The Fallen (Part 1)

A man sat quietly in his study, poring over a small book, no larger than a matchbox. The book itself seemed very insignificant, the man had found it in the junk-market outside his home. He was a collector of curious things, something that had gone quite out of fashion by then, and had been interested in this line of work for quite some time. Every day, coming home from tea, he would find time to meet another at their shop.

She was very young, about the same age as him perhaps a bit older, and she had a small shop to herself. He would come in every day to admire the new things that had come in the previous night and look at the older things that never left. Always would he buy something, it didn't fully matter what, sometimes it was an old model ship, another time a cane (while he never needed one he was sure to have a few just in case) and sometimes he would buy something from the next shop over to give to shop-owner.

He found the book the day before, while he pretended to rummage through the bins of books, he found a small one that was more odd than the others. The 'oddity' was handwritten in near perfect writing. The strokes were exact and no smudges appeared which, to the man, seemed odd since it required a magnifying glass to read properly. But he struggled to call it any sort of 'reading' as there were no letters. Strokes and dashes littered the page in an structured mess. The woman told him that it had been there for quite some time and nobody had ever picked it up before, she gave it to him as a gift.

So he went home and started to research it. He had read some things about code-breaking before but had never tried to actually break any, so he pulled his old books down from his library and started to work.

Time passed slowly as he kept working, a person came in to give him his afternoon tea but he did not notice, a floating sugar cube fell under as he worked. As the second cube fell, the telephone rang. Holding the earpiece up to his ear, he heard an old, familiar voice from the other end. The voice, however, was much changed. Instructions were panted through the phone, telling the man how to read the book and just as suddenly as the phone had rung, the line was cut.

The man set to work again, questioning what had just happened. His secretary walked into his study, placing a few bills on his desk. He sifted through them quickly, a electricity bill, plumbing, and a cancellation notice for his telephone service from two weeks ago.

She wasn't there the next day, nor the following week. He passed by the place her shop had been many times, hoping to find that he had just failed to see it or that it had not mysteriously disappeared but it did. Everyone that he talked to seemed to not understand what he was talking about, the woman and the shop never existed to them, it was a patch of land that had never been rented on the street.

He pressed on with his work, reassuring himself that she had been real and this was supposed to be what happened; this was his destiny.

A year passed, then two. His house, falling into disrepair, caught on fire when one of the drapes were too close to a lit candle. He was out at the time, on his evening stroll when he saw the red glow where his house once was. Red petals of ash and fire rained down on him and the surrounding spectators as they watched furniture and some special items being salvaged. And in this refuse he found the book once more. Fitting in the palm of his hand, he opened the book but only found one page in it, looking like a patchwork quilt rather than a page in a book. But there was a distinct writing on the page itself.

41° 43' 32" N, 49° 56' 49" W