The Book of Common Dread

by Brent Monahan

  The woman's blush was swift, coloring her almost as pink as the muumuu that tented her ample form. "You said you don't really hear people when you're in a trance."

  "That's right."

  Mrs. Raymond looked relieved. "It's a personal question, about a member of my family. I'm too embarrassed to say."

  DeVilbiss made a small bow. "I understand. Then by all means say nothing more. My only interests are your complete happiness and peace of mind."

  The blush faded into her relief. "That's wonderful." She handed the check over and grunted up from the chair.

  DeVilbiss backed unhurriedly toward the front door, holding his smile fast as he watched her stumpy legs waddle in his direction. When they reached the entry, he took her hand and kissed it lightly. "It's a pleasure helping you, Mrs. Raymond. Shall we try again in two nights; nine o'clock again?"

  "So soon? Oh, that would be wonderful, Mr. DeVilbiss," she gushed.

  DeVilbiss opened the door. "Vincent, dear. Call me Vincent."

  "Good night, Vincent," Mrs. Raymond obliged with pleasure.

  It was all he could do not to wince at her simpering smile. DeVilbiss closed the door and leaned on it. For thirty dollars. It might as well have been thirty pieces of silver. The only thing that made it bearable was the anticipation of hearing her question. He was sure he had heard it before; he was betting on an unquenchable curiosity at whether Arthur had ever slept with her sister, mother, or daughter. Arthur very well might have, but whatever the secret it was safe in the grave along with his remains.

  DeVilbiss walked into the kitchen, filled the tea kettle and set a flame under it. The voice spoke just as he was taking a teacup off the shelf. He nearly dropped the cup in his surprise. After five hundred years, he was still jarred by the perpetually unheralded sound of it.

  "You killed the wrong man," the voice said. The abruptness of the accusation added to DeVilbiss's unnerving. He didn't bother to face its emanation point; there was nothing to see. There had never been anything to see. Just a whispering voice, always during the night, from a place without air.

  "I did not kill Martin McCarthy," Vincent admitted, in measured syllables. He set the teacup down on the counter. "But I did kill the right man. The genius behind the discoveries was Dieter Gerstadt, not his protege."

  "We do not believe that," the voice said, in equally measured cadence.

  DeVilbiss placed both hands on the edge of the counter and leaned forward, head down. "Then why don't I get the folder and lay a few of the articles out on this counter? In every one of them Gerstadt is the prominent figure."

  "This is not the first time you have failed to destroy the one we named," the voice reminded. "You are to obey our will without question."

  "Even if you are mistaken? I move among my kind; you cannot. That's the first reason I've lived so long. And then there is my ability to recognize the good ones before they've done much good. If I sacrifice my judgment to your will, you do yourself a disservice." DeVilbiss had hardened his tone, until its angry edge was unambiguous.

  " 'No man can serve two masters.' If you felt so strongly, you should have destroyed them both," the voice countered. "Waited until they were together and created a single accident."

  "They would not be together until school began again." Without turning, DeVilbiss made a small obeisance. "Sir-reverence, but may I remind you that a holy day approaches?"

  "You may not." The whisper was now a hiss.

  "Be reasonable for once. Killing McCarthy was your afterthought to your original purpose in ordering me here. He wasn't home; Gerstadt was. I needed to be done with it so I could concentrate my energies on destroying the scrolls." He was prepared for silence; often it tortured him with no response. "I tell you, McCarthy will be lost without his mentor."

  "Time will tell," the voice replied. In the beginning its whisper had seemed seductive, almost sensual to him. Now he knew it as furtive, a spirit throat perpetually filled with the smoke of brimstone, the messenger of absolute Evil.

  "Speaking of time, I trust the elixir will be delivered soon," Vincent said.

  "It shall."

  "Because I have only enough for four days more," he said into the cabinets. "I gave a young woman one dose, to cure her cold."

  "I saw you give her herbs," the voice said. "Nothing more."

  It had observed him at the mock channeling with Frederika. At night it came and went as it pleased, watching him as undetectably as if it stood behind a one-way mirror, banished from the daylight world but all-seeing in darkness.

  "Then you either visited at the end of my preparations or else you're lying."

  "We never lie," it lied.

  Vincent went on, inured. "Together with the elixir, I gave her a mixture of kava and dried teonanacatl mushroom, to induce hallucination. Her father was already foremost in her thoughts; there was little chance she would see anything else." He returned to his agenda. "Despite your doubt, I will need an extra day's worth next month."

  "Your self-seeking generosity does not obligate us to anything," said the voice.

  Vincent spun around. "My generosity was to gain her confidence! This girl works at the library and is my only access to these cursed scrolls with no name. After all these centuries I have earned the right to know who's responsible for them."

  "Ahriman."

  "God damn you!"

  "That has already been accomplished."

  "Was the giver of the words a traitor, hoping to return to the light?"

  "This girl works at the library and is your only access to the scrolls," the voice echoed.

  Vincent abandoned his questions. "The Ages of Enlightenment and Reason have passed," he argued. "This era will believe that if the science in the scrolls is true, then the supernatural passages must be also. We flourish only because of disbelief. Nothing is more important to our mutual survival than destroying the source of this information once and for all time."

  "Agreed."

  "The university's library is a fortress. There are fire and security alarms everywhere, as well as guards, vaults, and steel gates. I've tried the frontal assault and failed. The scrolls must be reached obliquely. I used your elixir and my herbs to gain the woman's trust. She had to believe in me and in another plane of existence, and now she does." As he spoke, he realized the irony. He had made her believe in a false Other World and, in so doing, she had pledged herself to serve the real one.

  "When will she procure the scrolls?"

  "Soon enough," DeVilbiss promised. "They have only one scholar translating them. Whole teams have been working on the Dead Sea scrolls for more than thirty years, and still they're unfinished. Long before he's begun the metaphysics section, I'll have them. Have I ever failed?"

  "You will have your powder when you need it." The voice left DeVilbiss's other question unanswered. Tomorrow or the next day a package would arrive in daylight, either in the U.S. mail or by overnight courier, while DeVilbiss slept. Its source was maddeningly untraceable. Once and only once had Vincent made the effort to follow the thread backward, to seek the place of the elixir's formulation. Under deep hypnosis, the delivery man had revealed that he knew nothing of value, having picked up his package from a place rather than a person. Vincent imagined some ten-thousand-year-old Tibetan monk manufacturing the elixir for a small corps of Undying scattered throughout the world, the monk's perpetual loyalty guaranteed by something as absolute as insanity. If Vincent did more than daydream, if he made a concerted effort to find the elixir's source, he knew he would either be summarily annihilated or else cut off and allowed to wither slowly and die.

  The tea kettle started to whistle. DeVilbiss ignored it. "I have aged at least a year waiting for packages that arrived late."

  "Why should we care about that? You have allowed yourself to age more than a decade of your own free will."

  Vincent turned and smiled. "I grew tired of being forever in my thirties. I decided that I wished to spend eternity in my forties."

&n
bsp; "There is no going back," the voice declared. "Trespassing beyond the darkness will be your death yet. The water boils."

  Vincent whirled around and whisked the kettle onto an unlit burner. "Do you drink?" he inquired, turning around. He waited for an answer. "Are you there?" He got no reply. That did not mean it wasn't still in the room. Its coming and going defied even DeVilbiss's heightened senses. He had found that personal questions were invariably the way to silence it, for it had steadfastly refused to volunteer a single fact about itself. After five hundred years, Vincent did not even know the voice's name. This did not surprise him. The kabbalistic Hebrews affirmed that knowing the name or the number of any entity, tangible or otherwise, gave one power over it. Vincent drew in a slow breath, brewed his tea and took his cup out of the kitchen.

  One thing was certain: even if it was still in the house, it could not read his mind. If it could, he would have been dead almost a hundred years ago. In the second half of the nineteenth century, drug companies began evolving out of local apothecary shops; first in Germany and then the United States, universities and hospitals started to create research branches. In the course of his required reading on "good men," Vincent learned of the advances being made at these places, in chemistry and pharmacology, of their scholars' ever-expanding abilities to analyze compounds and reproduce them. The same year Queen Victoria died, Vincent approached his first organic chemist, presenting him with four days' worth of the precious elixir that maintained his youth, that gave him superhuman powers and was intended to keep him forever a slave to his Dark Masters. That night he had told his first lie to the voice-who, inside the sanctuary of Vincent's skull, he had long ago begun calling Piccolo Niccolo or Little Nick-telling it that he had spilled much of the dark brown bottle's contents down a sink drain. The chemist was gifted, but the state of his branch of science was still primitive. He admitted that he could decipher only a few links of the molecular chains. For his trouble, he died. Twenty years later, Vincent had hoarded up another four days' worth and offered it to an equally gifted scientist. This man professed to have "solved the major secrets of the mixture" and presented Vincent with a batch reproducing his findings. The human to whom DeVilbiss fed the mixture died in agony on the second day. But Vincent did not despair. If he was careful, he had forever to wait, and forever would not be necessary. Each decade of the twentieth century brought swifter and more amazing advances in science. He felt growing confidence that his original race would free him from his chains. On that great day, in thanks, he would become the new Prometheus, broadcasting to the world not only the information contained in the Ahriman scrolls but the little extra he had personally learned over five hundred years. In one gesture, he would expiate all his sins and repay every ounce of blood, every life taken, by warning mankind that the fear they harbored for the "ancient foe" ever since leaving the Garden was absolutely justified.

  Frederika would be his lucky talisman; Vincent felt it in his bones. Ten years before, a woman he had hypnotized and then fed the latest reproduction of the elixir had gained great strength and sensual acuity. After she took the elixir for a month DeVilbiss had shot her point blank in the stomach, and she had survived. Her skin had completely healed over after only a day, but she died of septicemia after a week of unimaginable suffering. Ironically, the latest pharmacologist to contribute her knowledge to the accumulated pool worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb, whose laboratories lay just down the road from Princeton. Vincent had been corresponding longdistance with the woman for almost a year, but now he was able to visit her in person on his second evening in town, exchanging a bundle of thousand-dollar bills in exchange for her formulae and a large bottle compounded from their symbols. If this version failed, he vowed to disembowel the moonlighting pharmacologist. But not by moonlight, because Piccolo Niccolo must never suspect.

  The other dangerous game Vincent played he had begun shortly after World War II. His first deliberate decision to defy Little Nick was made in June of 1948. The designated victim that month was a thirty-year-old Southern Baptist preacher who had turned to traveling evangelism. Through various ruses, Vincent contrived to avoid the man until, by 1949, the charismatic fellow was speaking to tens of thousands of thirsting souls each week and had become far too well-known to terminate without the expectation of a major investigation. Why Vincent had begun sparing lives was, after more than four decades now of such acts, still somewhat a mystery to him. He credited it partly to his cautious return to daylight. For hundreds of years he had moved almost exclusively at night, and the denizens of darkness were largely the immoral and amoral elements of society, from the drunks, gamblers, thieves, and whores to the tomcatting rich and titled, with their demimondaines in tow. In comparison to his own opinion of himself, these creatures who called themselves humans were lower than vermin, more like cockroaches or water beetles, needing the darkness to conceal their foul existences. But when he returned to the daylight he rediscovered the kindly policemen on their beats, the innocent and uncorrupted children, Salvation Army workers with their Christmas charity kettles, mothers nourishing babies, scores of honest workaday tradesmen, all but a few of whom reacquainted him with the nobler side of mankind.

  Vincent also attributed his sporadic acts of altruism to the overall advancement of humanity. Although he had been born after the so-called Dark Ages, his time was nonetheless black-when slavery was common, the mad were chained in cellars, children under ten clapped in mines and dark factories from dawn till dusk, and debtors thrown into prison until someone paid their debts. A time when major faiths condoned persecution and massacre of those with different beliefs. Yet, he had witnessed man growing gradually kinder. To him, the worst villains were members of the media, who prospered by feeding the public a diet of negative news and inciting the wicked. If he had his way, he would have drunk exclusively from the fourth estate's veins. Men like Martin McCarthy, however, compelled even these insects to write positively. And so Vincent had scored another point in his second game.

  The problem was that both games only worked if Vincent made all the rules and so long as his opponent had no idea either game existed. Taking the double risk made Vincent feel good about himself and gave him sound reason for anticipating the days, months, years, perhaps decades to come with something other than jaundiced ennui. He drained the last of his cup of tea and looked around the living room for the novel he had been reading. He smiled to the walls, in case Little Nick was still present. Powerful as you are, he thought, you can't exist in God's light or God's air. And you can't read my mind. If you could, you'd know that I do serve two masters. But not forever.

  CHAPTER NINE

  December 20

  He is a slave of the greatest slave who serves nothing but himself.

  -Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, no. 1909

  "It's about time!" Willy Spencer carped. His crooked, arthritic forefinger pointed at the clock mounted high above the card catalog cabinets. The library would not officially open for another six minutes, but the reverend had once again wheedled his way inside. As soon as he had graded the semester's final exams, Willy had taken up virtual residence in the Rare Manuscripts Preparation section, a fixture from first opening to as late as he could cajole Simon to stay, which was usually a few minutes past five. It was Simon's habit to arrive for work a quarter hour early, giving him time to put on the coffee and glance at the New York Times. He had spoiled Willy, but he didn't begrudge the old scholar his impatience. Simon had never known anyone so revitalized by research.

  "Sorry, Willy," Simon said.

  "Lazy layabed." Even as Willy mumbled, he grimaced apishly, in way of apology for his curmudgeonly nature. "Just don't let it happen again." He scooped up the Thermos and lunch pail he brought each morning and impatiently shifted weight from one bowed leg to the other while Simon unlocked the door.

  Simon moved through his routine like an old milkwagon horse: he pressed the sequence of lighted buttons that released the steel gate. The precautions seemed p
aranoid until one learned of the scale of rare-book thievery throughout the country. Few stole books for profit; the vast majority were mentally unbalanced persons with unnatural lusts to possess rare and beautiful volumes. The sickness had its own name: bibliomania. Perhaps the arrival of the Schickner Collection had focused Simon's attention on the problem, but in the past two months he had read about the apprehension of three bibliomaniacs. A woman who had worked in the University of Pennsylvania's main library since 1982 was accused of stealing six classic works valued at $1.5 million, including a 379-year-old edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet. A man from San Gabriel, California, had cut sections out of books worth more than $6 million, from universities throughout the country. But the most incredible of all was a man from Iowa who had amassed fourteen thousand stolen books in his house, with an estimated total value of $20 million. Princeton University had had its share of losses through the years, but far fewer since the installation of guards, embedded magnetic strips in the book spines, outer windows that could not be opened, and several sets of imposing steel-barred doors.

  After closing the gate behind them, Simon thumbed through his key ring for the smallest of his keys. Meantime, Reverend Spencer had set down his lunch and scuttled anxiously to the other side of the room. He produced a key similar to Simon's and moved to a metal box mounted on the wall.

  "Ready?" Willy called out.

  Simon fitted his key into the electronic wall box.

  "One, two, three!" Willy cued. He and Simon turned their keys simultaneously. In the center of the room, the metal and glass lids of the two stainless steel cases popped open. Inert gas hissed out. Reverend Spencer rushed to the cases to claim his prizes.

  Simon withdrew his key. He felt like half of a Minuteman missile team inside a Great Plains launch silo. In spite of the bibliomaniacs, a fail-safe theft system for the Schickner Collection's scrolls seemed a bit much to him. He put it out of his thoughts and went for his coffee.