The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller

by Richard Long

  I have a true photographic memory, the kind that guarantees a perfect score in any test, the kind that easily passes itself off as high, perhaps genius intelligence, even if there are no other outward indications that this is the case.

  I sit. I watch. I listen. I record. I see all these people, but they don’t see me. I wish things were different. I’m lonely too, like they are. At least I can admit it.

  Some of them are better than they seem at first. Some of them are worse, much worse. Sometimes I think evil is just loneliness with nowhere else to go.

  Take me for example. All my life I’ve struggled to do the right thing. Well, most of it anyway. I’ve fought hard and long against the darker urges, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It’s easy to lay the blame on genetics, or on Paul and The Striker. I could even blame Rose if I wanted. But as I watched her and Martin through my closed eyes, as I heard her scream a cry of pleasure I had never heard, seen, felt, or even imagined, something clicked inside my head.

  I wish I didn’t see so much. I hate this gift sometimes. When I was younger, I thought everybody had it. I guess I was about six or seven when I mentioned “the eyelid movies” to Mother. She dropped her cup of tea. “You get them too?”

  She told me she had them all the time when she was younger and so did her sister. Her sister went a little crazy because of it, she said. That was the most I ever heard Mother talk about her past. She did tell me more about the eyelid movies though. She called them her visions. She said they were really strong when she was younger, then they came less and less frequently. Sometimes they showed the future and the past, but most of the time they were about other people, what they were doing or thinking in the present. It was more like that with me, I learned. Mine never faded away. They got stronger and stronger and stronger. After a while, I didn’t have to close my eyes, though it helped cut out the clutter of whatever else I was looking at. Mirrors and ponds are good too, but I like clear blue skies the best. It feels like I’m looking into another dimension. I suppose that’s true.

  Sometimes I can’t see anything. Sometimes the visions are so clear, it’s like I’m in the same room. They were much too clear that fateful morning. I could see everything. I could feel everything too. Their hearts beating. Pounding. My head pounding in a queasy echo. And right before I ran to the bathroom to heave up all the hate churning in my guts, I saw something else.

  I wasn’t the only one watching.

  The Book was everything. As his blunt fingertips skimmed the crinkled pages, old memories flickered through his mind like the stroboscopic sputtering of a hand-cranked nickelodeon. Paul breathed in deeply, savoring the poignant rhythms of a story that had been told and retold at numberless firesides for countless centuries until it was finally, faithfully recorded in this, the only volume of its kind in existence.

  He rifled through the yellowed leaves faster and faster, the words and images cascading in a blinding flurry, pages turning and yes, the Great Wheel turning with them, faster first, then slower and slower, so slowly until…

  Paul stopped at the center of the book. He stared at the two blank pages. They had remained forever unmarked, but showed him everything he’d ever known or would ever need to know. His eyes rolled backwards into his head until only the whites were showing. No, not the whites. His vein-etched orbs were the color of coffee-stained teeth. They matched the ancient vellum leaves almost perfectly.

  He stared at the pages with iris-less eyes and he saw. Saw Martin in bed with the girl. That girl. They’d been circling each other day after day, passing each other on the staircase, shopping in the same deli, flitting to and fro like moths circling a lightbulb, far more oblivious to each other’s existence, to their significance, than he. And now, she was here, driven by the will of her scum-sucking sire, her very presence heralding the prophecy. They had found each other. They had rutted. And even though neither of them had an inkling of what had passed between them, of what it meant or how deeply their connection was ingrained and yes, foretold, they would eventually arrive at the truth of it, and with that truth they would fully awaken. To each other. They would know.

  He would never allow that to happen. Measures had been taken.

  He gazed at the metal-studded face of the girl, oblivious to anything accept the man lying next to her, the man she inexplicably adored, the man she would destroy by the strength of her compassion, if she could not be stopped. He saw the mark on her chest, the crescent she concealed with her first tattoo. He saw the mark on Martin’s chest, the ring encircling his solar plexus. It was the sign he knew would appear this cycle.

  The training, as always, had been long and arduous. But the boy exceeded all his expectations. Her fingers toyed with the ridges of Martin’s scar as if she knew the story it told. The long, sad story. He thought back to the early days. The very early days. There was so much hope then. Now everything was stained and faded. So much promise. So much loss.

  The only consolation to his sadness, rage and loathing was that he was not alone in the witnessing, or his suffering. Right before he closed the Book, he saw one last, and not too startling, vision. It was me. Staring right back at him.

  Before I met Rose, before all the darker roads it led to, I had always been a collector. Being a collector is a lifelong adventure, an endless treasure hunt. If you’re a collector, you know exactly what I mean. If you’re not, you’ll probably never get it. Being a collector means that there’s always somewhere to go, always something to do, always the possibility of excitement, of discovery…of eureka!

  It’s little wonder why I love it so much. Collecting is the great obsession and distraction for the terminally lonely. The greater the obsession, the more compelling the need to seek and acquire, to escape that gaping hole. I needed all the help I could get.

  I never actually thought about becoming a collector. I already was one from as far back as I can remember. Most kids play with toys. I collected them. I would line them up in rows just to look at them. I didn’t really define any of this as “collecting” until they came out with those monster movie models you would assemble with that wonderfully stinky, toxic, brain cell-eating glue that millions of children are now deprived of.

  My collecting got out of hand gradually, by degrees. Always drawn to the morbid, I branched out from my monster toy collection to monster magazines and movie stills. I read every horror novel ever written. As I grew older, I began to lose interest in horror books. The monsters and ghosts and ghouls had gradually lost their main appeal, which was their ability to genuinely frighten me. They just weren’t real enough.

  I turned to the occult. Once again, I studied everything I could get my hands on—Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Luciferianism, Satanism, Pythagoreanism, Rosicrucianism, Paganism, Kabala, ancient legends and obscure myths, witchcraft, pagan festivals—the Druids. It didn’t stop with books. I learned about divination. Numerology, the I Ching, and the tarot. And guess what? I suddenly discovered that my little “gift” wasn’t limited to visions of the here and now—I could see the then too. Well, some of the time. Those visions were always murky by comparison, distorted like a funhouse mirror. Even so, it was enough to interest girls at a party. Keep the bullies off my back.

  I loved the tarot and started collecting old decks I found at flea markets or in musty, dusty antique shops and secondhand junk stores. One time I found a hand-painted deck that was so old I couldn’t believe it. The dealer only wanted forty bucks for it, which I haggled down to thirty. Any good collector is a good haggler. I recently had it appraised for several thousand dollars, though I’d never think of parting with it.

  See? That’s what it’s like to be a collector. Treasures mean so much more than money.

  I never told Mother about any of my occult wanderings, but I’m pretty sure she saw anyway. One day out of the blue she said, “Never use your gift for personal gain. And stay away from the darkness.”

  Oops. Too late.

  I left Mother as soon as I turned eight
een. I couldn’t wait to get as far away as I could, applying to East Coast Ivy Leaguers. My SATs and GPA were in the top two percent nationally. Got a scholarship to Harvard. Impressed? You needn’t be. I was expelled after the first semester for selling acid in my dorm. Oh, well. I didn’t fit in with the pink Lacoste polo shirt crowd anyway. My asshole preppy roommate ratted me out. I never should have had a roommate. Never had one since.

  I fled Boston for New York, far away from Mother’s outpost in Berkeley, moving into a small, cheap apartment between Avenues A and B. With only a high school diploma and minimal job skills, my career prospects were fairly grim. Even if I stuck it out at Harvard, I still wouldn’t be catnip for any headhunters, unless there’s a greater demand than I’m aware of for graduates with a major in evolutionary biology and a minor in anthropology.

  Guess what I did to make a living? Fortune telling. I put an ad in the Village Voice. The headline read: Scientific Readings. The “scientific” part mainly consisted of combining the numerology interpretations with the zodiac designations of the minor arcana cards in their readings. Translation: I could pick the dates when shit would happen. The accuracy of my readings was a surprise even for me. I had a very strong repeat business, which financed what I really wanted to do: collect stuff.

  At first it was more of the things I’d already been collecting. Tarot decks, Ouija boards, amulets, talismans and books. Lots and lots of old books, particularly books of spells, incantations and invocations. Grimoires. The Testament of Solomon, the Clavicula Salomonis, The Black Pullet, The Book of Simon the Magician, The Book of Enoch, The Sworn Book of Honorius, The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. Blah dee blah blah.

  We’re talking ritual magic here. Alchemy. I learned Latin, Greek, Coptic, Arabic and Aramaic just so I could read the original texts and come to my own conclusions about the proper translations. I spent every dime I made when the opportunity arose to possess one of the (hopefully) authentic manuscripts. The culmination of my efforts—and the beginning of my degradation—occurred after visiting a very old man in a very old bookstore in London. He claimed to have in his possession (and was offering for sale!), a slim volume with a white leather binding and yellow vellum pages, written in Greek. He said it was the Corpus Hermeticum written by Hermes Trismegistus.

  Depending on who you ask (if you actually know anyone who’s heard that name), Hermes Trismegistus was either: a) the Greek god Hermes; b) the Egyptian god Thoth; c) a combo Hermes/Thoth god; d) the human/god grandson of Hermes; e) a spiritual figure, maybe a god, maybe not, who reincarnates throughout history teaching his secret doctrine to worthy initiates; or f) Moses.

  I was fascinated with the various legends surrounding Trismegistus, so I jumped in with both feet, reading everything I could find, sorting through all the contradictory suppositions. My research began, as one should, I suppose, with the gods. Thoth was the god of wisdom who invented writing. Hermes was a herald, messenger and inventor. HT was thought to be all of that and more—a great sorcerer, the first alchemist—and a very prolific writer, composing thousands of texts, most of which eventually found their way to the Great Library of Alexandria. Only a handful of manuscripts survived the heretical purges of the newly Christian Roman Empire.

  Whether HT was a demi-god, a great sage or even a real person, all scholars agree that a rich legacy of esoteric teachings sprang from the Hermetic tradition. The surviving books attributed to Trismegistus or his followers were usually written in the third person, even though Hermes/Thoth is usually the main character—a kind, patient, wise teacher. Basically, he’s the answer man. The answers are usually veiled in cryptic dialogs between himself and some thickheaded apprentice, or one of his equally dense sons, Asclepius and Tat.

  The most legendary Hermetic work is the Emerald Tablet, which is said to contain the secrets of (drumroll, please) creation. The sacred text was carved into a big green crystal or maybe the world’s largest emerald. Composed of only fourteen verses in most translations, the Emerald Tablet became the basis of alchemy—the cookbook of creation. There are probably as many legends surrounding the origin of the Emerald Tablet as there are tales of its disappearance, discovery (and subsequent disappearances and rediscoveries). One thing I know for certain, it’s not on display in any museum.

  The Corpus Hermeticum is Hermes/Thoth’s greatest hits compilation. It contains most of the extant writings. So when this really old guy told me he had a really old copy of the Corpus Hermeticum written by the Great Master himself, I knew it had to be utter horseshit. Yet even if it was a legitimate Greek transcription I could interpret myself, it would be worth whatever he wanted.

  He wanted $11,100. “Interesting. How’d you come up with that price?”

  “That’s the number,” he replied grumpily in an unexpectedly rustic American accent, turning his head away, waving his arm like he was shooing a gnat. I thought he was being cute or ridiculous, equating the price with Hermes III, but I didn’t ruffle his feathers about it. I was too anxious to get my hands on it to get into a pissing match with the old geezer about something so petty, even though I was already haggling with him in my head.

  When he opened his small safe, put on his white gloves and pulled it out, my heart was beating like a bongo. He made me wear gloves too, which wasn’t surprising, even though my fingertips were itching to come in direct contact with the ancient vellum. Vellum is skin, by the way, usually lambskin, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  My first reaction was complete elation. I’d seen enough volumes like this to know that the binding and vellum could possibly come from the same time period associated with most of Hermes/Thoth’s writings—around 300 CE—the key transitional period from papyrus scrolls to parchment codices, driven by the emerging power of Christianity. The Greek hand-lettering was also consistent with other ancient manuscripts from the same period I’d seen in various metropolitan libraries. Best of all, just from reading the first few pages I knew that the material was truly the Corpus Hermeticum. Reading it in Greek immediately highlighted some discrepancies in the Latin and English translations I’d previously seen.

  Boy, this is going to be fun!

  Then I saw it. There on the spine, like a turd on a lotus flower. Someone had written “Hermes Trismegistus” in black ink block letters.

  “What is this shit?” I shouted, my booming pissed-off voice startling even me in the cramped quarters of his tiny office.

  “Don’t know who did it, don’t really care. Just wanna get it outta here. Been nothin’ but trouble for me. That’s why I’m sellin’ so cheap. You know I’m sellin’ cheap, dontcha?”

  I did. Despite the blasphemous desecration, it was still worth much more than the asking price, unless it was an extremely well-executed forgery. That was a risk, but one I was willing to take. “I’ll give you ten thousand,” I said. That was a hell of a lot of tarot readings.

  “The price is the price,” he muttered, crossing his arms across his birdlike ribcage.

  I paid. Cash. When I finally held it in my hands, skin to skin, I got such a rush I thought it really might be magical. I couldn’t wait to get back to my room and dig in. But he had another jack-in-the-box he was dying to spring on me.

  “Ever hear of anthropodermic bibliopegy?” he whispered as I made for the door.

  “Yeah,” I said, a shudder tinkling the ivories of my backbone. “Books bound in human skin.”

  “Ever seen one? Held one?” he asked almost tauntingly, displaying his yellow teeth in a quivering grin for the first time that day.

  “No,” I said. But I knew I’d be holding one soon.

  He strained to reach the shelf above my head, pulling a book down, handing it to me. No gloves this time. No, you wouldn’t want gloves for this. The cover felt…I guess crinkly would be the best way to describe it. Stiff and crinkly. The inside cover was smooth as suede. There was an inscription on the first page, written in an elegant hand that made it even more macabre: “The bynding of this booke is all that remains
of my deare friende Malachi Firth, flayed alive by Connor O’Ceallaigh on the First Day of November, 1238.”

  “I have more,” he said with a deranged spastic eagerness. He certainly did. Lots more. Mostly courtroom accounts of murder trials, covered in the skins of the condemned, a fairly common practice according to my new buddy, the Crypt Keeper. Once he saw how much I was enjoying myself, he figured I was a kindred spirit so he brought out the heavy artillery. “These ain’t for sale,” he whispered. “But I thought you’d like to see.”

  He opened a blue velvet curtain that hung floor to ceiling, concealing a doorway and the contents within. It was a narrow room, almost like a closet, with a creepy icon of some saint against an otherwise bare wall at the back. It was surrounded by bookcases containing many shelves holding many, many volumes, all with the same creamy tan bindings I was becoming way too familiar with.

  “Wow,” I said, honestly impressed. “That’s a lot of books.”

  “No, no…” he groaned, like I was some idiot totally missing the point. “Read one!”

  I picked one out at random and started thumbing through it, my eyes getting wider and wider with every page. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Read another, pick any one,” he cackled, so excited I thought he would crap himself.

  Holy Mother of God. They were diaries. Written by murderers. Notice the plural. Perhaps ten or twelve small volumes would be written in one hand with a similar binding style. Then there would be an equal number, or in some cases up to thirty or even fifty, written by another sicko, each and every one of them covered with the skin of their victims.

  “Where the hell did you get these?” I asked, my head spinning as I grabbed one after the other, thumbing through quickly. The gruesome descriptions were beyond anything I had read in a hundred horror novels or even the nightmares I had afterwards.

  “Can’t say, can’t say,” he repeated in a mumbling chorus, shaking his head, the gleam in his eyes snuffed out instantly by my prying question. “Have to close now, anyhow. Good day to you, sir,” he grumbled, suddenly as surly as when I came in.