If Books Could Kill

The gentleman in the grey angora wool suit sitting across from Henry placed a stack of paper gently before him, then just as casually brought a suitcase up from below the table. The bills inside looked crisp and untouched, as if just printed. His nose was almost against the banded stacks when he leaned in to inspect them.

“Twenty thousand, as promised. You may read the paperwork if you’d like, then sign the last page,” the man across the table lifted a pen from his coat pocket and lay it upon the paperwork.

“So, let me get this straight… I just take a book through a maze, and when I make it to the end the money is mine?”

“In short, yes.”

“I’m assuming there’s a catch. No one offers a large sum of cash just to carry a book around.”

“The catch is to get the book through the maze.”

Henry flipped through a page or two of the contract without actually reading much. He caught mention of forfeiture of monies if the maze was not completed, if the book was lost, destroyed, or maimed in any way prior to completing the maze, if the book was stolen without retrieval before finishing the maze-

He paused here. “Will others be in the maze?”

“It’s a possibility,” the man said airily. “Our tests vary day-to-day.”’

“So there are more books?”

The man seemed to grow tired of Henry’s questions, not out of irritation, but similar to an adult tiring of a child’s basic inquisitiveness when every explanation is followed by “Why?” His cool blue eyes remained calm, easy-going… but also eerily soul-piercing. “All the specifics are in the contract, if you care to read it before entry.”

Henry stared a moment longer at the paperwork, then glanced at the money again, then to the man, all the while twirling the fine ballpoint pen in his hand. “Well, let’s see the book then,” he said, flipping to the last page and signing. His loan shark “Tony” had sent him on this crusade, saying that if he did this test for a family friend he’d let all his gambling debts slide. He could even keep the twenty grand. Sounded too good to be true for Henry, but “Tony” assured him it was a big deal type of test, his cousin said it could be life-altering or something. He hardly cared if it meant being out from under the thumb of a man who poorly faked a Boston accent and always quoted Scarface, mostly so he never had to hear the question “Do you know what capitalism is?” ever again, or pretend he believed his name was Tony after his mother called him Armaan over the phone.

“Fantastic,” the man said, slipping the pen back in his coat pocket. Then, pulling again from under the table, he handed Henry a little black Moleskine book held closed by a thin elastic band. On the front a number was inscribed in silver Arial font:

37

Henry questioned it silently but thought better of voicing it aloud, knowing the explanation was probably something “in the contract.” He just wanted to get on with this charade and get to the coin.

“This way,” the man across the table beckoned, leading Henry down the longest hallway he may have ever seen, maybe for the lack of doors. After traversing the very basic build of the rest of the compound the industrial metal door at the hallway’s end gave him a slight twinge of unease.

“Good luck,” the suited man said, opening the door and waving him on. After he cautiously stepped outside the door made a heavy click behind him. He turned back and saw there was no handle, it’s steel frame flush with the metal wall. And that was all that surrounded him- sturdy metal walls towering at least three stories high and only about five feet apart. The ground however was dirt, and above him he could see the tops of trees looming on either side of a glass ceiling.

He was immediately met with a fork in the maze. He drew an arrow pointing left with the toe of his dingy white sneaker and began following it, but quickly turned back and dusted it away with his foot. 37… What if there were at least 37 people in here? And the contract said someone may try stealing the book. The dirt looked fairly undisturbed, so it was hard to tell.

He learned quickly that either the compound was much larger than he could’ve imagined, or there were not many other people, if any. After hours of turning corners and finding nothing but cameras above him in every hall he began drawing arrows in the dirt again. At one point he thought he heard a scream in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he was just going crazy from the constant hum caused by lingering silence. He tired of the game about what he figured was six hours based on the light above him and began pleading with a camera to let him out, but to no avail, so he sat to rest his legs. No devices were allowed in, not that he could Google an escape route or even get service in this God-forsaken place. He was really regretting agreeing to the test now that there had been no signs of exit since entering the maze.

Then, in the distance, he heard a blaring siren. He headed toward it hoping for a way out. It was getting dark, and the only artificial light were the cameras he came across blinking down from above. Would they leave him overnight? He tried to follow the sound, but after two more turns through the maze it stopped. “Hello?” he called. He called out again and turned a couple more corners toward where he thought the siren had come from, but he found only more blank steel walls.

“What the hell!” He hollered, kicking the wall beside him, the sound echoing down the current corridor. His toes hurt from the outburst, but he only clenched his fists and breathed deeply, unwilling to let whoever may be watching through the cameras laugh at his expense any more than they may have already been.

Then, a thought came to him…

Could the book have a clue about what he should do? He felt pretty foolish after half a day of wandering around never having opened the book at all. He pulled it from his jacket pocket and slipped the elastic band off the cover.

The first page was blank. He flipped to the next, then another, then on the fourth he noticed a black dot in the top right corner. Each page after had a dot larger than the previous. He remembered those flip books as a kid that sometimes had moving pictures or codes, so he held all the pages in one hand and somewhat slowly flipped through them. The spot grew bigger with each passing piece of paper. When he hit the last page a quarter of the paper was covered in ink, the round edges of the dots having passed the corner of the paper long ago, but no message appeared that he saw. “Well that was pointless,” he said in annoyance, but did it faster in case he overlooked something. When he got to the last page again, strange as it was, it looked like more ink appeared. The splotch covered about half the page now. He decided maybe third time’s the charm, and did it even faster this time, rushing to the last page. Then his hope became worry.

The ink on the last page hadn’t just moved this time- it still was. It dripped down to the ground, pooling and staining the pressed dirt below. He dropped the book and stood hurriedly to back away from the spreading darkness. From the ever-growing pool rose what reminded him of segmented ant antennae, four knee-high limbs prodding the dirt softly. He was frozen in place when more appendages slipped through the spine of the book. Black liquid spilled over the ground quickly now as the additional eight limbs protruded, these each at least twice his height, reminiscent of insect legs but for the taught brown skin on them glistening, and the sharply curved singular claws at the end of each slashing into the ground like thrown sickles. They hardly fit in the narrow hall.

Henry could feel his heartbeat in his chest, hear it thump against his cochlea, even see it distort his vision as he looked at this monstrosity and his sight wavered. Or was it pure madness? Only madness could make this creature appear from a book. When he looked where the book once lay there was nothing but liquid blackness bubbling from the ground while the legs fought for stability. Once they seemed to find it they pulled up in unison from the puddle a large, faceless mass covered in layers of flabby skin stacked atop one-another. It’s weight seemed daunting to the appendages, but as it lifted from liquid nothingness so too did more, smaller limbs that writhed beneath it like hundreds of worms, splashing in the black liquid below to keep it afloat. Then two of the original antennae reached down and began lifting the layers of skin up until he could see something moving…

He thought it a massive, four-feet-wide eye staring at the wall to his right, oily and so textured he could see it roll beneath the skin now pulled tight by the antennae. Rather than a definitive pupil the creature had a deep triangular hollow in the center where oil collected and shone like a slick on pavement. While he was mesmerized by its grotesque features it jerked in his direction, and one of its long gangly legs came down behind him, forcing him to jump toward it to evade. The other two antennae drew down to what he thought was it’s eye, then pulled at either side of the triangular opening until Henry saw what really resided inside.

Hundreds of tiny jagged teeth ground against each other as it gnashed it’s jaws within, and from deeper still a burgundy slithering tongue launched out at him. He had no time to react. It wrapped around his legs, and one of the antennae once holding up its excess skin assisted it back into the cavernous mouth while he screamed and clawed at the dirt.

The camera above caught the last few seconds as the monster dropped itself haphazardly into the blackness, rolling backward and disappearing before Henry reached it’s teeth, still being dragged alongside the worm appendages underneath it. The lanky legs accordion-folded quickly back into the darkness with him. His wildly grasping hand was the last thing to pass through before the book reabsorbed all traces of the liquid and closed, leaving no trace of what transpired behind.

“Took longer than usual,” the security guard behind the wool-suited man commented while they watched from a monitor. A siren went off in the maze and multiple guards headed toward the book, carefully replacing the elastic and carrying it back toward the library.

“At least it wasn’t as messy as our last though,” the suited man said nonchalantly. “Was the money lender that sent him paid off?”

“It’s taken care of.”

“Good. Let’s try 45 again, that one seemed more promising last week.”

His dull blue eyes turned to the book case behind him. The library was large, containing thousands of books, but this small cranny housed the most important of them- 53 notebooks, all blank but for the silver numbers set in their black covers. He gently plucked the book with 45 embossed on the front off the shelf, picked up the case of money sitting beside the monitor where Henry’s untimely demise had previously been recorded, then headed back toward the waiting room to meet the next book carrier.