Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
It seemed that the book was cold to the touch, to an almost unnatural degree, though she hastened to remind him that the covers were made of metal. She had remembered that during the time her mother first showed the book to her, she had shrunk back from the chilly surface of the thing, and her mother had reluctantly told her of the time the book almost seemed to be vibrating in her hands. She may simply have been shivering from the metal's cold touch, her mother had hastened to add.
Pym knew he must have this book in his hands. There was no doubt about this, it was not an idea or a question or a fantasy; it was a need. Though embarrassed to reveal his anxiousness, he couldn't contain his enthusiasm and asked his aunt if he could look at the book, secretly hoping she would offer it to him to keep, knowing his love of books. He had all he could do to restrain his anger at her response; she must have seen the heat flash in his eyes when she told him that she didn't want anyone to touch it until she got an antique book dealer to appraise its value.
Oh, she was no fool, he fumed to himself that night alone in his apartment, pacing with coffee in hand. She suspected, as he did, that this was the mysterious package someone had paid Arnold Stowe to hide ... and that it had to be something ancient and stolen from a museum, maybe smuggled into the country, maybe worth thousands upon thousands. Yes, she wanted the money, but Pym wanted more. He wanted the book.
He couldn't very well steal it, but he’d be damned if she stopped him from holding it, examining it, opening it if he could. He would embark now, this very night. He had what he needed. He would bring his camera to photograph its outside and hopefully some of its inside. And he had his professional lock-pick tools. They had been advertised in the back of a Kung Fu magazine, as insidiously available to an indiscriminate audience as those bizarre Ninja stars and darts and swords and such, even more insidious, he felt, but he had bought them because he liked novelties, toys, the unusual and the obscure. He knew they'd come in handy some day. For a mere twenty five dollars (not including his seven dollar how-to manual) he had acquired a ten piece set of tension wrenches, feeler picks and rake picks. Easily sufficient to open the simple warded padlock which secured his grandmother's rear shed, which would then give into the old house. He just hoped that this limited selection would be enough to give him access to the strange book's interior as well.
As he drove in the night, and later even after he had mounted the shed's creaking steps,
squatted at the door with a penlight gripped cigar-like in his teeth probing the lock like a dentist hovering over a mouth, he couldn't help but irrationally fantasize about stealing the book and some other articles and making it look like a robbery ... but his aunt would suspect him if that book, of all things, was missing. How about a fire? They wouldn't think to sift through the debris for this obscure book then. Pym paused a moment from his work to glance around him nervously at the dark and to suck in a long breath. Enough fantasizing. He would only examine the book.
The padlock gave after more work than Pym had anticipated, perhaps due to his agitation. Once inside, out of the cold, he calmed down considerably. He didn't dare turn on any lights, let the penlight's dim and tight pool lead him like a spirit guide. The house was musty, much of the smell due to the great amount of books his grandmother had supplemented to her first husband's already prodigious collection. Pym's grandmother had lent or given him books over the years but this was a cave of rich treasure and it was painful to forego it all in search of a solitary volume.
There were several possible closets, but the second one Pym tried was it. Even as the door squealed open a vague chill could be felt wafting out at him, but this had to be a draft from outside. A cardboard box rested on the upper shelf. Smiling to himself in the dark, Pym reached up for it.
The box was indeed heavy. He carried it religiously into a ground floor bedroom his grandmother had made into a den, though his aunt had removed the TV already. There was one window only, facing into the back yard. Pym dared to turn on one lamp and place it on the floor after drawing the shade and closing the curtains. He squatted down before the box. The old string had been cut at one point but now was only loosely tied in a bow. Pym plucked the bow apart, folded back the box's flaps. Again Pym shuddered at a waft of chill but reminded himself that his aunt had had the heat in the house shut off for the sake of economy. He reached both hands in to remove the shadowed book into the intimate light.
Pym withdrew his hands instinctively. His aunt had understated the matter...the metal was like a storm door in the winter, for a quick but accurate analogy. Of course, Pym reasoned, when she had last touched it the house had been heated, and this was late October. He was simply jumpy due to the circumstances of his furtive mission, he convinced himself, and with a fresh surge of inspiration lifted out the book.
The metal covers were tarnished almost black, but the odd Arabic-flavored characters inscribed on the front were discernible. The lock was very curious and sturdy, and the binding was odder still with its spring-loaded mechanism, the exact purpose of which wasn't clear.
The alien characters did disillusion Pym a bit, who hoped to read something of so singular a book, but the exciting strangeness of the volume and its obvious great age still gripped him. He would take pictures, attempt a translation somewhere. And just to hold so unique a thing as this was memorable in itself. He had to see more. His grandfather may have died guarding this book. He tried his first probe in the oddly constructed lock.
Squatting with the book in his lap, Pym pulled his sleeve over his left hand like a mitten against the cold metal, which didn't seem to be absorbing any warmth through handling. Impatiently he selected a second pick, glancing up around him, for some reason suddenly conscious of the black and deserted bulk of the old house all around him.
The book began to vibrate, and Pym shoved it off his legs as he bolted straight upright and cried out involuntarily. He stepped back to stare at the book as it lay on the floor just outside the pool of the lamp on the floor. He wanted to run, on a physical level. Other parts of him, stronger, kept him magnetized.
The probe protruded from the lock, still inserted. The book was making a faint, slight noise. It was like a squeak of metal hinges. It was hard for Pym to see the book in the shadows beyond the light o
f the lamp, but it seemed to be...moving. Pulsing...slowly...as though drawing in breath...a slumbering living thing.
This couldn't be true -- it was his agitated state of mind! Here he was trespassing; he had entered this house illegally, whether it was his grandmother's or not, and he knew it was wrong. This was no game, -no crazy adventure, n
o fantasy to live out in a book...he was doing something seriously wrong. This was simply his nervous conscience punishing him, an imagination made vivid by the fantastic and nightmarish novels he consumed. Wasn't it?
Pym shoved the lamp directly over the book with the toe of his shoe.
Again he recoiled, cried out, this time hugged his arms. But he didn't flee ... even as he heard the squeaks from the hinges magnify from additional strain as the book rhythmically bulged to a greater extent, the metal covers bowing out, the lock still resisting, the gilded pages breathing open into black gill slits but closing again.
Run...
run!
hissed the blood in his body. But the lock pick stuck up out of the book, waiting to be turned. He knew he could open the book. He knew it as surely as he had known he had to get his hands on this book when his aunt revealed its existence to him. His camera weighed heavily from his neck and against his chest. He had consumed books on life's mysteries, the supernatural, immersed himself in them and come away desperately hungry for more. How could he possibly turn from this now, the real thing before him, the unknown held apart from him by one foolish little lock?
Pym stepped nearer to the book as
it breathed in its raspy, rusty voice.
Pym's aunt couldn't sleep, but it wasn't grief that kept her awake; her mother had been dying for a long time, and if anything she was relieved for the woman and for herself. She was angry at her nephew for the resentment she had seen in his eyes, but concerned for him also in a vague, unsettled way. That damn book. It was a good thing she hadn't related the rest of what her mother had told her, if it weren't too late already to keep him from again asking to see it. She hadn't mentioned what her mother had seen or thought she'd seen, partly because it was too creepy for her to bring up and mostly because it was ridiculous, but that story had still been enough to make her return the unpleasant thing to its box quickly when she rediscovered it, replace it on its shelf rather than carry it into her house. But now she felt she should take care of the book and be done with it as soon as possible, before she had to turn her nephew away from it again, send it away with its cold metal surfaces and its strange mood of uneasiness, even if she didn't believe that when her mother found it lying on the basement floor sixty years ago a piece of the cut binding string from the box hung out of the pages an inch or so, and when she lifted the book from the floor the string was sucked inside the book without a trace, withdrawn inside like a tongue...
The next morning she let herself into the old Victorian house through the front door, steeled herself against the musty-smelling gloom. If only her son Tom could have come with her, but he had to work, and Judy was on her way back to Maine already. Thank God at least the book was tied up in its box and she wouldn't have to look at it or touch that icy tarnished metal again. She moved into the stillness of the house.
In the central dining room, the table covered with bric-a-brac and dusty stacks of books, she noticed the door to the den was shut. This was odd, since she didn't remember shutting it; in fact, her mother had never employed use of the door in her day. She hesitated in approaching it, her instincts lifting their alert little bright-eyed heads. She didn't want to go to that door and open it, but she had to. She did.
They found her dead body in her dead mother's house, eyes glazedly staring. The strain of her mother's death, and she had been a heavy smoker at the age of fifty-five. But if her son Tom had seen what she had seen, he wouldn't have taken the metal book which was found on the floor beside her home with him, meaning to unfasten that lock somehow or dismantle the spring-loaded hinged binding.
With his aunt dead, no one was able to testify as to how Pym must have struggled through the night and on into the morning; she couldn't tell anyone how she had come into the room in time to see him lose that struggle, as the metal book lay open wide on the floor, and Pym's legs stood straight up out of the black hole which was there where pages should have been, his legs thrashing madly but no screams or cries for help being heard from inside that black void as there should have been. No one would know how the fingers of one hand had gripped the outside of the book for a few last moments before being wrenched away, his legs sucked abruptly into the fathomless pit out of sight, the spring-loaded covers then slapping shut and locking automatically.
Only the glassy wide eyes of his aunt gave any clue, beyond translation to those who found her, of what she had seen coiled around the wrist of Pym's gripping hand, twined around one leg as it sought to drag him into that darkness. Slick and moist looking, it had been, grayishly translucent, and segmented; constricting and insistent, patient throughout the long struggle of the night.
More mysterious than the death of Pym's aunt was his disappearance, and his family murmured about it somberly at the gathering after his aunt's funeral. They had no idea where he had gone -- but wherever it was, he had brought his camera to take pictures.
Through Obscure Glass
-
For Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire
She
plummeted...
...into a black well of space, a wormhole to other dimensions. She plunged into the abyss like an angel struck down by an arrow shot from that netherworld. Hurtled...and in her terror, wished that she would strike the bottom of the pit at last, and find the relief of death...for it wasn't death she feared, but the falling...
Judith opened her eyes with a snap, just as the bus cleared the tunnel in the wooded mountain side. Again, the interior of the bus was flooded with sunlight. She was embarrassed, thinking she had let out a scream in waking, but she could tell from the lulled, quiet aspect of those around her that she hadn't. Sitting up in her seat, she glanced at the passenger seated beside her, a pretty teen ager headed for Seattle, she had told Judith a few hours earlier. She was blissfully asleep, her head resting against the window and her thick dark hair fallen into her face like a blanket.
Judith smiled faintly and looked away from the girl, but something made her look back. The
girl's shroud of hair covered all of her face except for her mouth and chin, and Judith had had the weird idea that if she were to part the girl's hair, the eyes she would uncover would be – be horrible. Inhuman. Though she knew the girl had friendly hazel eyes, in her mind she had thought that eyes of glowing pink, lurid and bright as a sunset, lay hiding behind those curtains of hair, glaring out at her secretly through the strands. Further, the way the girl's head was tilted, and her mouth hung open in sleep, it appeared as if her mouth were a vertical opening in her head. Like a vagina, Judith thought...with teeth.