Chapter 76: A Bedtime Story
This page was torn down the middle, the spell incomplete. I doubted the witch had ever successfully used it; it had the fewest annotations, as if she herself had given up on it as a lost cause, a puzzle with too many missing pieces.
“Alright, Brother Jared, leave me be,” I said, already lost to the world. “I need quiet to work.” I knelt on the stone floor, using the charred stick to begin my work of translation. Helpless, Jared went to the corner to tend the fire and boil some of the stale bread. I found that as long as my mind was occupied, the monstrous hunger remained dormant. And the memory of that single, sweet taste of the witch's flesh… it filled me with a revulsion so profound that all thought of food vanished. I focused completely on the grimoire.
I worked late into the night, my world shrinking to the small circle of firelight. My night blindness was a curse, forcing me to huddle close to the brazier to see the grimoire’s strange script. All around the fire, the stone floor became my slate, covered in the dense, elegant lines of my own language. The sight was… unsettling. A ring of Chinese characters surrounding a fire in a sewer. It looked like the scene of some strange, unholy ritual.
Sometime during the night, Jared, choosing a moment when the other sewer-dwellers were lost in their own troubled sleep, disposed of the witch's body in the canal. He tried to get my attention a few times, but I was lost, utterly consumed by my work.
I don’t know how much time had passed. The world outside our small alcove had ceased to exist. Then, a hand on my shoulder, shaking me. Jared. He pulled me from my trance, and I surfaced with a gasp, annoyed at being interrupted at a critical moment. “What is it?” I snapped. “I told you I’m not hungry.”
“It’s not about food, Parula,” he said, his voice firm. “It’s time to sleep.”
“I’m not tired,” I said, and it was true. The work, the translation, it energized me. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t sleepy. It was a strange contrast to the usual state of this frail body, which would normally be exhausted after just a few hours of activity. Even in broad daylight, I could close my eyes and fall asleep, with nightmares.
“It’s not about being tired,” he insisted, his voice low and serious. “MacDuff always said that children who aren’t asleep when the two moons meet in the sky will be taken away by demons.”
I almost laughed. A boogeyman story. A crude lie a brute like MacDuff would invent to frighten crying children into a fearful silence. It was nonsense.
“No, it’s true,” Jared insisted, his eyes wide and earnest. “Even MacDuff believed it. He would always be inside, with the door barred, before the three moons were high in the sky. He made sure we were locked in tight.” And MacDuff, for all his flaws, was not a man given to flights of fancy. If he took something seriously, if he feared something, there was a reason for it. I still didn't believe him. It was just common sense. In an age without cheap light, people went to bed when it got dark. And locking the door was a simple precaution against the city’s mundane dangers, and against his own "children" running away.
“I’m fine,” I said, starting to stand up to stretch my cramped limbs. “I’m just… ugh!” A wave of vertigo hit me, sudden and overwhelming. My vision blurred into a nauseating smear. The ancient characters I had been studying, the ones I had drawn on the floor, began to writhe. They squirmed like black snakes, like the disembodied tentacles of some deep-sea horror. The ink of the grimoire itself seemed to liquefy, the symbols weeping a thick, crimson blood that dripped onto the page. The book appeared to burst into silent, spectral flame. I scrambled back, dropping the charred stick with a cry, and the vision vanished. The grimoire lay there, unharmed. The characters on the floor were just marks in the dust. But the world was still spinning violently. A profound, unnatural exhaustion, cold and heavy as a shroud, had settled deep in my bones. It was the exhaustion of a mind that had stared too long into the abyss.
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