won't. I'm better. I can get everything I need on Amazon. Gun cotton, quicksilver, aluminum, even lives. I'll use bacteria. There's thousands in a single colony. I can summon him a hundred times over. I've got it all prepared. Set the ritual, sacrifice the lives, and fulfill my purpose. It needs to be done. It has to. I need to.

• Selected research notes of Simon King. Extracted from destroyed residence after large explosion by Project Mephistopheles.

I had an idea for a Blair witch project type story. Not as strictly based on the prompt, but I liked the idea of a mysterious artifact being found and a researcher slowly being corrupted by it.