9TALES FROM ELSEWHERE #4
© Copyright 2015 Bride of Chaos/ All Rights Reserved to the Authors.
First electronic edition 2016
Edited by A.R. Jesse
Cover by Turtle&Noise
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9TALES FROM ELSEWHERE #4
Table of Contents
SYBIL’S SPECIALTY BOOKS by Gregory Maus
IMMINENT CAMPUS EVENTS by Chuck Von Nordheim
DREAM KILLER by Rik Hunik
FAERIE BAD by David J. Wing
HIS GOD IS SOL BLACK by James B. Pepe
CHILDREN OF 2016 by Sara Green
DUPED by Daniel Brock
RAINS OF LA STRANGE by Robert N. Stephenson
NO DOGS, NO IRISH by Conor Miggan
SYBIL’S SPECIALTY BOOKS by Gregory Maus
For the most part, the Internet has torn the life out of rare book trading. All the adventure and intrigue of hunting for the perfect book through musty old attics and libraries over the course of months has been mercilessly reduced to a few clicks of the mouse to put it in your shopping cart. Once more the inevitable march of progress strips away another layer of mystery from the world.
“Here be dragons” isn’t efficient. It’s not good for profits.
But a certain type of book still remains in the domain of more old-fashioned book dealers. Those who naively try to sell them online or in public auctions always come to bad ends.
Here the dragons are very real.
I’ve met them.
Some of them are my clients.
It’s usually a bad sign when a tense meeting is suddenly plunged into darkness, particularly when there’s a suitcase filled with 265,000 dollars lying open on the table.
I reached into my satchel for my flashlight and pistol.
The light revealed a shotgun barrel that swivelled around to point at my head.
“What the hell, Sybil?” demanded the man wielding it.
“I was just about to ask you the same,” I replied.
“Drop what you’re holding and put your hands where I can see them.”
“And how exactly are you going to see my hands if I drop the flashlight?”
“Just—get your hand out of the bag—slowly.”
I lifted my empty hand gingerly from the satchel as my mind raced to get a grip on the situation. I had to think fast or my first trip to Tucson was going to end in a hail of buckshot. My eyes darted to the table where the suitcase lay and the codex beside it, precisely where I had left it when I’d stopped examining its bark cloth pages and their entrancing, grotesque designs.
“So what’s the game, Sybil?” he growled. “Take me out and grab both the book and the cash?”
“You’re suggesting that my brilliant plan involved me being alone in the dark with a jumpy, shotgun-armed ex-special forces guy in the back of his bookstore?” I deadpanned. “I am so clever. Particularly because it’s like an hour before dawn, so there would be no witnesses if he blew me away right here.”
Okay, that last bit was probably a really stupid thing to add, as I realized with the benefit of half a second’s hindsight. Fortunately, Corey didn’t immediately murder me.
Well, he wasn’t simply double-crossing me or else he’d have some sort of illumination of his own. So either we were being ambushed by a third-party or he was trying to make it look that way. His confusion seemed pretty genuine, though. But, I’m better at reading books than people.
If he’d been trying to pull switching the books in the dark, that little plan had been dashed by me getting my light so quickly, so part of his panic could be real even if he wasn’t bargaining in good faith, which would fit with him only giving me half an hour’s notice before the exchange and—
Okay.
Stop and breathe.
Examine your surroundings before diving into the rabbit hole of paranoid speculation. From what I could see of the little oak-panelled backroom, everything looked undisturbed.
My examination was cut short by the sound of tearing metal and wood beyond the door in the main room of the shop, followed by a loud slam.
Without taking his aim away from me, Corey rushed over to the door, and placed his back up against the wall beside it, using it as cover. He quickly undid the latches and threw it open. “What do you see?” he whispered to me.
There should have been pre-dawn light filtering in through the windows, or at least the light of streetlamps, but it was entirely black.
My flashlight’s beam swept across half-empty metal bookshelves and counters, all of them meticulously tidy.
Creeeaak.
I flicked the light toward the sound. It caught a blurred shadow—something long and serpentine—that vanished so quickly I wasn’t sure that I had seen it at all. I jerked the little cone of light around in a frantic search, but there was nothing there.
I brought it back to the central row where it unveiled, crawling along the sides of the bookshelves towards me, a humanoid figure.
It lunged, clearing the distance between us in a flash, throwing me onto the floor beneath it.
The face now inches from my own was a skull barely contained by a thin drapery of skin. The only things alive in it were its bulging red eyes, maniacal with horrific pleasure. It opened its jaws with a predatory hiss intermingled with the unmistakable sound of a baby crying.
The roar of a shotgun tore the thing off of me.
My world a deafened blur, I scrambled backwards underneath the table.
Corey barked something, but my ringing ears weren’t really up for the task of listening at the moment.
After banging my head on chairs several times, I came out on the other side of the table. I threw the codex in my satchel.
Peeking up at Corey, I saw him angrily mouth the word “Light!” with his palm reached out towards me. I awkwardly stumbled around the table and handed it to him.
He snapped it to the underside of the gun in what was apparently a practiced position.
“Go!” he shouted, the first sound my ears had registered since they’d been overwhelmed by the blast.
When there’s a horrific perversion of the human form crawling around in the darkness I don’t really need to be told twice to get the hell out. I had what I came for.
Feeling my way out of the backroom, I spared a glance back at Corey expertly sweeping the impromptu tac-light across the room. It shone on a blur of tendrils, but they disappeared back into the darkness.
I felt a surge of pain in my hip as something hit it hard. After a second of panic, I realized that I had stumbled into the counter. I made haste a bit more slowly and groped my way carefully around the shelves.
I heard that infantile wailing again just as the light was torn away. The cry was soon mixed with the shotgun’s eruption and then Corey’s own cry.
I made haste a bit less slowly, by which I mean that I collided with the wall on the opposite side of the bookstore and was overjoyed to do so.
I found the entryway and threw it open. Never had the
dim glow of twilight felt so glorious.
Much as I would have loved to savour it, it also illuminated an immediate problem in front of me. That problem was a middle-aged man leaning against the backside of a panel truck whose cavernous compartment opened in the direction of the store. The grey-haired Native American wore black jeans, a dark jacket, swirling ritual scars along his arms, a pistol hanging limply at his side, and a slightly startled expression.
My knee connected with his groin in a single motion. I grabbed the gun as he groaned in agony and reflexively guarded his crotch. I clubbed him on the side of the head with the grip for good measure, which brought him spilling to the concrete. Thank you self-defence classes.
A pale, bulky man stepped out of the truck’s cab with a rifle in hand.
“Put it on the ground or he dies.” I shouted, aiming at the middle-aged man on the sidewalk. The young thug complied begrudgingly. “Now kick it that way down the street.” I gestured with my head. He kicked it all of three feet away from him.
I scanned the scene for any other potential attackers, noting idly that trash bags had been taped over the shop’s windows, explaining why it was pitch black inside.
Unfortunately, my martial expertise wasn’t as extensive in the field of actually firing guns. I carry one around mostly because a 5’1” girl might otherwise look like an easy target when transporting small items worth more than most luxury cars. My Annie Oakley impression would wear thin pretty quickly under scrutiny though (I wasn’t sure whether I had all the safeties off for the gun I was holding, for example,) which is why I backed up quickly towards an alleyway and then darted down to my car the second the rifleman was out of my line of sight.
The rental check-in woman at Hertz gave me a wide-eyed look of shock. “Are you alright?”
Checking myself, I noticed that the shoulders of my shirt and the hips of my jeans were torn into tatters and were oozing a small amount of blood where the creature had gripped me. They stung somewhat, now that she mentioned it. “Oh, nothing to worry about.”
In the cab ride I switched out my shirt and pants while cleaning the wounds with iodine wipes from my backpack. The driver took it in stride.
Dawn had painted the clouds in brilliant red as I arrived at the Greyhound station.
Yes, I was taking the Greyhound. Don’t look at me like that. Sure the clientele leaves something to be desired, but it’s a cheap and anonymous way to travel—particularly with a fake ID. It’s not like they’re stringent with their background checks.
I staked out a row near the back with my backpack, satchel, laptop, and notes, so that I would have space to work. Fortunately there weren’t many others on this stretch of the route for the moment, so there wasn’t much competition.
As the bus started, I finally had the chance to examine my prize.
I had been in the midst of determining its authenticity when the lights went out just an hour ago. I had been fairly confident it wasn’t a forgery, but one can never be too sure in this business. Forgers can be extremely subtle, and buyers can be generous in sharing their remorse with the seller when they detect a fake copy, particularly if they detect the falsehood only after it causes a ritual to go disastrously awry.
The binding and material were consistent with the tome’s supposed origin in the mid-16th century, and it had all of the expected features of aging. The writing styles and illustrations similarly fit with its hybrid Spanish-Central American authorship. I didn’t know a thing about Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs), so I had to rely on the Spanish beside it, in which I was more fluent. I wanted to take it to an expert to be sure, but the writing seemed to be genuine Early Modern Castilian Spanish.
That eliminated the possibility of a cheap forgery, but to screen out more sophisticated deceptions I needed to consider every detail of the codex’s historical context.
The Codex Itzal is named for the pseudonym under which it was written. References to it first appear in the late 16th century, most notably its 1595 inclusion in the secret section of the Vatican’s index of banned books.
It documents the secret lore and practices of the Naualteteuctin, an occult order of magicians that both predated the Aztecs and survived their conquest. Not only did this mystical fraternity continue to practice their rituals in secret for centuries, hiding them from the Catholic authorities under a thin guise of Christianised terminology, but evidence strongly suggests that this loose confederation of mystics was instrumental in organizing the many revolutions against the Spanish.
While other tomes written in native languages might provide even deeper knowledge of the Naualteteuctin’s rites, the codex was of special value. The author was clearly familiar with the higher occult traditions native to Europe. Thus, not only could the author translate the language from Nahuatl to Spanish, but translate the key concepts from one continent’s school of thought to another. Using the book as something of a Rosetta Stone, a practitioner steeped in European occultism could learn to understand and apply the insights of the Naualteteuctin, and vice-versa.
The identity of the author or authors is a matter of some speculation, but the most widely-accepted theory holds it to be the inquisitor Isidore Gracián, who had been hand-selected by Inquisitor General Diego de Espinosa and nominally charged with ministering to the natives of Mexico as well as preventing any of their pagan beliefs from taking root in the minds of the colonists and blossoming into heresy.
De Espinosa had made the unusual explicit decree that the Holy Inquisition was to refrain from prosecuting any natives. This unorthodox policy, coupled with other factors such as the strange circumstances surrounding de Espinosa’s death had led some to conclude that he himself was complicit in the occult practices that the church tasked him with rooting out.
My ringtone tore me from my fixation on the codex.
I pulled the phone out of my cargo pants.
When I saw the number I dreaded answering it.
But I dreaded the consequences of not answering it all the more.
“Hi mom.” I said.
“Dear!” exclaimed the excited voice on the line, “I was just thinking of you earlier this morning. What are you up to?”
“Just traveling for work.”
“Oh? Heading to one of those ILAB conventions?”
“I’m actually already returning to New York.”
“You went on a big trip and you didn’t even tell your mother about it?”
“Mom, I’m 26. We’re a little past that stage when I have to tell you how long I’m staying out every night. How’s dad’s knee?”
“Oh he’s fine. Just a little scrape, nothing broken. Did you at least meet any nice young men while you were out?”
I sighed. “No, mom.”
“Well you’d better get at it. There’s more to life than work, you know. And here I am at the library, so I need to get to work myself.”
“You were navigating Boston traffic while talking on a cellphone?” I reproached.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got one of these hands-free things.”
“That’s really still not safe.” I insisted. “Say ‘hi’ to dad for me.”
“I will. Love you, Sybil.”
“I love you too, mom.”
I returned my focus to the book. The thick volume was quite the encyclopaedia, containing astrological charts, diagrams of sacred geometry, botanical prints, transcriptions of invocations, cosmological notes, and extensive theses comparing native practices to Old World traditions.
I’m not easily shocked. After a few years in my line of work there’s precious little to be found in books that can provoke a reaction, but an illustration near the end made me flinch back in terror.
It was the thing that had pounced on me in that dark bookstore. The drawing brought its blood-red eyes and wickedly grinning maw to horrific life. At the time I hadn’t been able to fully appreciate the twin tendrils emanating from its abdomen, its razor-sharp claws, and the additional eyes and spines along its lim
bs.
Those pages told of how, through surgery and perverse incantations, one could twist a pregnant woman into such an abomination and bind it into servitude. The page had a dark crimson stain splattered across it in a long, thin line.
To constrain myself from a violent reaction, I consciously retreated into consideration of what this implied for my immediate situation.
Our attackers had clearly utilized the techniques described in this book. It couldn’t just be a coincidence that they had attacked just after Corey had acquired the book and was handing it over to me. He’d probably gained it from them in a less than honest fashion. Unfortunately, sorcerers don’t take kindly to being cheated out of their beloved books.
That meant that they were probably coming after me if they could pry my identity from Corey. His training probably granted him iron-clad resistance to mundane interrogation, but I couldn’t be certain what forces these magicians could bring to bear or how much loyalty he even had to me.
At least there was a silver lining.
I e-mailed my client through our secure addresses: “Parcel acquired. Certainty of Authenticity: Very High.”
Tucson news feeds mentioned police responding to shots being fired at Corey’s store (a break-in was suspected—which was technically accurate), but the feeds didn’t mention bodies being recovered or homicide investigators on the scene. So Corey had probably either escaped or been captured.
I sincerely hoped it was the former.
I wish I could say that my hope was borne out primarily from concerns for Corey’s well-being, and in other circumstances it probably would be, but honestly I wasn’t feeling that sympathetic towards the guy who had just unloaded a stolen book onto me and might have just made me a target for a cult of psychotic sorcerers. That had been rather rude of him.
It wasn’t like I could simply give the book back. The money I had used to purchase it had been my client’s. Even if I had the cash to give him a refund, it would kill my reputation to not deliver at this point. In any case, I doubted that the sorts of people willing to torture a pregnant woman into becoming a servile monster would bat much of an eyelash at killing me just to tie up loose ends.
9 Tales From Elsewhere 4 Page 1
