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Contentment

A burning question began to grow stronger in my heart day by day. "Is there anything missing from the book?" I asked grandfather.

He shook his head. "I wouldn't know", he demurred, "The book belongs to you, not me".

"But it's been in your possession for years", I protested, "Do you mean to tell me you've never studied it? Wondered about it?"

"It's not my place", he said simply, picking up a bag of chicken feed. Then he gave me a long look. "If there's something wrong with it, maybe you should tell me."

I stared back at him, my eyes searching his. Then, exhausted with wondering, my gaze fell to the book, which lay open in my lap. There was an old fashioned engraving of an exquisitely lovely garden, populated by strange and beautiful creatures, and by shapely human women and men in various states of dress and undress, wearing placid expressions, seemingly doing nothing but enjoying the beauty of their surroundings. "Your feet shall walk upon a plush carpet of contentment" read the caption beneath the image. On the opposing page were printed the words to a spell. A blessing, I thought. Or maybe (and here I suffered a shiver of foreboding) the opposite. A curse.

Either way, the spell was incomplete. As with every other charm and incantation in these pages. As if a key of some kind were needed in order to actually use any of it. I wondered, for the thousandth time, if the idea was to render it useless, and therefore harmless, in the wrong hands. But weren't my hands supposed to be the right ones? Shouldn't I know how to use it? Why didn't I?

"What if I don't know?" I demanded, "What do we do with it then? The tourists who gave it to you came through years ago, when you still owned the curiosities shop, long before I was even born. They gave you no contact information of any kind. We have no idea who they were, where they came from, or where they were going. Who knows if they even gave you their real names... They made you promise to keep it safe, to protect it at all costs. They burdened you with this responsibility, and all they gave you in return was the book itself, and a note addressed to me, a child who would not even be conceived until well over a decade later, by name: William Eddelston Seavert, telling me I would 'know what to do with it' and very little else. But I don't know. I have no idea Grandpa. None. And if the tourists are dead, maybe there's no one left on Earth who does. " I sat staring at my hands for a moment, wrestling with my thoughts, hesitating to say what came next. "Except..."

His eyes were still on me. "Except you have a feeling that there's something missing", he finished mildly.

I nodded. "It's weird. It's like the words are familiar, but I can't quite place them. Like something inside of me recognizes them, and is trying to tell me about them, but I can't quite believe it enough to listen. And this something tells me... that there are things that are supposed to be in here that aren't."