When a man’s voice answered, Tom cleared his throat and haltingly explained that he wanted to sell a copy of Lovecraft’s The Outsider.
After getting a description of the title page, the bookseller said, “Maybe. What condition is it in? Does it have a dust jacket?”
“I don’t think so. What’s a dust jacket?”
“Jeez. The paper cover that wraps around the book and folds in at the boards. It’d be blue.” When Tom admitted that it had nothing like that, the man asked, “Are the pages browned around the edges?”
“Not brown—they’re colored. If you hold the book up, there’s swirls of red and blue that go across all the page edges.”
“It’s marbled? Who would have done that? And I suppose the marbling ink soaked into the pages?”
Tom opened the book in the middle. The outer edges of both exposed pages were darkened in a band an eighth of an inch wide.
“Yes,” he said. “About as wide as a toothpick.”
“Weird. I can only imagine what sort of vise somebody had to hold it in, to do that. Are the covers loose?”
“Well, they’re almost off. It’s just threads holding them on.”
A sigh. “It’s a curiosity, a token for somebody who wants to be able to say he owns an Outsider. Nothing more than that. I guess I could give you a hundred bucks for it.”
“I’ve got to think about it,” Tom said, and ended the call.
So much for that.
He laid the book on the desk and frowned for a moment at the apparently undesirable marbled staining, and he reached out to push the book away; but the heel of his hand only caught the top board, and the spine rolled flat, spreading the vertical stack of pages into a slope.
And the marbling was gone, replaced by a black rectangle with white spots on it.
Tom blinked in surprise and leaned forward, touching the spread pages. The narrow line of darkness at the edge of each page, which he had thought was the marbling ink soaking into the paper, was, he realized, something else: each was a thin segment of an image that was only visible when the pages were fanned out. Someone—his father?—had apparently spread the book’s pages in this way and then painted a picture across the eighth-of-an-inch-exposed page edges, so that the picture would disappear when the book was closed. The marbling, Tom reasoned, had been done afterward, to provide an explanation for the narrow dark band along the outer edge of each page. The picture was apparently not meant to be discovered.
But what was it? Eight white dots on a black background, arranged like a wobbly, peaked structure—
…like a kid’s drawing of a house, with bent walls, Evelyn had said. Libra…the constellation itself.
Tom knew that constellation meant an arrangement of stars in the sky.
And Blaine had said, If we can find the talisman…we can threaten him with its destruction.
Tom’s heart was pounding. Vivian doesn’t have it, he thought; it isn’t one of the pipes. I have it, it’s this book. I have him, with me.
He slowly pulled the top board back level with the bottom one, restoring the book to its ordinary rectangular shape, and as the pages lined up again the constellation disappeared, replaced by the innocuous marbled pattern.
He stood up, his hands trembling as he held the book. I should hide it, he thought—Blaine and the others might come here and take away anything Benjamin ever gave me, just on the off chance that one of the things might be the talisman.
Under the bed, he thought, in the cupboard, under a couch cushion—dumb dumb dumb! Think!
But instead of a hiding place, he found himself thinking of the pages of the book. When he had opened it in the middle to see if marbling ink had soaked into the pages, he had seen narrow lines on the outer edges of both exposed pages, the one on the right and the one on the left. The line on the right had been part of the picture of stars. What about the line on the left? Was it part of a picture that would be visible if the book’s pages were fanned out the other way?
He laid the book back down on the desk and turned it over. Hesitantly he pushed back the board that was now on top, rolling the spine flat and spreading the pages into a ramp.
And the breath froze in his throat and his scalp tightened, for he was staring into the wrinkled face, into the glittering eyes, of his father, and his father’s eyes seemed to be fixed on Tom’s with eager recognition. The picture was intensely realistic, a photograph, a hologram…
Tom wasn’t able to look away, but a shrill humming started up in his throat as the mouth of the face in the picture moved, opened and closed, and the sparse gray hair shifted as if in some otherworldly breeze. Tom’s own head was full of the smell of Ovaltine.
His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket, and he fumbled it free, turned it on, and blindly swiped his thumb across the screen. And his father’s voice now rattled out of the tiny speaker.
“Tommy!” said old Benjamin, and a moment later the face in the picture mouthed the syllables. “Is that you?”
Tom just stared at the moving picture.
“Ah, it is.” The face frowned, and when the voice on the phone spoke again, it was synchronized with the face’s lips: “I hope you’re alone!”
Tom started to say Yes, but his father was speaking again. “Good, good boy. If anybody comes in, c-c-close this book. I see your desk—you’re in your apartment. Is the door locked? Ah, yes.”
Tom hadn’t yet spoken. And it occurred to him that his father’s image was looking up at him; it was Tom himself who was looking down at the desk. Was his father looking through Tom’s eyes?
“Never mind that,” said Benjamin. “Where’s Lucy?”
“She’s at,” Tom began; his father’s voice interrupted with “At Forest Lawn,” but Tom doggedly finished his sentence: “—at Forest Lawn. I can speak!”
“Sorry, boy,” said the voice from the phone, “of course you can, of course you can. Forest Lawn, good; they can cremate that body after I meet Lucy.”
Tom’s view of the book blurred away, and for a moment he seemed to be standing in a paneled office, looking at a middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie who was holding a sheaf of papers. The man was speaking, but the only word Tom was able to recognize was one he had just heard—cremate.
Tom shook his head, and the vision dissolved, leaving him swaying unsteadily in front of his desk, still staring down at the face in the book pages. The vision had seemed to be a memory, though certainly not one of his own.
He sat down and tried to remember what his father had been saying. “Meet Lucy?” he said finally. “You want me to show her this book?”
“Yes, Tommy. Pay attention now. You’re slippery.”
And a phrase popped into his head: Mea culpa, sed non maxima! Tom didn’t know Latin, but the thought felt as if it meant something like, My own fault, but not serious.
“I could call her,” said Benjamin’s voice, “but she won’t—” A thought flickered over the surface of Tom’s mind, snatched away too quickly for him to catch. “She won’t be upset if it’s you who calls her. Tell her you need to see her, have her come here.”
“Okay. But—I can’t—” Tom struggled to find the words to describe the problem. He sensed that his father knew what he was trying to express, but was courteously letting him say it for himself. “I’d have to end this call,” Tom said finally, “to call her.”
The head in the picture seemed to nod, and the voice from the phone said, “That’s fine. Just have her come to your apartment and touch the book, and open it, as you did.”
“It’s heavier now,” said Tom. “The book. Vivian picked it up a few minutes ago, and it didn’t look heavy.”
“Vivian was there in your apartment? It couldn’t have been today, Tommy, not if she touched it.”
“Well, she had gloves on.”
“Oh, there you are then. S
he was always cautious! But Lucy won’t be wearing gloves.”
The word gloves hung in Tom’s mind, and evidently in Benjamin’s too, for Tom got a quick image of one glove being pulled off a hand and tossed aside, to be quickly replaced by another, which buttoned at the cuff.
Baffled and uneasy, Tom tried to look away from the picture on the book pages, and discovered that he could not.
It panicked him. “Let go!” he grunted, gripping the desk with his left hand for traction but still unable to move his head. He gasped, and again smelled Ovaltine.
“Don’t fight me, Tommy!” said the phone in his right hand. “I’ve always known what’s best for you all, haven’t I?”
“You’re wearing me right now,” Tom said breathlessly, “but you want to wear Lucy. And button her on.”
For a moment the phone was silent; then, “I wondered if you’d reciprocally see my thoughts too,” came his father’s voice. “But that’s pretty good, Tommy! Inference, extrapolation from an analogy! I was right to take precautions with you.” Tom watched as his right hand raised the cellphone. “Now call Lucy, get her over here, there’s a good boy.”
Tom tried without success to push his arm back down; but he took a deep breath, glad that he still had control of his lungs and throat. “I won’t,” he said. “You’re going to…take her body, be her, now that you got killed yourself.”
“No, no, Tommy. I just want to—” began his father’s voice.
“Now you’re lying to me!” Tommy blinked away tears, still staring helplessly into his father’s eyes. “I can tell. It’s like…it’s like you’re talking in another direction.”
Again there was no voice from the phone for several seconds. Then his father said, “Try to understand, Tommy, she won’t be gone. It’s just that I’ll be with her, I’ll be—”
“Controlling her! Doing what you want, not what she wants!”
“Yes, and she’ll have a better life for it! Look at her now, lonely, introverted—but young! With me, she’ll travel, study, write! She’ll thank me for it one day, you’ll see. Or she would.”
“G-get married? Have children?”
“Who knows? Hormones…Eventual offspring might be a—”
“All what you decide, not what she wants.”
Tom wasn’t touching the book, but the pages shifted slightly, so that the face seemed to be peering from behind a screen of thread-thin horizontal white lines; a moment later the pages had realigned, and the face was clear again.
“Tommy, damn it, will you just—? What I decide has always been best for you all—and I’ll consider her preferences, to the extent that—”
“You won’t even know what her…preferences are. I’ll call her, all right—and tell her all this, let her make up her own mind if it’s so good for her.”
“No, you won’t, trust me. If I have to—”
“I can’t believe you’d want to do this! You! Even I can see it’s a terrible thing!”
“Tommy, think! If it was wrong, I wouldn’t ask you to do it, would I? Don’t make me take harsh—”
Tom interrupted with the question he had to ask. “Why don’t you want me?”
The eyes on the book pages narrowed and the brows contracted, and for a moment the mouth opened slackly. Then the lips firmed up, and his father’s voice said, “Okay, Tommy, okay. I guess you deserve an answer.” The phone was silent then, but just when Tom was about to speak, his father went on, “Seventeen years ago I did something I had to do, but which I’m not proud of. You were five years old, and for a week we played checkers for an hour every day. It was hypnosis, for openers, but then I used my particular gift to climb into your head, like I’m doing now—and I embedded a powerful command into the fabric of your memory.”
“A governor,” ventured Tom.
“…I suppose it was that, yes. How did you—? But I’ve given you a good life, haven’t I, Tommy? You’ve never wanted for anything. And knowledge is but sorrow’s spy, as Davenant said. I felt I had to—”
“Was this Davenant one of the books I couldn’t read?”
A sigh rattled out of the phone. “Yes, Tommy. Yes. Listen, an oracle told me that you would one day outsmart me, as she put it, and cause my death, so— Oh. I see you already know it was your mother. Understand, I could easily have simply killed you, to prevent that. But I loved you. I love you still. So, instead, I gave you a block against learning, against being capable of systematic thought. You see? So that you could never in any instance—”
“Outsmart you.” Tom took a deep breath and let it out. “All these years.”
“But! I can remove it! You were an extraordinarily bright boy, and you can be again! You can learn, you’ll be able to read Tolstoy! In Russian! Dante in medieval Italian! Read Einstein’s tensor calculus field equations!”
“Beat Blaine at chess.”
“Yes! But it will take some work to remove the block. I’ll need to hypnotize you again and sort through your memories, with backward mutters of dissevering power, in Milton’s phrase, to excise that specific one. Drugs might be required, but I can assuredly do it.”
Tom sighed. His neck was aching because of the prolonged inclination of his head. “But not while you’re just in this book here.”
“No. I’d need to be in a body.”
“Lucy’s.”
“You know it’s something she would want to do. And I know you’d never do anything that would cause her death. The oracle’s prophecy will prove to have been wrong.”
“I would never have done anything to cause your death, either. I don’t care what my mother said.”
Tom thought of the books he had so often pulled down from the shelves over the years, hopelessly trying to puzzle out each first page, and then slid back into their places—The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in three boxed volumes, Flatland, Fear and Trembling, and a hundred others—and he imagined their paragraphs now opening like flowers, lighting like candles, parting like cobwebbed shutters to reveal the unbounded extent of a whole living world. And he imagined understanding the now-incomprehensible relationships that linked things into developing patterns: atoms, chess pieces, stars, people….
And this book he could close and put away. He need never look at it again.
And that would be good, he thought, because if he were to do as Benjamin advised, and then years later look into this book again, the picture on the page edges might be Lucy’s face. It would be her eyes staring up into his.
Even if he never looked, it would still be Lucy’s face hidden in the pages, behind the marbling.
“I,” he whispered fearfully, “won’t do it. I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ll warn her.”
Tom felt as if he were standing on the terribly narrow top of a very high wall, looking up. He had never disobeyed his father before, and he was dizzy with the dislocation of it.
“You can do as I say,” said the voice from his phone, “and have everything. Or, if you’d rather, you can disobey me and have nothing. It would take external effort to remove the governor I stitched into your memory, but right now, as I withdraw from this intrusion into your mind, I can simply take all of your memory away with me. Delete all, no careful differentiation. You’d probably still have language, and basic skills like buttoning a shirt, but you wouldn’t even know who you were, much less what year it is, or what country you’re in, or who Lucy is.”
Tears were running down Tom’s cheeks, but when they dripped from his chin they fell to the carpet in front of the desk, not on the book. “My…going-away present, from you,” he said hoarsely. “First you give me the governor, then you erase me.”
“No, Tommy, that won’t happen,” his father said softly, persuasively, “because you’ll do what I say, and then everybody will be better off.”
Tom thought again of his sister’s face, not yet lost. �
�I can’t,” he whispered. “It’s not—one of the things that can happen.”
“Ah, Tommy, I’m afraid I made it impossible to reason with you! Sic fiat.” The flavor of the phrase let Tom know that it meant something like, So be it.
In his peripheral vision Tom saw his own right hand lay the phone down beside the book, and then pull open the top drawer; it lifted out a Bic pen and an envelope, and Tom watched as his hand wrote out words in its habitual blocky capitals:
BENJAMIN CAN RETURN—
BUT FIRST YOU MUST CAREFULLY READ THIS BOOK.
Tom had tried to make his hand resist his father’s control, but hadn’t even managed to make any of the letters wobble. Now his father was speaking from the phone again—with at least some perceptible effort, since Tom was trying to impede the old man’s thoughts.
“Now—you’re stronger than I thought, Tommy!—now I’ll call Lucy, and I won’t say anything. She’ll recognize your number and call back, and when there’s—let me speak!—when there’s no reply, she’ll undoubtedly come over here, and read this message. And now I’ll leave you, Tommy—sadly. I wish you had trusted me.”
But while Benjamin had been concentrating on speaking, Tom had regained enough control of his right hand to draw two deeply pressed lines through some of the letters it had written. And as he did it, he made himself think of nothing but Lucy holding her phone.
“Yes,” said Benjamin, catching that insistent image, “she’ll answer. And I’m sure she’ll be here soon. But you—”
A rushing sound echoed from the phone.
Tom whimpered involuntarily as he felt his memories squashed discordantly together, seized, and uprooted.
“—won’t know who she is,” said Benjamin’s voice.
* * *
—
The young man blinked around at the room he found himself in. There was a bed, a desk, a black-bound book lying beside a boxy plastic thing—someone lived here. He held still and listened, but heard nothing but a low background susurration, remote and constant.
The Book of Magic Page 27
