by
Salvatore T. Falco

I was waiting on Tillman’s front porch when the first police car arrived, lights flashing but no siren. The officer nodded as he mounted the steps.

“Valdez,” he said.

I tilted my head toward the scarred wooden front door. “In the living room.” He told me to wait, as if I hadn’t been doing that already, and went in.

The flashing lights drew neighbors like moths. Across the street, a guy picked up the newspaper at the foot of his driveway, then stood there watching. A husband and wife drifted to the property line between their house and Tillman’s. They stared at me. I stared back until they turned away. A morning jogger slowed and then ran in place, taking in the scene. He talked to Newspaper across the street. Newspaper shrugged and pointed at me. The couple next door crossed the brick-paved street and formed a quartet of speculation.

Another police car pulled up. The first cop came back out, his face pale, talking into the mic mounted on his shoulder. He told me a homicide detective was on the way. I hoped my brother wasn’t the one who picked up the case.

Of course, he was. Raul parked so that he boxed in my black ‘02 Thunderbird at the foot of the driveway. He acted like he didn’t see me and went into the house with the first officer. The second was busy with the quartet across the street. I doubted any of them knew anything, and certainly none of them had ever been in the chamber of horrors Tillman used to call home.

The sun was over the horizon now, lighting up purple jacaranda blossoms like daytime fireworks. Ancient oaks, manicured lawns, and crisp paint jobs flared as the sun touched them, a dazzling contrast to Tillman’s weedy, patchy yard. Paint flaked from his house and the porch sagged like a busted jaw.

A north wind carried the remnants of winter in its teeth. I shrugged it off. Spring in Saint Petersburg, Florida lasts about five minutes. In a month, I’d be roasting. Unlike Tillman, who already was.

Raul came out, his sunglasses balanced atop his head. A bloodless pallor leached the color from his tan face and he shuddered as he crossed the threshold. His fingers felt beneath the knot of his tie, probably touching the hidden gold crucifix. It wasn’t the body that made him squirm.

He slid his sunglasses back onto his nose like a knight closing his visor. He tilted his head as if looking down at me, in spite of being only an inch taller.

“What’s the story, Sonny?”

Sonny is a pretty juvenile name for a thirty eight year old man, but try going through school with a moniker like Juan Valdez. After you hear enough coffee picker jokes, you stick with the nickname your mother gave you.

“Got here before seven to deliver some books Tillman asked me to appraise. Door swung open when I knocked. When I saw him, I called it in.”

That was all I could tell him. For now, anyway. In Florida, it only takes two people’s signatures to put you in a mental hospital, and that wasn’t my idea of a fun way to spend the weekend. If either of the uniforms heard me say that the victim’s ghost identified the killer, they’d haul me away.

“Killer took the place apart. He was obviously looking for something.” he said.

“She.” I spoke sotto voce. “A book. I have it in my car.”

Raul’s eyebrows went up. “How do you. . . Oh.” His shoulders squirmed again. “Let me see it.”

He followed me to my car. Once no one could overhear, I told him the story from the beginning.

#

Tillman wasn’t the kind to leave his door unlocked, much less unlatched. I pushed the door the rest of the way open.

Tillman was dead, his chest shot out.

The tang of drying blood hung in the air. I didn’t bother with a pulse. Nothing human survives that kind of injury. He lay atop the shattered remains of an ornate coffee table, his elephantine countenance frozen in surprise. The living room was as comforting as an H. R. Giger painting. A ram’s head mounted over the ash-filled fireplace leered at me, lit from below by a knocked-over floor lamp. Sideways shadows shrank from it. No natural light had ever penetrated the heavy black drapes. Sculptures of tortured bodies lurked in the corners. Evil runes marched around the crown molding. Every wall was lined with shelves for his occult books, a good portion of which he had bought through me. The books lay scattered on the floor like victims of a bombing.

Someone had drawn a bloody pentagram around Tillman’s body. The candles that anchored each point had guttered out. I was about to wait outside when every tiny hair on my arms and neck snapped to attention and icy fingers raked my spine. Blue, phosphorescent mist crept up my legs.

“You’re not powerful enough to possess me. Knock it off.”

A sound like metal scraping against metal screeched from everywhere and nowhere. The mist flowed off me and a luminescent apparition coalesced in the air above the corpse. It billowed formless and indistinct at first, then resolved into a younger, thinner, less repulsive-looking version of Tillman.

Ghosts usually take the appearance of their self-image at the time of their death. My late wife appears in her patrol uniform.

The screeching collapsed into a steady hiss and formed into a single moan: “Sonny.”

“Don’t get familiar just because you’re dead.” Only people I like get to call me Sonny. And my brother. “Especially after that stunt.”

Tillman’s shade quivered. “It’s not fair. I’m too young.”

“What happened?”

The spirit looked down. His form roiled. “She shot me!” His wail rattled my eardrums.

“I figured out that part on my own. Who shot you?”

He shivered like a disrupted television picture. “I have to find a new body.” His legs dissolved and ectoplasm flowed over the books on the floor. “If I can find the right spell . . . .”

“I won’t let you do that.”

His face twisted into a gargoyle leer. The gaping mouth grew fangs. “You can’t stop me. Everyone knows you don’t use magic anymore.”

“I don’t need magic to send you where you belong.” Exorcism is no more a use of magic than turning off a light switch is a use of electricity.

The visage melted back into a replica of Tillman’s face. “You wouldn’t.”

“I will. Who shot you?”

“A woman. I thought. . . I thought it was a delivery when I heard the knock.”

“What did she look like?”

His face rippled with lurid memory. “She had an enormous rack.”

Of course. I’d be lucky if he noticed her hair color. Or if she had hair. “What was she wearing over this enormous rack?”

The troubled face pouted. “A delivery uniform.”

“Which company?”

“It was . . .” His spirit dimmed. “I forget.”

Even he would have noticed that much. She’d probably used a glamour spell. Sexy delivery woman was exactly the kind of fantasy that would appeal to Tillman.

“All right, you opened the door. Then what happened?”

“She handed me a clipboard. I didn’t realize until after I signed it that it wasn’t a delivery form. It was covered in runes.”

One way to cast a spell at someone is to transcribe it onto paper and trick the target into taking it.

“She got you under her power. Then what?”

Tillman faded to translucence. “She asked me where the manuscript was. I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Why did she shoot you?”

“The whole time she was questioning me, I felt her spell faltering.”

If her spell compelled him to tell the truth and she wasn’t hearing what she wanted to, doubt could have crept into her mind. Nothing weakens a spell like uncertainty.

“When it fell, I was furious. I grabbed her.” Bilious yellow swirled in his shade. “She pulled the gun. Next thing I knew, she had me bound within the pentagram. The place was ransacked. She asked me all the same questions.”

“And you still didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“No. I finally told her you had a bunch of my things.”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t catch the sarcasm. “No problem.”

“I guess that’s it, then.”

His spirit flickered. “You’re not really going to. . .”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

He flew at me. I stood my ground, almost let him touch me before I spoke.

“Go to Hell, Tillman.”

It wasn’t much of an exorcism, but Tillman wasn’t much of a ghost. He dissolved with a gut-wrenching scream.

#

“But he wasn’t lying,” I told Raul. “I did have some of his books. He asked me to appraise a lot he bought on an Internet auction.” Most of the books were neither old nor unusual. The killer was probably after the lone exception: a leather bound octavo about the height and width of a hardcover novel and containing eight vellum leaves. There was no title, only an embroidered pattern done in a style that suggested a late sixteenth century origin. I put on a pair of thin cotton gloves and unfolded a piece of cloth on the hood. I put the book on the cloth and opened it for Raul. He peered at it.

“What are these symbols?”

The pages were filled with a hand-written code I hadn’t attempted to decipher. Thick, black lines and curlicues formed blocky glyphs.

“Not sure. Given its age, it’s probably some Elizabethan magician’s private notebook.”

“How do you know this is what the killer was looking for?”

I closed the book and put it back in the box. “A woman came into the store last night asking for it. She described it pretty accurately, down to the characters in the code. Offered me a grand for it.”

“Same woman?”

“Can’t say for sure. Pretty big coincidence if it wasn’t, though.” I described her and Raul jotted it down, for all the good it would do him. Who knew what she really looked like beneath the glamour? I was glad there had been other customers browsing the store or I might have ended up like Tillman. I shrugged. “She came in around eight last night. I didn’t think to ask Tillman what time he died.”

Raul shivered again. “The M. E. can give me an estimated time of death.”

“You want this?” I hefted the box.

He shook his head. “Not part of the crime scene. Hang on to it for Tillman’s heirs, if he has any. But see if you can find out the story with that book.”



Vicious barking greeted my footsteps halfway up the stairs to my alley-access apartment. I grinned. My little pal doubles as an inexpensive burglary deterrent. He landed on my shoulder when I came through the door. Cesar is an Amazon parrot who learned to bark from a stray dog I took in last year while I found her a home. Cesar is bright green with splashes of red and yellow on his shoulders like epaulets on the uniform of a third-world dictator.

I paused to check the protective runes carved into all three sides of the door frame. The runes block spells from crossing my threshold. Tillman had it wrong about me. I do use magic, just not as often as I did before Olivia died.

Satisfied that each rune was intact, I opened all the windows. Sunlight cascading through the southern-facing panes chased away the gloom that had followed me home. Curtains fluttered and popped like castle pennons in the cross breeze. One of them snapped against a framed photo on an end table. I rescued it before it toppled.

It was a picture of our wedding party, everyone beaming at the camera except Raul. He is staring at Olivia with a slightly perplexed look on his face, like he still can’t understand how this happened.

I never expected to marry a cop. Growing up with a cop and devout Catholic for a father, I rebelled against legal and spiritual authority. In my teens, I fell in with an evil crowd. A summoning gone awry scared me into cleaning up my act. I went to college, then graduate school.

On a summer visit home, I met Olivia at one of Papa’s backyard barbecues. I had no idea she was Raul’s date. I fell for eyes the color of Key West waves. She fell for. . . what, I don’t know. We were engaged in six months, married within the year.

Raul never forgave me.

I returned the picture to the end table. I set the octavo down, and Cesar hopped off my shoulder, heading right for it. I’d been defending it from him all week. Parrots love to chew. I rescued the book from his beak. He shrieked and nipped me, but didn’t break the skin. I slipped the book into a drawer.

I made a breakfast of scrambled tofu for me and a slice of mango for Cesar. We ate on the balcony overlooking Central Avenue and I let the sun bake away the last vestiges of the morning’s evil events. I retrieved the book, put Cesar on my shoulder, and headed downstairs to my occult bookstore. My good mood vanished when I found the door unlocked and the place ransacked.

Books were scattered everywhere. Not a single shelf had been spared. A rack of charms up front lay on its side. The register was open but the fifty dollars I keep in it was untouched.

My office door yawned and the intruder had ransacked my private book collection as well. Desk drawers lolled open. The safe was still locked but not for lack of effort. I keep the dial set to 00, a little quirk dating back to my high school locker. It was now at 28.

Nothing seemed to be missing. Of course not. I had what the intruder was looking for with me.

I called Raul and left a message to update him on this new wrinkle. Then I called my lone employee, who agreed to come in early and bring a couple of friends to pitch in for the day. When they arrived, I retreated into my office and put the octavo in a desk drawer. I righted Cesar’s perch in the corner and put him on it. He groomed his feathers while I cleaned up the rest of the mess.

The front door bell tinkled and I heard Dana say, “I’m sorry, we’re not open today.”

“I’m looking for Juan Valdez.”

The voice sounded like the woman who visited me last night. Same lazy, southern California intonation. I leaned out the door.

It wasn’t her. She was about the same height, but stocky, with ash blonde hair and a ruddy complexion. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties. She wore a loose peasant blouse and a billowy, full-length skirt.

“What can I do for you?”

“What happened in here?” she asked.

“We had a slumber party. Turned into a book-fight. Fun but ill advised. Come back tomorrow.”

“I really need to talk to you today. It’s urgent.”

She didn’t look like a threat so I invited her back. She glided into the office, skirts swishing. I indicated a chair with a tilt of my head and sat behind my desk. She pulled her chair close. Cesar cocked his head and stared at her with one amber eye. He tried the other eye, didn’t seem to like what he saw with that one, either. He took flight and swatted the top of her head. She flinched and squeaked. He landed on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry about that.” I scratched the top of Cesar’s head to pacify him. “What can I do for you, Ms. . . .?”

“Corwen. Please call me Rachel. I’m looking for a book that belonged to my father.” She described the octavo and told me the same story I’d heard last night. The book belonged to her father but was mistakenly sold when he died. That explained the similarity in the women’s voices. Everyone has trouble telling my voice from Raul’s at first, too.

“I was told you might have it.”

“Who told you that?”

“I went to the buyer’s house as soon as my flight got in this morning. The police wouldn’t let me onto the property but a man came out and told me what happened. He said he was Mr. Tillman’s lawyer.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest. “That poor man.”

“He wasn’t worth your sympathy.”

Cesar flapped down to my desk. He faced Rachel, fluffed all his feathers up to make himself look fierce, and opened his beak wide.

“Is that creature going to attack me?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing.” I put my finger in front of him. He stepped onto it and I brought him face to face with me. “Settle down.” His feathers flattened and he hopped to my shoulder. “He did the same thing last night to the other woman who asked about that book.”

“Leslie.” She said it with the same tone that most people use when they say, “A cockroach.”

“Your sister?”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Do you know what it’s like to live in the shadow of an older sibling, Mr. Valdez?” She snared my eyes with hers.

“I’ve heard of the phenomenon.”

“Leslie is. . . well, you saw her. She is the bright, shining star at the center of her own universe.” Her eyes watered. She fished a tissue out of her purse and dabbed at the tears.

“What does this have to do with the book?”

“There’s a family legend that some umpteenth-great grandfather discovered the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone and wrote it in code in that book.” She shredded the tissues as she talked. “It’s silly, of course, but my father and I used to try to crack it. We never got anywhere, but it was fun to try. It was the one thing he and I did together. It was supposed to belong to me when Daddy died. But because I want it, Leslie wants it, too.” Her eyes watered some more. Bereft of her tissue, she knuckled the moisture away. “Please, if you have it, you have to sell it to me.”

“I couldn’t even if I had it. If it was in the lot Tillman bought, it belonged to him. You’d have to deal with his estate.”

After a few rounds of pleading and denial, I convinced her I couldn’t help her and showed her to the door.

Rachel’s story didn’t add up. If Leslie only wanted the octavo for spite, committing murder was excessive. I took it out and stared at it for a moment. “So what in the world are you, and why do the Corwen sisters want you so bad?”

When I’d appraised it, I couldn’t find any references to it in occult bibliographies. Contacts in the book trade knew nothing, nor did any of my occultist acquaintances. Now that someone was willing to murder and pillage to obtain it, I wanted to crack that code.

Occultists often invent private codes to hide discoveries from rivals, colleagues, or even students. Most aren’t sophisticated, especially in manuscripts this old. It was probably a simple replacement cipher, with each symbol standing in for a letter. I copied the first page by hand and assigned a number to each glyph. Then I typed the whole mess into a decryption program. In seconds, the unreadable gibberish I typed transformed into. . .

Different unreadable gibberish.

Either this was more complicated than a replacement cipher, or the base language wasn’t English.

Cesar kept trying to get at the book with his little beak. I was frustrated, my stomach growled, and my head pounded. I put the book in my safe and went out to the store. It was closing in on noon and my troops were hungry, too, so I called the diner down the street and placed a take-out order.

I walked to the diner with Cesar on my shoulder. From the outside, the dingy concrete block structure doesn’t offer much hope. Inside, it doesn’t look like much, either. It had once been a bar and an alcoholic aura still clings to the bland yellow walls. The food is good, though, and within walking distance. It’s also near the police station. I nodded to a few familiar faces and sat at the counter.

Cesar adores Kim, the tough little brunette who runs the place. The first time I ever brought him there, she fawned over him and it was love from then on. If I don’t bring him once a week, he gets surly and starts nipping.

Sometimes he nips for fun, though, so it’s hard to tell.

Cesar abandoned me for her the minute I sat, the little traitor. They had their little love scene behind the counter while I waited for my order to come up. Cesar returned to my shoulder, though, when Leslie Corwen sat on the stool next to mine.

The simple description I gave Raul didn’t do her justice. She was movie-star beautiful, with the vavoom curves Tillman talked about. A barrette clasped her thick, wavy chestnut hair into a loose ponytail. Big, soft, amber eyes. The effect was a little over-done.

“Your sister came to see me this morning.”

She wrinkled her nose like she’d smelled spoiled milk. “I suppose she told you what a self-centered bitch I am.” Her honeyed voice was as counterfeit as her appearance.

“Something like that.”

“Whatever she said about me goes twice for her.” The honey leached out of her voice, replaced by vinegar.

Cesar stretched himself tall on my shoulder and gave her the left eye, right eye treatment. He emitted a low grumble. Leslie shrank as far from me as the stool allowed.

“You’d be a fool to give that book to her. And a dead man.”

Cesar stretched himself even taller and began to sway back and forth like an angry cobra, his beak wide. Leslie leaned so far away that the slightest push would send her to the floor.

“Your bird doesn’t like me.”

“He thinks you’re threatening me.” Kim set my order on the counter. I handed her my credit card. “So do I.”

“I’m not threatening you, I’m trying to warn you.” Her lip trembled. “Rachel will stop at nothing to get her hands on that book.” She plucked a napkin from the dispenser and blotted her eyes. “She’s the one who killed that man and ransacked your store.” She dipped her chin and looked up at me through her eyelashes, cute as a baby squirrel.

A baby squirrel with rabies.

I laughed. “There’s one problem. Tillman’s ghost described his murderer.” I pointed at her.

She shook her head violently. “No.” She began to tear tiny shreds from the napkin and drop them on the counter. “It was her. She uses. . .” She glanced behind her, confirmed that no one was paying attention to us, and dropped her voice. “She uses magic to disguise herself as me. She’s been doing it since high school.”

“Why go to so much trouble? What’s so important about that book?”

She discarded the remains of the napkin. “It contains a demon.”

“So I’ll destroy it. Problem solved.”

Her entire body tensed as if I’d threatened to shoot her. “You can’t! Destroying the book releases the demon.” A smile crept onto her face. “So you do have the book, after all.”

Nuts.

I rummaged through the order, pretending to make sure everything was in there while I thought of a response. “Not anymore. I gave it to the police. It’s evidence.”

She was watching my eyes. I tried to really believe my lie, to make it the truth in my mind. It seemed to work. Her shoulders sagged and she bowed her head.

“All right. As long as it’s safe from Rachel.” Her lie was as convincing as mine.



After delivering the food to my hungry laborers, I took Cesar to the apartment. His determination to destroy the octavo would distract me from deciphering it. Leslie’s story was more plausible than her sister’s but still felt incomplete. I wanted to find out the whole truth before either of them showed up again. Or both of them. Maybe they were working together: bad sister, good sister. As long as I gave it to one of them, they’d both win.

I looked at the screen full of gibberish. I knew a spell that would reveal the text. I banished that thought. Magic’s price is often higher than its value. Like maybe you cast a spell to bring you money, unaware of the enormous term life insurance policy your wife bought that morning.

Hypothetically speaking.

I cleared the gibberish. If the underlying text wasn’t English, what was it? Rachel said that the book was in their family for generations. Corwen was. . . what? Welsh? Five seconds on a search engine confirmed it. I changed the program settings and re-ran it.

Gibberish, again.

But it was Welsh gibberish this time. I don’t read the language but I know a few words. One of them is “cythraul,” which I spotted in the first sentence.

“Cythraul” means “demon.”

I copied the Welsh text, pasted it into a translation web page, and clicked a button. Bang. Seconds later, I had the gist of the text:

Within these covers I have bound a demon whose True Name I discovered after long study. By transcribing the demon’s name I have captured it and bent the demon to my will. In these pages I record the means by which I accomplished this feat.

I felt like I’d been punched. If that boast were true, the implications were staggering. But a demon’s true name is not simply a moniker like, “Lucifer, Prince of Lies.” It described every attribute the demon has, every thought it may think, every deed it can do or has done. Eight pages didn’t seem like enough space for that kind of detail.

I worked my way through the manuscript, transcribing, decoding, and translating a page at a time. You have to be careful when reading mystic texts. Sometimes a spell is constructed so that you can’t stop reading it until you’ve caused yourself a world of hurt.

My caution turned out to be unnecessary. The author described how he had summoned the demon, contained it, forced it to reveal its true name, and transcribed it “to capture it forever.” There was no hint as to what that name might be, though. There was no clue about what the demon could do for you. Or, more importantly, to you.

Whether they were working at cross-purposes or together, why on earth did Rachel and Leslie want this thing?

My employee poked her head in to tell me she and her friends were done. I locked up the store and walked around to the alley. I took the book with me. If I left it in the store, the Corwen sisters would probably dynamite my safe out of the wall.

I was on the second stair step when I heard, “Give me the book.”

It was Rachel. She had a friend with her. Her friend was a black semi-automatic pistol, staring at my guts with its unblinking eye. Probably the gun that had killed Tillman.

“So Leslie was telling the truth. It was you all along. What did you do, use a glamour to disguise yourself as your sister?”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” She smirked. “Too late now. Throw it to me. Underhand.”

She was ten feet away and her finger was on the trigger. Nothing I could do. And there was no demon in the book, anyway, so there was no danger in handing it over. I tossed it to her. She snatched it from the air with her free hand and tucked it under her arm. The gun never wavered.

“OK,” I said. “You got what you wanted. I guess this is goodbye.”

She laughed. “No. You’ll identify me to the police. Go on up. I’ll be right behind you.”

If I stood my ground, I was going to get shot. If I went inside, I was probably still going to get shot. All things being equal, I preferred to be murdered in my home. I started up the stairs. She followed far enough behind to keep me from doing anything to her, at least with a gun pointed at my spine.

When I got halfway up the stairs, Cesar started barking furiously.

“A dog, too? Call it off.”

I shouted for the non-existent dog to be quiet. Cesar piped down. “Getting my keys out,” I said. I didn’t relish the idea of getting shot in the back.

“Slowly.”  

I obeyed. I glanced over my shoulder, hoping she was far enough behind for me to slam the door. No luck. When I turned the knob, she rushed forward and shoved me. I stumbled forward. That gave Cesar all the opportunity he needed. Rachel was looking for a canine defender, not my little green Kato.

There was screeching and screaming. Cesar made noise, too. He landed on her head and battered her with his wings. She flailed at him with both hands. I used the distraction to hit her like a linebacker. Cesar flew out the door as her head slammed into it. She went limp and slumped to the ground. The book flew out of her hand and skidded across the hardwood floor under the couch.

I kicked the gun away and reached to check for a pulse. My hand froze inches from her neck.

Her straight, ash blonde hair darkened into wavy chestnut, and her face flowed from Rachel’s ruddy complexion to Leslie’s porcelain-skinned, high-cheekboned face. The glamour spell, broken when she crossed my threshold, was fading. Usually people use a glamour to make themselves more attractive, not less. I hadn’t expected that. But a glamour spell makes you see what you want to see. All too familiar with being overshadowed by a more attractive older sibling, I hadn’t looked past the surface of her story, and it nearly got me killed.

I wondered where Rachel was, or if she had ever existed at all. Not my problem. I used half a dozen cable ties to bind Leslie’s hands. I retrieved Cesar from the railing outside. All his feathers were ruffled. “It’s OK, Cesar. You did good. Come here,” I said. I reached for him and he cautiously stepped onto my finger. I stroked his neck for a few seconds and got him calmed down. Then I took him inside to his aviary. I called Raul and told him to come pick up Tillman’s murderer.

Later, after Leslie Corwen had been taken away, I realized I hadn’t seen Cesar for a while. I called to him, heard nothing. I stood still for a moment and heard a pop like a piece of string being snapped. Or an embroidery stitch on a leather cover. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the couch. There was Cesar, worrying at the stitching of the Corwen octavo.

“Cesar, no! Stop that!”

He cocked his head and studied me with one eye for a moment. Then he ignored me, as always, and continued gnawing at the book, standing over it like a lion feasting on a gazelle.

He snapped another stitch. He let out a satisfied chuckle and looked at me. Then it hit me. He wasn’t bent on destroying the book merely for the sake of destruction. He was trying to tell me something.

Within these covers I have bound a demon. . .

I reached for the book. This time, Cesar merely backed away and looked at me. No shrieking or nipping. I got a razor and slit the leather cover near the spine.

Tucked inside the cover were twenty vellum pages. They were covered front and back with cramped writing. I didn’t look close enough to know if it was English or Welsh. I took a metal wastebasket and a lighter out to my balcony, put the pages in it, and set them on fire. If there really had been a demon on those pages, it was destroyed forever.

I put the leather cover in Cesar’s aviary. He deserved the new chew toy. A couple of days later, I threw it out, untouched. Unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t care about what’s on the surface.

BIO:
Salvatore T. Falco is a software quality assurance engineer who grounds himself in reality by reading and writing fiction. His love of writing began in second grade, when he got an “A” on a fictional “What I did over summer vacation” essay that was far more exciting than the truth. His non-fiction has been published by Steve Jackson Games and his creative work has appeared in PKA’s Advocate, The Absent Willow Review, and Raphael’s Village.