063 - The Book of Lies

Artifact: The Book of Lies

Power: Significant.

Description: An old-looking, brown leather book (alleged to be bound in human skin, it’s just pig leather) with a faux-Latin title. Exactly 272 pages of lignin-heavy, yellowing paper and binding that puts its manufacture firmly in the latter half of the 20th century rather than the alleged 16th century dated in the dedication. At various times it has been sealed with extreme security, chained shut and locked with a bulky clasp. Today these have been removed and the only reminder is a hole in the front and back covers.

Effect: The book contains a demon. Created by an unknown (literally, all records of them have been magickally erased) bibliomancer it serves a compact prison for its intangible resident.

Hauptmann Baron von Leffers, Aleister Crowley, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Marylin Monroe: it has claimed to be all of them and more in desperate bids to escape. In reality the demon was once a plumber and diehard Liverpool United fan named Gary Wiggins, who slipped and fell from a ladder while cleaning his gutters in 1998. Gary had a secret second family he was planning to run away with and died with the thought of them on his lips. He will do anything to escape and get back to this second family, the two children now grown and with families of their own.

Gary is blind to the world so long as the book is closed, when it’s open he can see and hear within the field of view that the pages are exposed to. He communicates in a blocky, deliberate scribbling that appears on the page as though written by an invisible pen. The book is crammed with his insane ranting, begging, promises and threats, so thoroughly filled that the contents spill back over themselves, palimpsest, and are rendering the pages increasingly unreadable.

It is possible to free Gary. By tearing out the page he is currently writing on and having someone eat it he can automatically possess them. If he is released this way the other pages become blank and he is as free to roam afterwards as any other demon. Burning or otherwise destroying the book instead would annihilate them both.

One reason for freeing him is that a vacant book of lies can serve as a prison for other demons. By successfully summoning and controlling a demon (as per pg.104-105 of Book 2: Run) someone wielding it can spend a significant charge to trap them inside an empty Book of Lies just like Gary. There is evidence that this has been done before and Gary is not the first captive, the stubs of 8 missing pages are evident in the binding. For those aware of this power it makes the book of lies quite a prize.