Grimoire

Alice sat alone in her living room, shivering, gobsmacked.

She stared, wide-eyed, at the small black book and the open brown leather briefcase filled with crisp, new $20 bills sitting on her coffee table, her mind racing, her thoughts a jumble.

Is it unbelievably cold in here now? What the hell is happening?!

Her one-bedroom apartment was suddenly and quite literally freezing.

Down the hallway, the light in Alice’s bedroom flickered and winked out.

*************

SVARTEBOKEN.

Just that single word.

It was embroidered on the cover of the pocket-sized notebook in thick, tightly-sewn letters;

Alice gasped when she touched the flaxen thread of the embroidery. It felt like human hair.

But it couldn’t be.

The book was bound in some kind of jet-black animal hide; it wasn’t leather, it was softer than that and it felt oddly familiar. She couldn’t place it.

It was after hours at Addington Investments Group, and Alice’s manager, Janet, had instructed Alice to make sure that the large conference room was tidy and prepared for tomorrow morning’s client presentation. Alice had prepped the overhead projector and was pushing in the chairs around the main conference table on her way out the door when she noticed the black book in the crook of one of the seats.

The last person to use the conference room was Mr. Lundqvist, a very successful Norwegian investor in healthcare and pharmacy benefit management stocks. Mr. Addington offered the conference room to him as a makeshift office for the day during his visit this week.

Alice pocketed the notebook, figuring she would return it to Mr. Lundqvist personally tomorrow (after all, the Lost & Found was a cardboard box behind the front desk, and she didn’t trust leaving this book in there after seeing the receptionist, Veronica, lift a pair of sunglasses from it before).

*************

Alice hated riding the bus home at night after work; the seats felt perpetually sticky, the recirculated air smelled faintly of urine, and she felt one day she would definitely contract scabies from her commute.

She missed her Toyota Corolla; it wasn’t much, but it was hers, and it sure as heck beat public transit. Sadly, Alice had to sell the Corolla to help pay for Beth’s medical treatment; her mother couldn’t do it alone, and Alice – ever the dutiful daughter -- wanted to help with her youngest sister’s exorbitant hospital and treatment costs.

Alice’s middle sister, Cassie, was a selfish, self-centered hopeless case. Cassie felt no obligation to help with her sister’s medical bills, and was mostly estranged from the family unless she needed money herself.

Last month brought the most alarming development in Beth’s condition: insurance was refusing to pay for an experimental medication, Vanguardia, despite multiple letters by both Alice’s mother (and by Beth’s doctor) begging insurance company HealthRite’s Utilization Review Department to reconsider their decision to non-certify. Alice’s mom had been trying for the past couple of days to get attention from the local press on their situation, but to no avail.

Beth could die without Vanguardia. This medication was her best shot.

The total out-of-pocket cost, without any insurance assistance, for this very new and very experimental pharmaceutical was an astounding $35,000 for the monthlong course that Beth would require.

Cashing out everything she was able to, Alice’s mother could only come up with $15,000.

Alice hated even thinking about this wretched situation – the prospect that Beth lay sick and possibly dying just because she couldn’t pay, in this, one of the richest country’s in the world – yet she did so intermittently everyday.

Seeking a distraction, Alice withdrew the small black book that she’d found from her pocket and thumbed through its pages.

As she had half-expected, the book contained handwritten notes in what looked to be a Scandinavian language. But to her surprise, it also contained entries in Latin. There were tables as well, and what appeared to be recipes of some sort.

There was a notable absence of names or addresses of business contacts like Alice had anticipated.

She found a short passage in red ink (everything else to that point was written in blue ink) and tried mouthing the foreign words under her breath, unsure of the pronunciation (Alice only spoke English, and managed a B+ in high-school Spanish some seven years ago).

She thumbed through the small black book some more and came across an inverted pentagram drawn in red Sharpie, surrounded by symbols. Her eyes widened.

On the next page was a sketch of a bisected goat.

Alice gasped. She slammed the book closed and stuffed it in her purse.

What the HELL, Mr. Lundqvist?

She took a deep breath, and eventually returned to staring back out the window… and to thinking about her poor sister.

God, I wish I had that money.

*************

The thin, brown, leather briefcase sat silently in front of the door of Alice’s fourth-floor apartment, like it had always been there.

Alice looked up and down the hallway to see if anyone was walking away who might have forgotten it, but there was no one, and she hadn’t seen anyone pass her in the elevator.

She entered her apartment, tossed her purse on the kitchen counter, and placed the case on the coffee table, kicking off her heels. She turned on all of the lights, as was her habit (she hated a dark apartment), cracked open a beer from the fridge, and plopped her tired self onto the couch. That was when she noticed something peculiar.

The briefcase had no locks.

No dials for a combination. No keyhole. Just the latches.

Alice set the case down flat and slowly, carefully open it.

Her jaw dropped.

Neat, crisp, bound bundles of dollars. Straight from the bank.

Twenty-five $20 bills to a bundle, and she counted 40 bundles.

$20,000.

How the—

What the—

This can’t be—

Alice got up and retrieved the black book from her purse and threw it on the table next to the case. She returned to the couch, still astounded by what lay in front of her. More cash than she’s ever seen up close in one place, to be quite honest.

Out of the corner of her eye, something moved.

Down the hallway.

Not movement, so much. It was the bedside lamp in her room, flickering.

The light went out, bathing her room in an unnerving level of darkness.

Then her hallway light blinked out.

And the spotlight above the entryway.

Then, one by one, the lights in her kitchen.

And, finally, all of the lights in her living room.

The tips of Alice’s fingers hurt; it was so extremely cold, and unnaturally pitch-black in her living room.

There isn’t even light coming in through the windows.

Alice heard whispers; so quiet, from different sources. She couldn’t make out the words.

She felt a whooshing of air, like something darting around her in the dark. Like the flapping of monstrously large wings.

She screamed, but no one heard her. None of her neighbors responded or banged on the wall.

It was preternaturally quiet in her apartment now; gone were the normal sounds outside typically heard in the evening – the sounds of traffic, of TVs through the walls, of booming music in the distance.

It was quiet as the grave outside, as if the building was floating in space.

The only sounds were the movements and whispers in the dark. And the chattering of Alice’s own teeth, so frigid had the interior of her home become.

“Who’s there?” she cried out.

“Heh, heh… Amerikansk?” a deep, gravelly voice responded from the darkness. “Your wish is granted.”

The voice erupted into a hideous, bone-chilling laugh.

Seconds later, it was all over.

The laughter had stopped. All of the lights came back on simultaneously.

The temperature increased to a normal 70 degrees.

After taking some moments to compose herself, Alice searched every room of her apartment, armed with a baseball bat and her in her phone, and found nobody else in her apartment. Even the sounds of the street and the neighboring apartments had resumed.

There was one thing out of place, however.

The briefcase was still on the coffee table, open like a gaping maw.

But now the little black book beside it was open to a previously blank page near the end. Freshly written in crimson ink (it was still wet) were the words: “Hvis du godtar dette gaven, vil den forrige eieren av den Svarteboken dø, og sjelen hans vil tilhøre Den Mørke.”

Alice consulted instantly with the translation app on her phone. The language was Norwegian.

Translation: “If you accept this gift, the previous owner of the black book will die tonight, and his soul will belong to the Dark One.”

The phone fell from her Alice’s hands with a resounding crack.

*************

Cassie knew there had to be cash or something valuable in this dump somewhere.

She had snagged the spare key to her older sister’s apartment from her mom’s kitchen drawer.

Cassie and Alice had fallen out long ago: Alice was such a holier-than-thou, judgmental, uppity bitch. And what the hell was she even? An office manager at some office? Big whoop.

Now they hated each other more than ever, with Mom thinking Alice this perfect angel who “saved precious Beth’s life.”

Beth would’ve been fine either way. How ridiculous. But anything to add to the glory of sainted Alice.

Cassie was certain there was at least some cash or some jewelry tucked away in here. Her sister suddenly coming into big money like that, in cash (gambling winnings, my ass). Alice had to have some dough tucked away in her pad.

An hour of fruitless searching revealing only that her workaholic had little to show for all of her labors, Cassie grabbed a couple of cute outfits and a pair of shoes and was ready to bolt. She didn’t want to stick around too long (Alice could come home for lunch, after all), but with her hand on the knob of the front door, Cassie suddenly heard something stirring.

Very soft, but continuous. Urgent. She followed the sound.

Past the kitchen. Down the hallway. Into her sister’s bedroom. Into her master closet.

The sound was coming from the top shelf. A sound of something shifting around.

Cassie discovered that it was coming from a stainless steel lock box wrapped in a folded Business section of an out-of-town newspaper, dated three months ago.

A small headline on the front page of the paper read: “Activist Investor Nils Lundqvist Dies Suddenly From COVID-19.”

The shifting inside of the box stopped when Cassie picked it up.

“Disco!” Cassie cried. “Alice has a safe!”

It was a top-quality lock box, but felt surprisingly lightweight, like it barely contained anything. She shook it. It felt like it had a passport or some other booklet inside, and obviously something that was moving before. Maybe something antique, a mechanical toy or something she could sell.

More mysteriously, the box itself was ice-cold.

Like, freakishly so.

The lock appeared to have a patina of frost on it.

What the hell was Alice keeping in here? Dry ice?

Cassie fiddled with the lock for about a minute with a bobby pin when she heard something fall to the floor with a jingle by Alice’s desk.

She looked up to see the top drawer was open.

I could have sworn that was closed before.

The shiny thing on the floor was a tiny lock box key.

Cassie retrieved it and smiled.

The lamp in Alice’s room flickered just long enough for Cassie to see the white plume of her own visible breath before the light winked out completely, bathing the room in an unnatural darkness at midday.