shush.the.keeper

As darkness creeps across the whole of the world, Shush Montgomery is in his study hovering over the withered pages of an old manuscript. Hours of his life have been spent in this manner. In rare moments spent inside his own mind, Shush entertains the vision that his final breath might slip away as the pages of a yellowed document blur in his vision and he would slide into his battered leather chair, with a humph and a creek of the rusty wheels. But what better way, he had always thought, to prepare for the inevitability of what is to come in the next life than by studying what has already come to pass?

Very little time will pass before Aloysius Montgomery is introduced to that next life.

Glass paperweights and other books sit on the edges of the manuscript to press the curled corners flat and hold the document in place as he scours over the ancient language. Multitudes of heavy tomes on dark shelves shrink the already cramped confines of the room. The path from the door to his desk is the only area that Shush maintains with any consistency. This is where he finds new life every day in the midst of his failing health. This is where he has always felt most comfortable, looming at the threshold of the past. As a child, the documented history of the world fascinated him. With his nose buried in the interior spine of any record of the past that he could get his hands on, young Aloysius would sit alone in his home, constantly reading, leaving the perpetual flow of the present to part around him, like a boulder in a gushing river. Humanity's record is lush, he would bemuse, but reading our ancestry from the pen of an observer is not enough. At only ten years old, Aloysius knew his calling was to traverse the jungle of human history in search of a unifying voice that he always believed would tie together the severed and frayed strings of the various threads of humanity. One voice, he felt, had to exist which could break down the manufactured barriers that separate people from one another, if only in their minds. So, Aloysius spent day after day of his childhood hunched over books at the kitchen table, cross-legged in the grass, back against the concrete foundation of his single room schoolhouse, flat against the wooden slats underneath his bed to hide from his six older siblings. No one understood his curiosity; no one could even understand his proficiency in reading. Of his four older brothers and two older sisters, only three of them bothered to pursue schooling after the age of fifteen. But Aloysius weathered their side-eyed glances and barbed taunts by escaping into worlds long since forgotten. Rarely would he speak to anyone. His extensive vocabulary and firm grasp on language was an oddity to those around him, lending to the idea that he was touched in the head, instead of being seen as the brilliant young boy that he was. "Whatchya readin' now? Book on how'ta be nawmal? You ain't neva gone' be nawmal. May's well give up an' trynna find sm'otha weird boys to be friends with." Aloysius never paid much heed to the comments, seeing them for what they were: benign attacks derived from insecurity and ignorance meant to steal his attention him from his books. The most he would ever concede to the interruptions was in the form of a tart "Shush!" without so much as a glance in the direction of the vexing party. The shush and disregard was usually enough to detract further offense. 

But the nickname stuck. It stuck like the soles of his shoes to the gooey blacktop in the searing North Florida summer heat.

Now, leaned over the papers on his desk, Shush allowed himself a moment to step back from the pages. All morning he'd been at it, filling his mind with towns and people that used to litter the landscape of our planet, but are now no more than crumbling monuments and wafting memories. This pull into the past had always felt like more than an obsession. Whispers of the dead, echoes in the limitless cavern of time immemorial. Today, the pull was especially strong. His mind was searching for something in the pages but exactly what it was, Shush could not pluck from the recesses of his subconscious. When his brain wouldn't cooperate, he paused, breathing in the present and letting his mind settle, and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. There, buried under loose-leaf pages of various scribbled notes was the book Shush Montgomery loved more than any of the others.

Settling delicately into his chair, with what some might interpret as a subtle reverie, he stared at the cover of the book in his palms. Simple and only slightly larger than the journals in which he penned nightly, the book was struck with small, piercing red letters embossed at the top of the cover which seemed to glare at Shush as if to say You do not own me. It is I who owns you. The letters flared in contrast to the cracked black, faded to almost-brown leather of the books outer shell. The title of this tome, the one that Shush, student and scribe of worlds forgotten and names never known, was the one he saw dancing seductively on the backs of his eyelids every night as he slipped away to sleep...

The Dawn Ender