#elias bouchard. jared hopworth. sensing a pattern here

[the-magnusinstitute]

hey from what we know of jared hopwprth is he single

Jared Hopworth is a felon and wanted for several accounts of homicide, battery, grave robbing, and desecration of corpses. Please direct these inquiries to the local police station as they are more likely to know these things than us.

[andersunmenschlich]

Episode 17: The Boneturner’s Tale

Ah, finally. It’s about time I got another episode listened to. Amazing how long that takes; so much to do. And still I have no bookcases. Oh well. This one’s the statement of a Sebastian Adekoya, and apparently it has something to do with books. I am pleased.

...Oh, I am very pleased.

It seems to me that Sebastian Adekoya understands books very well. I’ve said before (and will doubtless say again) that all books are books of magic. Just as this episode’s statement-giver says, opening a book allows you to enter the mind of someone who may well be long dead. In such cases, reading is a form of necromancy.

To read a book is to change your mind: to place thoughts there that are not your own, to see things you’ve never seen, walk through worlds you’ve never been to, that no longer exist or don’t exist yet, or that never will.

To write is to preserve a fraction of your own mind, freezing it in symbols which wait to be decoded by the incautious.

You don’t know what thoughts you’re inviting to live inside your mind when you settle down to decipher a lexical set. You can’t know what they’ll do to you, nor you to them (nor what they, changed, may do to you again). The promises in the titles, in the genres and the labels, can only tell you so much. What does this set of words contain? Have you even understood what is meant by the description—are you sure you know what it means when an old story is called a “romance,” or when a newer one is labeled “wuxia”?

Some thoughts won’t be able to live in your mind. Some you’ll never be able to get rid of. Personalities and people, scenes and scenarios, images and ideas... foreign things birthed in the minds of others; decode the twisting lines on the page before you, and they’ll spring to life in your mind as powerful as the day they were written.

Words can be wonderful—and dangerous.

Books are beautiful—and bewitching.

You should never read unwarily, because when you read you’re bringing alien thoughts to life in your mind, and you may not want them to make a home there....

Sebastian Adekoya says he used to work at Chiswick Library. As he describes it, it’s a local library very like the one I grew up with: cheaply furnished, full of battered paperbacks, open-feeling, and frequented by friendly, quietly chatting patrons. Probably the occasional Children’s Corner with a librarian who reads aloud well and a much-loved copy of, say, Matilda or Owl at Home, depending on the audience.

Our statement-giver says it was 1996 when the thing happened.

He’d been working for the library about a year at that point, and knew that the library bought its books new, when it bought them (though he didn’t know where they bought them from).

A patron returned five books at the front desk. One of them, he’d never seen before. It was not, however, new. “The barcode and ISBN,” Sebastian says, “both registered as being that of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, but the book itself was an almost featureless black paperback, with a title on the front in faded white serif font: The Bone Turner’s Tale.”

Confused, he calls the librarian (Ruth Weaver) over to look at it.

She also didn’t remember ever seeing it before, but it had the appropriate markings for a book from Chiswick Library, and the stamps on the lending label indicated it’d been in their collection for several years.

Weaver shrugs and says not to worry about it: they’ll get it put on the system properly. Sebastian, however, is bothered. So he does a bit of quick research.

The man who brought the book in, one Michael Crew, apparently only checked out four books, not five. Our statement-giver thinks maybe he’s a self-published author trying to get his book into the local library, and suggests this possibility to the librarian, who laughs and says that’s probably it—though why anyone would bother trying to get a book onto the shelves of this particular local library was beyond her.

Sebastian Adekoya notes that the book looked worn, “like it had seen decades of being read, with a line creased down the spine and one half of the cover faded from the sun. Nor, from what I could see, did it list any author at all.”

At this point, our fascinating book story is interrupted by the arrival of another character.

According to our statement-giver, this Jared Hopworth is, “not to put too fine a point on it, thick as mud.” He was also Sebastian’s best friend when the two of them were kids: inseparable. Hm. I must admit, I never had (nor wanted) anyone like that in my life. I suppose there was that other preacher’s oldest kid, from the church in the next church region over (it’s not called a diocese when you’re Protestant, but the effect’s much the same...). We were mostly friends in name, though, and never spent much time together.

In any case, Sebastian went to college and Jared hit the back alleys. For some reason, it seems, Jared Hopworth saw this as Sebastian Adekoya betraying him by being too smart, not him betraying Sebastian via being an idiot too stupid for college.

I do have to wonder how intelligent our statement-giver actually is, however, given that he apparently decided to just put up with what he describes as “a campaign of petty terror” for the sake of a memory of childhood friendship. Oh, sure, “he was always very careful to stop before he did anything that might get the police involved—but let’s be honest with ourselves, shall we?

You should only brush off malicious behavior from others if you’re enjoying it, and want to encourage them to do more.

...And now we get an even larger interruption. Excellent.

I do believe this is the very first time another character has actually broken into the middle of a recording. I don’t like it. Who is this Miss Herne, and why is her complaint so important that my story has to be disrupted?

I don’t even remember ever hearing her name before. I don’t know her, I don’t care about her—weren’t we in the middle of something?

...Oh, no, wait... I do remember her.

Naomi Herne, the annoying woman who doesn’t know how to appreciate a misty moonlit graveyard meadow. The one with the unusual attachment to that large piece of headstone. What’s she complaining about? I don’t remember that she had anything to complain about besides her own unfortunate lack of, as the children say, “chill.”

Well, whatever the case, it seems Jonathan Sims considers Naomi Herne’s statement a waste of time. It wasn’t, it was beautiful—but never mind. The interrupting messenger, someone named Elias (which rings a faint bell), tells the head archivist that the Lucas family gives the Magnus Institute financial support, so he shouldn’t annoy anyone connected with them if he can help it. Does Naomi Herne count as “connected to the Lucas family”? Her Lucas husband’s dead. She doesn’t even have the name. No children that I’ve heard of. No reason she should be connected that I can see. And they didn’t seem terribly interested in a connection at the funeral, did they? I think Mr. Sims can antagonize her all he wants without damaging future Lucas donations, frankly.

Our interrupter is also looking for Martin (the supposedly-but-not-apparently incompetent archival assistant). Mr. Sims says Martin is off sick with stomach problems this week, and Elias leaves.

...Wait.

Elias Bouchard? Jonathan Sims’ boss? Why is he running messages down to the archives? This makes even less sense than Rosie the receptionist being in charge of upkeep on recording equipment. Just how much disbelief is supposed to be suspended here? I’m asking seriously, because the Magnus Institute seems like a very badly put together organization if you think about it too much. Or at all.

Well. Elias Bouchard leaves, Mr. Sims expresses “blessed relief” at the fact of Martin’s being sick and thus not at work, and we return to the statement.

...Our main character really dislikes this particular assistant, and for (it would seem) no good reason. Is there history there? Did Martin do something especially bad to Mr. Sims at some point in the past?

Or is it just some kind of negative bias, like thinking a man will be no good with children because he’s a man, or that a woman will suck at math, or that a Hispanic cleaner will steal your jewelry because they’re Hispanic (you dropped your necklace down the back of the dresser, Grandma—I am never going to forget that unjust accusation, nor how plain you made it that your suspicion was based entirely on race).

In any case: back to the library.

Sebastian Adekoya notes that it’s typically a bad thing when Jared Hopworth turns up at the library, because it means Jared’s “bored enough to seek me out for harassment.”

This is apparently exactly what Mr. Hopworth has in mind, because he waits for Weaver to go back to her office and close the door, then knocks the returns cart over, spilling books everywhere. Which is a horrible thing to do. I can’t stand seeing books mistreated this way, I’d rather watch someone bash innocent children around (which, I realize, isn’t saying much given I’m the one talking—but still).

Despite obviously having done it on purpose, he smiles and apologizes.

I’m familiar with this particular method of annoying people. Deliberately doing something terrible, then acting as though it was accidental? Yes, indeed.

People have trouble dealing with this. You did a bad thing. You clearly meant to do the bad thing. This should give them the right to demand retribution. But then, instead of continuing in the “person who does bad things deliberately” role, you switch to “friendly mistake-maker,” and it throws them.

Really they shouldn’t give you the benefit of the doubt.

There’s no doubt!

Sebastian Adekoya bends down to pick the books up, and as anyone with a capacity for noticing patterns of behavior could have predicted, Jared Hopworth hits him in the back of the head with a book.

Which is, again, a terrible thing to do to a book. Human skulls are, on average, much sturdier than the covers of books.

This book, however, may be capable of taking care of itself.

“Behind me, Jared stood holding the book I had put aside—The Bone Turner’s Tale—and had apparently picked it up to hit me with. But rather than offering me a fake apology, or further violence, instead his eyes were locked on the book. We stood there in silence for a few seconds, until he said something about needing something new to read, turned around, and walked off.”

According to our statement-giver, Jared Hopworth isn’t much of a reader, “and the look in his eyes when he left had something in it not entirely unlike fear.”

Yes, I think this work might be able to handle that book-abusing felon just fine.

On his way home after leaving the library that night, Mr. Adekoya passes Mr. Hopworth’s house. Apparently they’re both living in the same houses they occupied as children, which is rather unfortunate for Sebastian, don’t you think? It’s late September, which is a nicely spooky time of year, and something’s moving in the pool of orange light under a streetlamp.

It’s a rat. A large white rat that looks as though it was once a pet. Something’s wrong with the back half of it, and its head seems to be turned around farther than it should be as it drags itself along by its front paws.

Which is also deliciously spooky.

Sebastian Adekoya stares at it until it drags itself off into the darkness and disappears from sight.

He notes that the lights were off in Jared Hopworth’s house. As someone who sleeps days, works nights, and routinely doesn’t turn the lights on as I go about my nightly affairs, I don’t find this particularly indicative of a lack of activity—but that’s me. I suppose most people, when their lights are shut off, don’t make and eat food, read books, do jigsaw puzzles, etc. Ah, how limiting it must be to have such weak senses.

Jared Hopworth more or less vanishes from the scene for a while. Weeks go by without him turning up to torment Sebastian Adekoya, who begins to feel worried. Almost a month with no torment? Surely something must be wrong!

...Hmm. Do you suppose our statement-giver might be just mildly masochistic?

Whatever the case, he’s not eager enough for unpleasantness to actually go to Mr. Hopworth’s house and check on him, so the Jaredless time rolls by until late October, when Jared’s mother turns up at the library with her arm in a sling, wearing an unnecessarily bulky coat and a hateful expression, carrying a familiar black-bound paperback book, which she flings onto the floor at our statement-giver’s feet before turning to leave.

Sebastian Adekoya asks after the health of her son, which arrests her departure and provokes a bit of an outburst: “She spun back and started to swear violently at me, told me I had no business with her son and that I—and my books—were to stay away from him.” This outburst also gives Sebastian a bit more time to inspect the arm... which reminds me markedly of the rat.

“As she spoke, I couldn’t look away from her arm and the odd ways it twisted as she gestured. How her fingers seemed to bend the wrong way.”

Well, well, well.

Before leaving, Mrs. Hopworth spits at Mr. Adekoya—and I find it interesting that, while she clearly has no problem throwing the book onto the floor like it’s a live animal and she wants to smash its skull, she avoids spitting on it.

Despite the absence of spittle, our statement-giver decides to employ paper handkerchieves in picking the book up, rather than touch it with his bare hands.

He sticks it in the book returns cart, locks up the library, and goes home.

It rains heavily that night and Sebastian Adekoya, in his converted attic bedroom, can’t sleep. He’s worrying about the book. He’s worrying that perhaps he shouldn’t have just left it there, unsupervised, as it were. “What if Ruth came in earlier than I did tomorrow and took it? What would happen to her?”

Frankly, that strikes me as an interesting experiment. What would happen to Weaver? Come to that, what happened to Hopworth? Was the idiot eaten by the bone book? Twisted beyond telling? Possessed, perhaps?

I’d quite like to know.

“Should I have destroyed it?” Sebastian Adekoya asks himself.

I’m not sure this question would even occur to me. “Should,” after all, presupposes some kind of ideal state for things to be in.

Should you do thus-and-such a thing? It’s an incomplete sentence. You’ve left off your goal. “In order to [X], should I [Y]?” That is a complete sentence. So—should Sebastian Adekoya destroy The Bone Turner’s Tale? It depends on what his goal is. If he wants to study it, then no: he definitely shouldn’t. If he wants to stop it from doing what it seems to be doing, then yes: he probably should.

Completely failing to define his goal for an ideal state of things RE: The Bone Turner’s Tale, Sebastian discards the idea of destruction on the grounds that he wasn’t sure he had it in him to destroy a book—”even one with such a strangeness to it.”

Well now. Thank you, Mr. Adekoya, for letting us know that you consider strangeness a helpful push towards destruction.

...Oh, I’m not really surprised. I do have a passing acquaintance with humanity, after all.

Sebastian Adekoya lies awake in bed until sometime around two in the morning, when he finally gives up and goes to get the book. He gets out of bed, dresses, grabs his gloves and a jacket, and walks twenty minutes to the library in the rain, where he unlocks the door, goes in, deactivates the alarm, and begins turning on as many lights as possible without making it too obvious that there’s someone in the building.

He tells us that part of him wanted to keep the library in its nearly pitch-black state, but he turned on lights anyway. I’m guessing this is due to his weak eyes, since he says “I had to half-feel my way through the foyer and into the library proper.” [with a complete lack of sympathy] Must be rough.

He also uses a flashlight—but not before he puts his bare hand on the book returns cart, catching his balance, and his fingers come away wet.

The books, it would seem, are all bleeding.

...That is very annoying. I think I would be very nearly angry. Blood-soaked books!? Have you any idea how difficult that is to clean? Frankly, it’s impossible! This had better be the type of supernatural blood that vanishes without a trace.

The Bone Turner’s Tale, meanwhile, is as dry as... well... a bone.

Sebastian Adekoya puts his gloves back on (which means, unless he washed his hands without telling us or this is the type of supernatural blood that vanishes without a trace, that the inside of at least one of those thick gloves is going to need some rather tricky cleaning done), and picks up The Bone Turner’s Tale. He puts it on the desk and—clumsily, because of the thick gloves—begins reading.

He doesn’t begin at the beginning, just opens it randomly, which I suppose is understandable given the current unwieldiness of his fingers, but still. I can’t really approve.

“It was written in prose, and certainly seemed to be a story of some kind. The part I read dealt with an unnamed man, at various points referred to as the Boneturner, the Bonesmith or just the Turner, watching an assembled group of people as they made their way into a small village.

“It’s unclear from what I read whether he is traveling with them, or simply following them, but I remember being unsettled by the details he observed in them: the way the parson would move his hand over his mouth whenever he stared too long at the nuns or how the cook looked at the meat he prepared with the same eyes that looked at the pardoner. It was only at that point that I realized the book was describing the pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales.”

You know, I’ve never read The Canterbury Tales.

“Now, this certainly wasn’t some lost section of a Chaucer classic,” our statement-giver tells us. “It was written in modern English, with none of the archaic spelling or pronunciation of the original, and besides that the writing itself was of questionable quality. There was something compelling about it, though.”

“I flicked ahead a few pages, and found the Bonesmith had apparently crept up to the miller while he slept. It described him silently reaching inside him, and… it’s a bit hazy. All I remember clearly is the line ‘and from his rib a flute to play that merry tune of marrow took’. And as for the rest, I don’t recall in detail, but I know that I almost threw up, and that the miller did not survive. This was on page sixteen, and it was a thick book.”

Funny, since he described it as a small paperback earlier. Hmm. Something like my paperback copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, maybe? 6.75″ x 4.25″, over 1000 pages long—a veritable brick of a book. Hmm. Could be.

It also gives a bit of a hint as to what might have happened to the rat (and the mother... and possibly the son).

I like it.

Our statement-giver is notably less pleased, and turns to the frontispiece to see if he can figure out where this book came from. Apparently he’s given up on the idea that Michael Crew wrote and self-published it? I don’t see that that’s entirely out of the question at this point. I mean—what, after all, do we really know about Michael Crew?

Peeling off the Chiswick Library label, Sebastian Adekoya discovers another library label beneath.

This label is not in excellent shape. According to our statement-giver, it says something like “Library of Gergensburg” (or “Jürgenleit,” or “Jurgenlicht”), which suggests that the last library wasn’t in Britain.

I wonder whether it was still written in English there?

Giving credence to my tentative hypothesis regarding masochism, Sebastian Adekoya prepares to return to reading the book that nearly made him throw up.

At this point, however, Jared Hopworth breaks in. Literally. Through a window. Sebastian Adekoya recognizes Jared via voice, which is one of the only ways I ever manage to recognize anyone. (Why, yes: I am indeed borderline prosopagnosic. I blame humanity’s insistence on all looking basically identical. Two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth—and all in the same arrangement, at that. How, I ask you, is anyone supposed to tell any of you apart?)

As far as visuals go: Jared has apparently decided to dress himself in baggy pants and a thick coat with a face-concealing hood. This strikes me as a very reasonable way to dress, particularly if both coat and pants come well-supplied with those deep and useful pockets I take so much for granted in my clothing.

Sebastian says that Jared is now “longer” than he used to be, whatever that means.

If he meant “taller,” I’d expect him to say “taller.” But “longer”? I’m not entirely certain.... Does he mean to say that Jared has, perhaps, been a bit stretched? That would seem to fit with the pointyness of his fingers.

His bones, I’d say, are longer than they once were.

Jared Hopworth is also “standing at a strange angle, as though his legs were too stiff to use.” That’s interesting.

If I were to guess (which I’m about to), I’d say that reading this book gives people the ability to manipulate bone inside living bodies. Now, I might hypothesize that the book simply warps things all on its own... but that rat really did look like an experiment, and Jared coming for the book strikes me as an “I haven’t mastered this skill yet, I need more practice, give me the manual” type of thing.

Sebastian Adekoya, declining to give Jared Hopworth the book despite the obvious tidiness of giving a strange thing to a strange thing, decides to punch Jared Hopworth right in the solar plexus.

Whereupon Jared bites Sebastian with, not his teeth, but his ribcage.

“...I felt his flesh give way and almost retract, drawing me in close. And then I felt his ribs shift, shut tight around my hand, as though his ribcage were trying to bite me. They were sharper than I would have thought possible, and at last, this was what actually started me screaming.”

Now, if that isn’t just perfect for late October, I don’t know what is.

Sebastian drops The Bone Turner’s Tale. Jared grabs it and runs off. Sebastian starts chasing him, but....

“I started to chase after him, until I saw how he was moving. How many limbs he had. He had… added some extras. That was the moment it finally all got too much for me; I stopped running. It wasn’t my book, it wasn’t my responsibility and I had no idea what I was dealing with, so I didn’t. I just stood there in a daze and watched the thing that was once Jared disappear out into the rain. I never saw him again.”

Uh.

Well, that’s probably all for the best so far as Sebastian Adekoya’s concerned, but does he really think things are going to stay that way? Jared Hopworth likes bullying him; I somehow doubt that gaining new powers will have changed that.

Our statement-giver, I think, is just as doomed as... huh. As pretty much all of the others seem to have been, come to think of it.

Somebody heard Mr. Adekoya screaming, it seems, and called the police. They turn up to receive the best lie Sebastian Adekoya can come up with on the spur of the moment, which involves falling asleep at his desk and being awoken by an attempted robbery. He can’t remember how he explained the bloody books, which seems to me like a thing that would take some explaining.

Hmm. I wonder how many strange things the police see in the Magnus Archives universe. Maybe Sebastian didn’t explain the books at all—perhaps there are some things the police in this universe just... leave alone.

The blood, apparently, was not the disappearing type. Mr. Adekoya says “it took weeks to get out,” and I assume he means to imply “out of the carpet,” because let’s face it: blood-soaked books don’t clean. Those books had to be thrown away and we all know it.

...I wonder what the blood type was.

Jonathan Sims describes himself as “deeply unhappy” about this statement.

“I’ve barely scratched the surface of the archives, and have already uncovered evidence of two separate surviving books from Jürgen Leitner’s library. Until he mentioned that, I was tempted to dismiss much of it out of hand, but as it stands now I believe every word.”

So interesting, the things he believes and doesn’t believe. I’m becoming more and more convinced that he stubbornly denies things until evidence actually forces him to believe—which might seem like a good way to remain sane in a universe like this one, but consider: is the denial of reality sanity? I don’t see that it’s even safety, since not knowing about a thing (germs, say) has never prevented the thing from killing you.

An interesting side note: Mr. Sims’ boss, Elias Bouchard, apparently has a very hands-off attitude when it comes to the supernatural.

“Record and study, not interfere or contain.”

Personally, I think that study and interference aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive... but that’s me. In any case, I do think Sebastian Adekoya’s either very dense, or that library label was very oddly written. Two separate words with two separate capitals (Jürgen Leitner) seem difficult to confuse for a single word! “Jürgenleit”? Really? Come, now.

Tim and Sasha, two of the three amazingly competent archival assistants, have done research which proves that yes, Jared Hopworth had a warrant out for breaking and entering and assault, but no, nobody found him and the case was dropped.

And aha!

About seven years after giving this statement, Sebastian Adekoya was found dead in the middle of the road, body so messed up they figured it had to be a hit-and-run.

Even though there were no signs of crushing or trauma marks.

That’s lovely.

I’d like a Leitner.