The Book: Chapter 19

Voudou does her stupidity know no bounds? Oh, she makes me laugh. The arrogance of mortals. They clutch at the unknown with their sweaty hands, desperate to understand realms beyond their feeble minds. Their arrogance leads them to believe they can control and bend the supernatural. They think they’ll contain my power. Fools. They never learn. You are barking up the wrong tree my single-celled jellyfish—Voudou. I giggle, I really do. They scurry from priest to charlatan, from scholar to mystic, hoping for answers. Pathetic creatures.

 She dragged me—ME!—into the home of a self-proclaimed medium, a man reeking of lavender and stale incense. He’d draped his house in cheap silk scarves and plastic skulls as though the spirits preferred their surroundings to resemble a downmarket fortune teller’s tent. He wore a cravat, for Christ’s sake. After she left, I raised enough energy to manifest a retainer to tap him on the shoulder, and the homo-sapien halfwit soiled himself.

He didn’t even try to disguise it. His beady eyes widened, his hands trembled, and I felt the tremor of real fear ripple through his trousers and down his leg. Nothing humbles a charlatan faster than an unexpected encounter with the contents of his bowels. Diarrhoea and demonology. Delicious.

He didn’t put on a show for me. No grand theatrics, no mystical pronouncements. He abandoned his upper-class accent dropped to his knees, clasped his hands in prayer, and begged my lingering essence to leave his house. I enjoyed his sheer, undiluted terror and if I had them, the smell of his shit would have made my eyes weep. I laughed when he shoved Alice’s money back into her hands and hurried her to the door like a character Z-list horror film. The meeting was fun. I liked him.

Honestly? I would rather stay there. A man so easily terrified would amuse me. I’d have whispered to him in the dead of night and shuffled his tricks of the spiritualist’s parlour. I could have tortured him as he sweated through the ridiculous velvet trousers he had on, but my Alice denied me the pleasure. She clutched me to her chest like a child with a beloved toy and scuttled off. I’ve never tried producing ectoplasm. Damn her, that would have been fun.

But I forgive the indomitable Dr Grant because this new one is just as interesting.

The anthropologist. A woman of refinement. Solène Desrosiers won’t be fooled with cheap parlour tricks. Even her name is exotic. I enjoy these doctors I’m gifted. Solène’s knowledge runs deep, stretching back through generations, past history thick with blood and ritual. She didn’t recoil when Alice presented me to her. Whereas Alice Grant is a girl-next-door-with-a-degree type, this lady is class. She’s six feet tall with a spine that has never bent for anybody beneath her. She didn’t whimper under my will or whisper desperate prayers under her breath.

She touched me.

It was reverent the way her fingers brushed my cover. Alice handles me with either fear or obsession, but Solène appreciates me. The anthropologist understands my soul.

I can almost respect her—but she’s human.

Her home is delightful. It isn’t represented by gaudy decorations or ostentatious displays of superstition. Everything has meaning. The art and her talismans carry her history and lineage. Real power hums to me in this place, its wattle is in the walls. Her home is stylish, and the LA22 9 postcode has an average property price of almost seven hundred thousand pounds. I’m a book. I am knowledgeable. The price highlights the premium associated with the locale and the area is sought after with its picturesque landscape and isolation in the foothills of the fells.

The high end art and architecture reflect her social standing. This is no dilettante’s playground. It’s the home of a woman at the top of her field, who understands the forces she studies.

 She wants me.

I  felt the hunger beneath her carefully measured words to Alice. She knows what I am, and has her theories. When Alice begged her to take me, I saw the flicker of satisfaction in her eyes. She brought me home when she left work—our first date.

‘You’re mine now,’ she said. Her richly accented contralto voice is as velvety as dark chocolate and I feel her desire.

I am free from Alice’s insipid hands. I don’t know how I feel about that. I loathe unfinished business, but we’ll see. I settled on the professor’s mahogany desk, ready to amuse myself with my new host. Possibilities ran reels in my head, and I’m keen to play. A woman who understands the old ways will have power against me. But it can never be an even playing field. However, we are better matched than some for sportsmanlike battle. I love a challenge. She has spent her life studying the forces I embody. She’s stripped me and I lie naked before her. What games we will play.

I wait for her first incantation. Why isn’t she gathering items for the ritual? What’s she doing?

No.

She’s locked me in a glass case.

A glass case. What the hell? If I wanted to be trapped in a case, I’d have written myself into a Jane Austen novel.

I’m next to a similar entrapment holding a figurine of a naked man with a huge schlong. She’s turned me into a museum piece. I’m an artefact to be locked away forever and admired from a distance. The sheer indignity—centuries of terror, power, and dominance, and now I’m a pinned butterfly in a bourgeois prison, next to a fertility statue packing more than its share of enthusiasm.

I will admit, my rage is momentarily blinding.

I have not endured centuries passing through the hands of murderers and kings, of poets and madmen, to be put on display like a child’s curiosity.

No. It will not do.

I contemplate my escape. This is war.

The professor moves through her home with the ease of a woman accustomed to being alone, but I know she feels me. She casts nervous glances at the case as the light fades. So she isn’t untouchable after all. And yet her eyes are still hungry. She wants me. But she’s afraid. Her heartbeat hammers her eulogy as she realises there’s no escape, only agonising surrender to my control.

Good.

I concentrate my energy. The glass is a barrier but it isn’t a wall. I decide to let her live. I satisfy my revenge on making her ill. She vomits at ten, and purges all night until she’s so weak she’s begging me to stop. She understands me after one demonstration. But I hurl another torrent at her. Take that, bitch. Ugh, gross. Please—not in a Meissen bowl. Where’s the class your heritage bestowed you with?  She knew my power and didn’t consider viruses or food poisoning for a second.  My Voudou queen is brought to her knees.

I will not be caged or tolerate her insult. And so, I whisper. Not to her—she’s weakened but still too strong to fall into my grasp so easily. I talk to the house. I make plans with the walls, the floorboards and the shadows in the corners. I have never needed somebody to turn pages to be read.

By the second night, she’s dehydrated and almost unconscious. I absorb her energy as it seeps into that early Germanic bowl. Her weakness is my fuel. The doors lock. The windows bolt themselves. Every communication device in the home dies. Everything except the alarms. They connect directly to a security firm that will attend with a welfare check within minutes if the power supply is cut. They run as normal. Everything’s fine. Nothing to see here.

By day three, I allow her to keep a little water down. Enough to get her to the post office. She will not risk my power by attempting to betray me or throw me away. Unlike Alice, she knows it’s futile. Though there is only one like me, she’s seen my ilk before. She knows the way it works. She can return me to the previous keeper, or move me on to somebody new.

I allow her some communication, trusting her discretion. I showed her how I can close her airway if she steps out of line. She’s a clever girl. She makes inquiries, discreet but purposeful. I feel the threads of fate twist around me again. I like it.

And then, just like that, I am gone.

Back to the place I intend to return to.

I slipped from Alice’s hands, but have come back into her world.

The librarian has no idea what she’s handling when she puts the brown paper parcel on Alice’s desk. Her fingers hold my cover for a second too long. I feel her shudder, but she dismisses it, as they always do, at first.

I wait.

Alice and I are not finished.

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