The Book Lover Ch. 11

It was only then that she noticed the ring on her finger, because she had been so distracted by all the other bizarre things taking place that morning. It was a beautiful golden ring with a rather large diamond in it. It was clearly an engagement ring. But why would she have no memory of Tom proposing to her?

She picked up her phone to call Tom, but immediately thought better of it. She didn't think it would sit well if she called to ask him when he proposed to her. That should be a memory a girl would never forget.

So why had she forgotten it?

There was more than a week of her life which she simply couldn't remember. In that week, her body had changed, her breasts had gotten bigger, her boyfriend had proposed marriage and she had apparently accepted, and she had started dressing like a slut. Was that all that happened?

She had no idea what had caused the memory loss, but she had to assume that her memory would eventually come back to her. She certainly didn't want to either offend or worry Tom, so she decided to just pretend like all was normal. She would just wait and see if she could piece things back together until her memory hopefully came back to her. She knew she was supposed to have gone back to work on Wednesday the 22nd, so she decided the best course of action would be to simply go to work and act like she knew what was happening.

For a moment, she was going to just toss all the slutty clothes in her closet away, but she again decided it would be better to wait to do that until she had some idea why they were there in the first place. She got dressed in one of her normal business outfits, had breakfast and caught the subway to work.

She spent the first little while looking over things on her computer. She definitely had been in to work the previous week as her auto-reply on her email had been turned off and there were documents open on the computer and emails read and answered. She noticed a string of emails on Friday that hadn't been read yet, and it brought back a vague memory that she had called in sick on Friday, but she was unsure why. As she looked at the work opened on her computer, she found she could remember actually doing all the changes that were there, but could remember nothing else about having been at work on Wednesday or Thursday.

"Hey, welcome back," a deep baritone voice said from behind her. She recognized it as her boss, a 50 something man with graying hair named Greg. "Guess you're feeling better then?"

"Yeah, lots better," she said, hoping he wouldn't go into details about why she had called in sick since she couldn't remember any of them.

"Good. Check the email I just sent about the meeting at 11:00. I need you to have answers to all the questions in time for the meeting. I was able to put them off on Friday because you were out sick, but they're getting antsy."

He turned to leave.

"Glad you're back. See you at 11:00. Don't disappoint me," he said on his way out.

"I never do, boss," she smiled.

"I know. Let's keep it that way."

She opened the email he had sent and began working on answering the customers questions, making sure to provide enough documentation to make sure they understood the answers. Within a few minutes, she was interrupted again.

"Hey, I heard you were back, hope you're feeling better."

It was Hank from accounting. She had no idea why he would be in her office. She saw when he first walked in that he had looked rather eager to be there, but she could tell he seemed a little disappointed when he walked in and scanned her body to take a good look at what she was wearing.

Hank was a well noted pussy hound. It was no secret that he made his fair share of conquests both in and out of the office. But he never spent any time with Jessie, so she wondered why he would be in her office so soon after her arrival.

"Yeah, I'm a lot better," she answered. Then she waited for him to explain why he was there, giving him a rather stern look for having needlessly interrupted her when she was busy getting ready for a meeting.

She noticed him look away from her firm gaze and then he began to fidget a little.

"Ummm," he muttered, "okay. Well, glad you're back." He then turned to go.

"Did you need something Hank?" She asked, unable to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

"Ummm," he said uncomfortably, "no, just thought I'd check and make sure you were okay." He practically high tailed it out of there, more eager to leave than he had initially seemed on arriving.

That was extraordinarily odd. Why on earth would Hank be so eager to come see her, then seem disappointed in her appearance and then move on so quickly? She didn't have any time to reflect on it as she had to finish getting ready for her meeting.

Of course, she didn't disappoint Greg or the customer at the meeting, and the deal was finalized that very afternoon which got her a rather celebratory visit from Greg.

But it was the other events of the day that puzzled her more. There were several more visits from guys in the office that she seldom had contact with, and almost never actually worked with. The all seemed rather eager to visit her to "check up" on her, but none of them offered any explanation for why they were there in the first place. They all seemed to go away as disappointed as Hank had been.

She knew it couldn't be a coincidence. The fact that the first and apparently most eager one to visit her had been Hank from accounting was telling. She had to surmise that it had to do with the clothes that she had found in her closet that morning. They had seemed very slutty to her, and something she would never wear to work. But, if she had worn something like that to work it would certainly have captured Hank's attention, along with the other guys that had visited her. Had she openly flirted with them when she came back to work last week while wearing much more revealing clothes and sporting her new killer body? She couldn't believe she would somehow have done that, but then she didn't believe the changes she saw this morning, or the clothes she found in her closet either.

When she got home she went through her dirty clothes and pulled out the top two outfits and put one of them one. It was a black skirt that fit tightly around her hips, accentuating both the flare of her hips and the shape of her ass, that didn't even make it half way down her thighs. The top was long sleeved cotton, with a conservative tan color that fit her very tightly and displayed her prominent bust. It was also scooped low enough in front to show plenty of cleavage. She had to assume this was the outfit she had last worn to work, which certainly explained the attention from so many men.

She had no idea what was going on. All she could do was wait until Tom got home and see if she could figure something out when she talked to him without worrying him about her loss of memory.

Tom had to leave work a little early to get to his destination. He got off the subway and made his way down 2nd avenue until he could see the old, weathered sign across the street.

EG Rare Books, LTD

They closed at 6:00, and it was nearly 5:45. He would have hated to show up that late for what he planned to ask, but he had called Eli in advance and asked if he could look over a book that Jessie had found in James' collection. He said as long as Tom could get there before closing, he'd be happy to take a look. Anything for James' favorite granddaughter.

He walked into the shop and found Eli sitting behind the counter.

"Tom," he said jovially, "how are you?"

"Good," Tom replied, "and you?"

They knew each other quite well. Eli and James were basically best friends who shared a passion for books. Many of the times that Tom and Jess visited James, they would find Eli there, drinking whiskey and arguing over books with James. Some of the greatest discussions he'd ever participated in had been with Jessie, her Gramps, and his friend Eli.

"How's Jessie holding up?" He asked solemnly.

Tom shrugged.

"Not too bad," he said. "It's been kind of hard on her, I'm not gonna lie."

"Of course," Eli said. "Those two were as close as anyone can be to another human."

Tom just nodded.

"So what's this about a book?" Eli asked.

"Well," Tom replied as he took his backpack off his shoulder and began to unzip it. "I don't know if you heard, but James left his whole collection to Jessie."

"He told me he was going to," Eli said with a grin. "She's the only one he knew whose love of books came close to his own ... other than me, of course."

"Well," Tom went on, "she found a rather unusual book in James' collection. She set it out for me this morning, I figured it was because I work a lot closer to your place than she does. I'm sure she wants to know what you think of it."

By that point Tom had extracted the book from the backpack and set it on the counter in front of the old book seller.

"Hmmm," Eli said. "That is unusual, isn't it?"

"Weirdest thing I've ever seen," Tom agreed.

"Man," Eli exclaimed as he examined the outside of the book, "someone went to extraordinary lengths to create this thing, don't you think?"

"What do you mean?" Tom asked.

"Well, let's just start with the cover. It's made of some sort of rawhide. It looks like some sort of dye might have been applied, but it clearly wasn't tanned with any modern tanning technique. I don't think you could purchase anything like this. It would have to have been handmade by someone trying to replicate more ancient techniques. Why go to all that effort?"

"Good question," Tom replied.

"And that's just the first of many," Eli went on. "How is the cover still relatively pliable? Rawhide gets brittle pretty quickly. It's only soft and pliable for a few months to a year after it's initially dried. So either James just acquired this right before he passed ... may he rest in peace... or whoever made it found some unusual way to keep the hide from drying out too much."

He carefully opened the book to the middle pages.

"Look at the binding," he went on. It's made of strips of some thicker animal hide of some sort, cut into thin strips and somehow oiled so that they stay more flexible than the cover. Each page is punctured by hand and threaded with these strips to hold it all together. And look at the pages! When's the last time you've seen a book made of actual parchment instead of paper?"

"I've never seen one," Tom confessed.

"I mean, vellum still exists," Eli went on, "the British parliament still uses it for official documents and you can buy it, but this clearly is handmade parchment. We've got three different animal skins, processed in three different ways, all by hand, all by using ancient techniques. This was a pretty intense labor of love, even before there was any writing done inside of it, don't you think?"

"Definitely," Tom agreed.

"And then we get to the text," he went on. "Have you ever seen text like this?"

Tom shook his head.

"It looks a little like Sanskrit," Eli explained, "but I don't believe it actually is. And look how it's written. Entirely by hand. Using some implement that looks like it was dipped in some sort of blood."

"Wow," Tom explained. "I wondered what kind of ink that was."

"Someone spent a lot of time, effort and money to make a book using entirely ancient techniques even though it would appear to have been made in the last year or so. It has to be a copy of something, and I'm pretty sure I know what."

"That's good to hear."

Eli walked into a back office. After a couple of minutes, he returned with a very large, old looking ledger book. On the cover of the ledger, "James Stringer" was written in black ink.

"James bought a hell of a lot of books from me." Eli explained. "I kept a ledger of them. That way, if he ever came back for more information about a book, which he did all the time, I could find my notes that I took when the book came into my possession."

He opened the book, and began to scan the pages.

"I have a column on the end here," he said, pointing to a small column on the edge of the page which was mostly empty. At most there were one or two lines per page that had entries in that column. Tom looked and noticed that one of them, on the page they were currently on, read 'German'.

"I wrote down anytime the language was something other than English. He liked to find copies of books in the original language they were written in, even though he didn't know how to read them. That's kind of the way collectors work, actually."

Eli started flipping pages, scanning that mostly empty column, pausing to read any entries. After turning back a dozen or so pages, he stopped.

"There," he said. "I thought so."

He pointed to a line on the page where there was an entry in the language column.

Avestan

"I thought I remembered something like this," he said.

"Avestan?" Tom asked. "I thought we were looking for Sanskrit."

"Yeah," Eli replied, "that's what I was thinking too. But now I remember. It wasn't Sanskrit, it was Avestan."

Tom cocked his head quizzically. He had never heard of Avestan.

"You've heard of Zoroastrianism?" Eli asked.

Tom nodded.

"That religion sprang from a book of scripture called the Avesta. It's the only known text of the language we now call Avestan because it came from that scripture. It predates Sanskrit and shows up in the 2nd millennia BC."

He moved back along the line of the entry in the ledger.

"It's volume A6, page 40," he said, although Tom had no idea what he was talking about. "I'll be right back."

He walked back into the back office and after a couple of minutes he returned carrying a large notebook that looked much older than the ledger he had already retrieved.

He set the notebook down and opened it up and flipped through pages until he found page 40.

"Here it is," Eli said confidently. He put on some reading glasses and began to read the notes.

"Eureka," Eli declared excitedly and turned the notebook around so Tom could look at it.

Tom scanned the information written down about the book. Eli had purchased it in July of 1974 in a shipment of books that came to him from Egypt. The description of the book matched the book in front of them, with one glaring exception. In 1974, Eli estimated the age of that book as being at least 100 and more likely 200-300 years old. There were sections in the notebook where Eli had meticulously copied some characters from several pages of the book. He had numbered the pages.

Eli had already turned to the first page listed in the notebook. He turned the book and set it down next to the notebook for Tom to compare. It was easy to see that the text in the book matched the text copied into the notebook. Tom eagerly turned the pages of the book to the next page listed in the notebook and once again, he was able to match the notebook inscriptions to what was in the book.

"This is nearly an exact copy of a book I sold to James in November of 2001, that I had acquired in 1974. The book I bought from Egypt in 1974 was centuries old. I had the text analyzed with a friend of mine who was a linguist. He told me that he believed it to be a precursor to old Avestan. Which would make it more than four thousand years old."

Tom found that information to be quite surprising.

"So look at what I wrote down as my conclusion," Eli said, pointing to his hand written notes.

Tom read the notes.

I believe this book is likely to be a meticulous copy of an ancient text, put together sometime in the 17th or 18th century. Carl suggests the Avestan variant appears to him a legitimate precursor to Old Avestan, which would suggest the original text might be four or five thousand years old.

"So that makes this book highly unusual," Eli suggested.

"Why's that?" Tom asked.

"Because the only conclusion I can make here, is that James must have hired someone to make a nearly exact replica of a book that I sold him 14 years ago that was itself likely a replica of a book that was probably thousands of years old. Why spend this much effort to make a copy of a copy of a book?"

"Isn't it possible he just had it restored?"

Eli shook his head.

"You can't really restore these materials. Rawhide gets brittle with age. There's not really any way to reverse that process. The original book I purchased had parchment that was also brittle and cracked. This rawhide and parchment are fresh. They can't be more than a year or two old. You simply couldn't go from the book I bought to this one without making a replica."

"You're right," Tom replied, "that is weird."

"If you're asking what the value of this book is, I would have to say it has almost no value whatsoever. The copy that I sold James, which I guess was at least centuries old, might have some value to a collector somewhere, although the original book was of unknown origin or purpose. This is just a lark that James must have embarked on for no good reason that I can think of. I'll bet he had to pay someone hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to make this. And somewhere in his collection there has to be the copy I sold him for $75 dollars back in 2001, that ostensibly would hold much greater value. It doesn't make any goddamned sense."

"Agreed," Tom replied. "Well, thanks for your time." He closed up the book and put it back in his backpack and shook Eli's hand.

"My pleasure," Eli replied. "Say hi to Jessie for me, and let her know I'm thinking about her and she can come talk to me anytime. I'll always make time for her."

"I will, thanks."

She had already eaten dinner and downed two bottles of beer before Tom arrived, a couple of hours later than usual. She couldn't help but notice that he, like the men in the office, seemed disappointed to see what she was wearing.

"Hey," he said, "sorry I'm so late, but it took Eli a bit of time to figure some things out about the book."

"You went to Eli's?"

"Yeah," he replied, "you left that weird book out on the counter this morning. I assumed you wanted me to take it to Eli and see if he could tell what it was, or at least have an idea what the language was."

She was still unsure what book he was talking about, but didn't yet want to let on about her memory loss, so she just went with the flow.

"Did he have any ideas?" She asked.

"Well... sort of... but it's definitely an oddity. He thinks Gramps must have had it commissioned, but he had no idea why Gramps could possibly want to do it."

Tom opened his backpack and extracted a leather book with no markings on it and sat it on the table in front of her. Oddly it seemed as though she could feel heat emanating from the book, which seemed both very strange and eerily familiar as she reached out her hand to touch it. She pulled her hand back instantly as though it had been burned. Fortunately Tom had moved over to the fridge to pull out a beer and some leftovers and hadn't seen her do it. When she touched the book, it had felt quite hot, and her mind had flooded with the image of her hand wrapped around a very large penis.

Cock!



She shook her head, trying to figure out why that word had impressed itself on her mind.

She stared at the book and felt compelled to touch it again, this time simply resting her hand lightly on its surface and feeling the swirling energy emanating from it into her hand. The energy was accompanied with images, very lewd images of naked bodies writhing together.

She smiled.

Ahh, yes. The book was back. She immediately felt bad at having run off all the men at work earlier in the day. It had been so fun flirting with them the previous week. She hoped she hadn't scared them off.

"Why don't you heat up your dinner and then you can tell me all about what he said," She said to her fiancé.