An Empty Book. [Part 1]

I think I never thought it would end like that.
At least not how everything turned out. “Not like this,” I remember thinking.

It was 1990, and I had yet to find a job. The economy was still regaining its stability, and I was still not eligible enough to become part of it. It was after a failed job interview, and the aimless strut men such as myself take to find some meaning out of our failures that I walked past an old bookstore, located on a street far too well-known to remember its actual name.
The facade was falling apart. The white paint that carried the dignified ways of old establishments was chipping away, hit by time, and the forgetfulness of the newer generations.
Out of a nonsensical need to be a good fellow citizen, and partly enraged by the psychological projection of an underdog of my temperament, I stepped in, with the hopes of finding a used book I could buy and give the owners some sense of peace, or at least, the illusion of it.
That was the original idea I had as I crossed the wooden door, and the small bell rang.
I still remember Mary, a woman around forty, closer to fifty than thirty. Slightly overweight and clearly a bombshell in her mid-twenties. The child in me felt the confusing mix of oedipal cravings and the stiff respect we are bound to our apparent elders.
I guess that’s why I ended up staying longer than I needed.
If I was honest, it had been the bookstore owner who had given my current existential dread some pause, and though I didn’t intend to transform the situation into some sort of exploration of the compulsory unconscious pulses of all young men like me, I at least wanted to make Mary’s day as pleasant as she had made mine — platonically speaking of course.
We started talking about different books and novels, authors, and pieces of work that we both loved. I mentioned my interest in the metaphysical. Her eyes sparkled with joy.
I barely had any money at that point. It had not been like that always. I had actually been born in one of the most affluent and wealthy families of the east coast. But that changed when my parents kicked me out when I was fifteen, claiming that the best way to grow up was to go through the sort of traumatic experience they had forced me into, all in the name of “making a better Christian out you.”
They were the sort of inflexible dogmatists that could sever any kind of connection if they thought it was damaging to the family name.
For everyone in their social circle, I had been cast out as a prodigal son too blunt to mold into a respectable member of the higher echelons of society. But I knew the truth. They had forced me out of their lives to keep it all under wraps.
I was never a good son, that much I had provided to that equation.
I had drifted far away from the lavish lifestyle I had grown in, and now I spent my days attempting to either win enough money to pay rent or somehow trick the last few friends I had into paying it for me. Most of my social circle had evaporated as soon as I lost all my privileges and became commonfolk. I didn’t judge them; after all, I was one of them.
But more than anything, it had been my obsession with the occult that had driven my parents mad with a sense of rejection only protestant zealots could bring themselves to embrace. A god-fearing mentality that eventually led them to force me out of their lives in the name of “a greater plan.”
In retrospect, I hadn’t helped that much either. How many times can you find your child surrounded by dead pigeons and their blood all over your walls before you give up on them?
But it had not been my fault. It was the mere consequence of a series of events that led me to that fateful afternoon with Mary on the abandoned bookstore.
A single book had changed my life, a singular book with no name and no author that lay on the private library of my rich father. Hidden away in his fancy study room, locked inside a french safe made entirely out of steel, originally designed in the eighteen century.
It was difficult to believe, but back then, people had secrets worth creating a behemoth of an artifact in order to keep it away from prying hands.
The metal box consisted of nine levers, all of them with the capacity of moving in eight different angles, the cardinal points of course, and diagonally in both angles. Next to it, a considerable keyhole for a metal key presented itself as a silent guardian of the type you could not argue or persuade.
I knew that keyhole very well. It had swallowed pins and brooches I had used in feeble attempts to open it when I was ten.
The first time I had attempted to break in was an enfevered Sunday. My parents had left for mass, while I, too weakened to accompany them, had stayed behind alone.
I had seen that safe ever since I had a memory. It was always looming over a small fireplace, which burned perpetually as if hell itself borrowed its heat for wicked purposes.
My father caught me two hours later, trying to force my way into the small vault after my short temper had given in to a destructive nature present in all little men.
“There’s nothing there!” he yelled. That’s the first thing he said when he found me. Now, I was never a clever man, but I was smart enough to know that’s not the first thing a father says to his child when he finds him causing a mess in his room.
I caught on quickly enough, though.
There was a specific sequence one had to follow with both keys and levers in order to open it.
Whatever it was that was hidden inside crushed my dreams and seeped into my most desperate moments of wakefulness. Even for a kid, a density unnatural for someone my age had possessed me, a preoccupation of the sort that varnishes the eyes of older men. I could only think about opening that safe.
But sooner rather than later, my father’s secret combination started to fall apart under my ever-watchful gaze.
Pieces of it, that’s all I could get, but it was more than enough. A sickly child, I was abandoned continuously to my luck, but it was enough to spy on my withdrawn father whenever he was home. A very occupied person, my father spent most of his time in his study room, and I used that to my advantage.
I learned early on that the only thing grownups don’t pay attention to is a well-behaved child. So I did precisely that, and for the next year and a half, I became the most obedient child the Cain family had ever seen.
Even my mother was surprised by this. After all, it is mothers who know the true nature of their offsprings. But it was all a show I had carefully devised at such a young age, all for the secrets contained in the metal compartment above the fireplace in my father’s private room.
The last piece of the mystery came to me almost by mistake one night in which I woke up by happenstance.
It was 3 am, and my eyes simply opened. My mind suffered greatly, as if it had been severed from the dream world in an instant, too fast not to cause some damage to my physical body. In my dream I was an older man, living in a cabin, cutting wood and lighting my own fireplace. There was no one around me, no one for miles and miles, and I had to hunt wild game to sustain myself. It was winter, an unforgiving one, and my skin made me think that death was getting the best of me. There was this sense of jubilee mixed with defeat in my chest as if I had been betrayed by the only woman I had ever loved. But I knew that whatever caused this strange feeling had nothing to do with a fellow human, it was instead an object, or to be even more precise, a knowledge that had caused it. I looked at the fire as if my life depended on it, but I didn’t understand why.
And suddenly, there I was.
Back in my child’s body, with my small concerns and my young soul. I frowned for a long time, trying to understand my visions, but also why I had woken up so suddenly.
It was then that I heard the reason, someone was yelling downstairs.
I found myself in front of my father’s study room, the door was next to close, but on the floor, a piece of cloth had prevented the lock from setting in fully.
Excited, I peered inside, thinking that maybe my father was opening his safe and that I could get another piece of the puzzle.
And indeed, he was.
I registered it immediately. The lower right lever was moved diagonally towards the center.
The memory is imprinted in my brains, but not because I was so eager to find it, which was true, but because the scene in front of my eyes burned whatever childhood years still were left in me.
My strict mother was naked, which at first was the most shocking thing I noticed, then I saw the blood, and then, the knife.
She had cut her own womb with the blade, and a straight line dripped blood towards her genitalia. It was then that I gathered that it had been her who had screamed in pain and probably had made me wake up.
My mother was a prude woman, that’s all I can say. Never used a bathing suit, never dressed in anything other than what I called “nun clothes,” the below the knee, up to the neck sort of attire one expects only from the dried-up souls of monotonous people.
But that night, my mother not only was naked and bleeding from a self-inflicted wound, but she was also, and I still have problems reconciling myself with such an impression, sexually desirable.
Her skin glowed with the orange light coming from the fireplace, and her hair was loosened up, curled by some ungodly reason. But more than anything, her stare had changed into that of a slithering spirit, a wayward corrupted Eve. I still remember my heart racing as she calmly looked at my father as he opened the safe.
My dad, still fully dressed, carried himself with the same poise, and lack of prurience expected of a man of God. His stare too the same, a sort of deviated sense of righteousness and stoicism.
He opened the vault.
Inside, a single colossal book lay.
A single leather-covered tome with no inscriptions whatsoever.
The man took it out and opened it. It was empty.
The gigantic book was filled with empty pages. My father made sure to show me as he faced the door, luckily, his attention was solely focused on my mother, who walked towards him and handed him the bloody knife.
It was then that my father grabbed the blade with his left hand and allowed it to cut his palm. The now mixed blood of both my parents leaked down the tip of the knife down to the empty pages of the book.
I wanted to scream, but my entire body seemed to be so transfixed as to the events happening in front of me that I simply watched in silence and an opened mouth.
My father allowed for the blood to fall until no more of it gave to gravity. He passed the blade back to my mother, who then walked to the fire and crouched in front of it. She turned around and looked up him, my father dribbled across the book with the blood that had fallen on it. I couldn’t see what he was drawing, but at that point I could only think of a single word.
“Diabolical.”
My father finished and turned to my mother and nodded. She then stretched out her hand and placed the blade inside the fire. Her hand should’ve burned right there by the heat, but my mother didn’t even flinch. The blood seemed to dry up and blacken. My father meanwhile placed the book on the hardwood floor, which now I noticed also had some sort of drawings and symbols written in what was now obviously more blood.
The old man took his coat and sat on the floor. At that point, I couldn’t see what he was doing. My mother, on the other hand, approached him while standing up. She carefully pressed against the blade with her thumb and index finger, letting the dried up blood to fall on what I guess was the book which my father had left on the floor.
The flames stopped moving as if time itself had been erased, and from the red-orange wall, a single eye appeared through, and beyond it, an unspeakable dark.
“Speak.” It said.
My muscles finally reacted. I began screaming at the top of my lungs. I ran to my room and barged myself in there. My mother came knocking seconds later. She had to look for the keys to open the door.
I was hiding inside my closet, tears, and all sort of secretions fell down my face.
“Honey, honey,” she said when she found me, her eyes were back to normal, and an unlikely motherly love had appeared in them. “It’s all ok. I promise.”
She then covered my face with a piece of cloth, and I passed out.

The next day I woke up with my memories faded and my mind confused. I had mixed in part of my dreams with what I had seen, and I had no idea what was real anymore.

I confronted my parents, which were all too eager to laugh it off, “Douglas, you were having a nightmare.” My mother said.
I couldn’t trust them anymore. I went and checked the study room. But there was absolutely no evidence of what I had seen the night before. By the time I was going back to sleep, I was almost convinced I had indeed gone through a terrible dream, and I had confused it for reality.
My father was remarkably quiet that day.
We went to church next sunday. They talked with the priest, shook hands, exchanged smiles. No evil people would be so comfortable around their enemies, I thought. It had been a dream.
That was, of course, until I opened the safe.
My father had given me the last piece of the combination in my so-called dream, and I, in my still avidly curious mind, waited for a dinner party they held for a friend to sneak past the army of simpletons my parents called friends and made my way to the study room.
Dream or not, I was so anxious to find out the contents of my initial obsession I was willing to use the ethereal last clue anyways.
Once in there, I took out a piece of paper I had placed in my pocket and followed the instructions. I made sure to go slow enough not to make a mistake.I did not know if I could restart the sequence after making a mistake, the level of complexity of the french safe clearly indicated the possibility of a sort of reset button to exist.
I did not make a mistake.
A heavy clunking sound indicated my success.
I opened the safe.
The book was inside.