by Sasha Pruett
Chapter Thirty One
For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
“What was that?”
“These pages... they actually feel warm.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed, of course I don’t notice much when I’m translating. I wouldn’t even have heard you if it hadn’t been for me stopping for coffee. You want some?”
“No thanks. Tell me about this book.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Well, these pages, they’re so thick and the ink it’s not black, it’s brown.”
“Yeah, that. Well even though the journal may have been used as late as the nineteenth century, the creator actually used techniques from as far back as 1100 A.D., and earlier. The paper had to be extra thick to last and was usually made of either cloth like plant fibers or treated animal skin.
As for the ink, that’s slightly more morbid. The reason why it’s brown and not blue or black is because it’s not really ink at all... it’s blood.”
“Blood? As in blood, blood?”
“Yup, but if you think that’s sick the cover and binding’s made of flesh.”
“Please say you mean pig skin, football kind of flesh?”
“I wish. I’d need to take it back to the museum’s lab to be sure, but from the way that thing reads I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it turned out to be human, and I’d be willing to lay money on it that the person that made it killed whoever donated that pound of flesh himself. For the cover and the pages.”
Susanne was now thoroughly disgusted and twice as scared as she was before, which she hadn’t thought possible. What kind of monster would bind a book in human skin then write its words with blood? She knew more than she had wanted to, but she still had to know one more thing, “Wendy, what’s the story with this page that’s burned?”
“Burned?” Her stomach somersaulted and a roller coaster looped in her bowels. How could she miss something like that?
“What page?”
“This one here that was stuck in between the last couple of pages.”
Wendy snatched the book from Susanne’s hands and there it was; a page she had missed, a page unlike all the others. Thick, yellow, and brittle with a deep soot encrusted around each letter, and this time she felt that strange sensation of warmth, an unearthly heat that radiated from the page itself as her hand hovered centimeters above it. She gently caressed a corner of the peculiar parchment, trying to smudge the soot testing its identity, but the residue would not budge. It was as if the carbon was a part of the page itself as were the words entombed within it, but that was impossible; wasn’t it? She pulled the paper as close to her glasses as she dared, but still the proof was before her eyes and growing in mystery.
Next were the words, black as coal and rough, yet uniform and precise. They didn’t appear to be written in ink. Point of fact, they didn’t appear to be written at all, but, each letter of every word had been burnt into the aging parchment and the acrid stench of sulfur clung to it, wafting to her drawn up nose, and stinging her nasal passages.
She was entranced, hooked, addicted; her burning sinuses didn’t matter. Her mind raced and whirled into action as she reached for a fresh notebook and her previous notes then began to decipher the burned message; and the burning question.
Susanne on the other hand looked on with trepidation and awe. Back and forth Wendy went, flipping pages, scribbling more lines, scratching out errors, checking, and rechecking, all in a whirlwind of excitement and panic. Until finally, at the height of it all, flinging the once delicately handled tome to the floor along with all her precious work and raced franticly out of the room, bounding for the stairs; taking them two at a time.
Curious and concerned, Susanne picked up the near illegible notes and trembled as she read the last scrawled sentence that Wendy Kinsington had written, “Oh dear God no!”