I'm Raina Wallace, and I had a dream.
I had a dream about being seated in a book lined room, with other people. A ghostly woman appeared, tried to tell us something - the word Paris was in there - and vanished, drawn into the fireplace by weird tentacles. Which is all kind of standard for a dream. Except, the next day I saw someone - someone I had seen in the dream. In fact, I met everyone that had been in the dream, that next day. Everyone was in Cleveland, like me.
I don't mean "Hey, you kind of remind me of someone..." it was more like a lightning bolt this is the man from the dream. We all felt it. It was real. A connection. These were people I never would have met, otherwise (let alone hang around with - half of them were big thugs). And so we decided the room must also exist.
Meanwhile some lady in a sort of Ren-faire outfit came after a couple of the men with a knife or sword or something. I wasn't there. But I did see a guy in black sort of scoping us out, outside the library. That's where the room was, we decided; in the Cleveland Public Library.
Together we reserved the White room in the Cleveland public library - the room. And when we got there, it looked exactly like our dream. There were the chairs. There were the books. There was the huge fireplace. And there were mirrors in the ceiling - strange mirrors, in which each of us could see ourselves, and no one else. (Beat that one, Copperfield.) Yeah, it was out-of-my-comfort-zone-freaky. I have to admit I didn't notice the mirrors myself - Carlos (?) did, fixing his tie. What I noticed was the book. There was a book, on a pedestal, written in a language I didn't recongize at all, and definitely couldn't understand. It had Tolkein-esque sketches of landscapes. Those sketches... well, let's just say I was intrigued. Another connection. But Sid (?) wasn't intrigued - he was just freaked out, and so he opened the door to leave. And bam, there was that Ren-faire lady with the knife.
She flat-out stabbed him in the gut. (He wasn't one of the brawny thugs, and who expects to get stabbed in the library anyway?) He went down. The others charged at the woman. I screamed like a girl. Ralph charged at the woman, Weedy grabbed the fire poker, but Rex hit at her with the whole iron rack. She went down, too. So, Ren-fest, Sid and Jack all ended up going to Metro hospital. We slunk out, dazed and confused, and end up reconnoitering in a restaurant.
Over a late brunch I discover Weedy took the Book and slid it into his book bag. This annoyed me to pieces, since it was a who-knows-how-rare-and-expensive library book. But since it was there, I stared at it some more. Finally I figured out that the first page wasn't in the strange curved script; it was just a substitution cipher - and a riddle.
My life can be measured in hours
I live by being devoured
Thin I am fast, Fat I am slow
The wind is always my foe
~yawruoythgitotemesu~The first part is a candle. I knew enough to recognize that one. The second part was written backwards, which I am sad to say, I didn't figure out. But someone else did. Carlos somehow noticed a candle in the mirror. This would have freaked me out more if I had been paying attention at the time. Apparently when he grasped where the reflected candle should have been, it was actually there. And Weedy was paging through the book and found that the last page, the most recent page, held a sketch that looked exactly like the library room - the White room - where the book was held. Except, it had been sketched as if it were inverted, seen through one of the mirrors. We knew we had to go back and puzzle this out. We felt we would need to go back to the room and check it out, since we had the candle. But the room was crawling with guards and Police tape, now.
Carlos gave the guard a $50, and he let us in for 15 minutes. I thought that only worked on TV, but then again, this whole thing has been really surreal.(And definitely worth cutting a few classes over, talk about novel-fodder. But would anyone even believe it if this was set in Cleveland? Cleveland is so pedantic!) We took the book, and the candle, and Weedy lit the candle, which did nothing. Someone got the idea to hold the book up to the mirror, since it had that mirror-version of the room in it.
Something happened. There was a page, in the book, and I saw it in the mirror, and also... outside the book. Outside the mirror. No, inside the mirror, outside the book. And inside the book, outside the... it didn't make sense. Something warped, something expanded, something bent around in a way that didn't make sense. It... it was inside the book and yet it filled my vision and the mirror I couldn't look away. I felt like I fell into it. I don't know if I really felt right after that. I can't explain it, and it sounds extremely silly to write about it like this, and thinking about it makes me sick, like trying to comprehend eternity. Eventually someone turned the page and changed the image. No one else seemed shaken, except maybe Ralph.
We put the book back on the pedestal, by the candle, and another block of text shimmered into coherence.
With thieves I consort, With the vilest, in short, I'm quite at ease in depravity; Yet all divines use me, And savants can't lose me, For I am the center of gravity.We knew this had to be the letter V, but we didn't know what that actually meant to us. Fifteen short minutes of wandering around in the library, and Weedy started tearing random books off the shelf. One turned out to have a huge V on the cover - Unseen History of the Western Reserve by Agnes Violet. A slip of paper fell out. Good enough for us. He pocketed the books (I grabbed the candle) and we left in a hurry.
The slip held an address: 2800 River Rd.
And a phrase:
la cloche des couches du soleil perdusOur high-school French lessons collectively failed us, so we sat on that phrase for awhile - first we went to find this address. It was Squire's Castle.
We all managed to get there, in Rex's shiny Mustang.
There happened to be some sort of legend of the ghost of Squire's wife haunting the place, so a bunch of Goths were hanging around. We asked them to translate the French. They said it meant "The Bell of Lost Sunsets". Of course, that is why it was exactly the sort of darkly-romantic thing they could translate without batting an eye. Everyone decided to leave and chase the legend of the bell, as explained in the Unseen book, somewhere else, which annoyed me, and was fruitless, but I didn't want to be left behind. Eventually we came back to Squire's Castle.
The Goths (I didn't catch anyone's name, except Clockwork.) were inside smoking all sorts of things. I sat down and ignored them, to look at the books some more. One of them came over and we had a nice enough time investigating the books. Until the sun went down and an unnatural chill came up, exactly like you always hope and dread you will find. A real ghostly chill, along with a ghost. She appeared in the midst of everyone, in front of Clockwork, and then went down the hall to the empty trophy room. At this point I was more interested in the mystery and had given up on being afraid of things like this. Carlos and I ran after her. She was gone, leaving a frosty spot on the floor, which Weedy breathed all over for some reason, probably because he was higher than a kite. But other than that it seemed to be an empty room.
About this point we heard some yelling outside. We ran outside to find Rex and Ralph and the guy in black - the man who had been eyeing us outside the library. The guy in black had a sword. You know, at this point it shouldn't have surprised me so much. The thugs, by which I mean Rex and Ralph this time, were beating up on the guy who seemed to take it all and just keep going. Then Clockwork lobbed a shuriken at the guy's shoulder. Even if the sword wasn't so surprising, the shuriken was. Goth ninja? Carlos tackled the guy's waist. Weedy was feeling no pain and leapt off of a picnic table and ONTO the man with the upraised sword, but God was gracious and no one got impaled. I stood around with the Book.
Then I saw that a page was glowing. I quickly opened to it and, strangely, the text was legible. I don't know, I didn't understand it, but it was readable. It was pronouncable. So I read it. Angles of blue geometric light erupted from the book forming a strange container of light around the guy in black. Lines of energy glowed, coalesced, hummed, crackled, shifted, held, snapped him into a field where he could do no more damage, and when I looked up, Ralph's hands were in the same field - and the rest of him, cauterized stumps and all, was staggering backwards in shock.
I am going to throw up.
