"The Old Book" by Andrea Tillmanns
The Old Book
by Andrea Tillmanns
“Don’t you like it?” My husband looked at me closely as I unpacked the heavy old book. “You always love old books …”
“Oh yes, of course, thank you very much!” I tried hard to look enthusiastic. “But it must have been very expensive …”
“No, no, I found it online, at a household clearance sale,” he immediately contradicted me. “The daughter of the deceased just wanted to get rid of everything that reminded her of her father, and she didn’t want much money for it.”
“It must be valuable,” I murmured, carefully leafing through it. At least I could decipher the writing with some effort, even if I didn’t understand the words – was the book written in Latin? In any case, it contained pictures – not beautiful pictures, but at least I could guess what it was about. “It seems to be a book of spells,” I said and continued leafing through it. “I’ll have to take a closer look at it sometime soon …”
“Of course, but first we should celebrate your birthday properly,” my husband grinned and glanced at his watch. “You have just under twenty minutes, then we have to go – until then, you can guess where I’ve booked a table for us.”
Fortunately, he had been less creative in choosing the restaurant than he had been with my gift; I had been looking forward all day at the office to a good pizza at our favorite Italian restaurant. Nevertheless, I couldn’t get that old book out of my head. What had he been thinking? Of course, I collected old books, but only those that described animals in our region. I just found it exciting to see how the names – and often enough, unfortunately, the population numbers – had changed. With this old magic book, I didn’t even know where to put it on my bookshelves. I didn’t usually read fantasy.
The following weekend, I took another closer look at the book and this time opened an online translator, into which I typed the headings. In fact, the translation of the title was “Large encyclopedia of useful spells for …”, presumably for “the little wizard”, which was no longer legible on the slightly battered cover. The headings inside were easier to read, although not always completely. There was a spell for removing difficult stains, such as blood, another for bringing back an animal – presumably pets had also gotten lost in the forest from time to time in the past – and still others for binding a person, i.e., obviously performing a love spell. Somehow, the book was quite funny, even if it wasn’t really about domestic animals.
I had to laugh at the spell that could be used to help snakes shed their skin. A peel wouldn’t hurt me either. But the next spell sounded even more interesting – it was supposed to rejuvenate you. I was curious – what did you need for that?
The ingredients, as far as I could decipher them, were more or less what you would stir into cake batter. Except for the crushed dragon scale. And a drop of blood for every year you wanted to become younger – as far as I could decipher. The first part was no problem, as I knew where the lizards hibernated in our garden. There were always a few shed skins in their hiding place, which I passed off as dragon scales. I would normally have ignored the blood requirement if I hadn’t cut my finger while cutting up the lizard skin. I squeezed the wound thoroughly over the dough, just in case the lizard skin contained any germs. Together with the rest of the cake, no one would notice. If I was going to use a recipe from this book to bake a cake, I was going to do it right – after all, I wanted to be able to tell my husband that his magic book was useless.
As a precaution, I adjusted the other ingredients a little to get a reasonable amount of dough for an apple pie. When my husband came home from the gym, I told him that I had discovered a special recipe in the old book – “a kind of fountain of youth,” I said. I didn’t tell him that it could only work for me, since the cake only contained my blood.
But after we had each eaten three pieces of the still-warm cake, he must have noticed something, because he suddenly looked at me with a strange irritation. “What exactly is this cake supposed to do?” he asked slowly.
“Make us younger,” I replied. “Don’t you think my skin …” Perplexed, I stared at my hand, which I was about to use to reach for my fork. The skin there was flawless, no longer as wrinkled as that of a sixty-year-old, but soft and blemish-free.
How many drops of blood had that been? And what effect had my other unauthorized adjustments to the recipe had?
My husband’s face was mirror enough. I saw his growing horror, felt myself becoming slimmer and more agile, and then smaller, smaller, even smaller, until I could no longer sit, no longer lift my head, no longer see, trapped in a body that was too young to survive alone in the world, and still getting smaller and smaller, until finally my thoughts dissolved and everything that had once made me who I was.