1.

There is an email waiting for me when I get in, inviting me to his office to see the new acquisition. The timestamp said the message had been sent at 2:46 am. I sit down at my desk, take a long drink from my giant coffee thermos, and then spend a while rubbing my eyes. Will I ever be excited by this job like he is? Isn’t this my dream job? Why do I feel so tired?

I try to keep my heels from clicking as I cross the long, marble-floored gallery, the high ceiling magnifying every sound. Some of the other archivists will walk as quickly as possible, their steps like a series of gunshots tracking across the building, but I haven’t been on the job very long. I was trying not to be noticed based on the irrational thought that I might be discovered and asked to leave. I had beat out three rounds of other candidates for the job. I let my shoes make a little more noise.

I knock on Ted’s door and hear him grunt and mutter. I let myself in.

“Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” he says, by way of greeting.

Ted’s office is a close, cluttered nightmare mess. I have fantasies about coming in to clean it when he is away. Books are piled on every flat surface. His odd collection of lecterns each has some ancient tome open on them, the lower shelves filled with even more books. A large photograph collection is spread over one table, the primary source for a book he had been writing for decades on antebellum residential architecture. This office would be mine when Ted finally retired. Or they wheeled him out on a gurney.

“Anthropodermic bibliopegy?” I replied.

“Ah, um, see, ah, yes… you, ah, know what it is, of course,” he says. He has a curious smile on his face and seems unusually focused.

He often tests me like this. He had stayed on after I was hired as the new Curator of Rare Books in order to “help” me transition. The rare books collection is huge and poorly cataloged. Items had been accepted for donation or purchased with no real collection development policy to guide their acquisition: Sumerian clay tablets, Arabic texts illuminated in gold, Basque cookbooks, a holographic Galileo manuscript, Victorian children’s literature, court records from Spain in a dead dialect of Catalan all jumbled in with hundreds of other oddities that one would ever think to look for at the Special Collections of a medium-sized state university in the American South.

“The practice of binding books in human skin,” I reply.

“I have been, uh, looking for one for so long,” he says, sweeping his hand to one of his many lecterns.

It isn’t a large book–maybe 8” x 6”–and the “leather” of the cover is wrinkled and pocked. I step closer, bending over to look at it. There is a scar that wraps around the spine. On cow leather, it would be a barbed-wire mark. Here, maybe a knife. It hadn’t healed very cleanly. The leather over the spine isn’t tooled or stamped and there is no title or author on the cover or spine. Ted lays a pair of cotton gloves beside the book for me.

“How do we…” I ask, pulling the gloves on.

“DNA. There are so many fakes and traditionally, uh, attested volumes that they are all being tested now. They took a little bit from the inside front cover. The tan-tanning process corrupts it, but unmistakably human.”

He is already wearing gloves and opens the front cover. There are no endpapers so I can see the turn-in of the cover material. Cover material, I think, how bland and inoffensive. The skin. The tanned human skin. The board is a thin piece of wood and the cover material is tacked to it. I flip to the back cover and the board is also wood. The papers at either end of the book block were stained a dark brown from lignin. There is no headband or footband.

“Original to the text block?” I ask.

“That’s what I was thinking,” he says. “Look at the sewing.”

I stood the book on end and opened it so I could see down the spine. The sewing didn’t look like thread, too rough, too varied in thickness.

“The seller claims it is sinew,” Ted says and smiles, his coffee-stained teeth large and crooked. “I’ve wanted to buy us one for years. Years. I’m so happy.”

I don’t ask why he thinks our state college university needs a book bound in human skin, what possible research function the book supports, how it fits the Special Collection’s mission with respect to higher learning on campus. Having it was Ted’s goal, like most of the things in the stacks outside our collection development policy–acquisition was its own end.

“Middle French,” he says as I flip the pages. “Some of it is verse, so maybe a book of poetry bound in, uh, the poet’s skin. The l-l-last gift to a lover?”

I lean over and take a long whiff of the open pages. The usual rare book scent: dust, silverfish shit, mold. I think there is also a little bit of rot. I smell again, chasing it. Dead things, very faint. Things that had been dead a very long time.

“Did they say what the text block is made of?” I ask.

“Goat parchment, treated with staunchgrain,” he says, looking over my shoulder. I can feel his breath on the back of my neck. I stand up straight to get him to back away.

“How do they know it is goat?” I ask, turning and forcing him back a few more steps.

“The seller tested three of the pages as well.”

“Why?” I ask, keeping the frustration out of my voice. His wise master act is grating at the best of times, but this made me want to slap him.

“They wanted to know if the pages were human as well,” he says and smiles again. I don’t try to hide my shudder.

“Is it inked in blood?” I asked, smiling, a joke.

“No, dear, just regular old iron gall ink. But imagine, a whole book made from a person: cover, pages, sewing, and ink…” His smile is wider than ever and his eyes are bright with excitement.

Dear.

I walk back to my office, making as much noise as I want.

2.

“I reach out to touch his back, something I probably do a dozen times a night. But, like, my arm isn’t long enough to reach him. Dream logic, you know? You can’t touch someone right next to you.”

“And then what happens?”

“He disappears. Just disappears. Everything is black.”

“Every object turns black?”

“No, like I’m in a formless void. Just hang in a starless field of nothing. But feel dread.”

“It sounds very upsetting.”

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing literal. Dreams aren’t literal.”

“OK.”

“How is the new job going? Are you settling in?”

“It’s fine, everything is fine.”

“Juliet…”

“Call me, Julie. I hate it when you call me Juliet. You sound like my mom.”

“I am your mother.”

“I know.”

“I can give you a referral to someone local if you like.”

“The ultimate brush off. Do you know how many times you’ve threatened to refer me?”

“It’s not a threat.”

“Then don’t say it like one.”

I slam the laptop closed.

“Maybe a referral is a good idea,” my husband says for the thousandth time.

“It is rather perverse, isn’t it, getting therapy from my mother?”

“Perverse,” he says, “And unethical and unhelpful and damaging and…”

“Dread?” he asks, right as I am falling asleep. “You feel dread?”

I burrow deeper into my pillow and don’t answer.

 

3.

There is an email from Ted when I get to work

The email’s subject line is “!!!!” and the only thing in the body is “!!!!” and I understand that to mean “come see me as soon as you can” in Ted.

*****

“W-w-we found someone to, uh, translate the-the book,” he says excitedly.

“Are they local?” I ask.

I lean over to smell the book again. I never knew how much stuff I would have to smell to work in an archive. The rot is still there, maybe slightly stronger. It is something to keep track of. Books this old have often already experienced all the bad things aging and sub-optimal storage are going to do to them but Ted’s office was moist and warm. The book should be in the cold and dry storage facility but I was never going to get him to send his new baby away.

“Ontario,” he says. “We are going to image the pages and, uh, send them to her.”

“Neat,” I say. The text is probably not all that valuable compared to the binding but high-resolution images would cut down on future handling of the book. And opportunities for theft.

“And she already translated the, uh, title, ahem, page.” He coughs a couple of times and smiles and coughs a bit more.

I can tell he is embarrassed, so I wait silently to draw it out and make it worse.

“The Intimate Blush of Marianne,” he blurts.

“The Intimate Blush?” I ask.

“The, uh, intimate, uh, b-blush.”

Oh. “So it’s erotica?”

“I think so.”

I smile at Ted, hunched-over Ted.

“Do you want to, uh, come take it down to the digitization lab with me?” he asks.

“Sure,” I tell him.

He locks up for a moment, looking from me to the book to the door to me in a loop. I pull on gloves to take the book and shepherd him out of his own office.

*****

When I get home that night, I wash my hands and wash my hands. OCD is our professional disease, but handling tanned human skin overwhelms the control I have on it.

I reach out and touch my husband’s back in bed that night and feel his skin, imagine his skin tanned into leather, think about how many books I could bind from just his back skin alone. When I wake up the next morning I’m not sure if it was a dream or my mind wandering before sleep. I see his back, his back skin, in the morning light and I shudder.

 

4.

Ted knocks on my office door and lets himself in without waiting for a reply.

“It’s a palimpsest,” he says, “A palimpsest!”

“Can we recover the underlying text?” I ask, getting excited despite myself.

“You have to see,” he says, beckoning me as he backs out of my office.

*****

“It was Jonathan that first noticed it,” Ted says.

From the corner of the dark digitization lab, Jonathan nods. He is tall and cadaverously thin, rarely speaks, and is nowhere near the weirdest person that works here. The book is laid out under our phase camera, surrounded by strobes.

“You must allow your eyes to dilate,” Jonathan says, barely above a whisper, and turns off dim lights in the room.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“It’s a surprise,” Ted says, closer to me than I thought. Jonathan is humming tunelessly.

“Now you must cover your eyes,” he says. “Cover them tightly.”

I put both hands over my eyes.

“Is everyone ready?” Jonathan asks, like the fluttering of silk curtains.

A flash of light, intense light, I swear can see the bones of my fingers, the veins of my eyelids.

“Now look,” Ted says. “Quickly, it doesn’t last very long.”

I open my eyes and despite the blob in my vision from the flash, I see the book. There are lines and swirls on it, glowing a sickly green. I try to trace them with my eyes but they fade after two, maybe three seconds.

“What are they?” I ask.

“They are what was originally written on the pages,” Ted says.

“I know what a palimpsest is,” I say, dropping the inflection in my voice to icy levels. “I meant what sort of writing is it? Is it on every page?”

“I think so,” Jonathan says, turning back on the lights.

“There are a few pages that have been tipped-in and don’t show the effect,” Ted says.

“I have the over-writing imaged, but I would like to hold onto the book and try and capture the glowing portions,” Jonathan says. It is the most I have ever heard him speak at once.

“Yes,” Ted says, “Yes, of course.”

 

5.

“It’s clearly the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead,” my husband says in a sepulchral tone.

“No, it isn’t,” I say.

“Written by the ‘Mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred!” he continues, dumping a handful of onions into the wok. They sizzle and hiss as he makes a booming laugh.

I pass him the bell peppers I have been prepping.

“He was devoured by invisible demons before a screaming crowd in the marketplace!” he says. “Devoured, I say!”

“Howard P. made it all up,” I say.

“Mr. Lovecraft, you unlettered rube,” he shoots back.

I set down the knife and hug him from behind, laughing.

“Not while I’m cooking, woman!”

*****

After dinner, he reads to me while I bury us both under blankets. He has a rather deep voice and I have always loved it, sometimes lying with my head on his chest to feel it rumble. He insists on Lovecraft, of course, “The Nameless City.”

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and
inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted
ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were
laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no
legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive;
but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by
grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without
wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad
poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange eons even death may die.

I sigh and stretch like a cat.

*****

I run my hands over the skin of his back, smoothing it like an unruly bed sheet. I make the first cut high on his left shoulder and draw the knife across under his neck to the opposite arm. There is no blood even though I can feel his heart beating. The skin parts effortlessly and I can see the layers as the cuts blossoms open: skin, skin, fat, and muscle. Down both sides, along the curve of the ribs and across his lower back, kidney-to-kidney. I dig my fingers in and pull.

 

6.

A week later, Jonathan admits defeat. “I cannot think of a way to capture the afterimages,” he says.

We are in the breakroom. He never comes to the breakroom. I’ve been here almost two months and I don’t think that I have ever seen him eat anything. Ted eats his office–sauces and coffee too near the books he keeps with him rather than in storage. When Ted finally leaves I’m going to dance through the stacks as I reshelve them all.

“If the eye can see them, I should be able to capture them with the cameras,” Jonathan says like he is singing a dirge.

“A light frequency, maybe? Something the cameras can’t register?” I ask.

He stares at me for a long few seconds and then leaves the room.

*****

The text from Ted just says, “DISASTER DIGITAL LAB.” Ted loves texting in allcaps.

“Do you need anything from the disaster closet?” I text back and start to walk toward where we keep the mops and buckets and wet/dry vac and gloves and masks. In a fit of delirious literalness, someone had painted “DISASTER CLOSET” on it decades ago.

“NO BUT HURRY!”

I clomp down three flights of stairs to Jonathan’s lair.

*****

The book is where I had last seen it, splayed open on the camera table, almost vulgar in its display.

“Look!” Ted says, distraught.

I pull on the nitrile gloves I have in my pocket and cross to the book, open to a page in the middle of the small text block. The loops and whirls that were once faint and fading phosphoresces were carbon black; the Middle French had been eaten away or subsumed. I picked the book up delicately, hoping to see the once-lost figures refract in the dim light, and the black slides down and off the page.

Ted gasps dramatically.

I take out a microspatula and lift the page. The writing and figures of the underlying text are now cutouts, obliterating the overtext. I lay the book down and turn the next page carefully. It was the same, but the fine black powder was left in place on the page following.

“How could this happen?” Ted asks, his voice raw.

“I have no idea,” I whisper and, even through the mask I had put on, my breath stirs the black powder. I scoop some powder up with the microspatula. It is as fine as toner. I spill some on the interleaving paper the book had been wrapped in when we brought it down. It slides around on the paper like a fluid. I can’t smear it with my finger.

“Is it every page?” I ask, glaring at Jonathan in his dark corner.

“Yes, except the tipped-in pages.” He sounds stricken, maybe close to fainting.

“Did you try something after we talked?” I ask him. “In the breakroom? After we talked in the breakroom?”

“No, nothing,” he says, quieter, like he is receding into the distance.

I stood the book on end and fanned the pages, letting the black powder fall on the interleaving paper.

“No more digital photography, no more light, no scanning, no photocopies. I’m taking this and I’m going to try and salvage what I can.” I stomp back up the stairs.

 

I tell my husband all about it when I get home, full-on rant. I stop just for a bit and wonder if the neighbors can hear me, but decide I don’t care. I work the rest of the night, angrily, and don’t even bother going to bed. I sleep on the couch, curled in a ball.

 

7.

Ted isn’t at work the next day and that is for the best. I had rehearsed what I was going to say to him and it had become more bitter than I could stand, like fire and ashes in my mouth. I lock myself in the office with the book and get out cotton rag bond I scavenged from the small letterpress operation in the basement and fold it into quartos.

I start with page one, something that looks more like a graphed math problem than anything else. I put a pane of the bond behind so I can see the symbol better, the white of the paper filling the negative space of the burned-away parts. Burned away. Why burned away? It fit. The black powder was ash. Burned away.

I shade the underlying paper, carefully going over the lines and whorls with a rounded-off Blackhawk. I work on the page until I have recreated it. It looks complete. More than that, it feels complete.

With a new page of the paper, I flip to the verso and do the same. Before I’m even halfway done, I rip up the page and tamp the pieces down into my trash. It was wrong in the same way the first tracing was right. Only the righthand pages have anything.

I work until dark, the last person in the large and echoing building, alone with the chug-chug of the HVAC system, the sudden silence when the blowers turn off for the night. I work feverishly at tracing the symbols. Many pages are a written language, spiky letters that look designed to hurt you, thorns of a linguistic flower.

I take my copy of the book home and carefully go over everything with ink. My husband thinks I’m crazy, tells me to take a shower, tries to get me to eat something. I yell at him to leave me alone. I sew up the quartos and split the pages with my sharp, sharp, sharp book knife. And then I sew the quartos into a text block.

The book lives again and by my hand.

 

8.

Monday, at work, the office manager tells me that Ted is dead. Something about his heart. His wife found him in his study, fountain pen still in hand, his beautiful Spencerian handwriting producing a full page of gibberish. The office manager asks me if I thought it was a suicide note. I say that Ted didn’t seem the type. She tells me that everyone in the building had decided to go out for a drink after work. I nod. She asks me if I had changed my clothes since Friday ha, ha, ha.

I delete all my unread email. It feels so good. Patrons looking to confirm errata with our edition. Patrons looking for an illustration on page so-and-so. Patrons looking for me to date their undated book or tell them the value of the trashy Book of the Month Club novel they had bought at a yard sale. Boop, boop. Trash. I have a warm little sun orbiting my heart.

There is a somber tone all day in the building, everyone thinking about Ted, I guess, and no one thought to call me about Jonathan missing until after lunch.

“Have you seen Jonathan today?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything to you about being out?”

“No.”

“It’s weird. He just didn’t show up. That’s not like him.”

“Yes, that’s not like him at all.”

And because we are incapable of knowing what anyone else is doing, I have this conversation three more times.

I know Jonathan is dead as well.

I walk down to the digital lab the long way, so I won’t encounter anyone else, down to the basement taking the back stairs, and back up a flight to the digital lab. A small knot of technicians is gathered in a knot having a whispered conversation. I slip into the phase camera room. The black powder, the black ash, had been swept up and put in a small specimen jar. I swallow it in a single dry gulp. I can feel it going down my throat and into my stomach. I drop the jar in the trash.

Back in my office, I put the book in my purse along with some tools and leave for the day. I go out through the loading dock so no one sees me.

 

9.

My husband complains about the smell in the apartment. Tell him my period is late and he is so excited. He wants to go out and celebrate but I tell him it is too soon and I have work to do.

 

The original is in tatters because I have used it for parts.

Two binding boards attached the text block with buckram for the front and back covers. The thin leather stretched and attached to the front cover with animal glue and more buckram. After it has dried and contracted, I touch the fine grain of the cover. I refuse to ruin it for a title and an author, and I don’t know either of them anyway. All the windows are open and it is freezing. I haven’t eaten since the black ash, but I feel so full.

*****

I arrive at work before anyone else and disarm the motion detectors. I love the building when it is empty, a place of echos. I go into the stacks with my brand new book and wander, trying to think of the perfect place for it. A misshelved book can be lost for, years, decades, maybe forever. There’s no way we will ever have the manpower for a full shelf read.

No spine title, no cataloging card. I put it between two books in an esoteric Library of Congress range. I linger, touching my husband’s tanned skin one last time. He tells me he loves me. I kiss the spine. I feel the small life inside me laughing with joy.

I go to my office and wait for the building to fill with people and their complaints.