LOS ANGELES, March 15 – Tome sleeps.

And so he has.

Slept since the words were uttered, since he consumed that last book from the tall shelf. The improbable, inevitable book, blindly taken down in a moment of absent hunger; a snack to tide him over, to assuage his limitless hunger, if only for the time it took him to run his unfeeling inked fingers over the spine, to anticipate what it’s flavor might be, whether it might, at last, fill him.

Kave had been there, of course.

The stone bulk of him settled into a long burgundy couch, the velvet cushions flattened beneath him, its oak spine beginning to splinter. As all furniture eventually splinters under the weight of Kave. A deep hatred of all things inanimate and four legged dwells in Kave. Chairs, divans, stools, day beds, sofas, ottomans. All the breakable things that will not bear him. Each time another carpentered puzzle of sticks shatters under him, he mutters a curse in his guttural stone tongue, dreaming of a mighty wingback of granite, cushions stuffed with gravel, woven from diamond chips strung on lengths of alloy thread. Dreaming of such comfort, he listened to the ominous creaking of the couch, and observed as Tome opened the book and cast his fingertips over the pages.

Harbinger was not there, of course.

Had she been, had events not tossed her otherways, it would never have happened. It could not have happened. The book would never have approached Tome’s mouth, her blades having cut it from his hand, dissected its spine, quartered its pages and flayed them. But Harbinger had occasioned to be lost. A rare luxury. She had found an Eventuality that did not allow for her, and had folded into it, gloriously unknowing if she would emerge. Or, at least, pretending to such ignorance. A delusion allowed by the place she had lost herself within. But she would be back. She knew, with the certainty that made her cut herself.

And even then, without Harbinger to warn, if the couch had collapsed a moment sooner, still it might never have happened.

Instead.

Kave marked a telltale groan, a desperate rasp, an oaken grate that did not require Harbinger to tell what it foreboded. A heave brought him lumbering to his feet as the couch gave its last and, broken-backed, succumbed to the floor. Standing, Kave surveyed the other means of temporary respite from gravity, discarding from consideration out of hand the steps of the spindly library ladder, the narrow legged chairs at the reading table, and the desk’s castered seat, certain its stem would snap the moment he tilted the least from true. But the desk itself, a mighty thing of alien hardwood, might take him, if only for a few minutes.

He started across the room, floorboards splintering from his tread, the hobnailed soles of his great boots leaving deep divots in the polished wood.

Tome fingered the pages of the book. He could not, in fact, feel their texture, but the resistance they gave as he passed his digits over them, the friction of matter on matter, gave some indication of their quality. And it was high. Thick paper, he knew, robust linen perhaps. A book of quality. Dense with purpose or knowledge or imagination. A book that, at least at one time, was deemed to matter. A filling book. Perhaps.

Kave trod on, his path to the desk taking him close by Tome and the book.

Books were no great friends to Kave. Tearing so easily between his thick fingers, their greatest value seemed, to him, that they could be piled under the edges of a low piece of furniture, and therefore, bear it up for a moment longer than it otherwise might last. That, their greatest value for him, were it not for Tome. The fact that books sustained Tome, fed him and replenished his long, nearly limitless strings of dense print, the skeins of letters, words, paragraphs, chapters, parts, sections, prologues, epilogues, tables and indexes that were his physical body, that fact made him value the silly tissue things, and inquire occasionally after their contents.

Trundling past Tome, Kave looked down at the book open in his friend’s hands. His agate eyes at the deep ends of the tunnels bored under the outcropping of his brow peered at the ordered, repeated, bursts of type on the creamy pages. Between one step and the next, his great mass carrying him relentlessly on, he watched as Tome riffled the pages, saw the same phrase repeated without variation throughout, the same two words standing in on every page for date of publication, copyright, publishing house, chapter titles, lists of illustrations, even arranged graphically to form the illustrations themselves. Startled, uncomprehending, he began the process of bringing his frame to a halt, the usual rumble of his passage changing in tone as he flexed his strange muscles, to a clattered of rocks presaging an avalanche.

Tome closed the book. Anticipation spent, he raised it to his mouth, his lips spreading, his lexicon flesh stretching to take the book into his maw, to add its content to the vastness of the compendium of all-things that he aspired to be.

Kave’s heel crashed into the flooring, carving a long, stuttering furrow down to the joists. He turned, one blunt arm reaching, pebbled fingers stretching, longing for the pliability of most living things, the lithe malleability that allows them to extend a precious extra inch when reaching into tight narrow spaces to retrieve lost and treasured things before they can slip away. That or, looking at the title of the book, wishing for a different circumstance, an Eventuality to occupy that would bring into play his vast strength and stability to prevent this impending disaster.

The title of the book.

The same as the two words of text latticing its every page.

Tome Sleeps

But Kave was not made to bend. He was made to grind and to crush, and, eventually, to shatter. But not that night. Though he may have wished he had.

The book slipped entire into Tome’s mouth. The jumbled, indecipherable tales of his lips sealed around it. His gullet expanded, and Kave watched, immobile again, as the well defined rectangle of the book slid down his throat. The book, and its contents, becoming, as all things written must, Tome.

The book digesting, ink sliding from its pages to nourish him, contents being broken and critiqued with the context of the vastness of his terrible knowledge, Tome sensed Kave overhanging him and turned his face toward his obsidian guardian in his worn soldier’s dress, bandoleers, and holsters.

The knobs of Os that jutted from the oval perched on his stem of neck, approximating eyes for the comfort of others, flickered, as if a curious shutter of X’s had blinked over them.

Kave, in his natural anchored state, waited, his greatest talent, one hand, wrapped around the butt of his favorite pistol, the one he fueled with blood, the one that killed his immortal lord.

A thin gap opened near the bottom of Tome’s face, his lips reappearing, splitting again, a sound, a rattle of type and a slosh of ink, rose from within, an announcement, a telling of the content of the new book. A statement of the realignment of things known, and the ever shrinking supply of things unknown to Tome.

And, as with all things, what Tome speaks, is.

-Tooome sleeeeps.

And he tumbled to a barely coherent pile, just shy of a spill of ink, decipherable only to one as intimate to him as Kave, and he slept. The peacefulness of that sleep revealed in the small clouds of Z’s that puffed from his puddle face and drifted regularly into the air, and disbursed.

Tome sleeps.

And Kave, knowing what kind of danger this foretells, unlimbers the great gun from the iron holster riveted under his arm. He fires it’s boiler from rest, bringing a full head of steam, filling the reservoir from the flask of a loved one’s blood he keeps pocketed within the blouse of the uniform he wore in her service. From a pouch on his belt, both stitched from the hide of a beast long extinct, he chooses his bullet, the coin from a dead man’s mouth, its edges honed to razor. Thus armed, a horror begging death to bring him satisfaction, he slips a hand under his friend, gathers the long looping coils and drips of him, and carries him from the library, the door erupting from his path as if exploding from fear.

Testing,

Charlie

The King

No, not that king. I mean King’s Comics in Tracy, California.

King’s Comics

I will be visiting on March, 24th from 2-4pm. Come say hi.

Steel Cage Death Match

The deeply disturbed folks at FantasyBookspot.com are sponsoring a bloodfest of one on one sudden elimination bouts between novels. Think “The Octagon” with more dialogue. I’m not exactly sure how these things happen, or how they work, but NO DOMINION seems to have been tossed into the arena. I can only hope it survives. See the carnage HERE.

Bat Segundo Damnit!

Do I have to keep saying it? Not really, but I like the way it sounds. Bat Segundo. HERE’S me talking on the show.