Immersion in dream worlds eventually began to mar Michael's academic performance. His sleep had not suffered--he'd never slept so long and well--but challenging himself to warp reality further and further was distraction. Sometimes he would pick a certain theme, such as the sea, graveyards, insects, or factories, and attempt to mutate his surroundings to suit the theme. It was difficult to focus on a professor's words while a starfish clutched her face and sharks casually nibbled the flesh from her arms.
When he received his grades for the semester and saw several unprecedented B's, he realized that he had gone too far. He would be able to retain the skill of lucid dreaming, but this reality morphing must be restrained. The time for a new chapter in his journey of Gothic self-discovery had come.
He felt at a loss for weeks: he hadn't yet finished distorting the waking world. No new passion arose. His life became a mundane struggle to suppress the habit of unraveling sights and sounds, and to instead focus on his studies. He absorbed the material and resumed his excellent performance, but his inner existence went flat.
It was only by luck that he passed a mobile blood donation center while crossing campus one day. Michael had never donated blood before, but he boarded the vehicle at once. He trembled with excitement as he watched the steady crimson stream travel out of his body and into a plastic bag, and had to reassure the attendant that he did not feel faint. Precious blood! How had he not thought of something so simple? He needed to explore it at once -- but how?
It seemed vulgar to engage in cutting. He tried to watch a gory film, but found it distastefully lurid. After the experience with Charlotte, he certainly did not want to harm any animals. Obviously menstrual blood was not the same. He had already experienced violent descriptions in novels. And yet, he ultimately found the solution in literature.
It began when he asked himself, "Has any author ever written in blood?" He found not only that they had done, but also that human skin had been used as parchment; it even had a special name: anthropodermic bibliopegy. The more Michael read and saw, the more horrified he became, eyes wide and breath coming quick. Delight also filled him, for he felt he had reached a level of darkness and derangement nonexistent in his previous explorations.
Roughly 50 volumes around the world had been confirmed by modern techniques as anthropodermic. If Michael wished to lay hands on one of these rare volumes, he would not need travel outside the country. The John Hay Library in Rhode Island, for example, contained at least four: On the Structure of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife by Adolphe Belot, and two copies of Dance of Death by Hans Holbein. More could be found at Harvard University and various other places.
He laughed when he read of volumes that proclaimed themselves bound in human skin, only for peptide mass fingerprinting to expose them as animal skin. One such famous example, Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias Hispaniæ by Juan Gutiérrez , claimed, "the bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632." In reality, the binding turned out to be sheepskin.
Still, most of the images and descriptions he encountered deeply disturbed him. He required regular breaks. At one point, he felt on the verge of vomiting. Des destinées de l’ame by Arsène Houssaye read, "This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman." Apparently it had been harvested from a deceased mental patient under the care of his friend Dr. Ludovic Bouland; doctors' work of this sort seemed common in anthropodermic bibliopegy. On looking at a photograph, Michael saw that indeed the blotchy, tan cover was covered with the tiny bumps of human skin.
Justine et Juliette by Marquis de Sade claimed to be bound in skin from female breasts, but this was unconfirmed. Michael was struck, not for the first time, by the strange association that is occasionally but consistently created between the morbid and sexual. He was not ready to explore this further, and in any case, his own internal world provided quite enough entertainment and growth.
Some of the purported anthropodermic covers were created from voluntarily given skin, such as that of Terres du Ciel, by Camille Flammarion, donated by a French countess who died of tuberculosis. An inscription on the cover read, “Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish / Binding in human skin (woman) 1882.” This did little to lessen the horror Michael felt. He imagined the gory details: the painful death, the careful cutting away of skin from the wet flesh of the back, the cleaning and tanning. Human skin! He could not understand the level of detachment or perversion required to create such a book.
Michael felt he had reached the source, the incarnadine heart of his fixation since childhood, when he laid eyes on the aforementioned Dance of Death. He learned that the "Danse Macabre" was an entire movement that embraced the inevitability of death for all. Fear of death: the greatest reason for a love of fear, a mockery of death, or...a Gothic self-exploration? Perhaps this would be the ultimate step, one that might lead him to some kind of answer or satisfaction. So, bloodwriting unexplored, he descended deeper.
More?
A Book by Its Cover: The strange history of books bound in human skin.
