David Parker's Journal: 7
Mood: Grim
* * *
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
“Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
“While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
“As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”
-- Edgar Allan Poe
* * *
It was freakishly warm for winter. A front had moved through during the night, blanketing the area with an overlay of warm air. The morning dawned half-dark with haze. The fog stayed on through the middle of the day, thickening, the inversion stalled over the Mississippi. At twilight, a cold drizzle began to fall.
I’d taken the book from the Olde Curiosity Shoppe when I left it the night before. Maybe I should say I “stole” the book, though I left a $100 bill behind in compensation. No doubt the owner came in to open the shop, found the money on the desk in the office, and wondered. Where had the money come from? Who left it? How had they gotten into the locked antique shop during the night? And why, if they were going to commit a stealthy B&E, would they leave behind $100?
Life is filled with mysteries, so a few more will hardly tip the balance. Maybe someday the owner would realize the copy of “Pilgrim’s Progress” that had once been in industrialist William Benton’s library was missing from the bookshelves on the second floor, though I doubted it.
When I got home from my unplanned burglary, I put the book on the table next to my reading chair and went into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. The house’s previous owner had converted a cupboard in the butler’s pantry to a wine closet. There were some interesting bottles there – Chateau Latour, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, Chateau Haut-Brion – but I was hardly in the mood to intrigue my palate. On the floor sat a wooden crate containing my latest order, a California wine I like to drink with Italian food. I pried off the top with my fingernails. (Possessing a vampire’s preternatural strength has many practical applications.) I brushed away the synthetic packing straw and lifted out a bottle of Ravenswood Zinfandel. The winery’s logo shows three ravens in profile, their claws interlocking, forming a circle.
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore,’” I said.
The ravens on wine bottle label did not reply.
I opened the bottle and poured myself a glass, then returned to the living room and threw myself into the big leather chair.
I took a taste of wine and looked at the book. It just sat there. Thinking of how it jumped off the shelf at the Olde Curiosity Shoppe the night before, I half expected it to do something dramatic now – flip open, fly about the room declaiming its secrets, anything.
The book just sat there.
The magic had gone out of it. Or maybe the power that had animated it last night had withdrawn. The book was nothing more than … a book, an inanimate object, a tome written in archaic English whose main purpose in the world to inflict pain and suffering on college literature students.
Fortifying myself with another swallow of wine, I picked up the book began to read. It was 303 pages long, so it didn’t take long to read. In fifteen minutes I had read through it twice – three times, counting the quicker perusal I’d given it at the Olde Curiosity Shoppe. If the book had something to tell me, either the person who hid the message had been too clever for me, or else I was too dim-witted to ferret out the message.
I threw the book down and got up to refill my glass. I’d had enough of whatever game Tatiana was playing for the night.
* * *
I slept poorly, haunted by Tatiana and Poe’s Raven. In my restless dreams, Tatiana was the dead Lenore and I was the grieving Poe. The Raven, a ghastly refugee from “Night’s Plutonian shore,” perched on William Benton’s copy of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” croaking “Nevermore!” whenever I tried to get the beast to reveal the book’s secret.
The morning was gray, foggy, depressing, a perfect reflection of my mood. I moped around the house all day. In the afternoon, I sat down at the piano and started to play some Chopin, but my heart wasn’t in it, and I gave up after a few desultory bars of music.
It was nearly dark and beginning to rain when I picked up the book again. I hefted it in my hand and turned quickly toward the fireplace, seized by an impulse to hurl it onto the split oak logs and set the whole mass ablaze. I stopped myself in the course of drawing my arm back to throw. It was astonishing how an old book could seem to mock me.
I opened the book one more time and found myself looking down on the long-dead William Benton’s bookplate. The Sphinx and pyramid briefly glowed with ghostly light and then returned to their former state – dull ink printed on yellowing paper.
It had to have something to do with Freemasonry, I thought, thinking of the Masonic symbols pulsing with fairy light beneath the layers of paint in Hibernian Hall. It had to have something to do with the whispered nexus between the Masons and the Illuminati. A linkage between the two secret societies had long been rumored – though the Vampiri Illuminati was far more hidden from the world than the fraternal lodge.
My ignorance about the Freemasons is, I confess, almost complete, though if what Tatiana said about the Illuminati was true, then I’m equally ignorant of the vampire organization that had expelled me for losing control over the Hunger.
A few moments later found me racing up the street in the Audi, splashing through icy puddles of water, the filthy runoff of rain and melting snow on streets that had been heavily salted and cindered from earlier storms.
* * *
There were no parking spaces close in to Border’s, but then there never are. I parked at the far end of the lot, turned the collar of my trench coat up against the pelting rain, and ran for the front door. As I went in the pleasant aroma of coffee called to me from the café, but there was work to be done.
I went straight to the curved counter in the middle of the store, beneath a sign that saying, “Reader Service.” The woman manning the desk was staring down at a shipping invoice. She didn’t look up.
“What is it?”
I’d been so intent upon the thoughts boiling in my head that I hadn’t really paid attention clerk until she decided to direct her undisguised impatience toward me. She was, on the whole, an attractive young woman, in the manner of the self-consciously bookish, Bohemian types who gravitate towards employment in bookstores and espresso bars. Her brown hair was neatly trimmed so that it fell to the middle of her neck; she wore it tucked behind her ears. She had the kind of glasses that always strike me as being intentionally ugly, as if to contrast with a pretty face. The frames were heavy black plastic, the lenses wider than high, with uplifted corners, like the cat’s eye style popular in the 1950s.
“I’m looking for books on the Freemasons. Would they be with the history books or are they shelved somewhere else?”
She glanced up from her paperwork for the briefest of moments, disdain evident in her eyes.
“You can find everything you’re looking for by using our computerized database,” she said, picking up a pen to make a notation on the invoice. “There are stations located throughout the store.”
She made a dismissive little wave with her pen without looking up at me again, as if to indicate the ample supply of computers to which I could more appropriately address my questions, rather than annoying her when she was busy.
“Thanks for your help,” I said, managing to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
No response. It was as if I never existed.
I went to the nearest terminal, called up the book-search software, typed in my subject and waited for the response to come up on the screen. I was a little surprised to find that most of the books were located in the section of the store dedicated to the occult.
I spent half an hour there, picking books on the Masons from studies of Tarot and astrology guides. The books were, as a whole, lurid and obsessed with conspiracy and dubious history, covering such topics as Freemasons and the secret identity of Jesus, and plots by the Masons and the Trilateral Commission to rule the world. I learned a few things, but mostly I was exposed to a blast of paranoia, pseudo scholarship, and wild accusation. I wondered how the authors of these books would react to the Illuminati, if they had the slightest clue about their role in the world.
The nagging hunger in the pit of my stomach grew during the time I stood there, inhaling a book’s contents every few minutes. The smell of fresh-roasted coffee in the air didn’t make it any easier to stick to my dubious task. The hunger grew by degrees until at last I had a shock of unpleasant recognition.
It was not hunger, but the Hunger, I was experiencing.
I returned the book I was looking at to its shelf, nauseated by its absurd claims, and my need for blood.
How long had it been? A touring violinist had come to town for recital at one of the local colleges. The accompanist, a lovely Ukrainian, was a fan of mine and had asked the school’s PR people to send me an invitation. After the recital, I took the accompanist to supper. She was an excellent musician and a charming companion. One thing had led to another.
I ran the dates through my head. It had been two weeks to the night when I last quenched the Hunger. Not for the first time I reminded myself that I need to be more careful. If too much time passes, the Hunger become insistent, and that leads to carelessness at best, though far worse was always possible.
Either the Hunger or fate led me, at that exact moment, to look toward the young woman at the Reader Service desk.
I was in a dangerous frame of mind. My brief reunion with Tatiana had shaken me. The business about the book in the Olde Curiosity Shoppe, and my brief survey of popular literature on Freemasonry at the bookstore, had left me feeling frustrated and on the verge of anger. Added to all of that, the Hunger posed a risk, perhaps a danger.
An old woman had walked up to the Reader Service desk. The clerk ignored her.
I thought of the way she had treated me. She had been superior, remote, cold, perfunctory.
What is your name? I thought.
It came to me in a flash, the voice inside my head hers. It said: “Trish.”
* * *
I ordered a triple espresso and sat down. The café was busy, most of the tables occupied, some by people working on laptops, writing, be writers. I’ve never be able to decide whether people who work on books in coffee bars are to be admired or pitied. I need quite to work, and a door I can close and, preferably, lock.
One table at a time, the café’s customers decided they suddenly had other places they’d rather be, helped along by the suggestions I placed telepathically in their minds. When the café cleaned out, the woman behind the counter disappeared into the back room, where she would remain for as long as I wanted her to stay out of sight.
Around the corner, blocked from view from the rest of the store by the café kitchen, was a short hallway leading to a storeroom. I finished my espresso and went there to wait, leaning my back against the wall.
The young woman from Reader Service showed up a few moments later. She looked up at me, a mixture of confusion and embarrassment on her face.
“I hope you found what you were looking for, sir,” she said.
“Yes, thank you, Trish. I just did.”
I took her by the shoulders and spun her around against the wall, burying my teeth in her neck.
Posted by Michael on 01.23.04 @ 05:10 PM CST [link]
