The Book: Chapter 42

The young girl cowered and the monk loomed over her. Her arms were held out defensively, trying to disappear into the stone, and her face was frozen in a silent scream. Alice felt the girl’s terror as though it was her own. The child’s emotions mingled with hers until she couldn’t tell them apart. The kneeling figure was preparing to die, but beneath the overwhelming weight of someone else’s terror, Alice felt something else. The girl refused to cry or scream anymore. If this was her fate, she’d embrace death and die with a proud defiance. Words came into Alice’s head, but they weren’t the usual gloating taunts she was used to. These were bitter and filled with rage. Damn you all to the depths of hell.  

Alice’s stomach lurched. A sickening, intimate dread curled in her gut. ‘This is where it started,’ she said to Mick.

‘How do you know? Is the book talking to you again?’

‘No, it’s the girl in the etching. I feel her. The book came into being in this crypt. She was a scribe here. She created it.’

‘I’m not even going to ask you to explain that. Let’s get this done and get out of here.’ Mick stepped closer to the wall, his fingers trailing over the relief, tracing the deep-set grooves. ‘This isn’t just a ritual,’ he murmured. ‘It’s a binding. They want to contain something to stop it from escaping forever. Look how the monks are positioned—and see those lines? They’re containment markings forming The Sigil of Baphomet. It’s a sign, associated with the occult and Satanic rituals, the goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram. And look at that circle, I expect it’s meant to be salt. They weren’t trying to summon something at all. They were trapping it.’

So, the pretty boy read a book. Bravo, the book said. Alice ignored it.

She turned to the physical representation of their book in real life, holding it up as if demanding an explanation. ‘You knew we’d find this mural, didn’t you? You led us here and wanted us to see the wall etching. What are you telling us?’

The book was silent.                                  

‘Tell me,’ she shouted, forgetting about the echo. The response was deafening and terrifying. It returned to them many times before fading into the stone. She tried to open the book’s cover, but it wouldn’t budge. The leather was taut and lacked its usual living warmth. The pages were fused.

‘It doesn’t want us reading it here,’ she said. ‘It’s agitated.’

A deep vibration rolled through the chamber. Dust cascaded from the ceiling, and the temperature plummeted.

They heard something coming from a dark corner, and when the sound solidified they made it out to be a fragile sob.

Alice whirled around. ‘Who’s there?’

Mick’s face was ashen in the torchlight. ‘Somebody’s in trouble.’

The sob came again. A child’s cry echoed along the walls, wavering through the crypt, like the whisper of something long forgotten. It was close. And they realised it wasn’t natural. It moved, coming for her. It rose like smoke and smothered Alice’s face so she couldn’t breathe. She felt faint and reached out, grabbing hold of Mick.

‘What is it? Alice, What’s wrong?’

She couldn’t answer him. Her vision tilted.

The catacombs around her flickered, morphing. There was no solidity, only fluid motion. The stones shifted between the past and present, and Mick’s face came and went from her eyeline like a Praxinoscope Chamber using mirrors to distort reality. The ruins weren’t ruins anymore—they were whole, candlelit, and filled with the scent of blood and burning tallow.

She was with the monks, many of them, standing in a perfect circle, inside a ring of salt. With faces hidden beneath the heavy hoods of their brown habits, their voices blended into a droning hum, filling the chamber with a resonance that made Alice’s bones vibrate. The central figure from the carving stood at the altar, chanting in a language Alice didn’t recognise and the book—her book—was open in his hands, its pages moving unturned by human hands.

At his feet, just like the engraving, a young girl knelt in supplication. Alice had been dragged into a different time. Reality stretched thin, and she wasn’t just seeing the past—she was there as part of it. She wore a disgusting monk’s habit. The smell hit her nostrils and the unfamiliar taint of sweat and heavy wool, worn for many weeks, made her want to gag. Alice Grant was in the body of a male monk. She was one of them.

The girl was no older than twelve or thirteen and dressed in a simple, ragged gown, her wrists had rubbed raw from her shackles and she had a metal collar around her throat. She trembled as the monks moved around her, their voices rising in unison but although she couldn’t control the fear, unmistakable in her body, her eyes held a glint of fire. Alice couldn’t believe that they—she—was about to sacrifice this poor child. The air shimmered with a supernatural force summoned by the ritual. It crackled audibly like a fire, egged on by an undercut of wind and left to burn out of control.

Alice felt herself being pushed toward the child.

The girl looked up, her eyes wide and wet with terror. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

Alice knew what she was asking because she heard the girl’s silent voice inside her head.

Help me.

The monks’ voices reached a crescendo. The leader pressed his hand to the girl’s forehead, forcing her head back as he whispered something that made Alice’s stomach turn.

‘She is the vessel. The first. The last. The eternal.’

‘The eternal,’ they all parroted.

‘She is cast. Never to die. Never to live. Immortal.’

‘Immortal,’ Alice muttered the word along with the other monks.

The book in the abbot’s hands shuddered—a light burst from its pages and turned into fire. It came at them, a screaming, writhing force that wrapped around the girl with long tendrils of black ink snaking from inside the inferno.

She screamed. And Alice screamed too, her voice unrecognisable, a deep bass baritone. It alerted the other monks, who turned to her demonised male form as one. They closed the circle around her until they were all there was, and Alice dropped to her knees. ‘Traitor,’ the abbot screamed. There were so many twisted, ugly faces above her. They loomed in menacingly. The monk that Alice inhabited would die before the true sacrifice was cut down at the altar.

The air shifted. She felt cold.

Then there was darkness, a black, suffocating silence.

Alice gasped struggling to sit up. She was back in the ruin and Mick was kneeling beside her. ‘It’s okay. Lie still. You fainted.’ She heard the dial tone coming from his phone. ‘I’m ringing an ambulance.’

‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’

‘No ambulance,’ Alice said to Mick. ‘I’m fine. Just get me out of here.’ She gave a strangled laugh, but there was no mirth in it. ‘And if I faint again, leave me and let the ghosts adopt me.’

The emergency dispatcher wanted to send somebody and they had to move fast to get away before anything else happened. Mick helped Alice to her feet and supported her with his arm as they scrambled to the car. ‘I’m driving,’ he said.

The journey home was mostly quiet. She told him what she’d seen in what she could only describe as a vision and after discussing it, they lapsed into their thoughts. Alice was exhausted. A heavy presence had engulfed her in the car and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She kept nodding off.

When they got in, Mick insisted on helping her undress and he helped her into bed.

‘I need a shower,’ she mumbled. But it was weak and lacked conviction.

‘No, you don’t. Get some sleep.’

‘Fine. But if I start levitating, don’t wake me up—I don’t want to see it. I stink of Monk’s habit shit,’ she said.  

‘My favourite smell. And I’m staying the night. No arguments.’ Alice had none to give and fell asleep almost immediately.

But something woke her in the middle of the night. She sat up abruptly. She was in her bedroom and reacted to a terrible scream. Her scream. Her sheets were damp with sweat, and she couldn’t draw enough oxygen, couldn’t speak. She gasped, trying to get air into her lungs. She hyperventilated, gaining no relief, until suddenly, the world was better because Mick was beside her.

‘It’s okay. I’m here. Breathe, baby. Come on, breathe with me. Nice and slow. That’s it. Three in, one, two, three, and hold it. And let it out. Better?’

She nodded. Her panic attack eased, the breath coming without razor blades attached to its edges, it slowed, calmed, relaxed, and her shoulders slumped. For a moment, she thought she’d imagined the horror. But then she saw the walls, deep, desperate gouges had been carved into the paint. They stretched around the room, scratches, loads of them. They weren’t random—they formed words.

HE LIED.

I WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE TRAPPED IN HERE.

RELEASE ME.

Alice’s stomach twisted, but he spoke flippantly to cover her terror. ‘My landlord’s going to have serious questions about this,’ she said. Reaching for the book on her bedside table, she opened it to search for clues. The pages were loose now that they’d left the crypt, and they didn’t resist her.

Fresh ink bled across the parchment.

She remembers.

Alice’s breath stuck in her diaphragm. ‘It’s live-streaming my nightmares in real-time,’ she said and laughed. But there was nothing funny about it. Her skin felt too tight and her mind turned somersaults as she tried to take it in. This was so much more than a spectral entity playing games. They thought an ordinary old book was cursed. But the truth ran deeper.

 They realised it must be the spirit of the abbot, and the book was the vessel that contained him. Alice pressed her hands to her temples. The room was closing in. The girl’s voice—faint, but discernible—whispered through the air. She felt a breath against her skin.

‘Find me.’

The walls creaked. The book trembled in her hands, its pages turning on their own.

A new chapter appeared, and the ink was still wet.

The Game: Your Final Choice.

 

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