Blood Upon The Pages

There was a shuffle of a few pairs of feet as the remaining people left. The old, mahogany coloured door pulled it’s heavy body into the doorway, the protruding metal lock slowly sliding into place with a quiet, greasy thud. A large golden plaque hammered into the crumbling beige slabs outside signified that the birthdate of this place dated far back to almost two hundred years ago. The swift click of a light switch, one for the back of the room, and one for the front. The lights paused a minute, deciding whether or not to leave, before making a humble departure and flickering off with a quiet hum of year-old cables. Swift thuds made by the shoes of the bookkeepers; final twist of the brass handle before a long key was turned in the slim, chipped keyhole, and, finally, silence. Nothing. Not a rustle of paper nor a scrape of a chair. Only the moonlight managed to stream through the blue hued clouds, gently stroking the dark pine floors. Some managed to fall upon the shelves at the back of the room, many of which remained in solitude - untouched for years. The cold light illuminated several glistening covers, bands of old silver and brass peering through the gathering dust like little steel buttons on a stiff sailor jacket. The curling tails of words, drawn on in painstakingly sheer silver and gold paint also shone slightly, few actually managing to spell out a title: ‘Ancient Egypt - How Egyptians Changed Evolution’, ‘A Woman Betrayed: Anne Boleyn’, ‘Gold, Blue, Scarab: Ancient Egypt’ and a few more. Yet it was evident that all of these were books of history, tales of the first, the dead, and the soon-to-be-forgotten, their stories only kept alive by the tales written about them, fading portraits painted and stone drawings carved. Over time, people had lost interest in history - they preferred to focus on the future, not the past. And with it, they’d forgotten the importance of the past and what it holds for us, how much it can change. How many answers it could hold for preventing history from repeating itself. 

A quiet patter could be heard somewhere. The silence and abandoned feeling of the room was suddenly interrupted by movement of something, someone, someone living. In a place that rests like a corpse at night, life was not a common thing. Even during the day, when a couple students who didn’t have access to the internet, or others with a taste for antique objects and ancient horror folk tales, it was like nothing breathed. There was no body that inhaled and exhaled, no blood coursing through the corridors and aisles that spread through the room like veins, no one that needed the scripture written by people thousands of years beforehand but one. The pattering moved to a corner of the ceiling, as if there was someone up there. Then there was a shifting and the dry crackle of dust and dry white paint as it fell to the floor. There was now a square in the ceiling, a large, black square, clearly one that the bookkeepers hadn’t known about. There was no more pattering for a moment, until suddenly there was movement in the square, and a foot emerged. A pale, white foot, light purple veins spindling up the ankles and up the bony, slim legs. And after the legs, the tattered and worn out hem of a dress, possibly a deep navy long ago but now looking more like it was stained with chalk. A person descended, having somehow made a successful jump down from a hidden space in the ceiling to the hardwood floor 10 metres below. A little girl, seemingly no older than ten, with a frail little figure, deep brown hair past her waist and no taller than about 5 foot. But though her face held all the innocence and purity of a young, clueless child, her eyes seemed to hold all the anguish, anger and exasperation the world ever faced. Eyes the colour of an ocean on it’s stormiest night, with the little specks of colour in the iris little boats fighting for survival among the surging waters and starving waves. Her face was pale too, and her lips were dry, yet somehow she did not look unkempt - rather the opposite. Her hair was smooth, straight and silky, her skin so pristine and dewy, and even her dress, which looked rather faded and worn, also had some sort of smartness to it, as if she’d washed and ironed it daily. It was her lashes that made staring her into the eyes such an uneasy task; thick, black, long tendrils, curling at the edges and accentuating those fury-filled eyes. The very hue of the blue seemed to swirl inside, twisting and turning until your soul was dragged along with it and hurled into the big blue mess that was the world. 

Barefoot, she pattered over to the untouched row of shelves, segregated in the far corner of the room behind the dozens of more attractive looking, flimsy paperback covers of horror and fiction and fairytale. She made no sound as she walked, almost as if she wasn’t there, but the places where her nimble white feet stepped, footprints of dust were left behind - seemingly the same dust that lay on the jackets of those history books at the back. She finally arrived at the aisle, and paused before it. A quiet sigh left her parted lips; a cloud of silver vapour, the kind you make during winter, escaped her mouth. And then she walked, slowly and almost proudly, three fingers of her hand gliding down the dark spines as they quivered and trembled under her soft fingertips. 

“You.” She whispered. “At last.” 

The pages inside began to shiver inside their jackets, as if her very breath swept a harsh winter wind amongst them. Then she paused in front of one. Her head turned to it slowly, as if she’d known it was there without ever having to look.

“Oh, Anne. You poor soul.” She smiled pitifully at the book, ribbons of pale blue running circles in her glowing iris. 

Then she turned back, head tilted and eyes falling to her hand which she’d raised up, fingers open and clenched. Her head began to twitch quickly to the right, short, swift movements. Her eyes seemed to penetrate her skin, and then something began to grow out of it. The purplish veins began to rip through her skin, like roots cutting through wet ground, and extending outwards. They curled up, strumming themselves together into one thick plait, until smaller veins wrenched themselves out from the plait and knotted themselves together into a large, tight web of root-like vein and skin. Then she slid her other hand over it and the web seemed to smooth over, veins leveling out until they resembled the thick, dusty pages of a book: 

“And she watched as the beloved to her King Henry stared into the lustful eyes of Seymour. Her fingers traced the sharp keyhole, a-trembling as tears slid down her face, shining with pain and the unwanted joy of finding out. Secretly, she’d given in.” 

Her voice was dry and quiet, as she read the top of the page as if to a silent audience in front of her. 

“Oh Anne. Why did you give in darling?"

She sounded strikingly mature for someone who looked only 10, stripped of that childlike lisp and innocent unsureness that someone would expect for her to have. 

“You poor, poor girl. You didn’t deserve it. You’d loved him, I know you did, and he used you. Chewed you up and spat you out onto the chopping block as soon as you gave birth to her. Yet he didn’t know that you were pregnant at the time - you didn’t know yourself, it was too early to. But you were. A little boy, a mere pea of a person. And yet fate was against you, since you’d married...him.”

Her words were harsh, bitter, resentful. The books began to rattle against each other in their shelves, creating some uproar that seemed to echo Anne’s cries. Her hand twitched once more and the veins shrunk back inside the hand; she glanced at it admiringly. 

“My poor, forgotten little ones.” 

She traced her hand among the covers, and with each new one her arms flexed as if filled with energy. Her head rolled back and her eyes filled with light blue, lined with clear, salty tears. 

“Poor, forgotten ones, ones who helped shape our world and build the place that these beings live in today.” 

She stopped at another book. 

“‘Tales of Bravery and Loyalty: World War 2.’ And where has that undying loyalty gotten them now? Where are the memories of those who walked out into the field, knowing they were walking like lambs to the slaughter, if not shoved away into hated school notes and writings. How they swore to never repeat all that again. And at where they are now.” She let out a sour chuckle. “Always fighting, always hating, snarling and clawing at one another like starved, vicious dogs. And it always leads them to the same thing: war. How many answers you hold.” She said, gesturing at the books. “Or should I say, how many I hold.”

The pages chittered in agreeance, edges crumpling against one another.

“You need remembrance. You need for those miserable creatures to come back and learn and read. They cannot forget that history holds all the answers for the future. But I fear that they have forgotten - quite evidently shown in the absolute lack of interest in this part. But they will learn, because if they will not remember themselves, then they will just have to be reminded. Fate will take it’s course and not be interrupted, no matter how cruel and spiteful it may be, it will remind them. You need it to survive.”

She spoke the last words softly, gently stroking the silken spine of a dark green book as it purred under her fingers.

“And if memories will not suffice, then you will have blood. Fate will take it from them, cut it from their heart and drain it from their veins until it spills across these floors and soaks into the wood like wine. No one can forget you, because you are a part of them, embedded whether they like it or not, attached no matter how fast and how far they try to run. And we shall wait, here, in these shelves, in this room, in this two hundred year old building of worn brick and cement. Because history can never be erased.”

And then her slim white figure melded into their coarse white bodies, and she was gone. Reunited with herself. History with history. Until the blood shall spill.