Elias stared at the poem with a confused look; it read more like a proclamation than a real poem, with more flair than flow:
I am Returned! I am Returned!
Through long death, and longer life
To a horizon charred and burned
I am Returned! I will Return!
As the sun lives and surely dies
The stars will echo what I’ve learned!
The rest of the page was worn out and illegible, but he could tell it continued one quite a lot longer, at least 7 more stanzas before reaching the end of the page. Running his index finger along the brittle edge of the paper, which by this point was yellowed to the point of obscuring what once must have been exquisite gold trimming along the margin, he turned the page. On the reverse side, there were no words written, only a confusing set of images
A circular map of the constellations covered most of the page, with exaggerated and enlarged depictions of the sun and moon on the bottom and top of the circle, respectively. Within the map of stars, a humanoid figure, recognizably human from the shoulders down, but with a cow’s head stood staring just off to the left, with its hands crossed at its hips holding the opposite thigh. It’s right eye was closed, the other open, staring directly out of the page, almost as if it could see Elias…
“Enjoying the library, Elias?” he heard a familiar voice say from behind him.
Quickly closing the old tome, Elias turned his body to face his teacher, John, and replied “I’m not exactly sure, but these old books always seem to entertain.”
Looking at the nameless book in Elias’s hands, John’s expression turned quizzical before eyeing the surrounding bookshelves, as if to find where it came from. “Where’d that come from? They usually put the old nameless ones in the archive.”
Elias pointed to a shelf opposite him, and said “Somewhere near the top of that shelf over there. I thought it looked cool since it was so old, but it was filled with all this mystical stuff–pretty wacky stuff. A lot of the pages aren’t even complete anymore so it’s hard to parse a cohesive meaning in any of it. Still some of the illustrations look pretty cool–here, take a look” Elias flipped back to the page with the cow-headed figure to show him, “Here’s a cool minotaur looking thing”
John’s eyes narrowed upon seeing the figure, and he scratched his chin for a moment before saying “It’s not a minotaur, Elias–minotaur’s have bull’s heads, this is a cow’s head. Maybe you could just call this a Boucephalous–you know, cow’s head. Here, let’s see what else is here…” He reached over and thumbed through the pages following, which for the next half dozen pages or so depicted similar figures, with horse, eagle, dog, and other animal heads in similar illustrations. The section of the book ended shortly after with an entirely blank page with two words in Greek script:
Θηριοκεφαλοι
Θηριομορφοι
John hummed a little looking at the words before promptly translating “Theriocephalous, Theriomorphous; The Animal-headed, The Animal-bodied.” He tilted his head to the side, and chuckled a little, “What a curious book you’ve found here.”
“Well, if you can make some sense of it,” Elias sighed, “I guess maybe I should keep going through it”
“I don’t know, Elias,” he said with a giddy grin creeping across his face, “an ancient mystical grimoire filled with fantasy creatures and weird poems…you could get cursed if you aren’t careful.”
“Yeah right,” Elias rolled his eyes, before whispering, “right…?” as he eyed the strange typography of the greek, which appeared almost as if carved into the page.
-
Elias remembered a sort of wicked smile on his teacher’s stubbly face before he walked away after that exchange. The day at the library ended not shortly afterward, and Elias returned home with some scribbles in his composition notebook. He did a tracing of the Cow-headed figure before he put the decrepit book back where he found it, since he did find it strangely compelling.
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After he went into his room, he laid on his bed, and filled in more details of the tracing, recreating his own map of stars, full with the sun and moon above and below the figure. Once he finished naming some of his favorite stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel, he spent some time to think of his own stanza to the poem that preceded the illustration in the tome, before scribbling down
I am Reborn, again alive
An eyeless mask, once cracked
Master of the saved night
The words adorned the bottom of the image, curling up with it slightly. Satisfied with his work, Elias pinned it to the tackboard where he put all of his postcards, posters, and drawings by the side of his bed. All things equal, he went to bed after a brief dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, ready for school the next day.
-
2:31 am, the next morning.
Elias laid sprawled on his bed, half covered in a mess of blankets and pillows, snoring slightly. Aside from the idly spinning fan in the center of the ceiling and his own snoring, the room was silent, and particularly dark given that the blinds to the one window were closed.
Suddenly, a dim bluish glow began to emanate from the wall beside the bed, pulsating every second or so, and at its center was the amateurish rendering of the Cow-headed figure. With each pulse the glow brightened, and icy-blue light spewed farther into the room, and with it a low humming which pulsed with it.
The undulating glow grew and grew until the entire room was bathed in its unrelenting azure hue, and the humming grew so loud his cat was drawn to the outside of the bedroom door. At the very peak of its intensity, the room shook slightly, knocking some books off Elias’s nightstand and some paint chips from the ceiling by the fan.
Just after it had reached its climax, it began to die down rather quickly, returning the room to its prior dark and quiet state, but the rumbling and light had managed to disturb Elias slightly from his dreams, and he turned to the side of the bed nearest the tackboard. Once the glow finally disappeared from the room, and the deep shadows it cast were as well banished, a moment of calm returned to the place–before a faint, but definite blue glow appeared behind Elias’s closed eyes, as if answering the call of the Cow-head.
-
When Elias returned to the library not 2 days later, he was surprised that he couldn’t find that peculiar book again, but he didn’t find it that important, there were plenty of old and strange volumes in the shelves of the city library. He sat alone, earbuds in his ears, tearing through a few books he had found in the religion section, making impressions and notes about the interesting and even the disturbing.
At some point, when turning a page on a small novella about a magician who served an ancient king, but, in having an affair with the king’s wife, ended up being hanged–Elias cut his thumb on the edge of the paper. He looked at the small incision and quickly pressed the tip of his index finger on it to keep it from bleeding, and when he released it he saw the cut was mysteriously gone.
“Huh…” he muttered as he turned his thumb, looking at it from every angle, in case he simply forgot where the cut was, “it’s gone, just like that…Did I imagine it? Surely not.”
For the moment, Elias put it out of his mind and returned to his books, but he couldn’t help but return to it while he was in line to check out his books. He thought of it so intensely, in fact, that he couldn’t hear the librarian the first time he called him forward
“Sir!” Elias finally heard, shaking himself out of his momentary stupor, “Hand me your books.”
Elias’s vision cleared as he saw the librarian at the desk, a middle aged man with a clean shaven face and round glasses. He stepped forward and handed over the small stack of books in his hand to the portly man sitting behind the low desk. The librarian, whose nametag Elias could now read that said “Simon” in faded black ink, took the four books placed in front of him and methodically opened their front cover and scanned the barcode therein.
Elias watched Simon making these routine motions, fluid as possible, and imagined the many thousands of times he must have done it in the past.
Simon seemed to have noticed Elias noticing, and said with a brief chuckle “What makes a librarian a librarian isn’t so much loving books, or even less reading them, but simply working as one for a long time.”
“How long is a long time?” Elias asked, raising an eyebrow
“Until you’ve become a librarian, I suppose” he replied, making himself laugh so hard that his hair, which he had tied behind his head, began to sway back and forth. After he calmed himself down, he coughed a little before saying, “It’s quite a selection of books you have here, son. The computer’s telling me you’re the first to check any of them out.”
“Well,” Elias responded, “I tend to go for the weird ones. A few days ago I was looking at this old mystical tome that didn’t even have a title on it.”
“Well that’s strange,” Simon replied as he leaned back on his swivel chair, “we don’t usually put the nameless ones out on the shelves.” He scratched his chin for a moment before adding “Do you remember the number on it? I could look it up for you”
Elias thought for a moment back to that strange tome with the animal figures, and tried to remember the number on the inner cover, but couldn’t see one in his mind. “I don’t think it had a number on the inside, now that I think of it…”
“Well,” Simon said with a whimsical sigh, “it wasn’t one of our books then. I have no idea how you found it here”
“Curious…” Elias mused as he grabbed his books from the librarian in front of him, “maybe it was all just a dream then.”
“Maybe,” Simon said with a grin, “Those are due back to us in one week’s time, young man. Have a good day!”
“Have a good day,” Elias responded in kind, before promptly turning around and heading back home.