The Mirrored Books

December 22, 1970

The last of the pages from the little black book turned to ash, its gleaming but well-worn cover starting to follow suite. A few moments later, it too ceased to exist. The little girl got up from her hiding place in the catacombs of the church and rushed over to her mentor as he lay slumped against the altar, broken and bloodied. He looked saint-like, bathed in moonlight through the gaps in the stained-glass windows. She put her hand on his cheek and kissed his forehead. A single tear trickled down her dark brown cheek. His skin was cold to the touch, a brutal end for a benevolent man. She said her final goodbye and rushed to the church door stealing one last look before disappearing into the frigid night.

June 21, 2015

The little girl was now a wizened woman in her early sixties. She had lived an active life and it showed. Her scarred skin had started to wrinkle in the last few years from having spent the majority of her life outdoors. She was less nimble but her gaze was as piercing as ever.

Standing on the precipice of the day her entire life had been leading up to, she rejoiced that the weather was balmy and the air was filled with the sound of birdsong. She finished pruning the last of her vegetables and dusted off her blue denim overalls before venturing back inside her cottage to set a pot of tea on the stove. Company was to arrive imminently.

Every reporter had one perfect story in them which would put all their prior work to shame. Jeremiah Dorsett felt this was his. No sooner did he get to the driveway than the door to the cottage opened and out stepped the legendary Ms Agatha Wheeler. She looked resplendent even in her gardening overalls. A power radiated from deep within her, one that touched all those she came across. You would think that a woman of Ms Wheeler’s stature would own a mansion with a dozen guards patrolling the lawns but Jeremiah was surprised to see that it was no more than a cottage you would see on the cover of a children’s bedtime book with not a guard in sight.

Agatha waved him down the driveway as she took her place on the porch recliner. Jeremiah was a strapping young man in his early thirties. Olive-skinned, athletic physique and positively awkward. His car could barely contain his 6’ 2” frame and something about his gait reminded her of Marcus, her mentor from all those years ago. She gave him a warm smile as he straightened his suit. Evidently, this was a man unaccustomed to wearing one and Agatha appreciated the effort.

Jeremiah could feel Ms Wheeler’s gaze on him. He looked up and gave a feeble smile as they locked eyes. So, this is what it felt like to be in the presence of a living legend. Ms Wheeler was a philanthropist who had witnessed all the depravity that humanity had to offer. Through her non-profit organisation Blank Pages, she had saved girls from the flesh trade, helped rescue and reform child soldiers, escorted aid missions in war-torn countries, helped rehabilitate victims of war and spearheaded countless humanitarian efforts. What earned Agatha Wheeler her laurels was that she was the sole sponsor on these missions with only the manpower coming from local authorities. She was always boots on the ground first in and last out; she was rumoured to have had more lives than a cat. The only known fact about Ms Wheeler was that all of this started with an anonymous donation of USD 20,000 to her and the rest is history.

The stairs going up the porch creaked under Jeremiah’s weight. He was grateful for the quietude of his surroundings for it gave him the opportunity to rearrange his thoughts. He thanked Agatha for reaching out to him, admitting that he found it puzzling why she didn’t reach out to someone more seasoned. Agatha promised Jeremiah that he would understand all by the end of their talk but to get to the why she would have to start at the very beginning.

June 21, 1965

The Wheelers’ mobile home was parked at the edge of the trailer park they called home. Agatha sat at the window of her room. It was no more than the inside of a closet with a makeshift hole in the wall for ventilation she could tape to keep the rain out during the monsoon. For Agatha, this was her magic portal. It was the middle of summer but she had her ear muffs on. Her father had come home drunk again and her mother was screaming her head off. It was routine by now, on the nights her father did come home. She wished he would just not come back one night. The ear muffs and paper-thin door did little to drown out the shouting but it was better than nothing. As the screams were reaching a crescendo, a man hobbled into view under the streetlight.

He kept glancing over his shoulder as though he was looking for something or someone. The screams got loud enough at this point that the neighbours in turn began hurling obscenities at the Wheelers. The man shot a furtive look in their direction. Agatha waved out, but when the man hopped the trailer park fence and started making his way towards the trailer, she panicked and ducked realising that she hadn’t thought this through. She peered outside her window hoping that he had disappeared. He called out to Agatha from under her eye level and she yelped when she found herself staring straight into the bluest eyes she had ever seen. The man looked to be in his late fifties with salt and pepper hair and similarly shaded stubble. He had a long nose and thin lips with a square jaw. A fresh cut on his eyebrow had caused a stream of blood to flow down the side of his temple and his other eye was bruised as well. Agatha thought he looked like the racoons she often saw rummaging through their trash.

He handed her a small brown package and asked her to hold on to it for a few minutes. Too stunned to speak, Agatha simply took the package and ducked back inside. A few moments passed and curiosity got the better of her. She gingerly removed the brown paper and was surprised to find a book with a reflective black cover. The cover had creases on it and looked quite worn but it still shone like a mirror. She opened the book and flipped through the pages intently. She was sure she knew how to read but the book made her question her capabilities. She quickly shut it and wrapped it back up.

Marcus Niles was a tough man by all counts. He could give it back as good as he got but even he couldn’t hold out against six burly men without getting beaten to a pulp. He had inherited the book many years ago from his master and mentor. In the world that Marcus belonged to, there were Readers and Seekers. These people belonged to a part of society that had the skill to read the Mirror Books or to seek out someone who could read them. Marcus Niles was a Seeker. These books were said to hold the secrets of the world and the greatest people in the collective history of the world were known to have been in possession of the knowledge contained within one or more of these books. Alexander the Great was the only person in the history of the world to have possessed the knowledge of eight out of nine of the books.

Apart from the Readers and the Seekers, there was a clan known as the Black Clad. This group was made up of Seekers who became corrupted by the allure of the Mirror Books and decided to force Readers into revealing the knowledge contained within. The Black Clad stalked unsullied Seekers and upon their pairing with a Reader, they would extract the knowledge of the book from the Reader through any means necessary. Marcus had been on the run from them for as long as he could remember but they had finally caught up with him. In his current state, he knew that hiding from them was the only viable way to go about this. After all, he was yet to find a Reader for the book in his possession, the Mirrored Book of Wealth and Resilience.

Marcus kept an eye on the area just beyond the trailer park and saw the Black Clad who had got a drop on him earlier. They hopped the fence and made a bee line for the trailer with the little girl in it.

All of a sudden, there was a fortuitous commotion a few meters from Agatha’s trailer. Having gotten sufficiently drunk, Agatha’s father had gone and picked a fight with the neighbour for not cleaning up their dog’s excrement. The Black Clad decided to err on the side of caution and capture Marcus Niles another day.

Marcus waited for the commotion to die down and walked back to the window. Agatha probingly inquired what language the book was in since she couldn’t understand it. Marcus felt the earth shift under his feet when he heard that. After 15 years he had found his Reader. He just shrugged and said it was an ancient, lesser-known language. Marcus felt Agatha was too young to draw her into his world at just 12.

Soon enough, Agatha forgot all about that night and life seemed to go on until one day her mother passed away in a hit and run accident. The small semblance of sanity in her life was shattered in an instant. Her father’s drinking got worse and the night he raised his hand on Agatha was when she decided to run away from home. For the next couple of months, she begged at street corners to get by and soon learnt she had a knack for pick-pocketing.

It wasn’t long before Marcus Niles felt the sudden loss of weight in his pocket and realised what had happened. He saw a street urchin hurriedly duck and weave through the crowd and gave chase for 2 blocks till he cornered the little thief in an alleyway. A sudden bolt of recognition struck. He asked if the thief was the little girl from the trailer park. Agatha’s hazel brown eyes welled up with tears and she broke down for the first time in months. Marcus leaned in and gently wrapped his arms around her. He promised her that she would be safe with him and then picked her up. She was all bone with a thin layer of skin stretched over. Marcus silently cursed himself for ignoring fate that night.

June 21, 2015

Jeremiah sat in stupefied silence. Agatha paused and asked if he believed her. He simply gave an affirmative nod. She went on to explain that while all Readers are Seekers the same is not true of the reverse. The only way to read a Mirrored Book is to consume it and make it one with the Reader’s mind and the only way to pass it on is for the Reader to expel the book from his or her mind and materialise it back into the physical form upon which all memory of its writings is purged from the Reader’s mind. The only downside to this was that once the book re-materialised into its physical form, the Black Clad would feel its presence too. The real question was whether Jeremiah Dorsett was a Reader or a Seeker and if he could steer clear of the Black Clad until the Mirrored Book would open itself to him.

Jeremiah nodded again and urged Agatha to continue with her tale.