In Search of Syriac Manuscripts. Carlos del Puente Stories.

The library stood at the edge of the city like a forgotten tooth in a perfect jawline, its Gothic spires tilted at angles that defied both gravity and the good taste of the tongue in hot spicy sauce. Inside, among the labyrinthine shelves where the air smelled of vellum and monkey mold discarded by the fierce jungle, Dr. Hannibal Lecter IV—scholar of hibernating dead languages, connoisseur of rare meats, and grandson of that Hannibal—ran his fingers along the spine of a 14th-century codex. The leather binding pulsed faintly under his touch, as if something inside were breathing.  

This is it, he thought. The Syriac manuscript that shouldn't exist.  

His sisters, Carrie and Regan, lurked in the shadows, one generating static electricity between her fingertips, the other murmuring the enigma of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic.  

According to the faded catalog card, the manuscript was titled The Text of Unmarked Paths—a heretical text rumored to have been written by a monk who mixed his ink with bones pulverized by lightning accumulated over centuries and excommunicated tears from sad eyes. Its pages were said to contain the true names—those that, if spoken aloud, would unravel the fabric of matter.  

Hannibal's father, who now sold cursed antiques from an ice cream truck whose movements struck the police as highly suspicious, had always warned him: Some words aren't meant to be read. Some books bite. But it was already too late for warnings directed at a squatter beggar of 24/7 municipal libraries.  

With the surgical precision of agile fingers, Hannibal opened the codex. The pages exhaled a scent of incidents of rotting meat. The script writhed before his eyes, the Syriac letters squirming like white, transparent worms impaled on a hook. This isn't ink, he realized; it's dried blood.  

Damien the First reached over his shoulder, tracing a finger along a particularly virulent passage. His nail came away black. We shouldn't be here, he said—or at least, that's what Hannibal assumed he said. It was hard to tell when half the words were hissed through a mouthful of teeth that didn't match their architecture.  

Damien the Second disagreed. Vehemently. Their twin tongue within the same mouth escalated into a whirlwind of hissed consonants and knife-sharp vowels, a linguistic duel that made the library's gas lamps flicker. The debate was cut short when the manuscript screamed. Not metaphorically. Not as a poetic flourish. The book opened its pages like crocodile jaws and shrieked and shrieked like a gnu in the final leap of a wildebeest, a sound that sent spiders skittering from the rafters and shattered the stained-glass window depicting St. Jerome beating a heretical scribe with his own sandal.  

Carrie, ever the pragmatist, set the nearest bookshelf on fire.  

Regan began vomiting nails.  

And the words—oh, the words—they lifted from the page, floating in the air like flies over a corpse. The Syriac script twisted into an older tongue, something that hurt the eyes of rocks under a chisel. The letters peeled apart like skin, revealing muscle beneath, then bone, then something that had no name in any language still spoken by man.  

Hannibal's uncle, a certain Mr. Pinhead who collected puzzle boxes the way other men collected stamps, chose that moment to arrive. He took one look at the floating, screaming words and said: Ah. You've found the footnotes to the earthly apocalypse.  

The library, as it turned out, had always been hungry.  

By Carlos del Puente relatos