The Black Book

Jeremy never thought to go to the library except in the fall. The squat stone building that housed the library was close to his house, just two blocks down Walnut, three blocks on Prince. But, summers were for tree forts and bottle rockets, winter was for sledding, and Jeremy spent every spring hunting tadpoles, salamanders, and every other living thing that swam, slithered, or crawled. Autumn was for books, and one day in mid-October the sun’s rays would slant just so between the houses, the leaves would rustle like turning pages, and he would jump on his bike and race through accumulating drifts of brown and red leaves to the library. 

Ms. Bellwether was pushing an empty book cart back to her desk near the front door when he walked in.

“Good afternoon, Jeremy,” she said in her soft voice.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Bellwether.” Ms. Bellwether lived six houses down from Jeremy. She seemed old to him, though she was likely no more than fifty, her dark hair streaked with silver but her face still quite smooth. She wore yellow horn-rimmed glasses and always dressed in blue. Today it was a long navy dress, and a lighter blue sweater. 

Books on dinosaurs were in the 500s section, the first aisle on the right, and that was where he headed. He ran his finger along the books, fingertips tapping the spines as if feeling out the one he wanted, while his eyes rose and fell to scan the shelves above and below. He picked a large book with illustrations, and headed to the back of the library where he knew there was a well-worn chair tucked into the corner. 

As he passed the last aisle, the 100s aisle, he stopped. He would later wonder why the book caught his eye, why it pulled him so irresistibly. He was reminded of beach trips with his parents, walking along the shore and spotting a single shell out of the millions spread across the sand. A single, black shell.

It was sitting proud of the books on either side by a thumb’s width. Maybe that was why he noticed it. He pulled it off the shelf. It was a small book, smaller than the paperbacks on the spinning circular racks at the front of the library, and thinner. The binding was leather, which was odd. All of its neighbors on the shelf were board bound, dust jackets removed. It was a deep, inky black, perfectly unblemished, which also set it apart from the other books, which were worn at the corners, coffee rings on the covers. 

Tucking it under the dinosaur book, Jeremy went to his reading spot. The old chair released a soft, dusty sigh as he sat. He opened the book on top to a random page in the middle, and began pouring over the illustrations of an ankylosaur, hunched down on its forelimbs, club tail frozen mid-swing, battling an invisible foe. After a few minutes, however, he realized that his eyes were not registering anything on the page. He was scanning the pictures, but his attention was focused on the little black book beneath, resting on his lap. It felt… warm.

He shut the ankylosaur away with a clap, and pulled the black book to the top. It was so dark. It seemed like it should be glossy, but it wasn’t. There was no reflection at all of the overhead lights. The book was a flat black, despite the smooth surface, a deep black, as though it were resting at the bottom of a well. 

“Jeremy?” 

Jeremy jumped so hard the books almost slid from his lap. Ms. Bellwether was standing over him, her hands clasped across her belly.

“It’s time for me to close up, dear.” She gave him a small, kind smile. 

Jeremy stared at her, not understanding. 

“Are you closing early today?” he asked, perplexed.

Perplexity can be contagious, it seemed, and Ms. Bellwether’s eyebrows furrowed an echo to Jeremy’s own. 

“It’s five o’clock, dear. Time to go home.” She gave a little laugh and turned away. As she went she added, “I always love to see someone lost in a book.”

______________________

Jeremy dropped his bike in the front yard, yelled a greeting to his mom on his way in, and ran upstairs to his room. He pulled the two books out of his backpack and set them on his desk, the little black book on top. He found himself inexplicably reluctant to open it, so he did his homework instead. 

There was a large poster above the desk, an enormous butterfly composed of gears and pistons and other machine parts. A model rocket ship swung from fishing line overhead. There was a plastic T-rex, mouth gaping over a spaceman figurine. An orange balloon, the helium half leaked, wandered the room like a lost spirit. Colored pencils covered half the desk, and clothes blanketed much of the room, hanging from his chair and his bed. 

Normally when he was in his room, surrounded by his clutter, Jeremy felt like the center of it all. He had never noticed this feeling until, halfway through his math homework, he noticed its absence. The black book stood out in the colorful mess surrounding it, a dark and foreign presence, the gravitational center of it all, a black hole around which the bright, colorful galaxy of his room orbited. 

From downstairs, his mother called him to dinner.

It was just the two of them, Jeremy and his mother, at the dinner table. Jeremy ate his meatloaf in silence. His mother kept glancing at the front door. When he was finished and his plate was washed, he kissed his mother on the cheek and went upstairs.

“Don’t read too late, dear. It’s a school night.”

The sky outside his bedroom window was purpling toward night. He turned on his desk lamp as he sat down, and took the little black book in his hands. He opened it to a random page near the middle. It was blank. He flipped through the pages toward the title page. Unmarked white flashed by. There was no text at all, right to the front cover. His thumb was still stuck in the middle where he started, so he turned to the next page, thinking to flip all the way through to the end of this weird, blank book.

There was text. Starting at the top corner of the next page. The hairs on Jeremy’s forearm stood up as he read the first words. 

Mr. Throndsen…

Throndsen was his last name. Mr. Throndsen was his dad, or Jeremy himself when his math teacher was angry with him. He had never met, never even heard of someone with the same last name, and here it was, the second word in this strange book. He continued reading.

Mr. Throndsen fumbled for his keys as he stood swaying beside his car. It was getting dark, the temperature was dropping, and he could see his breath lit red by the neon. Finally he got the door open and collapsed into the driver seat of his Plymouth.

Jeremy stopped again. His father drove a Plymouth. His heart beating faster now, he scanned the text, alighting on a paragraph on the next page.

The world flowed past his window as he drove, the light swirling in eddies, the trees and signs along the road doubling and tripling. Both hands grasped the steering wheel hard, holding to the center of the lane, or where he thought the center should be. The window was cracked to let the cold air hit his face, which was nice. But the radio was off, and it was too silent. He reached for the radio dial, but when his hand came off the wheel the car swerved left. He snatched his right hand back to the wheel, pulled the car back, too far. There was a sharp thump as the front tire went over the curb, and then there was a dark figure in the headlights, a human shape, and a sharper, louder thump as it struck and spun away from the corner of the bumper. 

He closed the book. His heart hammered inside his chest. What was this? He again opened the book to the inside of the front cover. There was no title, no publisher, no author. He opened it to the back cover and found the endpaper blank as well, save for the barcode sticker Ms. Bellwether had scanned when he checked it out. 

Jeremy did not want to read any more. He stared at the dark cover. He imagined the letters trapped in between the covers, scurrying around on the white pages like little black insects, creeping on spindly legs right to the edges of the page, ready to spill out into the world when he opened it. 

Filling his cheeks, he blew out a long, slightly shaky sigh. He cracked the book, flipping to a few pages after… after where he had stopped. He started mid-paragraph and mid-sentence.

…just five blocks from his house! He banged his hands on the steering wheel, furious at his own stupidity. The adrenaline had washed away the blur, and his vision was now infuriatingly clear. He rubbed his face, hard, and then slapped himself on the cheek. Once, twice… the third slap fell across his upper jaw and set his ears ringing as he pulled into the driveway.

Headlights flashed outside Jeremy’s window and he heard the unmistakable squeal of his father’s brakes. He slammed the book shut and threw it under his bed.

Ear pressed against the inside of his door, he listened as his father came inside. The storm door creaked, the front door closed, the hall closet opened to receive the long gray overcoat. There were voices, muffled. They seemed to be angry, but Jeremy couldn’t be sure, the sounds were too muted by carpet and wood. He put his hand on the doorknob to open the door in order to hear, but as he did, he heard the bottom stair creak.

He jumped up and hurried back to his desk, turning the lamp down to point directly at the dinosaur book. He did not want the light on his face, but he didn’t know why. 

The door opened. With the hallway light on behind him, his father was a black silhouette. 

“Hey champ. What’re you doing?”

“I just finished reading. I’m about to go to bed.”

“Alright.” His father made to step into the room, seemed to change his mind, and stepped back. “Alright,” he repeated, “don’t forget to brush. Have a good night, bud.”

“Thanks, dad. You too.”

In the dark, under his covers, Jeremy could not tell when his eyes were open and when they were closed. He should take the little black book downstairs to show his mom. He should have never opened it. He should burn it. When he finally slept, he dreamed that he could hear deep, rhythmic breathing under his bed. 

____________________

At school the next day, sitting at his desk under harsh fluorescent lights with the clock ticking on the wall, it all seemed like a dream. Surreal, dark images circled in his mind: an impossibly dark book, scuttling insects, his father’s silhouette swaying slightly in the white rectangle of his doorway.

When he got home from school, he passed his mother on her way out the door. 

“We’re having leftovers tonight, honey. Just heat yourself up some when you’re hungry. Your father left work early to get his oil changed, he should be back soon. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

Jeremy muttered a reply as he brushed past her and took the stairs two at a time to his room. He needed to get to the library. To return the black book, if nothing else. 

When he pulled the black book out from under the bed and laid it on his matted rug, it looked like he had torn off a rectangular piece of the bed’s shadow, a dark hole sitting in the bright square of sunlight pouring in from the window. He stuffed it into his backpack and ran back downstairs. Outside, his mother sat in the driver seat of her car, watching as her son jumped from the top step to the ground, swung his bike up to standing, and tore off down the sidewalk toward town. 

In front of the library, Jeremy stared at the dark windows, still seated on his bike and leaning on one leg. There were posters in the windows, illustrations of the covers of classic books. Gone With the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, The Scarlet Letter. Behind them, the library was dark. Jeremy put down the kickstand and walked to the door. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass and used his hand to shield his eyes, gazing into the murky stacks. There was no movement. He kicked the door gently with his toe and swore. He’d hoped Ms. Bellwether might be able to help, offer some insight into the black book. No one else in town knew more about books, surely. 

Frustrated, Jeremy walked to the side of the building where there was a little square of grass canopied by a large oak tree, resplendent with orange leaves and loaded with fat acorns that would occasionally fall and strike the single picnic table beneath it with a loud THOK. Not wanting to risk catching one of those to the head, he sat on the ground with his back against the cold stone wall of the library. He pulled the black book out of his bag and slowly, reluctantly, turned to the page where the text started, determined to read it through to the end. 

There was mercifully little detail about the accident, but it was still terrible: a leg sticking out from under the passenger side corner of the bumper, headlights shining onto a spray of bright blood on the low retaining wall running along the sidewalk, ruby droplets dripping onto the stones below. 

His stomach heaved as he read how Mr. Throndsen crept out of the house early the next morning, filled a bucket with soapy water, grabbed a rag, and proceeded to wipe down the corner of the car. When he read that there was a bloody clump of long black hair stuck in the crack of the hood, Jeremy rolled onto hands and knees and vomited yellow bile into the grass.

He read how Mr. Throndsen told his wife that he would be leaving work early to get an oil change, but replaced a cracked headlight cover instead. Jeremy was sweating, his heart racing, quivering hands shaking the book so badly that he could barely read. He could feel the timeline of the book careening toward his own, a huge black locomotive bearing down on him, about to smash him into the tracks. 

He thumbed to the next page. He was nearing the end.

There was no one there when Mr. Throndsen got home. He got out of the car and walked around to the front, examining the bumper and hood. The new headlight cover stood out compared to the fogged and scratched cover on the driver side. He resolved to replace the other one tomorrow. Other than that, there was no sign other than a dent, no bigger than a cupped palm, just on the edge of the hood. 

Content that the car was in satisfactory condition, he turned his attention to the lawn, which needed raking. Normally he would have Jeremy do it… [Jeremy froze. It was the first time his name had appeared. His breathing stopped, but his heart continued hammering. The locomotive was right on top of him now] … Jeremy do it, but it was a crisp fall day, there was a faint smell of smoke in the air, and the adrenaline of the last twenty-four hours had not yet worn off. He went to the garage to fetch the rake. 

Mr. Throndsen had not been raking for very long when a car pulled into the driveway. He turned, expecting his wife, but saw a police patrol car instead.

Jeremy slammed the book shut, stuffed it into his bag, ran to his bike and pedaled hard for home. Dead leaves slipped under his tires. Cold wind whistled in his ears. There was the smell of smoke in the air. 

The hedge along their yard blocked his view until he was there, jumping from his bike while it was still rolling, running into the yard to stop dead, stunned, gasping for breath.

The police car rolled backwards out of the driveway. The officer in the front glanced disinterestedly at the boy staring wide-eyed at him. In the back seat, Jeremy caught a glimpse of his father’s face, pale and expressionless. He was turned toward his son, but his large glasses caught the light, turning them into two eyeless white circles. Jeremy stared down the street long after the police car had turned out of sight. Then, because once a story is started it needs to be finished, he pulled out the little black book and opened it to the very end. 

Jeremy stood in the slanting afternoon sun, alone and unsure. His father was gone. His mother would be home soon, and he would have to tell her. He looked down. Half the yard was covered in a blanket of leaves, the other half was grass. A few hardy dandelions still stood along the driveway, their seeds long ago blown away. In the middle of the yard sat a small leaf pile, raked together by his father just before he’d been taken away. Not knowing what else to do, Jeremy picked up the rake and began to finish the job.

The words stopped halfway through the last page. There was no “The End.” Jeremy closed the book and held it limply at his side, staring at the rake resting across the pile of leaves in the middle of the yard.