The Book of Souls: A Sailor's Tale
by
Mark Howard Jones

ONE evening as I was at dinner with my noble doctor friend a disturbance at our door alerted us to the imminent intrusion into our warm company of a rough and disruptive influence.

Despite the innkeeper's best efforts the perpetrator of the disturbance insisted upon joining our table.

Eager to put our reputations as men of learning to the test, the man introduced himself as an ocean traveller only this day returned to shore.

He began to unfold a tale which, he made an oath, would torment us many a time when sleep was but a moment away.

There is an island, said the sailor, not many days latitude from fair Martinique which he had visited but once. He would give it no name but spat upon the floor when we inquired of it.

On the isle of which he spoke the twisted seed and crooked forms of the people had, over time, produced a race of bizarre beauty and horror comingled. Nothing seems as it truly is and there are times when a poor traveller could not be certain even if the ground was below him and the sky above.

"Having stopped at this isle I met a woman whose wide lips and broad hips made a place for my weary body to rest after many a month at sea," said the traveller.

Staying at the woman's house he watched her work her arts on him with no great grief or heaviness of soul. Near two months passed before the woman, knowing him to be a reader of great books and wondrous tales, told him of the means of his terrifying downfall.

Among the back ways of the city's high, winding streets, with its little-inhabited houses, the woman claimed there to be a small shop that sold chiefly books, balms and soothing remedies of all kinds.

" 'An apothecary of the body and soul' that darkened whore called it," swore the man.

The woman told the traveller he must go to the shop and linger an hour among its shelves, racks, high-stacked papers and curious bottles. Only then would the owner of the shop - a woman whose breast would be wrapped in the softest leathers and furs and who would be dusted with sweet, scented pollen - perceive his presence. For she was ancient and slow, said the woman, though she looked but twenty summers old and moved with the swiftness of a hunted animal in the deep forest, unused to man.

The traveller was to ask the woman to show him the oldest book in the shop. She would then reveal to him a bound parchment written by a man who claimed the idea of creation had been stolen from him by God. Indeed, the book is so old it served as the original and inspiration for the Bible, the Qu'ran and many lesser holy and unholy books the world around, she claimed.

This book, called the Cherillichquion, should not ever be asked for by name, the whore told the man. He would be allowed to see the book (if such it could be called), he may even glance swiftly at the etched portrait of the author on its innerleaf ( if his eyes could perform the task) but he must not touch the pages of text nor must he read one word of it, she warned him.

If he did these things his eyes would scorch black, his hands be consumed by flames that would not die and his mind become a nest for obscene snakes of damnation and despair.

All this would happen because the gods of all lands had cursed the book and its damned author for his arrogance and his blasphemies, she claimed.

"Such tales I had heard in many places but this whore's eyes burned so and her body said such things that I was compelled to seek out this mythical book that I would not be able to read. But I was equally prepared for disappointment and anger. I would be on guard, I swore," the traveller told the good doctor and myself.

Suddenly an awful look came across the man's grim face and a tightness of breath overtook him.

"I have been at sea too many a day. Pay no heed to aught I say. Salt cakes my tongue and my brain," said our guest as he fell into a chair.

My friend the good doctor ministered to the man and after some minutes' rest and a stiff brandy he was eager to continue, no doubt anxious to rid our faces of the masks of incredulity he had noted moments before his collapse.

The seafarer then told us it took many hours to find the shop in the higher streets of the old city, with their crumbling walls, toppling towers and deserted palaces.

Once inside the curious little shop it was no ordeal to while away the hour it took for the owner - on whose remarkable beauty he halted to remark many times - to recognise his presence.

He filled the hour full with queer glances at tiny glass phials full of coloured powders and lingering looks at seething liquids held in shapeless bottles.

His fingers traced the spines of ancient books and he sniffed the fresh ink of pages seemingly printed that day.

He recalled how thin books on the higher shelves seemed full to bursting with words and drawings and diagrams. Some of the thicker, heavier volumes he managed to heave up from their place near the floor had scarce a dozen words in them and lacked any illustrations.

He felt surrounded by the cracked leather spines of despair, the smooth silken papers of laughter.

As the full hour was due to pass, the traveller told, he approached where the woman sat and spent some minutes gazing upon her beauty before she wlooked up and saw him.

When he asked for the volume in the manner prescribed she smiled, slowly rose and went to a set of shelves set back from the others.

She handed him the volume without comment or warning, he claimed.

" I read the title on the first page and it was as the whore had told me that morning. There seemed nothing unusual about the book.

"It was neither heavy nor light, despite its great thickness. I could find no portrait of the author within the first few pages as I had expected," he told us sternly.

"I expected to feel cheated but felt still doubly cheated that I was. This was no great and blasphemous book, I thought. I turned the pages to where the first words appeared and began to read.

"It was difficult because the words seemed to move and melt and held true meaning for but a moment at a time."

Tears fell from the corners of an eye as he related his tale, as if fearing to recall the truth of the events.

The man gripped the arms of his chair with his gloved hands and opened his mouth to continue his tale.

"I then saw the most beautiful and appalling thing my eyes - or those of any other man - had ever fallen on.

"This was indeed a book of wonders and abominations. My eyes did no turn to dust, my hands were not engulfed by undying, demonic flames. Instead, from out of the book itself the head of a being - so bright, so beautiful - emerged and came towards me.

" As it moved closer its lips parted as if to kiss me and I was drawn forward to mimic its actions.

"Then ... then this angel - I can only call it that and if you had seen it you would not have been able to give it a better name - kissed me and my mind, my soul, everything that was me, was no more."

The man's voice ceased and he stared at us in expectation.

The doctor shot up from his chair and strutted over to the man, berating him for wasting our time and taking us for mere fools.

If his tale were true, complained the doctor, he would not have been able to join us this evening.

The man smiled indulgently.

"There you have struck upon something, my dear sir. The traveller of the oceans is no more and, in truth, I am not he - though this is his body and is the same as that inhabited when he strode into the shop that morning," said the man.

I regretted the doctor's haste and wished myself gone from that room. The doctor now said nothing, for the man's voice carried a chill conviction - such as the voice of a priest pronouncing at the side of a grave.

" You are both men of great learning and your reputations as scholars with a prospect of broader horizons has spread across the oceans to even the tiniest islands.

"I have come to you in this traveller's body as I knew that if this tale were to be related by yourselves it would be believed by far more people than if an unworthy wanderer were to peddle it among taverns and dockside dens and on ships ready to set sail," said the figure sitting before us.

"Your lives are full of the threat of nothingness from your first cries upon birth to the final moment before you plunge - afraid or unafraid - into true nothingness.

"I say only this and ask that you tell all those who would travel in search of blasphemous wonders and cheap miracles - beware you are not used as a living vessel for a full measure of nothingness for all eternity - just as this fool is now only a gourd of sweet, sick nothing."

At the moment the last word left the stranger's lips, his eyes burst briefly with a bright light and a million tiny holes appeared in his flesh, only to seal themselves instantly.

The man's head tipped to one side and a strand of silver drool ran from his mouth to the lapel of his dusty, well-travelled coat.

--------------------------------

The good doctor still refuses to speak of the man and his tale.

After making arrangements for the traveller's residence in a charity hospital for those with minds either troubled or entirely vacant, he seemed to wish to wipe the entire incident from his memory.

He claims even to have forgotten on what we supped before the stranger appeared. This is most unusual for the doctor, who takes particular delight in exercising his singular memory in that manner.

The traveller's tale remains untold (except to this good company), for the good doctor refuses to consider it for inclusion in the next volume that we issue.

"After all," he insists when his tongue has loosened itself on a good measure of port, or a fine highland malt, "how can we include in our book atale which neither of us has heard and which does not, in fact, exist."

On these occasions I, of course, make no reply.

© 2002 Mark Howard Jones