When Sarah Met Clyve, Part 3

[You can read part 1 of this story here, and part 2 here.]

What-have-I-done?  What-have-I-done?  What-have-I-done?

Clyve teetered on the spot and…THUD.

Sarah could not believe she’d failed to consider the mechanical difficulties posed by drugging a Very Tall Person (as she’d never been one herself).

Mountains of guilt.  Continents of it.  How had this ever been a good idea?  She bit her lip and looked around for the room to yield some direction.  Spotting a toss pillow on the couch, she quickly grabbed it and gently wedged it under Clyve’s head.  He wasn’t bleeding anywhere, and the light would only be good enough to use the crystal for a little while longer.  She’d have to put off ministering to him further until after she’d retrieved the livre from the library.

She grabbed her bag and the Moleskine notebook she’d been keeping as her personal livre and headed out the door, the locket, as always now, around her neck already.  She knew the vault at the library was fair game for any dizzy person to use if it was empty, so she would leave her own book there while she was reading Clyve’s, lest it be poached while she was doing her illicit research.

Quickly, she scurried down the hall stairs after carefully locking her incapacitated boyfriend in her apartment.  It was hard to control the wellspring of worries over what might go wrong with this plan, but it’d all be worth it if she could help them both.

At last, Sarah reached the library.  Her fingers fumbled with the clasp of the locket as she glanced around and wondered how long she could be at this before someone noticed how oddly she was behaving with the library’s oddly fancy thermostat.  When the locket finally sprang open, its little crystal disc fell straight out of her hands and onto the carpet.  She dove after it desperately and raised it up to the panel of cells on the thermostat, clenching the little object with both hands resting as firmly as possible against the panel lest they shake too much for the disc’s patterns to read clearly.  When the little vault swung open, she gasped and offered a quick prayer of thanks in her relief to the gods and saints of obviously meddling girlfriends everywhere.

She grabbed the musty, folded old livre as quickly as she could and shoved it unceremoniously into her bag.  The door to the vault had started to swing shut again when she remembered to jam her own livre into the tiny space.  She left her left hand in the door as she quickly scrawled “I’m sorry” on a folded back corner of the Moleskine’s cover.  Just in case, she thought nervously.

She slammed the vault shut and jumped at the noise she’d just made in the quiet building.  Cramming the crystal disc back into her locket and the locket back down her sweater, she beat a hasty retreat from the latest scene of her mission.

Yes!  It’s a mission!  That sounds so much better than plan or endeavor, she thought.

Yes, and also better than betrayal or scheme, came a niggling little voice in the waddled little cluster of brain that controls moral decisions and insurmountable waves of crushing anxiety.

Shush, thought Sarah, We’re on a mission!

With her battling senses of worry and adventure keeping her company, Sarah felt she’d gotten home in no time, which wasn’t generally a feeling she experienced with any frequency.  She burst through the door to her apartment and with another pang in her heart at the sight of Clyve spread out on the floor, she threw herself into a chair at her little dinner table and unrolled her spoils onto the table without even pausing to take her coat off.

This was the first really good look she’d gotten at the livre.  The leather was old, dull and soft except for the shiny finger-spots rubbed near the edges of the front and back covers.  It’d been so well-used that she could even make out shiny marks where the heels of its readers’ palms had cradled the covers through who knew how many years.

Sarah took a ragged breath and reached out her somewhat steadier hand to open the cover.  Her nervousness seemed to be settling a bit now that she was home.  The hardest parts seemed to be past her, although, according to Clyve, opening this volume might well be the most dangerous thing she could do.

She read, and she read, and she read.  All through the night Sarah studied and searched the well-worn old pages of Clyve’s livre for an answer to the problem of dizziness.  Though she hadn’t really expected to find the answer laid out in one quick and easy sentence, she found herself becoming increasingly more disappointed when no such entry surfaced.  The first pages seemed to be filled with confused observations and asked more questions than such a small volume could ever hold the answers to.

As she read on, Sarah came to realize that the book was written more like a series of journals than a reference volume.  Each of Clyve’s ancestors had simply tacked on their questions and observations after the ones who’d come before.  Occasionally, if someone had taken the time to reread the volume, he might scrawl a quick answer or thought next to an original entry, but it seemed most of the livre’s authors had taken to heart the warnings of its dangers and had only chosen to revisit their own contributions to it.

Sarah scowled at the book and considered knocking Clyve out again at some future date simply so she could index the stupid thing.  As she got deeper into the little book, however, her scowl slowly became a grimace that was only broken by the occasional gasp or muffled scream.  Many of the livre’s owners recounted visions of beasts much more frightening than the hecht she’d battled with Clyve or, indeed, any other of the frightening things she’d seen before.

One contributor, Lily, had seen particularly gruesome things in her time being dizzy.  Sarah almost breathed a sigh of relief when she’d reached the end of Lily’s passages—until she read the first entry by Lily’s son noting that she’d turned herself into a dog to escape the tortures of her human life.

Sarah jumped from her seat and threw the book against the wall and swore loudly.  So that’s how this could end?  Turning yourself into a stupid dog to escape a life lived dizzy?

She sank to the floor and began sobbing loudly into her hands.

Sarah wasn’t sure how long she stayed there crying while Clyve slept silently on, but as the birds started to raise their pre-dawn racket, she started to come back to herself.  She couldn’t be certain how long Clyve would stay unconscious, so the approach of sunrise meant she needed to make some decisions about whether to return the livre to its vault while the light would be right and Clyve would still be knocked out.

She hadn’t planned for this.  She was supposed to have found an answer by now!

If she returned the book now, Clyve might never find out what she’d done while he’d slept, but she might never get another chance to study it again.

If she kept it, though, he might never speak to her again and would likely take it—and any hope of her ever finding the answers she wanted—with him right out the door.

“There has to be a third option,” she muttered.  “What can I do with what I know right now?”

You could turn yourself into a Lily dog, a snide little voice sneered from the back of her brain.

Sarah snorted dismissively then stopped dead still.  How had that worked out for Lily, anyway?

Utterly wrung out, she dragged herself across the room to retrieve the book.  It took her a bit, but she found her place again.

There wasn’t much unusual to Lily’s son’s passages except that they were remarkably sparse and blasé.  He noted once at the beginning after all that his mother had seen and been through, he’d decided not to read the livre himself but intended to perform his ancestral duty of adding anything that might help someone else someday.

Sarah found that the young man had relatively few dizzy encounters over his life and, indeed, seemed much more prone to talking about a particularly good day he’d spent with his mother the dog rather than about any strange creatures or menacing monsters.

Lily had a good time at the park today.  We played ball.

Lily and I just moved to Boston.  Always tough for me to be in a new place, and she must know it.  Spent all night with her head on my pillow instead of staying on the rug by the bed.

Today, Mom left me quietly in her sleep.

Sarah paused and thought that the book couldn’t contain too many sentences like that last one.

And, not for the first time, Sarah thought that perhaps Lily’s end was the smallest but brightest jewel the livre had to offer.  But this time, she saw the kindness and the peace in Lily’s ending tale.  All those years spent playing joyfully around her son and sleeping peacefully by his bed were rare ems indeed in a tome recounting the horrible beasts and forces that sought out the dizzy and the weapons and wards these people had learned to create and used to protect themselves from such deep and unusual danger.

The story of Lily was the livre’s pearl of great price.  Lily’s gift to all dizzy people brave enough to open the book of dangers and wise enough to tease out the message she’d sent through her son’s understated updates: peace, joy, freedom from unnatural terrors, and a quiet and dignified end could all belong to the dizzy person determined enough to have them.

Sarah could save them both.  They didn’t have to be dogs, but they didn’t have to be dizzy either!  If dizziness could be escaped by turning into a dog, then it could be done by other means too, Sarah thought—any means that completely wiped the mind clean of any prior dizzy knowledge and perhaps another procedure to blind their eyes to any new dizzy experiences.  Then, they could be free.

Having grasped the branch of hope firmly with both hands, she knew, somehow, just what to do.  She went to her pantry of things from the tienda that she hadn’t yet used and withdrew one of her favorites: the Luck Reversal Candle.  She lit two long matches.  In one hand, she held her own match, and in the other guided Clyve’s hand to hold his.  She thus guided her clumsy orchestra to light the candles as one.  It glowed beautifully and brightly for a moment, and then Sarah’s senses began to spin and reorder the room and space around them.  She then saw only Clyve’s face as the world around her went dark.