The Chaff

Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

Evil Incarnate

Last week, I was digging around the book section of a “garage sale flea market” store that had recently opened up near my house. You know the kind of place I mean: they cruise garage sales and probably dumpsters for worthwhile stuff, dust it off, slap a price on it, and toss it in their shop. But these particular people underestimate their books: I’ve already gotten some real gems, including the full 10-volume set of Literary Classics for Children, at excellent prices. So I go there every other weekend and see what’s come in.

And there it was, upside down and sideways on the second shelf from the bottom, halfway behind an overlapping shelf. Four inches thick and leather bound–this one had to be a treasure, I thought. As I fished it out, my hands trembled, and a shiver went down my spine. The leather was the color of dark desert sand, smoother than any cow’s skin, and freckled here and there with minor imperfections. I turned it over and traced the gold lettering on the front with my fingers; it was cold, like real metal: Testamentum Rovi.

The Book of Rove.

I couldn’t believe it. This was just a myth, a rumor, a prank. I started paging through it. My Latin was too rusty to make out more than a word here and there. Each page was a slightly different color, and the text looked hand-written in a shiny, brown-black ink. For a second, I thought I smelled a gas leak or something, and then I realized the smell came from the book. I put my nose to page and sniffed.

It was oil.

Snippets of stories flooded my mind, blog-based bullshit about a book dictated by the devil himself. Bound in human skin, written in oil on parchment made from endangered species, this book gave anyone who followed its instructions all the power they could want, even control of the entire world. Excerpts from it were supposedly in the hidden bible of the Dominionist cult, well-known precepts such as “Blessed are the warmongers, for theirs are all kingdoms under heaven” and “Loathe the strange Others, as I have loathed you.” Even these small parts of it made the Dominionists nearly invincible. The power of the actual book itself was said to be unimaginable.

I shook my head to chase these thoughts away. Falwell and Dobson and the others were just expert con men who manipulated subconscious fascist leanings with slick marketing techniques. There was no demon-haunted book behind their success. It couldn’t be. These things weren’t real.

I flipped to the front cover and looked for the publishing information. Odd. No copyright, no publisher, no Library of Congress information, no ISBN number. I turned the fly leaf, and my heart stopped.

There, in the upper left corner of the fly leaf, was a single letter crudely written in bright red: W.

It was written…in crayon.

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