[Archive] Anthropodermic Bibliopegy (Draft 02)

This was a complete re-write of the previous draft, trying to approach the subject matter from a different angle.

 

    Several years ago, an old friend of mine came to me with a strange request. My friend, Alexander, was a man a few years my senior whom I’d met at a Christmas party back in Ridgeport, where I’d lived for a time when I was a young man. Alex taught literature there, at the university, but he was a worldly soul, and I’ve never felt that the title of professor really did him justice, when pressed to describe him. He’d spent his childhood with missionary parents in some far off corner of the world, and seemed to have a broad perspective on life.

    It was late in the evening, a Thursday I think, and I’d started to prepare dinner for myself when Alex rung me on the phone. At this time, I hadn’t spoken to him in a handful of years, though we wrote to one another on occasion, and traded Christmas cards each year, as people do. He was brief— I imagine he was in the middle of something himself, and said “Frank, I need you to drive down here tomorrow” and I said what on earth for? Has somebody died? That is the assumption, you know, when an old friend calls you out of the blue in the evening on a Thursday. “What? God, no, no… I mean.” He paused for a moment, “Yes, someone has died, but that’s… that isn’t—“ I cut him off and asked him if it was his mother, because I knew— in that vague way you know things about your friends— I knew his mother was in poor health. At least she had been around Christmastime that year.

    “Frank, no, it’s— I need to ask you a favor, it’s… personal? It’s hard to talk about on the phone. There’s money involved.” He said that last part in a somewhat more formal tone— perhaps assuming that mentioning money was keen tactic to perk my interest. Sure, I responded, after a moment. I assumed that it must be important. Alex wasn’t the sort to impose for no reason.

    Despite my going on earlier about how unlike a professor Alexander is, in theory, I’ll tell you that his office certainly fit the bill of that title. It had that paradoxical combination of temporary lodging and a lived-in hominess. His desk was a clutter of ungraded papers and other assignments, which he hastily began to sort into random piles as I walked through his door. There was space for his desk, in front of the window, and a single chair in front of that, and little else besides. He had also managed to fit in a bookshelf, though curiously, for a literature professor, I can’t recall seeing a single book in his office. Rather the shelves of the book case were lined with tchotchkes and memorabilia.

    “Frankie,” He said to me, as I sat down in the single chair “fuck, but it’s been too long” Alex had this way of always acting like every old friend was, at some hazy point in the past, his very closest friend, and you and he had simply fallen out of touch over the years. Alex and I had never been particularly close, but his enthusiasm for our imaginary bygone days was welcoming enough.

    It has been awhile, I told him. He said “I’m sorry to impose on you like this, but I… look, hey, could you shut the door?” I reached back behind my lone chair and nudged the door closed with my elbow. When I turned back around to face Alex, I put on a face as if to say all right, get on with it.

    Alex began to explain. One of his students, (or perhaps a former student, it doesn’t matter) had died. Not abruptly, he assured me, as if that mattered— it had apparently been at the hand of a debilitating disease, so he’d known the end was coming. After telling me this, Alex sat silently for a moment, looking down at nothing on his desk. He looked up, then, and said to me “Look, Frank, trust me here, this kid and I, we were close enough, but not that close, so this is as weird for you as it is for me.” What, I insisted, was so weird for the both of us? Again he paused, this time, staring at nothing on my face. “He wants… wanted to be made into a book. A book full of his poetry” So, I queried— squinting my eyes to establish confusion— so he wants a… biography? Or an anthology? “No no,” Said Alex “I mean, like, literally. His will was really very specific— and truth be told he’d talked to me about this, a year or so ago, and I’d just thought he was kidding. But nope.” Nope indeed. Alex then pulled out a folded sheet of paper from one of the random stacks he’d made, and presented it to me.

 

“Dear Professor Dawson,

             Let me just say, first off, that I really hate to burden you like this. To you, I’m sure I was just another student, but you really made a big impact on me. I didn’t get to live as long as I’d have liked (though I don’t suppose anyone really does) But hearing your stories about the places you’ve been, and the people you’ve known, it always put a smile on my face. You said once, my sophomore year, that life can either be ‘a friend or an enemy, but it’s never an acquaintance’, and I’ve got to be honest with you, I thought you were full of shit at the time, and I still do, ha ha. But, I think that says a lot about your world view, that you see things that way, you know, and I respect the hell out of it. And it’s also why I’m asking you this favor, because I know if there’s anyone who can do it, it’s you.

You always used to tell me I rambled on too much in my writing, when I was in your class, so sorry if I’m doing that, even now! I want you to have my body turned into a book. I’ve arranged for my organs to be harvested and donated as soon as I’m declared dead. Some asshole will get to enjoy my spotless liver! Anyway, the rest of me will be held at the White Falls morgue until everything can be processed. I’ve set aside a good lump of money to pay for everything, my lawyer should get you the details on that.

None of this is binding, of course. You could have me cremated and take the money and do whatever you like. I won’t know. And if G-d has something to say about it, then maybe he shouldn’t have made me a fucking cripple! Ha!

Anyway. I want you to fill the book with my poetry. I know its garbage, you told me often enough in so many words, but it is part of me anyway. I want the book to be all me, the cover, the pages, the ink. I’ve read a lot about it, it shouldn’t be that hard.

It was cool being your student, take care!

                -Ryan”

and wished for his body of work- poetry, to be collected, and made into a book. Not published, rather he wanted, specifically, for a single book to be written, and constructed.

This itself was not a strange request, but it was that the student wished for his body- his actual body, not his poetry- to be processed to make the materials needed for a traditional book binding.

    Alexander said the letter was included as part of the young man’s will, and had been hand delivered by his lawyer earlier in the week. As for the request there in, the academic term for this is anthropodermic bibliopegy, and it isn’t, in itself, a novel idea. Though he wished to take it a step further than any historical examples I’d heard of. He specifically wished for the book to be ‘all him’, and so that would mean not just the leather cover of the book—   He mentioned by name the pages and the ink, from parchment and bone char respectively, I’d think, but also by my imagining his tendons for the binding, and excess cartilage and bone to boiled into a glue.

    What could possess a person to desire such a statement for their legacy I can only hope to imagine. Which is to say, I did imagine— this notion I can scarcely omit from my mind, not only because I was tasked with fulfilling it. Oh, certainly I could have denied, I owed Alex no favors, nor to his student, certainly, but I’ll tell you now that I did not. I didn’t deny the request. My reasoning isn’t important, but I’ll tell you; partially, it was the pride in saying I’d accomplished such a unique act. And, partially, it was from a respect I grew to recognize in myself, for the audacity of the request.

    The process, for those curious, is not arcane. The production of parchment in particular from a human corpse is not wholly different from its procurement from a slaughtered calf- though, given I had but a single body to work with, some planning had to be done to get the necessary number of folios. I was in luck: the student was somewhat fat. To my understanding, he had a degenerative disease, and was mostly bedridden, near the end of his life. If your mind wanders down the same strange alleys as mine, you might consider that he plumped himself purposefully to give me more material to work with in the end, knowing that his end was fast approaching. And he must have considered this plan of his some time in advance. That is speculation on my part, none the less, but I cannot conceive of a soul deciding to be turned into a book after death on a whim.

[Archive] Anthropodermic Bibliopegy (Draft 01)

   I've tried to write about this thing several times, but it always seems to come out rambling, awkward, or both. I've had trouble finding a good angle on it. This was my first serious, if somewhat heavy-handed attempt— and one of the first pieces of longer personal fiction I wrote, sometime in the late naughts.

 

    The bones always took the longest. I would sit beside the old, cast iron stove for hours at a time, tending the fire as I charred those most resilient remnants of human existence. Under the right conditions, bones can last thousands of years— even longer of course with the curious miracle of fossilization, transforming what was once living into permanent immutable stone. My victims would never experience such timeless solace. And that is what they were; victims. I’ve had to make peace with that. Really, that is what takes the longest. The long hours of blistering fingers and sweat dripping down from my brow, though arduous, could not compare to the lifetime it would take to truly wrap my soul around the atrocities I was committing, the cold reality of the vulgar artifact I was constructing. But I would take those hours to recollect, still, as it seemed it was one of the few moments of peace I had in those days. My life had so become such a swirling whirlwind of toil in an effort to complete my work… it was impossible to take for granted those moments of inner dialog, haunted though they were by the visceral memories of loss, a profound loss that defies description, though I may make attempts— and the noxious stench of burning human remains. That is an unforgettable smell, one that I regrettably never became nose-blind to. Perhaps it was those sensations that would etch that particular step in my process into my mind despite its relative placidness.

Loss, of course, was important, not just to this step in particular, but to my arcane task in its entirety. Perhaps even the most important, because even setting my exacting precision aside, this act of inhumanity would be pointless if it did not mean something to me. I’ve speculated that this important factor is what has stopped others from stumbling upon slivers of what I was trying to achieve in the past.

Certainly others have murdered and butchered and even delved into esoteric bibliopagy as I have, though perhaps not to the same extent. But, most of these acts have been perpetrated under the apathetic haze of disturbed psychopathy- or, more disturbingly, due simply to a misanthropic lack of empathy by those whom might be considered otherwise pathologically sane. Because, after all, what value does a life have to a base animal? Savagery is endemic to the natural world, but… to care for another being so deeply, through love, or friendship or kinsmanship- or even only to value the life of another objectively, this is a purely human phenomenon.

To have asked the me that existed before I took the first step along this path to damnation, what the value of a human life is- or, more specifically, the life of a loved one- that me, who is of course long dead and gone now, would have responded that life is valueless- or rather, priceless, that one could not put a value to a head. To make some manner of objective calculation of another’s worth is to examine your own worth- and then you must ask, what are you measuring yours or their worth against? Against some idealized version yourself, or an idol? Against the ever growing and changing needs of a society? Against the abstract and subjective values of that society, or his contribution to it?

Ultimately, it seems that the value he has to those closest to him in his life, those that knew him or at least loved him, that is what seems to mean the most. That was my conclusion, ultimately, as I have given this much thought. Human compassion is, as the fossils I mentioned earlier, immutable- if perhaps fleeting and ephemeral.

This is because, even if you cannot assign a value to another man’s life, you can assign his value to yourself in relation to others. This is a strangely confusing concept, despite being an innately human one.  Let me explain.

We make these sorts of judgments often without realizing it. I’ve always found it best to shine light on the idea by picturing it in its hypothetical extreme. You are given a choice. Someone has to die. Shall it be your neighbor, or a man you have never met?

I suppose this is a rather bad example, because I’ve known more than a few to detest their neighbors to the point of wishing to do the deed themselves. All right then. There are two men you have never met. One is old and has lived a long life. The other is a young man who has just married, and wishes to start a family. Do you see how easily your mind will say, “Oh, of course we should pick the old man” And if you think a bit harder, you might say, “Yes, of course, the old man would have died soon anyway, right? The young man has so much life ahead of him!” But this is tricky, you see! Because in this example, your mind instinctually is valuing these men by their potential to live, which is utterly arbitrary. What if we were to imagine which might be missed more? One might still say the young man, but the old man’s death may have an impact on many more lives than that of the young man, if only because he has had longer to live. And again, we are jumping to conclusions about these men, so perhaps this too is a poor example, but you may begin to see the picture I am painting.

Let us forget about these abstract examples, because they prove nothing. One could easily answer the question above by saying “I do not care, kill either one, neither affects me” and while this may seem like a terribly cold answer (though the question itself is, admittedly, emotionally frigid), understand that this is the key to what I am getting at. So imagine if instead I said to you that I will kill either your grandfather, or your son. Pick, now, which one it shall be. Suddenly, our morbid hypothetical becomes instantly relevant to anyone who has both a grandfather and a son. I can imagine that there are few who would choose their grandfather- or even their father- to live over their own child. Indeed, I can imagine few grandfathers who would be pleased to know that they were not the one marked for death in this scenario. It is instinctual to value our children above all else, even other members of our family, even over ourselves. Siblings, mothers, lovers, none of these compare to the love felt for a child, no matter what sort of person that child is, no matter what they have experienced. It is a valuation measured against nothing. But our cruel thought experiment has yet to reach the apex of depravity.

Imagine now, though I’m sure you do not wish to, if we posed our question to a mother, and asked her to choose between two of her sons. I will not dwell on this subject, because it is sickening, even to myself. But one must see that this is the other extreme of our scenario, in opposition to the case where apathy makes the choice between two strangers unimportant, to where compassion makes the choice impossible. Our spectrum lies between these two incarnations of horror, and place those in our lives on this value scale without realizing it. This is, of course, a scale between unconditional love and indiscriminate apathy, to put it in more clinical terms. It does not include those that we detest, however, which involves a different sort of passion.

Indeed, it is a different sort of thing all together, because to begin to hate another person, you must first , at least partially, view them as an object, rather than a human being. An object onto which you project your malcontent- but amplified, of course, because they are a willingly detestable object, rather than, for instance,  a rock on which you stub your toe, which meant you no harm, but still registers as a target for your annoyance. A man who kicks you in the shin has no such reprieve for inanimaty.

Anyway, this valuation is vital, though I do not completely understand why. And, understand, this is not a thing that is exclusively extended to other humans. One cannot dismiss the love one might have for his dog; even an object can be so cherished to inhabit this spectrum of value. But dogs and possessions rarely have the impact needed for what my work entails, but honestly that could say more about me than about the human condition in general.

What little research I have done seems to indicate that long ago, in the forgotten infancy of the human timeline, the personal loss necessary to empower the forces I have discovered was far, far less severe. The sacrifice of livestock or harvest, or a portion of a hunt, this was all that was needed. Before I began, when I had time to speculate on these things, I thought often about what could have changed in the world to have made this cost inflate so severely. I supposed that like gods and miracles and other magic, it was driven far and away to the distant penumbral borders of human experience by our eventual expansion around the face of the earth.

As we illuminated every last corner of the globe, and gathered in our steady and practical exploratory way knowledge of every cog and gear that makes up the vast movement of the natural world around us, that this enlightenment pushed away the dark arcane forces of our world that can only exist when there are shadows to hide in, and mysterious incomprehensible ways in which to work. But now there are no shadows, there are now few niches left in science left that are beyond comprehension. To the average man, perhaps, yes, he lacks an in-depth knowledge of the world around him. But that looming shadow of the unknown is gone from his mind.

Common sense would say that the inexplicable artifacts left over in our global memory of the dark, beastial past are shadows of things that were never there to begin with. It is easy to assume that the world known to our distant forbearers was the same world we live in today. But, like a room newly entered with the blinds drawn, it appeared to be strange and with unforeseen boundaries, boundaries that were none the less there, but which eluded investigation until specifically sought out. So we drew the blinds and saw that, ah, yes, there are the walls. And so, you imagine, that is where they were before we could see them as well, of course! The thought that this could not be the case is beyond comprehension- the world we observe appears to obey very simple rules of causation, and we base much of our activities on the assumption that the world with which we interacted with yesterday is no different than the one we see today. This single assumption would be, ironically, what created the confining box of the universe in which we have trapped ourselves!

I ask that you imagine with me again- and no, do not worry, this will not be as morbid adventure into speculation as earlier- imagine that you are alive ten thousand years ago. This was the world in which man-kind was born into. You live with your kin, you hunt, and you gather things to eat. You carve tools from wood and stone to help you to eke out your existence in a world ambivalent to your survival. You meet and know, maybe less than one-hundred other individuals throughout your life- and it is a short life by our standards, but no less of a life lived. What do you experience? There is the world around you, a world that changes in unpredictable ways from day to day. You do not know where the rain comes from, you do not know what the land is like on the other side of the hills you can see in the distance. You do not know how your organs work, or why wood burns and rocks don’t. Those things aren’t even remotely important to you, and so, your world remains small. But obviously the world still exists outside of our periphery… right?

What if there is something about the human mind that permits us unconscious control over the world we live in? What if the evolutionary adaption of large complex brains was not to better understand and manipulate the world we found ourselves in, but was instead to produce some manner of effect on the world itself, to cement it into a state more habitable to us. Humans are driven to explore and understand- but why? What good does that do the individual? It gives him power over the world around him. But what if we only perceive this power as adaption on our part for the sake of convenience?

Ah… this must be very confusing, I apologize. I have… strayed very far here, but it is… it is hard not to discuss these things for they have captured my interest so entirely. Infact, it was that interest that led me on my path. So, really, I must apologize further, for I must implore you not to seek out the same answers that I did, curious though you may be. I found myself compelled to act once I had found the answers I was looking for, once I accepted them for what they were, and though I tried to dismiss them… the idea, like a seed once planted, grew. I gave in when hardship fell upon me but… it has only brought me pain and misery the likes of which I would have never dreamed possible for a single man to inflict upon himself. I cannot stress this enough- to understand, truly, the world that we live in, is to desire to have the power to change it, at the most fundamental level. This concept… Heisenberg called the idea Unbestimmtheit, which means ‘undeterminedness’ and it applies to the world we experience as well as the world of sub-atoms. And to control it… that power is a temptation that, once you see how close, and within reach it hangs… at least for me, I could not stop myself, though I so wish that I could have. I cannot close my eyes without wishing I could go back and stop myself.

I cannot close my eyes without smelling the charred bones of my wife and daughter.

Boneblack, the char one makes from bones, looks and feels quite a bit like charcoal. It was a small grace, in hindsight, that many of the elements that went into my cadaverous project would appear to a casual observer to be relatively benign, on the surface. In this case, the resemblance was not untoward- after all, the process would have been essentially the same if I had substituted wood for bone, but…. the smell was off. It also had a somewhat greasy texture to it, and soiling my clothing with the powder- a frustratingly common occurrence- would result in a blackish yellow stain. The stains were, as far as I could tell, permanent, and no amount of washing would completely remove them from any surface they defiled. They might become dull and less noticeable, but still accusingly present. That was an inconsequential trial that I had to deal with during each process, stains. It seems like every substance one might derive from a human body will irreparably sully your clothing, or anything else it comes in contact with. I’m sure I could make some sort of analogy there with the acts I was committing and their stains on my conscience, but honestly I do not feel like being poetic about this particular aspect of what I have done. It was disgusting. It was like a macabre perversion of real artistry- at every step it was like that.

Boneblack is a vital ingredient in making the ink, you see. Blood and tallow on their own make a poor ink. The color seems rich at first, but fades quickly, and binds poorly to the vellum. I would collect the char carefully, pressing it into a cloth and setting it aside while I prepared the other ingredients. This part, the making of the ink, was often the step I would do last. Everything else would need to be done first anyway before I could begin writing, and I was concerned with the ink separating if I let it sit for too long- though as it turns out it was quite stable. By the time I was ready to work with the blood in this process, it was long sense icy cold. Collecting it was one of the first steps, and needed to be done quickly indeed before it coagulated. Mixing sour salts with the blood halts that, keeping the fluid thin. This also seems to have a preservative effect. I can so vividly recall those nights when I would, with soot covered fingers, set a pot of tallow to melt over the fire as I portioned out and mixed a batch of sanguine ink.

With everything complete and prepared, I sometimes gave myself a few moments reverie as I would wash the soot, blood and grease from my hands and face. I would methodically clean up my workshop  and change my clothing. Cleaning… it was calming if only because it seemed in a way like the only step, at that point, that had a degree of normalcy. Simply cleaning- myself and my workspace. It reminds me, just thinking about it, of the life I used to have. The artistry of book binding, restoration work- that of course can be a dirty process itself, so cleaning up after each step was already part of my process, you understand? I would, in that life I left behind, take the time to reflect and appreciate- it’s an easy thing to do when cleaning ,you know? It is like retracing your steps, returning to any little parts of yourself that you… mn, I am going on and on yet again.

But still, cleaning up, you may step back, and see more fully what you have completed, and what is left to accomplish. This is a thing that I found applied even to this hellish task. I found there was… there was something to be appreciated, the effort and precision I had expended. The process was tortuous yes, but… but still, each time I became a little more… numb. Numb, though I abhor to admit it, the human mind cannot help but to grow callouses over areas of repeat abuse- even to the gruesomeness of what it was I was doing- and then… Then, dare I even suggest that I became more than a little satisfied with the artistic nature of…. of…     No.

No!

 I refuse to even acknowledge, to even discuss that!

That any of this could be artistic or…, or beautiful in any way- that is sickening! Dear Lord, I am sorry, I am so sorry, but I am- I must remain disgusted with myself.

Every time I sit and give thought to my monstrous, monstrous actions, I feel myself slipping more and more and MORE into this callow, unfeeling creature.

               A creature that can look at a grisly book, bound and foliated with human flesh, words written in his victims’ own blood, bound with glue made from their skin and sinew…. An animal that could look at such a thing and see… and see some… aesthetic merit…

God in heaven, what have I become.

But this is a facet of my self-built hell- I cannot, must not allow myself to slide into that unfeeling apathy- my personal agony is paramount to my goal. I can’t let myself forget that.

You must forgive me again; I am a man ever at odds with himself. Perhaps I am commendable for maintaining my sanity at all, but still… it is likely frustrating to listen to a coward ramble and self-flagellate.

Ah, you thought I wasn’t a coward? You must have thought that certainly, if I had committed such atrocities, why… certainly I must have had a good reason. And to remain so stoic in the face of such hardships! Truly a respectable man! Ha! Ha! I have never been anything but a coward.

Oh, yes I wouldn’t be surprised if you became dis-interested in my sordid tale at this point, knowing now I am something less than an upstanding character. I wouldn’t blame you. I said earlier I would go back and stop myself if I could. Oh god, if I could- I even dreamed that maybe… maybe I could just be careless. If I could just have been careless, I could have been caught, stopped, maybe murdered, righteously so. It has often felt like that is the way the story should have played out… I am clearly some manner of villain. But it is a reminder that I do not live in a fairytale, I suppose. But I’m telling you the ending now, aren’t I? Let me start at the beginning before you are further off-put by my madness.

Before the bone charring and the ink making, the tanning or butchery, I should tell you something of how I started down this winding path to hell. Fittingly, it began with a book that I came into possession of. I worked then as a restorationist. I repaired and restored paintings and occasionally furniture, but primarily old books and documents found their way into my workshop. It is a trade handed to me by my grandfather- it skipped a generation, as my father had his eyes on bigger goals in life. But not I. I loved it. I always have. The sight and smell of old books, the feel of those dusty pages and ancient bindings- ah, and then breathing life back into them, swatting away the disrespectful hands of time that rip and tear and yellow and crumble. There was something heroic and artistic about it that appealed to the shy, quiet young man that was I. So, as I was saying, there I came across this book, this ancient book. Miraculous that it had not crumbled to dust ages and ages ago, truly, as I’ve honestly never seen one older. Even then, I suspect that it had been copied, many, many times, as each one’s predecessor fell apart.

The book, I would come to find out, was a copy of the long sought Book of Thoth, a tome supposedly penned by the eponymous Egyptian god himself, as a boon to humanity. The book was said to contain magical and esoteric secrets; those who believed in its existence had searched for it for centuries- for the original that is, as there were several books that claimed to draw material from it as a source, or discuss it, but never a true Book of Thoth. Yet, there in my hands I held a tome that claimed to be just that, and upon decipherment of its title, I could almost viscerally feel the power of that history behind it washing over me.

The book’s previous ownership was, and still is something of a mystery, one that I never unraveled. An occasional client of mine brought in a sizeable stack of books to be treated and checked for worms, or something like that. They had been acquired from an old library, liquidated due to closure- if there were records of where the book came from before that, I could not find any. And believe me, I looked. It was a curious thing, this book; large and thick and filled with diagrams I could not understand, and words in a language I could not read. Certainly there had to be someone who could decipher it- or at least who could tell me how to go about such a task myself. I always liked puzzles, you see. But no. Nothing. Perhaps this simply speaks to my lack of networking skills, but none the less, it is for the best, I suppose.

The text was clearly written in a Coptic script, that much was obvious. This ancient derivative of the Greek alphabet would be familiar to any well versed in ancient Egyptian documents. But fascinatingly, confoundingly, the script in this tome contained additional, strange symbols that were unfamiliar, and, in fact, dissimilar to any I had ever come across. In addition, the language it was written in could not possibly have been Egyptian. What words I could read on face value were not of any language I had ever seen, nor even apparently similar to any. I thought that, perhaps it had been a transliteration from some esoteric sub-Saharan source, and ultimately that was the assumption that I started with in my research.

It took me several years. I am… I am to this day, not even certain that my translation was accurate. There were many conclusions that I jumped two in my effort to make the book’s contents known that were, perhaps, careless to make, but I felt so compelled… At any rate, my final result was readable, and I took that as affirmation that I had done my job well. What I found horrified me, repulsed me, but… but what was implied, I could hardly believe. I thought.. I thought, while in the process of translation that what I was writing would make sense when I read it in full…

After the work of reproducing the text was done, I put my project aside for many years. I… still, refuse to discuss precisely what that book contained, but.. suffice to say that it was ridiculous, what was suggested, what was implied. And I mean implied- for the text did not explain any of the outlandish prescriptions about the world that it claimed as simple facts, it was as though the writer, Thoth, or whomever he may have been, expected the reader to already have knowledge of the base lore behind arcane forces this work dealt with, but that the book was simply some manner of instruction manual- which is absurd, of course.

So, you may forgive me for not taking it seriously. It was only later, when I found myself in a state of mind more conducive… or at least, weak enough to actually consider attempting… I disgust myself still, but let me explain.

I mentioned earlier what a shy man I was. The fact that I would perish old and alone had been something I came to terms with as a young and awkward young man. And I did not mind the thought, so much- though of course, I’d had no idea what it was that I was casting aside so easily. But things went, as things often do, quite differently. Sweet Amélie found me despite the shell of disinterest I had built around myself, as though to dissuade the opposite sex in spite of myself, (I think many youths do this). She would say, “François, you may love your books, but they can never love you back, you stupid man!” and I would, in histrionic frustration, agree to set my work aside for whatever thing she wished to drag me off for- it never mattered what it was. Absorbed as I may have become in my work, being with her made my world of dusty tomes and moldering paper so much brighter. We ran off together- several times, infact, because we always came back when we grew home sick. But after a fashion we started a family together. I had known her for several years by then, but the thought of settling down had not occurred to us until then. The curse of children born to sleepy lives, who want nothing more than to see the world, I suppose.

Or first child, my son, Henry, died in still birth. It was a cold, tragic dose of reality to a couple of children who fancied starting a family. These things numb over time, but it still marks in my mind the turning point. That loss of the wide eyed look we had on the world. The death of a child is a stupid thing. I mean that in the way that, in the animal kingdom, it is a thing that is almost common place. Animals, in response, will often invest very little in their children early on, but humans are different. We invest energy in our children, mental energy, dreams and expectations, from before the child is even born.

And so, when that dream is obliterated before it can even start, specifically when it is supposed to start, like a gift dashed away right as it is given, it is almost the most cruel time for it to happen. To not have a chance to enjoy, even a moment of your child’s life. But it is stupid in that, though it is a death, it isn’t like a normal death. When a loved one dies, there is a vacuum formed in the lives of those they leave behind, and that ache dulls so slowly, even if it is expected, as with an ailing parent. But for a newborn, the hole instead is one they were expected to fill, a hole crafted specifically for that young life.

So our lives became very different, suddenly. As I said, it is cruel. I wonder sometimes if our daughter felt that hole as she grew, as though perhaps it wasn’t one that was meant specifically for her. We never even told her, of course, but I wonder if she knew. Perhaps we held her a little too closely, when we might not have otherwise. She was born a year or two later- and again, the cruelty crept into even the new miracle of her birth. The hopeful expectation that should normally fill a parents mind as their child is being born, and the months prior was instead filled with dread that our horror would repeat its self. And still, as she grew, when you have already lost a child, you look over your shoulder all through her life, expecting death to be right around the corner, as though you had tricked him by having a second child, and if he notices, he will rip her away from you.

I speak so morbidly of this, but it is likely only my recollection to see that looming shadow. In truth, Adelise grew happily, and she made us proud parents. Our lives with her were content, and when I am not dwelling on morbid thoughts, I like to remind myself of those times. It seems like a fragile instant in my life, then, when our family was happy and normal- and I say normal because my life later became pointedly not normal. And instant seems like a good way to describe this; my life is a tragedy, you see, so any reprieve from sorrow may never last more than a single act. My wife’s cancer was a cold surprise sprung upon us, caught far too late for it to be dealt with beyond making her comfortable and waiting for that black cloaked death we had been expecting for so long. It was no consolation that it came for my beloved, and not for my daughter. I spoke earlier about that morbid choice, and I do not think, honestly, that I could have chosen between the two of them, even ultimately irrelevant as it was.

I am a weak man, and it was around this time that the book itched at the back of my mind. Imagine the power to change the world you live in… to change the life you have lead with the knowledge of already walking some of those infinite paths you might walk down. I doubt there is a man or woman alive who hasn’t dreamt of that sort of power. I could feel my life crumbling down around me, because my Amélie, she was my life. As she grew more and more ill, I could feel myself slipping away from her, perhaps you could say prematurely; but then, I did tell you I was a weak man. And so it will perhaps not surprise you that my heart opened for another. I was not the shy child I had been when my wife and I met, but I suppose you could still describe me as reserved, and I certainly did not seek out companionship. But when lightning struck twice, and it did find me, when she found me- Cosette, I was rubble of a man beaten down too many times, and I was, ashamedly, receptive.

This is an embarrassment of mine, a deep shame to compare with my later deeds, but I cannot deny reality. She rebuilt the man I had once been, and though my wife had many good days left in her, and though my heart had sung once for her and no-one else, the bad days began to eclipse what little life was left in her. Do not mistake me- I did not give up on her… not until… not until my circumstances changed. I still loved her. I still love her, but desire is not always, as I discovered naively and confusedly, one dimensional. Cosette restored in me the life that I had once had, the life that had been quickly fading to match my wife’s own failing health, and I began to even envision a life with her beyond what I had once had with my wife. Dear Amélie was truly my better half, and she had been the most wonderful partner I could have even encountered, and yet… and yet, as a man grows older, he may not want the same things he did in his youth. Though my wife and I had had our childish fun, always returning to the nest after running off as though the world expected nothing of us, Cosette was a different bird. She wanted to leave- and truly leave, not to return. She had a wanderlust in her that I admired, and the thought of escaping the pain that my old life had slowly perished into was… exciting.

Life is littered with accidents. We spend more of our time than many of us would be comfortable acknowledging making plans for things that never come to fruition. Either because plans are prone to changing, or.. accidents. Things that cannot be accounted for that turn your world upside down. Cosette loved me, despite my innumerable flaws, despite that I was still attached to another- despite that I still truly loved my wife. And, impossibly, despite even the sickness of betraying someone who so clearly is dependent on you in the twilight of their life, she accepted me. I felt like I monster, but she didn’t see that, and she made me forget that I thought that of myself as well.

I was at my wife’s side that day. I felt that she needed me more- it was not one of the good days for her. If I had only… but no, I could say that of so many other moments in my life.

A car struck Cosette’s bicycle while she crossed the road, and her candle was snuffed out in an instant, her beautiful, lithe, songbird body mangled in that intersection. Her flat mate told me, some time later, that she had left to buy flowers for me, that foolish, irreplaceable woman. I had never even told her of my allergies. I would have swollen up like a blimp, but she knew no better, and so, was dead on my account, indirect though it may be. I was in agony for weeks, and my poor sweet wife, she thought it was on her account- a notion that made me sicker still, disgusted with myself, and heartbroken.

That, you see, was the place I was in, the darkness, the darkest place a man can be in his mind, when I returned to my work, which had sat untouched for several years then. To bury myself in a fantasy more twisted than the thoughts my mind already was flirting with was… relieving in a way. I sat up late many nights after that, pouring over the text that I had compiled out of that arcane document- referring to the ancient tome as well, for its various diagrams and illustrations I had not attempted to reproduce. The book draws out- in minute detail, I should add- the process of creating a hellish artifact. The power I have told you of… it is centered on sacrifice. The ancients, perhaps, assumed they were giving tithes to a benevolent (or malevolent, for I suppose it does not matter) deity, who would grant boons in response. I do not think this is how it works. I am loathe to refer to it as magic, for there is too practical a functioning to its machinations for it to appear spiritual, but that is simply my interpretation. At any rate, it is clearly an anthropocentric force, the human element being paramount to its workings. Sacrifice is rewarded with power.

I mentioned earlier of my speculation that the cost involved has become so much more vastly severe in modern times, but I of course have no evidence of this. I have only what the book instructs for me, and in this, it is explicit. Though many may value their own life above all else, giving one’s life in this way would be a meaningless gesture, as there would be no one left to receive the resultant boon. At any rate, simply taking a life, yours or anyone else’s’ is not enough. The process involves binding… I suppose you could call it a soul. Many souls in fact.

No, as I say it, soul does not seem like the right word. Perhaps you could say you are binding their essence. Or at least, the essence they had to you. Because again, I must reinforce this concept that the value of a life in this way is not at all intrinsic. It is only the value they have to yourself that is of interest here. None the less, this binding must be done in a specific way- the book does not discuss why, but I suppose it must involve this.. this impression of a life needing a point of reference. And so, the artifact that is made- the book is constructed from the flesh and blood and bone of those you wish to bind. Their lives are taken by your hand- not, necessarily, purposefully, I should add, so long as the blood that is spilled is on your hands alone. Then you must make their skin into parchment and their blood into ink, and you must inscribe the binding.

The book is bound with the flesh of your victim in whom you assign the highest value. This is very important. Ultimately, I suppose any of your victims could be used as the binding, but the power contained in the foliations seems to use the binding as a sort of axiom, and for you to use flesh of lesser value would make the artifact imbalanced. The book did not go into detail on this ,so again, this is mostly speculation, but its instructions were specific and I had no reason to doubt them. No reason, of course, aside from this entire thing that it was suggesting that I do being utter and complete madness. To this day… to this day I am still uncertain how I actually convinced myself of this course of action. I sat for a whole night contemplating as I looked upon my wife’s failing body. Her parent’s had died before I met her, and she had no siblings. Many of her friends had moved away over the years, and in her ailing state she had dropped correspondence with most if not all of them. The rest of her friends had, as people often do,  disgustingly abandoned her, like rats on a sinking ship, none of them desiring to console a dying friend in her last hours. People can be sickening, but I suppose I am being a hypocrite. My point is that if the time of her death were to come a month or two early… well, I alone would be around to notice. Myself and our daughter anyway. At the time, I strangely had not thought of her. Suddenly finding that you would be motherless in the next year had hit poor Adelise very hard. She asked to come home from boarding school early, to be with her, but my dear wife absolutely forbade it. She demanded that we remember her only as she had been, and hated the thought of imprinting the image of her frail corpse upon her only child’s mind. She was a difficult woman.

When one thinks of something like this, the mind goes to strange places. I watched her, my wife, as she sat up in bed, and wretched dryly over the floor beside her bed, only to fall back into a cold sleep when her body gave up on trying to vomit. What little food she could get down was usually lost this way. I saw a woman miserable, alone and in pain. What if, thought I, I could alleviate that pain. What if I could give her peace… and at the same time, give myself the light of my life back, my sweet Cosette? Would that not be what she would want? For me to be happy? For her suffering to end? Even if, I thought, even if the process laid out in that book was pure nonsense, even then… would it not be the kind thing to do to put her pain to an end? If I were to do so, I would need to dispose of her body discretely either way, otherwise the deed would be discovered. I did not think she would want her husband put in prison for only doing her a kindness. So if I were to do this… this thing with her flesh and bones after the fact, just to try could I truly be blamed? What harm would come of it?

So, like that I had made up my mind- though I still thought on it for several nights, hoping, the more I considered it, the less distasteful the idea would become, despite my justifications. It did not, but that dissuaded me none.

And so, on what would be her last night, I sat beside her wheelchair as she watched the sun setting. I wish I could say it was a particularly beautiful one, but it was not. The sky was dull, with a rainstorm thundering to the west, occluding most of the sky’s beauty with a dark hateful grey. I held her hand and she clutched it wanly.  I took her to bed, carefully gave her twice the amount of the drug she used to help her sleep, and laid her down. I caught then, a look of my gaunt and harrowed face in the mirror, and a cold-eyed ghoul stared back at me, his gaze dripping with revulsion at what I was about to do. I waited until her breathing was slow and steady, and then clamped my hand down over her nose and mouth, holding her body down  with my weight. She didn’t wake. She barely stirred. Her body had so little energy left to resist with. And it was done. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, but the time holding my hand to her face felt like aeons. I wept while the rain pounded the roof and windows, drowning out my self-contemptuous wailing. I felt my heart breaking over and over again, the thunder booming accusingly in my head after each flash of lightning illuminated the bedroom, the mausoleum, my wife’s half lidded eyes reflecting me, her murderer, in each of those brief haunting instants. Until the dawn I wept, until my eyes were dry and swollen. The sunrise, mockingly, was the most beautiful I have seen in my life.

Hell Above

 This was a short piece I started last year but lost interest in. I've always wanted to do the story-told-through-letters thing, but haven't quite found the right inspiration yet.

 Dearest Beloved,

    Consider this a follow-up to our previous correspondence. Reports from the university astronomers indicate that the creature is, in fact, dead. It is, certainly, a creature— that is, a singular entity, but thinking of it that way has never been productive. It is an environment— much in the way a bacterium would consider a human body. I am writing this to you, my beloved, wherever it is that you are. Somewhere, I understand, that the ordinaries of this world are foreign to you. A place, I am sure, would seem alien to me as well. And yet, as it is a place, I understand, where the enormous otherworldly arm that has dominated our sky for one hundred years is absent, I do so envy you. 

    The magnitude of this being defies description. The bulk of its arm intersects the path of our earth more and more every year. It has caused perturbations of our orbit, not not as much as one would expect. It seems that our magnetic field has some sort of effect on its flesh that carves into it. The moon, however has not fared well. It was long ago thrown into a strange orbit, one that has been growing more distant each year. That would be more concerning without the looming flesh that fills the sky each autumn.
    Our earth is like a swinging pendulum blade, carving further into the arm of the beast each year, the flesh parting gracefully as though there were a tactile edge to our ionosphere.
    And this brings me back to my main point. The creature is dead so the astronomers say, but the arm is not. The immune system of this beast will be our ultimate end.
    When the first reports of the creature's death came to the emperor, the state psychics were put on private trial almost immediately. Their claims of communication with the creature were clearly fabricated, in an attempt to stir up some sort of insane cult among the populous no doubt. It has been well established that supernatural telecommunication does not adhere to the natural principals which restrict the speed of all things to that of light-waves. Funding from the Emperor's predecessor provided for the construction of a new, sophisticated lens, which has allowed the astronomers to peer for the first time at the body of the creature with enough resolution to determine that it is very dead. The central body, where they have discerned that the sensory organs are located, and there for, the center of whatever constitutes its nervous system, has been gorily damaged, as if impacted by something incomprehensibly large. From the spread of the viscera, and the presence of what could be called decomposition, it was estimated to have happened many eons ago. Additionally, the light that has traveled from the ruined corpse of the beast to our eyes began its travel thousands of years ago itself.
    Even still, it is clear that the beasts nervous system is either distributed, or acts considerably slower than light-speed. Alternatively, it is possible that for a beast of this size, the extremities must be somewhat autonomous, not unlike an octopus. Government paraxenologists have suggested that the creature would have used psychic telecommunication to control its limbs, though relativity would have still limited the speed at which it could have moved.
    Ultimately, this information is no more relevant than theology. The arm is here, dead or not, and this year, it may engulf the earth completely, raining its horrid antibodies down upon us. My associate in Brussels, a leading biophysicist there, claims that the math he has calculated for the arm's trajectory, indicates that it is rapidly shifting to entangle itself with us completely. He claims that the pull of the sun- which, he supposes, brought it in from the outer solar-system to begin with, will pull "der Tentakel" as he calls it, into the earth's orbit in a ring. Our orbit will be completely engulfed, and we will be swimming inside of its flesh for the next million years. This knot around the sun, he claims, is a stable formation, balancing the strange forces that work on the flesh of the arm with the sun's gravitational pull.
    He says we are, perhaps, lucky— if one has an abstract definition of luck. Initial calculations indicated that it would miss the earth and wrap tighter around the sun— an unstable situation, but one that would take hundreds or thousands of years, during which time the earth would become a frozen hell, deprived of sunlight.

    The theologists claim that the arm is, in fact, hell itself, and has been set upon the earth as punishment for our endless list of sins. Its an idea that rings some truth— the... things that rain on us, the things that the paraxes call antibodies, they could certainly be described as demons. Ironic, as it should be angels flying down from the heavens, wouldn't you imagine?

-With love as always, your Lewis