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GRIAN:
Statement of Darryl Glasscock, regarding a gift for his thirty birthday. Original statement given May 3rd, nineteen ninety eight. Audio recording by Grian Watcher, Head Archivist of the VOID Institute, London.
Statement begins.
‘My husband has many weird friends so I wasn’t so happy when he told me one of them bought me a present. To be fair, he wasn’t so happy about it as well. Don’t get me wrong, Peter is not a jealous man, but he doesn’t like when his friends take interest in me. He claims they are too dangerous and I must agree with him. Especially after this accident. Pawn, er, Peter, we just tend to call him that - he really likes chess, so the nickname just stuck to him - brought the present himself, no matter how reluctant he was about it. He might be cautious, but he tries his best to stay polite. It was an old book, nothing too flashy. It was bound in black leather, that much we noticed, with letters on top barely visible. It had such a bizarre title “Guppy geyser”. Of course we thought it might have been an old travelling book on some geysers somewhere in the world. We didn’t even bother looking into it as we’d already chosen a place for holidays. So we just put it on the lowest shelves with other useless books and forgot all about it. At least… for the time being. It’s what you do with a book no one intends on reading, right? Maybe we should have just thrown it away, it would save us the bother later on. Don’t get me wrong, what happened later on freaked us out and an unaware person might have gotten hurt, but it was just… strange. It started the next week after we got that book. It just started to smell… like a fish market. You know these markets by the docks where the fisherman come to sell their fish and those blasted seagulls are looking for prey? Yeah. That’s how it started to smell. Of dirty water and rotting fish. I thought I was just making it up. We lived in Switzerland at the time and there was no way that there would be this smell here and I started to miss the sea so… but Pawn told me he smelled it too. We tried to investigate it, but of course none of us bothered checking the library. Because why would a book cause a smell like that. It was another smell that made us consider this option - it was the smell of rotting. Rotting pages in fact. Our library was flooded. The lowest shelves were all damp and rotting, wooden flooring swollen. It was so unreal, there were no pipes in those walls or in the floor, so there couldn’t be a leak. And… I was right as Pawn picked up the only book that wasn’t rotting, its leather cover clean and dry. “Guppy geyser”. Out of its pages was running water, murky salty water, the same you would encounter on the sea shores, water that I had missed so much. It freaked me out - how was it possible that a book would have water running out of it? Pawn on the other hand stayed calm. He placed the book in the bucket and took it out, leaving it in the sink, letting the water flow freely. Then he began to clean everything up. It unsettled me greatly, but when I talked about it with him later on, he said that he just wanted to calm me down. That he couldn’t let himself be afraid of a leaking book. Looking back at it, I shouldn’t be afraid as well, but… it was just so strange. We gathered the books and threw them out, nothing important was lost. But there was one small thing that we missed at first. Behind the books… was lying a fish. A tropical fish, can’t specify which. I’m not a fish expert. At least… I don’t think about myself as one, Pawn isn’t either. We were both more than baffled by it - what was it doing there? Was it another thing that that book could produce? We moved all the dry books to our rooms and the furniture alongside it. At least the ones that could move or there still was a reason to do so - the shelves were swollen and starting to rot as well, so they were beyond saving. We weren’t especially upset by it, we wanted to change them a long time ago. But going back to the topic, you don’t want to hear about home repairs after all. The book. Once we finished, we decided to check it, to see why it was producing water. The bucket was full, liquid spilling out of it and going down the drain. But when Pawn took the book out of it, it was dry. Completely dry. We debated over opening for a while, but there was nothing to see on the binding of it. It was just dark leather and the worn title. So Pawn opened it. Hundreds, no, thousands of fish spilled from the pages onto the floor, flopping in a struggle to find water, some swimming up the waterfall spilling out of the pages and disappearing into the paper. Blank, blue paper. Some of the fish were poisonous, we recognized this much - they would make us paralysed if it wasn’t for the fact that I jumped away in surprise and Pawn just held the book with an outstretched arm, which made enough for the falling fish not to reach him. And we just had a whole floor of tropical flopping fish. And before we could react - they were all dead. Thousands, hundreds of dead fish. In our eyes their flesh rotten and decayed and they just turned into bones only for them to turn into ash. Within five minutes they were all gone. The only thing left was the water and that smell of rotting fish. What ripped us out of our thoughts was another fish, flopping down onto the floor, struggling for its life. Pawn started to look through the pages, but all of them were empty. Empty, blue pages. The only thing in the book was the sticker, a label from a library of some sorts. “From the collection of Joe Hills” or something like that. We didn’t bother looking at it closely, we just… Pawn claimed it was unnatural and just tossed it into the fire after covering it in oil. I felt kinda bad that we had to burn it, but on the other hand it kind of put me at ease. That was the last we saw of it, so I can’t provide any real proof of what happened. I only have this one photo of the dead fish, just before they all started to rot. But that sound of the flopping fish on the cold tiles of our kitchen… I can still hear it sometimes. And I stay away from all port fish markets. Pawn seems to agree with me on that as well.’
Statement ends.
The photo was indeed provided and it shows a room full of various tropical fish, some of them mid movement. If this really was another Hills, it was strangely not dangerous. Nonetheless it got burned, even if that man knew nothing about the others. Unfortunately the name of that friend who gifted the book to mister Glasscock was not provided and so we can’t contact them directly. We tried to contact the two men as well, but they seemed to have moved out of England to an unknown location about two years ago.
IMPULSE:
Grian, there is- oh, are you recording?
GRIAN :
I was about to end either way. What’s going on?
IMPULSE:
There is a package for you, I don’t know from who, it wasn’t signed.
GRIAN:
Couldn’t you just ask the deliverer?
IMPULSE:
It was left on the doorstep of the Archives.
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