The Tome of Unreachability
Written by Sara and Em Chapter One'Do you all like the exhibition?' asked Mr Campbell.
Most of the kids in the year ten history class raised their hands.
'Do you like Christmas?' continued the teacher.
The class was becoming suspicious and so only a few raised their hands.
'Do you like getting presents?' asked Mr Campbell.
Ten hands were raised.
'Good! Because I have something that's just as good!'
Many kids groaned in anticipation of the coming horror…
'An assignment!' Mr Campbell cackled and he circulated around the class with a thick sheaf of paper, distributing the assignment sheets.
'Oh, but sir,' whined Em as she received her paper, 'we only just handed in the last one!'
'Oh, man!' said Sara, flipping the first page of her paper over to find the assignment's due date.
'Well, you'll be in perfect gear to finish this one quickly, won't you, owl-girl?' snickered Mr Campbell in his twisted idea of a joke.
Em grumbled something unintelligible that faintly resembled a few very violent curses. 'Why does he insist on calling me that?'
'You do have owls on your history book,' said Sara helpfully.
'That may be so, but you know what?' Em asked Sara venomously.
Sara smiled wickedly. 'What?'
'Owls eat squirrels!'
'Squirrel, squirrel!' chanted Sara and Em to Mr Campbell's turned back.
'Looks like we can do the assignment together,' said Sara.
'Really?' asked Em in unveiled surprise. 'Geez, Mr Squirrel is loosening up.'
Sara glanced up at the ravaging hordes of her classmates as they crowded and tore at each other in their bid for books on World War Two, the subject of the new assignment.
'Let's just get a book from the public library,' she said.
'Yeah, I'm not going in there,' concurred Em as the piteous cry of 'he bit me!' permeated the usually still air of the school library.
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'You're cutting it fine, girls,' said the librarian at the public library later that day as Sara and Em walked between the tall barcode sensors guarding the sliding entry doors. 'We close in half and hour.'
'We won't be too long,' said Sara.
'The war books'll be in non-fiction,' said Em, pointing down the left isle of the labyrinthine library.
As soon as the girls entered the ceiling-high corridor of book shelves, an unnatural silence fell upon them, broken only my their quiet breathing.
The silence was unlike that of the every-day stillness of a normal library. It was pressing, like the air in a cave long undisturbed.
'Down here,' said Em, whispering unnecessarily given the complete lack of anybody save Sara to hear her. She lead Sara down the nearest right-hand isle.
The girls stopped in front of a wall of books on World War Two that was easily five metres wide and just as tall.
'There's tons of information here,' said Sara.
Em ran her finger along the row of books closest to her eye-level. The Second Great War, A History of WWII, Seven Years of War and More, The Tome of Unreachability, The-
'Hey, check this out!' hissed Em, taking down The Tome of Unreachability.
Sara leaned over to see while Em scanned the first page.
'Spells! It's a book of magic!'
'This shouldn't be here…' said Sara slowly, looking over all of the war books.
'Wow… This is some funky stuff… We should get this book out!' said Em.
The speaker mounted into the ceiling crackled loudly. 'The library is closing in ten minutes. Please bring your books to the borrowing stations now. Thankyou.'
Sara and Em glanced at each other. Sara grabbed two war books at random and she followed Em through the confusing maze of voiceless books.
Sara handed the librarian at the borrowing station counter her library card and the three books.
'Doing an assignment on World War Two?' asked the librarian as she scanned the books and card.
'Yeah,' said Sara.
'Well, you should get a lot of information about it from these three.' The librarian handed Sara back her card and Em picked up the books.
'Wait a sec- three?' asked Em while Sara returned her card to her wallet. 'But there are only-'
'Moving on!' said Sara, dragging Em toward and through the sliding glass doors of the library.
'She thought The Tome was a war book!' said Em when she and Sara were out in the open air. Dusk was falling over the city, bringing with it a chill wind.
'So what?' asked Sara. 'Let's just get to your house.'
Em held The Tome reverently and her brow furrowed. 'Uh, Sara?'
'What?'
'Where'd the barcode go?'
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Sara and Em skimmed the pages of the war books that Sara had borrowed, vainly trying to find any interesting facts that they could put into their assignment.
After catching the train and arriving in what could only be described as Hicksville, rural suburbia in the middle of nowhere, Sara and Em had walked to Em's house.
'Nobody's home,' Em had assured while fiddling with the lock on the front door. 'Mum's out with whatshisface.'
'Who?'
'The new boyfriend.' The front door had swung open and the girls crossed the dingy threshold of Em's home.
Now, not even an hour later, Em's mind wandered. She surreptitiously fiddled with The Tome as it lay on her lap, her thoughts about as far away from Hitler's Blitz as it was possible to get.
The girls had searched The Tome's covers in search of the amazing disappearing barcode to no avail. The face of the book gave no inclination that it had been borrowed from a library and had been read by possibly hundreds of people- given that there was no publishing date or any other dates for the matter of that.
The book wasn't even contacted to protect the dark red leather from the oils and maltreatment of a thousand hands. The front cover was soft and supple- pigskin most likely- with The Tome of Unreachability emblazoned upon it in black looping letters below which was a pentacle bordered by a perfect circle. The script was in curly cursive and was almost certainly handwritten; the capital letters at the beginning of each paragraph were embellished with the likenesses of birds and beasts and plants.
Sara had instantly placed all of the strangeness associated with The Tome squarely upon Em's clearly overactive imagination. The barcode had probably fallen off in the library. The librarian was probably hard of sight.
Sara continued, blissfully unaware of the inward struggle taking place within her friend, to peruse facts of a war sixty years passed until…
'I can't take it anymore!'
Em's exercise book fell to the floor as its owner stood up suddenly, kicking her heavy wooden chair back with force.
'I want to try out a spell!'
'They're not spells!' exclaimed Sara.
'Well, the only way to find out if they're real is to try one out,' said Em smugly.
'Fine, then. Shall we try to go to Africa?' asked Sara sarcastically.
'No, let's try the To Find What is Lost spell,' said Em, flicking through The Tome's pages.
Sara was quiet.
Em looked up at her friend. 'Aren't you gonna help me?'
'Yeah, I guess,' sighed Sara. 'It's not real.'
Em ignored her. 'It says we need candles, feathers and a bowl. We have all of those.' She dashed off to collect them.
'Don't forget this… item of sentimental value,' said Sara, reading a passage from The Tome.
Em returned to the lounge room where she and Sara had been studying with a lolly dish, five purple tea candles, a lighter and seven green feathers plucked from an invention she had made in year six.
'It says place the candles in a V shape- the apex away from you. Inside the inner shape, place the bowl. In the bowl place a paper with the name of the lost item written upon it.' said Em. 'We don't need the feathers.'
Sara arranged the candles and Em wrote on a strip of paper the name of her lost item.
'Put it in the bowl,' advised Sara and Em put the paper in the dish. 'Where's your item of sentimental value?'
Em pulled a silver locket and chain from the breast pocket of her school uniform blouse. 'Here,' she said simply.
'Where'd you get it?' asked Sara conversationally.
'Mum gave it to me.'
Sara grimaced. Em's mother was infamous for her long tirades and inappropriate punishments.
'But that's not why it's special.'
'Why is it special?' asked Sara quietly.
'There's a part of Mickey in here- the last bit of her I have,' said Em. She ran her thumb across the carvings in the silver tenderly. 'My first muse.'
Sara smiled but knew better than to ask any more. Mickey's demise was laced with tragedy and was to Em a festering wound that had as yet not healed. A year since it happened and only recently had the resulting depression lessened slightly.
Em lit the candles, gripped the locket in her right hand and read aloud from The Tome:
'Silver trinket, wooden shoeStolen or lost, I come to you
What once was mine, be mine again
To appease my mind and inner pain'
There was a moment of expectant suspense.
Sara blew out her breath aggressively. 'See? It's all-'
POOF! Clouds of white billowed from the lolly dish, dousing the candles.
Sara and Em gazed in awe at the dissipating vapour. When it had completely cleared, Em picked up her lost object and held it tightly, her eyes unusually moist.
'What is it?' breathed Sara.
'It's Lee,' replied Em, showing the doll to Sara. 'She's the one thing Dad got me that I didn't pick out.'
Lee was a slightly grubby Cabbage Patch Kid baby in a hooded purple jumper suit.
Sara reached out to touch Lee's soft hand as if to make certain that she was truly real. 'Wow.'
'Thought you said it wasn't real,' said Em snidely.
'I do now.'
'We should have a celebration feast!' cried Em, setting Lee down on the coffee table.
Sara blinked. 'To celebrate what?'
'That magic is real and we used it! I'll see what Mum left out for us- she said she'd take care of our dinner before she left with… thingo,' said Em. 'I'll put on the telly for background noise.'
As soon as the television set glowed into life, it was clear that finding a program that was halfway interesting would be as difficult as finding a single, straight guy at a Backstreet Boys concert.
'Oh, jeez,' sighed Em. 'One Piece?'
Sara nodded. 'One Piece.'
Em fitted a videotape that contained nearly three hours of One Piece taped from Toasted TV and pressed play.
As the announcer's voice came on, Sara seated herself on Em's L shaped lounge and Em vanished into the kitchen.
Halfway through the One Piece theme song there was a crash and Em stalked into the lounge room.
'Mum took all the junkfood to whatshisface's! And she hasn't made us anything!'
'It's okay, Em,' soothed Sara. 'We can get pizza.'
There was a cold silence.
'She didn't leave us any money,' said Em.
There was another pause, broken only by:
'Usopp's doin' that marksman thingWhile Sanji's cookin' for the would-be king!'
Sara inhaled a sharp breath, an idea forming in her mind. 'I know what we could do!' She quickly told Em her plan.
'With The Tome?' asked Em, excitement creeping into her voice. 'Can we do that?'
Sara turned to the to Summon a Spectre page in The Tome of Unreachability. 'We should be able to. Let's try it!'
Em grinned and helped Sara arrange the candles from tallest to shortest from west to east. Sara put the dish next to the tallest candle. Em dumped the feathers into the dish and scribbled a name on a scrap of paper, which followed the bright green and glittery down (she had been an extremely colourful child in year six).
Sara lit the candles and undid the gold chain around her throat.
'Your mum's ring?' asked Em as Sara held the engagement band in her right hand.
'Yep. There's not much closer to me than this,' said Sara.
Em held her locket and she and Sara recited together the spell to summon a spectre:
'Heart to heart, I summon theeCast this spell to set thee free
Soul to soul, hand to hand
Divided, now shall cross the land'
A short pause… and POOF!
The bowl spewed forth a blue cloud, choking out the candles and reaching to the ends of the room. It was much bigger than the white cloud from the To Find What is Lost spell had been.
Sara and Em held their breath as from within the blue haze a shadow took form…
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A/N disclaimer- the Authoresses in no way, shape or form own One Piece or the One Piece theme song. We do, on the other hand, own The Tome of Unreachability. Please review or we will take no more interest in this story.