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The Shadow House
In a house lost to time, a house in nowhere, the Fox Library waited to be discovered.
The house had once stood on the banks of a loch in the northwest Highlands of Scotland, a Victorian lodge that had once been a home, and then a hotel, before it had been bought by Sir Edmund Fox in the early twentieth century.
“I need a place to keep my books,” he had told the sales agent.
“It’s a big house,” the man had said, as the two of them had stood with their backs to the loch admiring the house.
“I have many, many books,” Edmund had answered.
The house was an odd place, but not without its charm. It was a building full of narrow staircases and unexpected corners, tall windows that let in the light and afforded views of majestic sunsets. It had high ceilings and uneven floorboards and huge fireplaces that gaped like the mouth of some dragon. And after Sir Edmund moved in, it had books.
By the end of his life, books lined every room in his house, leaving space only for windows and doors and other less important features such as light switches and furniture. Books were everywhere, in tall bookcases along the walls and on shelves over doors, on side tables next to comfortable armchairs. But it was not ordinary books that had excited EdmundFox for most of his life. His interests had lain elsewhere: in the business of special books.
Born in the late nineteenth century and raised in the upper classes of British society, Edmund Fox had yearned to escape what he saw as a tedious existence. He had started his adult life with the idea of becoming an explorer. In the course of his adventures in Southern Europe and North Africa in the early twentieth century he encountered stories of a special book that could transport the reader wherever they wanted to go. Some claimed the book was a relic of ancient Egypt, while others claimed it to be a product of witchcraft and devilry. Fox, who hated all things modern and scientific and who loved anything that suggested hidden, ancient knowledge, set about pursuing this item with considerable vigor. He followed leads and ignored dead ends all over Europe and North America, throwing family money away on any wild story and gossip. He found people who claimed to have seen the book, people who claimed to have used it, and most of these people were lying. But some were not. Some gave enough information to suggest or hint at a hidden truth behind the myths and mysteries.
In his early forties Fox invested his considerable family wealth in the establishment of a secret organization—the Fox Library—dedicated to finding this incredible item. Convinced of the book’s existence, Edmund Fox made a deductive leap and concluded that there must be other such books and magical items, other wonders hidden from the rational world.
“One does not look at a dog and assume it is the only animal to exist,” he famously proclaimed, on the evening of the first meeting held by his library’s small group of members. “One reason is that there are other animals out there also, some we can see easily, some we can never hope to see. These books are the same. If we know that one exists, then others must too, and we will commit ourselves to finding them. The Fox Library will stand for my lifetime and beyond to preserve these wonders for all mankind!”
Fox’s group of friends and collaborators—many of whom thought he was mad, but who enjoyed the drinks and the good company—cheeredand banged the table, and the Fox Library thereafter set about pursuing magical books for the rest of Edmund Fox’s life.
The Fox Library—the organization, rather than the collection of books—might have shriveled out of existence shortly after the death of its founder and benefactor but for one surprising development: The library actually found what it was looking for. Not the legendary book that had first caught Edmund Fox’s attention, but another book, with similarly confounding and amazing abilities.
In the mid-1920s, only a few short months before Edmund Fox finally succumbed to the liver failure his prolific drinking had guaranteed, one of the library’s most dogged investigators discovered the existence of a special book. Like all other similar books it was a slim notebook, just the right size to fit into an inside pocket and innocuous enough to be overlooked and ignored. The leather cover was colored in shades of dark gray and black that were discernible only in the right light, and the edges of the pages within the book were similarly painted, as if they had been sprayed with black ink. When it first came to the attention of Fox’s investigator the book had been in the possession of a former British soldier who had been making a successful living as a jewelry thief across continental Europe. The soldier-thief had admitted to finding the book some years earlier in the neglected library of an estate house somewhere out in the English countryside. For years the man had carried the book with him, and during those years he had never once been caught while going about his burglary business, never once been discovered while engaged in even the most audacious of break-ins.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” he told Fox’s investigator, over a few drinks in a French restaurant that overlooked the Bay of Biscay. The man was old now and had long since given up burglary. “Look at this, at what it says.”
The man had opened the book and shown the investigator the first page. There were a few lines of text that Fox’s investigator read as the man spoke.
“It says it is the Book of Shadows,” he said. “It says that if I tear a page and hold that bit of page in my hand, then I go into the shadows and nobody can see me!”
The investigator nodded.
“What else is in the book?” he asked.
The man shrugged and flicked some of the pages, showing dense scribbles and ink blotches on many of them. For a moment the investigator thought he saw the text moving or shimmering.
“Just nonsense,” the man said, cutting across the investigator’s thoughts. “It doesn’t matter about what’s on the pages. It’s what the book does! See, when I tear a bit of a page and hold it in my hand, the book starts to sparkle!”
“Sparkle?” the investigator asked dubiously.
“Like fireworks!” The man nodded. “Like a little cloud of colors. And while I have the torn bit of page in my hand, nobody can see me! Not until I let the bit of page go again, and then I come back. And you know what else? When I come back, there aren’t any torn pages in the book. It’s like it heals itself!”
Fox’s investigator didn’t know if he believed the man, but he paid for the book using the resources of the Fox Library, rewarding the man with a fortune to waste in the last few years of his life. Upon his return to the library the investigator experimented with the book, along with other members of the library staff. They examined the pages of text and the images that seemed to float in and out of focus, to appear and disappear. They studied the book’s properties, noting how much lighter it seemed to be than it should have been. And they experimented with tearing bits of the pages, trying to make the book actually do what the previous owner had claimed it could do. It had taken some days, with different people trying repeatedly, until one of the staff members simply disappeared, and then promptly reappeared again, his hand open and a scrap of paper disintegrating in the air.
“That was strange!” the man exclaimed.
The other people in the room thought it was strange too, but their excitement quickly overcame any shock, and the book became item 001 in the catalog of the Fox Library. Soon enough, it became better known as the Book of Shadows.
It was the beginning of everything. The Book of Shadows was the validation of Edmund Fox’s obsession, and the legitimization of thepurpose of the Fox Library. Edmund Fox went to his grave knowing he had proven his doubters wrong, and bequeathing his entire and considerable fortune to the library, the running and management of which had passed to his niece and nephew by his youngest sister.
Over the decades of the twentieth century the Fox Library continued about its business, seeking and investigating special books, using Edmund Fox’s country house on his Scottish estate as its base. It built a significant collection, seventeen books in total, and the Book of Shadows had been an ally in that work, a tool to be used by one or two of the investigators who wereableto use it, whenever required. All of the books shared similar qualities to those of the Book of Shadows—similar size, similar dense text in unreadable languages and enigmatic sketches and scribbles, and similarly inexplicable weight. Some of the books had notes in the front, describing what they were or what they could do, but some did not, and the purpose and abilities of several of the books remained unknown, perhaps awaiting the right reader to unlock their mystery. It had been noted by the library how the contents of many of them seemed to change and evolve, as if the books were somehow alive, responding to circumstances, perhaps seeking just the right reader to reward with their riches.
During the darkest days of the Second World War, the Fox Library as an organization intentionally slipped into obscurity, deciding that its activities and possessions were better kept out of the light, but the library of special books remained hidden away within Fox’s country house.
