Tales From the Black Chamber, page 11
“I take it she uses Lily.”
“Yes, indeed. And she’s E.S.S. Park in the medical literature. Eulalia Sun-Sook Park.”
“How did she get involved with the Black Chamber?”
“Long, long story. Short version: pretty much like you. The incumbent Doctor had died—of natural causes, I hasten to add—and she had come to our attention a couple years earlier when she had been involved in something strange. We convinced her to join us and help keep a lid on the Weird.” John rubbed his neck. “I imagine she probably could have become world-famous by publishing scientific papers on what happened, but she was more than eager to help us cover it up.”
“Cover it up?” Anne asked.
“That’s part of the job. You’ll see in the Presidential Charter. Basically, we’re to keep tabs on weirdness, stamp it out where we can, and keep too many people from finding out about it.”
“So we’re the Men in Black?” Anne asked.
“I wish I were as good looking as Will Smith, if that’s what you mean.”
“Ha.”
“To answer your question: sort of. Honestly, most everything we run into ends up so ambiguous and odd that it’s not all that hard to keep a lid on it.”
“But doesn’t that impede science and people’s right to know what’s out there?” Anne frowned and took another sip of wine.
“Remind me of where in the Constitution the Right to Know is?” John joked. “No, this isn’t about cover-up for the sake of cover-up, or trying to keep a monopoly on occult knowledge in the government’s hands. It’s trying to keep the Weird at bay and its existence a secret, insofar as it’s possible, lest someone discover it and try to do bad things with it. Like our necromancer friend. If whack-jobs out there knew that you could do that kind of creepy shit, you don’t think you’d get a bunch of loons getting ordained as priests, quitting, downloading the spells from the Internet, peeping in girls’ locker rooms, or worse?”
“Speaking of the Internet, doesn’t it complicate your life a lot?” Anne asked.
John waggled his hand. “Well, we worry about it a lot, and Rafe and Joe and Lily have spent a ton of time working on programs for scanning for material, others for scrubbing servers of specified code, and even more for breaking into secure sites that we think might be hiding something. But to tell the truth, we haven’t had a single really worrisome incident on the Internet. In general, those who desire this kind of knowledge also want to keep it all for themselves, so their paranoia and secrecy work for us. But we assume something bad on the Internet is inevitable, and we hope that our preparations are at least partially adequate.”
Anne crossed her arms. “If I accept the lawfulness and desirability of your, er, our cover-ups—and I can’t say that I yet do—isn’t it really hard to do?”
“Not really,” John said. “First, the culture doesn’t accept weird occurrences. We’re all science, all the time. Oddball stuff gets shoved onto sketchy cable documentaries and is considered the province of eccentrics. Second, really explicit encounters are very, very rare. You’d be amazed what most people can rationalize. Third, some combination of legal threats, large sums of cash, and/or assurances that they’re part of a secret elect, will generally obtain most people’s silence, especially given that they know they’re likely to be mocked and treated like a lunatic if they tell the truth anyway. And, honestly, I think most people want a reason to forget. Tell me you wouldn’t rather forget that face in the mirror.”
Anne tapped her wineglass in thought. “You’re probably right. I’ve lain in bed wondering how I could ever tell a friend or even my parents what had happened to me. And I don’t think I could. They’d immediately conclude I was mentally ill. Heck, I was ninety percent of the way towards convincing myself that I was mentally ill.”
John smiled. “Yep, but I’m glad that the offer of a sizable salary, my insistence on the classified nature of our work, and your initiation into the most secret organization in the U.S. government have bought your silence.”
Anne laughed and drained her glass. “On that note, sir, good night.”
Two weeks passed, during which Anne almost got used to never seeing her own reflection. On her fourth day, she’d been trying to do something with her hair in the ladies’ room, and Wilhelmina had come in. Anne shrugged helplessly, and Wilhelmina immediately came over and began coiffing her, saying, “Oh, let me help you, sweetheart. This has got to be hard on you. I know you’re young and you’ve got your looks, but I remember those days and I’d have gone crazy without a mirror. Girls have to know they look good to feel good, am I right? Tell you what, you bring in whatever you normally use on yourself and first thing, I’ll make you up.” Anne had tried to demur, but Wilhelmina was insistent. Anne thanked her—feeling so grateful she wondered if she were vainer than she thought—and told herself that, well, she didn’t really wear much more than a little eyeliner and lipstick, so it wouldn’t really be too much of an imposition.
Anne came to like her other coworkers as well. Rafe Stoll, the Scientist, turned out to be a quiet, funny guy of about six feet with black hair and startling blue eyes. She’d broached the topic of how magic could be reconciled with science. He’d laughed. “Well, if you held a gun to my head, I’d posit that it was some sort of means for causing a large-scale quantum entanglement or quantum teleportation, since it’s clearly a violation of the principle of locality—and of course it fits perfectly with Einstein’s description of spukhafte Fernwirkung, ‘spooky action at a distance.’” She’d laughed at that. He’d continued, “Of course, translated from the Physickish, that means, ‘Uh, it’s magic?’” and they’d both laughed.
Lily Park was a little tougher to warm up to. Maybe five-one in heels, wearing a white lab coat over a series of interchangeable dark suits, she had sharp, excellent features set in a wide, flat, Hangukin countenance. Her eyes were often a bit red, as if from fatigue, and her manner could be distant and self-contained, which after a while Anne ceased ascribing to hauteur or aloofness, but rather to the fact that she constantly seemed to be preoccupied with some sort of complex mental gymnastics. If she was the genius John said she was, she was living proof of the maxim that the brilliant are never bored.
Every day, they’d all meet in the morning for an hour or so to kick around ideas for finding the necromancer, as they decided to call him. Given the historical association of necromancy with Catholic clergy, Mike Himmelberg had suggested asking some of the Black Chamber’s contacts within the Church. Anne was a little surprised that they had multiple sources in the Catholic hierarchy around the country. “There’s a surprising amount of overlap between our bailiwick and theirs,” Mike had explained. “And when you’ve seen some of the same strange things, you tend to trust each other.”
The problem had been, however, trying to figure out how to find the necromancer, who—even if their guess was correct—was, as Mike said, “a beadle in an abbé stack.” Lily had suggested that an element of the FBI’s profiling practices might help: identify those clerics whose background indicates that they’d be inclined to evil practices. Mike said, “Hmm, so we just have to get a list of all the Catholic clergy in the country, then do background checks on all of them to see if they tortured animals as a kid. Ay yi yi.”
“Poor you,” joked John. “Mike already owes the Archdiocese’s official exorcist a slew of favors,” he explained to Anne.
“Worse, I owe him two hundred bucks from poker,” Mike mumbled.
“There’s an official Washington exorcist?” Anne asked, surprised.
“Sure,” said Mike. “A few of the big archdioceses have them. Although they don’t admit it. I want to say New York and Chicago admit they do, but they won’t reveal the exorcists’ identities. D.C. portrays itself as more ‘modern,’ so they’ve never announced they have one. Too medieval, you see. But they do. I met him investigating an incident in West Virginia one time. He’d gotten there independently.”
“An incident?” Anne asked. “Like a demonic possession? Linda Blair, pea soup? ‘Your mother sews socks in Hell?’ That kind of stuff?”
“Sort of,” said Mike, screwing up his face as if trying to think how to describe it. “Yeah, sure. Okay. That kind of stuff. The four marks of possession, just for future reference, are a strong aversion to holy objects, supernatural strength, knowledge impossible for the possessed to have, and speaking in identifiable languages that the possessed doesn’t know.” He ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “Aversion, Strength, knowing Stuff, and Speaking. Or as I like to call them, ASSS. The extra S is for ‘extra scary.’”
Wilhelmina scowled and shook her head. Claire rolled her eyes. Rafe laughed. Joe McManus swatted Mike on the head with a three-ring binder. To Anne, he said, “Unfortunately, you’ll get used to Mike’s sense of humor.”
“No offense taken. And, sadly, I will remember that mnemonic,” Anne said.
“See?” said Mike to Joe triumphantly.
“Back to the problem, though,” said Anne. “If you’re trying to find out who tortured animals as a kid … aren’t those all sealed court and psychiatric records?”
Joe laughed silently, his head going back. “Yeah, that’s not a problem. Sealed or not, they keep those records on computers. And the computers are on networks.”
“This is going to be a ton of work,” said John. And time proved him right. Mike had obtained a thick computer printout from his exorcist contact, and they’d begun the laborious work of trying to identify juvenile-court records or newspaper stories that matched the names and ages of the priests, in hope that something would jump out. Very little did. It was slow, painstaking, frustrating work, and after a few days of it, no one was in a particularly good mood. Anne was particularly frustrated that she didn’t seem to have any extra brainpower to devote to the riddle of the book. They’d moved the rack with the scans of the book into their headquarters, though, to give everyone a chance to look it over.
One afternoon, John, Claire Krakauer, Rafe Stoll, Anne, and Steve McCormack were sitting at the long table in the conference room, which doubled as a general reference library, sorting through stacks of documents they’d dug up. They’d stopped for a moment, and Claire was telling a funny story about running into the character actor Ben Stein in Georgetown a few months back when Mike Himmelberg knocked on the doorframe and said, “Hey, can I ask a question of the Book Lady?”
“The Book Lady is in,” said Anne.
“Okay,” he said, holding a piece of paper in his hands. “I’ve had my computer monitoring various news feeds, law-enforcement systems, and so forth. Since this all started with rare books, I set it to alert me to anything involving rare books, book thefts, and the like. I really haven’t gotten anything significant. But all of a sudden, I’m getting a whole bunch of stuff revolving around Yale. Near as I can figure, they’ve had a very valuable book stolen, but they’re doing their best to cover it up and keep it out of the papers.”
“That’s pretty common,” said Anne. “You tell people the book’s being restored or on loan to another institution while the insurance company pays whatever fraction of the insured value the thieves will take as ransom.”
“Ah, like art theft,” Mike said, nodding. “Well, here’s the thing, they’ve brought in the Connecticut State Police, they’ve talked to the insurance companies, and they’re calling lawyers, private eyes, auction houses, and people all over the world. They seem to be more than slightly worked up. Do you think we should go up there and find out what’s going on?”
Steve said, “We’d have to be very careful. The FBI has an office in New Haven and it’s not that big a town.”
“Where was the book stolen from?” asked Anne.
Mike looked down at the paper. “Looks like the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.”
Anne perked up, having spent many hours of research there. “That could be a very valuable book. They’ve got an original Gutenberg Bible and an Audubon folio. Do they say what book was stolen?”
“No. Even with the police, they’re just using some code number. MS 408.” Anne did a double take and almost spat coffee all over the table. Mike went on, “Sounds like a second-tier Central American gang. ‘Hey, ese, you in MS-13?’ ‘No, man, I couldn’t get in. I’m in MS Four Hundred Ocho.’”
Now able to speak, Anne asked, “MS 408?! Are you sure?”
Mike checked the paper. “Yep. Mike Sierra four zero eight.”
“That means ‘manuscript number 408.’ And that’s huge. That’s the Voynich Manuscript!”
“Holy crap,” said Rafe, his eyes wide.
“Wow,” John said, pushing back from the table.
Claire, Steve, and Mike looked at each other. “Anybody going to explain?” asked Claire after a moment.
“You’re the Book Lady,” said John to Anne.
“Ah, okay..” She took a deep breath and started in. “The Voynich Manuscript is a totally unique text, not least because no one has any idea what it is. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, an English book dealer who bought it from the Jesuits in Italy in 1912 and eventually gave it to Yale. It’s written in a language no one understands in an alphabet that no one understands. It’s got pictures of people and plants and astronomical charts and all sorts of crazy stuff—like the pictures of little nude women, some wearing crowns, who appear to be bathing inside bodily organs—but no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of the thing. It first surfaced in Prague during the reign of Rudolf II, who was a famous patron of alchemists, mages, and the like. One very popular solution to the problem of what it means is simply dismissing it as meaningless, a hoax to be sold to some gullible rich guy as a mysterious book of occult wisdom. And it’d have to have been a rich guy because the thing isn’t a slapped-together job. It’s got 240 pages and originally had 272, all of which are pretty much covered in text and pictures. It’s got a strange, but reasonable-looking alphabet, which probably has twenty or thirty underlying letters, though there are what appear to be ligatures and combinatory glyphs.”
Claire said, “Hmm. Could we get a facsimile and have Joe run it through some computer algorithm or other to try and figure out the code?”
“No, no way,” said Rafe. “The Voynich Manuscript is legendary among cryptographers. Some of the best cryptanalysts in the world have gone to town on it for decades, and no one’s figured out a thing. Which is why so many are convinced of the hoax theory that Anne mentioned.”
John spoke up. “Right, I think they’ve ruled out that it’s Latin or German or English or most European languages. If I’m remembering right, someone did a frequency-of-letters or structural analysis and the ones it came up closest to were East Asian: Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai. So that theory is that it’s just one of those languages written in a made-up phonetic alphabet. Which, oddly enough, tracks closely with a purely hoaxed theory that a guy put forward a couple years prior, saying that it was written by a couple Chinese visitors to Venice in the 1400s, using a Roman-looking alphabet of their own invention. The hoax guy was as shocked as anyone else to find that the structural analysis made Mandarin a plausible idea.”
“But, wait, what would be the point of such a book?” asked Steve.
John held up his hands in helpless ignorance. “Got me. A private code? There’s an Englishman who makes a very persuasive, very clever argument that it’s the private technical diary of a fifteenth-century Italian architect/engineer who was heading off to the Ottoman Empire to build some buildings and wanted to take his technical secrets with him, so he encoded them and camouflaged his technical drawings by making them fantastical plants, and so forth.”
“Really?” said Anne.
“Yeah,” said John, “it’s a great book. I’ll loan it to you.”
“Thanks. Returning to what Rafe said …” said Anne, looking over at him. He seemed to be trying very hard to remember something, looking into the middle distance, his eyes moving back and forth, “… the other main theory—which jibes with the architect story—is that it is something meaningful in a European language, just encoded a number of times, the last of the encodings being the secret alphabet. And, last but not least, there’s a theory that it’s written in an artificial language someone made up. Like Esperanto.”
“Or Klingon,” Mike deadpanned.
“That’s an excellent point, Mike,” Anne humored him. “The academy has been terribly remiss in not checking it against Klingon, Esperanto, Volapük, and Tolkien’s elvish languages.”
“Hey, Rafe, you know Kli—” Mike started to joke, but Rafe leapt out of his seat without having heard them and ran out the door. “Was it something I said?” Mike said sarcastically.
“You just have that effect on people,” said John.
Rafe came bursting back in, holding a piece of paper with something printed on it in color. He started at it intently. “I knew it! There you are, motherfucker. Look, look here.” He put the paper down in the middle of the table, and everyone was drawn to it like a magnet. It was a printout of one of the pages of the Brevarium dæmonologicum from the back of the book, with mundane notes and doodles they’d ruled out as meaningless.
“Here, right here. See that?” Rafe stabbed his index finger at a series of unassuming doodles on the left-hand edge of the page next to the binding that looked like:
cgHg
“That,” Rafe said, “is Voynich. Voynichish? Voynichese? Whatever.”
“Are you sure?” asked John.
“Pretty damn sure,” said Rafe.
“I think he’s right,” said Anne. “It’s been years since I looked at it, but now that he says it, it seems exactly like it could be. I’d dismissed it as just practicing with a new pen nib or something—trying some ligatures or ampersands or something. But—I’ll be damned. I think that is a Voynich word. We’d have to look to see if it actually occurs in the manuscript. But, wow, that’s a huge scholarly coup, finding some evidence of it outside the book itself.”
