Page 140 of Devil Inside
“Never too late.”
“Why this one?”
“It speaks to a greater truth those other books never can.”
He looks at us. Considers us. “How much?”
We smile. “Take it.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s yours.”I am yours, if only you could see me...
“Seems like a bad business model you’ve got going here. How do you ever turn a profit if you keep giving books out to potential customers?”
“Only for our preferred clientele.”
“I made the cut, did I?”
“Don’t fret. It won’t break the bank. As you can see,” we say, “business is absolutely booming.”
“That’s very kind of you,” he says. The words are warm. His voice tender.
We want him. Need him to see us. “There is a catch...”
“Knew it,” he says.
“When you’re finished reading it, you have to come back. Tell me what you think.”
“I can live with that.”
Live with that.
We take the book back, just for a moment, plucking it from his own hands.
We open it. The faintest wisp of dust drifts up from its pages. We smell it, the musk of antiquity, of time slipping. We flip through its yellowing pages, the paper brittle with age.
We find a particular passage we’ve been searching for. We bring the book up and read from this crumbling edition, letting the words sink into these lips. This tongue.
“If Death
Consort with thee, Death is to me as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The bond of nature draw me to my own,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our state cannot be severed, we are one,
One flesh; to lose thee were to lose my self...”
We lose ourselves in the words. Taste the sumptuous text. The spirit inhabiting these lines. There is a succulence to them. A vibrance, even now, centuries later. It’s impossible not to drift away, unmoored by the very words, even for just a brief moment.
The words pull me out of our host, unleashing me. An emotional release. I am outside of myself for just a brief, fleeting moment, set adrift by such beautiful words.
When I return to our host’s body, we sense Jordan staring back. He looks at us differently. His eyes now clasp onto us, this dawning recognition spreading over his face.
