Free Martin Sloane by Michael Redhill

on his face. Then he closed his eyes, and his face went to stillness. I realized I could relax, I was here with permission, and I stepped up with Molly and breathed them in too. Pine resin and cold iron and moss. In Childhood Game, a crank on the side moved a row of colourful animal faces along a track, like the targets in a shooting gallery. A plate of smoked glass below revealed the underside of the game, family photos pasted onto the targets. (Two separate chains made it look like the animal heads, sinking out of sight, transformed into real people upside down — I’d opened the back of this box with a screwdriver and marvelled at its construction, at the fact that, somehow, Martin would know how to make something like this.) Molly had one hand on her chest and her fingertips over her mouth. They really are beautiful, she said.
    They’re just a few things I want to keep. He was in silhouette now, the moon against his back.
    What’s this one? Molly asked. She was kneeling by a low shelf where she’d pulled a box made of glass on all sides out of its place. The front and back panels held an object encrusted with dirt. Through one side, you could see a rusted latch. Through the other, a page from an old Bible, lit up with illuminations. I’d seen it once or twice before. Martin had described it as unfinished — he hadn’t even given it a title. But now he took it from Molly and told her it was called The Good Book of Mysteries.
    You’ll like this story, he said to her. It’s based on something my father told me when I was little.
    Is it? I said.
    Yes, said Martin. This story is for
Molly
though.
    Alright.
    It was called the Clonmacnoise Bible, he continued, the one my father told me about. It was supposed to be the most beautiful illuminated manuscript ever discovered. It was named for the ancient monastery on the shores of the Shannon where they discovered it. When they found the Bible, buried in the foundation of a nine-hundred-year-old church, it was in a rotted box, and its pages were open to two ancient illuminations, the most beautiful things ever seen. But the rest of the pages in both halves had partially decomposed from water leaking into the box through the ground, not to mention the discharges of all the bodies buried at varying depths in the church floor and in the yards, and then the pages had also petrified from centuries of pressure on the collapsed box. So what they decided to do was, they kept the second half at Clonmacnoise and sent the first half to Trinity in Dublin to be studied. And so began a succession of terrible luck. A curse, in fact.
    Really, I said.
    Martin shot me a look. The first man who tried to pry the pages apart was the most renowned archaeologist of the time, and after a week of trying to separate one page from another with nearly microscopic wires, he gave up in despair and hanged himself from the corner of a bookcase in the library. The second man, a chemist, tried to find a solvent that would separate the pages without destroying the illuminations, and although he was able to get the very edges of the pages to come apart, he could not see any of the illuminations, and gave up as well. He didn’t despair about his failure, but his wife took their three children back to their grandmother’s in Belfast, appalled that he would tamper with a religious artifact, and so come in for the wrath of God. This man spent the rest of his days alone and bereft.
    Bereft, Molly said.
    Finally, said Martin, a group of scientists decided that the best way to separate the pages of the first half of the Clonmacnoise Bible would be to immerse it in oil — since the pages were on an animal skin of some sort and wouldn’t be damaged — and allow the oil to soak in, and then subject the book to a long, slow drying process that would likely separate the newly supple pages.
    Uh-huh, I said suspiciously. And?
    Well, they had the Bible in a kiln with a glass door, and they had it on a low burn. After a