Update: I added some stuff.
The old man
gestured towards Edward. “You like books?”
Edward
didn’t. He liked book stores. The
smell, the look, the feel of gnarled and worn leather against his hand. Thick,
tarnished bosses on the spines like taxidermied creatures of eras bygone. He never read them, curiously enough. What
had started as a harmless walk and browse an evening after work had become near
obsession. He chose books purely on aesthetic appeal. The more beautiful or
different the book the greater the draw it exerted on him.
“No.”
Edward said simply. The man smiled, teeth gapped and angled like broken
sidewalk tiles.
“I have a
book you’ll like.”
Edward
hadn’t been to this store before. It was off Burbank and Chancellor street in
Grand Braxton, England. The door had been broken off a lorry and hung in a
frame of some sort, and Edward had found it by taking a wrong turn and ending
up in front of it, staring at the curious sort of place.
“What does
it look like?”
The
wrinkled little man brought out a very plain book from behind his teetering
counter. Edward liked it. It was as though someone had sat down and very
carefully thought of how to possibly make the plainest book imaginable, except
the cover was wood. There was no ornamentation, and the cover was a sort of
blackish, stained, gouged out wood. The pages were yellowed but cut perfectly
even. The pages were so thin that the whole think resembled a block of layered
wood or clay, not a book at all. Edward touched it and nearly recoiled. The
cover was like ice, so cold it burned for a moment.
He opened
it. Every page was blank, but with the faintest suggestions of words like ink
had once stood like marching soldiers on the cream pages before fading like
ghosts. The harder he tried to make out the words the less the words seemed to
matter or exist.
He bought
the book and left, taking a right turn and a left and finding himself once
again in the familiar streets.
At home, he
placed the book on the table that sat next to his bed. It sat there unmoving as
Edward stared at it. He shook himself. It was as though he expected it to move,
to jump or dance or speak like men. It remained comfortingly, or
disappointingly, booklike. The evening grew chill, Edward warmed a potato in
the coals of his oven and baked two rolls in a pan. A bit of cold beef came out
of the icebox, and Edward drew the heavy velvet curtains to his apartment and
ate his meal in a silence that was neither lonely nor comfortable. The sounds
of passing trucks and carriages grew seldom, the voices of the adjacent
apartments faded into the swaddled night. Up the stairs, into bed Edward went,
pausing a moment to brush his fingers across the cover of the book. It was warm
to the touch now. As he laid down in the bed, he pulled the curtains of the bed
closed. He thought almost he heard a soft, catlike step across the floorboards,
but a breathless moment passed without further sound. As Edward fell asleep he
turned his back to where the book sat, and whether this was conscious or
unconscious flickered through his mind a moment longer than a thought of that
sort might.
Edward
awoke in a cave.
The air was
warm, like the breath of a stranger on one’s neck.
Thinking
himself in a dream Edward thought nothing of it. The passage in front of him
was lit without light, and stretched away for a short distance. Edward followed
the passage, feeling the walls thoughtlessly as he went. After a moment he
reached an opening. He stood in a cavern so enormous a feeling of something
like terror flitted over him. An ink dark pool stood as flat as a plate in the
center of the enormous cavern. The pool was round like a porthole, opaque but
reflective, and so large the other wall of the cavern was swallowed in
darkness. Edward found himself drawn towards the pool as though not of his own
volition. He reached towards the pool and awoke.
The moon
threw shafts of deathless light threw the bubbled glass of his windows, etching
grids on the floor. Edward pressed his hands against the glass, reassured by
the coolness of the window against his palms. The street below and away the
window rested like a stone river. A faint feeling, neither hunger nor nausea
but some brother of the two knotted Edward’s stomach. He took the stairs with
the care of the recently awoken, standing in his silent kitchen as he poured a
glass of water from the silver pitcher he kept in his icebox. The water drove
needles into his teeth and swept the musty flavor from his tongue. Edward left
the glass on his counter and returned to his room.
The book
lay open on his nightstand. Edward tried suddenly to remember opening it, and
could neither determine that he had or had not. He closed the book. It shut
with a slap that was not unlike that of a water snake sliding into a stream, a sound that ran a cool finger down his spine.
The next morning was the chill gray that heralds
bone-cracking cold. Edward sat on the edge of the bed and regained wakefulness
before rising to dress. In the middle of putting his waistcoat on he remembered
the book. It wasn’t on the nightstand, but instead another book had been set
there. A copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to
the Center of the Earth sat in its place. Confused and not a little
unsettled, though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Edward searched the
apartment half-dressed until he came upon the volume sitting on his kitchen
table. It was open and on the page was a strange symbol, filled with intricate
hairlike lines and knots that so tricked and confused the eye it was hard to
follow, seeming only to change position and orientation the longer you looked
at it. Edward flipped quickly through the other pages, looking for new symbols
but nothing was there. When he tried returning to the original page, the symbol
was gone. Edward looked at the clock that sat in his foyer, cursed, and
resolved to search for the symbol another time.
He worked
at the First Anglican Bank on Halifax, across from a seedy pub he took lunches
in. At noon, Edward walked across the street for a bowl of fish soup and a
muffin. Inside, a group of sailors had taken up residence at several of the
tables Edward would normally sit at so he was forced to take a position at the
bar. Not three minutes later a large Swede, stinking of rum and ocean, stumbled
to the bar and sat directly next to Edward.
“Have you
heard?” His ice-blue eyes bored into Edward’s brown ones.
“Heard
what?”
“The
graffisk. They found a graffisk in morning.”
“What’s a
graffisk?”
The Swede
emanated exasperation before replying. “A white squid was found this morning on
the beach near the pier. Bad omen.”
“What does
it mean?”
“Death is
coming.” The Swede hailed the bartender before turning back to Edward. “Death
is going to come to Grand Braxton, mark my words. It won’t be pretty.”
“What
should I do?”
“Leave. Go
to the states, or up north, if you can. Ireland or Scotland. South, per’aps.
The West Indies. Anywhere but ‘ere.”
“Will it
reach London?”
“The last
time we found a graffisk was the beginning of the Great War. Before that, the
potato famine in Ireland. When it happens, it will be bad.”
Edward
nodded, shaken, and returned to his soup. The Swede drained the beer he was
given, threw a coin on the counter and shambled off.
That night,
Edward went to bed with some trepidation. The book was still sitting on his
kitchen table where he’d left it that morning, but with shaking hands he put it
in the cabinet below his desk and locked the door. Mentally laughing at himself
for his superstition, he traipsed upstairs, locked the bedroom door and after
getting into his nightclothes, pulled the curtains on his bed. Sleep didn’t
come at first, but deep into the night rain began to fall and somewhere in the
depths of his racing thoughts, Edward fell asleep.
