Legend of the Book Keeper Read Online Free Page B

looking for—a sharp, serrated knife. He staggered toward the stairs. This is it , he grimly determined, or the world as we know it is doomed.

A Scarlet Letter
     
    C ody rubbed his eyes and stared back into the small room. How could it be? He glanced around the room; he had expected a lot of things. He had prepared himself for the most horrific sights. But what he now saw before him was the last thing he had ever expected to see. The room was filled—with books. An initial feeling of disappointment was soon consumed by the uncomfortable feeling of a tightening stomach, the kind you get when you realize you have just made a terrible, terrible mistake. It had never crossed his mind that his theory could be incorrect; it had all seemed so logical: the door, the blood, the sign, and the freshly dug grave. Jade was right. Jade’s always right. It suddenly dawned on him that with the absence of murdered bodies, he now had no conceivable reason to have broken into an elderly man’s house and trespassed onto private property. Cody sickly began to think that Wesley was not the man who was going to end the night behind bars.
    The room was not large, about the size of a small bedroom or large bathroom. After entering through the child-sized door, the ceiling once again rose to standard size. The two flanking walls, mirroring the rest of the store, were covered with large bookshelves. Various trinkets and unusual objects decorated the shelves. The center-piece of the room, against the far wall, was an extravagantly carved podium with a single book resting on it.
    What is the book? Cody wondered as he walked toward it. His eyes explored the room. The spines of the books were too worn down and tattered to make out the names or authors. But what really captured Cody’s attention were the unusual objects on the shelves. Many of them looked like travel devices, perhaps a sexton or a compass, yet like nothing he had ever seen before. As to what purpose they served, Cody could only speculate.
    Approaching the book on the podium, a decoration on the final shelf drew his attention away. It was a picture, framed by an elaborate silver frame. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the frame, however, what was inside the frame left Cody speechless. The picture was of Wesley, looking many years younger, shaking hands with a familiar man. The man was George Washington.
    Cody was no history scholar, but he remembered enough from the history essays Jade had written for him to understand that George Washington lived around the seventeen hundreds. How old IS Wesley? Shaking his head, he returned the picture to the shelf. All this adrenaline is making me crazy . Gathering his wits, he realized that the man with Washington could easily be one of Wesley’s ancestors. Or at worst, it was merely a photography trick. Several of the boys in his school had played a similar prank on him a number of years back by photo editing Jade into a picture with Jules Verne in an attempt to make Cody jealous and profess his love for her. It hadn’t worked then, and it wouldn’t work now.
    Besides, the more pressing concern was the large Book lying, unopened, on the podium before him. Cody’s first impression was that it would be a Bible or a Koran, or some other significant religious book. Now that he stood before it, he realized his assumptions had been wrong. It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong tonight .
    The Book was larger than the average novel, closer to the size of a traditional magazine. It had a dark brown, leather cover, which was tattered and clearly showed the wear-andtear of its age. Along the edges of the front cover, various cryptic symbols created a border around the perimeter. The only other marking, placed directly in the middle, framed by the symbol border, was a large scarlet ‘A.’
    You have got to be kidding, thought Cody. All this trouble for a lousy Hawthorne novel? Reaching down, Cody picked the Book up with his hands. It was