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Lucien Booker had a reasonably profitable business, as well as an apposite surname and a very bookish demeanour to go with it. It had always been a family story that the Booker Prize was, in fact, connected with them. It wasn’t. It was just a fanciful notion promulgated by a grandfather who had more creative imagination than sense which was offset by a good nose for the book trade, even in his dotage when he came up with the notion. Hence, ‘Booker’s Independent Book Shop’, despite all the odds, was still going strong some 100 years after it was founded in Victorian buildings whose antecedents had been a public lending library and an early photographic studio. A mock Gothic structure, it lent the premises an air of authority and verisimilitude which had stood the business in good stead over the years. It looked like a proper book store. One where you could get lost amongst the shelves. One where you could pick up long out of print volumes at - it has to be said - a hefty mark up, but apparently worth it to Lucien’s clientele, because the antiquarian trade was probably worth more to the business than the modern stock.

Lucien had, for the past few years, exploited the family’s fanciful notion by introducing ‘Booker’s Book Prize’, a competition open to Creative writers from an expanding catchment area which had proved extremely attractive to local wannabe writers. Bookers was fortunate in that it had a number of back rooms behind the racks of books, formerly used as library reading rooms, which Lucien made available to local writing groups and book clubs - which he personally ran - at very reasonable rates. The facilities were very well used and the book sale/return and resale spin off that went with this business diversification was very welcome. He had also installed a small refreshment area and, although he had failed in his attempts at getting a licence, a blind eye to the surreptitious BYOB and a sly quid-pro-quo with the liquor store next door, further enhanced the popularity of the group activities. Lucien was doing alright, if slightly on the fringes of honest respectability.

Bookers had been Lucien’s whole life. He lived - alone - above the shop. He revelled in organising his groups. He practically ran the place single-handedly, apart from his frequent buying trips when he relied on knowledgeable agency staff for cover, and a young and willing female assistant who was somewhat in awe of Lucien’s knowledge and fawned on his every word, a trait which completely passed Lucien by. To Lucien, the only thing that stirred his blood was the Dewey Decimal System which ran through his veins in the same way that Binary Code underpinned computing - which he had only reluctantly embraced purely for the purposes of business. He ran both systems in tandem but much preferred his card indices. He could practically recall his stock volume for volume with date of purchase and provenance without recourse to either. He would readily - and happily - admit to being a bit of a throwback.

This was reinforced by a series of historical prints of the town and environs wherever there was a space on the crowded walls. Bookers could well have served as a museum piece as well as a place of business and that was how Lucien liked it.

One of his latest acquisitions was a set of skin bound vellum tomes of unknown origin and provenance from a country house sale just a few miles away, Unknown provenance or not, they were right. Lucien smelled it. Smelled it in a way that was almost orgasmic in its intensity, - and pungency: the volumes had obviously been exposed to water damage in the past and the particular smell of damp vellum lingered, like a wrung-out chamois leather left out to dry. But that formed part of the charm for Lucien. These would not be part of the stock. These were his. Reluctantly, he stored them away and prepared to welcome his next book club.

What had first intrigued Lucien about the volumes was the mundanity - and relative modernity - of the text. Simple estate accounts and, in one case at least, florid and amateurish poetry in a Victorian hand, they did not sit at all well with the once magnificent skin bindings, decrepit though they were. The house from which he had acquired them had been a sadly run-down example of a relatively minor country seat - a little better than yeoman stock but hardly touching aristocracy. In fact, he had an old print of the house in his collection on the walls, seemingly deplorably neglected even when the original painting had been executed some time in the late 19th century. There had been some subsequent improvement in fabric over the intervening years, but modern economic uncertainties being what they were, the final parts of the estate were being sold off prior to redevelopment as the ubiquitous Country House Hotel.

No, what drew Lucien’s imagination was that the volumes were quite obviously of much older origin and that the pages had been reused - the vellum scraped clean and fresh text applied. And applied in inferior ink which was now so faded as to be almost illegible in parts. Whilst that did not permit immediate decipherability of any underlying text, it did at least confirm that there was something that had gone before. Book conservation was part of Lucien’s DNA, if not as a formal discipline, at least as a working practice given his immersion in bibliographic antiquary over the years. So, it was a siren call to his soul.

It took months of painstaking work before Lucien felt he was getting anywhere with his project. And this was at the expense of his other activities which either fell by the wayside or were taken on by his willing assistant wherever she felt she could help. It was not so much a project as an obsession and Lucien’s usually neat appearance began to take on a dishevelled look with an almost manic gleam in his eyes as work progressed. One of his initial discoveries confirmed his suspicions which fuelled his thirst for more: the books were, indeed, mediaeval manuscripts whose illuminated texts had been criminally defamed through their treatment. Faint traces of the original colours only hinted at their original magnificence. Other than that only the odd ghostly word floated disconnected from the pages. The words were in Latin, of course, and Lucien had enough Latin to identify that the Estate record volumes had formerly been purely religious texts - more than likely copies of early biblical writings and too indeterminate to bother with. But the poetry collection was a different story.

Once cleaned up, the faint images beneath the now largely deleted later texts revealed themselves to be glyphs and diagrams with drawings of apparatus, annotated in a language that was not Latin and appeared to be some form of archaic English. The script and diagrammatic representations, such that could be made out at all clearly, put Lucien in mind of Da Vinci, although he was too realistic to hope that it might be such a momentous discovery. But it did appear to be a scientific treatise of sorts. Or Alchemical. Diagrams of pentagrams even suggested some direction away from the purely physical plane, and it was to this that Lucien eventually turned his attention.

Throughout his progress of working on the books, he had kept a working diary. And it was this to which the Authorities turned their attention when Lucien’s horrified assistant called them in after finding his flayed body sprawled alongside his beloved vellum books inside a chalked pentagram on the floor. Books which now displayed a pristine set of skin covers.

The clubs and societies continued for a while once the Probate had been settled, although a certain sense of unease prevailed in the back rooms when the sessions recommenced. The new owner, who had carried on with Lucien’s legacy could never himself feel quite at ease in the premises, understandably so: but especially since one print from the walls kept appearing on the counter overnight: a picture of a sadly neglected country house, with an indistinct figure carrying what appeared to be a set of books across the lawn. Getting closer to the front door each time he looked.