Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Meredith had a number of secret nicknames for Andrea, her brother’s girlfriend, with her profusion of blond hair pinned up over her head as if to give her height. “That blond troll” was one, and indicative of the others.
Meredith read from the table of contents aloud...
“‘The Keys to Keys.’” She looked up at Leonard. “Huh?”
Standing apart from them, arms folded, he explained, “Keys meaning certain tones, a certain pitch, a certain sound that will create resonance, a special vibration. Like
ommm
...and Buddhist chants. It’s not the words chanted, but the sound they make, especially repeated over and over. It’s one of the ways in...”
Meredith returned her gaze to the text, but Andrea was paging ahead, then shutting the book to again take in its odd design.
The Book of Awe
– front and back covers and every page between – was triangular in shape rather than rectangular, bound along one of its three sides. Andrea scrunched her face at the book, held it up horizontally to view it from its side. “What could be stuck in there, Lenny? It’s big. And it smells.”
“I didn’t want to pry those pages apart yet. I didn’t wanna tear anything. They’re stuck pretty good.”
“Can I see the thing, please?” Meredith sighed in great weariness.
Andrea pushed the heavy volume into her hands. “Go for it.”
Meredith inspected the book in a similar way but with a more composed expression. A group of pages about three quarters of the way through were adhered together by a black material like tar that had hardened but retained a tackiness. She shrugged lightly, flipped to the start of a chapter. “‘The Geometry of Transcendence’...ha. Looks like trigonometry on acid.”
“Another way to open doors. Certain bizarre geometric patterns...configurations...when reproduced precisely can bend the barriers between dimensions. The patterns have to be drawn in the corner of a room, and differently depending on the angles of the corner.”
“Like drawing a witch’s circle?” Andrea asked.
Meredith gave her an arched eyebrow, but Leonard said, “Something like that.” He turned back to Meredith. “There are a number of ways to travel between dimensions. Some ways only involve astral exploration. Some involve dreams. But these ways here, the ones Marotta really gets into, involve full physical results...”
“And he got his information from that –
Necronomicon
?”
“Among other sources...yeah.
The Pnakotic Manuscripts
,
The Book of Dzyan
...
Der Vermis
Mysteriis
,
The Book of Thoth
,
Liber Ivonis
and
The Metal Book
. Your standard Book of the Month Club fare.” Leonard smiled as he watched Meredith page further in, as if he himself were the proud author of the volume. But that man, Louis Marotta, had compiled
The Book of Awe
over twenty years before. And he had also disappeared without leaving a trace less than a year after that.
Leonard smiled more broadly when Andrea peered around Meredith’s arm at the book and a moment later recoiled with a small gasp. She hadn’t seen the illustrations before. Meredith showed no outward reaction upon discovering them, but shuddered once. She returned her attention to the stuck pages. They crackled at the gentle probing of her thumb in the crevice at their center. “Have you shined a light in here?”
“No. I just got the thing a few hours ago. But that’s a good idea...”
“A better idea would be to just peel the thing open. I don’t think it’ll rip any pages.”
“I have to look at it some more.”
“Looks like something was purposely sealed in here, Len.” The bulge at the center of the glued section was fairly large.
“I hardly think he would’ve glued something inside a book of such importance.”
“How many copies did he have made?”
“Only six,” Andrea spoke up. She worked for
The Book Worm
bookstore in Cambridge, old and rare books their specialty. Leonard had met her in that store last year, and she had helped him finally track down this damaged copy of
The Book of Awe
. It had been in the possession of Marotta’s niece. She had obviously never cared to try prying the stuck pages apart, and it hadn’t been hard to convince her to sell the book. She hadn’t haggled for a higher price, either. But as cooperative as she’d been in letting Leonard have the volume, she hadn’t been able to tell him much about her strange uncle. “Drugs,” was about the extent of her description.
Meredith sat down with the deltoid book in her lap, became more engrossed. She found, in fact, that Marotta did suggest drugs as a way into other realms. Leonard lit a cigarette, turned his back to the women and stared into the corner of the room. His apartment was on the third floor. An attic loft. The ceiling slanted down to meet the floor along the sides of this, his bedroom. He had only a mattress for a bed, as he preferred, and he had always kept it in that corner before. But today he had slid the mattress against the opposite wall...
Andrea watched Meredith’s lips silently form words from the text. She asked, “Do you honestly believe in this stuff, too?”
Meredith only glanced up at her emotionlessly before plunging her eyes back into the book parted open across her thighs.
Andrea was close to her family. Leonard was not even close to his own, but for Meredith. He did not accompany Andrea to Sunday dinner.
Meredith had come, and Leonard made her coffee in the kitchen while she sat down in the small parlor with the book. She called in to him, “You haven’t cracked open the gummy part yet...”
“I know...I told you,” he replied. From his cupboard he selected the heavy black mug with white marbling he knew was her favorite. “There’s enough to read in there for now while I figure out what to do. Maybe a solvent that won’t damage the...”
He heard the crackling rasp.
“Hey!” he said, and set the mug down heavily.
Then he heard something thud heavily to the floor. And on the tail of that, Meredith was crying out his name. Even as a child, she had never cried out to him before...
“Merry.” He bolted for the central roan, and nearly collided with his sister in the threshold. Even in the seconds following her cry she had regained much of her composure, but she was still not his familiar Meredith. Her face was flushed, her neat bowl of hair had got ruffled, and her fingers were claws hooked into his forearms.
“What’s going on? What did you do to my book?”
“Go look at it.”
“What...”
“I think I found Louis Marotta.”
Leonard pushed past her into the living room, and on the central rug he saw the book lying with its covers closed in the fall. He lifted it. Opened it to the crusted portion. And for the first time, he was able to easily peel the central crevice apart.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
There was a withered, mummified human hand pressed in the book, in the center of a pool of that black material, which totally obscured the text on the two facing pages. The hardened ooze had not covered the hand, but was thicker and layered around the base of the wrist like melted and resolidified wax around the base of a candle. It seemed that the ooze had originated from inside the book. From this page. Either from the stump of the wrist...or...
“Blood?” Meredith asked.
“No. God...”
“What, for Chrissakes?”
Leonard didn’t know a huge, odd grin had stretched upon his face. “This goop came from around the wrist. It came out of a hole...”
“A hole? In the book?”
“Not in the book, Merry. In our dimension...”
“Len...”
“
Look
at it!” He whirled to hold the book open under her nose. She recoiled slightly from the sight and the smell. “The hand isn’t cut off, Merry. It just didn’t go all the way in with the rest of him.”
Excited by this discovery, less concerned about damage to pages already obviously ruined, Leonard peeled open more of the stuck pages. The ooze had only marred the edges of these. At last, a bit more carefully, he pulled free the page immediately following the one into which the hand was pressed. “Look at this!” He moved the page with the hand sprouting from its center open and shut away from the rest. “One page! One page in this book he turned into a door!”
“And that stuff came out.”
“Maybe the ocean of another world. Or the air...”
It was as though a great void on the other side, a fluid limbo, had begun to pour through and congealed upon contact with this plane. Wouldn’t it be funny, Meredith thought deliriously, if the hand had corked the hole accidentally, thus saving the earth – the universe? – from being totally consumed? Yeah, funny. Hilarious.
“Len. Len, you gotta get rid of it! That thing is too damn
dangerous
...”
He lifted his great grin to her. “What? What are you saying?
You
...afraid? Hey, do you know what we could learn from this?”
“Maybe what he learned. How to
die
.”
“Whatever dangerous shit was written on that page is gone now. There are as many other doors as there are dimensions, and that’s an infinite amount. We’ll avoid the one he chose. Anyway, we know Marotta’s motivations for making this book. Personal gain. Power. Immortality. All that good shit. But I’m not out for that, I’m not some power-hungry madman. Right? He got greedy...”
“So what the hell do
you
want?”
“What do I want? To learn, for God’s sake! I can learn more from this book than I would’ve learned in a lifetime at Clark, or any other school in the world! Do you know what could be done with this thing? The places we could see? The races we could meet and learn from? The resources we could tap? We could save our whole damn planet with this thing! It’s a link to all creation, all space and time and knowledge! This book
is
God!”
“Well who are you to think you can handle it? Turn it over to somebody else more capable, if you aren’t out for the glory.”
“Turn it over to who? Ahh, religious leaders? They’d destroy the thing! The government? They’d use it like Marotta, not to help the masses. No one’s qualified. At least I’ve got the open mind to believe in its potential and treat it with the proper caution. Marotta didn’t write the thing, he just pretty much was a researcher. A thief. He didn’t respect the powers enough. I do.”
“Len,” Meredith sighed, “who are you kidding? You sound just like any damn delusional Messiah I ever heard of.”
“You think I'm only out for myself? That must be you you’re thinking of! I care about things...”
“Oh...that’s cute. I’m only out for myself. Well, face it, bro...
you've
always been a poor little rich boy trying to show daddy you can be something important on your own. But you don’t really wanna work at being important. You’re really just an irresponsible lost soul looking for a few thrills to kill the time...just like me. If you stop trying to dramatize it all the time and just live it, it won’t be so bad. Life is empty and boring and pointless. More learning and knowledge never changes that.”
“So why did you help me look for the book? What made you so interested in finding it, too? Just for a cheap thrill?”
She pouted. “Sure. Why not? It was something to do.
“Something to
do
? You don’t care about anything, do you?”
Meredith thought of a line from
Pandora's Box.
When the character Alwa asked Lulu, “Do you love me, Lulu?” she replied, “I? Never a soul!” Meredith had quoted that line herself, more than once.
But in answer to her brother’s frustrated question now, Meredith only gave an enigmatic shrug, and lit up a fresh cigarette.
Meredith straddled Leonard, the curled ends of her bob swaying down to frame her white face and her breasts swaying down to fill his milking, stroking hands. He dreaded her seductions. He lived in secret, aching hunger for her seductions. He never instigated them. Every time she had to seduce him like the first, and he thought that was most of the appeal for her. His guilt, the squirming nervous reluctance in him when he saw one of her seductions nearing, must have filled her with an odd satisfaction. When it was done he swore never again. And waited for the next time...
“Going to show the midget the hand?”
“No. Not yet...”
“It was his right hand.”
“Mm...”
“Most people just put leaves inside books.” Meredith smiled down at him and undulated.
“Did you see how long the nails were? Very long...”
“Don’t nails grow after death?"
“No...that’s just the skin receding around them. Either he had long nails to begin with, or...he didn’t die right away. He was trying to catch a hold and not be drawn in. And he got pinned that way. And maybe he stayed that way for a long time...”
“If he wanted to explore other dimensions so bad, why’d he fight going in?”