Chapter Text
He asked me once if I remembered the life I left behind. Well, I remember it very much, despite the long years I've been alive, and the many years I have ahead of me. I do not know if I miss it, but I allow myself bittersweet memories of it, because it only makes my days with him that much sweeter.
I had been alone nearly my whole life before he found his way into it. My parents had died when I was young and left me no kin, and so I let myself be consumed with study and work to keep my mind off the loneliness that was my existence. When he came to me I'd only spent twenty-nine years on this earth, living far from the coast where I was born, though on days where the sky was gray and brooding as it conjured up a storm I found myself longing for the smell of salt and algae on the breeze.
In those days I found myself gripped by a newfound ambition I could not keep up with, overcome with dreams of becoming the one who could decipher the Book. They called it the Book of the Dead, the Book of Darkness, the Book of Mystery or some other silly, inconsequential name that did not hold up to the magnificence contained within. Darkness, yes, as he had brought that with him, but in that darkness I found a radiance unlike any other I had seen. Mystery, perhaps, though he laid himself bare before me and no longer was he mysterious but all-knowing, all-known, seeping knowledge that spilled over the edges of the cup I tried to hold beneath him. Death, certainly not, for he brought me a new life.
And I had never felt more alive.
So when the Book came to me along with a sizeable box of notes from scholars past who'd tried and failed for nearly seven hundred years to decipher it, I was ready and more than eager to prove myself as the one who would finally translate it. National recognition was something that terrified me yet urged my mind to begin searching through the notes to try and see how far some of my predecessors had gotten. Perhaps then, I could reach the end of my short life with satisfaction, knowing that I had done something worth being remembered.
In the shadows of the university archive, hunched over my desk with only a lantern and few ways to tell the time save the pocket watch that I forgot I carried with me half the time (the archives had not yet received electricity except for the hanging bulb in the entryway), I scoured the pages of the Book. Some of the notes from my predecessors were so brittle they flaked away in my hands as I flipped through them, which I thought odd, since the Book seemed so much older yet had remained intact for God knows how long.
The first whispers of his existence happened when I traced my finger over the strange runes that marked the page beside his depiction (which I have learned is inaccurate, but I do not fault the authors of the book for failing to capture a likeness which they cannot comprehend). At that moment, when my finger touched the black ink, there was something like a breath across my collar that stirred my hair and made me jump. I dismissed it as a combination of exhaustion and a draft, as the archive is several floors beneath street level, and older than the structure above it by nearly a century.
Still, doubt stirred in my mind as I touched the illustration itself, a crude imitation of a man or beast or neither, and felt the breath again, accompanied with a strange weight I could not define. I rose from my chair quickly and with the clumsiness of a man slowly giving himself over to panic, bumping my desk with my hip and nearly sending the lantern over the edge. A fire in the archives would certainly give me national recognition, but not the kind I wanted.
I caught the lantern in both hands and set it back on the desk, then looked up to see the most peculiar of disturbances, like the very air was breathing, causing the shelves to bow inward.
I did not linger, then, to determine whether or not I was going mad. I snatched up my lantern, as many of the notes as I could, and finally the Book, not caring what the curator would have to say once he discovered that I had taken a historical artifact home with me. As I passed through the disturbance, the weight shifted and lumbered behind me, and I, too frightened to look over my shoulder, broke out into a run. The shadows my swinging lantern cast upon the walls seemed to contort and twist and reach for me, and I made my feet to carry me faster, faster, towards the stairs that would lead me up and out of the archives and into the street.
Of course, now I know it was him, reaching out from behind the veil that separates our worlds. And I know now that he meant me no harm, that he meant only to perceive, to understand who it was who had somehow managed to turn the veil so thin that fateful night.
The night air was so, so sweet that night, still damp from the rain that afternoon. The clouds had cleared, and I could see the stars rather clearly. It did not strike me as odd, at first, but then I realized I should not have been able to see the stars at all due to the many streetlights and glowing signs that filled the denser neighborhoods of the city. I whirled about and came to the discovery that the electricity had gone out, and the whole street was dark.
So, lantern in hand, I ran. I did not pass any cabs at this late an hour, which was not wholly uncommon but strange enough that it made me begin to worry that some terrible disaster had happened while I was buried beneath the city, totally engrossed in the Book. Somehow I made it all the way to my apartment on foot, up four flights of stairs without losing my breath, through the door only to slam it behind me and throw my weight against it as the flickering light in my hand sent shadows bouncing every which way. I set the lantern on the kitchen table and the Book and notes beside it, then turned at once to lock and bolt my door, as if that would do anything to keep me safe from whatever force that was strong enough to rob the whole city of power.
I stumbled to the window, and after a minute, I allowed myself to laugh—from this height, I could see it was only this neighborhood and the next without power, as beyond the gray rooftops I could see the rest of the city was still aglow, as if nothing had happened. And indeed, nothing had happened, I told myself, so I dismissed what I had experienced in the archive as exhaustion, hunger, and an imagination that had grown overactive from untold hours of reading through the Book.
And so I allowed myself a supper of cold chicken from the icebox, biscuits and jam, and made my tea by lighting the gas stove with a match. I showered in cold water, which wasn't completely unpleasant, and tucked myself into bed with the windows open to catch the breeze.
I dreamed of him, though I did not know it yet. I dreamed of a world so young yet ancient at the same time that it was alien to me; the ground shifted and split open to show impossible depths, and as the shattered plates of this old world heaved, I could feel a consciousness far, far below me. And as the waters of the sea rushed forth, I could see countless white-robed people slowly marching forward to be swallowed by the waves. I awoke that morning in a sweat, clutching the blankets to my chest, to find that the power had come back on. The morning sweat and the tightness in my chest frightened me enough to rush to my bathroom, to see if the illness I had been warned about had begun to manifest on my skin.
It had. The gray pallor had begun to crawl up my neck, much the way it had with my parents, and the shadows beneath my eyes were so heavy it appeared that they had been smeared there with charcoal. I swallowed, resting my hand on my throat. Soon the cough would come, my eyes would glaze over, my lungs would never be able to expand fully…and by the time I turned thirty, I would be dead.
It was a curse I could not escape.
The Book remained on the kitchen table where I had left it. But I did not recall having left it open on the page I had let my fingers caress the previous night. The windows were still open, and one of the pages lifted slightly in the breeze as though a curious hand was trying to see to the next one.
I did not go into work that morning, hoping my absence would go unnoticed long enough for me to get as much information as I could from the cryptic writing. I studied the Book right there at my kitchen table over a cup of coffee. As an archivist I should have known better, I should have been more careful, but the night had filled me with a ravenous hunger that neither food nor drink could satisfy. The notes offered a few comparisons to ancient script, but the runes contained within the Book were unlike anything I had ever seen before. Jagged edges and harsh lines defined them, as though the hand that had etched them into the parchment had done so with a great deal of anger, or perhaps pain.
A previous analysis of the Book's pages had been unable to conclude what material they had been made from, as well as what sort of hide had been used to make the simple, brown leather cover. There was a rumor going around the university when I was still a student that the Book had been bound with human skin, and the writing inside was some sort of black magick. None of these claims I believed. The most logical conclusion I had arrived to was that the Book was the source of a great hoax that had persisted for at least seven centuries, one that continued to stump the learned in the modern day.
I would have assumed the Book itself had been made in this modern age, its creator knowledgeable enough about what ink and what paper and what binding techniques had been used nearly a millennia ago, had it not been for the countless notes and papers and lectures and entries in history books for the past century or so to corroborate its existence. There were even a few photographs I now flipped through, most of them from the last fifty years, showcasing the strange illustrations and runes everyone before me had failed to translate. As to how the Book had been found, well…that had, for some reason, never been documented. As far as anyone knew, it had always been there, locked away in its ebony chest deep inside that strange alcove in the walls that now made up the archives, waiting to be found.
I continued to flip delicately through the Book, draining my coffee down to the few grounds that always made it past the press, until the telephone rang and startled me. It was a good thing my cup was empty; I might have spilled my coffee across the pages, destroyed the contents before I ever had the chance to learn his language and meet him. I don't know what I would have done then.
I knew who it was before I even stood from the table. Carefully, I shut the Book before rising from my kitchen table and stumbling towards the telephone, my right leg having been overtaken with pins and needles from sitting on top of it in my wooden chair. I was still in my pajamas, stubble clinging to my jaw, my eyes swimming from staring so long at the runes without looking up.
It was Masters, the curator, on the other end of the phone. Who else would it have been? He was shouting so loud that his voice cut out at times, only giving me a few snippets here and there of his rant, and though he was not there in person I could imagine his spittle traveling all the way through the telephone lines to hit my face. I caught a few lovely words like 'bastard', 'prick', and, my favorite—'thieving cunt', which I was neither one, nor did I have one.
He liked to diminish me. I suppose I should be glad I've long outlived him.
"I'm sorry sir," I managed to get in while he paused to suck in a breath. "I just thought…I thought my home would be a better environment. To study the Book, I mean." I did not tell him about the 'visual disturbance', as I called it before I knew what it was, that spurred my flight from the archives. If he was already furious with me, he did not need to think me mad.
He made a dry sound, which at first I thought was him choking, until I realized it was him laughing. "Better environment? Better environment, and that being the fucking slums you call home?"
At this I winced. I did not correct him, that the industrial district wasn't technically 'slums' but rather lower income housing; instead, I stayed silent, awaiting the next barrage of expletives.
When he was done, I was certain he was very red in the face, for I could hear his breath heaving on the other end of the telephone. "That Book," he growled, "is seven hundred fucking years old. It is property of the Crown. I'm giving you one hour to return it to the archives before you lose your job, and then you're never going to see it again. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir," I said, my voice shaking as my dreams of being the one person who somehow managed to translate it began to slip through my fingers.
"Should have never put it in the hands of a fucking wharf roach like you," he grumbled. Then, "one hour, Daudley," before I heard the telephone on the other end slam with enough force to make me pull the earpiece away from my ear.
One hour. In one hour, I was going to go back to what I had always been before the Book fell into my hands—an archivist with a knack for ancient tongues, and nothing more. No moving up in the world of historical research, no leading archaeological digs, no private office with my name on the door. Hell, I should have known better than to dream.
But it's alright. It all worked out in the end.
I dressed hastily, making sure my collar was high enough to hide the gray discoloring on my neck, and gathered the papers, along with the Book, before deciding to pack everything into a briefcase to shelter it from the humidity outside and prying eyes. I knew I would look a sight, in my crinkled suitcoat and crooked tie, my dark hair sticking up in back because I had missed it with the wet comb, the unlit lantern I had snatched from the archives the previous night bobbing in my other hand. I flagged a horse-drawn cab, as I hadn't any money for the newfangled gas-powered motorcars that had begun to claim the inner streets of the city, and settled into my seat. It was any wonder I had managed to make it home on foot the night before; I picked at my lip and concluded it had been fear, adrenaline even, that urged me along, as though I had been an animal pursued by its predator.
When I came through the double doors at the bottom of the stairs, Masters was already there waiting for me, along with a man close to my age with curling brown hair and large gray eyes similar in shade to mine that did not move from my face during Masters's third vocalization of his displeasure with me. Masters kept his verbiage relatively tame in the man's presence, which made me assume the man was someone of status high enough for Masters to hold his tongue. Not even the director of the archives got so special of a treatment.
When he demanded the Book, I withdrew it from my briefcase with a heavy heart and handed it to him. I felt very small then, like I was a child again, having to hand over the sugar plums I had purloined from the kitchen before the sisters struck the knotted ends of their cinctures across my knuckles. No such physical punishment awaited me then, even though I wished it would. Pain on the ego, I learned, often lasts much longer than pain on the knuckles.
"And the papers?"
Those too I handed over. The young man accompanying Masters watched the transaction with a subdued sort of curiosity, his lips pulling downwards at the corners and his soft brow raised high enough on his forehead to crinkle the pale skin there. I wanted to ask who he was, but I was certain another round of expletives, complete with a shower of spittle, would quickly follow my question.
"Now Daudley, I'm certain you've work to do? That's twenty pennings off your check this week for missing an hour of work this morning, unless you'd like to stay an hour past the clock." Masters held the Book in both hands, out and away from his body, the papers pinned to the cover underneath his thumbs.
I hung my head. "I'll stay an hour past, sir," I said in defeat.
"Very good." He turned to the young man, who looked up from my face (I could feel him staring at me). "Shall we go to my office? I've got everything arranged for you—"
The man held up a hand, the gesture almost regal, or saintly—I could not tell if it was the natural, relaxed state of his hand, or if the way he curled his ring and little finger towards his palm was deliberate. "I'll be there shortly. I'd like a word with this, ah—" He turned to me, eyebrows raised yet again. "—Daudley, you said? Tobias Daudley?"
Masters flicked his watery eyes between myself and the young man. "The archivist? He's just an assistant, really, and he hasn't gotten very far with the translation. I don't think he'd have much to offer you."
"A word, Mister Daudley?" The man's attention was fully on me now, and I felt myself shrink under his gaze.
"I'm…" I cleared my throat. "Certainly." I threw Masters a look that told him, without words, that for once I had won the battles we always seemed to have going on between us. I saw the red begin to rise to Master's face, but he simply gave a dip of his head and stormed away without saying anything.
"My, what a character." When I looked back at this mysterious young man, I saw he was dusting off the sleeves of his gray suitcoat as though dusting off Masters' presence altogether. "Have you a space where we might speak a little more privately? I'd rather limit our chances of being overheard."
My heart began to race at this request. Private? Overheard? I couldn't understand what was so special about me, a so-called wharf roach, that might demand a private conversation. "My desk," I offered. "It's in the back." I made a motion with my free hand towards the shelves, and the darkness that swallowed the spaces between them. "I'll have to light this, they haven't finished wiring the place." I indicated the lantern I had set on the floor so I could open my briefcase.
"Ah. Of course."
He waited patiently as I pulled my matchbook from my breast pocket, struck it against my heel, and lit the lantern. Silently, I indicated for him to follow me as I led him into the thick shadows that filled my workplace. As I passed between the shelves I could not help but hold the lantern high and look up, then around, half expecting to see places where the shelves had bent and cracked as they bowed inward. There was nothing, which solidified my belief that the visual disturbance was nothing but a vivid hallucination.
If the man noticed, or thought my searching strange, he said nothing.
Eventually we reached the corner where my desk had been set up, and only then did I wonder if Masters had it placed in the back deliberately, perhaps to keep me out of sight. The papers I had left there the night before were gone, no doubt gathered up by Masters' furious hands when he realized I was gone.
I set the lantern on my desk and turned around.
The man stood a few feet behind me, his attention turned to one of the shelves, his hand feeling along its underside. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but thought it best to hold my tongue, so I instead just watched him.
When he finally turned to me, he held up his hand, all his fingers stretched out this time. Curiously, his fingertips were black as if he'd just dragged them through soot.
"Do you know what this is?" he asked.
I shook my head.
He approached my desk, one hand held behind his back, the other held in front of him. He looked down at it and touched his fingertips together once, twice. "Odd," was all he said.
I stood at the corner of my desk and folded my hands together. "What was it you wished to speak with me about?" I ventured to ask.
The man reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a kerchief, which he used to wipe the black soot from his fingertips. "You hail from Ellismere, do you not?"
His question caught me off guard. Ellismere was the village where I was born, somewhere on the northwest coast overlooking the vastness of the sea. It was where I had watched my father, then my mother, slowly fade away to the sickness that had plagued my family line for generations, laying on their beds gasping for air. When the image of my dying parents faded, I offered the man a small nod. I did not know how he would have guessed my childhood home; I figured it was the 'fish-like' look that Masters always told me I had—large eyes, almost bulging out of my skull, a small, flat nose, and a wide mouth most thought rather ugly. It was rumored at the time that the citizens of Ellismere were all half-fish.
"I see, I see." He cleared his throat and returned his kerchief to his pocket. "When was the last time you were there?"
"Not since I was a boy," I said. "Perhaps five or six. I had no kin to take me in, so I was sent to an orphanage here."
"Hmm." He clasped his hands together; in the flickering glow of the lantern's flame, he looked much older for a moment, until he turned his head and the shadows lightened. "Well, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Inlan Lyr, and…I'm the owner of the Book."
"The owner?" I echoed, incredulous. "Why, it's been in the university's possession for nearly two hundred years…"
Lyr held up a hand. "It's a long and complicated story, my dear Tobias," he said, and I shuddered at the casual use of my first name. "I'm a…collector of sorts, and by rights the Book very much does belong to me. But fear not, I'll make sure it gets to your desk once Masters is finished with all the notes."
I didn't quite understand what he was getting at, so I just nodded again.
"You see, I've been looking for a translator for a long time, but I've since been unable to find someone who can understand the runes. It's a forgotten language, as you probably already know."
"Of course."
Lyr reached into his suitcoat again, this time pulling out what appeared to be a tiny jewelry box before handing it to me. Gently, I took it; upon closer inspection, it was some sort of…dial, made of bronze, etched with the same sort of runes found in the book. It was octagonal in shape, heavy in my hands, and in the center was a needle like that on a watch face that I could move with my hand.
"This should help you with the Book," Lyr went on.
I looked up at him. "How do I use it?"
"I'm afraid I don't know," he replied. He gave a smile that caused the corners of his eyes to crinkle; I felt something twist in my stomach, and, shamefully, I looked away, hoping there was no evident flush to my cheeks. "But you should be able to figure it out, hm?"
"I…" I stood up straighter, squaring my shoulders so that I did not look as small as I felt. "I should, sir."
He waved a hand with a laugh as soft as the breeze on a cool spring evening, and the twisting in my stomach intensified tenfold. "Just Inlan will do. I believe we shall be seeing a lot of each other in the coming weeks, so I would like to start off our relationship to each other cordially. Is that alright with you?"
"It's…yes sir—Inlan." His name felt sweet on my tongue when I spoke it, like I had been waiting centuries to hear it, to form the syllables with my lips. I shook the sensation off; I was tired, I told myself. Perhaps this was a side effect of the illness that I had never been informed of.
"I should get back to Masters to finalize a bit of paperwork. I should be back soon to make sure the Book gets to you." As he turned, I could not help but stare at the way the cut of his suit framed his body, every edge perfectly sharp and tailored flawlessly, down to the tails of his suit hanging over his backside...
I thrust the impure thoughts away at once; it would do no good to dwell on attraction when I had perhaps less than a year left, and to think of the same sex in such a way would no doubt get me sacked if I ever acted on it. It was another curse of mine, another illness which had no cure—to yearn for the touch of another man meant a life of loneliness I was already committed to, afraid that seeking intimacy could out me as a degenerate.
"Would you like some light, Inlan?" I called after him, my throat suddenly dry.
"No, no, I should be able to navigate my way back," he answered, waving another hand without turning back to look at me.
I watched as the shadows swallowed him and prayed he wouldn't bump into anything and bring a dozen shelves down on top of him. When no such disaster occurred, I allowed myself to breathe. What an interesting fellow, I thought, claiming to be the owner of the Book! I tried to understand just how it might belong to him, then concluded that perhaps he was the descendant of its original author. I looked down at the dial still in my hands. As to how I would be the one to translate it…I still had no idea. I turned the hands of the dial this way and that, expecting something to spark in my brain, but nothing happened. With a sigh, I set the dial on my desk, then pressed the backs of my hands against my cheeks to see if they were warm.
They still were. How shameful of me, to ogle someone I'd just met, who likely did not suffer from the same vices as I did. I could not deny Inlan was handsome, with his light eyebrows, his gentle round eyes, his long and protruding nose. He was he sort of man I fancied at the time. Many evenings I had entertained the thought of letting myself indulge in carnal pleasures just to experience it once, before I died, and many times did I find myself wandering into those narrow streets where workers of both sexes lined the porches and sat in the windows waving their hands, beckoning to those with a heavy coin purse and an itch in their trousers. Each time, though, fear and shame overcame every other emotion and I would flee from those streets, afraid that I wouldn't know how to conduct myself, or how I would look at myself once I did finally lose that purity which I still clung onto.
I shivered, rolled my shoulders, and tried to fix my mind on other things. The Book, namely; Inlan's request, why and how he'd discovered my origins and sought me, specifically, out. The black soot on his fingers…
Curiosity got the better of me, and I stepped forward to the shelves that Inlan had run his fingers on. I did the same thing, and when I raised my hand my fingertips were, like his, also coated in the same dry, powdery substance. I returned to my desk to hold them closer to the light, and as I looked closer I realized the 'soot', as I had been calling it, was not actually black. It was a deep green, tiny flakes of something silver glittering inside of it. For some strange reason, I thought of the scales of a fish.
When I raised my fingers to my nose, the 'soot' smelled of algae.