Perhaps you might first wish to read 'Sneeze on Monday, sneeze for Danger', which introduces Dr. Mecuniam to the reader.
*****
The sky was thunderous dark; a sky you see in paintings but cannot believe could be real, but it was. To the west the palest blue sky as of a summer's day but overhead and coming from the east black, black clouds and with them a wind.
"It looks sort of like rain." The incipient stupidity of Roberta's comment drove Asala almost to a fury. Of course, it fucking looked like rain. It was going to come down in torrents and there they were out for a walk, a walk that had been Asala's idea and not Roberta's at all. Roberta had been content to stay in and watch 'Strictly Come Dancing' or some other inane programme or, instead, go on Facebook or Twitter or just text her vapid friends. It was Asala who had wanted to do something real, something involving moving flesh, working bone and hot blood for that matter: not just sitting and mindlessly watching or tapping a screen. She wanted to be up and doing, experiencing life to the full.
"Life is real! Life is earnest!" she had said to Roberta, but the pretty girl had just looked at her in puzzlement.
"All right, I suppose so. It's what you like doing."
A walk had seemed the very minimum of real activity, albeit up on the moors in a place ten times more real than the studied security of Roberta's mother's new boyfriend - or was it partner's - flat. Asala had not really wanted to come with Roberta to the modern flat at the seaside in the first place but Roberta had made a fuss, said she did not like to be all alone and bored, and so Asala had been kind. After all they had been at school together and, most of the time, she loved being with Roberta.
Roberta, she well knew, would not let Asala forget whose idea it was to go for the walk and get soaked - not though the soaking had happened as yet - but it would. The sky was dark and Asala could not see it as anything but ominous, her mind always made a bit of a drama out of... no, that was unfair, she saw the potential in situations and liked to see the dramatic possibilities. Imagined or not, the weather was still not good. It was a dark, threatening sky, the sort of sky, Asala mused, had seen the Transylvanian count in Bram Stoker's book - no, not the Lair of the White Worm nor the Jewel of the Seven Stars - Asala had been assiduous in her reading - but the other, better known one, milked for all it was worth, she had noted, in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast where they were staying.
To Asala, it seemed the dark cloud brought him but to Roberta he was just an old man caught in the rain - just as they were - and sheltering in an old stone barn. Roberta seemed to have little curiosity about how he happened to be there. She was far more worried by the poor reception on her mobile than about the unlikelihood of an old man being up on the hills in a dark suit and black shiny shoes. Asala did not like him, nor the way he sat in the darker parts of the barn as the rain and wind came - and did rain and wind come, dark and howling.
Asala did not like the man from the first but was that because he seemed to almost ignore her, his attention focused almost exclusively upon Roberta? Was that jealousy?
At first, he had said little but then seemed inclined to some conversation at least. The inclemency of the weather, who they were, where were they saying. His own answers seemed a little too general, a little too unspecific to Asala but she did not think Roberta noticed, was probably not even really listening to what he was saying.
"You might find this diverting." The volume was old, leather bound no less, and probably badly foxed. Asala could not see Roberta so much as touching it when he withdrew it from an inner pocket of his coat and offered it to her. Roberta liked everything new and modern; not for her second-hand things and that went not just for books but authors as well. "Who wants to read what dead people have written?" would be just what she would say. Asala took a very different view: unimpressed by the endless pages of simple prose and poor conversations, half the time without any sort of real plot that, in her opinion, formed the modern novel. Asala buried herself in the more testing and intelligent writing - old or modern - though with a penchant for excitement of a real kind.
The man seemed oddly eager for Roberta to take the book.
"Oh, not my sort of thing." Roberta spoke, hardly even glancing up at the man. Almost flippant - uncaring was how Asala saw it - but then Roberta seemed to realise she could not say that without actually looking at the book. Even she could not do that. She picked it up and idly flicked the pages sending a small cloud of dust into the air.
Asala could not think why the man had even thought Roberta could be interested in such a book. Clearly it was in a process of decay, its pages disintegrating before their eyes, turning to dust. Asala stood and stared out of the doorway into the rain towards the sea and waited for Roberta's curt dismissal of the loan.
Apart from a cough or two, Asala heard nothing and, having watched the moving clouds and rain for a time, she turned to find Roberta actually reading. The man was watching her friend with what seemed a hunger as if he wanted to eat her. It was an unsettling image but one that remained with Asala. She could not imagine what had possessed Roberta. It was not in character. Asala turned back to the landscape and watched the rain slanting down like stair-rods. She smiled wryly, who of her generation would know what stair-rods were - certainly not Roberta. It required a penchant for old books to know such things.
"You may borrow it... of course." Behind her the man spoke. Asala did not like his voice.
The man had not actually said where he lived or was staying, much less how to return the book but Roberta seemed almost to have forgotten about that when, eventually, the weather was sufficiently settled for them to attempt a homeward journey; merely dropping the old book into her knapsack. The man had been strangely quiet whilst Roberta was reading and Asala had most definitely not engaged him in conversation or indeed gone near him. In a way it was surprising her interest had not been sparked. The whole situation almost a reversal of the usual. It should have been Asala interested in the old volume and a curious old man, whilst Roberta fidgeted and stared out at the rain wishing it to stop and let her get back off the moor, not Roberta.