The Attention Farm — Part 3

Series — Winston and Cal visit the site of the Sigil’s discovery, learning the true nature of the evil they face from an old mentor

Earlier…

Part 1 / Part 2

The heat-baked boulevard buckled beneath the weight of neglect. Petrified trees stood at attention along the median, and dried weeds sprouted from spiderwebs of cracked asphalt. Roads remained the only real hint of the town's size; houseless cul-de-sacs and store-less streets wrapped around heaps of debris and naked slab foundations.

When I tried to picture what the place had looked like before, I recalled only skirting shadows, and the rancid smell of Sulphur.

Gorham's survivors left the place a soot-stained time capsule, exactly as it was when the flames stopped. Cal maneuvered around the burnt-out shells of cars, toward the only building left standing above the rubble.

"Josiah's Paige," was a three-story brownstone, situated in the crux of an unusual Y-shaped intersection. The building looked like it could've been a mainstay in whatever downtown area once existed.

Cal parked beside a half-melted "tow-away" sign, and knocked on the pale blue door. Up close, it looked as though iridescent flames licked the tan brickwork, neither advancing nor burning out. Before either of us could knock, a window sash clattered overhead.

The unmistakable clack of a pump action shotgun closely followed.

"Not one more step." The voice was that of a shrewd old man, face set with deep wrinkles and framed with wiry gray hair. He leaned out above the sidewalk from the second story window, brandishing his weapon at the two of us.

I raised my hands. "Josiah, it's me. Remember?" I certainly didn't. Vague recollections of the man blinked in and out of my brain like fireflies in midsummer. There was the name, and a sense of former kinship. That was all.

He lowered his gun, and squinted. "Shit on a shingle, you're actually alive. And who's your friend?"

"Name's Cal," he introduced himself. "We're running a bit of an investigation together. Winston said you may be able to help us out."

"Oh, anything for an old friend. Hold on."

Josiah disappeared, and the window slid shut.

Cal elbowed me. "Old friend?"

"We were close, I think… some of it is coming back to me," I explained. "Whatever destroyed the town, wrecked my memory of it, too."

"Well, you better think of an explanation that doesn't set off the paranoid man with the shotgun."

Footsteps approached from the other side of the door. I counted a combination of at least four locks, chains, and bolts being drawn back, before it opened. "Come in, quickly, quickly." Josiah cast a shifty glance up and down the desecrated street, before yanking us inside.

A cafe dominated the front of the shop, beyond which I could see bookshelves lined up like dominos, and a narrow staircase. Josiah ushered us toward the only table without a dust cloth.

"What brings you back to Gorham?" He asked. "Or, at least... what's left of it."

"We’re investigating the Sigils," Cal said.

Over the next half hour, we explained everything we knew: ARC, its experiments, and the ultimate goal of the attention farm.

Josiah just shook his head. "Damned bureaucrats, toying with things they couldn't possibly understand. Sigils don't feed on attention. And even if they did, what the hell would it matter to them whether it came from a phone?"

Cal winced. "I'm sorry... but if the Sigils don't feed on attention, why does their effect get stronger the more that people see them?"

The old man looked between the two of us, clearly confused. "Winston knows why." He turned to me. "How come you didn't explain?"

Cal gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. "Don't," he mouthed. Eying the shotgun still propped against the next table over, I decided dishonesty would be unwise."

"To tell you the truth, my memory of Gorham.... the Sigil... it's all Swiss cheese. I mostly just remember you, that I trust you, and that I think I lived here."

He let out a barking laugh. "You did more than live here, boy. This is where you came up."

"I—pardon?"

"Gorham is your hometown. I knew your parents before you were born... God rest their souls."

My parents? My home... The wave of recollection nearly knocked me over: the tiny two bedroom ranch across the field from where I used to play; the hideous marvel of modern architecture they called a public school; and the magnetic craving for books that first brought me to Paige's doorstep.

***

I'd been just 15 the first time I walked into his little shop, wandering the dusty stacks. The place wasn't the type of store where you'd pick up the hottest release from the New York Times bestseller list. Oh no, this was an ever-changing collection that you could get a piece of for the right price.

Josiah's niece ran the first floor cafe, stocking the shelves around it with the kind of books you'd expect to see in your local library. But on the higher floors, past a locked security door, was a whole other matter. Here, Josiah amassed his hoard. After a long and lucrative career, Josiah spent his retirement traveling the country, hunting for rare and unusual books. Some were borderline arcane, others merely archaic, but all fascinating to my inquisitive mind.

Unfortunately, I was shopping outside of my price range. With no real way to pay, I approached Josiah for a part time job. I’d drop by for an hour or two each day on the way home from school. Some days I dusted. Others were spent researching flea markets, estate sales, and auctions across the country for promising acquisitions. Inventory work was my favorite by far, as it allowed me to pour over the newly purchased tomes as I cataloged them for sale.

My friend circle shrank in proportion to my growing responsibilities at the shop. During my later years in high school, he had me in the fourth floor vault, handling priceless collector’s items in sterile gloves. I learned to appraise, track down private buyers and orchestrate bidding frenzies. I was only outworked by the ventilation system that kept the airtight room dry and pristine.

Seeking further knowledge, I enrolled at the local university to study antiquities and finance. Paige had no heirs, and hinted heavily at passing the torch. He had no heir apparent for his vast collection.

Paige seemed to cherish my enthusiasm, relishing the opportunity to share his latest finds. The summer before my final year of undergraduate studies, he made his greatest find of all time.

He summoned me an hour after closing, affording his niece enough time to clean up the cafe, and vacate. Within the safety of his sterile sanctum, he showed me the most peculiar volume. The thing was bound in the scaly, pale blue hide of an unknown creature. It was so large, the lectern beneath it seemed to groan under its weight.

“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. “Should we get our gloves?”

“No need. Watch.” He pulled a book of matches from his back pocket, and struck one. Josiah held the flame against the pages, to no effect. “See that? Won’t tear or cut, either. The owner claimed it was indestructible. Called it the Signum Confinum.”

“Whatever it’s printed on… it can’t be paper,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not printed at all.” He flipped open the cover. “All handwritten.”

Handwritten was a simplification. The page he opened to was a mishmash of glyphs, characters, and shapes all drawn across and atop one another with no discernible order. They wouldn’t quite stay still either. Instead, the markings skittered across the page like a scurrying swarm of insects.

“Where the hell did you say you got this?” My voice shook.

Josiah place a hand on my back. “A rich man, who couldn’t part with it soon enough. He thought it was driving him crazy.”

“What does it say?”

He leaned over my shoulder, and spoke softly: “Let’s find out.”

And over the next few months, we did.

Our initial progress was slow. Individual symbols slipped away like grains of sand before they could be decoded. Josiah tried photographing the pages to look for patterns, only to develop images that looked like Rorschach inkblots.

“Some kind of visual trickery,” he muttered at his prints.

He didn’t get it yet.

But I would come to understand soon enough, on a particularly late night. Already depleted from my studies, my weary eyes lost focus on the swirling page. In an exciting, terrifying instant, I saw beyond it. The glyphs became an overlay, stitched symbols on a layer of almost invisible linen, plastered to a window screen by an evening summer breeze. The information—the knowledge—lay beyond.

Josiah struggled with this explanation. So I thought hard, and offered him another. “It’s like one of those Magic Eye posters. You’re trying to get the picture by focusing on one tiny part. You need to look at the whole thing… just right.”

“So what does it say?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure yet.”

Comprehension came after several more days of staring, and squinting. Each attempt allowed me to see and venture a little further beyond that fluttering veil, until the visions began. The book transported my consciousness to mind-bending, fantastical places. When each trance was broken, I simply understood.

Josiah eventually learned to perceive the world within the book, but was much slower to actually experience visions.

We found it more expedient to channel the information through me, while Josiah served as stenographer.

What he translated filled fat binders, brimming with annotations and hasty illustrations when words themselves were insufficient.

Unfortunately, the magnetism I felt toward the knowledge within the Sigum Confinium was neither metaphorical nor unique to me. Shortly after we first began making sense of it, our first visitor knocked on the door.

He wore a pressed white shirt and a simple, solid color tie, barely visible beneath billowing blue-gray robes. Around his neck, hung a wooden medallion, carved in a shape I had seen countless times crawling across the pages of the book.

“We’re actually closed. But the shop opens in another half hour, if you’d like to come back.” I offered a polite smile, which the man returned.

“Something special calls to us, in there. I simply must see it.” He spoke like a traveler from another era, flowery and pompous. "I've come from a long way away. Do you think I'd be able to sit at one of your tables? You're here, inside, after all."

"Yeah, but I really need to take care of a few things. I don't have time to babysit you—no offense."

The robed man put a firm hand against the door, preventing me from closing it. "I know you have the book. I can feel it." He tipped his head back, almost as if to sniff the air. "And you—you've read it. Your eyes have seen that place beneath the stars..."

"Beat it, creep." I pushed back, closing and locking the door.

***

“I remember,” I said, resurfacing in the present. I turned in my chair to face Cal. “Sigils don’t feed. Sigils aren’t sentient, not the way ARC thinks. They’re more like windows… looking into prison cells.”

Josiah gave a knowing nod. “And those cells hold unspeakably evil spirits, who like to tap on the glass, so to speak; whispering, spreading their influence.”

“How did they get there? In these prisons?” Cal asked.

“They were tricked,” Josiah said. “The Signum Confinum isn’t just a book, my boy. It’s what we would call in English, the ‘Sign Prison;’ a conceptual place, crafted by a clever fellow who understood the spirits’ lust for worship. If each Sigil is a window into that ethereal jail, each page is a cell door.”

“We were never really reading,” I realized, “Just peeking through the bars. Getting understanding from those things.”

“Precisely.”

Cal mulled this over, leaned back, and crossed his arms. “If everything you know about the book, came from the book, don’t you have a bit of a credibility problem?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“You learned about these spirits, from these spirits. Can any of the information be trusted?”

“Yes, and no. I have two theories about the nature of the book. It could be that we are looking at the spirit’s maddening consciousness without its control or awareness… a bit like breaking into a library after hours and rummaging about.”

“And the second?” Cal pressed.

“The spirits are trying to offer a Faustian bargain of sorts; tease the reader with enough useful knowledge, they can eventually be persuaded to turn them loose. If that’s the case, the book was stolen before the damn thing could make its sales pitch.”

“It was stolen?” Cal’s eyes widened. “By who?”

“Whom,” Josiah corrected. “And I don’t know. Not long after we found the book, a group of cultists started coming around, asking about it. Feel days later, it was missing. Not long after, the town went up in a flash of fire and light.” He gestured toward me. “When you turned up, I thought I was looking at a ghost.”

I chewed my lip. “How the hell is your place still standing?”

A wry smile flickered across Josiah’s face. “Little trick I learned from the Confinium. Lucky for me, I still have all our notes.”

“And you have no idea where the book is?”

Josiah shook his head. “I’m sure someone will find it soon enough. The book calls out to those freaks. All the new windows ARC is opening, those calls will only get louder.”

His words echoed in my head all the way back to the hotel, still kicking around in my brain when I lay staring at the ceiling, trying to sleep. Much of my memory remained missing, and we knew frightfully little about the quiet terror spreading through cell phones and silly videos.

I rolled out of bed, tugged on my sneakers, and slipped out of the hotel room. Perhaps a little air could clear my head.

My stroll took me to a breezy hotel terrace that still smelled a bit like the remnant of a nearby fire. I sat down on a bench, overlooking the dark landscape where Gorham once stood.

“Mind if I join you?” A woman’s voice asked. I turned and saw her hovering at the end of the beach. Her beauty was visible even by the dim starlight. Waterfall curls of raven hair cascaded down either side of her heart-shaped face.

“By all means.”

She sat, and drew closer.

Another gust of wind kicked up. The smoky campfire smell grew stronger.

“Can’t sleep?” She asked in a voice like a lullaby.

“Not a bit.”

“Hardly anyone comes to this hotel anymore,” she remarked. “The whole place feels haunted; like most travelers know on instinct to avoid it.”

“Not us.”

“Not us,” she agreed, “because we were here when it happened. Remember?”

I clenched my teeth. “No. I don’t. And—sorry, do I know you?”

Her laugh sounded oddly seductive. “Of course you know me, silly. I’m Willow.”

I wracked my brain, trying to recall her name from the fragments of my childhood that hadn’t been deleted. All I got was a headache. “I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?”

She placed a warm hand on my cheek. Too warm. My heart fluttered.

“Do you want me to show you what you forgot? Why you forgot?” She asked.

“Yes.”

“Then come with me; there’s no time to lose.”

Part 4 coming soon…

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