Thirteen Days of Midnight

by Leo Hunt

  “A question for another day, maybe. Let’s look at this book of yours.”

  “Right here,” I say, tapping my bag. “The Host definitely can’t get in here, can it?”

  “I’ve got hazel charms on the front and back doors, and around my bedroom walls especially. Spirits can’t enter this house, except perhaps on Halloween. All bets are sort of notoriously off on Halloween, as I have already mentioned.”

  “Yeah, I know. So we need to — hey! Get out of there! Bad dog!”

  Ham has taken advantage of our distraction to rear up at Elza’s sink, and is busy extracting a Bolognese-encrusted wooden spoon from the sink. He drops it with a start and slinks back down to floor level.

  “I can’t get over how huge he is. What’s his name again?” she asks.

  “Ham.”

  “Is it short for anything? Hamlet?”

  “Uh, no, I named him myself when we got him. I wasn’t that old. He’s named after my favorite sandwich filling.”

  “Of course. I suppose it was a bit much to expect any literary allusions from you.”

  “I’m here for a ghost hunt, not so you can criticize my dog’s name.”

  “Yes, yes. All right, bring your tea upstairs and we’ll get started. Do you mind if we shut Hamlet out in the garden? I can’t say I trust him in the house, sadly.”

  “His name’s not — yeah. Fine. Come on, son.”

  I grab Ham’s collar and lead him out through the glass door into Elza’s back garden. Ham drags his feet on the tiles, scrabbling in protest. I apply extra pressure to his neck, and he stomps outside in a huff. The backyard is long and thin, with a tumbledown shed and a scrawny apple tree. The hedges loom above head height, so he shouldn’t be able to escape. I turn back into Elza’s cramped kitchen. She’s standing in the doorway that leads into the hall, watching me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing. I just would never have had you pegged as a dog person.”

  She gives me one of her infuriating grins and walks out into the hallway, then up the stairs. I follow her across a landing cluttered with cardboard crates and half-assembled furniture and into her bedroom.

  Elza’s room is exactly what I expected. It’s tiny, and there’s stuff covering every available surface. There are old mugs and dirty plates in a greasy heap by her bed. There are posters for the Smiths and the Cure, David Bowie and Nick Cave. The wall above her unmade bed is covered in black-and-white photos of dead leaves, broken mirrors, abandoned buildings. Another wall is taken up by a bookshelf, which is collapsing under the weight of secondhand paperbacks and glossy art books. I can’t see any poetry, but I figure she’d probably hide it.

  Elza slumps onto her bed and pats the space beside her. The sheets smell of cigarettes. She unzips my backpack and pulls out the Book of Eight and the bundle of Dad’s papers, scattering them all over the purple duvet. She frowns at his nonsense writing.

  “Some kind of code, then.”

  “Like I said.”

  “And we can’t get this open”— she gestures at the Book — “because the clasps won’t come away. But you’ve seen one of your Host open it, so we know it’s possible.”

  Elza looks at the Book of Eight for a few more moments, then leaves the room and comes back with a hammer and a chisel.

  “You sure?” I ask.

  “I mean, opening it is a matter of urgency. If you don’t mind me damaging it a bit, I think this is the best way to go. Those clasps look ancient. If you don’t mind,” she repeats, giving me a look that suggests she’s going to smash the Book open whether I mind or not.

  I shrug. Elza puts the Book on the floor, kneels beside it, and arranges the chisel so it’s pointed directly into the hinge of one clasp. She raises the hammer in her right hand, then stops. For a moment I think she’s just trying to find the right angle to strike at, or is having second thoughts about breaking the Book, but she holds this position, kneeling, hammer raised to head height, for far longer than looks comfortable. Her arm is starting to shiver with tension.

  “Elza?”

  She’s frowning. Her jaw is clenched. Just as I’m starting to get properly worried, she sighs loudly and brings the hammer back down to the floor. She lets go of the chisel and sits back, looking at the Book with confusion and anger.

  “Stupid thing’s strong,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Stronger than it looks. Must’ve hit it five times.”

  “Elza, what are you talking about? You didn’t even try to break it open. You just sat there looking at it with the hammer raised.”

  “I did?”

  “I was here. Seriously.”

  “My head feels weird.”

  “I don’t think you should try to break into the Book again. I don’t think it appreciates people doing that.”

  Elza picks up the chisel and examines the tip for damage. Finding none, she frowns and puts it down. She runs her hands through her storm cloud of black hair.

  “Well,” she says. “This just got even more interesting.”

  However irritating I find Elza’s air of being Someone Who Knows About Things, she proves far more enlightened about the mechanics of Dad’s code than me. After a few moments of intense concentration on the pages spread out around her, she goes over to her desk, picks up a small makeup mirror, and holds it to the side of one of the coded pages.

  “OK,” Elza says after a moment of peering at the mirror, “it’s like I thought. Some of this is mirror writing. Not the most difficult encryption method in the world to break. I wonder why he even bothered.”

  I bend down and hold my head at a weird angle so I can see the reflected page. What was reversed is now the right way around.

  “Why on earth would you write some of this backward? It’s coded anyway, right?”

  “Very cryptic,” Elza replies. “So: What are these numbers? Are they dates?”

  “Could be . . . No, I’m wrong, they make no sense that way. Look at the spacing.”

  Elza sits back against the wall. She winds a strand of black hair around her fingers.

  “Maybe it’s a spell in itself? Numerology? There’s meant to be power in some numbers. Maybe you say them out loud?”

  “The Shepherd didn’t say anything when he used the Book.”

  “Oh, look, just try it? I’ll read you the numbers.”

  I slide down onto the floor, spin the Book of Eight around to face me. I try the clasps, but they’re locked tight. I put one hand on the cover.

  “Seven,” Elza says, “a one, but it’s reversed, four, three, but the three’s also reversed . . . OK, seven, five —”

  I repeat the numbers, feeling like a malfunctioning robot.

  “four, nine, three reversed, one, one,” she continues.

  “I don’t think this is working,” I say.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just don’t think there’s a combination lock to the Book that takes more than a few seconds to use. I mean, how many sheets of this stuff are there?”

  Elza sits back upright, lays the hand mirror flat on her duvet. She riffles through the pages of notes Dad left me.

  “A few hundred, I think.”

  “I mean, am I going to just repeat all of them? I don’t think it works like that.”

  “Good point. So the numbers mean something, but we don’t know what. Some are reversed, but we don’t know why. We have a book we can’t open, that resists any effort to break inside. So what else do we — OK, this sheet isn’t just numbers. What’s this?”

  She’s holding a sheet of yellowing letter paper with Dad’s handwriting scrawled over it. It’s less densely packed than some of the other pages.

  I — the Shepherd. Leadership — vision — speaks for the dead.

  II — the Vassal. Loyalty — honor — thankless service.

  III — the Heretic. Dissent — naysayer — unloved by God.

  IV — the Judge. Reason — closed-minded — pragmatism.

 
V — the Oracle. Intuition — wide-minded — prophecy.

  VI — the Prisoner. Desire — ravenous — an insidious thief.

  VII — the Innocent. Peace — purity — the kindling of being.

  VIII — the Fury. Power — rage — enemy of life.

  IX — the Necromancer. Mastery — sigil bearer — opener of the gate.

  “Any of that mean anything to you?” she asks.

  “Well, that’s the Host, isn’t it?”

  “Obviously. But is this about your Host or every Host? Is there always a Shepherd and a Heretic, et cetera? There’s so much I don’t know . . .”

  “The Vassal told me a bit but not much. And who knows if what he said was true? He acts helpful, but there’s so much he never says a word about.”

  “This part here: ‘The Necromancer — Mastery — sigil bearer.’ What does that mean? That’s talking about you, right? You’re the ninth member of the Host. Their master. So what is the sigil?”

  “Never heard that word before.”

  “Hmm.” Elza gets up off her bed, walks to her overstuffed bookshelf, and with cautious Jenga-playing movements eases a fat dictionary out from the bottom of a pile of hardbacks. Standing, she rests the dictionary on the edge of her desk and flips through the translucently thin pages. “OK: ‘From the Latin sigillum, “seal.” A magician’s mark, through which his power is exercised.’ So that’s interesting. This note of your dad’s says you’re supposed to bear a sigil. Where’s your sigil?”

  I reach into my backpack and take out the metal case full of rings. I unscrew the lid and let all nine tumble out onto Elza’s floor: golden rings, silver rings, a ring made from smooth green stone. A ring that’s lion-headed, another a silvery skull, a ring set with red stones, another studded with sapphires. Elza raises an eyebrow.

  “These are Dad’s,” I say. “He left them to me, with the Book. Do they fit the bill?”

  “Quite probably,” she replies. “A seal . . . Traditionally seal rings had designs engraved so they could be pressed into hot wax. Animal sigils . . . maybe this lion?”

  She picks up the lion-head ring, turns it over in her hands. She holds it close to one eye, squinting, like she’s trying to see through it, peek at whatever’s hidden inside. She puts it back down.

  “Not that one,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. It’s too obvious, anyway.”

  “What even makes you so sure only one of these is the sigil?” I ask. “Maybe I have to wear all of them. There’s nine, right? One for each of the Host.”

  “Sure. And one for the necromancer. The note says ‘the sigil’— singular. I don’t think you’d want people knowing exactly which ring was your sigil. If you wore only one, it’d be obvious. If you wear lots, it’s not as clear. Best place to hide a leaf . . .” She trails off. She closes her eyes, and runs her hands over the pile of rings. She bites her lip and picks one up, eyes still shut. “. . . is a forest,” she says, opening them. She’s holding a dull silver ring with a black stone set into it. “It’s this one,” Elza continues. “I’m certain.”

  Elza hands the silver ring to me. I weigh it in my palm. It’s no heavier or lighter than you’d expect, no hotter or colder either, but I notice the black stone is cut into an octagonal shape. The eight-sided black stone doesn’t seem to reflect the light of Elza’s room but instead swallows it, the stone appearing totally black and opaque. I slide it onto the ring finger of my right hand. Although I remember Dad’s hands as far chunkier than mine, the ring is a perfect fit.

  “So do you feel anything?” she asks.

  “Not really. Are you totally sure this is it?”

  I stand up, do a few mock karate moves, swiping at Elza with the ring hand.

  “Abracadabra!” I yell.

  She doesn’t crack a smile. Tough crowd.

  “Try the Book again,” she says.

  I sit back down, the Book in front of me. I pull at the clasps and to my delight and horror they spring open like the mechanism of a trap, with a small, sharp click. The cover is still shut. Elza kneels down on the floor beside me. Her eyes are wide, almost luminous. She’s winding and unwinding a frond of hair in her fist.

  “Do you realize how few people have seen inside this book?” she asks.

  “Not many?”

  “Not many at all. It’s one of the biggest secrets in the world.”

  “Here goes.”

  I grip the underside of the front cover, about to turn it and read the first page, and the Book swings open by itself, yellowing hand-cut pages thinner than any dictionary’s, thinner than new skin. The pages flow, moving by themselves in a blur, faster than my eye can follow, a torrent of pages that seems like it’ll never end. I see flickers of writing, of drawings and diagrams, and then the Book of Eight comes to a rest, open at what looks like the very middle pages. They’re both blank.

  I reach out with my ring hand, my sigil hand, and turn one page to the right. This spread is blank as well. I turn again, and again, each time finding the pages blank and unlined, trackless, dumb.

  “What?” Elza asks me.

  “I don’t know!”

  I turn the pages faster and faster, leafing through ten at a time, grabbing at the Book in desperation, turning pages by the hundred, and each one is blank, blank, blank.

  Friday doesn’t get much better from there. the Book of Eight remains blank, no matter how we try to read it. Pleading with the Book, commanding it, threatening it, all result in empty yellowing pages. What’s more, the pages seem to be inexhaustible. No matter how many blank pages I try to turn, we’re always in the exact middle of the Book. Whether it’s a hallucination or some kind of strange defense, we can’t decide.

  Instead we turn our attention to Dad’s coded notes. Elza tries numerous code-breaking techniques she found online, without success. After a few hours of this, I’m gnawing at the walls. We need to try something else.

  “I can’t do this,” I say to Elza, putting the stack of notes down.

  “You’re not giving up, are you?” she asks, glaring over the top of her reading glasses.

  “There has to be another way. This isn’t going anywhere. We’ve been trying for three hours now. I can’t just sit here copying numbers while my mum —”

  “What do you suggest?” she asks. “We’ve got the sigil, the Book, your dad’s notes. That’s it. What else can we turn to?”

  “There’s got to be something else . . . like . . . Berkley and Company! My dad’s solicitor. We could speak to him.”

  “Do you think he knows anything about the Book?”

  I think of Berkley’s electric-blue eyes, his predator’s grin. Vellum. . . . We have a man in Cumbria. He knew something, I’m certain. He knew what I was signing for.

  “He definitely does,” I say. “Let’s go and ask him about it. And I don’t think we should bother phoning ahead to make an appointment.”

  It’s raining when we get into Brackford. Elza’s face is tinted pink by her red umbrella. She clacks along in battered boots, pushing through the rolling horde of shoppers. Ham’s nearly choking on his collar with excitement at how many new friends he can see. We pass a shop window with a display of orange plastic pumpkins, all cut with black leering smiles. I feel like they’re mocking me. Halloween next Friday. We’ve got one week. The idea of Dad’s solicitor offering any kind of advice seems remote, but I feel sure he must know something. I run my thumb over the stone set in Dad’s ring.

  “You come here much?” I ask Elza.

  “My boyfriend lived in Brackford, so I’d be here most weekends.”

  “You’ve got a boyfriend?”

  “Had. Past tense. And don’t sound so surprised!”

  Elza swats her free hand at my face.

  “All right, all right! What happened?”

  “Oh, he went to university in September. London. Two weeks in he tells me he’s met someone else. So screw him, and screw Stephanie from Leeds, too. And no,
I didn’t stalk her online.”

  “I’m sorry, Elza.”

  “It’s all right. I’m down to Mouthful of Lemon on the bitterness scale rather than Rubbing Salt into Both Eyes.”

  “It’s hard for couples, long distance, apparently.”

  “There were signs, let’s say that. So how are things with you and the princess?”

  “Who?”

  “Holiday.”

  “What has she ever done to you?”

  “Well! We used to be friends, believe it or not. Back in lower school. And then we got to high school and suddenly she doesn’t want to know me, going around with Alice, telling everyone I was a lesbian because I liked David Bowie. Or the time they took my woodcut of Edgar Allan Poe that I had made in art class and —”

  “All right . . .”

  “— plus the way she throws her hair about like there’s a shampoo ad camera crew about to rush into school and start filming, and how she always smiles really wide like she’s reaaally interested in what you’re saying, she looks lobotomized —”

  “She’s not a bad person,” I say, though I don’t really know Holiday that well, and it seems like Elza might be better placed to judge her than I am. Elza makes a sour face. “Anyway,” I continue, “we’re here. This is the place.”

  Elza pushes through the double doors, which make a soft hooshing noise as they swing open, and we’re in the lobby, all bright marble and frosted glass. Nothing’s changed since Monday. A pair of plastic trees stand guard by the elevators. A group of old accountant guys pass us, trim gray hair and neat suits, glaring at Ham through rimless glasses.

  “Do you think they allow dogs?” asks Elza.

  “Act blind or something.”

  An elevator arrives. Ham looks at his reflection in the mirrored wall with bemusement, then turns his attention to nibbling Elza’s hand.

  “What floor was it?” she asks.

  “Doesn’t it say on the directory?”

  “There’s no Berkley and Company listed here.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the signs. It’s not listed here. There’s Hodge and Ridgescombe, Moebius and Sons, Vostok Incorporated, Goodparley and Orfing, but no Berkley and Company anywhere.”