The man in the Hawaiian shirt brushed the dreadlocks out of his face and caught a glimpse of the sun as it was setting behind the mainland. The dying rays cast ominous shadows across the sky. Behind him violent waves crashed against the beach and the ocean pier that jutted into it like some great concrete dagger. The sea was angry, churned wild from the storm that had dominated the weather all day. The sea was angry, but the sky was clear, almost serene. The moon was high in the sky, a full moon, like a titanic, yellow eye gazing down on the human world, and judge its sins. Sins that Malachi Chan had a habit of exposing.
It was Malachi Chan’s job to pry into the affairs of other people; he worked for the Department of Justice and of late much of his time was spent on the east coast of Florida, from the wilds of Bone Key to the metropolis of Vizcaya, and on occasion the barrier island of Orchid Beach, where the old families, with old money cared to reside in their old houses. It was a bit of a drive for Chan, not that he minded. Being called out to Ocean Drive in exclusive Orchid Beach to investigate a double homicide at a beachfront mansion built out of white marble with mahogany accents was exactly why he had become a cop. He had double majored in Art History and Criminology, just like his grandfather, and just like his ancestor he specialized in art theft and fraud, something that had become rampant of late. The excesses of the late Nineties and early Naughts had created a boom in the art and antiques market, which had in turn created a thriving black market for stolen collectibles from comic books to the most ancient of relics. The Justice Department had created an entire division to deal with the illegal trade, and Chan was just one player in a very large game.
At the front door of the mansion a local cop gave him the stink-eye, but he had to flash his badge to gain entry and a gesture in the direction of the crime scene. The prejudices of the local residents had been passed down to the men who patrolled their palm-lined streets. It didn’t matter that he had gone to Choate, or graduated from Lancaster College in Oxford, or that he had worked for two years at Christie’s, some would always judge him simply by the color of his skin, and the way he wore his hair.
The interior of the house was just as opulent as the exterior, though Chan was surprised that the walls seemed rather bare. There was no artwork, no photographs, no paintings, not even an abstract post-modern wall hanging, just sheets of cool marble that lined the hallways that led to various rooms, including the mansion’s private library where apparently the murders had taken place.
“Malachi Chan, DOJ.” He said as he passed through the door. There were four men in the room, two were part of the investigation, the other two were quite dead. Between them was a massive book, something ancient and tattered.
The man closest to him had a jacket that said Sheriff and when he stood up, he took a deep, frustrated breath. “Lieutenant Tony Verona. That’s Hastings from the Coroner’s Office.” He gestured to the other man who was dressed head to toe in a blue protective suit. Hastings was bent over the corpse of an infirm looking man. “Looks like a robbery gone bad. This was Kennedy Kincaid, 86 years old, and the owner of everything you can see. Old money. He’s considered something of a recluse, not a regular in the social circuit. We called his doctor’s office; they say he’s been legally blind for the last decade. There are two slugs in his chest, he bled out in under a minute.”
Verona pointed toward the other body on the floor, it had fallen at the base of a rather ornate pedestal case. The man was pale, almost white, as was his hair. There was a gun clenched in the dead man’s hand. “This one is a local businessman by the name of Donald Fester, runs a shop down on Garden Avenue. Deals in rare books, movie posters, stuff like that. We have a file on him, a few investigations, a few suspicions, but we’ve never been able to prove anything.” He paused. “The gun in his hand is his and properly registered. Hastings says it’s been fired twice, we haven’t had a chance to test for ballistics, but the size of the holes in Kincaid seem about right.” Chan looked at the skin, it was pale, almost translucent, and his eyes, frozen open in death, were pink. “You don’t see many albinos in Florida.”
The coroner nodded. “By all accounts he didn’t use to be, at least not the last time we had him in for questioning.”
Chan reached into his coat pocket and took out a leather satchel and removed the fine gloves that were held within. They were as white as his own skin was black and they seemed a size too small as he slid his hands inside them, but they stretched and formed a kind of second skin that Chan could barely feel as his fingertips found their snug homes. His hands properly protected he reached out and gently took the book from between the dead men. It was heavier than he thought it would be. The binding was black goat skin, you could tell by the grain. It was old, maybe four hundred years, maybe more; the wrinkled and warped leathers spoke volumes to the trained eye. On the spine tooled letters in gold hinted at a title, but they had been rubbed away long ago and were illegible, even to Chan.
With care he lifted the book and carried it to a nearby table. As he did so he took note of the pedestal case and assumed that it had been made especially for the volume he now held in his hands. Of this he had no doubt. He set the book down on the velvet-lined table and ever so gently opened it to the title page. The paper was crisp and clean, and its condition bore no relation to that of the hoary leathers that encased it. The pages themselves were ivory and flawless, with no trace of a blemish or flaw. Chan examined the book, carefully turning its pages one by one, slowly at first, then as he progressed faster. In the end he was flipping through the book faster than he could read. Not that it mattered; the entire book was blank.
Verona screwed up his face. “A strange book. Why would you want to steal an old, blank book?”
Chan shook his head. “That is not even close to being the right question. In fact, we have a pair of questions we have to ask and answer.” He closed the book and stared at its spine contemplatively. “Why would a man like Fester be willing to kill for this book?”
Verona nodded his agreement, “and the second question?”
Chan pointed at the second body lying just feet away. “Why would Kincaid be willing to die for it?”
Chan stood up and carried the book over to a queer marble pedestal that stood in the center of the room. There was an ornate bookstand on top of the pedestal, carved from ebony and lined with felt. It was the right size and shape for the book that Chan held in his hands. He set the book in what seemed to be its proper place, and indeed it fit there better than he could imagine. Resting on the felt-covered wood, Chan opened the queer volume to what should have been the title page, though he could not understand why one would choose that particular spot to display a book. The wall lamps were simply too weak to illuminate the pedestal. There was a small window in the ceiling to let in the light, but even that bothered Chan. Most collectors shunned the light of the sun; it acted as a kind of slow bleach causing the bindings and text to fade into dull shadows of their former selves. Why would Kincaid place a book directly beneath a window?
The problem made Chan’s head ache, and he set the book down letting the thing fall back to the title page. He took in his surroundings. The library was octagonal in shape with no windows and only one door. There were hundreds, likely thousands of books on those shelves, and yet only this one, this unnamed book, was given a place of honor, and only this one had been removed from its place. To understand the value of a thing you had to put it in perspective, to place it in its surroundings, to put it in context. Even from a distance one could see that this library was something special, collected over decades, perhaps for an entire lifetime, perhaps even more. Yet two men had died for just one book out of the entire library, what made it so special? And just as importantly, what made all these others less so?
Each of the eight walls was easily twelve feet tall, and perhaps twenty feet long, and divided into sections by ornate, wrought-iron columns at each corner and another in the center. At first, he thought the columns mimicked stylized trees overgrown with vines, but as he drew closer, he saw that in actuality they bore a greater resemblance to some abyssal cephalopod or similar polypus monstrosity with curling tentacles adorned with primitive mouths like those of a hagfish. The shelves were thin pieces of grey slate, an extravagance to be sure, but one that created an illusion of invisibility. In the dim light the thin stone made it look like the books were simply hanging there in space, unsupported by anything but their owner’s will.
If there was an organization to the collection, it wasn’t immediately apparent, for books that appeared hundreds of years old were likely to be sitting next to titles that had been published in just the last few decades. Nor was subject matter a discerning factor, and neither it seemed was quality. A leatherbound folio of The Murder of Gonzago was sandwiched between Hope’s Telemachus Sneezed and Wanderly’s The Nightwatcher. There was a battered copy of Wimsey’s Notes on Collecting Incunabula that propped up de Vaillantcoeur’s Histoire d’Amour, which in turn leaned against a WPA volume entitled The Miskatonic River Valley. Here someone had seemed to try something akin to organization for the next book was The History of the Miskatonic Valley by Pr. Everet Watkins. Something by Bottfolio entitled Obscuri Libri was wedged between two volumes of The Collected Works of Robert Blake, while Goddard’s The Rise of the Colored Empires looked uncomfortable against Emerson’s History of Ancient Egypt. After these there was a sudden run of vintage mysteries some of which were recognizable including Ariadne’s The Lotus Murder, Rex West’s The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish, and Klopstein’s Once More the Cicatrice.
It was the next book that caught his eye, for he had himself been searching for a copy for the better part of a decade. There tucked beside something called the Ethics of Ygor was Edgar Allen Poe’s The Worm of Midnight. The spine was a little shaken, and as he withdrew the book he saw strands of the cloth binding tear away, but it was a magnificently beautiful book, and he handled it with even more care than he had the other book. It was odd for sure, but while Kincaid and Fester had died over that odd book full of blank pages, to Chan this small hardcover was worth more. In Chan’s mind this slim book by Poe was priceless. But as he flipped through the pages, his wonder turned to confusion. Every leaf inside that book was blank, devoid of words, of page numbers, of any ink at all. Just like the book on the pedestal.
As he gaped in awe, Chan thought briefly that the library had been robbed, that the original book had been surreptitiously changed with a blank book of similar shape and size. But no sooner had the thought crossed his mind he dismissed it; the binding was too well crafted, too well aged, the impressions that formed the titles and decorations of the actual cover were intact, and so any thought of theft was rejected. It was so odd that he took the book into the light and then flipped through it again, this time gaining evidence of an even weirder phenomenon. As the pages played through the light you could see impressions of where letters had once been. This book wasn’t blank; it had somehow been erased, drained of all its content, made void of everything that had made it an actual book. He turned back to the shelves and pulled down another book, and then another, and another, and another, but the result was always the same. All the books on every shelf, from centuries old copies of Vallet’s Le Manuscript de Domm Adson Melk, to ultra-modern editions of Vetch, were empty. The library had been corrupted, emptied, made meaningless by some force he didn’t understand.
His head was spinning. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. There had to be an explanation. He just didn’t know what it was.
“This book isn’t blank at all.” Chan looked across the room. Verona was standing over the pedestal, but both the detective and the book weren’t shrouded in shadow as he expected but were rather illuminated by a pale glow filtering in through the window above. In the time that Chan had been investigating the library the moon must have climbed higher into the sky, high enough to cast its weak, cold light through the glass portal above. Even from a distance Chan could see that the man was telling the truth, in the moonlight the title page of the book was suddenly no longer blank.
Chan crossed the room in great strides, closing the distance in seconds. He pushed Verona aside, nearly knocking them man to the floor. It was true the book was no longer blank, where there was once nothing, there was now something, something wonderful. The text was magnificently black, darker than the darkest ebony, and so well defined, so free of bleeding that it seemed almost an impossible task to set before any master printer of any age. In the center of the first page the book revealed itself,
The Oculus of Glyyth
Being Elias Ashmole’s Translation
1654
That would make the book around four-hundred and fifty years old, something he just couldn’t believe given the condition, style and skill. There was a decorative border at the bottom, an interweaving of loops and arcs that were generically Arabic in design; it was here he found the artisan’s secret mark. The date was 1734, and the publisher appeared to be George Gamwell of Philadelphia. A reprint edition then, probably custom made, or at least very limited. With care he lifted a block of the text and took a look at a random page.
If anything, the interior reminded him of Trevisan’s The Lost Word, for like that volume the one in his hand was a treatise on the occult. The text was doubled, on one page was the 18th century translation and on the other the original written in Early Modern English, the language of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Hobbes and the first King James Bible. Not that it made much difference, for Chan reading either text was difficult, more of a translation than anything else, and he only was able to understand the shortest of snippets, and the one he was looking at made little sense.
Glyyth is Their light and Their eye. Through Him They scour the world and cast Their light onto the works of men. Through Him and His They devour that which is touched and in devouring the very source becomes pale and lost. Glyyth is Their light and Their Eye, and men and the works of men are Their feast. What His works touch He devours. Only the sea may know and cleanse the vast wickedness of Glyyth that feeds as the flies on the cattle of mankind’s knowledge and art. Only the sea can purify Their servants, Their artifacts and Their works. Only the sea can disperse the accumulated filth of ages. Nothing else is vast enough to swallow the accumulated poisons. Only the waters of the sea can drown them and only the purifying salts can bleach them clean.
Chan had of course heard of Elias Ashmole, an alchemist of sorts, and the namesake of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. However, he had never heard of him authoring such a book and had no clue as to what or who Glyyth was. It was a situation that filled him with dread, for as he stared at the queer book whose words only appeared in the moonlight, he realized how terrible a thing it must be. The only book in the entire room that was left with any content, with any trace of text, were the pristine pages of that queer grimoire in the center of the room, the one that looked like it had just been printed last week. It was a book two men had apparently died over, and one had been turned pale.
Through Him and His They devour that which is touched and in devouring the very source becomes pale and lost.
He looked over at where the old man’s body lay, and even from a distance could see the pale, blank eyes that stared out of Kincaid’s face, eyes that were empty, devoid of color, not unlike the pages of the library full of books behind him. Kincaid probably never even knew what had happened to his collection, he had started to go blind nearly a decade ago. A funny thought crept inside Chan’s head. Something to do with the way the books had been emptied, the why of Kincaid going blind, and how Fester had been killed, but it was all too impossible to take seriously, and yet in Chan’s mind it made a kind of sense.
The idea gnawed at him.
He could barely think that name, and he dared not say it.
The Oculus of Glyyth.
It lounged on the table like a beast waiting for unwary prey, and he knew now what prey that hungering book fed on to sustain its own horrid existence.
The Oculus of Glyyth.
The Oculus of Glyyth waited, its ivory pages hungry for more.
Something would have to be done.
Someone would have to do something.
He watched in a daze as Verona moved beside him and motioned toward where the book sat. Chan watched but he didn’t understand, he was too distracted by his own thoughts. Verona’s hand reached out, his fingers coming closer, ever closer to the thing that sat on the table. “Is this what all the trouble is about?”
Malachi Chan cried out, but he was too late.
Verona’s fingers grazed the cover of The Oculus of Glyyth, and the book responded as Chan had expected. It lashed out, engulfing Verona’s hand, forming an unbreakable bond with the flesh of the detective. “God!” Screamed Verona. “I can see. I can see it all. The truth, the monstrous apes of truth! The lurkers at the threshold that fumble at the gate! The flautists who pipe and reel in the abyss. The three-lobed eye that leers and laughs. And beyond it all, the festering, nuclear chaos that seethes and frets in the center of our galaxy.” He was screaming. The color was draining from his skin, from his body, running down his arm and out his hands.
All the while, that evil book seemed to throb with hideous delight.
“He is Their light and Their eye … He watches us for Them. The Moon-Beasts and Their God. He watches and He waits, and he learns. Ia, Ia, n’gaih mglaw-nagl nnn! Glyyth! Glyyth! Glyyth!”
Verona’s screams drove Hastings from the room, but brought his colleagues running with weapons drawn, but there was nothing to shoot at. Verona was just standing there his hand engulfed by the book, his very life being sucked out of him. Before anybody could understand what was happening, before they could decide to do something, it was all over. When the book finally let him go, Verona had been turned white, his very life drained away. As he crumpled to the floor there was no doubt that he was quite dead.
In the confusion that followed it was easy for Malachi Chan to pick up the book and clutch it to his chest. Even through the gloves and his shirt he could feel the book trying to reach him, trying to show him the madness that Verona had seen, trying to drain the very life out of him. He ran from the library and then from the house itself, all the while enduring the pain as The Oculus of Glyyth clawed at his body and mind. It promised him things, terrible things, incredible things, wondrous things. It whispered secrets, dread and monstrous secrets. In an instant he knew more about the truth of the world, of the galaxy, of the universe than any other man alive. It drove him mad, but it didn’t matter. Malachi Chan’s course of action was set, and nothing could stop him.
Outside the house he passed Hastings and the man gasped as the book and Chan passed by. Hastings had seen something in the moonlight, a shadow of something unearthly, something inhuman. He watched as Chan ran across the street, towards the beach. Everything that Hastings new told him to run in the opposite direction, but he couldn’t help himself. The little man from the Coroner’s Office followed Malachi Chan, across the road, down onto the beach, and onto the Ocean Pier.
The waves encircled the pier, rising and falling like monstrous leviathans coming out of the darkness, coming out of the deep, coming out of the abyss. Chan reached the end of the pier in seconds, and Hastings watched as the man climbed up onto the railing and paused there. Chan was like a titan standing there on the edge, surrounded by the savage sea and bathed in moonlight, his forbidden prize clutched to his chest like some promethean boon.
He stood there just long enough for Hastings to catch up with him and issue a single desperate plea for the man to stop. But Malachi Chan couldn’t hear him. Whether it was the wind or the surf or the madness Chan could no longer hear anything but the voice of The Oculus of Glyyth as it filled his very being with the eldritch knowledge of the audient void, or at least tried to. Even now the thin cloth of the gloves and his shirt served to protect him from the worst of it. Only the barest minimum of cosmic filth had seeped through, but that had been enough to drive poor Chan mad. He stood there on the edge screaming, and though Hastings could barely hear him, he somehow knew what the words leaving Chan’s mouth were from the very book he held.
And then the sea took him.
Hastings couldn’t tell the Coast Guard whether he jumped or fell. Not that it mattered. They searched for hours, their ships scouring the wine-colored waters beneath the cold pale light of the moon, but to no avail. They did find him eventually, not in the sea, but on the beach, just two miles down the coast. It was just before dawn and the beachcombers were out, but the light of the moon was enough to reveal the horror that stained the shoreline. The outgoing tide had left a monstrous sight. There had been a fish kill; an entire school of baitfish had been enveloped in something thick and black. It was almost like tar. A huge mass of viscous, black, filthy ink dotted with thousands of fish, and embedded there within a single human body, that of Malachi Chan, frozen in a tortuous pose.
It took a few hours to extract the remains from the tar, but after that was done the men in the protective suits burned what was left right there on the beach. They burned it with chemicals, and fire. They burned it until there was nothing but ash for the incoming tide to wash away. With each wave the remains were carried away bit by bit, until at last the sea swallowed it all.
Chan’s death was ruled an accident, with the official cause of death being drowning. That is what the death certificate said, but Hastings knew better. The Coroner’s Office could tell you the cause of death, but they could never explain why he had leapt into the sea. Nor could they explain why Malachi Chan’s hair and skin had gone white, why his eyes were so pale, and why his hands were frozen in that horrible way.
They seemed to be clutching at something; something that the sea had washed away; something that thankfully no longer existed.