by Leo Hunt
“You were convulsing,” Elza says. “I got worried.”
“I was dreaming,” I say.
“You’ve only been back in your body about five minutes. What was the dream?”
“Uh . . . it was horrible. But it was important. I wish I could remember. . . . My dad . . .”
“Your dad was in your dream?”
“Yeah . . . there was someone else as well ”
The dream keeps slipping out of my grasp, like dreams do. Dad was trying to tell me something. Whether it was actually him . . . I wonder what happened to him once he died. Why haven’t I seen his ghost hanging around anyway? Did he already cross over? Is the Host keeping him away somehow?
I decide to focus on the concrete facts. It’s the twenty-sixth. Five days until Halloween. We’ve got the Book of Eight. The sigil is back on my finger. We’ve got a chance. Ham grumbles and sets himself down in the doorway of the bedroom.
“OK,” Elza says, sitting on the bed. Her knee rests against mine. “Good news.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“The good news is I’m making chicken fingers and baked beans for supper.”
“That’s excellent news.”
“Please don’t judge me. The freezer was, like, Old Mother Hubbard’s freezer.”
“You’ve never had my cooking, Elza. I don’t judge.”
“So,” she says. She’s still wearing her raincoat. She reaches into the inside pocket, pulls out the Book of Eight, and places it in front of me, on the bedsheets. “Body returned to rightful owner. We’ve made some progress, and we’re actually back at square one now. We’ve got the Book and the sigil and your dad’s weird numerology code. And no idea how to put them all together.”
I run my left thumb over the cold eight-sided stone set into my sigil. I remember my dad’s hands on the steering wheel. Tall forking trees all around us. Something stirring beside me in the other seat. I look at the Book’s green cover, the eight-pointed star. I feel like the dream was more than just a dream. (That Book is not a product of the conscious mind.) Where am I getting this from? Is that what Dad told me?
“What we need to know is inside the Book,” I say. “I’ve seen the Shepherd using it. The Host wouldn’t take it if it weren’t important. We know it’s not all blank. I’ve seen things written inside it.” I’ve stood up, and I’m pacing as I think, body aching.
“Right,” Elza says. She looks exhausted, wrung out. She looks as bad as I feel. The sharpness I saw in her when we first talked about the Host, in the graveyard, has dulled. We need to finish this soon, or neither of us will have the energy to go on.
“The Shepherd . . . the first time I spoke to him, he said the Book of Eight was infinite. He said even experienced necromancers would find pages they’d never seen before.”
“Well, that’s impossible” Elza says. “How can a book be infinite? Look at it. It’s only a couple of inches thick.”
“It’s magic, Elza. I’m not even sure it’s really a book at all. What it looks like to us doesn’t matter. What if he’s right? What if it is infinite? It could look blank forever. There’s room for as many blank pages as you can imagine. We could turn the pages all our lives and never reach one that had something written on it.”
“So how would we find one that does? The Shepherd seemed to manage it. Right?”
“Not by turning pages at random. It’ll always be blank if we do that, I think. But there must be paths.” The dream’s coming back to me fully now, the forking road, the forest, the trees with endless branches covered in pages. (My sequence shows the path.) What sequence? Are the numbers a sequence? Is that what he meant?
“What paths, Luke? What are you talking about?”
“The Book’s a maze. It’s a dark forest. Normal books, page one leads to page two leads to page three. But not this one.”
“The Book of Eight is a ‘dark forest’? Are you really feeling all right?”
“Look, just . . . trust me.” I hurry through into Elza’s room, come back with the document wallet full of Dad’s notes. I spill them out onto the bed in front of her. “I think this is our path,” I say, pointing at the columns of figures. Elza picks one of them up and squints at it.
“How?” she asks. “Are you saying these are page numbers? The Book doesn’t have numbered pages.”
“No,” I say. I think of the car winding through the forest, Dad driving me, and the other thing, sitting next to . . . No, I won’t think about that right now. I think about the car turning. The numerals written on the road signs. “I think it’s how you turn the pages that matters. Maybe if you turn, say, three pages at once, you’ll find yourself somewhere different than if you go forward one page three times. The paths split.”
“Well,” Elza says, “we might as well try your theory out. I can’t say I totally follow you, but . . . we don’t have any other ideas.”
We sit for a moment, cross-legged on the bed. On the floor Ham rumbles and shifts in his sleep. We look down at the Book of Eight, sitting between us as innocently as any book ever sat, green-bound and double clasped.
I pick it up, and at the touch of my sigil, the clasps snap open. I put it back down, and the pages flutter, moving until they come to rest, open and totally blank.
“OK,” I say, “so help me out. What do the numbers say?”
“Seven,” Elza reads. I turn seven pages forward, all in one movement, and stop. It’s still blank.
“All right.”
“One,” Elza continues, “but this one’s mirror writing.”
I stop and think for a moment. The dream . . . I remember the car winding through the tall endless trees in the forest. When we turned left, the sign was mirrored. A mirrored book would read from right to left . . .
I turn one page back, toward the front cover. As I do it, I see a flash in the pages, a tiny blot, a sigil in answer to my sigil, which fades as I try to focus on it.
“It’s working!” I say. “Did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything,” Elza says. “Well, OK. Four. Then a reversed three.”
I turn four pages forward, then three back. There’s another brief flash of black ink on the empty page, like someone clearing their throat in print. I feel electric. This is it, we’ve done it!
“Keep going,” I tell her. She reads the numbers to me, Dad’s sequence, and I turn the pages of the Book. Soon we’re into a rhythm, and she reads faster, I feel like the pages are turning before I even get to touch them, the Book flowing like this great river of paper and print, my sigil prickling with cold, Elza’s voice reading faster and faster, her voice not even sounding like hers anymore but my own, just my own voice chanting to me, and the Book is about to reveal itself, any second now I’ll break through and —
Elza’s face is right in front of mine. She’s not reading the sequence to me anymore. She’s crouched in front of me with an intent and unhappy expression. I’m still holding the Book of Eight. Elza draws her hand back and slaps me hard in the face. I drop the Book and yelp.
“What was that for?”
“Oh, Luke . . .”
Elza puts her arms around me, hugging me close. Ham rushes into the room and starts butting at me, nibbling my ears.
“What . . . Elza, what’s going on? Why are you hitting me? What’s wrong?”
My head is spinning, my eyes feel prickly, like someone filled them with sand. Elza lets go of me. I see that she’s really upset.
“What’s the matter?” I ask her. “Was it working?”
“Luke . . . you’ve been reading the Book for three days.”
“I’ve . . . I what?”
I’m not able to believe her. It’s barely been a few seconds since we started. I don’t feel like I haven’t eaten for three days. I barely feel hungry at all. I look around the room. When we started the experiment, the spare room was lit with a milky afternoon glow. Now it’s dark, with a hard orange rectangle of light cast onto one wall by the street lamp outside. Elza and
Ham are backlit by a softer white light coming in from the landing. How I didn’t notice the change until just now, I can’t say.
“You’ve been reading it for three days,” she repeats. “We started on Sunday afternoon. Sunday the twenty-sixth. It’s now half past ten in the evening, Wednesday the twenty-ninth.”
“You’re joking,” I say.
“There’s nothing funny about it,” Elza says. “I thought I’d . . . I didn’t know. I thought I’d lost you. You kept turning the pages and muttering to yourself, you wouldn’t look at me . . . you wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t move. You were like a breathing statue. You haven’t drunk or eaten. The pages were blank but you kept reading them anyway. What was happening to you?”
“How can I not have eaten or drunk for three days? I’d die, it’s not possible.”
“I’m just telling you what happened. You . . . Luke, you’ve gone white. Are you OK?”
I don’t reply. Something’s happening inside my head; my ears are ringing like a struck bell. There’s a rush of blood, a giddy champagne froth of dizziness, the darkness in the room is filled with glowing shapes: lines of force, sharp crowds of triangles, circles, and pentagrams and eight-pointed stars, all morphing and crawling and spreading over every surface, the symbols rippling like the air over hot pavement. Elza’s face suddenly swarms with them; she looks like a mask, flurries of glowing dots flickering around her eyes. I shake my head in desperate denial and it subsides. Whatever’s in the Book, whatever I read, it’s inside me now.
“I remember,” I say. “It’s like remembering things you never knew.”
“I told my mum we’ve been rehearsing a play together,” Elza says, “but I don’t think she remotely believes me. I’m lucky my dad’s away and Mum’s been working lots of shifts. I managed to keep her out of here. She thinks you stayed here only Monday night . . . in case she asks. But she’s at the end of her tether with Ham, and I just didn’t know what to tell her. It’s been a nightmare. I didn’t know what I’d do if you didn’t snap out of it before Halloween. I kept coming in and trying to talk to you . . .”
“It’s OK,” I say. “I’m back. I’m here.”
Elza reaches down and plucks the Book of Eight from my grasp, shoves it under the bed.
“I don’t want you looking at that thing ever again,” she says. “You need to eat and drink. And probably you should go outside. Get some air.”
I close my eyes. The sigils and symbols are still there, spiraling and cavorting across my field of vision. They’re lemon-yellow, neon-green, searing-headache-purple. They’re inside me, part of the darkness behind my eyes. They’ll always be there.
The moon is nearly full, shining through a gap in the dark cloud like a single searching eye. The rain is light but steady. Ham is deciding what exact position he should squat in. He seems as if he’s about to squat but then doesn’t. He chooses another position. The wind pushes his ears back and forth like leaves. His thin tail is raised up like a flagpole, but nothing appears. Three days, reading the Book of Eight . . . it’s impossible to get my head around it. The Book is more dangerous than I could’ve imagined. Three days of sitting in Elza’s spare room, and I can’t even explain what I’ve been reading, what I was looking at. The knowledge I need is there, but I can’t remember exactly where it came from. I don’t remember looking at the Book’s pages, don’t remember what they actually said. What I have is a sense that I know. I know what we have to do. I just don’t know how I’m going to explain it to Elza. I can barely explain it to myself.
Ham starts to poop. He always looks embarrassed when he does it, and accusatory, as if I’m the rude one for being there when he decides to go.
Something stirs beyond the hedge to my left.
“Boss?”
I feel the chill of the dead. I stay silent.
“I know you’re there, boss.”
It never ends. It won’t end, until I finish with them.
“What do you want, Judge?”
“Just a word. Diplomacy.”
“You need to pick a side, Judge.”
“Well, just hear me out now, boss. Came to my attention you might have yourself a certain book, one that were my duty to guard. Shepherd’s not happy with me.”
“I don’t imagine he is.”
“Took your mum away, boss, same day you got in and stole the Book. Took her and hid her. In case you were thinking of trying another rescue. She’s not in the house no more.”
“Where is she?”
“Shepherd don’t trust me so much, boss. Haven’t seen her.”
This is getting worse. Whatever they’re planning for Halloween, she must be important. I wish we’d gotten her out of the house on Sunday. . . . I should’ve known this was coming.
“Why are you here, Judge? To tell me that?”
“All I’m here to say is, maybe you could think about who it were on guard duty when you came by the house? Who it were what helped you out and didn’t raise the alarm and that?”
“That would be you, wouldn’t it?”
“Could be, boss. I suppose what I’m asking here is, whatever happens on Halloween, leave old Judge out of it, right? ’Cause he never wanted this.”
“You’re trying to bargain with me now?”
“Shepherd’s been talking to all of us, boss. Says you’re planning on sending us off to Hell. You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”
I think of Mum floating above her bed, her mind locked away inside itself. I think about Holiday; her family; her cat, Bach, with his belly slit open.
“You don’t know what I’d do, Judge. I’ve got the Book of Eight and the sigil. I’ve read the Book, spent three days in there. The Book’s part of me now. You don’t know what I could do.”
“I’ve a fair idea, boss,” the Judge says at last. “But the Shepherd and his boys, they’re well prepared. He were a necromancer, too, was at it a lot longer than you’ve been. Three days reading that book ain’t nothing on him. What you got, it ain’t enough.”
Ham has finished performing and is now investigating the damp pile of compost by the side of the shed. The wind sounds like the out breath of an enormous creature.
“Why couldn’t you have just let me off?” I ask.
“Boss?”
“Why couldn’t you all just have talked to me? I wanted to let you free without anything like this happening. We could have worked it out. I don’t want a Host. I’m not my Dad.”
“Dunno. Your pa weren’t exactly Mr. Sunshine. Suppose we had no reason to think different of you. And it ain’t in our natures, I suppose. Don’t ask, when you can take.”
“I mean, none of you have heard of forgiving people? Die and let live?”
“Listen, boss,” the Judge says, “you don’t want this, do you? You don’t want to be like your pa. You’re not him. I know you don’t want what he had.”
“Not really.”
He shifts about beyond the hedge. The lights in Elza’s living room go on and off.
“Why not die?” he says.
“What?”
“Just . . . look, see, right, the Shepherd says to me, you don’t understand the Book of Eight. You think you do, but you don’t. He was a bad one, your pa. The stuff in that bloody book . . . the way you might end up, you follow what’s wrote down in there, is worse’n anything we could do. Just give up, let go, and we’ll be free. We’d all be free. You could head off into the big beyond.”
“Are you joking? Did he put you up to this?”
“No chance, boss. It’s all me. That’s what your Judge is here for: hard truths. I want the best for bloody everyone, right. Look, I know everything’s very tense right now. The river’s not far, right, you go down there with me now, some stones in your pocket, it’s all over. Your mam’s left out of it, the girl who lives here —”
“No. That’ll never happen. I’m sixteen, I’ve got a whole life. Why should I give anything up for any of you?”
“You’re right,” he says.
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“I don’t know how you thought this would go, but it’s stupid.”
“It ain’t that bloody bad, dying, you know —”
“Just go.”
I can feel him standing, trying to think of something to say, and then there’s nothing. Ham comes up to me, and I reach my hand out to rub his head, but he moves past, snorting. I turn and discover Elza’s mum standing at the back door.
“I was coming to say there’s a guest toothbrush in the bathroom,” she says, ignoring Ham butting at her legs.
“Right,” I say. How long was she standing there?
“Do you often talk to yourself?” she asks.
“I was rehearsing for the play, Mrs. Moss.”
“Ah, yes, this play with ghosts. Elza has told me about this.”
“I’m nervous, but I think it’ll be all right on the night.”
“And yet, strangely, my daughter has never once attended rehearsals or mentioned drama club before this week, and whenever she’s preparing her lines, it’s always in our spare room, with you.”
“All our scenes are together, Mrs. Moss.”
“And I know that your mother is unwell, but I would have appreciated being asked before your dog boarded with us for six nights.”
“It wasn’t intentional, Mrs. Moss.”
The rain falls in flurries. My jacket is slick with water, and drops fall from the raincoat hood, tiny silver movements past my face.
“Elza is very dear to me,” she says after a moment.
“Sorry, Mrs. Moss?”
“My daughter is a sensitive and unique child.”
“We’re just friends. Really.”
“I’m not sure what’s going on between you two,” Elza’s mum says. “But I know Elza well enough to know when I’m not getting the whole story. I’m led to understand you have some trouble at home. You’re welcome to stay here again tonight, but I do think it might be best for you to go home tomorrow. And if I find that you’re getting her in trouble somehow . . .”
You have no idea. Absolutely no idea.
“I’m really just lucky to have a friend like her,” I say.
“Well. I remade the bed for you in the spare room.”
