 "The
Narconomicon"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
The library was of fantastic proportions,
filled with bookcases towering a hundred feet high, melting away into
shadowy blackness. The bookcases stood in endless rows as far as he could
see in any direction. A faint cacophony of overlapping sounds echoed
everywhere, sounding vaguely like distant wails and faraway screams of
agony.
Then, one clear sound, booming from far
across the colossal library: Come.
He spun dizzily about, fighting for his
balance. Everything shimmered slightly, as if seen through heat waves
rising off a highway. The floor seemed to tip in circles, as if the world
were precariously balanced on the head of a pin.
He focused down the long corridor that divided the bookcases. In the hazy
distance, he saw a shining, red-gold glow, like something made of copper
radiating raw magic, beckoning him. He heard it in his mind again, more
insistent now: Come!
He staggered into a lumbering run. He
couldn’t feel his feet hit the swiftly tilting floor, but he ran like
Mercury on the wind. The gargantuan shelves flew past, and with them went
an endless supply of books. There were no glossy paperbacks or plastic
dust jackets; they were all ancient volumes of all sizes, bound in myriad
ways.
And they all whispered to him as he flew
past: Go, they said, hundreds at once, even thousands, spurring him on.
The copper glow intensified as he approached, even as the marble floor
tiles became cracked and then broken, giving way to bare earth. It was an
outdoor clearing, at the center of which was a giant black tree stump,
like some burnt, dead altar. The bookcases were gone, save for five
forming a half-circle beyond the stump. Their shelves were filled with
books in groups of one to a dozen standing together, empty spaces between
them, as if some had been removed. They were all black, save for those at
the left sides of the very top rows of each bookcase, which were
blood-red.
But the source of the golden-red radiance
was atop the black stump—a dark brown, leather-bound book, its spine laced
with a black cord. Something was written on it, but he couldn’t see what.
As he neared the thing, he saw its cover tremble, as if trying to open
itself.
He had to have the book, had to read it.
He reached for it—
The brilliant illumination flared
tenfold, causing him to stumble back and topple over in surprise. He
shielded his eyes against the glory of the book as he heard it screech in
his mind.
The library! it screamed like a crazed
demon.
He stared up in confusion. He was already
in the library! What did the book want?
He was about to get to his feet and grab
for it again when he caught movement to his left. Something was tumbling
toward him out of the black edges of the earthen clearing, something white
and bouncing like a soccer ball. Something brown flailed around, like a
mop head glued to it, and it rolled to a stop near him.
Jill’s face was locked in a death mask of
horror, her dead eyes staring up from her disembodied head, accusing him.
Howard Phillips screamed, and the dream exploded around him.
#
Howard sat up in bed, shuddering, his
heart pounding, his body soaked in a cold sweat.
The clock said it was nine in the
morning; he’d been asleep for four hours, just what he’d expected.
Usually, he napped ten minutes or so a day, and every four or five days he
slept a few hours. It had been like that for two years, ever since he’d
lost Jill. And through those brief periods of sleep, he never remembered
his dreams. Until now.
He got up and plodded out of the bedroom,
past the cluttered bookcase in his living room. It was seven feet high and
four feet wide, with six big shelves. He owned mostly scholarly texts on
the occult, but he had a fair amount of related fiction. Unlike the books
in his dream, his were haphazardly stacked and piled in no particular
order. Jill had been the neat one. He was just a bachelor slob without
her.
“Good morning, honey,” he said softly as
he passed the picture of her on the wall. He could only manage the
briefest glance at her smiling face and shining blue eyes, though, because
the dream image was far too fresh in his mind.
He headed for the kitchen to make some
herbal tea before heading downtown to a place he knew he had to visit.
#
The library hadn’t changed much since
high school, starting with the old bulletin board in the marble-floored
foyer, overrun by notices from babysitters, dog-walkers, and car sellers.
When he passed it and went up the marble steps into the library proper, it
was clear the place looked nothing like the mythic hall in his dream.
He stood in the middle of the big entry
room, watching as people checked out and returned books, worked on
computers, photocopied pages, and sought help at the reference desk. He
felt like a lost child without a hint at direction; but after two
dreamless years, he wasn’t about to ignore his first, no matter how
nightmarish.
He wandered through the expansive,
labyrinthine building, glancing over every book on every shelf—as if
expecting to find the leather-bound tome from his dream. He even spent an
hour back in the stacks, poring over the library’s old books collection.
He found some similar volumes—even a few black-laced brown-leather
ones—but none were right.
Eventually, when he decided he’d gone
from the depths of curiosity to the outer limits of absurdity, he gave up.
He was heading down the stairs past the bulletin board, heading for the
big door—
—something moved at the edge of his
vision.
He halted, turned his head slowly. Seeing
things moving out of the corner of his eye was nothing new; it was one of
the mild hallucinations that went along with chronic insomnia. He rarely
bothered to look anymore.
Of course, there was nothing there; just
the overcrowded bulletin board. He scanned the clutter of overlapping
papers, finally settling on a small yellow card that stood out in the
field of white like the yellow center of a daisy:
SUBJECT NEEDED FOR UNIVERSITY RESEARCH —
Must read and speak fluent Latin, have an occult background, and suffer
from insomnia. Absolutely MUST meet all criteria to be considered.
He blinked in surprise. He met all three
conditions. That was one hell of a serendipitous occurrence—or maybe a
clairvoyant one. He whipped out his cell phone and dialed the posted
number.
#
He checked in at a research building on
the edge of the university campus with a receptionist who regarded him the
way a high school cheerleader regarded a chess club geek. He confirmed
that he could read and speak Latin like a Roman emperor, had minored in
occult studies in college, and suffered from chronic insomnia. She
directed him to a seat to wait for Dr. John Edgecomb.
Howard waited, comfortable in the chair,
on the edge of sleep, until the clipboard-wielding Edgecomb wielding a
clipboard, came out to meet him. He was clearly excited, enthusiastically
pumping Howard’s hand for so long that Howard expected to begin spouting
water. “We thought we’d never get anyone,” Edgecomb said. He was sixty-ish,
bald plate shining through a gray-white wreath of hair. “That’s a wildly
eclectic list of requirements, after all.”
“Not if you’re me,” Howard said with a forced grin.
Edgecomb led Howard through the
interconnected front offices to a cinder-block corridor lined with steel
doors. Howard told his legs to move, and felt himself float magically
along on a cushion of sleeplessness as he followed Edgecomb through one of
the doors. The room beyond contained only a conference table and cushioned
chairs. On the table was a lidded plastic box. Howard sank wearily into
one of the chairs, and Edgecomb sat across from him, clattering his
clipboard on the table.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that
you responded to the ad,” Edgecomb said. “I’ve put them up all over the
area. I teach archeology, and I’ve run into something that may transcend
anything my profession has ever dealt with before. Now, just so I’m
absolutely clear, you’re fluent in Latin, correct? Not a casual book-smart
person, but someone who can actually speak the language?”
“I had Latin burned into me by a bunch of
nuns from grade school to graduation,” Howard replied, hearing how hollow
his voice echoed through his head. “I took it in college, too. It was easy
credit.”
“Excellent,” Edgecomb said, and spun the
clipboard around and slid it across the table to Howard. “For this
project, you don’t have to translate; but you’ll have to understand what
you’re reading. So, to put you on the spot, translate these passages
aloud.”
Howard took the clipboard and studied it.
“Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum,” Howard read aloud. He looked up and sighed.
“Come on, doc. The Lord’s Prayer is kid’s stuff for a Catholic schoolboy
like me.”
Edgecomb chuckled. “They get more
challenging.”
He read brief passages from Cicero’s De
Officiis, Plutarch’s Lives, and Seneca’s Essays. Then he read more
contemporary things, like the Latin version of Burgess’ “Purple Cow,” the
lyrics to Billy Joel’s “A Matter of Trust,” and a brief bio of Carl
Yastrzemski. They were all pieces of cake.
The final one was far more interesting.
Phillips skimmed over the passage and recognized it immediately. “It’s the
opening paragraphs of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Hound,’” he announced.
“I’m impressed further that you knew
that,” Edgecomb said. “But then, you have an education in the occult,
correct?”
“I went to a liberal arts college. After
years of Catholic torture, I decided it was time for something more
interesting. And I read my share of Lovecraft when the sisters weren’t
looking.”
“Then you know the significance of ‘The
Hound.’”
Phillips shrugged. “Lovecraft didn’t
particularly care for the story, and he borrowed heavily from Poe when he
wrote it. But it contained his first mention of the Necronomicon—his
so-called Book of the Dead.”
“Indeed,” Edgecomb said with a
conspiratorial smile, his eyes gleaming as he pulled the plastic box
toward him. “And that’s why we’re here.”
Edgecomb removed the lid and pulled out
the box’s contents, and a cold chill surged through Howard’s blood like a
winter wind through a drafty house.
The book was barely an inch thick, bound
in dark brown leather. The spineless covers and pages were tightly laced
with a black cord. It was the book from his dream, right down to the
inscription on the cover, which he could now read: SOMNUS VOLUMEN.
“‘Sleep book,’” Howard said, feeling his
skin crawl despite his exhaustion. “Generally, one would expect it to be
‘volumen somnus,’ although Latin word order was pretty flexible. Likely
the author was trying to emphasize the ‘somnus.’ So this is the Book of
Sleep, I take it, and why you need an insomniac?”
“We jokingly refer to this as the
Narco-nomicon,” Edgecomb said with a grin as he slid the book in front of
him. “Everyone who has read this book has fallen asleep on the very last
page.”
Howard blinked through bleary eyes. “Come
again?”
“It’s a very mystical text, and the
instructions are to read it aloud,” Edgecomb said. “So I did just that.
It’s only sixty pages; reading it takes under an hour, depending on how
well you read Latin. Before I could finish the book, I fell asleep.”
Howard weighed everything mentally. He
certainly wasn’t going to tell Edgecomb about his dream, but so far
nothing the doctor was saying made much sense. “Forgive me, doc, but I’ve
been awake for awhile,” he said. “I’m usually awake in four-day stretches,
minus a daily ten-minute catnap. I sleep for a few hours every fourth day,
when my brain just can’t take it anymore. I’ve lived like this for two
years, so I’m usually a zombie. As such, what you just said doesn’t make
any sense. So you fell asleep. That isn’t amazing; most other people can
fall asleep while reading a book. I don’t.”
“That’s why we need you,” Edgecomb said.
“I clearly remember reading the entire thing, right up to the very last
line. But I don’t remember finishing. I only know that I fell into the
deepest sleep I’ve ever known, and I slept for exactly twenty-four hours.”
Howard perked up. “Really?”
“At first, I thought it was a fluke, but
a few days later, I read it again. The same thing happened.” Edgecomb
snatched gold-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket, slid them on, and
opened the book. “The book warns of that on the first page—advising that
only a person with some power to resist sleep may read the incantation and
resist its sleep effect, thus allowing its true purpose to manifest. Now,
I can’t imagine why the ability to stay awake would be a condition, but
that’s how it works. My two colleagues have also attempted reading it, and
the same sleep has befallen them—and none of us could be awakened, however
unscientific that may sound. We believe that if someone could remain awake
through reading it, the true power of the book should be revealed.”
“And that is?”
Edgecomb shrugged. “That’s what we want
to discover. If it can put people to sleep, what else can it do? We feel a
chronic insomniac may be unaffected by it and thus complete the reading.”
“You’re right,” Howard said, “this sound
pretty unscientific.”
“Indeed, but we cannot ignore the facts
of what this book has done so far.”
Howard sighed, slumping in his chair. “I
have to admit, doc, you’ve got me excited for a different reason. I’m
thinking this magic book could be a cure-all for my insomnia. You can
appreciate that I won’t be disappointed if the experiment fails.”
Edgecomb chuckled. “In case it does, we
have a cot in the back where you can spend twenty-four hours of coma-like
sleep.”
“Coma-like sleep,” Howard echoed with a
smile. “That sounds nice.”
#
Edgecomb brought Howard to a big room
where a fold-out cot with a thin mattress was set up in one corner. The
room was otherwise empty, save for a thick exercise mat on the floor and a
narrow table on the opposite wall from the bed.
“I recommend reading while standing,”
Edgecomb said. “The first time I read it, I fell out of my chair and woke
up on the floor, having cracked my head pretty good on the way down. Also,
standing will keep you from getting too relaxed while you read. The mat
will keep you safe if you should go down.”
#
After Edgecomb left him alone, Howard
held the book up and studied it carefully. It was about ten inches square,
the leather a dark, earthen brown. Holding the real thing in his hands
felt alien, supernatural, powerful. He flipped it open; the thirty sheets
of heavy, yellowed parchment were thick and stiff. On the first page was
the title, and the text began immediately.
He skimmed the first page and went on to
the next. He wasn’t ready to read it out loud yet; he wanted to get a
handle on what it was about. His lifelong interest in things like
Lovecraft and the occult wasn’t just a passing fancy; he certainly
believed in the supernatural, at least from a scientific
perspective—“supernatural” things were merely those nobody had yet
explained.
The incantation was decent Latin, but the
prose was definitely strange. Like Edgecomb had said, it detailed
instructions on the first two pages: you had to read it aloud, you had to
stay awake, and only those with the “power” could fight the sleep effect.
“‘He who completes the reading of this
spell… who utters every magical linchpin and casts it with the reading of
the final words… shall work the magic,’” he translated under his breath.
“What the hell are linchpins?”
And what were the final words? On
impulse, he flipped to the last page and figured it out: the final
sentence of the book was set off by itself after the previous paragraph,
centered at the bottom of the page and scrawled a bit more ornately than
the rest of the book. So he had to read the spell and all its
linchpins—whatever they were—and its final line, and the spell would
supposedly manifest.
He shook his head and sighed. It seemed
silly, but Edgecomb seemed sure the book could knock people out. As
interested as Howard was in discovering the book’s real magic, failure
with a coma-like sleep seemed a good option. In two years, he’d logged
only eight hundred hours of sleep, tops, compared to being awake for well
over sixteen thousand.
He’d once been a good sleeper, often
enjoying afternoon naps on lazy summer days. He’d even snoozed
occasionally after work on the couch, snoring lightly amidst the heavenly
smells of Jill’s latest dinnertime wonder cooking in the kitchen. Sleep
had never been a problem.
And then she’d died. Off to the video
store one Friday night to rent a chick flick and a guy movie—their usual
Friday-night tradition—and she never came home. The bitch of it was, the
guy who’d torn through the stop sign in his Corvette and killed her got
away with it. He’d claimed his brakes had failed, and there wasn’t enough
left of the Corvette they’d pried him out of to disprove his claim. He’d
walked.
Took Jill’s life and walked. Took her
head clean off her shoulders and walked. That’s what had started it all
for Howard: the dreams he’d have of her head being sheared off, then
crying to him from where it had rolled to a stop against the curb at the
accident scene. Her head would wail and sob and beg him to save her, and
he’d come awake in a cold sweat, crying and shuddering like a terrified
child. The nightmares persisted, and his sleep periods lessened until they
were almost nonexistent.
He was doing it to himself, the experts
agreed. He was so distraught over Jill’s horrible death, and his
overwhelming feelings of guilt about it, that his brain made sure he
wouldn’t remember any dreams—and only let him sleep when his body just had
no choice. But even awake, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Had she
been aware? Was she conscious for a time as her head lay there against the
curb, looking at the wreckage? Were there a few moments when she could see
her headless body and feel terrible agony?
He shook involuntarily, the book
trembling in his hands, and he focused. He couldn’t think about that. He’d
spent two years trying not to think about it. And he hadn’t dreamed of her
head until his prophetic library dream.
He pushed it all from his mind, flipped to the first page of the book, and
began reading aloud.
* *
* * * * * *
*
And Howard is about to go beyond the
point of no return, and eventually discover what it is the book wants...
and how it needs him to do it.
To read the whole story, order Bound
For Evil: Books Gone Bad from
Dead Letter Press,
which specializes in ultra-limited edition books.
|
When
I stumbled upon the submission guidelines for Bound For Evil: Books
Gone Bad, I wanted to be in that anthology in the worse way. Here was
an anthology devoted exclusively to stories about books: evil books,
demonic books, possessed books, books that controlled their owners, all
types of bad books. What a great idea for an anthology!