by Niall Boyce
You must forgive me for falling out of touch. The past few years at the library have been quite absorbing. I have not had time for my friends, or for anything else for that matter. It is a situation I am keen to rectify.
I think the last time we spoke was just after results day, when I got my disappointing 2:1 and my PhD funding fell through. I know you were worried that I resented you for your First, and for being able to stay in Oxford for your PhD. I must admit I was not convinced the world needed another expert on Nazi Germany, but I now see you have carved out a considerable niche for yourself. I understand your latest book comes recommended by a husband-and-wife team from daytime television. Quite an accolade.
Whilst I have many regrets in life, the fact that I was not able to pursue an academic career is no longer among them. I managed to get a job in London, at the British Library. After joining, I rose rapidly through the ranks to become the keeper of a substantial collection of medieval religious texts. It was a remarkable privilege to care for these books. In my more sentimental moments, as I checked and catalogued them in my little room in the basement, I imagined myself to be the spiritual brother of those monks who scribed the original texts in their candlelit cells.
By the time you get this letter, however, I will have resigned from my job at the library – something of a snap decision. I have decided to go travelling, and will therefore be incommunicado for quite some time.
I expect you are wondering what the purpose of this letter is, if we won’t see each other again any time soon. I will be plain: I have had some terrible experiences recently, and I feel that you are the only person to whom I can turn in the hope of resolving them. Don’t worry – you won’t have to take any time out of your busy schedule. All I ask is that you read this letter slowly and carefully to the end. Perhaps you should settle down and pour yourself a glass, imagine that we are back in the Eagle and Child on a Sunday evening.
***
Yesterday afternoon, I was checking over one of our fourteenth-century missals before I sent it to the photographer. It was part of a long and somewhat tedious project to make digital copies of our collection, and perhaps I handled it with less care than I should have. As I turned one of the pages, a leaf came loose and fluttered to the floor. Of course, I was mortified; I was sure the book’s catalogue entry had stated the binding was relatively tight and intact. I knelt down, and used a ruler to gently lift the edge of the page and get it between thumb and forefinger. When I got a secure hold, I lifted it up onto my illuminated work surface to get a better look.
On further examination, I realised that this leaf had not come loose from the missal. It was much older than that, and from an entirely different sort of text. You will remember that I once took an interest in demonology. In fact, I have no doubt that you will remember, because you asked me a few questions about the occult when you were writing an essay on the superstitious aspects of National Socialism. I will not repeat what I told you, as I have never known you to forget facts pertaining to your research. However, other people’s activities were of far less interest, so I will summarise what I said about my own work.
Demonology was popular in the middle ages, and numerous texts were produced on the subject. However, many were destroyed after Saint Albertus Magnus made his famous pronouncement: a daemonibus docetur, de daemonibus docet, et ad daemones ducit. I will translate for you: It is taught by the demons, it teaches about the demons, and it leads to the demons.
I believed that I was looking at a page from a volume of demonology that predated the missal by at least two hundred years. Perhaps, I speculated, the keeper of that particular volume had disobeyed the order to destroy it, and had instead divided it up into its constituent leaves and scattered the pages throughout the rest of his library. Maybe he intended to reassemble it one day. Then again, perhaps this page alone had been preserved: why? Did it describe something particularly entertaining, perhaps salacious? Or was it more important than that – did it describe a demon of such power and ferocity that someone had thought it vital to preserve this knowledge for future generations?
Translation from the Latin hardly made things any clearer. The demon described in the first part of the text was not one I had read about before. The second section seemed to address the demon directly, to be a sort of binding-spell to trap and imprison it. The final paragraph consisted of just two words: noli videre.
I will also translate that for you. It means don’t look.
I stayed at my desk late into the evening, puzzling over the meaning of those last two words – don’t look. Was it the beginning of a sentence that was continued on the next page of the book? It couldn’t be, because there was a full stop after the second word. I brought my illuminated magnifying glass close to the text, to check I hadn’t been caught out by a speck of dirt or mould.
No – it was quite clearly a full stop, a perfectly round one inscribed in thick black ink. In fact, the ink looked remarkably fresh. The light glinted off it as if it was still wet, although I knew it could not be. I picked the paper up, and held it closer to my face, the magnifier over it. The full stop now seemed to stand out, just like a blot of ink before it soaks into the paper. It was then that I noticed it moving. It was not a full stop at all. It was a small, black, spherical eye, staring directly at me. I started back and dropped both the paper and my magnifier. The page fell next to my briefcase, whilst the glass hit the edge of my desk and shattered.
I left the shards on the carpet for the cleaner, grabbed my briefcase, and fled the office. The security guard at the entrance to the library tipped his cap as he unlocked the main door, but I am ashamed to say I ignored him. I fumbled with my bicycle lock for a good few minutes – my hands were shaking too much to get the combination right – before I gave up and walked back to my flat, trying to clear my head.
By the time I got to my front door, I had developed an explanation that was almost convincing. It had been late, the lights in my office had been low, and my eyes were tired. I remembered that a few weeks before, I had been to my doctor about some small, grey cloud-like objects that I noticed tumbling across my vision sometimes. He had assured me that these things – ‘floaters’ he called them – were benign irregularities in the fluid of the eyeball, perfectly normal. Perhaps it was one of those that had given the sensation of movement. I chose not to acknowledge the fact that I had sensed the eye tracking me around the room, staring up at me from the floor where the paper fell.
I opened a bottle of wine and made myself dinner – only a few slices of toast, as I wasn’t very hungry and my ulcer was flaring up again. I first had it when we were students together, but I don’t suppose you remember that. I was really very ill – I spent the night in the John Radcliffe Hospital after I threw up some blood one evening. You seemed very put out the next time we met. You hadn’t been able to get hold of me, had a tight essay deadline, and wanted to pick my brains.
After I ate, I repaired as usual to the armchair in my small living room. I had just got myself settled when I remembered that the book I was reading at the moment – a new translation of The Owl and the Nightingale – was in my briefcase next to the door. I hefted myself up, retrieved it, and returned to my seat to drink the rest of the wine and read, determined to make it as normal a night as possible.
It had been a mild day, and my heating was on rather too high; this, and the wine, made me drowsy. I was at that stage of tiredness when my eyes scan the words, but the meaning is either hard to grasp or altogether absent. Sometimes I can run on for a page or two in this way before I realise that I have lost the thread and flip the page back to start again. I was in just this state when my gaze settled on the full stop at the end of one of the footnotes.
I don’t know what is was that struck me about it, but I found myself staring at it. As I watched, it seemed to grow in size and depth, until it looked more like a little pit or tunnel bored into the page. It was then that I noticed something moving inside the pit. I wanted to throw the book down, but I could not. I gripped the book firmly, my muscles in the sort of spasm that comes with an electric shock. The paperback cover crumpled in my hands.
Silently, something thin and the colour of dead flesh slid out of the page, and reached out towards my face. I could smell damp paper and mildew. It was like an insect’s antenna in the way it moved, although there was a certain thickness and sharpness to it as well, like an overgrown fingernail. Further and further it extended, until it was at my eye. It reared back, preparing to strike – and it was at this point that I got a hold on myself, cried out and flung the book back across the room where it hit my bookshelf and slid to the floor.
I ran forward and stamped on it, grinding my shoe into it, the pages crumpling and tearing. Then I gingerly picked up the ruined book and, holding it at arm’s length, carried it through to my kitchen sink. I threw it in, grabbed the kitchen matches, and set fire to it. I pulverised the ashes and washed them down the plughole. Then I sat down on the kitchen floor, the tarry smell of burning paper in the air, and tried to make sense of what was happening to me.
I hadn’t written out my translation of the loose leaf I had found earlier that day, and the original was back at St Pancras, on the floor of my office. There was no way that I could return and retrieve it at this hour, so I cast my mind back over the salient points.
The page had described a demon that lived in books. It hid inside the text, and was able to leap from page to page. It also had the ability to jump between volumes, if they were placed proximate to one another. There was a reference to an infestation of a monastery library in Normandy. The demon had tormented the monks, hiding itself in hymnals and bibles, shouting out horrible blasphemies in the middle of services. It drove one of the librarians quite mad, and several of the monks gave up their orders. After a number of months, the whole building burned down. Whether this was an accident, the final act of the demon, or the last resort of the monks was not documented.
It turned out that the demon was not destroyed in the fire. It cropped up on English soil some years later, presumably because someone had been unable to part with one of the books and had rescued it from the flames. It came to a monastery on the Welsh borders, where it finally met its match in the form of an abbot skilled in trapping demons. The text replicated the incantation he had used to do this. He had imprisoned it in a volume that would then be stored in a vault deep in the monastery, safely out of contact with anyone or anything. He contemplated burning the book, but had rejected this option for two reasons; firstly because he found the prospect of burning a book barbaric, and secondly because he felt it was better to be certain of exactly where the demon was, rather than lay open the possibility of it escaping undetected. I suspected another motive. The demon would have been a clever and sadistic weapon to use against an enemy.
It was then that I realised the significance of the page I had found. It was not, as I had thought, a page from a larger book of demonology. It was a page from the original book that had trapped the demon. I had brought myself to do what the abbot could not; I had burned the book to which the demon had transferred itself. I felt a little melancholy then, despite myself. I had never even so much as given a book away before (not intentionally at any rate, although I dare say there are a few volumes of mine in your library). I hated the thought of my books being neglected or damaged, and to have actually burned one of them – I thought of the rest of my collection, neatly filed and cared for on my shelves.
My shelves. The book had hit them when I threw it away. How quickly could the demon transfer itself? Was it now loose in my flat?
I pulled book after book out, flipping through the pages, peering into every full stop to see if there was any sign of the demon. When I had finished with each volume, I threw it across the living room so that the intruder could not double-back on itself.
I had deposited over half of my collection on the floor before I found it. As I opened my copy of Henderson’s Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, I became aware of a force resisting me. Evidently the demon knew that I was onto it. I forced the covers until they snapped open like a clasp-knife, and scoured the pages. It had fled to the very end of the book. I saw a flash of movement behind the last full stop, and that terrible bulbous black eye peering out at me, full of hatred. As I watched, a claw flung out and flailed around trying to gain purchase on the paper. It was sharp and mottled, like a bird’s foot, and covered in a sticky blackish substance like drying ink.
I slammed the book shut and ran to the kitchen with it. I bound it up with the thick elastic bands I kept in the drawer there, and threw it into the sink. I took my bottle of Jameson’s out of the cupboard, and uncorked it ready to douse the book in spirit before setting fire to it.
Something made me stop. I wondered if I could really be sure that this was the way to kill it. I had another idea. I cleared out all the printed packets of food from the fridge and the cupboard adjacent to it, and put them safely in the living room. I then picked up the book carefully, deposited it in the fridge and slammed the door shut. I felt suddenly exhausted, and I was getting that feeling of tightness around my skull that usually precedes a migraine. I left the kitchen, lay down on my bed with the lights off, and thought about what to do next.
I thought again of the original page that the demon had sprung from. It had successfully contained the demon for several hundred years. If I went through it again, I felt sure that I could find the key to returning it to its prison, or even devise a new one.
I slept fully clothed that night; or rather, I caught fitful snatches of sleep as I waited for the morning. It can have been no longer than three or four hours before I set off again for the library, but it seemed much longer as I lay there alarmed by every creak I heard, every tap in the walls or sound of footfall outside. Finally, with the sickly morning light seeping out from under the curtains, I got up and set off for my office at St Pancras.
***
The paper was gone. I got on my hands and knees and crawled under my desk to look for it. But it was nowhere to be seen. I went through every paper on my desk, too, soberly and methodically sifting my way down the pile. The cleaner would usually have placed anything that looked of value back on the desk; but it was not there. She must have mistaken it for a piece of scrap and thrown it away.
It was still early –I might yet retrieve it. I hurried along the corridor until I found our cleaner at the end of the corridor, pushing a rusty, squeaky trolley with a bulging wastepaper sack attached to the back. I pulled the bag loose and began rummaging through it. The cleaner grabbed the other end and pulled hard. The plastic ripped, spilling crumpled paper, sandwich boxes, apple cores and coffee cups onto the pristine, freshly-mopped floor of the corridor.
‘What you looking for?’ she demanded.
‘A piece of paper. A very valuable document. It was on the floor of my office.’
‘If it was worth so much, how come it was on the floor?’
I ignored her, and kept searching – to no avail.
‘It isn’t there,’ I said apologetically, and tried to shovel some of the debris into the damaged bag. She took a fresh refuse sack from a drawer in her cart and opened it with a contemptuous flick of her wrist.
I went back to my office and sat in my chair, my head in my hands. I considered going from door to door, to see if any of my colleagues had somehow ended up with the missing page, but I knew it would be no good. The page had gone. It was as if it had never existed. There was no-one I could speak to, no-one who would believe me. I knew how fast gossip travelled in the library. By mid-morning, half the staff would have heard that I had come in early, stolen the cleaner’s rubbish bag and torn through it on my hands and knees. And what would my explanation be? Would I take them back to the chaos of my flat, pull a book out of my refrigerator and show it to them. ‘Look – look closer. There, in the full stops – don’t you see it?’ I put my head in my hands, which smelled of rotting apples and stale bread.
It was then that I thought of you.
I decided to leave straight away. When my manager saw the state I was in, she agreed and added that as it was Thursday, I might want to take a long weekend. I went further, and offered my resignation. She accepted it.
***
My flat is overlooked by another building, so it is never fully in daylight. It looked somehow tired and sordid in the dull colours of an overcast morning. I picked my way over the debris of the night before, thinking how little I really have after all these years, and opened the drawer of my writing-desk.
I had worked out what to do. The demon lives in pages. It is a parasite, and paper and ink are its natural habitat. And what do parasites love more than anything else in the world? I think you are eminently qualified to answer that question.
Parasites love a fresh host.
I took my fountain pen, an envelope, and several sheets of my best writing paper from the desk, and made sure I had emptied my pockets of anything printed or written. Then I went into the kitchen and got out the book. I have been using it to rest the paper on as I write this. When I finish, I shall find out where you live, and deliver this letter by hand. I suppose there is a slight risk that the demon will escape before this reaches you, but I am sure it will not. I think it will find these fresh pages a snug little hideout until it meets you. I feel a little quiver in my pen. I think it is interested in you.
It is somewhere in this letter, Richard. It is watching you.
Look closer.
About the Author
Niall Boyce lives and works in London. He has previously published fiction with the popular literary events/websites ‘Liars’ League’ and ‘Tales of the DeCongested‘. He is currently writing a gothic tale about folk traditions in rural Austria and a novel about memory loss and time travel. More stories can be found here.
©2009 Niall Boyce
