The Merchant

For Abdul Alhazred

I found him where the city gave up pretending,
where cobblestones slicked themselves with mist
and the cathedral’s gargoyles wore black streaks
down eyeless faces.

Crows unsettled the air beyond the harbor.
Waves struck the wharf’s old legs.

The bells no longer rang there.
They rusted mid-sentence.

He kept his stall beneath the apse’s shadow,
between a shuttered apothecary
and a door bricked over so long ago
the mortar had grown veins of moss.

Relics crowded his table;
saints’ fingers carved from bone,
a compass that refused north,
rosaries knotted with hair,
and what I was looking for; 
a bound volume stamped 
with a black heart
burning with rainbow fire.

He looked up as I approached.

His coat was the color of turned earth.
His smile belonged to someone
who had survived more funerals than birthdays.

During our exchange
I asked him
what was the strangest thing
he longed to place upon his table.

He did not hesitate.

“The Necronomicon.”

The word did not fall.
It settled.

“Al Azif,” he continued.
“The sound insects make in the desert
when the dark grows too large for prayer.”

The fog drew closer.

He spoke the name Abdul Alhazred.

Noon in Damascus.
The sun vertical.
No shadow to hide in.

Witnesses said he was taken in the open street,
that something tore him apart
without touching him.

They said the air learned how to bite.

The Greeks softened the title
so it could pass among scholars
without breaking their teeth.

Latin followed,
inked condemnations,
sealed copies,
public burnings performed
for the comfort of crowds
who did not know what smoke refuses to forget.

Libraries catalogued the absence.
Basements locked twice.
Keys misplaced.
Doors bricked.
Inventory amended.

Still—

There was a copy, he said,
resting beneath Arkham;
in a university that studies the sea floor
like it is scripture,
measures trenches
as though depth itself were a promise.

R’lyeh drawn in the margins.
Geometry that resists the eye.
Angles that do not permit the skull to remain unchanged.

Cthulhu—
He said it: cooh-thloo, 
like an infected cough—
waiting,
not asleep,
not dead,
but patient.

His fingers traced an empty space on the table
with the tenderness of someone mapping a body.

As if the book already lay there.
As if it breathed.

“To lay that spine open,” he said,
“to feel the page resist the hand—
that would be enough.”

Behind us,
the cathedral shifted, 
stone remembering weight.

After the conversation drifted elsewhere,
I wished him luck in finding it.

He met my eyes.
Smiled.
Nodded.

The fog entered my lungs
as though invited.

Somewhere beyond the harbor, 
the tide turned without wind.

I left him to his relics
and, 
When I glanced back 
from the end of the street,
the empty space on his table
was no longer empty.

---

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