John shivered against a sudden chill. Not only was he nervous about the impending reunion, but in his haste to leave the house, he hadn’t thought to grab a jacket. Twilight had turned to dusk, and he found his lightweight polo shirt lacking. John pressed the button on the intercom. Almost instantly Professor Hazelwood’s voice sounded from the metal box. “Is that you, Jonathan?”
John greeted his old mentor, surprised by the pleasantness in Hazelwood’s voice. He was unable to detect any of the anger that he’d heard on their last visit.
“Then come on in, old chap,” the professor said as the gate began to hum and slowly creak open.
John took a step forward and then stopped suddenly, stunned by the full view of the professor’s lawn and gardens, which had once been meticulously manicured. Now everything was overgrown or dead. Images of southern graveyards came to mind, but even those places had some order to the flora. This looked as if nature had been given free reign to do whatever it liked.
Still teetering on the edge of turning around and leaving, John thought of the Berretta 9 mm hidden on the top shelf of his closet at home. He’d considered bringing it after he accepted the invitation to visit the man he’d nearly destroyed, but ultimately told himself he was being paranoid and left it locked in the security box. Now, whether or not the old man had been serious, John couldn’t ignore the fact that Hazelwood had threatened his life the last time the two had met.
The intercom buzzed and Hazelwood’s voice came across. “The tea is getting cold, Jonathan.”
John scanned the grounds for the camera that was allowing the professor to monitor him. He found it hidden halfway up a pine tree to the left of the intercom. Hazelwood had been watching him the whole time. Not willing to look any more ridiculous than he already did, John started up the driveway, the gate closing slowly behind him.
There was still beauty in the garden; it just had to be found: a solitary rose blooming amid the thorny brush on the left side of the driveway, a young sapling emerging from the wall of weeds to the right. Good can survive with the bad and life does go on, John thought, but then he looked to the rotting tomato plants and realized everything comes to an end.
The door to the professor’s house was just ahead. Now was the time to deal with Hazelwood and see what this was all about. Susan would be fine.
The black maple door opened just as John raised his hand to knock. Hazelwood appeared, dressed in a shabby dinner jacket. The yellow crest on the pocket was fraying. So was Hazelwood. Thin wisps of silver hair stuck out in every direction. He was a tiny shell of the man John had studied under nearly two decades ago. His back hunched, making him look like a turtle, especially the way his small head with its beady eyes poked forward from the collar of his shirt. Hazelwood pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled. “You can put your hand down, Jonathan, unless you mean to strike me.”
The old man’s sly smile and questionable sense of humor worried John. He had betrayed Hazelwood’s loyalty when he published The Book of Revelation; Exposing the Truth. He’d gained the man’s trust, learned all he could about the sacred and secret tomes, and then wrote a book systematically disproving their existence. In doing so, Hazelwood’s life’s work was ruined. He still had his tenure at the university, but he’d lost all credibility.
John hadn’t set out to deliberately hurt the old man; he simply saw the fallacy in what Hazelwood espoused. At the time he was researching and writing it, John had told himself that Hazelwood would be dead before the book hit the market. But he’d obviously been mistaken and the book’s publication had crushed Hazelwood. Now the old man was smiling up at John as if nothing bad had happened between them.
John lowered his hand and scratched at the scraggly, unkempt beard he’d been meaning to shave for several weeks. “Good to see you, Professor. You look well.”
“Thank you, Jonathan. I would say the same, but then you’d know I was lying.” Before John could respond, Hazelwood continued. “But that is to be expected. I read about Susan’s disappearance. Are there any new developments?”
John could only shake his head.
“That’s a shame. I did enjoy her company.” Hazelwood moved out of the doorway and waved John inside. “I don’t want to waste any more of your time than I need to. I heard you’re writing another book, and I wouldn’t want to impede your progress.”
John winced at the dig, then entered the house and waited while Hazelwood closed the door behind them. John admitted, “I haven’t written a single word since she disappeared.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Hazelwood shuffled down the hallway and motioned for John to follow. He led him into the bookcase-lined study where they used to meet every week to pore over manuscripts and letters from antiquity. Hazelwood pointed John to the seat at the head of the long oak table.
John walked behind the chair and studied Hazelwood’s emotionless face. “What’s this about, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Actually, I do. It’s a surprise. Now have a seat while I fetch the tea.”
John wanted to protest, the idea of a surprise made him feel ill, but there was no sense in pushing Hazelwood. The old man would talk when he was ready. He’d learned that lesson a thousand times over the years. Might as well take a seat and relax.
A few minutes later, Hazelwood reentered the study pushing a small bronze cart. After pouring the tea and maneuvering the cart into a corner of the room, Hazelwood said, “I let go of the help. In case you were wondering.”
Instead of saying that he had gathered that much from the garden, John simply nodded and took a sip of the Da Hong Pao tea, a treat he hadn’t had in five years. It tasted just as delicious and exotic as he remembered.
Hazelwood shuffled to the other end of the table and took the seat opposite John. Looking over the top of his steaming mug, he studied John’s face.
John waited as long as he could. “What is it, Arthur?” he asked impatiently, forgoing his usual formalities. “I don’t have time …”
Hazelwood held up his hand to quiet John, finished sipping his tea, then set down the mug. “You’ll want to see this.”
“I don’t see anything,” John said, irritated as he looked about the room. John knew he was being rude, but all he wanted to do was leave. Just seeing his mentor’s face brought back the feelings of guilt.
“Maybe you can’t see what you don’t believe.”
John pushed away from the table. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“John, sit,” Hazelwood said with the same force he used on his more unruly students. “You don’t want to help me?”
“I’m sorry. Tell me what you want.”
“I want the expert of rare books to verify my greatest find, the one you and I have been discussing since the first day we met.”
John perked up, recalling his first visit to Hazelwood’s office. John had been a sophomore and was desperately trying to get into Hazelwood’s class, Lost Books of the Ancient World. He tried to remember the list Hazelwood had compiled and hung on his office wall. “Which one? You haven’t found the unedited Taming of the Shrew?” Shakespeare had always been Hazelwood’s favorite, even though he’d spent the better part of a decade trying to disprove the Bard’s authorship on classics such as Macbeth.
Hazelwood shook his head and got up from the table to take down the painting that hung between the two largest bookcases. A safe. He dialed in the combination. “Even better.”
John couldn’t begin to think what could be better. Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies had sold for over six million dollars, a dozen times more than John’s most lucrative find. If it was better than that, it explained Hazelwood’s friendly disposition and forgiving attitude. “Don’t tell me it’s da Vinci?” John guessed as Hazelwood opened the safe’s door.
“You won’t guess.” Hazelwood slipped on a pair of latex gloves he kept in the safe.
John leaned forward in his chair but couldn’t identify the cover of the thick bo
ok Hazelwood extricated from the safe. Its glossy black binding with bright red letters looked to be something from the latter half of the twentieth century. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be more than sixty years old, and as far as he knew, nothing of much value had been produced that recently. When he looked at Hazelwood’s crooked smile, he wondered if perhaps the old man had lost it.
Holding the book so John couldn’t see the title, Hazelwood handed him a pair of gloves. Once he had them on, Hazelwood set the book on the placemat before John.
Stephen King’s The Stand. Complete and uncut, not even a first edition, and probably only worth the twenty-seven dollars any store would charge for it. “If this is a joke, I don’t appreciate it,” John said. “You said this was something I had to see.”
“How many times have you been told not to judge a book by its cover? Surely, you of all people should know that.”
John breathed through his nose, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out his reading glasses. As he slipped them on, he examined the cover, searched for anomalies and imperfections that could raise the value, but he couldn’t detect a single one. “What exactly am I looking for, Arthur?”
Hazelwood returned to his seat and took another sip of tea. “Open it. Tell me what you see.”
Exaggerating in order to humor Hazelwood, John lifted the cover with the utmost care. The smell of rotten meat wafted up from the title page and immediately brought tears to his eyes. John turned his head to the side and slammed the book shut.
“What the hell was that?” John wiped the spit from his mouth, realized he could no longer smell the foul stench. All he smelled was the tea.
Hazelwood offered his infuriating smile. “You tell me,” he said, ever the teacher.
“It smelled like death inside a toilet.”
“That’s aptly put,” Hazelwood said, almost to himself.
“So what is it?”
Instead of answering John, Hazelwood instructed him to open the book again. John steadied his stomach and prepared for the gut-wrenching smell as he opened the cover, but this time there was nothing except the aroma of aged paper.
“But it … ,” John trailed off helplessly, looking up at Hazelwood for an explanation.
“Read the details inside the cover. See anything interesting?”
John wasn’t familiar with many of King’s works, but he had read this book after the miniseries had come out. Everything, as far as he could tell, seemed in order as he scanned the page. Then he came to the copyright date. “19666.” His first thought was that someone had accidentally hit the 6 key one too many times, but then he considered the newer looking cover. “How old is King?”
“Sixty or so.”
“He wrote this as a teenager?”
“Not quite. The official copyright was 1978.”
“Interesting,” John said, not all that impressed by one mistype. “How many of these were printed with this date?”
“You’re looking at it.”
“Just the one?”
Hazelwood motioned to the book. “Keep going.”
Annoyed but more than intrigued, John turned the page and read the dedication aloud: “‘To all my true believers: May your fate be revealed.’”
John looked to Hazelwood and asked, “Do you have another copy of this book?”
As if reading John’s mind, Hazelwood recited, “‘For Tabby, this dark chest of wonders.’ That’s the original dedication. The one I’m sure you’d read as a younger man.”
John didn’t want to jump to an irrational and impossible conclusion. He needed more proof before he would even acknowledge the question the dedication sparked. He’d heard this dedication countless times, but it’d been years since Hazelwood discussed it. To all my true believers: May your fate be revealed.
“Anything else?” John asked, knowing he needed more than a dedication to even begin to entertain what Hazelwood was suggesting.
Hazelwood nodded. “If you need more convincing, that is no problem. Be assured, you have The Book in front of you.”
With one hand ready to turn the page, John said, “Professor, you and I both know it doesn’t exist. This might meet some of the so-called criteria, but this is not …
“All I ask is that you hold your judgement until you’ve finished the examination.”
“That is what you want me to believe, isn’t it? That this is The Book of Revelation?” John wasn’t referring to the one from the Bible, but the original written a century before the New Testament. Legend said it’d been burned over a million times, but it couldn’t be destroyed; instead, it found its way into other books, hiding in the pages of lesser works.
“That’s not what I want you to believe,” Hazelwood said. “It’s what I want you to acknowledge. It’s what I want you to verify.”
“I can’t verify a myth.”
“Yes, you can and you will. You’ll verify that it is real, that it is here, and that both you and your book were mistaken.”
John started to close the cover, but Hazelwood told him to stop.
“What are you afraid of, John? If it is just a hoax, as you claim, then The Book of Revelation doesn’t exist. But there is no harm in checking, is there? It seems to me that you would want to do that. Look at it as me giving you another chance to disprove me, to embarrass me once again.”
“I didn’t write my book to embarrass you.”
“But you did. Now verify my finding or disprove it,” Hazelwood insisted, staring at John. This wasn’t a simple request, and both men knew it. Still, Hazelwood wasn’t about to let John walk out the door. “You owe me that.”
An unexplainable panic surged through John’s body, urging him to run. It had been a mistake to come here, but he was here. The professor deserved his time. Even though John’s book had been accurate, he still should’ve told his mentor what he was publishing. Hazelwood had discovered his pupil’s writing the same way as everyone else—in the newspaper.
John acquiesced, figuring he could do a quick examination of the book and be done with the whole mess.
John looked at the book, then back at Hazelwood. “After I prove this is not the book you’ve been spending your whole life in search of, you’ll let me go and I’ll owe you nothing?”
“Let you go?” Hazelwood laughed. “You’re not being held. I’m simply requesting a small favor from an old friend, the preeminent authority on fakes, forgeries, and fables.”
John’s guilt reached nauseating proportions. “Fine. Let’s do this.” He turned past the author’s note and browsed over the preface. “What else is there? Another typo? An inscription?”
“Turn to a page in chapter one.”
John did as he was told. “So what am I looking for?”
“What page are you on?”
There was a number one in the middle of the footer at the bottom of the left-hand page, but a five on the page beside it. John began speed-reading the page, searching for any kind of abnormality. Everything appeared just as he’d read in his dog-eared copy when suddenly, across the page, five nonconsecutive words transformed from black to bright red. The words then made their way toward the header. John mumbled his disbelief.
“Yes?” Hazelwood said giddily.
“What is this?” John asked. But before Hazelwood answered, John looked at the old man and said, “Nice trick. Okay. Well done. How’d you manage that?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“The ink turns color when the air hits it, or is it just the temperature change?”
Hazelwood smiled. “It’s no trick. What does it say?”
Reluctantly, John read the highlighted words to himself:
respect, don’t, him, you
Always quick with puzzles, he reversed the order of the words: YOU DON’T RESPECT HIM. Instead of telling Hazelwood though, he shook his head and said, “I’m surprised you’d sink so low.”
“There’s no deception. I have no idea what it reads.”
“Then I’m even
sadder, because either you’ve been duped this easily or you think I’m an idiot.”
Hazelwood didn’t seem bothered by John’s disbelief. “Try another page.”
“Which one?”
“Your choice.”
Figuring Hazelwood would direct him to specific doctored pages, John was surprised to be given a choice, but only slightly. “Don’t tell me you fixed every page? This had to cost some money.”
“Not to mention the amount of time it would take to do what you are suggesting I did.”
Hazelwood made a good point, but it only made the situation more pathetic. “Any page, right?”
“Any one you choose. Be my guest.”
John flipped through a few dozen pages before stopping. Hazelwood asked him what number he’d landed on. John said, “It should read 47, but there’s only a 2. A mistake, but not a very revealing one.”
“It’s no mistake. You don’t see anything else?”
John adjusted his eyes. Seemingly random words slowly turned from black to red, then moved to the top of the page.
back, is, coming, she, not
It didn’t take John long to rearrange them: SHE IS NOT COMING BACK. John fought to keep from grabbing the heartless bastard by the throat. Gritting his teeth and staring at the old man, he said, “This is no longer funny.”
“I agree; it isn’t. Recognize what you have in front of you. Or are you truly blind?”
John’s hands couldn’t stop shaking. Even after what had happened because of his book, John was unable to believe the old man would cross the line and bring Susan into the hoax.
“If you recall, you stopped at that page. I didn’t direct you to it. Please, tell me what it reads.” His voice seemed to be truly interested, not a trace of malice. Hazelwood had never been a good bluff, so John started to wonder if maybe he wasn’t trying to pull off some sinister prank.
Twisted Reunion Page 23