Forbidden Knowledge
G. Matthew King


	A hand reaches down from the darkness.  Candlelight draws closer,
contrasting the bone-white skin with the black velvet sleeve.  Gray dust
cakes on the fingertips being slowly run across the leather-bound book.  
A soft caress, yielding but very possessive, as she feels the textured 
cover.  The cover is familiar to her touch, and she shudders coldly.
This book of the dead is bound in skin like her own.
	She sets the candle upon the desk, brushing aside a tattered
cobweb.  Light flickers unsteadily in the drafty library; wind softly
moaning throughout the ancient tower.  Heat lightning jumps across the
humid summer night.  Her nervous tension seems to hang in the air as she
slowly opens the cover.  
	A skull greets her; a grinning fore-bearer of the terrible things
contained within the tome.  The ink is faded blacks and reds, befitting
the knowledge of death and disease recorded century by century in the
master's private notes.  Dead now, he was old beyond his time.  His mind
was sharp unto the end, when madness over took his once great being.
Flinging himself from his study window, he was impaled on a post outside.
His body was not found until the next day, already half ravaged by the
wolves of the nearby haunts.  Another shudder runs through the young lady
as she remembers the horrifying image of his face as she took him down.
Half pulled into the largest, most insane grin she had ever seen, and the
other half but a rag concealing the grin of a bloody jawbone.  
	The candle's flicker in the draft draws her eyes back to the pages
before her.  The skull seems to swim in front of her tired eyes.  Laughing
with the insane knowledge of the dead and decaying, the skull pulls itself
out of the page to confront her.  She screams, drawing back out of the
candle light in a twirl.  Falling, smashing her head roughly against the
floor.  She scrambles farther back, whirling again to face the apparition.
Nothing is before her but the candle, wax slowly dripping down the taper.
	She rises to her feet slowly, eyes never leaving the sphere of
candlelight filling her vision.  The edges blur into indistinct shadows,
half-images of bookshelves and alchemical jars.  Creeping in the shadows,
she approaches the desk cautiously.  She rights the overturned stool, then
sits upon it once more.  She quickly turns past the opening illustration
to the book proper.  
	Cramped scribbles ran across the pages, scrawled ponderings and
sub-passages smearing together in a symphony of insanity.  Tiny,
cris-crossed notes surrounded drawings of animal and human anatomy.  The
margins were filled with half-written ideas and discoveries.  Each
experiment led to more and more bizarre, thoughts and inspirations.  Her
eyes broadened in horror and fascination, the candlelight sparkling in the
green-blue depths.  Faster and faster she read, fearing the things to be
found on the next page but not having the strength of will to close the
tome.  She knew if she closed it now, she would never summon the courage
to open it again, the arcane knowledge would be lost to her curiosity
forever.  The smell of dusty decay filled her nostrils, causing her to
sneeze slightly.  The candle burned lower and lower; the smoke made her
weary eyes hurt.  Still she read through the night.  Experiments lay drawn
out before her, experiments with brimstone and electricity, with the dead
and decayed, with rings of candles, blood, and bone.  
	The pages blurred into her memory, pressing back barriers into the
darkest corners of her psyche. 
She knew of her own mortality with the stroke of a pen, and of all the
attempts of reaching beyond that coil.  She learned of the horrors of the
passing of those too young to even conceive that one day they too must
follow the way of all of mankind.  She knew of being buried not dead, and
of the fine line between life and death and what lies between them both.
She could see in her mind the terrible agony of plagues and leprosies.
She felt the pain of being burned to death in an inferno and the cold
chill found in a watery pool come coffin.  She learned of ways to live and
die in manners she had never comprehended before this night.  The last
page crinkled beneath her touch as she read the final inscription.  A
passage in Latin greeted her:  Dum vivimus, VIVAMUS! --While we live, let
us LIVE!
	She slowly closed the book.  Her mind reeled as the strange
writings took shape within her, pushing her to think of new things and in
strange, archaic directions.  She rested her hand on the book' cover.  Her
skin sagged, bones and tendons showing through the shallow flesh.  Her
fingernails were brittle and cracked, bearing a trace of age-begotten
yellow.  Her body felt weak from the long night and the stress of the
reading.  She sat on the stool until dawn's light greeted her through the
window.  And as she sat, she pondered many things concerning life and
death and the meaning of either and both.  But the one thing she pondered
most was a simple question.  Did she now own the book, or did the book now
own her?

G.Matthew King