The Little Black Book

It was just another quite ordinary day in the small town of Westville, situated somewhere between good enough and dreamland. It was a mid-morning Sunday, and the church bells signified the end of the morning mass, not that Toby went anyway. Toby was in his early twenties, back home from college and took to walking around the small town while most everyone else went to the church to be saved.

He looked around the shops on the main street as he walked casually down the sidewalk. People flooding into the department store to check out the latest fashion or to buy that one tool that most father probably already owned seven of, but never managed to know where they put them. Others made their way to the pharmacy for a phosphate soda, or the popcorn stand to buy a salty buttery snack, the daily newspaper, and in some cases the most dubious among them would buy the latest sports illustrated swimsuit edition and spirited it into their home before their wives or mothers found out.

Toby was not keen on crowds all that much and turned into a little store on the left at the end of the street. This was the local antique shop that had a strong “Sanford and Son” feel to their organizational scheme. He came here from time to time and wandered around the shop and its many twists and turns gazing at other peoples long forgotten treasures that had ended up here one way or another. Today he made his way over to the bookshelves in the back room, which resembled a small library from one of those older black and white silent films. Hardly anyone ever came back here because books were falling out of fashion these days, so the books were covered in thick layers of dust and several cobwebs lined the ceiling. The shop owner was petrified of spiders and took to them with a “you don’t touch me; I won’t touch you” policy.

He grabbed one book after another reading peculiar titles such as Recipes from Yesteryear: classic cuisine from the 1800’s, How to trap your Beaver, and Bloody Vengeance: The complete guide to slaying monsters. One after another he laughed at the titles, others intrigued him and warranted flipping through a few pages. He took one off a shelf near the middle, and suddenly, the shelf fell, and books came raining down on him. Toby tried the best he could to catch them with superhuman speed, which he did not exactly have, so instead displayed a nice comedy act for the potential ghosts in the shop. He dropped the couple books he could catch on top of the others, grabbed the shelf to put it back on the rest of the bookcase, and that is when he saw it, a small crack in the back wall of the case. He pried it a bit and found a small black book behind it.

The book had about two hundred pages total and had no markings of any kind on it is hard cover. Toby flipped through the pages, which appeared blank at first until he returned to the very first page and it started to fill up with words and very peculiar designs. The books title was Magika Antiquita: Spells, enchantments, and alchemical recipes from the court of Merlin. Toby locked his eyes on the title and stared in absolute wonder at what these pages could teach him. As he lost himself in the first few pages, his eyes transfixed on the words and symbols printing themselves seemingly out of thin air, the shop owner stood a few feet from the book section entrance.

“Hey! What did you d…. AHHHHHHHHH!” The shop owner screamed as he bolted behind an old suit of armor as a decent sized spider has appeared on top of the book pile.

“C…come here, don’t worry about the mess. I hate spiders too; I would have done the same. Just get out here before they start grouping up to attack.”

Toby did as the shop owner requested and exited the book section, he walked silently behind the shop owner to the front counter and placed the book on it in order to make his purchase.

“Oh, I see you found something you liked.” Said the shop owner as he flipped through the pages in order to find a price scrawled somewhere.

“hmm…well, I see no price, let us call it five bucks. That’s quite a deal for such a fine-looking Journal.”

“Yeah, it seemed like a steal.” Responded Toby, completely confused as to why the owner called it a journal. Then he realized the shop owner probably never was able to see the utter magic of the book revealing it is secrets.

Toby Paid the man, who was still shaking from the ordeal of seeing a spider and exited the store with his newly found treasure hidden away in a brown bag. Hardly able to contain his excitement he ran straight home and lock himself in his basement bedroom to study the book in depth. He sat at his desk with a table lamp shining onto the pages as the began filling up before his eyes, turning the page to read what it would reveal next he stared with anticipation, but nothing else came. Flipping back to the beginning he began to read what was revealed and tried to fully comprehend the meaning.

The first pages laid out details for a simple spell that would simply refill a refreshment before it could be fully drank. He left the book propped open on his desk and went back upstairs to grab a glass of water and returned to his room. He reread the pages very carefully and recited the incantation before he started drinking the water.

“Refilius Brimous” Toby whispered to the cup and began to drink.

He drank all the way down till there was just a few drops left in the glass, and he stared at it in astonishment as the water started to increase, a small vortex in the middle formed as if it were being refilled by an invisible butler. Feeling proud of himself for performing a magic spell, he flipped through and found that another couple pages were writing themselves, and the title of it was Midas Immaculum. He read on to discover this was a feat of alchemy that require several reagents to create an enchanted rod, which when the tip touched something it would turn it into solid gold.

It had taken some time for Toby to collect the reagents, but he had managed to find everything required. Tuft of black cats’ fur, spiders’ silk, blood from a horned toad, a gemstone, and a copper rod to fix it to, as well as the moss from a skeleton’s bones. He pulled out a hot plate and set a pot of water on it to boil. He read the incantations and added the reagents to it one by one until everything was inside the pot, and to finish it off a drop of blood from himself. The water turned a deep shade of red as he uttered the final words, and a shining rod that looked nothing like what he trough in had surface and hovered above the pot allowing him to take it for his own. The copper rod and gemstone had fused and warped into a thing of beauty.

Excited by the incantation’s success, he took the rod in his right hand, and through a small handful of rocks onto the desk, he touched them one by one, and was stunned with bewilderment as each one transmuted itself into solid gold. He set the rod, tip down into a pencil cup on his desk. The cup turned to gold, but it became a safe spot to hold onto it when he was not using it. Toby realized that the rocks looked like gold nuggets, and that if he could fill a jar with them, he would be richer than anyone he ever knew. With the thought in mind, he rushed up the stairs and outside to the backyard, collecting as many small rocks as he could carry, and stopped in the kitchen to grab a jar.

Toby through the rocks onto his desk, took the rod in his hand, and touched everyone of them as fast as he could and deposited the rod back into the cup. He waited a few moments, just in case, and then scooped up all the gold nuggets and placed them in the jar. By his calculations he was now a multi-millionaire. He could quit school, buy a big house, and a boat, and a butler, and maybe even a country of his own and call it Tobania. With the rod secured in its cup and gold in the jar, Toby left the house and went to the next town over which was a good hour drive, but they had one of the biggest banks in the country, where he knew they would have the money to buy his gold.

Bankers being as greedy as the come, tested the gold and upon discovering it was real, they hoarded it away in their vault like a dragon of old and gave Toby a whole suitcase luggage set full of money that amounted to One hundred Million dollars. Proud of himself and the magical little black book, he rushed home to show his parents how wealthy their son had become. It was night when he returned and as the headlights showed on the house, he caught a glint of gold flashing from his room.

Must be the cup. He thought.

He entered the home, and it was eerily silent, save for an infomercial on the television in the living room. He grabbed a soda from the kitchen and went down to his bedroom with his suitcases full of money. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he froze, dropped everything including his soda, which shot back out of the can and sprayed him in the face. The car headlight had not caught the cup through the window. He looked on in horror as he saw both of his parents standing there…solid gold statues. He approached them with tears in his eyes, and carefully took the rod from his father’s grasp. He looked around frantically trying to find the little black book, and then he found it in his mother’s hand, it too had turned to solid gold.

Toby Fell to his knees crying, horrified at what happened. All he wanted was to surprise them with this discovery and let them know that they would never have money trouble ever again. He should have told them before he left, he should have warned them not to touch it. He stared at the rod in his hand and through it across the room…unfortunately for him, it ricochets off the wall and hit him on the leg. The wall, the floor, every single piece of the house and Toby all began to turn into solid gold. He grabbed the rod and placed it under his shirt. He knew he was done for the moment it tapped his leg, but at least this way the book and the rod will never harm anyone ever again. His last thought as the gold encased the remaining part of his face was what his mother probably thought as she turned to gold. He could see it in her facial expression, it was not one of horror, but one of worry…the expression a mother gets when all she thinks is “What will the neighbors think about this?” In his final breath he smiled and the gold likeness of him appeared as if it wanted to laugh. What would the neighbor’s think indeed.