A Collection of True Evils

  A COLLECTION OF TRUE EVILS

  a short story by

  BARRY NAPIER

  A Collection of True Evils by Barry Napier

  Copyright © 2012, Barry Napier

  They had been searching for the book for so long that it was hard to accept the fact that it was now sitting on the table directly in front of them. Five minutes ago, when the book had still been in its cardboard packaging, it had still seemed distant somehow; the two of them had convinced themselves in the backs of their minds that there had been a mistake and that the book in front of them was either a hoax or had been misidentified.

  “There’s no way it’s real,” Alex said.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Theo responded quickly. “I mean, just look at it.” It made sense that Theo would be so quick in trying to extinguish the doubt of his friend. He had been the one that had found the book on an on-line auction and had eventually purchased it for sixty-one dollars, so he was overly protective of his find.

  Alex looked at the book as if he were trying to see through its faded cover and to the fabled text beneath it. They had placed the book perfectly in the center of the table, as if the book itself were the very core of not only the table, but the basement they sat in as well. The dim glow of the single lamp within the basement somehow added to the book’s faded appearance and seemed to make it appear more authentic.

  Alex, a Gothic Lit professor popular with the horror-fiction crowd, stared at the book as if he had seen it somewhere long ago but had forgotten its appearance. Theo sat across from him, staring intently at the book with a sheet of sweat on his brow although the basement was unnaturally cool. He was obviously proud of the fact that after all their searching, it had been one of his random trips to an on-line auction site that had brought the book to them.

  “I say we open it,” Alex said finally, his voice like that of a child on Christmas Eve.

  Theo smiled nervously, realizing perhaps for the first time how momentous this night could be for them. They gathered here, in the basement of the city library, twice a week to discuss literature concerning the occult. They had been doing this for five years, allowed to do so by the key that the library’s janitor hid behind the library’s garden shed; he did this in exchange for a bottle of Jack Daniels that Theo delivered to him once a month. This gathering had always been their little secret, known only by them and the janitor whom had been sworn to secrecy. And now as their holy of holies sat before them, its cover dusted with age and its binding gnawed at by some small animal over the course of its one hundred and fifty years of existence, all of those midnight meetings to dabble in the darker things seemed to have paid off.

  Before Alex could reach out for it, Theo seemed to back away from the table a bit. “But what about the stories?” he asked. “What if everything we’ve heard about it is true?”

  “All the better,” Alex said. “That is why we’ve spent so long looking for it, right?”

  Theo knew he wouldn’t win this argument, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hell, he wanted to open the book just as bad as Alex. But from just looking at its cover and worn binding, Theo knew that this was the real thing and he could feel its history like some invisible force in the basement with them.

  With an unspoken final agreement, Alex finally reached out for it and lightly threw open the cover. While the cover had not held the book’s title, the first page did. It was a title that was known to few and, in those few learned circles, was whispered about with legendary respect and awe. The title page stared up at them and it was then that they truly realized their victory and their dread.

  The book was called A Collection of True Evils. As the story went, it had been written between the years of 1856 and 1907. Several demented and disturbed authors had contributed to it, but most of it had come from a man named Harold Nesmith. The book had been in Nesmith’s possession when he hung himself from an attic rafter in 1908 after killing his wife and writing down the book’s final line.

  As Alex and Theo slowly thumbed through the pages, the layout of the text retold the legends of the book to them; some of it was typed and put together in a somewhat disarrayed binding while portions of it had simply been handwritten from an ordinary pen. It was the only copy of the book in the world and as they turned each page with elegant caution, they reminded themselves of this.

  They huddled closely together like a pair of preteen boys having just discovered their first Playboy. Their eyes and mouths were wide with wonder. The look of the pages and the very bold and off-centered fashion of the type gave further proof that this was indeed the real thing: A Collection of True Evils had been dismissed as rumor by many small groups similar to their own but here it was right in front of them, smelling like the forgotten corners of bookstores and cellars.

  Every time Alex turned one of the pages, the smell wafted up in a brief breeze of musty air. There was a very faint trace of tobacco in the dusty scent of the book and Alex wondered if it was from the pipe that Harold Nesmith had been known to smoke from time to time.

  “It’s incredible,” Theo said, running his finger along the bottom of one of the handwritten pages, as if willing the ink to smudge against his finger. Even the sound his finger made against the paper seemed eerily real, almost too authentic for the confines of the library basement.

  “Hey,” Alex said, so abruptly that it made Theo jump a bit. “What are those?”

  He was pointing towards the center of the page, to three columns of oddly sketched shapes that had been placed on the page with painstaking care.

  “I think they’re inscriptions,” Theo said, taking the time to read the writing above the sketches. “Yeah, it says they’re inscriptions found above the door to Agatha Redden’s cottage.”

  “Agatha Redden,” Alex said, sighing heavily. As beautiful and sacred as the book might be, the fact remained that it had a sordid history. Agatha Redden was a confessed witch from the early 1800s. She had caused a frenzy in a small town in Virginia, killing eight children and supposedly cursing two families. Both of those families—all of them, every single member right down to the pets—died in identical fires in the course of two months, long after Agatha had been burned at the stake.

  A Collection of True Evils was full of well-documented accounts like this. It was full of accurate histories centered around serial killers, witches, members of satanic cults and all other sorts of undesirables. And the icing on the cake was the fact that Harold Nesmith had also dabbled in the occult and it was believed that every sick soul he had written about had claimed the book as their own; the book was allegedly haunted by more than a dozen such souls.

  “I’m starting to get chills,” Theo admitted with a nervous laugh.

  Alex nodded. He didn’t say that he felt the same way, but it was evident in the fact that he didn’t argue. He was also vaguely aware of the fact that his stomach seemed to be doing cartwheels. He stopped turning the pages and the two of them simply looked down to the page with Agatha Redden’s markings on it.

  “Are we in agreement that this is authentic?” Alex asked. He tried to hide it, but his voice was trembling. Theo would have normally been shocked at this, but he was also in a pretty shaken state. They had all heard the stories about the book and now that they actually had it—had actually opened it, at that—it was hard to ignore them even if they were just rumors. Besides that, the seemingly synchronous queasy feeling that had overtaken them within the last few moments was a testament of the book’s authority.

  “Yeah,” Theo said without hesitation. “It’s definitely the real thing.”

  Alex nodded and finally managed to look away from the book. He looked the floor and spoke as if he were speaking to his shoes
. “Well, I think we have a decision to make, then,” he said.

  “To read or not to read,” Theo said, attempting to be funny. But as he spoke, he thought he understood why Alex wasn’t able to look him in the eye at that moment. They had been meeting to discuss the darker things—some downright evil things from time to time—for over five years, always speaking of it under the assumption that true evil probably didn’t exist. It had been their belief that writers, especially ones as troubled as Harold Nesmith, tended to sensationalize evil and the people that were attracted to it. But now that they had put their hands upon the almost legendary A Collection of True Evils, their views had been drastically altered.

  Theo felt this but could not explain it. But he knew that it was why Alex could not look at him; all of the knowledge they had accumulated over the years, all of the theories that they had pieced together…it had all just been crushed by the proven existence of this book.

  Now the only thing left to be discovered was whether or not the book’s alleged curse was true. As if reading his mind, Alex voiced this and Theo was thankful for his honesty. No matter how much it plagued his mind, Theo wasn’t sure if he could have found the voice to mention it.

  “If the legend is true, we might already be dead,” Alex said. It sounded clichéd, but Theo still felt as if he had swallowed a chunk of ice that refused to melt in his stomach.

  “We don’t know that,” Theo said weakly. “Are we to assume that a bunch of ghosts should have jumped out at us when we opened it?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Alex said. “The rumors are silly. Are we really supposed to believe that every person who has ever come into contact with this book has died before finishing it?”

  “It does sound dumb,” Theo said.

  “And even if it is true,” Alex said, “I think the solution is obvious. We simply don’t read it.”

  “Then what was the point of looking for the damned thing for so long?” Theo asked.

  Alex had no answer. He now glanced around the basement nervously, bothered by the fact that they were being forced to make such a decision.

  “Maybe we should take some time,” Theo said. “Let’s leave the book here, just to be safe. We’ll hide it here in the basement and take a few days to think about what we want to do.”

  “Why are we going to leave it here?” Alex asked.

  Theo gave another nervous smile before he spoke. “This thing made me feel weird the moment we opened it,” he said. “There’s no way I’m keeping it in my house.”

  Alex chuckled a bit but nodded in response. He saw that there was a look of hurt on Theo’s face and Alex assumed that it was a hurt that stemmed from the fact that they didn’t feel safe in touching their treasure. He briefly thought about how a bank robber must feel when they root through their money and constantly fear that the bills are either marked or equipped with an ink bomb.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” Alex said. “Hide it here, take a few days to think about it and then come back. Either we’re going to read it and store it away, or keep it until the legend spreads and sell it for much more than you paid for it.”

  And that decided it. They hid the book beneath an old writing desk and, despite the fact that they usually spent two hours or more on their meetings, they shut the lamp off less than forty minutes after they had arrived.

  They stepped back out into a night that felt heavier with the weight of the decision to be made. Alex returned the basement key to the garden shed and then they pulled away from the library, pretending that the night didn’t seem darker than usual.

  **

  The next morning, Alex woke up feeling groggy. He felt as if he had a hangover although he had not had a drink in almost a week. Outside his window, a bird was chirping in a lively manner to any other birds that might be listening. As Alex sat up in bed and wiped the last remnants of sleep away from his eyes, he noticed an itch on his right arm. He scratched absently at it at first, but then he looked down and saw what was there.

  There was a phrase scrawled on his arm, written out in a handwriting that was not his own. Not only that, it looked as if the writing had been there for a long time, almost like a faded tattoo that the owner had regretted very soon after having it put there. The phrase made no sense to him and that bothered him almost as much as the fact that he had no idea how it had gotten there. He rubbed at it, but it didn’t smear. And the more he looked at it, the more intense the itch became.

  The bird outside his window continued to sing, willing him to get out of bed and get to work. Still scratching at the phrase on his arm, Alex started to feel a cold spike in his gut. He looked at the writing on his arm and remembered a friend of his in college that had gotten a tattoo of Yosemite Sam while stinking drunk and had barely been able to remember the trip to the tattoo parlor.

  Confused and growing a bit frightened, Alex got into the shower and scrubbed furiously at the phrase. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the six words on his arm did not go away. In fact, the harder he tried to clean it, the worse the itch became.

  Out of the shower, Alex got a cotton swab and soaked it in rubbing alcohol. He rubbed at the writing but this did nothing but irritate the itch even worse. Frustrated and afraid, Alex threw the bottle of alcohol across the bathroom where it bounced from the wall and spilled to the floor.

  “Damn,” he said, and bent down to clean the mess up.

  Behind him, the bird at his window continued to sing. The noise was pleasant enough, but it irritated the hell out of Alex as the smell of spilled rubbing alcohol filled his head. He peered back into his bedroom and saw that the bird was actually hopping about and singing on the window’s small ledge. Alex almost expected it to tap out some sort of message on the glass…perhaps the inane phrase on his arm.

  Alex turned away from the jubilant bird and finished up cleaning the spill. As he stopped to scratch at the mysterious words on his arm, he actually read them aloud for the first time. He’d looked at the words a hundred times in the twenty minutes he’d been awake and read them silently to himself each time. But this was the first time he had spoken the words aloud.

  Strangely, it felt good. Even more peculiar, the itching came to a sudden stop. Rubbing at the spot on his arm, Alex saw that the words were fading away slowly, dissolving harmlessly into his skin. He watched the words disappear in amazement and then, on shaky legs, stood up and walked into his bedroom. He felt a bit dizzy and as he made his way back into his room, the sound of his voice speaking those words seemed to bounce around in his head.

  As he approached his closet to get out the day’s clothes, he noticed the silence of the room. It took him only a moment to realize that everything seemed so quiet because the bird had finally stopped singing. Alex grinned, glad that the little nuisance had decided to fly away. Yet when he looked to the window where it had been hopping and singing, he saw that it was still there.

  The bird hadn’t flown away. It was leaning against the glass, not moving. The bird was dead.

  **

  Alex had never had a soft spot for animals, but he kept thinking about the bird for the entire morning. He thought about the unfortunate creature as often as he tried to rationalize the appearance and sudden disappearance of the phrase on his arm. It really wasn’t such a sudden thing, though, he told himself. It was there when you woke up and it went away when you read it out loud.

  And as staggering as that whole episode had been, he found himself testing it out throughout the day. When he was at work, sitting behind his desk during a two hour break between classes, he peered out of his window and watched two squirrels running back and forth between the student commons and the park. Alex spoke that phrase again and waited for the squirrels to stop dead in their tracks. When it didn’t work, Alex wasn’t really surprised. He watched the squirrels at play for a bit longer and the mix of relief and disappointment made his head hurt. He had somehow known that the words would be meaningless because they weren’t on his skin anymore. He didn�
�t know how he knew this, but he did.

  He thought about faking sick, posting a notice on the door to his two and four o’ clock classes and going home. He tried to block it all out—the words that had been on his arm and the fate of the bird at his window—but it would not go away. No matter how badly he wanted to believe that it had been some vivid dream, his skin still seemed to crawl with the itch of the words.

  As he waited for his next class to begin, he continued working on a speech he had to give at a horror convention over the weekend concerning the sudden resurgence of vampire folklore. He hated speaking in front of people, so he wanted to make sure he got the speech exactly right. It was something that should have only taken a few hours at the most, but he had been obsessing over it for almost two weeks now, editing and revising the ten page speech numerous times.

  For a while, the nervousness of the upcoming speech preoccupied him enough so that he nearly forgot about the morning’s weirdness for a whole ten minutes. This might have lasted longer if the phone had not rung and broken his concentration.

  He answered the phone on the first ring because it had startled him a bit and he didn’t want to hear the absurdly loud ringing again. “Hello,” he said with a slight waver in his voice.

  “Alex, we might have a problem.” It was Theo’s voice on the other end and he sounded very tired.

  “What do you mean? Theo, are you okay?”

  There was a brief pause and then Theo finally answered, “I don’t know. But this whole thing with the book…I think we need to get rid of it.” He was talking fast and although Alex wasn’t sure, he thought he heard a subtle hint of physical pain in his friend’s voice.

  “Slow down,” Alex said. “What problem are you talking about?”

  He clearly heard a tremor in Theo’s voice now and Alex was instantly afraid again. He thought of the phrase that had been written on his arm, the dead bird and the way the book had made them feel last night as they had first opened it.