“You’re late, Brother,” she said, hovering outside the weathered cottage near a pebbly beach, indistinguishable from the shadows cast by moonlight that hit the thick hydrangeas. It was late in the evening of a seawind-chilled Thursday in early summer on Block Island.
“I miscalculated, Sister, and manifested in Port Judith,” he explained. “So I took the last ferry in. Haven’t been on one in years.”
“Pleasant ride?” Her tone indicated a smirk. Not her face, though, for she had none. A shade, she was simply the silhouette of a head atop an hourglass figure. His was a bulkier shape.
“For me, yes. The ocean was choppy, though, and a dozen passengers turned green, two heaving over the side,” he replied.
“I wonder what it’d be like to feel motion again,” she mused.
He found her shared thought droll, and shrugged his silhouette shoulders. “He’s alone?”
“Yes,” she answered. “He’s been consulting his notebooks and an encyclopaedia for days now to translate that tome.”
Which was the purpose of the visit.
In May, the man inside the cottage had found, in a hidden compartment in the study of an abandoned brick mansion, a weighty volume on necromancy that had been thought lost for centuries.
Two decades of research, and a lucky break, had brought Professor Seamus Dirk to the site, which was in a secluded wood on the outskirts of Woonsocket. The brittle map he used crumbled as he walked through a dense maze of twisting paths to get to the mansion. His keen sense of direction got him out of there, with the treasured tome in hand.
The Elders had caught wind of it, and dispatched the Sister to keep watch on him, and the Brother to assassinate him. They were then to destroy all evidence of the tome and the professor’s research.
Dirk had decided against bringing the volume to university. He wanted this remarkable discovery to be his, and his alone.
So after the semester ended, he rented a small cottage far from academia, near Black Rock Point on the southern shore of the island. There, he brought his notebooks, and Witherstone’s Encyclopaedia, to work at translating the tome. It had been written six centuries earlier, according to the annals, by a mage and two clerics, who subsequently disappeared.
How it had ever wound up in Woonsocket was a mystery.
“He’s been able to fashion his own Rosetta Stone,” she observed.
“How close is he to translating it?”
“A couple of days, if you allow it,” she replied.
“I won’t,” he said. “The Elders were quite firm about this.”
“How will you dispatch him?”
“Come,” he invited her.
They both slipped into the interior of the cottage through various crevices in the structure. The two shades manifested behind the professor, who was bent over the tome, running a finger down a column while consulting one of his notebooks. He lifted his head, and a “Eureka” smile started spreading across his face in the heavy quiet.
The only sound in the cottage was the soft crackling of burning wood in the small fireplace across the room.
The Brother dissipated and flowed into the man’s head through the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. He condensed his shady form in the professor’s throat, acting like a vacuum. The man jerked his head and, unable to breathe, flailed his arms, knocking over a lamp.
Feet scuffing the wooden floor, he desperately grabbed at his throat as his face turned blue. His eyes bulged obscenely. Life flickered out of him, with his face frozen in airless torment.
“Let’s finish,” the Brother said as he manifested, motioning to the fireplace. They both coaxed a small flame to drift over and settle upon the tome, whose aged parchment smouldered, and then curled as fire caught, air pockets popping. The tome turned to ash. The fire next consumed the notebooks and encyclopaedia, then died out on the charred tabletop in front of the professor’s unseeing eyes.
Satisfied, the shades dissipated and departed.
fini