The weight of a thousand whispers

1

The parchment slipped from Qasim's hand like a living thing. 

He had not dropped it. It moved on its own.

Moonlight cut through the mashrabiya screen and covered the manuscript in  shadows. The House of Wisdom's scriptorium should have been silent at this hour but the air hummed somehow and and seemed to whisper in his ears which sounded like distorted words.

He pressed a trembling hand to the page. The ink was still wet. His breath was caught in his chest.

Impossible.

He had prepared the mixture himself gallnut and iron, gum arabic to bind it but this was no ordinary author's work.

The letters shivered. Not the tremor of a draft, but a slow and serpentine undulation as if the words themselves were struggling to rearrange, as if the words were desperately finding their right place.

"You see it now."

The voice came from behind him. Qasim turned too fast and knocked over the inkpot because he was too startled. The black pool spread like a stain of night across the floor and in its reflection,  a face that was not his own.

Wide, milk blind eyes.

Qasim recoiled and Standing over him was Shaykh al-Ruhan, the blind librarian, his empty eyes gleamed with reflected lamplight. In one skeletal weak hand, he held a silver bowl filled with ink. The surface was perfectly still. As if it was mirror.

"They warned you not to take this task, ibn Zaviyar ."
The shaykh's smile showed too many teeth. "But the book chooses its readers. As it chose the last one."

Qasim swallowed. Three nights ago, the House's chief translator had been found in this very room, his eyelids sewn together with hair fine wire. His lips had been moving, though he had no tongue left to speak with.  That was the most terrifying thing he had seen, and now it felt like it was the beginning of everything.

"What does it want?" Qasim rasped.  His hands slightly trembled

The shaykh placed the bowl before him. "To be read. To be remembered. That is what every book wants."

The Manuscript was Bound in what might be animal skin, it emitted a scent of buried myrrh.
The margins crawl with half faded illustrations, figures with too many joints, mouths where their eyes should be. 

It should have been destroyed
                  ______________________

Qasim al-Zaviyar's hands still smelled of the grimoire's ink like thick and metallic, like a butcher's fingertips after slaughter. He scrubbed them in the river on his way home but the stain clung, darkening his fingertips like old bruises.

Why wont it come off

The water was unnaturally cold.

A whisper of silk made him look up and his eyes widened.

She stood waist deep in the river, the current of water tugged at her robes. Layla bint Yusuf, the Grand Vizier's daughter, though this could not be her, Layla never left the palace after sunset.

The moonlight caught her face, and his breath stopped

One side was hers almond eyed, lips parted in warning. The other was rotten, completely melted flesh.

Not decayed. Preserved. The skin there was gray and bloated, the eye milky as a dead fish's. It stared without blinking.

"You took the book," the thing spoke. The words bubbled as if rising through water.

Qasim took a step back. The riverbank squelched underfoot, the mud was too soft and too warm.

She is not human. This is not layla iam just seeing her face...
His whole body felt like it was giving up he could barely stand his body trembled uncontrollably

"I was ordered to translate it," he spoke through the horror

The Drowning Woman laughed, a sound like a body sinking into deep water.

She lifted her hand. In her palm lay a pomegranate, its was split open like a wound. The seeds inside glistened. They pulsed faintly, as if something inside them breathed.

"Eat," she said.

His throat tightened.

The good side of her face wept. The dead side grinned.

Behind her, the river's surface trembled. Shapes floated just beneath they were not branches, not fish. But Fingers.

Dozens of them, pale and grasping, their nails black with old blood.

"Leave Before dawn," she whispered. "Or the next face the river wears will be yours."

Then the current took her, dissolving her into the water like ink in rain as if she had never been there as if it was all an illusion of his mind.

he ran back, somewhere on the track the scholar's body gave up and he fainted.