Black-Market Manna 5

an occult metafiction in 5 parts

This novella was originally published in Angry Old Man Magazine, Volume 2, in 2018. It has undergone a few updates and visuals. No further angel meat was consumed in the process. Enjoy!

And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.

1 Kings, 12:11

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God's Power In Motion

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“John Hyrcanus, angel hunter and angel eater, dabbled in the dark arts to launch a literary career. He did not torture angels into telling him fantastical tales; he tortured them to tenderize them into consumption, flavoring their meat with their own adrenaline.”

Part One/ Part Two/Part Three/Part Four/Part Five

Within the labyrinth of texts, the Iad Bab Zna punched holes through walls and connected parallel paths; it made paths appearing to lead into others, or even toward the way out, into dead ends; it flipped the hapless traveler upside-down, Escher-like, so that the maze was complicated by a ceiling mirror whose posing danger was that its reflection was not the trompe d’oeil of any ordinary surface of glass, but a portal to an aggregate space.

Aside from the rare books, I had the full inventory of a normal bookstore. That brought in traffic and in a way camouflaged the rarities. I never wanted to stoop so low as to hi-tech my shop against break-ins. I figured that old, musty volumes would be enough to turn away the thieving kind.

I was wrong. My place was broken into again. There were no signs of forced entry on the front door, nor on the back door, where couriers came in from the alleyway. The only thing the thieves took was an old set of Encyclopedia Britannica that I had up on the second floor. This meant that they had been in my shop before and had likely scaled the steps to the loggia. It was unlikely that the theft happened during store hours, right under my nose: they couldn’t have stowed that bulky collection away in a backpack or anything. Plus, I hadn’t noticed last night when I filed some new arrivals up there, the entirely empty shelf that now gutted the integrity of my collection. This time I did pay the insurance premium.

I went ahead and bought a surveillance system from a company two blocks down. I decided to install the cameras myself. Their price tag already set me back two-thousand bucks. And rent had just gone up. And Boston Public Works had jacked up the garbage collection fee. I was barely solvent.

I had placed cameras over the back entrance, the front entrance, and on a support beam on the first floor. I was on a ladder, busy bolting another to a second-floor beam when the business phone rang. I nearly fell off the ladder when going to answer it. It was Marie. She and Vasmatzidis would be back in Boston by tomorrow and would like to have lunch.

“So, did you find the cannibal book?” Marie asked.

“That Iad Bab Zna or whatever? I’m afraid not,” I said, directing the first-floor camera to scan its 180 degrees. “None of my colleagues have ever heard of it. They all agree that it probably doesn’t even exist.” I could find a buyer for that bastard book in no time. I needed way more than four cameras to pinch off this hemorrhage.

“Shit,” Marie said. I wanted to tell her that she should give up the goose chase and get ready for the coming winter semester. Instead, I told her about the thefts. “That’s quite a shame, Vespasian,” she said. “I didn’t do it. I’ve been in Germany for the last two months.”

I chuckled. “Burgers and fries,” I suggested, heading back up to the second floor. “And beer.”

“Okay.”

“Who’s picking you guys up from the airport?” I asked, scaling up to the second floor.

“My mother,” Marie said. “You do remember her?”

“I have had the pleasure,” I said, stepping down the ladder to zigzag through the aisles. I stopped at the last bookcase in the southwest corner. “You know, it’s too dark in certain aisles up top here. Do you recommend LED?”

“What are you talking about?” Marie said. I detected annoyance. She was genuinely peeved about the book.

“I need to light up certain areas of the store,” I said, pulling out the Iad Bab Zna and cracking it open. To my surprise, I saw that I had overlooked the fact that there was text on the left-side pages, but only in the last one-tenth of the book.

Marie finally spoke. “Halogen, I guess. I don’t know. Listen, Vespasian, I’ve got to go. Hamburgers it is. See you.” She hung up.

The book of bad psalms was copyrighted at a later date than all the other Hyrcanus texts. Rather than serving as a counterpart to the Book of Psalms—which is under a hundred pages, regardless of font and Bible version—it was an exercise in one-upmanship; the pages were not numbered, and though only every other page counted, the printed text amounted to at least two-hundred pages. Every time I re-counted, however, the page count turned up different. Had that not happened to the missing pages that had blown about at that Berlin coffee shop? How did four become seventeen, then eleven?

I couldn’t read one jot of it, since it was in that angelical script that I still think was invented by two overpaid thunder-chuggers elbowing each other in the ribs at the expense of the virgin queen. The language didn’t seem expansive enough to be the vehicle of holy praise, or even holy derision.

John Hyrcanus, angel hunter and angel eater, dabbled in the dark arts to launch a literary career. He did not torture angels into telling him fantastical tales; he tortured them to tenderize them into consumption, flavoring their meat with their own adrenaline. In turn, that dietary intake fueled his poetry. Some would no doubt find comfort in thinking that the whole ordeal might have been a tale itself, a metaphor about the rigors of unlocking higher planes of consciousness for the sake of producing good art.

I was tickled by the possibility that the Berliner allergic to poetry may have written the very opus responsible for his death, incapable of surviving the orthographic burden placed upon him by a host of miscreant angels reined into obedience by a stray Maccabean.

The following day, guilt prevented me from enjoying my hamburger and beer. But I ate on, not wanting to rouse my friends’ suspicions. The novelty of Marie’s mother being there made it more difficult for us to discuss the Iad Bab Zna, but I still tried to be careful. If I wasn’t busy reacquainting myself with her, I was asking the two professors about their imminent return to work. They in turn wanted details on the breaking in of my store. The whole time, the table was dominated by downcast eyes. The Hyrcanus book cycle was straining our once-telepathic friendship. Books that are either indecipherable or not enjoyable, or both, have always had an emetic effect on me: I thought of the book of black psalms and felt like unleashing a Niagara of beef and Indian Pale Ale.

I wanted to put an end to their obsession. It had to stop. There would be nothing in that book that would be new to them—nothing that one couldn’t find in a more readily available, more understandable hermetic text. And if their goal was no longer knowledge, but a need to follow some gossipy arcana, then they’d be satisfied by any eventuality. The whole business was so convoluted that a clear-cut path was all but hopeless. I could give them a sort of literary methadone, and not an inkling of doubt would enter their minds.

We made dinner plans for next weekend. Vasmatzidis said he’d try and hook me up with a female colleague of his, a professor of Iberian literature. I said I was already hopelessly in love, helping Marie’s mother out of her chair. The lady blushed. Her daughter shook her head. “You’ll love her,” Vasmatzidis said.

Instead of heading home, I drove to the store. I wanted to catch up on some organizing.

I loved being surrounded by books. If I ever did foreclose on my house, I’d have no problem going to my store to sleep. I had a cot and heater already in the storage room. All I had to do was lie low, lest building management catch wise.

Books didn’t just serve to beautify a place like antimacassars and throw pillows. They were utilitarian. There was nothing like observing a tall stack of books and knowing that the intellectual drill bit of your mind would begin the slow plow through their pages, knowing it would be dramatically changed by the time you closed the bottom book.

Sure, books attract dust. But they attract nothing to their insides. The pages, pressed safely together by the guardian angels that are the covers (the godhead being the bindings), never attract dust, never smear their texts, and very rarely fade, provided there is no light exposure. Yes, they may take on the not-disagreeable distinction of having yellowed. No matter what, the sentences and paragraphs and chapters fashioned out of nothingness by the mage (who should never settle for the pedestrian title ‘writer’) giggle when stacked upon each other, knowing they will work their miracles upon the world once scanned by the eyeball. The phenomenon of being transported while reading, taken for granted by so many, has always amazed me.

A friend of mine who is a copy editor for a major publishing house told me an interesting story about a book that was all books at the same time—an archetype, a Book of Books.

He said that all books, if they worked together, could take over the world. They were portals to another dimension, through which they communicated with each other. Theirs were paths that could not be trodden by the physicality of the foot. These books’ only drawback was that they could be closed up and stowed away for ages, thereby being rendered ineffective. But once opened, they could thrive on the blood of their hosts’ minds. They could mold readers into any mindset, political affiliation, or temperament.

This one book, having sucked the blood out of a reader’s mind and stamped that mind with an indelible assessment of just about anything, could then lead that brainwashed pod, as it were, to another book, which could either build upon the previous parasite’s imprint like a palimpsest or create an entirely new one. The key for the books was always to use the curiosity and docility of the human mind to their advantage. Surely dyslexics and LCD-addled cell phone junkies weren’t to be bothered with. Haters of books were to be scoffed at, for the very sort of world in which they lived had been dramatically determined by the likes of Newton and Hitler, avid readers both.

The only way for the books to survive was for them to perpetuate their kind. For a book was nothing if it was not read; it was little more than nothing if it was not to be understood. Its very worth depended on its being opened and perused; for besides that, it was nothing but a trick box randomly decorated with ink, and its pages were not the three-hundred wings of an angel blowing in the face of a subservient reader. So it was paramount to cultivate an avid reader.

An even higher task was to condition a reader into a writer. Those were the most valuable slaves of all, they who supplicated unto the great Book, the book which was all books, the Kitab Min Al-Kutub, the ideal Book which all the slave writers strove to write. The efforts of these slave writers—the man-hours put in at the desk—set up a hierarchy of structures, the highest ones being the closest to the ideal Book, having rendered the best reflections of the Book’s purity. That very deception on the part of the Book was what kept the Book at the apex of the universe.

A complete set of first-edition works by Alexander Dumas, in the original French, was missing from the third shelf of a bookcase. I saw the half-emptied shelf as I came out of the bathroom. I got on my phone and played back the video of the ground floor, starting from last night, when I closed up and went home. I played it at 10x speed. The camera I had bolted over the front entrance swept frantically back and forth, as the time code sped through the hours. It made its way up to two hours ago when I had come in. Nothing. Not a flickering shadow, not a mouse scurrying across the floor. Those books were priceless, and after doing the calculations, I was surprised to learn that calling the damn insurance company and making a claim would be well worth it. I only hoped they wouldn’t suspect fraud, or because I had been turning to claims overly much as of late, jack up my premium.

I couldn’t figure out how the hell my store was being broken into. I was disturbed less by the blatant act of theft than by the manner in which it was being perpetrated. It was getting to the point where the cost of stolen items was something I had to figure into my overhead. Foreclosure was looking like a sure thing if I didn’t get a buyer soon. I sent a written request to the ILAB to have my entire inventory reappraised—sure to bear a gargantuan fee.

I had to find or at least stop the culprit, and quickly. I wasn’t looking forward to the day when there would be a single, fat lousy book left on the bare shelves, lying on its side, belching dust.

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Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.

Suicide by Jiu-Jitsu? Hmm. Tequila? Of course. Crushed Trachea Blues is live and livid. You in?