By Al Bruno III
March 24th: It was a slow day at the pawn shop. Sara was watching the cash register. Mrs. Vincenzo had given her a crash course in running the shop and kept her on a very short leash. Technically it was a one-person job, but in reality we spent most of our time behind the counter together, flirting, sharing Harlem Shake videos, and somehow getting paid for it.
I’d told her about my meeting with Ashley Fowler, albeit a much more positive, hallucination-free version of it. She was relieved to know we finally had a plan, even if she didn’t know about the various felonies I’d have to commit to pull it off.
For the moment, she was content dusting the counters and straightening the used DVD and VHS rack while I chatted with a few friends on the FEAR AND TRUTH message board. There was an entire subforum devoted to Lost Media. Buried inside it was another dedicated to disruptive legacy media knowledge.
Or, as H. P. Lovecraft called them—blasphemous tomes.
That was because one item on Ashley’s to-do list required me to find a copy of the Eternal Codex of Tovit -no small task. You aren’t going to find many seven-hundred-year-old books on Facebook Marketplace—especially not one that most reputable scholars insist doesn’t exist.
Which was fine. The moderator of the Lost Media subforum, Atwater—better known as GonePostal—had never been all that concerned with rules and regulations.
As it turned out, he’d dealt with the book a few years earlier… or at least its aftermath.
Here’s what he told me.
###
...Foster, I should begin by telling you that everything you know is wrong. Don’t take that personally. You’re doing admirable work. You’ve stared down things both living and dead, and you’ve survived encounters that would have killed most people. That’s genuinely impressive. Unfortunately, the scale of your ignorance remains breathtaking. You insist on treating each new horror as though it were its own phenomenon. Gorgo? Mormo? The Thousand-Faced Moon? It’s all the same. There is only one darkness—so immense that every civilization has mistaken a different facet of it for the whole.
They give it different names, invent different histories, fight different holy wars, but they’re all describing the same thing. The Cross and the Pentagram are the same symbol viewed from opposite sides. There are a thousand words for fear, but only one thing being feared. Maybe you have blundered into the Mire of Nix but tell me Brian… can you even begin to understand what the mere existence of such a place implies about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organization?
No, of course you don’t. It’s the kind of thing that only someone like me, a high-ranking employee of the United States Postal Service, can truly comprehend.
You ask whether I know the Eternal Codex of Tovit? I’ve read portions of it. A doctoral candidate in philology procured a handwritten German translation of the Prayer of Alick several years ago.
I was fortunate enough to obtain a copy. Normally, documents of this nature circulate through encrypted forums or private couriers, making them difficult to intercept. Fortunately for me, this one passed through the United States Postal Service and was selected for routine transcription under standard departmental protocols before being forwarded to its intended recipient.
As for the history of the book itself? Its beginnings were humble enough: the Latin-inscribed peregrinations of a fourteenth-century alchemist named Tovit. It concerned itself primarily with blasphemous evocations and abhorrent dismissals. Athanatoi. Barghest. Domini Candelarum. Each received an entry that fit comfortably on a single page. There were even a handful of named daemons scattered throughout the text. But this was more than a book. The components of every incantation were bound into the vellum itself.
Can you comprehend what that means, Brian? Each page a ritual in totality. All any user had to do was burn the page itself. So simple. So dangerous. Tovit was both a genius and a madman. He could have brought sorcery to the masses a century and a half before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
Predictably, when Tovit finished his masterwork, he was set upon by a pack of Greater Zoogs. While they did not kill him, whatever they made him into didn’t live very long. The forces of the Inquisition, those blood-soaked defenders of mediocrity, seized his papers and burned them.
Impossibly, the book resurfaced at a gathering of warlocks in 1318. It was in pristine condition. At the end of the convocation, the assembled warlocks decided to divide its pages among themselves. Twelve each took a handful back to their respective countries. The host of the gathering, Osmund Hutchmen, kept what remained.
Over the next half century, those warlocks used their pages to summon and cast out all manner of beings that make up the metaphysical gestalt you people insist on calling the Forces of Darkness.
But here’s the important thing—the mind-boggling thing. Osmund Hutchmen eventually realized he always knew when one of the pages had been consumed. Within a few months, it would simply return to the book. Regrown, the way a lizard regrows its tail.
Now that was your history lesson. Let me move on to the story of my encounter with the Eternal Codex of Tovit.
It was a glorious time for the Postal Service. Times of war usually are. It was also a glorious time to be a Postal Inspector. We’d only just begun dipping our toes into internet fraud and cybercrime, but my team spent most of its time chasing unpleasant missives and troubling artifacts making their way back from the Middle East thanks to foolish soldiers, shady contractors, and—of course—Hobby Lobby.
My story begins with a dead man named Cyrus Fingal. A man who forgot the four basic rules of life.
Forgive and forget.
If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.
Patience is a virtue.
Never hit Reply All.
His is a tawdry tale of eldritch horrors and local politics. A tale of a man who treated life as a series of entitlements.
He got into a good college, so naturally he expected a good job.
He made a lot of money, so naturally he expected women to flock to him.
He became a highly paid member of the local political machine, so naturally he expected the path to public office to be an easy one.
And who knows? He might have gotten exactly what he expected. If only he hadn’t forwarded those racist emails to everyone he knew—and a lot of people he didn’t.
As I said, never hit Reply All.
Such behavior might have been brushed off in some of the more, shall we say, bucolic parts of our nation. Indeed, in some places it might even get you elected. But not in Albany, New York.
The long and short of it is that Cyrus Fingal found himself out of a job faster than you could say “Rush Limbaugh.” But Cyrus Fingal was not one to vanish quietly from the public eye. In fact, for an entire news cycle, he was ubiquitous.
He said he had been hacked. He said he’d been set up. He said those heavily photoshopped images had been sent to him directly by the governor’s nephew. Then, finally, he blamed a cabal of homosexuals and minorities. As a member of both groups, I assure you we have much larger concerns than Cyrus Fingal.
So much for “if you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.”
As you know, individuals who find themselves suddenly unemployed have many options. Updating their resumes. Applying for public benefits. Or moving back in with their parents.
Cyrus Fingal didn’t bother with any of that. Orthodoxy was not among his vices. Instead, he decided that exacting revenge upon those who had wronged him through demonic summoning was the next logical step.
Forgive and forget? No, not at all.
Unfortunately, my team did not realize that a single page from the Eternal Codex of Tovit had been sent to Parkwood Towers in Albany, New York, until it was too late. I don’t blame them. The shipper had hidden the page beneath the false bottom of a box containing bootleg Magic: The Gathering cards. By the time the disparate pieces of evidence came together, the situation was already well out of control.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me simply say that while we know where Cyrus procured the page, we never discovered how he obtained a saint’s bone and the tears of a jackal.
What I do know is that once he had gathered the requisite materials, he locked himself in his apartment and, after properly defiling himself, began the dark chant to summon Druaga the Possessor.
When the chant was completed, all Cyrus Fingal had to do was wait. He did wait—for nearly forty-five minutes—before deciding to begin the chant anew. Neighbors on either side of his apartment later reported that the chanting stopped and started repeatedly over the next twenty-four hours.
After twenty-four hours, Cyrus Fingal fell silent. “Fell” being the operative word, as he’d hanged himself using a crude noose fashioned from his draperies.
Things might have gone differently had he read that fateful page from the Codex more carefully.
Or perhaps if he’d remembered that patience is a virtue.
My condition leaves me loath to venture far from my office, but after the deaths of three local politicians, I felt it best to return to the field. While I may enjoy a certain degree of respect within the Postal Service bureaucracy, my predacious reputation has left me with little choice but to work alone.
You know my situation, Brian. You know what I endured. But the rumor-mongering hoi polloi occupying the lower rungs of the United States Postal Service are small-minded, judgmental, and, frankly, exhausting. Once you’ve been accused of cannibalism, there are no HR solutions. No sensitivity seminars. No mandatory inclusivity workshops.
Enough of that. Back to the case of Cyrus Fingal. Even before I got on the plane, I was doing research and making preparations. One must never go into the field unprepared, a lesson fate has endeavored to teach you on more than one occasion, Brian. Once I touched down at Albany International Airport, I checked in with the local law enforcement. Specifically, Detective Philip Bradshaw.
I know your opinion is clouded by your acrimonious relationship, but he is a good man with a clear, if single-track mind. He wasn’t assigned to the Cyrus Fingal case, but he was more than willing to help me sift through the mundane details while he was off the clock.
The death of Cyrus Fingal was the most straightforward aspect of the case. As I stated previously, he’d hanged himself—and done a sloppy job of it, to boot. The coroner estimated it might have taken him as long as twenty minutes to die.
But as always, the devil was in the details, and the subtext is frequently text.
So I made my way to Parkwood Towers, flashed my government credentials, and spent far longer than any civilized man should have explaining to the pimple-faced, slack-jawed wage slave manning the security desk that, yes, a Postal Inspector is essentially a policeman for the mail.
I weep for the future. We all should.
I instructed the so-called security guard to remain at his post and hand over a passkey so I could let myself into Apartment 229.
The décor of Cyrus Fingal’s apartment was as generic as they come, but only on the surface. What an untrained observer might have dismissed as kitschy, out-of-season Halloween decorations and unpleasant-looking antiques, I recognized for what they truly were. Nor was I surprised to discover the absence of a television. In its place stood an impressive collection of books. One cannot serve two masters, and it was obvious that Cyrus Fingal was far more interested in plumbing the preternatural than keeping up with the Kardashians.
In the center of the dining room table sat a punch bowl full of ashes. Doubtless the page from the Codex. Doubtless it had been put to use. Thankfully, the local authorities had overlooked it, leaving me free to pour the ashes into the evidence bag I carried. I found myself wondering whether the ashes would vanish as the page reconstituted itself. It was a disconcerting thought.
Equally disconcerting was the data regarding the murders of the three local politicians I mentioned earlier. All of them had been strangled. All of them were found slathered with traces of human bile and strands of animal protein fibers.
I spent the next hour exploring the apartment, searching for genuine arcane artifacts hidden among the dime-store statues of Baphomet and mass-produced Tarot cards. I checked behind every solid object for a hidden recess that might conceal something of real value. But it appeared that the page was Cyrus Fingal’s first brush with a truly otherworldly object. I did, however, uncover a single scrap of notepaper that proved highly illuminating. I pocketed it.
Then I sat upon his couch and considered the scene. I examined the living room again and again until I finally realized what was missing. I left the apartment, conscientiously locking the door behind me, and knocked on the door of Apartment 231. Cyrus’s neighbor—the one who had reported the marathon of chanting.
I knocked on the door of Apartment 231 and was greeted by the now familiar face of Blake C Rivers. “Inspector Atwater,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I need to resolve a few inconsistencies.” I shouldered past him into the apartment. “I need a little more of your time.”
An annoyed look crossed his features, but he closed the door behind us and followed me into the living room. “I’m not sure how I can help.”
There was a slight sneer on his face when he spoke next. “I didn’t realize being a postal inspector was such serious business.”
“Deadly serious,” I said, my smile well rehearsed.
On one wall, there was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. A nice choice. Blake C Rivers said, “I don’t think I can tell you much more. I started to smell something foul. I knocked on his door. It was unlocked, so I went in and found him hanging there. He’d tied the drapes to a ceiling fan. I pulled him down, but he’d been dead for days.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary while you were there?” I asked. “Something that didn’t quite seem right?” I crossed the room over to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony.
“No. Nothing.”
The sliding door was unlocked. I turned my attention back to him. “Did you see his enemies list?”
“Enemies list?”
I pulled out the piece of paper I had found and handed it to him. “Before the end," I said, “he wrote down the names of everyone he believed had wronged him.”
He didn’t bother to read it. He didn’t even give it a cursory glance. “Am I on here?”
“Do you think you should be?”
I went on to explain to Blake that a good portion of that enemies list had died recently. “It’s really quite bizarre,” I concluded.
“I don’t see what that has to do with me. I barely knew the guy.”
“True,” I said, raising a finger. "But you were the one who found the body, “and the police report also stated that some things were missing from the apartment.
As expected, that angered him. “I think you should leave.”
“Understandable, but first I’d like to read you the list of stolen items."
“Look, asshole, I’m not going to…”
“One laptop. One iPhone. A complete collection of Radiohead’s discography. And the very set of draperies Cyrus Fingal used to kill himself.” I folded my arms. "Quite the eclectic mix.”
“The drapes?” Confusion flickered across his face, followed by the slightest twitch of fear. I didn’t steal his drapes.”
“Then perhaps, his drapes stole you.” I paused, watching numerous emotions parade across his face like a vain teenager trying on outfits for a Saturday night. I let the pause linger. “ Come on,” I said, “This little charade is over, and we both know it.”
There was a wet, gurgling sound. Blake Rivers’ mouth cracked wide open, and his eyes rolled back until only the whites remained. Curiously, the rest of him remained almost perfectly still. Save for a faint tremor passing through his frame, he might have been mistaken for a statue. His torso convulsed once. Then again. And then a tendril of yellow fabric wormed its way from between his gaping lips. It was slick with bile. Some parts were twisted and knotted. Other parts were frayed. Each loose thread made skittering motions in the air like the legs of an upended millipede. It was a parasite. A parasite made from fabric and a curse. It seemed unlikely that either Cyrus Fingal or Druaga had anticipated such an arrangement. Parasites, after all, have a vested interest in the continued health of their hosts.
I reached into my other jacket pocket and pulled out a flask. The top popped open easily. “Hear me, Druaga,” I said. “The supplicant is dead. You have no purpose on this mortal plane.”
Blake C Rivers toppled over. His face had turned purple, and he was convulsing. I liberally splashed the contents of the flask over the unclean spirit and its host. Then I muttered the exorcism rite I had long ago committed to memory.
Regrettably, the entity proved unpersuaded. The only response I got was a scream of outrage.
Then the scream was replaced by a wet sound. A tearing sound. The entire length of the drapery tore itself free of Blake Rivers’ body. Long, ugly bits of the man’s digestive system were dragged out along with it. It would have been an agonizing death, but by then Blake C. Rivers had been dead for quite some time.
The creature darted cobra-like toward me.
I had to throw myself across the dining room table to escape. I gave the holy water and the exorcism rite one final attempt. The creature reacted only with renewed aggression. I tried to throw myself back the other way over the dining room table, but my most agile years were far behind me.
One end wrapped my throat. It reeked of intestinal juices and brimstone. I kicked and pulled, but it held me fast. I tried to find some kind of hold on its bile-slickened body, but could not.
When I gasped for air, the creature immediately slid upward, making for my face. I knew then what it intended. It was going to force itself down my esophagus and into my stomach.
My dignity finally abandoned me. I began caterwauling for help—for anyone who might hear me. The effort was short-lived. The creature dove in.
It didn’t get all the way down my gullet, but it got deep enough that even now my palate is forever damaged. Miraculously, in that moment of near-certain doom, my desperate clawing fingers found purchase in the moist, tattered fabric.
Once I had a grip on the creature, I somehow found the strength to yank it away and hurl it across the room. It smacked wetly against the wall. Then I ran. I stumbled onto the balcony and slammed the sliding-glass door shut just as the creature righted itself and lunged. It smacked against the sliding-glass door with a satisfying sound.
Thankfully, Druaga, Thrall of Mormo, possessed an even smaller reserve of patience than the man who had summoned him and gave up after ten minutes of trying to get through the sliding-glass door I was desperately holding closed.
I suspect the fact that I was not among those on its hit list also contributed to my survival. After one final thump on the door, it slithered back into Blake C Rivers’ body. After a brief period of convulsing, Blake C. Rivers sat up, got to his feet, and walked toward the sliding-glass door. I must admit that, despite being two stories above a concrete walkway, I was more than prepared to throw myself from the balcony. The creature wearing Blake C Rivers' body merely paused to lock the door before leaving the apartment and disappearing, never to be seen again.
Brian, I have little doubt this thrilling missive has left you with more questions than answers. That is, of course, to be expected. How did I get off that balcony? I called Detective Bradshaw, of course. Why didn’t my exorcism work? There is no easy answer there, but perhaps Father Vincent of St. Casimir’s Church lacks either the skill or the faith to truly bless water. Alternatively, perhaps my own skill at performing exorcism rites has diminished since the career-ruining incident in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
As for the entity itself, while I am sure you have noted parallels between it and the Vorvolaka that upended your life in 2009, I can only tell you there appears to be no meaningful correlation between the two cases.
But what of Druaga, Thrall of Mormo, and Cyrus Fingal? Perhaps Druaga cannot leave this plane of existence until it has completed Cyrus Fingal’s bidding, and as I may have noted earlier, his enemies list was extensive; it ranged from his prom date to actor David Carradine.
Neither I nor the United States Postal Inspection Service would have the displeasure of encountering Druaga again. I did, however, keep tabs on Cyrus Fingal’s enemies list. A surprising number of those individuals suffered premature or otherwise unpleasant deaths, and asphyxiation proved to be a ubiquitous—if not universal—theme among them.
I do sometimes wonder if, despite the various governmental oaths I have taken, I should reach out to the individuals that have not fallen prey to this situation, but what would I say?
Beware of individuals with the shambling gait like something from a cheap zombie film?
Get in the habit of carrying around holy water with you.
Or, if I may indulge in a lamentably sophomoric turn of phrase-
Be aware of every room you enter. Examine the décor carefully, especially if the drapes clash with the rug. It might be curtains for you.
###
When the story finally ended, my mind drifted back to the reality of the pawn shop. Of the 80’s classic radio drifting from the overhead speakers. Of the high school kids looking greedily at the case full of used video games. Of Sara negotiating over the price of a rock tumbler with a man who seemed to want to be anywhere but here, of the afternoon sun doing its best to shine through the front windows crowded with merchandise and signage. Despite the completeness of Atwater’s narrative I still had one lingering question.
HOW THE HELL WAS THIS STORY GOING TO HELP ME FIND THE DAMN BOOK?
And that is what I typed for my reply—all caps and everything.
Atwater must have either realized he had been so busy talking about himself that he'd forgotten the reason I'd asked him for help, or he simply remembered what I'd actually wanted. He responded to my email with an explanation that six months earlier a friend working in Customs had flagged a shipping crate going from an estate sale in Prague to a mobile home park in Bridgeville, Delaware. The crate turned out to be full of old books, fossils, wax cylinders, and—of all things—dirt. Atwater explained that while it might be perfectly legal to ship fossils of Devonian arthropods, Mamluk astrolabes, and ancient tomes, heaven forbid you try to mail some dirt from Timbuktu to Las Vegas.
The dirt had to stay behind but the other stuff? Including a book that matches every known description of the Eternal Codex of Tovit? Those got sent along to an address in Bayard Estates.
Now that I had the address my next question was how was I going to get the book from Delaware to here. I needed to think of something and think about it fast before something else went wrong.
There was a crash and a clatter, the sound of a formerly mint condition rock tumbler falling to the floor. Sara made a pained sound and practically ran to my side. No strike that, she stood behind me.
I looked up to see a well-dressed, well-kempt couple entering the Pawn Shop with an expression usually reserved for vegetarians entering a slaughterhouse. When the man spoke his voice was refined and cold, “We’ve spent a long time looking for you.”
“Me?” I said. When in doubt, play dumb.
Now it was the mink-coated woman to say something, “Are you the freak that likes to take advantage of mentally unwell people?”
“Me?” I said again. More dumb.
The man was at the counter now, actually trying to reach past me and grab her. I swatted him away with more force than I expected. He made a pained and angry sound. The woman fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a bedazzled container of mace.
She sprayed and I dropped to my knees.
“Mom! Dad!” Sara shouted, “Stop it!”
Of course. If my eyes hadn’t been on fire I would have rolled them.
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