Chapter #2The Fake Book by: Seuzz   Ted Arnolm is standing behind a stack of books, marking the inside cover of each one with a pencil, as you approach his work station. He glances up at you from under tangled white brows. "I can't find the price," you tell him as you set the strange book in front of him. "How much is it?"
He regards you with a mildly skeptical expression before turning his attention to the book. With his thick wooden pencil he circles a faint number in the upper right-hand corner of the title page: $225. You face falls. "A little out of your price range?" he asks with gentle sarcasm.
You start to take the book up again, but he stops you. With a bony white finger he points to a spot on the inside of the front cover. "Water damage. I can take a bit off for that." He slashes the pencil through the original price and scribbles "$200" in its place. You make a face. "Did you get this out of the special collections case?" he asks.
"The cabinet door was unlocked."
He grimaces through his white beard. "Lemme check for other damage." Arnholm, you've found, isn't a very nice man, but he is a fair one. He won't let the book go for as little as you can afford, but he might try driving the price as low as he thinks he can bear. You wilt and absent-mindedly glance at the rows of used D&D manuals that line the top shelf of the store's "Games" section.
"Tom," he barks, and his brother pokes his head out from behind a shelf. "Who's the joker that glued this book's pages shut?"
You retrieve your attention as Tom Arnholm hurries up to join his brother, who is shaking the book and vainly trying to turn its pages. But even with his thick, yellowed thumbnail, Ted cannot pry the pages apart.
Tom takes the book and also gives it a go. He tries peeling pages back one at a time, but none of them will yield. In fact, they are so tightly bound together that the book itself might be a clever fake carved from wood.
"Was it like this when you cataloged it?" Tom asks Ted.
"No, it wasn't like this when I cataloged it," Ted retorts. "I wouldn't have cataloged it if I'd seen it was in this state!" Tom casts a suspicious glance at you. "I don't even remember cataloging it. I assumed you did."
"I don't remember it. It looks like it came from the Blackwell acquisition. Mitch did the work on those."
Ted Arnholm looks relieved: a victim has been found and will be summarily executed. He gives you a po-faced glance, then inserts a decimal point between the "2" and the "0" in the price. "Might make a nice bookend," he says with no little bitterness.
You part with a single dollar and some coins, and with the book under your arm almost dance out of the store.
* * * * *
You don't live on the outskirts of Saratoga Falls, exactly, but it's still a good twenty-minute drive back to your house, during which you pound your fist against the truck console in happy time to the rap music blaring from the truck radio. Actually, you don't even live in Saratoga Falls, but in the township of Acheson. A hundred-and-something years ago, the two villages were separated by many miles, but the former mushroomed in size after the railroad went through. It has since grown to nearly engulf Acheson, and the latter now exists mostly as a bedroom community for the well-to-do who want the amenities of a city while still living on the edge of the countryside.
You gun your engine as you pull into the driveway, startling your thirteen-year-old brother, who's kneeling in the front yard next to his bike. Robert flips you off as you hop out of the cab. "You know, they got satellites sharp enough to spot that kind of shit," you say as you slap at his hand with the book. "One of these days, they'll snap a picture and pop it up on a big screen at NASA, and Dad'll freak when he sees you." Your father is an aerospace engineer.
Robert ignores you and snatches at the book. "Whatcha get?"
"Something for school. When's supper?"
"I dunno. Lemme see that." You hold the book out of his reach as you saunter toward the open garage. "Is it porn?" Robert asks. "I bet it's porn!"
"If so, it's your kind of porn." You shove the book at him, and grin to yourself as he tries to flip the pages.
"It isn't even a real book," he exclaims.
"The kind of porn you deserve." You try to snatch it back, but he yanks the book away. So you grab him around the waist and thrown him into the yard. The book bounces off, forgotten for the moment, as you wrestle.
* * * * *
Up in your room, you flop onto your bed and flip on the TV to waste a little time before dinner; your mother chased you out of the kitchen when you tried getting an early sample of the spaghetti sauce. The strange book is by your elbow, so you pick it up and glance at it casually as commercials play. To your surprise, you see that the first page has turned loose and now flips over easily. You examine it and the page behind it carefully, but can find no trace of glue residue. The rest of the book, though, remain tightly sealed.
You sit up and study your discovery. Both the first and second pages are covered in whole paragraphs of intricate script. At the top of the first page is what you take to be the book's title: Summa Libra Personae, it reads in big letters. Underneath, in slightly smaller letters: Personas. De Elementa, et ad Relatio Inter Se; et eorum Constructio; et Modum Repraesentationis et ejus Reflexio in Materia The rest of the page, and the page follow, are alas also in Latin. You take out your phone and pull up an online English-Latin translator. With a notebook and pencil plucked from off your desk, you start to copy down a translation.
To your surprise and dismay you find that pens and pencils leave no trace—not even a crease or indentation—on the page as you try to write down your translation. You open a word processor on your laptop, but it freezes and crashes when you try typing the translations into it. Even the web browser you're using becomes glitchy when you try putting large blocks of type into the translator. The hairs on the back of your neck are soon standing on end.
Your dad will not be coming home for supper, so you beg off joining your mother and brother at the dining room table and take your plate upstairs, where between mouthfuls of pasta you doggedly set about deciphering the page, word by word, memorizing it as you go. It is sweaty, tedious work, and most of what emerges reads like garbled nonsense even after you abandon Google Translate for a more scholarly website. But gradually, by inference and intuition more than translation, it dawns on you what you've got.
It's a book about disguises. Personas, it calls them—masks that can transform their wearers into other people. It's not just theory either, for the book promises you that these personas can have very practical uses. Dangerous uses, too, and the second page is given over almost completely to warnings and cautions about the penalties of deceit and the risks of using the book without full understanding. And it closes with the exhortation not to "sign" the book in a light-hearted spirit.
The latter exhortation causes you to frown. Sign the book? What does that mean?
You turn back to the title page, which is when you see that the facing papers inside the cover have changed. Those shifting, dizzying patterns have vanished, and on the newly blank inside cover a sentence has appeared. Emptio me cum pecunia, possidere me cum sanguine.
The translation is easy enough: Claim me with money; possess me with blood.
Your eye drifts down to the whorl of lines that has appeared beneath this exhortation, and you chill when you recognize it as the stylized form of a thumbprint.
You gulp. Well, if anything is going to drain the lightness from your spirit ...  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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