Morning all. Oddly enough it is warmer this morning than it has been all week. This has been a very strange autumn. Still the writing prompt awaits. So timers set and lets see what story ideas this sentence provokes.
Oh my magical senses are tingling. Need to decide if the book is good magic or evil though.
Thursday, November 13th: It was obviously very old.
It was obviously very old. Jake slipped the cotton gloves on and slowly slipped his hands under each side of the book. It was wrapped with a long strip of faded velvet and placed in a wooden box. The box was a tight fit, but luckily it was a fairly cheap box.
There were no dovetailed joints at the corners. There weren’t even screws. The wood overlapped at the corners and was simply nailed together. The nails were varying sizes, and some were bent in strange ways. It was as though someone decided they needed a box and used scrap lumber and a jar of salvaged nails to knock it together. Perhaps they meant to come back or to get a better box later but never did.
That they didn’t was helping him now. The wood around the nails rotted just slightly. With no sealant the holes were an entry point, and he could wiggle the sides easily. He didn’t want to destroy the box in case it had clues as to how the book came to be here, but the wiggle room let him slide his hands along the sides of the book and slip his fingers underneath. Thus supported, he could lift the book out of the box without worrying about losing the cloth or even the back cover. It was all protected.
With his fingers along the sides it was an even tighter fit and he gave the book a little jerk, feeling the cloth wrapped bundle pop out of the box. The box dropped to the table and with the book now free, the sides leaned in.
Jake was fairly certain the book’s presence had been the only thing keeping the box from leaning it. It consisted only of four sides and a bottom; the top being removed earlier when Jake peered inside. There were no interior supports so it became less of a rectangle and more of a parallelogram.
Jake set the book to the side and thinking the box was not long for this world, he examined it. The bottom was branded with some sort of strange symbol he had never seen. He picked up his phone and took a couple of pictures of it. On each of the interior sides there were also symbols. He took photos of them but wasn’t certain if the symbols were placed there on purpose, or if they just happened to be on the scrap wood picked up to create the box.
Each side had a symbol, but they weren’t evenly spaced and one looked as though only part of the symbol made it onto the wood, the rest on part of a plank not used. There were odd paint marks showing the wood had been part of something else at one point. Once it ceased to be part or whatever it was, Jake was sure that the wood caught drips from other painting products.
Cautiously he lifted the box, turning it slowly around in his hands. There were other symbols, smaller and on the inside. Some were branded in, others drawn in with a light hand. He couldn’t decide if they were experimental or meant not to catch the eye. Jake turned the box, set it down and photographed it again. He took wide shotes and then detailed ones of each of the symbols.
None of them meant anything to him. They weren’t symbols he had ever seen. He would have to seek assistance to find meaning. The box recorded. Jake turned his attention to the book.
Ten til Midnight 