Revelations in Red: Part 6 (Final)

Malone didn't like being caught in storms. Rain made him feel spread out all over the place as he slipped in it and it engulfed the world around him, as if he had intruded upon it.

He didn't like to feel that he was an intruder, that he was somewhere he shouldn't be. He had been told all his life that not liking that feeling, the thrill of intrusion, a sense of adventure, was what prevented him from following in his father's footsteps as an archaeologist, and the same men had also said he was nothing more than an intruder and a leech on his father's good name and fortune. Most often though, for his fraudulent discoveries and greed, he was called a pig. He hated that feeling, those names. Why then was he so faulted for sticking to writing books? Sure he had not actually written those books himself, but that was merely him recognizing his own limitations.

Storm clouds rumbled in the heavens and lightning danced across the parts of the sky that were not yet consumed by gray clouds. Malone cursed at them. He should have remembered to have brought his coat and an umbrella, a rare consequence of not recognizing his limitations.

But recognizing limitations in others was a specialty of his. Waiters. Postmen. Chauffeurs. Women. He enjoyed making them aware of their limitations every chance he got. Such a shame he had not been as critical of the men he hired to write under his name. Their limitations were obvious. Malone had hired some punk, a former Vegas attraction and gambler said to possess psychic powers, consulted frequently by the police and his rival archaeologists, and asked him to help. Psychic powers? Total nonsense, but that didn't matter to Malone as long as he got results, and the man named Sable Sear("Sabal the Seer" the old Vegas ads had called him) was notorious for always getting correct results, and if Sear could ghostwrite a book for him about the infamous, impenetrable tome called The Red Book, there was no reason to worry. Results were all that mattered.

Now he wasn't getting any.

Malone suddenly lost his balance and fell face-first in a puddle as a woman ran past him. He shouted at her, and she then looked at him, a look of recognition on her pale, alabaster face and haunted green eyes, which peaked out through long black tresses, covering her odd, robes(a toga?) covered with what appeared to be dried fudge stains. Suddenly she seemed as if she wanted to say something, clasped a long nailed finger to her lips, but then ran off as though the devil were chasing her.

Like a scene from a horror movie, thought Malone. The setting didn't help either. He had to admit he felt a twinge of fear. He really should have had his chauffeur bring him down here, but no, walking all the way and barging in Sear's apartment door would make a better impression, make it seem as though he could brave anything, put the fear of god into him.

Even more like a horror film then he'd thought! As he entered the apartment, lit occasionally by flashes of lightning, not only was the door wide open, but there were flames scattered about the floor and table! Malone was lucky enough to find a fire extinguisher outside. Oddly enough, the flames hadn't seemed to have affected anything, and a match lay at the floor. Sear had tried to burn the damn place down! Thoughts of every horror movie he'd ever seen flashed through his mind, as he noticed the whole apartment was done up in odd occultic symbols, pentagrams, inverted crosses, salted floors, and the whole place smelled of incense and the walls were stained with dried blood! What could possibly have happened?

Sear had tried to burn The Red Book to anger him, that's what! Malone noticed that it lay on the table where the unsuccessful fire had been. It hadn't been burned an inch! Malone's rage about having the priceless tome almost burned was quickly dissipated by noticing one thing, the iron encasings on the book were open! Sear had unlocked the book! Why had Sear not contacted him? Wait a minute, on the bed there was a note! Malone began to read:

"If you are reading this, it means I have failed. I know in my heart that not even fire can quell the monstrous evil I've unleashed! Yet, I hope that it will, and that no human being will ever find this note as it will burn too. All of my research, none of it matters. Nothing matters. The Red Book. I know it all, all! The book will consume all. I was wrong, yet right! Right, yet wrong! I'm going mad! It doesn't matter what level of power one has attained spiritually, it consumes all.

I am a powerful psychic, hired to somehow unlock The Red Book's secrets by my employer, a fellow I shall only call M. M hired me so that I might ghostwrite my findings into a book under his name. I succeeded in finding out only too well.

Centuries ago, a powerful vampire and sorcerer known as Drachyllus; spawn of a bat-demon and a satyr, perhaps the first vampire, perhaps not, and his orange-eyed son Alybrx held sway over a powerful cult in ancient Greece. Their feasts of flesh, blood and terrible sacrifices terrorized the Greek provinces for years, tainting all around them. Drachyllus even managed to corrupt the King Lycaeus by promising him that he would be the God of wolves as he and his son were of the bat. Lycaeus, the man who served a child's flesh to Zeus and was cursed to be a wolf, the first werewolf, the one whose name the term "Lycanthropy" is derived from, just as I assume Drachyllus was the inspiration for the name Dracul(devil), and of course, Dracula(son of the devil).

Drachyllus's cult was destroyed, but one of the young and beautiful cult priestesses managed to hide Drachyllus and his son in the local woods and slowly tried to rebuild the cult while she seduced her way into a noble family. All were caught and put on trial at the oracle of Zeus by all of Zeus's worshippers. The Order of Zeus knew well that Drachyllus could not be killed, so they, in order to mock his claim that he ''was revelation'', a record of all whom he drank of, well--they made him into a record! He was skinned alive and his blood drained into a tub, the cult priestess was exposed and thrown into his amoeba-like blood, absorbed till nothing remained! Then the blood was splashed onto the flayed flesh and dried, and as an eternal mockery, made into a gigantic paper scroll, a record indeed!

Alybryx, who had escaped, found the scroll, and knew of his father's agony; life as flayed flesh and dried blood was no life for the lord of vampires. So Alybrx, allying himself with the mad Arabian sorcerer Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon, bound the flesh of Drachyllus into a book; the Red Book I speak of! The memories, the souls of those who had gone into the pages then haunted it, preserved forever as a nightmare record. In a way, they *had* received immortality!

Alhazred saw that the book was encased in enchanted iron so that it would not prove uncontrollable, so that only a drop of blood could unleash the memories within, to call upon them. The only other way to hear the souls from within is to possess extraordinarily acute second sight, sixth sense, psychic powers, as I do. Some called upon the book for knowledge, Alybrx called upon it to communicate with his father. Yet, other sorcerers stole it for the information therein, information known only to the souls that haunted it, and it lost its way from Alybrx for centuries, sometimes regained(once, the book had its new owner, a corrupt young Balkan nobleman, call forth Alybrx merely so that Alybrx would be reunited with it), but always stolen away again, winding up in many diverse hands, each being consumed by it, for they had fed it their blood. Each one, etched by the book itself onto it's cover in a grotesque mockery, like a photograph. Those are the bizarre gold symbols.

Unfortunately, due to the effectiveness of my powers, I did not simply hear the memories within, but lived them! I even wrote in my journals from their point of view, as I had seen the events happening to them/me as I relived their memories in my sleep, for I can absorb the contents of books when I sleep with them under my pillow, for with an unopenable book, that was the only option. With my final experiment, where I would focus more intensely than ever before, I took precautions so that I would not be consumed as the previous users had, which I assumed meant to be corrupted or possessed by the books memories. I even--heaven forgive me, stole a human skull from the morgue and used it in a spell I learned from a separate book to make a psychic recording of my own memories, so that If I were lost to the Book or possessed, some other psychic may find the skull and be warned.

My precautions to prevent my being consumed or possessed, worked--mostly! For when my experiment finished, my mind had remained the same! But my body--I looked in the mirror briefly, and realized that I had almost been possessed by one of the malevolent spirits within, who had tried to reshape my mind and body into theirs, their only way of escape! The spirit failed to reshape my mind, but succeeded in altering my body!

And the skull, my recording skull, had been transformed too, into a likeness of my own head! The skull I had slept with clutched to my chest--now my own disembodied head! I had trapped myself in another's body, if found no one would believe my story, they would assume with all the occult paraphernalia, that I had murdered the man I had been, and cut off his head for some sacrificial rite! I could not even alter my new appearance back to my old one with makeup or plastic surgery, for my new one is too different!

My body is now that of-----the Priestess of Drachyllus!

I tried in vain to find some way in the book to change me back and opened it by offering a drop of my own blood I had saved from an earlier spell--and then--I realized just *HOW* the book consumed it's owners! I then wrote this all down, and torched the book, then fled, for--"

Malone stopped reading and laughed so loud that if anyone was listening it would have drowned out the thunder. This nonsense about Greece, orange-eyed vampires, the necronomicon, books created from the skinned flesh of a vampire and haunted by the souls of his victims, and then the ending with Sear; nearly possessed by the book but turned into a woman! This was the silliest thing he had ever read! It had to be an elaborate joke! Sear was probably hiding in the bathroom, ready to leap out at any moment and go "BOO!' Malone found the skull on the floor, it looked realistic, but he wasn't gonna believe it for a moment, he ran outside and threw it in a dumpster.

Then as he walked back inside Malone thought back to when he was a child, his father's stories of how he acquired the book, from an old gypsy who claimed that it had once belonged to his ancestors, but was stolen from them by a nobleman who became suspected of vampirism, who disappeared in the company of a man with orange eyes. Then--then there was the woman he'd seen earlier, the toga stained with dried blood--the look on her face upon seeing him--

Who cares? He had The Red Book, opened, freed from it's iron clasps! Just writing of the discovery alone was worth it! Forget Sable(Sybil? he chuckled) Sear, this was his, for the taking! He examined the spine, looked at the sides of the pages that had been covered up for so long, now he knew why it was called ''The Red Book'', the pages were red of course! "HaHa" he thought. Odd paper though, not like paper at all, but soft, lumpy, rubbery, wet, glistening. Now he would open the cover, and see the pages! He tossed the note Sear had written aside and it fell to the floor. He opened the cover, not all the way but just to feel around inside. It was wet, stinging....

The note had said, where Malone had cut off: "--for I realized that, although the spirits within can possess the unwary, they are not how the book consumes the user, that aspect is unrelated, for the ability to possess and assimilate a person's body, mind and soul is one which all spirits possess. No, the book, made from the flesh of a vampire and his amoeba-like blood--consumes people who open it--not mentally or spiritually--but by clamping down, gushing out it's amoeba-like blood, and EATING THEM."

After the muffled scream, the last sound heard in the apartment until the next morning was a loud thud, like the closing of a thick book, preceded by a sound that was untraceably, yet unmistakably, a deep, satisfied *BURP*
.................
The Book itself is not red. It's cover is a faded black with gold symbols embossed in the edges and in the middle.

Some say it's a fraud though, it's cover is known to have five symbols: A man being consumed, a grasping feminine hand, an open mouth, fangs, and in the middle a grinning, devilish face described alternately as that of a satyr, vampire, or devil. There is not supposed to be a sixth symbol, showing a fat, bipedal pig with greedy eyes, being devoured by the satyr creature from the middle symbol. The feminine hand is not supposed to be making a clenched fist either, as if it had failed at something and is shaking it's fists in anger. The book is also supposed to be encased in unbreakable iron clasps, but it is open. Scholars agree before even opening it, it's most likely a fraud.

Care to open it up and see?