Bestial Acts (4 page)

Not long after that, I disappeared from my parents’ world.

Despite my embarrassment at how rudely I’d behaved with the old shopkeeper, I returned to the bookshop the very next day. I really needed to get my hands on that encyclopaedia again.

Just as he’d promised, he’d kept the book for me. I apologized for the day before. He thanked me. Then, he showed me a room in the back where I could sit at a desk to pour through the
Clarence & Charles
. Those volumes were big. You really needed to set them down to read.

Anyway, I started to come every day. Mister Rafael—that was the old man’s name—allowed me to help him out. Running small errands, shelving, sweeping. I loved it so much at Lost Pages. It’s where I wanted to spend all of my time.

At first, I found Mister Rafael’s sense of humour a bit odd, a bit intimidating, but slowly I started to get it. Pretty soon, we were spending our days trading silent jokes while customers moved reverentially through the shop’s stock of incunabula and esoterica.

By then, I knew that the shop only occupied the storefront area of Mister Rafael’s large house. I had seen enough to know that I belonged here. Here. With Mister Rafael. And the dogs! And, of course, the books. Learning about everything I’d always dreamed about and so much more I could never have imagined. Making it my life’s work.

One night, after the shop closed, I told him I had something important to discuss. Mister Rafael didn’t look at me the way other adults did. I felt like a person around him, not like an annoyance to be dealt with. He nodded at me with that wry smile of his. “Let’s go in the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll make us some tea.” Drinking tea was his answer to most situations.

We sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t awkward. He waited for me to be ready to speak, enjoying sitting around with me. I was never more sure. So I spoke to him. I told him my life’s story. I told about how I felt. I stopped short of telling him that I’d come to see him as my father, much more so than the man whose genes I carried. Those words stuck in my throat. But he understood.

No-one at home or at school knew enough about me to trace me here. And, besides, I’d already begun to suspect that Lost Pages wasn’t fully tethered to the world I’d come from.

“I was expecting something like this,” Mister Rafael said.

I went back to my parents’ house one last time. I packed my clothes and came back to Mister Rafael’s house. I came home.

He’d prepared a bedroom for me. Two walls were covered with shelves stacked with books, including a full set of the
Clarence & Charles
. There was a big, old wooden desk. The window was open to let in the cool, late-summer night breeze.

Three of the dogs—Verso, Pipedream, and Unit; they’re long gone, now—were lying on the bed, wagging their tails. I went over to them. They climbed all over me, wrestling and playing. That—

—sealed it. I’ve been living here ever since.” Lucas nodded, remembering. “Some years later, when I was old enough, Mister Rafael retired and left to explore all those—” Lucas paused, measuring the weight of the next word “—worlds he had only read about.”

Aydee waited for Lucas to explain what he meant, but instead there was an awkward silence between them.

Finally, Lucas continued, “He left the shop in my care and still sends me the occasional message. My life would have been pretty desolate without him.”

On the table, there was a spread of breads, fruit, and cheeses, on which Lucas and Aydee nibbled while Lucas recounted his story. There were large bowls of dog food and water on the floor. Aydee couldn’t keep track of the number of dogs that came in and out of the kitchen to eat, drink, or get their heads scratched.

She said, “Lucas . . . what happened today . . . does it . . . does it happen often? Is this what your life is like?” She wanted to ask him why no-one else could see the skeleton fighting the darkness. She thought of the lioness, and of learning to trust Lucas enough to ask him if he knew about her. Soon.

“No . . . not often. . . .” He winked at the girl. She giggled.

“Hey! I should get back to work. I’ve got boxes and boxes of books to sort through.” He downed some apple juice. “Wanna help?”

She nodded. Before she could stop herself, she blurted out, “My name’s Aydee.” She felt scared and exposed, speaking that name aloud for the first time in her life.

“Well, I’m happy we met, Aydee. I really am.” When she heard Lucas say her name, she knew she’d come home.

The giant lioness’s powerful paw shattered the front door of the apartment, which opened into the living room. She walked in, destroying the doorframe, bringing down the wall.

The lioness strolled up to the couple on the couch—a small-faced man with a big moustache and a woman drinking from a jumbo-size bottle of cola—crushing everything in her path. The couple was oblivious to her presence; they looked right through her, didn’t notice the destruction. A thundering growl erupted from deep within the creature. She raised her paw again and, in one swipe, killed both the man and the woman.

Blood and gore seeped into the spotless couch, splattered against pristine surfaces, dropped on the soft, clean carpet.

She sniffed at the corpses. She devoured the stomachs and innards first. She stripped the meat from the bones. She chomped down on the skulls and chewed out the brains, the eyes, the tongues. She shattered the bigger bones with her teeth and sucked out the marrow.

Her meal finished, she left.

Her engorged teats cried for release.

There were many who needed her.

Claude Lalumière (
lostmyths.net/claude
) is the author of the story collection
Objects of Worship
(ChiZine Publications 2009) and the chapbook
The World’s Forgotten Boy and the Scorpions from Hell
(Kelp Queen Press 2008). He has edited eight anthologies, including the Aurora Award nominee
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction
(Edge 2008), and he writes the Fantastic Fiction column for
The Montreal Gazette
. With Rupert Bottenberg, Claude is the co-creator of Lost Myths, which is both a live show and an online archive updated weekly at
lostmyths.net
.