Our friar picked up the book – though he continued to think of it as a sheaf of parchment, a strange, even wondrous, manuscript, we know it’s a book, don’t we? – and turned it round in birdlike hands. His only recourse was to study the text further.
“Étudier et trouver la réponse; trouver le salut,” Brother Leon had told him, before he locked him in the dungeon room: Study and find the answer; find salvation.
The friar puzzled over Brother Leon’s edict. Salvation? Salvation was in Christ, whose story was told in scripture, the transcription of which the friar had dedicated his life to. Surely, this strange text couldn’t hold the answer to salvation.
For one thing, most of the people described in the text had died. One poor soul, an unregenerate drunk, had burned to death in a fire; another, the doctor who was a fount of knowledge to Alabama Zack, had met a violent death carried out by strange magic the friar could not fathom; and one man, described only as ‘the man in the brown suit,’ had seemed to perish twice in the telling!
Two of Zack’s friends – Cork McGraw and Cork’s maid Matilda – were each lost in their own way: Cork, drowning in vengeance, had been responsible for the drunk’s death; and Matilda was adrift in passion too, pining for Zack, who had abandoned her.
The friar supposed, though the text did not cast this stone, that Zack had abandoned them all. Though he had realized this strange, ‘dimension-jumping’ power, he had gone in search of peace instead of using his power to save them.
The friar stopped turning the book. There was much in the text he did not understand, but a paradox presented itself as the possible riddle for Brother Leon’s order: the doctor, who had been killed midway through the telling, had somehow been alive at the abrupt end of the text. How had this apparent resurrection occurred? Had he missed something, some kernel of truth, some article of faith, that was the answer Brother Leon had intimated?
He turned to the last sheet of the manuscript. Oui, here was the doctor, alive and well, speaking to Alabama Zack:
“That room sounds like a receiver; the inky black cloud is a strong indicator of that. A receiver picks up strays from other dimensions, and those who have slipped out of their home dimensions without clearly holding their destination in mind. A receiver can be a dangerous thing, unless someone is policing it well.”
“The Claytons kill everything that comes out of that room,” Zack said.
Bien sûr, the Claytons, the friar remembered. Hadn’t they killed the doctor, earlier in the telling? He flipped back through the sheets, but as he did the torchlight in his room was suddenly extinguished. He found himself in darkness deeper than any he had experienced. He froze in fear.
From what seemed like a vast distance, a sound like a thousand mallets banging at once reverberated.
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Base image from Pixabay, by geralt: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/