I’d expected an imposing tome, but this wouldn’t have covered much more than the palm of my hand. The exterior was utterly black, not just the binding but the edges of the pages. I saw the library had bound the book, but if the title and classification number on the spine had been gilded or otherwise emphasised, they were all but engulfed by blackness now. The volume looked as monolithically solid as a lump of coal, but when Lister passed it to me I felt it shift in my hand, betraying that it was less stable than it looked. I could have fancied that I’d wakened it somehow, especially when Lister said “If you could rest it on a pillow.”

There were cushions on the tables, so that readers could prop up books they were consulting. When I dumped the item on the nearest unused cushion the journal sprawled open, revealing that the front board was loose, while the pages were losing their hold on the spine. Someone hadn’t shown the book much respect, and I couldn’t help suspecting it had been the previous reader, though why would Bella treat such a rarity that way? The endpapers were as black as the binding, which gave me the unsettling notion that their darkness was designed to contain more of the same. I had to glance about for mundane reassurance – the sockets embedded in the tables for powering laptops, the cables lurking in recesses by the sockets, the high windows displaying office workers at their lunch on benches in the street – before I opened the first page.

Lumen Scientiae, His Life and Explorations. Although these were the solitary words on the page, the elaborate script was minute. It seemed introverted, addressed only to its author, as if the intricacies of the penmanship were designed to obscure any secrets it contained. I felt inexplicably reassured to see it didn’t look much like Bella’s writing, and I needn’t think hers suggested an attempt at imitation. How could it when her writing dated from before she’d seen the book? I tried to leave my confusion behind as I turned the page.