Infernal

6

-65:14

With Tom ensconced behind the wheel and winding the car back toward Route 84, Jack hunched forward in the passenger seat with The Compendium of Srem balanced on his knees. This being the shortest day of the year, the sun had already set, so he switched on the courtesy light.

Took him only a few pages to realize this was the oddest book he'd ever seen. Not simply the metal covers with their unusual hinges, and not the curlicue handwriting, but the pages themselves. The page paper—if it was paper at all—felt thinner than onionskin, but was completely opaque. He'd figured that if the book was half as old as it was supposed to be he'd find some damage. But no. Not a tear, not a wrinkle, not a single dog ear.

And who or what was Srem? If he was the guy who'd put this thing together, he at least could have had the decency to include an index or table of contents.

Jack flipped through the unnumbered, single-ply-tissue pages—lots of illustrations, many in color—hoping to catch a glimpse of the Lilitongue. He went through twice, stopping on the second run and backtracking toward the rear when he thought he saw movement in one of the illustrations.

Couldn't be. Just a trompe l'oeil of the flipping pages, like the little animations he'd drawn in the corners of his loose-leaf sheets back in grammar school when he was bored and—

Christ!

He froze and gaped at a page with an illustration that moved.

More than simply moving: an animated globe spinning in a void. He recognized it as Earth by the layout of the continents. He also recognized the crisscrossing lines connecting the dots on its surface.

He'd seen that pattern on an oversized globe hidden away in Luther Brady's office.

And he'd seen the same pattern cut into the back flesh of two of the women with dogs.

He ran his fingers over the animation. It felt no different from the rest of the page—not a ripple, not the slightest vibration, not even a tingle.

"E pur si muove," he whispered.

Tom said, "What?"

"Nothing."

"Find anything yet?"

"Oh, yeah. But not what we're looking for."

Jack tore himself away from the animation and began to plow through the Compendium one page at a time. He'd never learned to speed read, but he could scan text at a decent pace. He set three key words as targets: Lilitougue, Gefreda, and infernal.

About a quarter of the way through he came upon an otherwise blank page that announced: