Book of Knowledge

by Slater, David Michael

  But now he was slowly getting to his feet. And now Daphna got a good look at what remained of his face. It was nothing but peeling crimson parchment. His hands and feet were gnarled, waxy and wet, dripping with something that looked like pus.

  Emmet looked at her tentatively, so Daphna tried not to look away, willing herself to focus on his eyes, his red, ruined eyes. They’d shaken her so much before, but now they were the least frightening thing about him.

  “It’s you,” Emmet finally said, looking down at Daphna with what she could plainly see was simple shyness. No amount of damage to his face could conceal it. His voice sounded nervous, just the way it had when she’d lured him away from the store. “I was hoping to talk to you one more time, this time,” he added.

  “This time?” Daphna asked. Between Emmet’s timid expression and his strange comment, she managed to forget her fear for the moment. “What do you mean, ‘this time?’”

  “This lifetime,” Emmet replied. “Who knows if I’ll even know you in the next.”

  “You sound like Rash,” Daphna said. “I hardly understood anything he talked about.”

  “Rash only talked about one thing,” said Emmet. “Time. The Infinite Quality of Time.”

  “The infinite quality of time?” Daphna repeated, dumbly. “I have no idea what that means.”

  “I can explain,” Emmet offered. But before he began, he started shuffling around the perimeter of the clearing. Daphna used the opportunity to assess the situation. So far so good. She’d found Emmet, and he didn’t seem to want to hurt her. Daphna scanned the area, searching for the Book of Nonsense or Rash’s Ledger, but there was no sign of either.

  Then it occurred to her that whatever Emmet was going to say might be worth considering. That is, if he had any idea what he was talking about himself. It was hard to imagine a complicated phrase like, “The infinite quality of time,” ever coming out of Emmet’s mouth. But then, he probably heard something like it from Rash every day of his life.

  “Time is forever,” Emmet said, stopping his circuit directly opposite Daphna. “Think about that for a second.” He paused and gazed up ruefully at the patches of blue sky visible through the branches over his head. After a moment, he went on.

  “There was no beginning to time,” he said, “and there won’t be an end to it. And that means, even if it’s ten trillion years from now, people will be born that look and talk and think exactly the way we have, which means they will be us. It has to happen, eventually. If time is endless, everything has to happen. Everything has to happen over and over and over again. We’ve had this conversation before, who knows how many times. I only wish it was my turn to kill Rash a long time ago, but I never thought of it. Maybe he could keep some thoughts out of my mind.”

  Daphna offered no reply to this, amazed now to see Emmet wasn’t just parroting words he didn’t comprehend. He’d obviously thought about what he was saying. When she’d led him around the other day, he’d just mumbled and stuttered like a moron, like the moron she’d assumed he was. Now she understood that he’d fumbled around her simply because he liked her and must’ve been nervous.

  Daphna tried to refocus on what Emmet was getting at, but it was difficult with all these other thoughts crowding in. She was pretty sure she understood the gist of it, though.

  “Emmet, the world isn’t infinite,” she said, detecting a flaw in his thinking. “It was created at some point—one way or another—and it sure isn’t going to be around forever. If we don’t blow ourselves up, we’re going to cut down all the trees until no one can breathe, or poison all the food and water supplies.”

  “Of course we will,” Emmet agreed, surprising Daphna. “We’ll do all those things.” He began moving toward her, but stopped suddenly in the center of the Clearing. Did she flinch, or look afraid—or disgusted? She couldn’t afford to make him mad right now, not when she needed to get the books from him. Fortunately, Emmet didn’t look upset, and he continued on with his lesson.

  “Of course we will,” he repeated. “I said Time was infinite, not the world. The Earth will be destroyed, in every way you can imagine, but when enough time goes by, other Earths will form, just like the trillions that formed before this one. And when we—you and me and Asterius Rash—when we come around again, things will happen to us with ten billion tiny differences, or just one difference, or they’ll happen exactly the same way. One time, Rash will adopt another child from the orphanage and brainwash him into feeling like an animal and force him to stare at books sixteen hours a day.”

  “But—”

  “And another time, he’ll adopt me again, and I won’t practice every single Word of Power he makes me put in his Ledger—or I will, but I won’t learn the one that makes you not feel pain, and so I’ll die the same horrible death he did when the store burns up.”

  So that’s how he survived, Daphna thought. She tried to take in the rest of Emmet’s arguments, but wasn’t up to it. The nature of his words was confusing enough, but it was just too bizarre to be engaged in philosophical speculation here, in the middle of the woods in Gabriel Park, with an arguably psychotic brute burned badly enough to kill him a dozen times over, one with a crush on her, no less.

  And under the surface of this bewilderment her other worries simmered. There was her suddenly nonexistent social life, her ailing father and her insensitivity to her brother, not to mention the small matter of completing the Council’s mission of finding and destroying the Book of Nonsense. Emmet was going on with his explanations, but Daphna didn’t tune back in until his voice took on a much more subdued tone.

  “One day,” he was saying, his head bowed, his voice dropping low, “one day when we meet again, you won’t have to pretend to like me.” Emmet shuffled forward until he was standing directly in front of Daphna, who didn’t draw away even the slightest bit. Emmet’s voice sank to a whisper.

  “One day, when you ask me to walk with you,” he said, twisting his fingers and trying to look Daphna in the eyes, “we might—maybe we might—hold hands.”

  The wistful look in Emmet’s eyes—they weren’t so ruined that Daphna couldn’t see it—sapped her of every emotion but one. She felt horribly depressed. A sadness that seemed to have physical weight pushed down like the heel of a hand on her heart. She knew what she was going to do. She was going to play whatever feelings Emmet still had for her against him. What choice did she have? However smart he might actually be, he was dangerous. It didn’t really matter that Rash made him that way, did it?

  Resolved, Daphna smiled at Emmet. “One day you might meet me right here,” she made herself say, giving her hair a flip like Wren always did, though she had no idea if bobbed hair could flip. “And you might give me the Book and the Ledger,” she added, “as a sign of the friendship we’re going to have next time.” Daphna tried to enlarge her dappled eyes the way the woman on the TV talk show had when she looked at the camera.

  Emmet returned a forlorn, exhausted smile, but didn’t reply at first. As Daphna waited nervously for his response, it occurred to her that his gruesome appearance no longer bothered her, but before she had time to figure out what that meant, Emmet let out a bleat of surprise and then abruptly collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been severed all at once. Daphna dropped to her knees beside him.

  “What? What is it, Emmet?” she pleaded.

  “Damn,” Emmet said. He rolled carefully onto his back.

  “What’s wrong?” Daphna asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Doesn’t hurt, but I guess I’m all burnt up inside.”

  “Do you know any Words to help?”

  “Maybe.” Emmet screwed up his eyes, thinking, then began intoning a series of odd-sounding Words. They sounded similar to those Daphna heard Rash use under his breath at the ABC.

  Strange things immediately started happening in the Clearing. Leaves began to swirl, lifting off the forest floor in a mini-twister. A moment later, they fluttered peacefully back to the ground. While that
was happening, bark began to peel off a stand of trees across the way. And something else was going on behind Daphna. She could hear the branches swaying as if in a heavy wind, but she didn’t turn to see because Emmet started to rise unsteadily off the ground, the same way the Metro Central’s warehouse had. But then he settled down.

  “It’s no use,” he sighed. “I’m too messed up. I think my brain’s been cooked.”

  “Think! Emmet,” Daphna encouraged. “Do you know anything else?”

  Emmet closed his eyes. His hairless brow furrowed with concentration. Finally, he muttered a Word that sounded like he was spitting out something distasteful. The moment he did, Daphna couldn’t breathe. She clutched her throat, and when Emmet saw her, he repeated the Word and then fell silent. Daphna gasped as the air flowed into her again.

  “I’m sorry,” Emmet whispered. “It’s no use—” He looked Daphna firmly in the eyes and said, “I was hoping this life was going to come around. I was sure you were going to make me good. That’s why I was looking for you. Can you make me good?”

  “I—I—it’s okay, Emmet,” Daphna said as her eyes welled up. It was impossible to know exactly what she was feeling. Daphna took Emmet’s hand. It felt a little bit like the cover of the Book of Nonsense.

  “You don’t have to pretend anymore,” Emmet whispered. His voice was soft, almost gentle. “There’s no possible way any of my future lives can be worse than this one.”

  “But I’m not pretending,” Daphna pleaded. It came out as a whine. Tears swam before her eyes. She was lying to a dying boy. Or, if she wasn’t lying, she wasn’t telling the truth, either.

  “I believe you,” Emmet croaked, his voice cracking now, his eyes beginning to roll in their sockets.

  “You can have the books,” he said. “I was going to give them to you when I was done with them, anyway. I only learned to use a few Words in Rash’s Ledger, but you’re smarter. It’s the first Word that chokes people. The last one on the fourth page lets you go wherever you want just by thinking about it. I only got it to work a few times.”

  “That’s what you did at the dump!”

  Emmet nodded weakly and waved at something across the way.

  “They’re over there, under that split log,” he said. “I don’t think that other book will do anything for you, the one I got back from that old lady. It’s all messed up. I took it ’cause Rash was desperate for it. I thought it might have something in it I could use to change my skin back, but it’s useless. That’s why I went after the Ledger, except I couldn’t find anything to help me in there either. I didn’t have enough time.” Emmet couldn’t help but laugh at the irony.

  “Thank you, Emmet,” Daphna said, softly. “I need to ask you something else,” she added. There was no turning back. She was going to work her advantage as far as she could. “Do you know anything about someone called Adem Tarik?”

  “Rash talked about him all the time,” Emmet said.

  “He did? What did he say? Emmet! What did he say?”

  Emmet looked surprised by Daphna’s ferocity, but he answered without questioning her.

  “Rash was obsessed with finding some kind of magic book that used to belong to Adem Tarik,” he explained. “He’d freak out at least once a day and start screaming about how Adem Tarik was a fool for wanting to make Heaven on Earth. Sometimes he’d laugh, but mostly he’d just scream. I kept away from him when he did that. I guess he thought that book over there was it. I don’t know.”

  Daphna’s mind spun. This was critical information, but she couldn’t think why just then. “Emmet! Emmet! Is there anything else?”

  Emmet’s eyes had closed again, clearly against his will. But because he wasn’t actually suffering, it seemed as though he was just exhausted and unable to keep from falling asleep, like Milton. Daphna knew better though, and after several more urgent pleas, Emmet seemed to revive.

  “Sorry,” he managed. “Rash told me he stole the book, but he lost it somehow. When we came here, he told me the thirteen year-old he was looking for had something to do with it. He told me if I found the kid, he’d let me kill someone. But now that I’ve killed two, I don’t feel any better.”

  “Is that it?” Daphna asked, aware but unable to acknowledge the seething volcano of regret under the surface of Emmet’s words.

  “Did he say anything else? Emmet!” Daphna cried. “Hold on!” She knew most of this. She knew Rash had come for one of her mother’s children to learn the Words of Power for him. She needed more.

  “I’m okay,” Emmet muttered weakly. His eyes opened to Daphna once again. They seemed to clear out completely for a moment, and he said in a determined voice, “Next time. Next time I’ll do better.”

  Then, without shudder or complaint, he let out a long, slow breath, closed his eyes and went utterly still.

  CHAPTER 6

  more monsters

  Carefully, Daphna set Emmet’s hand down. She said his name, but he didn’t reply. She touched his shoulder, but he didn’t react. He looked peaceful now, and for that she was glad.

  “I’m so sorry,” Daphna sighed, and her eyes finally overflowed.

  But she got up, angry at her tears. Why had using her new talent, a talent she’d never dared dream of having, make her feel so awful? You did the right thing, she told herself, wiping her face. You had to get the books, and you got them the only way you could.

  Maybe she felt sick because it made her like Wren and Teal, but she’d done a good thing here, an important thing. It wasn’t like she was getting some moon-eyed boy to carry her books or deliver ditzy notes to friends. That had to make a difference, didn’t it? She wasn’t anything like those girls, no matter how much she looked like one of them.

  Daphna hardly knew who she was anymore. She paced the perimeter of the Clearing, trying to puzzle things out. The only thing she understood was that she didn’t understand anything anymore. But then she had it. Emmet had already told her everything she needed to know.

  “Well,” Daphna said right out loud—she felt better even before the words passed her lips—”next time, I’ll do better, too.”

  Suddenly, Daphna could focus on the matter at hand. She approached the log Emmet had gestured to and crouched down beside it. Despite its size, it rolled over easily, revealing a cavity below. They were right there, the mutilated Book of Nonsense and Rash’s Ledger.

  Thousands and thousands of years of searching, of fighting, of killing were over. Daphna, daunted by the epic story she’d joined, didn’t reach for either book, but rather remained where she was, staring at them, lost in thought about Time. Could time really be infinite? How could it not be?

  She’d first learned about the concept of infinity in elementary school, when one character in a cartoon movie asked another to think of the biggest number he could and then told him to add one, and then add one again, and then add one again, on and on.

  Well, Daphna thought, if the world ever ended, there would still be a moment after that, and one after that, even if no one was there to experience it, right? And as for the first moment of the world—well there still had to be a moment before that, and one before that, forever the other way.

  Daphna didn’t know what any of it meant. She took a seat, shaking the entangling web of thoughts away, then finally reached out for the precious books. After lifting them out of the hole, she tenderly whisked the dirt off their covers and set them on her lap. She’d looked through the Book of Nonsense before, or tried to anyway, when she and her father were taking it to the ABC, thinking it was just a very strange book that might have some value. It had been interesting then, but now it inspired absolute awe. Could a book really belong to God? She didn’t know the first thing about the subject, but anything seemed possible at this point.

  Carefully, Daphna turned over the nearly shredded cover and looked at a random page. The words were a blur, even more so than they’d been when she’d opened the book with her father and figured she’d gotten carsick. The words we
re now in rapid flux, and they dizzied her.

  Daphna flipped forward, but all the pages looked that way, so she closed it and opened the Ledger instead. Inside its pages were neat lists of fairly legible words. They didn’t have explanations, but Daphna didn’t find that troubling. They were Words of Power—the closest thing to them, anyway—and they were right there, for her eyes only, thanks to Asterius Rash’s centuries of dogged hunting and collecting.

  Daphna tried the first Word, the one Emmet had accidentally choked her with, but nothing seemed to happen. She paged through, scanning the lists, trying various Words in a low voice. After a particularly strange one, the Ledger slid to the edge of her hand, paused, then fell to the ground. It didn’t work when she tried again, so she closed the book.

  Amazed, and not a little terrified, Daphna closed her eyes and sat motionless but for her trembling hands that cradled the books.

  Her reverie didn’t last long.

  Daphna heard voices. People were in the woods nearby. At once, she got to her feet, took one last guilty look at Emmet lying in the center of the clearing, then rushed back toward the park.

  Just before emerging from the woods, Daphna veered behind an especially large cedar tree with the two books clutched awkwardly under an arm. A group of fifteen or so boisterous girls were playing Frisbee on the adjacent grassy field. She recognized most of them from school: Ava, Branwen, Jarita, Robin, Yara. They were Pops: the best dressed, the best talkers, the best looking.

  Daphna had never claimed to be super close friends with any Pop, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t go up and talk to each and every one of them. Even if Wren and Teal were liars and users, the rest of them were nice to her, and she didn’t do their work for them.

  Still, Daphna didn’t want to deal with any Pops just yet, so she moved stealthily back into the woods and walked along behind the border of trees. When she felt she was beyond the girls’ field of play, Daphna reentered the park, but after no more than two steps, an errant Frisbee hit her smartly in the back of the knee. The books tumbled out of her hands onto the grass.