Carahya made the decision that she needed time for things to calm down before she was able to accept Mr. McBride’s offer to teach her. After calming herself down in Meath Olc’s large, comfy armchair, she repacked her bag, and with a friendly hug from Mr. McBride, she returned to the comfort of her home. The lack of sleep really did a number on her emotions. She managed to stay calm long enough to get inside the apartment while maintaining her composure, but as soon as the front door was shut behind her, she slid down to the floor, curled up in a tearful heap. Her eyes ached from both the tears and the exhaustion, and she determined that maybe staying up all night reading was not the best choice she could have made after all. She managed to pull herself up from the floor and into her room, where she collapsed on the bed, wiggled under the covers, and promptly fell asleep. As she slept, she dreamed.
She dreamed of her apartment, back in the days when it housed three instead of its lonely one. It was a memory of her parents’ room, the master bedroom of the apartment. The room was spacious and comfortable, colored with hues of earthy browns and warm oranges and reds. Within the room was a king-sized bed with two end tables, a large dresser, a desk with a computer and a swivel chair, and a door that led into the small closet. A large bookcase made of dark-stained wood sat in the room’s far corner, stocked almost overflowing with old tomes and modern books of all sizes, genres, and topics. A young Carahya of about ten years old entered the room stealthily, shutting the door quietly behind her. The young girl was green-eyed and had shoulder-length auburn curls that bounced when she walked. She made a beeline for the swivel chair and dragged it to the bookcase, climbing up to reach the tallest shelf. After rummaging through the various books on the top shelf, she picked out the one that she was after. She climbed down from the swivel chair and replaced it in front of the desk, then retreated to the privacy of the bedroom’s closet. She pulled the chain that served to turn the light on and off, and closed the door, sitting on the cramped, carpeted floor.
The book that she held was an old tome, with fragile yellowing pages and a black leather cover inscribed with silver. “Ars Daemonibus Susurrit” was written on the cover and the binding of the book, and young Carahya held it gingerly, as she feared the images within. She could not read a word of the book, as it was all written in a language she did not recognize, but the illustrations were enough to make a grown man shudder. The girl was under the presumption that by conditioning herself against the beasts within the book, her great and terrible fear of them would cease to be.
“Okay…one…two…three.” She flipped open the book to a random page, picturing a great, winged beast with the muscular torso of a man and a horrid face that made Carahya’s stomach turn. She shut her eyes and told herself that he would not jump off the page at her, and slowly opened them to look at the book again. The beast bore the leathery, membranous wings of its hell-spawn brethren, and horns atop its great ugly head that dripped with the sticky crimson blood of its hunted. The intense detail of the illustration was almost too much for a person to look at; his long, pointed nails were caked with grime and dried blood, and were crooked and unkempt. The roar that he was uttering could have been heard in Carahya’s ears, though the space was silent. That is, silent until a set of footsteps was heard outside the closet door. The door opened, and standing in the doorway was Carahya’s mother.
“Car, honey, what in the world are you doing in the closet again? I thought I told you not to go looking at this book anymore. Hand it here.” Carahya reluctantly obeyed her mother’s exasperatedly stern tone, and held out the book with a hung head. “This is not just some ordinary book, Carahya. How many times must I tell you that before you’ll listen? It is not a toy. It is a dark and dangerous book. You will not go after it again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, mum…” an ashamed Carahya mumbled.
Her mother tilted her head and said with a sigh, “Come on, then. Let’s go see what your father’s up to.” She replaced the book in its spot on the top shelf and gestured for Carahya to follow her. The girl jumped up and continued out the door to the bedroom, pulling it shut behind her.
The scene changed instantly. Through the door she had just shut was the Fortiers’ apartment as it looked when Carahya had last been there. Silent as the grave and lacking light, the apartment was no longer inviting to her. She walked through the doorway into the kitchen and saw the black tome that she had found in the apartment before. Upon closer inspection, the tome looked almost identical to the one that young Carahya held in the closet. She flipped it open to a random page, and saw the same nasty creature that had stared up at her in her parents’ closet. The text around it was written in English, though, and that was the only difference that Carahya could spot right away. Dumbstruck and blank-minded, she slammed the tome shut again with a loud thump.
She jolted awake and looked at her clock. It was now late evening, and she had been sleeping for several hours. Remembering the tome from the dream, she threw off her covers and dashed to her parents’ unoccupied room. She headed straight to the bookcase and reached for the top shelf. In shuffling the books around, two fell off the shelf. One was the black leather tome that she was aiming to find, looking exactly as it had in the dream. The other was simply a stack of bound printer paper put into a binder. The binder cover and the first few pages had opened in the fall, and Carahya bent down to take a closer look. The title page in the binder had been exposed, showing a title – “Ars Daemonibus Susurrit: The Art of Demon Summoning.” The author and translator’s names were both given, and at the bottom of the page, the name “Spinetap Publishing Company” was written, along with the year of publication. This manuscript…the year of publication was four years ago. The same year that Mum and Dad…
She quickly pushed the thought from her mind when she saw a wax seal stamped in to the right of the publisher information. The wax was green, and the imprint said, “Company Approved by the Council of Draelin.” Curious, she brought the tome and the binder to the computer desk and sat down in the swivel chair. She let the old thing boot up and searched Wikipedia for an article on Spinetap Publishing. She scanned through the article and scrolled to the bottom, where there was a list of the books that Spinetap had mass-produced in its time. Missing from the list was “The Art of Demon Whispering,” but Carahya did find a title that jumped out at her. “Hmm…’Daemonic Self-Defense: A Guide to Knowing Your Daemons’…wait a minute…”
Carahya’s heart was in her throat as she rushed to her backpack. She pulled out the book that McBride had lent to her and looked at the title. There it was. “Daemonic Self-Defense: A Guide to Knowing Your Daemons.” She flipped the first few pages and found the information on the publisher. Sure enough, right next to the year of publication was the name “Spinetap Publishing” and an ink-on-paper version of the Council’s approval seal. The coincidence was uncanny, if it was a coincidence at all, and Carahya began to wonder – what in the world could her parents have been doing with an original tome and the manuscript of the translated copy of a book about demon summoning?
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