by Derek Ivan Webster
“Do you have it with you?” the larger man asked, his voice as soft and smooth as the neatly gloved hands he had folded on his lap.
The smaller man touched two fingers to the leather binder he held close to his own chest.
“And you have,” the gloved man paused a moment, as if struggling to find an appropriate enough word, “verified it?”
The quiet man nodded his head. It was all he could do not to scream out the warning truth of it. But that was bad business. This was a transaction. An important one. Maybe his last chance. All he had to do was hold together until the deal was done, and he’d walk away a rich man. Maybe a little less sane for the burden he bore, but a rich man none-the-less.
“May I take a peek?” the larger man seemed so casual. Perhaps he really didn’t know what he was asking for.
The two sat across the car from one another, each studying the other. The steady click-clack of the train beneath them lent everything a humming vibration. Their stare held straight and true, uninterested in the jumps and jolts dealt to rest of the world.
“Just a tiny look. No more than a glance,” the larger man pried harder. He edged forward in his seat. The calm façade was beginning to roughen. Something simmered at the edge of his gaze now; something hungry. His gloved fingers clenched open and closed at his side.
“Not until the train stops,” the quiet man whispered, the strain of speaking evidenced by his pronounced wheeze. “That was what we agreed.”
The larger man frowned and edged back in his seat. He wasn’t happy, but he was at least willing to abide by the contract.
“What will you do with it?” the quiet man rasped. He knew the question inappropriate, unprofessional, but he had to ask it anyway. “I mean once it’s yours. Once you’re alone with it. What will you do?”
The mere thought, loaded as it was with anticipation, brought a smile back to the larger man’s face.
“You’re afraid of it, aren’t you?” he asked the little man, expecting and receiving no response. “I can see it in your scrunched up face. It makes your guts churn just to consider the things it might accomplish. The rules it might break.”
He waited for the little man to protest. Instead, the binder was clutched more firmly.
“And I’ll tell you why,” the larger man continued. “It’s because you don’t have the right kind of imagination. You see things for how they are and how they might be,” he took a moment to point thoughtfully at the binder. “That work of art is all about the things that might not be. The potentials that should not ever be considered. It scares you, because it suggests you and your closed mind might not be right. Everything you believe might just be a lie.”
The little man forced his eyes closed and took a long, shallow breath. He wouldn’t allow himself to be baited like this. There was no money in divulging anything he’d already learned from his years with the binder. Let this man rant to himself once the transaction was complete. Let him speak with such confidence when the thing was in his hands. The little man would not allow himself to think of what this buyer might accomplish with his purchase. That was none of his business. None of his concern.
“What a waste,” the larger man mused to himself, his genuine distaste uncensored. “To think that something of such value has been trapped in your possession for so long.”
“I kept it safe,” the little man murmured uncomfortably. There was a tone to the larger man’s voice he did not like. A tone he had heard before.
“You kept it caged,” the larger man stood from his seat now, his voice taking on a fleshy rattle. “You held it prisoner.”
“Please, sit down,” the little man begged, he could feel himself losing control of the situation. The binder began to itch beneath his fingers. He had thought he could prevent it this time. He had thought if he planned it out well enough, took enough precautions, he could finally be rid of the thing.
“You are too late,” the larger man growled, looming over the little man with a bestial curve to his spine. Shiny, razor-white blades burst through the end of the man’s smoothly gloved fingers.
“I will eat you now,” it was no longer a man speaking. The voice came from within the binder. The thing had awoken again.
With a click and a clack the train disappeared within a mountain tunnel. Darkness owned the moment. There was a growl and a cry of anguish. Something fell to the floor, followed by the explosive crash of glass.
Then the train reemerged, and the sunlight refilled the car. It streamed in through a gaping hole that had once been the passenger window. The binder lay, unopened, at the center of the carriage. A wide spray of crimson decorated the shards of glass that littered the floor and two benches. The larger man was nowhere to be found.
“I should have warned him,” the little man shook his head with anguish. “It could have been different this time.”
The little man tried his best not to look through the shield of his splayed fingers. But he couldn’t help it. The binder was there. He had to look.
Though blood was splashed across the whole of the car, the binder was still immaculately clean. It was as if every drop of the spraying gore had miraculously missed this one thing; but the little man new better. He knew what would happen if he wiped up the rest of the mess with the face of the binder. It would all be gone, absorbed into the thing that lay inside. The pages that he wished he had never read.
Even as he picked the binder up, he could feel the warm, red lacquer running off his own skin. Gushing through the cracks of the leather. A wet licking sound came from within the leather casing.
“No more,” he said to himself. He thought he heard laughter then, a deep, dark echo trapped within the binder.
Click and clack, the train started over a suspension bridge. Far down below, a river babbled to itself, the picture of nature’s innocence.
“No more,” the little man said again, this time making up his mind.
He held the binder to his chest and ran for the jagged hole in the car’s window. With no hesitation, he used all his meager strength to leap through the opening.
Immediately his body slammed into the iron girding of the bridge. The binder flew free of his lifeless hand, continuing outward and off the bridge. As it spiraled through the air loose leafs of paper rained out in all directions. They fluttered, like a snowstorm in autumn, spreading across the wide-open sky.
Many pages came to rest atop the river. They were sucked down into its wet flow and angrily destroyed.
A few were trapped within the branches of tall trees, caught in limbo, their execution stayed for another day.
One single page landed on the lap of the dreaming boy. He came awake as if woken by the touch of another. Looking in either direction, he was surprised to find himself alone.
The page he picked up as an after thought. He couldn’t read, but he liked the bright red shade of the letters written so neatly across the face of the thing. He would take it home to his eldest sister. She had picked up her words a few years back, and was always looking for something to read to the whole family.
He jammed the page into his pocket, proud of himself. He had found a new bedtime story. He hurried down the winding path at a run. If the paper in his pocket felt a little itchy against his skin, he paid no mind.
Behind him, back on the surface of the swift moving river, the leather case bobbed up and down atop the water. The binder was now empty, its contents released. Nothing remained to protect the world from that which should not be.
About the Author
Raised in a tiny Alaskan fishing village, educated at Yale University, Derek Ivan Webster is a writer that appreciates a good contrast. A victim of the freelance lifestyle, it is only his sage wife and precious/precocious little girls that keep him sane. Read more from him here.
©2009 Derek Ivan Webster
