Memory 2: Mister Day's Back Room

[wontforbidtherain]

"The Litany of Earth", 8-9 and 14-15

Where you can see it, the skin on Cat's hands looks dry and sallow, as if she's been ill for a long time. She's in a bookstore, shelving books, when something gets her attention. A blond man is trying to sell the bookstore owner (one of the men in Cat's previous memory, Mister Day) a booked called The Book of the Grey People.

Cat walks over and takes the book out of the blond man's hands. He calls her young lady and objects. Cat declares the book as fake and that while it is supposed to be a language called Enochian, it is actually nonsense in the wrong alphabet. Also someone bound this fake in real human skin, which is an abomination and disgusting but the price was already paid by whatever poor victim was sacrificed, and the man should take it away.

Mister Day asks her about her knowledge and Cat is suddenly cagey. He offers to show her one of his secrets in recompense, that he keeps in the back store room.

The storeroom mostly looks like what you'd expect -- so many books -- but one shelf is better built and carved. Cat is drawn to it and immediately reaches for some of the titles. She pulls off a book labeled Necronomicon with apparent familiarity, and checks the inside cover and title page, where people would keep an owner's name. She skims the first page (it is in Arabic), puts it back, and takes another off the shelf.

She also asks why Mister Day has these, and he tells her that he wants to learn magic, even if most of the books are written in languages he can't read. He hopes that someday he will be able to. Cat shows him the second book she took (this one in actual Enochian with the correct alphabet), and tells him it's a child's primer and that she learned a little magic before she 'lost access to her library'. She doesn't know enough to teach, but she's willing to be a study partner. She also turns aside so Mister Day can't see her crying at finding these books and someone to learn with her.

What Cat Learned
• Books! Books are important.
• She was studying magic as a child, but then lost access. Another memory where it is very clear she lost something, and that her family lost an educational resource (Cat's brother can't read well in Memory 1 and they've been out of contact with their elders for a while).
• Which included checking the book to see if she could figure out if it came from someone she knew (via a 'this book belongs to' note or a dedication).
• She's also a polyglot.
• Magic is something she has to be cautious about. When she yells at the would-be customer, she is afraid she said too much in front of Mister Day, and will have to find a new job. This doesn't fit with her experiences on the train, which is full of magic and people who know it.
• There are a lot of fakes regarding magic that even someone she thinks highly of, like Mister Day, can be taken in by.
• This one must come before the other memory; as she has Mister Day as a student in that one for some time.

What Everyone Else Learns
• While the Necronomicon is wide enough use in pop culture so it's not certain, Cat is from a world linked to HP Lovecraft's Mythos. Cat for her part views the book like an advanced science lab manual. There's a lot of ways a person without knowledge, common sense, and/or good ethics can cause a lot of harm using it, but the knowledge itself isn't any more dangerous than knowing how explosions work in chemistry. Later in Winter Tide she mentions that Miskatonic University's copy is infamous among the student body and faculty, but she also thinks that the average Miskatonic University faculty has no ability to read a damn warning label and do stupid things likes try to summon gods. (You can't summon gods, but you will probably summon something, and it probably won't be conducive to your continued health and the health of those around you.) Hence why she doesn't freak out about Mister Day having it: even knowing him less than a month, she trusts that if he learns to read it, he'll actually be cautious about trying things. (She does seem to believe that this one is a real copy, not a fake.)