A feeble lie. Death wasn’t fair. It wasn’t even random.
As I watched my friend Pierre open up the tomb and my fellow orderlies place old Henry’s coffin in the hole, I figured that I should have seen it coming. The man had no rich relatives to pay for more expensive treatments that could have slowed down dementia’s deadly grasp, and neither did he possess a strong constitution that would forestall the creeping hands of age and disease. Father Beno?t simply said his time had come when he gave the final sermon, but the truth was that Henry Nelson couldn’t buy more for himself. He was a poor lonely man who had died a lonely death.
Even his final resting place felt like an insult. Portenoire’s graveyard always lacked space for its dead residents, so Pierre had two corpses dug up and then rearranged the plots to fit Henry between them. It was cheaper than paying for yet another extension.
“This is a pitiful day, Laurent,” Germaine said with a cigarette on her lips. While most alienists looked in a hurry to kill their lungs with that smoke stick, Germaine was older and shrewder than most at the age of sixty-two. She had decided to take her time. “He was with us for nearly twenty years. Can you imagine?”
“No, I cannot,” I replied. I had only been a part-time orderly at the Portenoire Sanitorium for a year. Director Rochard had agreed to house me in exchange for my service and proved most… accommodating about my research.
“Well, he couldn’t even remember his own name in the end. Age and insanity do not make a good combination.” Germaine shrugged, a look of sadness flashing behind her glasses. “I’ll miss him.”
I believed as much. Henry had been something of a bizarre pillar for Portenoire’s community as one of the oldest and most well-behaved patients. Most of the staff attended the ceremony. They’d even taken Agnès out of her cell for the occasion, though she was strapped to a wheelchair to prevent an incident. She had always been strangely fond of the old man.
However, I didn’t see anyone from outside the asylum. Henry had no relatives as far as I knew, nor any friends to speak of. If he had any, he had either lost them to time or when he burned down his own bookshop during the Siege of Paris eighteen years ago. Enough people died then that the courts had him institutionalized for the rest of his life after the newborn Third Republic reestablished order in the streets.
Henry didn’t leave anything worth fussing over either. His personal belongings mostly included the clothes on his back and that blank book he obsessed over even in the depths of his dementia; a gift which I inherited.
“Are you set on taking that memento with you, Laurent?” Germaine asked me after we left the graveyard behind us. She eyed the black, featureless book under my arm. “Henry died cradling it.”
“It would feel disrespectful to throw it away,” I replied. “Besides, I need a new notebook.”
Germaine scoffed. “Most would rather spend a few coins at a bookstore than use a mad arsonist’s last possession.”
“Most don’t live on a student’s stipend.” I’d earned a study grant from the Ministry of Public Instruction by virtue of my merits and results, but the amount was a pittance. “I would rather spend my money on other acquisitions.”
“Another censored book?” Germaine asked, which earned her a scowl from me. She had unfortunately guessed right. “Are you researching that spiritualism nonsense to better debunk it? Or do you truly believe in that quackery?”
“I do not,” I replied with a small smile. “When sufficiently analyzed, magic will stop being quackery. Instead, we’ll call it science.”
“An elaborate way to say that yes, you do believe.” Germaine didn’t hide her disappointment. “I cannot fathom why such a brilliant and rational student entertains those pseudo-theories of conmen.”
“I don’t believe it’s all smoke and mirrors.” I’d gone through one such unexplained experience in my youth, which inspired me to study science. “I think there is indeed an invisible force around us that we cannot observe with the naked eye, but which has a tangible impact on reality. I simply need to develop the right tool to measure it.”
“I don’t see how old alchemical books will help you with that, but suit yourself.” Germaine gave me a small nod as we approached the menacing gates of Portenoire’s east wing. Great walls of gray stone loomed menacingly over us, while statues of angels stared down from the brick roof. “Your next shift is in an hour.”
“I know,” I replied politely. “Will I see you at the Universal Exposition?”
“Of course you will, dearie,” she replied with a warm smile. “I wouldn’t miss our Revolution’s hundredth anniversary, nor spitting on that ugly metal tower disfiguring our city.”
I was personally impressed with Eiffel’s work, but Germaine was too stubborn for me to change her mind. I had the feeling its inauguration would be the exposition's highlight.
The year 1889 promised to be most memorable.
I thanked Germaine for her time and left her at the facility’s double doors. The likeness of the Virgin Mary carved on them hardly made the place feel welcoming. The artists chose to portray her with a pitiless frown instead of a smile, likely to remind patients that disobedience would not be tolerated. Neither could she alleviate the howling screams of the madmen trapped in the basement. I’d heard a few orderlies complain about the noise wearing them down mentally, but they only inspired pity from me. Those poor souls were begging for a cure I couldn’t provide yet.
Patience, Laurent, I told myself as I walked past the guest lobby and ascended one of the five marble staircases leading to the upper floors. A few more years and I will have completed the world’s first dementia treatment. Patience.
Director Rochard had been kind enough to provide me with a room on the first floor next to his own office, though it didn’t differ from the average patient’s quarters: a set of walls, a pair of metal-framed beds with old musky mattresses, and a single window protected by simple blinds. I at least enjoyed my own wardrobe and desk, though I mostly used the former to store my books.
My latest acquisition, a copy of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, lay on my desk between a human brain preserved in resin—extracted with the director’s permission for study—and my homemade “orgone detector”: a cluster of hollow copper tubes connected to a central silver pipe, and from there to steel wires connected into a Baudot telegraph keyboard. The grimoire was open on the first page, where I’d stopped upon finding a familiar owl sigil and an irritating statement.
‘Validated by the Bureau des Moeurs du Ministère de l’Instruction Publique.’
That awful call sign appeared on every alchemical and occult treaty I’d managed to track down; a mark which I’d grown to associate with censored texts and missing content. How did the government expect scientists to do their jobs when they allowed bureaucrats to interfere with their work in the name of outdated morality?
I closed the door behind me, sat at my desk, and barely had time to settle when I heard a sharp clink.
I looked at my orgone detector. Its telegraph had started printing dots on its paper strip.
This was new. Had I triggered it by sitting down? I stood and watched as it continued to type. Could it be…
My eyes fell on Henry’s book. I held it close to the detector’s tubes. The steel wires began to vibrate, and the telegraph punched holes at a faster pace.
“Fascinating…” I muttered to myself. Franz Mesmer and Reichenbach had theorized about the existence of an invisible force linked to life, which they had called animal magnetism and odic force respectively. I preferred the term ‘orgone’ myself, since I only ever detected traces of it in living organic matter.
Why would my detector react to a book of all things?
Was its paper somehow imbued with its late owner’s spirit? That seemed far-fetched, but I hadn’t seen the detector react to any other object like this.
Stolen story; please report.
Henry kept the book close for as long as anyone could remember and reacted with distress whenever it was taken from him. It wasn’t anything special, just a black and featureless journal devoid of any writing whatsoever. I never saw Henry write anything in it, if he still retained the ability while deep in dementia.
Taking the journal and putting it to use had been my way of honoring his memory. I wasn’t close to Henry—I only ever changed his bedpans and fed him now and then—but the man cared enough about this book to clutch it during his last moments. It had value for him, even in the throes of his madness.
Had this emotional attachment somehow rubbed off the document? If so, then it could prove to be a phenomenal breakthrough.
I opened the book’s first page to find a single sentence written in Latin.
I only reveal the truth to my master.
I frowned and flipped the page. Shock hit me as I saw the next pages scribbled over. Most words were written with various handwriting styles in alphabets I could not understand, but the latter parts revealed a series of names closed by a strange sentence.
Johannes Kepler
Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar
Jean-Philippe de Beachamp
Ali Puli
Comte Manuel Bellamarre Soltikoff
Edwin Soltikoff
Catherine Soltikoff
Alphonse Horace Soltikoff
Henry Nelson
The old master is dead, may the new master live forever.
I scoffed in disgust. I didn’t recall Henry ever writing anything in this book. Was this a prank from a fellow orderly? That dimwitted brute André, perhaps? It would have been his style, but I doubted he was bright enough to know about Johannes Kepler. Whoever did it, writing down Henry’s name and crossing it out after his demise felt disrespectful.
I flipped to the next pages only to find them all blank. I knew I should have dismissed these writings as a prank, but my detector’s clicking noise continued to arouse my curiosity.
“I only reveal the truth to my master…” I murmured, eyeing the empty space below Henry’s name and a wild idea crossed my mind. I took my fountain pen and then signed with my own name.
Laurent Valmore.
The machine’s typing intensified with each letter I wrote. By the time I finished, the telegraph hammered the paper furiously. I stared at my name on the page for a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, with my device’s noise alone breaking the silence.
Then words suddenly appeared below my signature, written in French with pale red ink.
The Lost Deaths: A Guide to Murdering Mortalities
I gasped in shock and surprise. I could have sworn they… No, no, my eyes did not deceive me. These words were new, fresh. Either I’d gone mad or a force had indeed responded to my action.
I looked back at my detector, whose paper roll had run out. The wires and tubes vibrated at an intensity I’d never witnessed before. This was it—a genuine supernatural phenomenon. Something was here, in my room, speaking to me through the book; perhaps the late Henry himself.
Unable to contain my excitement, I flipped the pages and swiftly froze in shock at what I found.
The drawing of a horrifying monster stared back at me. It was a vaguely arachnid abomination of viscous crimson slime carried on spindly legs, with two horns sprouting from its faceless head above a set of calculating bloodshot eyes. The sight of them filled me with an unease whose source I couldn’t explain. A description written in French accompanied the drawing.
The Red Terror
Death by the color red, who drove primitive men to frenzied violence with the sight of their own blood. Devoured at the dawn of humanity by a Qlippoth spawn of Ialdabaoth, Father of the Blood, before its banishment.
My jaw clenched as I flipped to the next page. I swiftly found another drawing instead of answers, this time representing a spiral of numbers that made my head spin. Its description was equally ominous.
The Final Equation
Death by mathematics, a servant of the Hecatomb of Dementia. Slew those seeking to understand the secrets of the universe by reducing their brains to ones and zeroes. Destroyed on October 24th, 1601 in Prague by Johannes Kepler with the Silent King’s guidance.
I kept going, each page revealing monstrous entities called ‘Deaths’ slain across the ages. Was this book a demonic bestiary of some sort? Yet I didn’t find any mention of Hell or Heaven, only a list of ‘Mortalities’ which had never killed anyone. I counted dozens of entries, each described in lurid detail.
The mystery further deepened once I reached the end of this twisted gallery. The last two entries, which described some kind of awful bird wearing a plague doctor’s mask and a faceless human wrapped up in scrolls written in German, caught my eye.
Featherbane
Death by feathers and quills, a minor Mortality in the service of the Hecatomb of Predation, whose touch caused fatal allergies to the weak of constitution. Slain by Henry Nelson during the Ankou Society’s assault on his library in Paris, January 5th 1871.
The Prussian Litany
Death by German language, a minor Mortality in the service of the Hecatomb of Dementia. Murdered men with words that filled their brains with blood. Slain by Henry Nelson during the Ankou Society’s assault on his library in Paris, January 5th 1871.
Both descriptions mentioned the late Henry Nelson, and the date during which he set his bookshop on fire with his customers still inside.
I didn’t recall ever hearing of an ‘Ankou Society’ though. The book implied Henry hadn’t been the arson’s culprit, but some kind of defender fighting these ‘Mortalities’ during an ‘assault.’ Strange, very strange indeed.
I flipped to the next page only to find it blank, and then the next hundreds afterward. Barely a fraction of the book contained illustrations, as if the rest of the entries were missing; or perhaps, waiting to be written.
I considered my options for a long time. The book had said that it only showed the truth to its master. I’d unlocked its secrets by signing my name.
What if I simply asked it for answers?
“Who are you?’ I wrote on an empty page, half-heartedly expecting a lack of response.
My orgone detector let out a droning noise louder than ever before. My words faded away… only to be replaced by new ones written in pale red ink.
“A practical guide to immortality, so that men may live forever in defiance of Deaths great and small.”
I was too stunned to move for a moment, but then quickly recovered. I’d been wrong. I had assumed a spirit inhabited the book, but the document clearly referred to itself as an intelligent and independent entity; one whose existence triggered the orgone detector.
A wild idea crossed my mind, one that threatened to undo all that I knew about science and life in general; a discovery greater than Darwin’s own discovery of evolution.
“Are you alive?” I asked the book.
And it answered with a simple yes.
“Are you possessed by a ghost or demon?” I inquired next. “An angel mayhaps?”
“No,” the book replied. “I have always been The Lost Deaths and served no other purpose than for which I was created.”
So this… thing existed as a living book. It wasn’t a ghost or demon, but an impossible lifeform created with purpose. My heart pounded with excitement and wonder. Was it a unique case, or merely a specimen among many hidden in libraries?
I had so many questions, and so little ink.
“What are these creatures you mention in your bestiary?” I asked the book. “Demons?”
“They are the Deaths that were destroyed, freeing the world from their grasp and hunger. Many more remain. So long as a single one survives, the lives of men will end.”
I read the response twice. Deaths, as in creatures, plural. Multiple forms of death preying on mankind and yet mortal themselves. The concept sounded absurd in my head, but then again, I was talking to a living book.
“How do you destroy a Death?” I asked.
“With magic,” the book answered simply.
How could two simple words carry so much weight? They struck me like a bolt of lightning. Magic. The very thing I’d devoted so much time to studying, the esoteric truth denied to me for so long was at long last within my grasp.
“How do you learn magic?” I asked out loud.
I could have sworn that the pages chuckled as I wrote down those very words.
A/N: this is a the first chapter of a six-parts novella/short story entry for the RR Community Magazine January Contest, whose theme inspired me a great deal, so fair warning: this tale will be quite short. Hope you'll enjoy it.
https://www.royalroad.com/blog/73/happy-new-start-of-the-community-magazine-contest); this is a short novella whose chapters will be published daily until completion, with my next actual long serial, Dungeon Wreckers, being published later this month. Hope you'll enjoy it!
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