The Gnkohmencloak

Part i: Jupiter's Rare Books, 49 S. Topside Avenue

As her eyes fixed on it… or, more accurately, as they fixed on the space just beyond it… the dark leather of its delicately beveled spine seemed to almost completely recede. That is to say, the book disappeared. In its absence it left a vague outline that danced with invisibly thin threads of shimmering light. Her breath caught, and the image evaporated as her eyes habitually refocused on the book’s smoothly textured body. Vanessa spun around and quickly scanned the alley of books behind her. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, it was more a knee-jerk reaction to having just experienced something, well, something completely unimaginable. Seeing that she was still alone felt exciting, however, and her attention immediately returned to the book. She cautiously reached up to take it from its place on the shelf. It was unassuming: a little pocket-sized black book no thicker than a quarter inch. Supple in her hands, she turned it over to view its cover, which, mysteriously, was entirely blank…

Flipping through the book’s pages, she found them to be blank as well. Vanessa grew increasingly puzzled, a spark of familiar anxiety rising along the back of her neck. She wasn’t losing her mind, was she? Having a mental breakdown after spontaneously moving to a new city without friends, family, or even the prospect of a job? She had felt called here, even to this very bookstore as she’d walked past it, but her daring move now felt shrouded in uncertainty. Then she heard the bookkeeper’s sing-song voice ring sweetly across the room on the shelves above her, and her heart lifted again as she began to grin.

“Find ye an item of interest, beo?” he sang.

She made her way back to the cathedral-like registration desk where she’d met him earlier. He was there as he’d been before, his bushy white beard framing a broad and apparently permanent smile as he hummed and surveyed stacks of variously sized hardbacks, some of them so worn in appearance that they would probably look more at home in a glass vault. The bookkeeper hummed and surveyed, stopping occasionally to juggle a few books into piles and scribe notes in a Moleskine journal as he slowly advanced through his task.

“Master Bookkeeper,” Vanessa inquired as she approached. “Could you tell me more about this little black book here?” The warmth of the bookkeeper’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyebrows betrayed a moment of surprise when he looked to inspect what she held.

“Aha! A Gnkohmencloak,” he said with a hint of genuine amusement. “Quite a find! Quite a find…” he paused. “And quite a lot of book for one lass to wield,” he said almost questioningly, looking up to meet the eyes of the young woman. His own eyes glinted with gentle mischief as he watched her, obviously waiting for her response.

Cued by the mysteriousness of his answer and the sudden intensity of his gaze, Vanessa felt a surge of validation. Whatever she had experienced earlier was something more than just a trick of the light. It wasn’t a bizarre hallucination; it had been real. But no sooner than she’d let out a short sigh of relief, she realized the implied nature of the book in her hand. Looking down at it, her eyes widened in surprise, then quickly narrowed as she concentrated on forming her next question.

“Do you know how it works?” she asked, looking up at the bookkeeper.

The bookkeeper seemed to approve of her question, his smile growing so wide that his eyes almost squinted shut. He turned to sort a few more books onto the slowly growing stacks, singing his blithesome response.

“Little beo, I do indeed, and I’d wager ye’d like to learn?”

“I would!” She nodded eagerly, her eyes wide and her smile growing nearly large enough to match his.

“I am called Jupiter,” he said beaming toward her, “and I will tell you what a Master knows.”

Part ii: Concealed Success

“Curses!” Dirge spat angrily, laying as low to the ground as he could while pulling Vanessa to crouch on hands and knees beside him. “Get down! Get down, or they might see your obnoxiously large human head!” She would have been offended by that, were she not struggling to still her nausea from the apparent spinning of her surroundings. Her head was very normally sized, thank you very much, just unusually woozy at this particular moment.

To Vanessa, the last few minutes seemed a vague and unintelligible blur. When a moment ago she’d handed the little black book to the squat man, “Dirge” as he’d introduced himself, she had been instantly overwhelmed by disorientation. It was like the room was spinning. Both ways at once, in fact. And at the same time, growing and shrinking in rapid succession. What’s more, she’d felt a thick haze settle over her thoughts, as if everything around her were part of a bizarre and distorted half-lucid dream. Vanessa felt somewhat appreciative of Dirge’s insistence that they remain low to the ground, as an attempt to stand would likely result in toppling back onto the floor in a panic. She was beginning to fret as it was. Where was she? And how did she get here?

She remembered a butterfly, drawn in the electric light of the gnkohmencloak’s pages. She remembered the light dancing, fluttering wings, standing and joyfully chasing the butterfly as it fluttered off the page and deep into a grove of trees. A door! She remembered a door in the tree... And a long spiral staircase leading into the earth beyond it...

Dirge’s rumbling broke her reverie. “If the constable is carrying a scry-stone then he’ll be able to see right through the stature illusion that you’ve been casting...” He tugged harder on her sleeve, urging her below the table that had been host to their polite conversation just a few moments earlier. His questions continued in a flurry.

“How did you learn to use it, anyway? Don’t answer that, no time. So curious, though, a human learning to use a gnkohmencloak. I didn’t even know it was possible. And how did you find our citadel?” His tone took a turn toward the dramatic. “Pillager? Villager? Protectress or scourge? These are the questions that plague poor young Dirge.”

Dirge quieted as one of the constable’s shouts rang on the cave’s ceiling above them. The constable was making faster progress toward them now, having pushed through the densest crowd of gnkohmes within the network of wooden bridges that filled the massive underground chamber. Regardless of his movement now being relatively unimpeded, the constable continued to loudly scold the pedestrians along his path. “Clear the way!” he cried. “I said I saw a man! Cursed gnkohmen drones, slow bones, I said to clear the way!”

“Gnomes…?” Vanessa murmured quietly to herself, grinning and beginning to laugh. Her humor was suddenly cut short by the dawning of a fantastic realization. “Wait, Dirge. What happened just then? When you took the book. I felt like I grew very suddenly. Or perhaps like you shrank. Did that actually happen? Oh my… Dirge, are you a gnome?!”

Dirge looked back at her in horror for a moment. Then his eyes shut as he burst into a fit of laughter. “Am I a gnkohme?” he giggled out. “Why yes, yes I am. You poor lost lamb. I’m a ‘gnoooome.’” He drew the last word out awkwardly, speaking it in a low pitch to mock her pronunciation. “And of course you grew! What did you think would happen when you shed the gnkohmencloak?” He paused, pointing to the book and looking at her suspiciously. “You don’t actually know what this is, do you?”

Vanessa was too distracted to answer, looking around and marveling at the fact that she had walked right into the center of a city of gnomes without noticing. It was almost as if she had been dreaming, moving through a strange reality without questioning it. That is, until the moment she’d handed the little black book to the strange little man who she now found herself hiding under a table with.

“Dirge?” She asked, forgetting the gnkohme’s question. “I take it that humans aren’t allowed here…”

“Far from it,” he said gruffly. “Which begs the question of how to get you out, now that you’ve been spotted... I considered the options. Just now, I mean. While you got all glassy-eyed and distant. I think I have a plan.” He grinned broadly in a way that struck Vanessa as oddly familiar.

Part iii: Rushed Planning

“It’s crucial that the constable never know that you’ve used a gknohmencloak,” Dirge warned. “If he discovers that?” He paused anxiously. “There’ll be no chance of you seeing earth’s magnificent surface again. If he catches you… Well, when he catches you, because that’s inevitable at this point, then the best case scenario is that the Elden Council elects to wipe your memory and send you back up to Topside.”

The sense of adventure that had been rekindling itself within Vanessa’s chest was abruptly replaced by alarm.

“Wipe my memory?!” she exclaimed, her eyes wild.

“It won’t hurt a bit,” Dirge said placatingly. “They’ll just guide you to a room lined with orange half-heart gemstones. Like the ones lining that path,” he said, pointing. “You’ll get so deliriously wrapped up in how pretty they are that your brain’ll misplace your memories of the last couple of days.”

Her heart plummeting into despair must have been visible, because Dirge smiled kindly and wrapped an arm around her.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Like I told you, I have a plan. Yes, we’ve got to get you into that chamber and get your mind blitzed before they can… It’s our only guarantee that the best case scenario is the one that plays out. But this option comes with a bonus! We stand to make quite a bit of reward money for catching a rouge human.” At this he grinned widely and nudged her with his elbow. “Forty-thousand quibbles! Which hold an equal value to your dollars, since I know you’re about to ask. Though I’m not sure how we’ll split it.”

Vanessa smiled weakly, still hurt at the thought that she’d soon forget this experience. Melancholy that she’d forget having visited Jupiter and his bookshop, discovering the gnkohmencloak, and stumbling accidentally into a different world. As she thought of Jupiter, an image of him formed in her mind. Standing in his bookstore, smiling gently at her, scribbling his notes… “Wait!” she said suddenly, spurred by an idea. She pulled from her purse another little black book almost identical to the gnkohmencloak: her own Moleskine. She dug for a pen, jotted down her address, and tore off the page. “Find me,” she insisted, locking eyes and holding it out to him.

The constable’s shouting drew near. They were out of time.

“Okay. I’ll find you. Now hand me the cloak and prepare to run.”

Vanessa handed Dirge the gnkohmencloak, a wave of nausea hitting her as she suddenly quadrupled in size.

“Remember!” Dirge demanded, gesturing ahead of her. “Follow that path. The orange one. And no matter what, don’t stop. Now run!”

Dirge leapt up onto the table, pointing at Vanessa as she scrambled up and began half-running-half-stumbling along the orange crystalline path.

“Human!” he shrieked, “Human in Gnkohmtown!” He began jumping from table to table, following her as gnomes scattered out of the way in terror. He leapt again, landing squarely on her shoulders. “Don’t mind me,” he said as he began pulling her hair. “You’re doing great, by the way!”

Part iv: Reawakened

Vanessa was groggy when she woke. How long had she been asleep? She reached to the nightstand for her phone, but instead found a large yellowed envelope. “To the Bookkeeper’s Apprentice,” it read in a small script, “20,000 human dollars and one gnkohmen cloak.”