The basement of the annex smelled of damp paper and old copper. It was a soothing scent to Arthur. He adjusted his spectacles, the wire frames digging slightly into the puckered, angry skin of his cheeks.
The book hummed. It didn't have pages so much as thin sheets of cured vellum that felt uncomfortably like human skin.
"Chapter four," Arthur whispered, the movement of his jaw pulling at the stitches of his permanent, jagged smile. "The section on the 'Language of the Void' is particularly poorly translated."
He didn't mind the debris on the stairs or the strange, vine-like cables that snaked through the rubble around him. They were part of the building now, just as the scar was part of him. He reached into his pocket for a pen, his fingers trembling with a scholarly excitement. There was a mistake on page eighty-two—a misplaced comma that changed a blessing into a curse.
"We can't have that," he chuckled, a wet, rasping sound. "Precision is the only thing standing between us and the things that live under the stairs."
