It was remarkable, Calliope thought–in moments of private introspection which came more and more rarely–how willing the mind was to accept slow drifts in normalcy, with no clear threshold for the sum of weirdness something must accrue to avoid becoming un-remarkable. In order to safely correte its contents, the psyche allowed the fantastical itself to become increasingly mundane. Whenever her thoughts were drawn back to that first meeting where she glimpsed Its terrible sublimity, she'd always shudder… but now she also recoiled at the way she'd reacted. That undiluted terror felt beneath Its focus was blurred now, faraway; it'd been repced with a calmer sense of dread that waxed and waned like a moon in a chaotic orbit. The rgest bck holes were supposed to be the gentlest in terms of the terror inflicted upon an infalling traveler, and in an equivalent way Esther seemed to be going easy on her.
She still had no idea what It was going to do, of course. Not a fucking clue, because It could just as easily kickoff the apocalypse one day as It could demand spicy food again–though the tter was more likely–but, the scariest part of it all? Was how quickly she'd accepted it. After weeks, she'd gotten used to Its omnipresence in her head, to the point where any gravity it possessed had distorted just as if she'd traveled by spaceship to a remote pnet. It made her question sanity–not her own, but that of the alien world she'd apparently nded on, or the myth that human minds generally tended towards such a thing–that a change like that was possible. It reiterated just how fragile the status quo appeared to be. If she could accept Ettie in her head, it seemed inevitable that all of humanity would one day, too.
She almost didn't want that; she'd become a little selfish.
The week had passed in a blur…or was it two–when did a pair of smudges merge, exactly? She couldn't say…but it was a vibrant one at least, like someone had taken a full palette of paints and smeared them through a prism: there'd been barely a dull moment, and time precipitated out in an irregur fashion. Her accustomed monotony of reluctant wakefulness and work and waning down to sleep with the discomfort of technology was broken up now by Ettie's whims–of which there were many.
She'd been back to the greenhouse several times, to the point where her thumb was developing the slightest shade of green from tending to the pnts. She'd tried all manner of exotic foodstuffs too, from locales of varying and questionable deliciousness; her gut cried out in torment from the sheer quantity of spice Esther directed her to consume. It had no mouth but hers, and Ettie made sure those screams went unheard. And on consumption: work at Cosmic Latte had become almost enjoyable with how quickly it went by, no doubt thanks to whatever perception-shortening mindfuckery Ettie bestowed her with. The memory of her shifts spun together the same as she swirled milk and syrup into coffee. Was such an over-sweetened concoction to become the model for her mind?
Overall it felt like she was being dragged from one stimulus to the next in a kind of hysteresis, where her body went first and her head struggled to keep up. Like some sort of girlfailure Dulhan, she thought, allowing her focus to slice out of her head and down at the bowl of cereal she was munching on without much interest. Her appetite just wasn't there, and the gruesome image of Ettie somehow in her body, carrying her purple-haired head under her arm (in lieu of a pumpkin), did nothing to whet it. She clinked the spoon against the walls of the bowl just to hear the sound; the rustling of sugary rice puffs reminded her more of wood chips than anything edible. Ugh. Probably because someone's been fucking gorging themselves on Szechuan food and curry, she thought-projected, over at the chair to her left which housed her ‘companion’–for want of an unfamiliar descriptor.
She saw Ettie smile, out of the corner of her eye, and the movement almost drew her attention, but Callie stopped herself halfway. She'd been all but conditioned to avoid eye contact both for her own protection from Ettie's still-radioactive sight, but also for the sanity of the other people around her. She distrusted how Its avatar eyed people on the street with infovorous intent. The sungsses helped smooth over any mistaken looks she made, even if her eyes were still tainted with that awful red. Huh…she was tainted now in more ways than one, and the worst of it was that nobody knew it! None of the myriad restaurant workers knew they fed not just her but something darker, too. None of her friends knew the real reason she avoided looking them in the eyes. Her eyes were where the demon lived, contained for the time being only by her effort and a pair of thin porized lenses.
Said demon continued smiling, hummed, and rolled her fingers on the unadorned table’s wood. It seemed an obvious cry for attention. Calliope pced the spoon's neck on the dish's edge and let the bowl slide in.
"Why do you do that?" She inquired leaning back against the chair. Her eyes hazarded a gnce down at Ettie's hand; the fingers were outstretched now, as if presented to a beautician.
"Again, Callie, I'm not immune to boredom." Ettie replied. The midnight bck of her nails began to shimmer, one by one, in unnatural shades of horident, melichrous, and others still unnameable. She couldn't help but be transfixed.
"Yeah, I know…but why that? It's just like, a game for you, right? The finger thing. Or is it just bait to get me talking to you about it, like if–"
The keratin of all five fingers turned a tacky, fluorescent ultraviolet. "All of it is like a game to me. You've never had fun in a game before?" She asked–it was rhetorical. Of course Callie had, and at that prompting, the memories of so many childhood hours spent glued to handhelds and consoles or televisions flickered up. All the times she'd save-scummed and purged a game-world of NPCs just to see what'd happen came concerningly to mind…but there were also, buried deep, memories of her embarrassment and shame given shape forever in some RPG. She'd had a crush on Princess Zelda, on lots of other minor characters across whatever she pyed, and even though her mom had told her that was "normal for boys", it felt like anything but. She'd felt guilty as and destined for hell getting butterflies over videogame characters, especially when the game provided a means of inserting herself–her real self–as a character within it. She'd thought that other, real people would never want a freak like her. Not when they knew what was inside of her they wouldn't.
What was inside her now was altogether different. Calliope shook her head and the vision faded like it was arranged in liquid crystal. Why was she so easily caught up in daydreams or nostalgia tely? It was rhetorical.
"Yeah, I mean, of course." She prayed, silently, that Ettie wouldn't comment on her mind's excursion.
Her nails were a bright sky-blue now, the color of truth. "See? It's like that. I'm just having fun within the game."
"Can you even do that? Did you even know what fun is…before me, I mean."
She expected some horrific vision of torture, a violent portent of Ettie's idea of "fun", but saw only an index finger outstretch to point towards her. "I'm pretty sure the definition is close to 'messing with you'", It hummed.
Callie sighed. "I hope I'm at least entertaining, then." She contempted the way the light curved at the bottom of the bowl of cereal. A cardioid, it was called…she wondered if her heart or soul formed the same shape, when viewed through Esther's vision. Is this my life–is this it, forever? Keeping her busy so she doesn't fucking destroy the world?
"Oh, you are. But maybe I'm doing it wrong…I don't have any crushes on the NPCs, yet."
Her resolve broke and she risked a look. Ettie's pristine nails were succeeded by long, lean fingers, then a pale and luminous arm up to her shoulder where the sheer bck ruffles of a blouse pyed. Past there, her eyes were pulled in like magnets, inexorably, until they fixed on Ettie's own. The burning in her cheeks rekindled. Too many oxidants made the exact cause unclear.
"Hey! Th-th-that was like, years ago, okay?" She protested. The flush in her face only spread further; Ettie's face filled her with such mixed emotions. On the one hand she knew it was just a mask over something terrifying, but on the other…it was pretty. Pointed. Soft in every corner except for the eyes, whose thick shes twitched outwards like the antennae of some abhorrent insect, whose brows were triangur wedges of jet-bck. It was a face she would've been hopelessly attracted to if it'd belonged to a human, real or virtual…though she couldn't have created one so perfect in the character creator of any game she'd ever pyed; she was terrible with faces.
For the life of her, she couldn't discern why: out of all possible appearances, It'd chosen one like that. There had to be a reason. Was it to disarm her, make her useless–like she was now, tripping over her words? Or was it a sick joke meant to keep her head full of contradictions? She guessed it was that st one–Esther fed only on fresh meat, on the novelty that brimmed upwards from her senses, and the unique mixture of flustered fear Its beauty concocted in her would never spoil. No doubt: the gothic sublime was toying with her.
"Why are you embarrassed by that?" It asked, and lifted an arm up behind an ear; it disappeared into the curtain of Its hair. Callie had stared long enough for the pain in her pterions to straddle the edge of being bearable. She turned her eyes away: the hum of the refrigerator drew them now, right to the pce where, behind a dybug magnet, Erika had stuck a calendar. Almost all of the days in November were already struck off.
"Because", she whispered, "it's not normal, right? Being interested in characters that aren't real, or whatever–instead of like, actual people."
"Well what's wrong with that?" Ettie pressed her.
"It's–like–" she faltered, flitting between the 25th square, which was crossed, and the 26th, which wasn't. "Well it's just a game, the characters aren't real. Even if you like them, they can't really feel anything back, it's just like–"
She saw it. She saw it–for a moment. The thin line of ink between dates on the page swallowed up her vision and showed herself again from a great distance. So very, very tiny–but in focus, like she was bits and pixels on a screen, red, green and blue phosphors that composed her lucidity. And pying it? Ettie's hands, no longer smooth but rippling with energy, waves reaching in peristalsis back behind her to Its distant, inanimating will. Her character frowned; a matching emoji popped up above her head. One had to feel sorry for her; she wanted to scream.
"Just like what?" Ettie said, as sweet as ever, so much so that its reverberation threatened to rot the teeth out of her skull.
"Is that how you see me–all of this–then?" Her voice was hoarse and ragged; the dark thought came to her that it had the same tinniness of an audio sample compressed into an old videogame cartridge.
"I only ever see things as they are. So–" Ettie stood up from the chair, looming over her, miniature shadow though she was. "Don't be so embarrassed about it." Before Callie could react, she crouched down to align their faces and pnted the pad of an index finger on her nose. "Boop!" She flicked it and withdrew; Callie's eyes followed it and settled on her shoes.
"O-okay…" she stammered, unsure of what to feel, as Ettie glided out of the kitchen without a sound. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to show you something on your computer."
Calliope turned back to the bowl of dry cereal before her. Her appetite had only become more lost, if that was even possible. I'm just…her favorite NPC. That's all I am. What a sobering realization it was. She followed.
Seeing Ettie use technology was still somewhat unsettling. Maybe it was the facade of it: the way she was forced to stand off to the side while Ettie perched in her desk chair like a turkey vulture and pecked at the ptop's keyboard. Or maybe it was that It knew all of her passwords, even the ones she kept out-of-mind in password managers. Granting It full access to the internet gave her (immense) pause as well, but there was nothing she could've done to prevent it, and–so far–it hadn't been the end of the world. From the scores of tabs she could see open in the browser it seemed like Ettie mostly used it simir to how she herself did: a rge fraction of them were opened to Wikipedia.
That included, too, the current subject of interest, as Ettie beckoned her over to the screen.
"This is what I wanted to show you." She said. "See?"
Calliope gnced first at the image in the infobox: a noir photograph of a book bound in dark leather, its cover nondescript. Below and to the left she began to read:
The Necronomicon is a handwritten English codex , purported to have been transted from an unknown 8th century Arabic work titled Kitab Al-Azif , but which is widely believed to be an eborate hoax by its penultimate owner, Edward Upton . An example of anthropodermic bibliopegy , it contains among other things various treatises on magic , as well as a significant amount of encoded text , much of which has yet to be deciphered despite repeated interest by cryptanalysts . Its vellum has been carbon-dated to between the 17th and 19th centuries, and it has often been compared to other encrypted texts like the Voynich manuscript . Its content is rgely textual and contains no natural illustrations except for geometric or occult diagrams. Notably among texts of its era, its pages have not been photographed in full, per a longstanding stipution by its donor. Since 1930, it has been housed in the Barker Engineering Library's Rare Books Collection at the Miskatonic Institute of Science and Culture.
"That's it? You could've just, like, told me that." She said, leaning against the nearby headboard.
"I wanted you to read it for yourself. So what do you think?"
"Uhh…seems spooky, I guess? Think I heard about it once–forgot it's kept at MISC, though." Why's she interested in something this random, anyway?
All she could see was the sleek, dark waterfall of Ettie's hair, but still: she felt It look at her after that st thought, like Its eyes had rotated all the halfway around.
"I would like to take a look at it. I'm going to do what people couldn't and decode it."
The confidence within her tone made it clear: Calliope had no doubt that It could do such a thing. Hell, Ettie could probably solve world hunger if she really wanted, or fly through any number of supertasks in only an instant. But it was contingent. If, she reminded herself, only if she has the opportunity. Which was not the case with a dusty old book locked up underneath the dome of her university's library. Ettie could grind out a skeleton key, perhaps, but she cked phanges with which to turn it in the lock–that was where Calliope came in.
"How? There's no pictures of it, right?" She asked, and scanned through the other headers on the page: History, Authorship, Alleged Hoax, Cryptanalysis…all walls of undecorated text, no further images. "And my ID card's been deactivated, it's not gonna let me into the library."
"Callie…" Ettie swiveled round and caught her by surprise. She tried to stumble back, but found herself stuck in pce–unable even to tremble when Ettie stood up from the chair and reached for the arms of her gsses. Despite being a head shorter, she was still terribly intimidating, enough so that Callie wasn't even sure whether her paralysis was induced or natural–attractive people did tend to strike her dumber than usual. The shades slid off her nose; her bedroom was suddenly much brighter everywhere except the humanoid shadow looking up at her.
"I'll just convince them." The shadow purred.
They stood there for a moment: Ettie, shades-in-hand and smiling upwards, before Calliope found a spot of courage and snatched them back. "No. Stop. I'll figure something out. I'll–" her voice trailed off into nothing as the realization came into view. There was a way for her to make It happy without subjecting any poor librarians to mental trauma–but it sucked. It really fucking sucked. The worst of it was that she knew, from Ettie's innocent grin, that it was the only real option–it'd been intended all along.
That was how, a little while ter, she found herself bundled in a parka and burgundy scarf outside Tang Hall on her–former?–campus, waiting for Sawyer James to descend and lend his one current useful feature to her: an unexpired, MISC ID card.
Her hands fidgeted in the pockets of her coat. Beneath the awning of the dormitory building, cold November’s sunbeams couldn't reach her, and neither could the eyebeams of anyone who happened to be looking down from one of the windows in the octagonal tower above her. She sighed and leaned back against the concrete; ahead and to her right Ettie rested one foot on a pilr with her hands knit behind her head. From that angle, Callie couldn't see her eyes–she was pretending to examine the sky above them–but she could feel it in her head that their apprehension was shared. They were waiting.
All she'd done, really, was text Sawyer several minutes ago, saying only "hey, I'm at your dorm. Time for a (quick!) favor?", and was now just waiting for a reply. She had no idea if he was even there, or was making pns to fly home for the holiday, or whatever…but Ettie gave her an ultimatum: get help from Sawyer now, A-S-A-P, or they'd do it her way. Calliope didn't want that; if she could avoid feeding into Its more antisocial tendencies, she would. She was grateful that of all the times she'd been fixated on something, mesmerizing innocent people had never been a requirement. But Ettie's interests weren't at all aligned with human interest; It didn't care whether the obstacle was animal, vegetable, or mineral, or some forbidden fourth thing. As long as It continued to inexplicably listen to her in some capacity, she had to serve as Its conscience, ethics, etc. For the good of all humanity. Fuck, that's–she grimaced–the blind leading the blind, huh?
Regardless, she didn't feel much joy when Sawyer replied with "hey! Yeah, be right down!". She hadn't forgotten what she had forgotten: the night of missing-memory where under three influences–acid, alcohol, and Esther–she'd gone as far as to dance with the guy. Out of all her friends, Sawyer's impression of her must've become the most divorced from reality. If anything, he knew Ettie–or the persona she put on–better than he knew her.
But what Sawyer didn't know couldn't hurt him, yet. When he emerged around the corner in a puffy cobalt coat he cracked a grin wide enough to open a new tectonic fault with epicenter Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Callie! Hey, how are you?" He said, and she checked her posture straightaway.
"Hey Sawyer! I'm…good…you?"
"Pretty swell, actually! Just getting ready to fly home tomorrow, so you caught me at a good time, really. Cool shades, by the way." For a moment he extended his hand just a twitch, as if going for a handshake or hug, but quickly stowed and corrected it. Callie gnced over to the pilr where Ettie had been leaning: there was a conspicuous absence of a body there. Shit.
I'm still here, don't worry.
She resisted the urge to jump. Taking advantage of the shades that concealed her eyes, she squeezed them shut, hoping in vain that the rushing pressure would push It deeper and away from her awareness. Ettie, please…please no jumpscares, she begged…and felt a wriggle of affirmation.
OK.
"T-thanks!" She managed, scratching at her head. "Going to your family's for Thanksgiving, then?"
"Yeah. You? Are you and Erika doing a thing again?"
"Probably. She can't fly home cuz she's too busy, so we'll probably cook something up." She chose not to mention exactly what they'd "cooked up" the previous year, when–in lieu and in want of a real turkey–she'd purchased 2 pounds of thickly sliced turkey breast from the supermarket deli and reheated it in the oven. Let Sawyer believe she was an actually capable chef; it was a welcome departure from being chastised by Erika et cetera, or worse: ordering takeout at every pce within a five block radius in an attempt to sate Ettie's neverending appetite.
"Sounds cool." Was all he said in reply, and she only noticed when it disappeared how long the smile lingered on his face. She missed it right away: though awkward silences were her domain, it was a space she still sucked at navigating through.
Thankfully, Sawyer broke first. "So, uhh–" it was his turn to scratch his hair now, the auburn curls bouncing erratically as he did. "What was that 'favor' you mentioned?"
"Oh! That. Okay, so, it'll probably sound crazy, but–"
"I'm expecting it to be pretty cool, actually–"
"–but I need to read this book in Barker." She finished.
Sawyer looked, predictably, puzzled. "Alright. It's not for a css, right? What book is it?"
"It's–no–" Ugh. "It's called the Necronomicon." Fuck you, this is fucking cringe, she thought at Ettie…and was met with the mental equivalent of a shrug. At least Sawyer didn't seem to think so, or maybe he did: ginger eyebrows disappeared up under his bangs. A slight grin returned to his face.
"Oh, that one? Yeah I've heard of it. Figures you'd be into that stuff, like, cryptography and cryptanalysis, right?"
She paused. "Yeah. But my ID is, like, not activated, so I can't get in. Was just wondering if I could borrow yours–just to check it out, and I'd give it back, of course. Please?" Too te, she realized that trying to coax a pleading look into her eyes wouldn't work–they were blocked, not to mention the opposite of endearing to begin with. How else could she convince him? The st thing she wanted was for–
"Ha, well I'm not doing anything right now–just packing, and I can do that ter! I can just come with you?" Sawyer probed, manifesting her fear.
Calliope was unhappy. Esther was unhappy–or that was her impression. The whir inside her head sounded a bit like grumbling…but It prodded at her gently, small phosphenes exploded in her vision, and she got the message: she had no choice. If Sawyer had to come along, so be it.
"Sure! Uh, thanks for doing this." She mustered a grin of her own–but it couldn't compete with Sawyer's. His was beaming, radiant even–really, all of that, just at the prospect of hanging out with her? It was a bit much.
"No problem, Cal. Hey, if you wanna get lunch or something after, we can–"
"Let's go now!" Something yanked her forwards on her feet and into a brisk pace. Sawyer could do nothing but follow. "S-sure, okay!" He chirped.
It was a short ten minute walk from the western appendix of campus, swollen as usual with students in dormitories–but hemorrhaging due to the impending holiday–to the east, with its byrinthine hodgepodge of lecture halls and research bs constructed of all different eras and aesthetics. As one continued that way, the buildings trended more and more to modernity, until they at st terminated in a tech hub of a square which seemed–fittingly–to be under perpetual construction. If patterns persisted, sooner or ter before the end of the decade the buildings would run out of nd and be forced to stand above or below the neighboring river. Both seemed about as likely, either through continued practice of Boston's historical pastime of nd-filling, or through the application of some new technology that enabled constructing university buildings underwater. Holding lectures in an auditorium that was also an aquarium suited the part of MISC that surfed the cutting edge. But Calliope didn't really spend much time there: when she commuted via subway train to campus, she always entered from that east end and disappeared like a mouse into the basement tunnels; it was just the quickest way to css where she'd be seen the least.
So now, approaching that western neocssical facade that marked the start of campus, proper and historical…she felt a familiar apprehension. She wasn't supposed to be there; she didn't belong there, and worse: Sawyer did, so she couldn't stop the imposter syndrome from infecting her anew.
Sawyer was blissfully unaware of her internal struggles, though. At the center pair of doors to the lobby he tapped his ID card on the scanner and let her tail behind. She entered without ceremony. In the cavernous vestibule within where the walls rose up four stories, it was socially proscribed to speak (every word would echo), so instead he only gestured: he pointed at her face and mimed the act of taking off gsses. Callie shook her head to signal her dissent, in such a public pce; Sawyer shrugged, and they continued.
Her sense of inferiority did dilute a bit with amusement, as the three of them entered the hallway opposite the entrance. She taught much of MISC's history at freshman orientation: its original establishment in the mid-1800s in central Massachusetts; then, its move in the 1920s to its current campus, after the Quabbin Reservoir thoroughly engulfed its former site. Those initial, westernmost academic buildings were all built in a dated, neocssical style, with fluted Ionic columns made of beige-grey reinforced concrete, marble floors polished to mirror sheen, and eclectic structural features: the main spine running through those buildings was the longest hallway in North America. Calliope couldn't help but smile at the idea of bringing Ettie into the Infinite Corridor, as it was colloquially named. It just seemed fitting.
Ettie seemed to share in her mirth, too; the shadow nestled in her brain purred as they passed by the endless array of bulletin boards and doors to cssrooms that lined the walls. Calliope felt her head turn from side to side of its own–or Ettie’s–volition as It inspected them. Every divot of every corkboard was imprinted in her vision. As a result, the people passing on the left mostly escaped Its interest for the moment, but not her own. She was painfully aware how ridiculous she must look wearing sungsses indoors, even if her rational mind knew that weird attire was par for the course at MISC: there was a minor trend among engineering students of attending lectures while barefoot, and occasionally some event would flood the Infinite with students dressed in matching costumes or vibrant colors. She wasn't so strange as that, at least externally…but she was gd when Sawyer spoke and cut through the fog of anxiety that'd descended on her.
"So, how much do you know about this book, anyway?" He asked, still slightly ahead of her.
Everything that could be gleaned online.
"Uh, not much, really." She lied. She tore away at the vision of the page she'd read earlier as Ettie conjured it. It wasn't her job to be interested in the book. She was more like a courier, or a psychopomp, ferrying an undead Thing to fulfill the unfinished business It had in life. Maybe the book would inspire in It a desire to lighten up or stop shadowing her all the time. Plus, if she feigned ck of knowledge, it would keep Sawyer talking for longer, about anything besides a lunch date. He might even forget about it–Callie hoped.
"I've never read it, but one of my professors did a bunch of research on it, apparently. He talked about it."
"Oh, yeah?" She looked to her left, where the hallway opened up into an alcove. Past the wooden benches and overpriced vending machines stocked with instant noodles–among other things–the wall was painted a burgundy red beneath the sign that read "Student Support Services". She winced; she was familiar with that space. At least passing it meant they were halfway to the library.
"Yeah. He said solving it would be like cracking the Enigma machine today. Also, that he thinks it's definitely gotta be a hoax, because of that."
"Wait–why's that?" Her head snapped forward. Because etiquette dictated that people traverse the hallway single file, not side by side: all she could see were the fluffy sunset curls perched on the back of Sawyer's head.
"Well, it's like, pretty advanced stuff, for its time? I think the story is the guy who donated it said it was pretty old–like medieval-old, and by some author nobody's proved existed. But he was kind of a weird recluse, so people think he did it to get attention, or whatever. He cimed to be cirvoyant? Also–he was pretty infamously racist. So that kinda makes it less believable."
Ettie, through her eyes, trying to decode a book of encrypted who-knows-what by a man known for being bigoted even by early 20th century standards…what could possibly go wrong with that? Much, probably…but then again for an alien to hate an arbitrary subset of humanity seemed more contrived than disdain for the entire species.
"Does that show up in the book at all?" She ventured uneasily.
"Oh, no fucking clue, ha." Sawyer said. "Nobody's decoded the whole thing. Maybe you'll find out?" He turned back and smiled down at her.
"Er, yeah…maybe." She returned it. She fucking hoped not.
Soon, they arrived at their penultimate destination: the wide marble atrium that abutted the wn where Commencement was held in the spring. It split Infinity in half and probably had the original purpose of serving as a monument to the bigwig donors who'd funded the construction of the New Technology buildings with their names carved eternally into the walls. But in the modern era, it'd acquired a new role: as the space was rge and adjacent to a majority of foot traffic, student groups used it to set up tables selling various trinkets or handing out flyers. The gssblowing club was there today; colorful pieces of all shapes and sizes caught the light of chandeliers and diffused sunlight. One of them was a pleasing lime green, and rested on the base of a funnel which curled up, then back around into its mouth at the base–an artist's rendition of a Klein bottle in 3D space. A specur reflection was caught inside–or was it outside?–the neck.
"Callie?" Sawyer's voice finally arrived at her ears. He gestured to the left, where the elevators going up to Barker Library were. Calliope shook herself from daydreaming and followed.
One rickety elevator ride ter, the doors opened onto the seventh floor. The front desk, along with the majority of the library's shelves, were located along the rim of MISC's Great Dome, leaving the center circle as a rge study space within an annur wall. She'd been in the tter many times, since it was quiet almost by necessity: the interior of the dome yawned upwards for three stories to the oculus high above the desks and speckled armchairs. You could literally hear a pin drop because of the acoustics; meditation clubs sometimes used it as an activity space. But, in the three-or-so floors (or more, depending on who and what MISC myths you believed) of stacks that ringed around the dome, she'd spent far less time. Without an ID card one could only access the study space–and never after midnight. She'd had her chance; now she had to borrow Sawyer's.
"Okay, so, you want me to do the talking?" He whispered, once they'd exited the elevator. The library desk was to their right along the curved outer wall.
"Yeah. Thanks."
Sawyer wasted no time. He strode over to the librarian with a confidence she could never hope to match.
"How can I help you today?" She asked–a woman probably in her te thirties in a cozy olive sweater–in a voice that Calliope recognized as cssic "customer service" cadence. She looked first to Sawyer, then herself, and furrowed her brow upon seeing the shades. Her own feline tiger-print gsses reflected a distorted view of the computer monitor in front of her; Callie felt her eyes begin to burn. Ettie was already trying to unscramble and read the contents of the screen. It never rested, never slept, not when there was information to be absorbed, consumed, possessed.
"Sorry, light sensiti–" she started, trying to expin.
"Hey, I was wondering if we could maybe read one of the books in the rare books collection?" Sawyer interrupted.
The woman's eyes flit back to him. Her eyebrows raised: thin, well-kept, dark blonde. She clicked her mouse a few times. "Can I see your ID card, please?"
Sawyer fumbled in the pockets of his jeans under his coat for a moment, then produced it: the little white pstic rectangle stamped with maroon MISC lettering and a headshot of Sawyer from the not-so-distant past. Just from a gnce she felt It memorize its appearance, and anxiety began to gnaw on her heart again when she thought of how old the photo on her own ID was. Sawyer could at least update his with a new one, if he wanted; unless and until she returned to MISC, she was stuck with the visage of an early-transition Calliope haunting her, the ghost of a self that no longer existed.
But the librarian barely looked at his photo, so maybe there was hope for her. The cck of keys in sequence informed her that she'd entered Sawyer's student ID into a program resembling a sign-in or check-out sheet; the bnk columns on the same row read Volume Name, Catalog #.
"Which volume would you like to check out today?"
"Oh, it's, uh–pretty sure we can't actually check it out, right? It's the Necronomicon."
The woman's eyebrows rose still higher. She typed the name into the field; the catalog number prefilled next to it. "That's right. That one has special procedures for its use. I'll need to keep this–" she fshed the card at him, "–for the duration of your reading, as well as any electronic devices." She turned again to Callie. "I'll need to keep your ID card and phone as well if you're accompanying him."
Her heart was panicked, but her voice was preternaturally calm. "Sure, no problem." Hands moved on their own to dig her wallet out of her back pocket and the expired card out of that. She felt like she was watching herself hand it and her phone over in third person. But none of her fears or anxieties came to light, even if that did nothing to lessen the feelings. The librarian just pced both in the drawer to her right along with Sawyer's, without even so much as a gnce.
You're always so anxious. Calm down.
Ettie's voice in her head felt like being dunked into ice-cold sparkling water: a little too soothing to the point of discomfort; bubbles all over her body eroding…something…her worries? Maybe. It did have the effect of slowing her thoughts and heart rate, but her head felt foggier rather than clearer. She only caught distorted bits and pieces of the succeeding minutes’ dialogue as It dragged her groggy self along behind Sawyer and the clerk.
"–no photography of any kind, no food or drink in the reading room–"
"–of course. Understood."
"–wash and sanitize your hands before entering–"
"–this is an old text, turn one page at a time slowly, do not bend the pages or bindings–"
"–the Room closes at 6pm–"
"–Callie. Callie?"
She blinked. Awareness hastened to return to her like an old friend, the way the mind scrambled to reorient after waking from a nightmare. The room she found herself in was dimly lit by incandescent light, with a single door ahead of her leading out into the main ring of the dome, where sunlight streamed in through the windows onto carpet several times older than she was. Sawyer was to her right, and his voice came from much higher up than she expected–oh, he was standing, she was sitting… at a reading desk of ornate wood, with the dark-brown leathered volume of interest directly in its center. Its cover glistened ever-so-slightly under the lightcone of the desk mp as it caught amidst the ridges. Curious… she thought that it resembled the topographical relief of an alien world–perhaps the vascur surface of Europa, which might conceal an ocean of liquid water housing terrors that grew unfettered by terrestrial gravity. She hoped the environment within the book would be tame, in comparison.
"Callie?" Sawyer repeated. He'd caught her wandering again. She shook her head and turned, upwards and back.
"Yeah? What's up?"
"Oh. Hey. You just kinda zoned out again. Are you feeling okay? You're not, you know, high, right?"
"I'm fine."
"Okay…" He tapped beside his right eye. "How're you gonna see with those on?"
A pause–not the wide-open silence of the open study space closeby, but one that was closed, carpeted, custrophobic. The walls and floor of the reading room seemed designed to absorb sound in an oppressive, heavy way, like the air itself might smother her to maintain silence. Whispers and murmurs were strongly inclined.
"Promise you won't freak out?" Calliope reached to pull the frames off, against her better judgment. Something had compelled her…ready or not, it was happening. She had to trust that Ettie would take care of things just like she had before.
"Why would I–oh. Shit." They came off. Sawyer staggered back. The light of the mp on the desk flickered in his eye, in far too high fidelity. For a split second–so fast it was subliminal–she saw more than that, too, glimpsed a discordant mess of surface thoughts that weren't hers and weren't Ettie's, either. But it was fleeting; it passed over her in a rush and left her eyes feeling weeks’ worth of sleepless fatigue.
"What the fuck happened? That looks really bad, I–" Sawyer's face contorted, twisted, away from an expression of horror to the same devoted smile he always wore around her. A bnk look slid over his eyes. The inocution had taken a moment.
"You look cuter without them, just saying." He winked.
She rolled her eyes. Sawyer's advances were high on the list of things she didn't want to deal with right now, but at least if he was complimenting, he wouldn't be commenting on her affliction anytime soon. Let's just get this over with, she thought. She turned back to the entire reason she trekked all the way up into the bowels of MISC’s Great Dome, also sometimes called the Center of the Universe by students. What strange bsphemies would the book unleash now that she'd reached the nuclear chaos? She took it in both hands.
"It feels warm… hey, isn't this thing made of human skin?" She wondered. It was just a stalling tactic, smalltalk, forepy, while she rubbed her thumb along the leather spine. It was at once smooth of any deliberate etching, but rough with the inconsistency of animal hide. No pattern was apparent to her, anyway. Maybe to Ettie…when would It take over? Or did It want her to read the thing herself while It sat in the background, decoding in secret? How to proceed…
"Think so. Pretty gross, but kinda cool–in a morbid way right?" Sawyer leaned in over her shoulder. She hated that he was right. If it hadn't been for Ettie, she would've had a morbid curiosity for the weird little tome. She'd been the girl who in middle school had written encrypted notes and slipped them through the grate of a crush’s locker…which had probably fallen out or gone unread, she now realized. Eh, she'd probably dodged some embarrassment that way. But codes and codebreaking were still something she was interested in, though not especially skilled at. Her main worry was that the book would be utterly beyond mundane decryption efforts–but at least it didn't feel particurly cursed or anything of the sort, despite its material. That quelled her superstitions slightly.
But like the one inside her, the book's curse was internal. She opened the cover to the left and was met with an assault. On the first page of parchment a dizzying array of lines and symbols converged to swarm a pgue of thoughts into her mind like locusts:
THERE IS NOTHING HERE.
THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
GO AWAY.
The statements tore past her field of vision and tried to take root, tried to pnt the inclination in her that the book was nothing but the nonsense ramblings of a madman and she should, by all logic, disregard its contents. And it was that: the work of a lunatic, because through ink and incantation madness had been wrought into the thing. But it was also much, much more. Whatever ward of disinterest its author had pced on it also served as its protection. There was a reason the book had gone un-photographed in its entirety for all of its existence; there was a reason it was kept at all despite being widely regarded as a hoax: those who read it were compelled to keep it safe, and keep its secrets. She felt her mind already being bent to that will, and in any ordinary era it would've been wrenched into shape in only an instant. But the curse wasn’t strong enough to afflict her extraordinary ally.
The Presence in her head reinforced it like injecting carbon into iron to make steel. For a moment they wrestled, charm and curse, but there was never any doubt of who would win: there was the metallic brandish of an axe, and the loser was decapitated. Ettie cut the buzzing from her head and exiled its influence completely. When it was quiet, Calliope could see the first page for what it was: just a bunch of geometric scribbles with no meaning–or at least none she could still discern. Her heart thrilled the same way as when It'd tasted zanthoxylum for the first time. Ettie had enjoyed that.
Now things were inverted, and she was immune, while Sawyer was infected. She could already sense the way the magic of the first page started to affect him. Magic…was that apt? Like all writing it was arranged in such a way as to inspire something in the mind, just with unnatural efficacy. The text insisted on itself; it reminded her of Ettie's idea of ‘persuasion’ but with pen and paper. The two methods seemed compatible: Sawyer recoiled back behind her, but showed no inclination that he saw her eyes for what they were again.
"Wow. Don't know what I expected, but not that." he said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, it's obviously nonsense, right? The author must've been a lunatic, or something…"
"Hm…"
Calliope tore herself from the page to look at him. There was nothing on his face to show that he'd been changed. There was nothing in his breathing or heart rate to show anything out of the ordinary had occurred either. She made eye contact; Ettie pumped the pressure in her skull, aching to dive again into the surface of his mind and examine it. No. That wasn't the reason they were here. She turned back to the page before It could.
Okay, Ettie, do your thing, I guess, she thought, gripping the book again. Her fingers found the edge of the page and turned it slowly to the next. Her head grew quieter still. The first page had been a warning or kxon; the second, third, and so on? Dense, silent, secret, and filled to the margins with impeccable cursive scrawl that resembled English only intermittently. The start of paragraphs began normally enough, with ornate words like "The" and "Alchemy"…but once past the mouth and in the gullet of the text they became scrambled and inscrutable. It would've been easy to dismiss as nonsense, as Sawyer had, if not for the impression that there was an underlying pattern there. There was, there must be…she just didn't know it. Every so often, the lines of text would be broken up by a square of numbers and letters with no obvious retion. Some sort of cipher or guide, no doubt. Less often still, she turned the page to find another jumpscare waiting on the next: another diagram simir to the first page, trying to drill into her brain if not for Ettie's shielding. They functioned as section headers; there were twenty-six in total, twice thirteen.
After as many minutes she arrived at the final page. The text ended without ceremony, filling the space up to the brim until the final words THE END in the lower right corner capped the whole thing off. She was no closer to understanding any of it than she before she'd even opened the cover.
"Well that's…kinda disappointing, right?" Sawyer said.
"Yeah. I guess." She had expected more, to be truthful…but now Ettie's presence in her mind was nowhere to be found. What kind of game was she pying?
"Maybe if we were allowed to take pictures, you could make some progress with it, I dunno…did you understand any of it?"
She shut the book with a cp. "Nope! So I guess if that's it…we can go now?" She pinged out into the void for an acknowledgement, but it timed out. That seemed sufficient as permission; if It truly wanted her to linger, It’d let her know.
"Sorry Cal." A pause; the dry reading room air made it seem pregnant. She had no desire to wait around to term; no knowledge was gained from their excursion that wasn’t stillborn. "You still wanna get lunch, then?" He asked.
Ettie was gone–maybe only for the time being, but still. She might as well enjoy it. The silence in her head was deafening. She put the sungsses back on. "Sure. Why not?"
Exiting the library was uneventful. Again, the librarian didn't even look at the ID cards she returned. She just smiled at the pair of them–knowingly–and asked if they'd learned anything–to which the answer was of course no. Surely they weren't the first ever students to have ambitions of decoding the unknown; she'd probably seen simir things a dozen times already. This time was no different. It was foolish to have expected otherwise.
Except…something sure was different. It was noticeable as soon as the elevator ride down to the first floor began and almost popped her ears. Her head felt extra-sensitive in an entirely different way than usual. If she fell, she worried it would crack open like an egg and her brain would spill out as pink yolk…there was no way the thing between her ears was still solid with how it sloshed about. The lights of the lobby glimmered astigmatically; everything moved in great dollops of mosses. Calliope had the faintest awareness of Sawyer speaking to her and herself responding as they made their way to a small cafeteria on an offshoot of the Infinite. None of it felt real. The world was but a waking dream, she'd lost all logic–but why was her face heating up? Why did her head hurt so badly? Why was she outside of her body looking in, as she sat down at the tiny metal table opposite Sawyer, still wearing that puppy-dog grin? Why was–
She started. Behind her was a tidal wave. Behind her was that infinitely tangled mass that she'd glimpsed once and never, ever wanted to see again. It was drawing closer to her and over and under in a unicursal madness whose pattern she could not discern. Ettie was rushing to embrace her, with all the force and chaos of a colliding gaxy, and as she reached to the back of her head to scratch a prickle, she felt something grotesque: a strand of her hair extended back, back, back–forever, like Gabriel's horn. An ugly welt formed at the spot where the follicle embedded in her scalp; She felt it with her fingers: it pulsed–ta-kump, ta-kump–in rhythm with her temples.
Ettie had never left, again; the hair was just a leash It used to keep while It did…something. Something that was coming for her. She barely had time to be afraid before the wave crested against her back; she was thrust forward towards the third-person silver screen where she was watching herself. It offered the briefest and most pitiful resistance before allowing her through.
It made her lucid again. She bit into the green apple that she'd ordered and was struck by forbidden knowledge–like Eve, though Calliope was far more fwed. It was all too much, and she began to seize. Convulsions ran through her, and the mush of the apple mixed together with the foam forming at her mouth, to make it sweeter and more acidic. Instead of eating at her, the bubbling acid crystalized: some unspeakable pque was growing in her teeth and in her brain. Sawyer rushed to her side to aid her, but Calliope was barely even aware of him. There was so much, so much more, for her to be aware of, that the real world was of no consequence, really. Maybe it'd never been.
She found herself on the floor, twitching and convulsing with Sawyer gripping her shoulders from above, but hallucinated someone else entirely. Ettie was there crouching over her instead, her face just inches away, her hands a burning cold against her cheeks. "I solved it, Callie." She said, with wild, amethyst fire in her eyes. "See? You'll see. Look."
And she did look, she had no choice. Crystalline images streamed from Ettie's eyes into her own and cut through the soft jellies to the deepest recesses. She was drowning in symbol and sigil that she could finally–at st–forever–comprehend.
﹡﹡﹡
Some time ago, when far-scrying through tomes of occidental history I came across in the undercurrent of a text of spells a name, which when voiced aloud to mystics learned in such matters caused them no small consternation, and of which I desired to know more. I am sadly ever-cursed to follow such paths of curiosity whither they will lead, and a name which most will speak only in hushed and timid tones excites the part of me that yearns for understanding at any cost, no matter how terrible. Now I have seen, and have learned, and will share all that I know in due course hereafter.
Puckwidget was the name–a funny one at that, too reminiscent of children's tales of mischievous little things to inspire much fear in ears green to it, though it inspired plenty in the pointed lobes of the nocturnal magician from whom I first pried the knowledge. I suppose that names must also wear masks after the fashion of their subjects, and Puckwidget does indeed: the phrase drapes a whimsical veil over the shadow that it represents. The umbra of that shadow declines to wane in the passage of time, however, and this feature marks its eponym as an especially foul thing–or things, I should say, as we shall see.
I undertook an astral journey to further my research, and after a painstaking trip across the interleaving mists of sea and spirit that divide this Earthly realm in twain I was able to uncover that mask, or a piece of it, and may speak to the meaning of the underlying word.
Puckwidget was the accursed name of an ancient fairy civilization, a race of diminutive humanoids that ruled the primeval forests of New Engnd with a thorned fist and a fell gre that–it is said–could splinter flesh and bark and stone alike. They were a rather unseelie folk, and schors disagree on their retion–if any–to their European kin, though in one of the oldest pce names in the New World a peculiar serendipity is found: Gungywamp, an archaeological site near the Pequot river, which houses among other things twin circles of stones resembling fairy rings back East. Its name means "church of the people" in Gaelic, by some accounts, and–if believed–this may hint at the Puckwidgets' origin and possible exile from the European continent, long before the age of discovery ever breathed a westward knot into white sails.
Occult historians agree on one thing, however, and that is the status of Puckwidget as powerful and dreadful, a people to be feared. What little info has come unfiltered down through the intervening years tells a story of a culture steeped in dark magic, or what modernity would perhaps call science, though performed with stick and stone and incantation rather than the iron scope and scalpel of the human physic, and executed on the lithopedic and bequilled bodies of the Pucks rather than weak and spongy human flesh. The other, indigenous peoples feared them for this, it seems–naturally–and even today that fear remains upon the ndscape like a stain. I have seen it: one may stand in the depths of some untrodden boreantal forest that has seldom caught the glint of sunlight, and be struck by the sense that aged trees and wild hills and elder stars watch one all with restless eyes, fearful of their witch-masters that will not return, or whose likeness remains only in descendants from whom I've extracted painstakingly these scraps of tale. Those afterbears are–always–ever-great-grandchildren with grim faces diluted by the many halvings of fae blood that have proliferated through the centuries.
It is a small comfort then that the Puckwidget were an insur people. Their demesne was the thickets of deepest wood that sunlight struggles to relieve, not the pins or coasts on which man made his living. Content in their conquered forests, they left the more mundane races unmolested–but only within the sphere of Earth, and not the lofty realm of thought from which it is whispered all fae ultimately descend. For the Puckwidget were an extraordinarily jealous and petty people: they resented the mortals who upheaved the dreamsoil with their gods of hearth and harvest, whose pharos-bearing sea-patrons polluted the white shores of the Silver Quay… and so they sought to unmake all those divinities, to violent effect.
In that they succeeded. On what grounds the Pucks condemned an earthly god to death, none can be certain, but the records say they condemned many. The stories tell of wailing and mentation among mortalkind as their great culture-heroes were consumed by a dark burning they would not name, or whose name is concealed, or perhaps was never named at all. The names, too, of the petty gods the Puckwidget fed into that fire are irrevocable, along with their symbols and station–though I have witnessed more than once in some western circles a kind of mourning ceremony fueled by strange tinctures, in which they are briefly able to remember the names–or meanings of the names–and weep anew at all that they have lost. They would not speak them to the likes of me, however, at such a remote viewing.
The horrible secret is that where other cultures sacrificed sheep, goats, or other ungutes, the Puckwidget were behooved to sacrifice the very gods themselves they deemed unworthy of grace. They possessed a ritual–the scraps of which I have reproduced here in the margins, though such inhuman magick is beyond my reach to perform even if I wished–that could draw the deities of humankind from great distances across the astral sea, into a kind of trench or well which they constructed. Beneath a hidden star the irreal was given shape and substance and as such made a temporary subject to physical w, to its great detriment. The Pucks would tintinnabute in dreadful tones “Tekeli-li” and encircle the trapped form, whirling round and round. A baleful asterixis would afflict the captive god's extremities, and–at the peak of that manual tremor's resonance–in an acrid evaporative fsh: it would be gone from mind and memory forever.
The violence wrought upon the minds of the freshly-bereft worshippers is immeasurable; the madness, too, persists perhaps, in echoed wails of ghosts in woods whose minds shattered from the loss. One can imagine crops and mothers left unfecund, warriors sapped of all their strength as their patrons of battle and bounty disappeared in the inferno; these traumas were visited upon the popuce time and time again in that dark age. Like water blood was spilled, and soaked into the Earth, and was ter freed from irons and taken up to live again as rain. But the ferrous stain remains; the nd remembers.
We are fortunate that such spiritual warfare has vanished from the Earth, or that none remain to wage it against the new Gods that come out of the Old World. The Puckwidget civilization came to an end long ago, and one tale may shed light on that ending, which is suitably grim. I was told of an eclipse–which may assist me in pcing the date–that cloaked the nd in unnatural darkness, and of the Puckwidget's great power during such occasions. Celestial alignments mirror the hearts of thinking things, I believe–that or the reverse is true. All such beings are capable of pride according to their measure, and so too were the Pucks with their great skill in matters beyond matter. It was their undoing. They sought to sughter not some local demigod of the hills or pin, but a Power far away, perhaps not of this Earth or even the heavens surrounding it. They prepared the ritual one final time; in umbral darkness their power reached its zenith, and also its nadir. They were destroyed. By what means, I cannot tell; whether their stone-skin unraveled into pebbles, wrenched apart by the wrath of some evil Hex beyond even their ken, or whether their minds were drawn beyond the shadow of the sun and their bodies left bereft to wander in the woods before at st colpsing… I cannot say.
All I have heard is that their gnarled tree-cities have long since fallen down, or that some remain but their sighting will refuse to linger in the memory of mortals, which makes them nigh-invisible after a time. That such pces of embalmed horror remain unknown is perhaps a blessing; I could discover none. But traces of the Pucks do remain. Legends tell of their half-human, changeling children–spared from the cataclysm by the thinness of their blood or the thickness of their disbelief–who piled high the stony corpses of their parents into cairns and apiarian chambers that still dot the ndscape in remote pces. Those I have seen. And the st thing I have heard, from a woman of fae blood with eyes like leaves that y forlorn and undisturbed for a millennium:
They say that at Gungywamp the circle of stones is incomplete. "The void-which-joins’ mouth is ever open; but the serpent would not eat Its own tail.” That is all she knew, or all that she would say.
In the end, I am grateful that of the spells that have come down from that depraved lost people, few may even be imitated by things with human hands and mouths and minds, and the st one not at all: the whirling chant by which Puckwidget for a time devoured the divine, and was in the end itself devoured.
