The Eyes of a King

T
hese are the last words I will write. “Tell me everything from the beginning,” you said. “Explain to me why you did it.” I have. There is nothing left to tell you anymore.

The dust drifts across the paving of the silent balcony. A dark wind—the first wind of autumn—rifles through the pages and draws the stars behind it into the fading sky. Light and laughter are rising from the rooms far below; still farther below that, the lights of the city are emerging in the settling darkness. When you were here, half an hour ago, you lit a lamp for me. The breeze makes it waver now and turns the pages back to the beginning. This book is the past five years of my life. How can I close it now?

I do not have the strength to go down into the noise and the light
of the party. So I turn the pages of the book instead, tracing the words I wrote. There are parts of this story that still haunt my dreams, that repeat themselves in all my waking thoughts and refuse to let go. But I did not begin by writing about those things.

I began with the book, and the snow.

T
he snow began to fall as I walked home. It was dark, though barely five o’clock, and cold. My breath billowed white in the darkness and everything was quiet. Even the jangle and thud of the soldiers’ horses seemed deadened. The flakes were so cold that they almost burned where they touched my face, and they lodged on my clothes and stuck fast. I tried to brush them away and pulled my coat up tighter about my neck.

I was used to snow—we all were—but not at the end of May. It looked set to stay cold for at least a week. We got more than enough snow in the winter.

There was a sort of beauty in it, I suppose. The clouds had closed like a lid over the narrow squares of sky, and already the gas lamps were lit. The snow caked on their panes and glowed yellow. I stopped still, and then it was almost completely silent, without even the wet crunch of my footsteps. Quiet, not silent. Through the still air I could hear the feathery sound of the snowflakes settling.

I looked up into the sky. The way the snowflakes swelled in toward my face made me feel as if I was rising. It got darker. It got colder.

I started to think about going home, but I didn’t.

I began to shiver, but I went on staring into the sky. It got
still darker. I would have stood there all night, perhaps. It was like an enchantment. And I did not want to go home yet anyway. The constant frantic motion of the snowflakes made me dizzy, and my neck ached from looking upward. Still the snow fell. I was hypnotized.

Suddenly I felt someone was near to me. The spell was broken. I was back in the street again.

I looked around, but there was no one. Only a presence in the air, as if someone was hiding in the shadows. I felt sick suddenly. There were ghosts here perhaps, invisible spirits moving close by. I turned away.

Before I had taken three steps, my foot met with something heavy and I stumbled. There was a black shape in the snow, spotted with the flakes my feet had thrown up. At first I thought it was a dead animal—a rat perhaps—lying there frozen.

I bent closer. And I saw that it was not an animal at all but a book. Just a book. I reached out toward it cautiously. I could still feel a strange presence—someone else’s thoughts like a vapor in the air.

I willed the book’s cover to lift itself, with the slightest tensing of my fingers and my mind. It didn’t stir. That was a trick I’d known for years, and it usually worked. Although it was only a cheap trick, no more. It did not even work on the Bible.

I was suspicious of the book. I did not know if I should touch it. Perhaps it would be better to leave it where it was. I turned to walk away. But I could not. I was going to pick it up; I knew I was. It was unavoidable. There was no point in reasoning with myself, then.

My fingers drew close to the dark leather of the cover even
before I had decided. I watched them hover above it for a moment, as if they were someone else’s. I tried to pull my hand away. I couldn’t. For a second I was frightened. Then my fingers closed around the book, and at the same moment the presence vanished. I picked the book up and flipped the cover open.

The pages were stiff and suntanned yellow, like sheets of bone. The first one was blank. I turned to the next. Nothing. The next one and the next one too were empty. I fanned the pages out loose, impatiently, bending the covers back almost to breaking point, so that the dry glue in the spine bristled. They were all blank.

The weather had changed while I had looked away. The wind growled through the narrow streets, the pitch of its voice heightening. The snowflakes dashed at my face like ground glass. My jaw ached with cold, and my fingers on the book’s cover were raw and wet from the melting snow. I pushed the book into my coat pocket and set off for home.

Later, when I held the book to the light of the oil lamp in the bedroom, I wondered if I should have left it where it was. There was a strangeness about it that made me uneasy. I had been sure that there was someone behind me in the street, and I could not help connecting the book with that presence. Perhaps it was a stupid thing to think. It was only an empty book.

I turned away from the lamp and pressed the side of my face against the window to create a shadow that I could see out of. The wind had rent a hole in the snow clouds, and a few stars shone through. I liked looking at the stars. One of them was called Leo, but I did not know which one. I never knew which one. The snow was freezing hard in the streets. It caught every
faint glimmer from the gas lamps and reflected it ice blue. Tomorrow would be cold—very cold.

A sound made me turn back to the room. “Leo!” came my grandmother’s voice sharply. I pushed the book across the floor, into the darkness under my bed, and sat back on the windowsill. “Leo!” my grandmother said again, and she stepped into the room. She looked at Stirling, asleep in his bed in the far corner. Then she turned to me. “Leo, do you need that light?” Her eyebrows lowered, casting her eyes into shadow, like a skeleton’s. “Put it out!” she told me. “You’re wasting oil. What are you doing?”

“I was going to go to bed.”

“Aye. It’s late.”

She gazed at me for a moment. She looked so old in the shadows, though she was only sixty-five. Her gray hair shone, tight across her head, and the loose wisps about her ears caught the light of the lamp. The lines around her eyes and mouth were pronounced, and her face was tense. Her face was always tense when she spoke to me.

“You were kept after school again?” she said. “Leo, I am losing count of how many times this month.”

I did not answer. She looked at me for a long time without speaking. “What is it?” I said eventually.

I expected her to continue nagging me. But instead, she looked away and said, “You have grown so like Harold. His eyes were gray too when he was your age. That was what I was thinking.”

“Grandmother?” I said, and stood up.

She turned back to me. “What?”

I changed my mind. “Nothing.”

“Good night, Leo,” she said sadly. “God bless you.”

She looked as if she might reach up and put her hand on my shoulder, then seemed to decide against it. She left, and closed the door behind her. I heard the door of her own room rattle shut. It needed fixing. The screws were rusting, and one of the hinges had snapped. I would have done it. That door was going to fall soon. But it was hard to get hinges these days, when the factories only made bullets.

I waited for a moment before kneeling and reaching under my bed for the book. I felt a corner and caught hold of it. But what I pulled out was a different book altogether. Larger, and older. I blew the dust off the cover, as quietly as I could, and it prickled in my nose. This had surely been there a long time.

Then I remembered what it was. It was years since I had put it there. My grandmother would have gone crazy if she’d known I still had a copy.

The Golden Reign
by Harold North. A hardback book, leather. It was a bestseller. Hundreds of thousands of people read that book. Then it was banned. They burned the entire second print run. My father was already far away. It was strange that my grandmother had just mentioned him, and now here was his forgotten book in my hand.

I ran my fingers over the cover. He was the best, my father, the best writer of our time. But seven years had passed now and I hardly remembered his face. I had been eight then, Stirling’s age. Perhaps my father would not have known me either.

The cover peeled away from the title page reluctantly. Underneath the printed title my father’s signature still stood out in yellowing writing. I remember he autographed it for me, because I asked him to. I said I wanted to be a writer, like him.

I slammed the cover down hard, pushed the book back under my bed, and turned to blow out the oil lamp. But I didn’t have to. The oil was finished. The lamp flickered once … twice … and went out.

The next morning I woke to cold white dawn. White, not gray, because of the strange light of the snow. That was what I saw when I opened my eyes—the snow in the street, like pure white waves frozen in a channel, and above the dirty houses snow hanging heavily in the sky. Then I remembered that I couldn’t see the street from my bed. Every morning, when I woke, I saw only the sky. But I was looking down into the street now.

I was sitting on the windowsill. My head was pressed hard against the freezing window, and it hurt to pull away. Why was I here? I remembered going to bed the night before, after the lamp had gone out. I stood up.

The book was lying on the windowsill, beside the stone-cold lamp. That book I had found in the snow. It was strange, because I was sure that I had left it under my bed, where I’d shoved it carelessly the evening before. I picked it up and fanned out the pages absentmindedly, blinking. It was early, and I was tired. It could not have been much later than six o’clock. Then I started. There was writing in the book!

I snapped the book shut. It had been empty the day before; I had checked every page. I opened it again. Yes, there was writing. Close-packed black writing that I did not recognize. Surely then, the book was more than what it seemed. It could only be evil. I put it quickly back on the windowsill, afraid to keep hold of it. I stared at it for a long while.