Tales From the Black Chamber, page 6
“They blew up my office.”
“Oh, dear God, are your friends ok?”
“Yes, everyone’s fine, it sounds like. I’ve got to call them though.”
“If it was a time bomb,” John speculated, “that was a lousy time to try and kill you.”
“I doubt they were trying to kill me. Scare me, maybe. But they must have found one of our missing pages in the conference room and realized that there was a copy on my computer, and they were trying to destroy that. Of course, now I’m scared out of my mind. Who are these people? What’s next? My apartment?!”
“Not to unnerve you further,” John said, “but chances are they’ve already searched it.”
“Okay,” Anne said, her voice tight. “I’m going to do my very best not to freak out and start screaming rhetorical questions about what the hell is going on and what the deal with this goddamn book is.” She took a gulp of her mocha. “And I’m going to go call my partners, coworkers, friends, and ex-boyfriend and tell them that I’m alive and then apologize for, I don’t know, attracting the attention of a mad bomber. Also that I’m on indefinite leave, as of right now.”
John began, “An—”
Anne held up her hand. “No, John. I can’t talk about this anymore. I’m going to go make my calls and then go to bed.”
As she walked up the stairs she heard Agent Hunter come in the front door.
“They blew up her office,” John told him.
“Who are these guys?” Hunter asked with audible exasperation.
“I wish I knew,” sighed John.
A day later, they declared the text of the book to be identical to the control breviary. The type was consistent and within the natural variations of a print run as well. John had brought a laptop from the Coolidge Foundation with which Anne was able to download the three pages left behind in the conference room. So it came down to the underlining or the marginalia, they figured. They spent another day carefully writing down all the marginalia longhand, then entering it into the computer. John already had most of the underlined words and their position on the page written out: salvat, p. 132 ¶3 ln. 4 wd. 8. He explained to Anne that it was conceivable that the position on the page could be a numerical code that could then be transposed back into letters. Anne agreed that that was certainly possible given sixteenth-century cryptography and steganography. But despair crept in when she started talking about the variety of codes that could have been used: the line within the paragraph could indicate the letter in the word—here, line four would indicate the fourth letter, v; the initial letters might be arranged in a transposition cipher; rotating letters in the word might also be used; there might be a key word or number used to encode it that they wouldn’t have at all; or a variety of other methods.
“If only we knew a cryptographer,” said John.
“This is Washington. Aren’t there a lot of retired NSA and military types we could consult with?” Anne asked.
“I’ll ask Agent Hunter. He might be able to pull some strings. But even if he can, I’m worried about disseminating the text.”
“Because we know these mystery people will try and kill anyone with a copy,” Anne said.
“Exactly.”
“Damn it, if we could just figure out who they are,” Anne said, smacking the page in front of her.
“Well, I know Agent Hunter has people trying to run them down.”
“Of course, if this were some crappy novel, it’d be a bunch of albino Vatican hit men trying to cover up the fact that Jesus’s descendants are a family of Lithuanian shoe salesmen in Perth Amboy and the papacy is run by aliens.”
John cracked up. “If only it were that simple!” He laughed. “What the heck did Mildred see in here?”
“You know what?” said Anne. “Let’s put codes on the back burner. She didn’t have enough time to do any elaborate code breaking. Even if this was the first and only book she looked at—which I doubt—she just wasn’t in the conference room long enough. So either there’s a code she recognized right off—in which case, maybe we should be looking in her library, not this book—or there’s no code at all, and we’re just missing something.”
John looked thoughtful and didn’t speak for a while. “You know what, I think you’re right. What say we break for the night and go down to Mildred’s house tomorrow and see what we can find?”
“Sounds good to me,” Anne yawned. “I’m exhausted and just about cross-eyed from looking at all this stuff.” She rubbed her eyelids.
They said their good nights and went up to their bedrooms. Anne immediately went into the bathroom and began brushing her teeth. She was looking at the Van Gogh reproduction on the wall next to the sink absently when she thought she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look in the mirror, for that’s where she’d seen it, then looked behind her. Nothing. My eyes are tired; my brain is frazzled, she told herself. Maybe I should take a Unisom.
She spat into the sink and looked at herself in the mirror as she drank a cup of water. You’re not looking so hot, honey, she told herself. I look like I’ve been pulling all-nighters at college for a week, but I don’t have a nineteen-year-old’s constitution (or skin) anymore.
Suddenly, her reflection rippled in the mirror. Or she thought it did. It looked like someone had dropped a pebble onto a pond surface right at the tip of her nose and a little wave radiated outward.
Oh my God, I’m tired, she thought. I’m hallucinating. It had happened to her once before in college. She remembered sitting in an exam room seeing little movements out of the corner of her eye that weren’t really there. Nothing as dramatic or weird as the ripple, though. She rubbed at her eyes for a while.
When she looked in the mirror again, Anne was comforted to see her face undisturbed by any sort of special effect. For a moment. Then it happened again. She started and stepped back. She stared at the toilet. No distortions. The shower, nothing. The Van Gogh print, fine. The mirror again. Ripple. Ripple. Then a slowly eddying darkness at the central point—where her nose should have been. Anne shrank back, taking a step to the left. The blackness followed her to the left, as if attached to her face. She reflexively batted at her face, but only succeeded in giving herself a sore nose.
Suddenly, the blurry, indistinct lines of a face appeared in the darkness. Anne watched, riveted, as they sharpened into the features of a boy. A little black boy of about eight, who was squinting mightily. All of a sudden, he seemed to see her, and his eyes popped open in surprise. He smiled guilelessly and started pointing at her, then turned his head to talk to someone to his right. She couldn’t hear a thing, but saw his lips moving as he was excitedly describing something—probably her—to someone out of sight.
Anne didn’t know what to do. She waved, and he waved back. Then with a final ripple, the picture dissipated and the face in the mirror was her own again.
Anne looked around the bathroom, somehow expecting something to be different. She thought for a moment about whether she should just write all this off to fatigue, and possibly incipient mental illness, when common sense kicked in.
She knocked at John’s bedroom door. “Just a second,” he called, appearing a moment later in a Redskins T-shirt and sweatpants. “What’s up?” he asked, looking puzzled.
“Uh, look, I know we’re both tired and overworked and stuff,” Anne said, screwing up her courage. “But something very weird just happened to me. If it was fatigue, it wouldn’t bother me. But I don’t think it was, and it was very strange, and I thought I should tell someone.”
“Fire away,” he said, concern and sympathy in his eyes.
“Well, either I saw something odd, or I’m going crazy, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going crazy, even given the events of the last couple weeks.”
John’s eyes opened a bit wider, and his face grew graver. “Tell me and I’ll believe you. We’ve spent enough time together that I know you’re the farthest thing from crazy.”
“Okay.” Anne took a deep breath. “I saw a face in the bathroom mirror.”
John looked startled, but not shocked. “What kind of face?”
“Well, that’s the odd thing, it was a little boy. A little black boy. He seemed very friendly and when I waved at him, he waved back. Then he disappeared.”
“Oh crap,” said John. He quickly scanned the hallway for something, and not finding it, said, “Okay, Anne. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He reached behind him, grabbed a little ladder-back chair from a writing desk, and placed it in the middle of the hall. “Sit here,” he said, stepping out of his room and closing the door behind him. “I’m going to just close all these doors here,” he said, doing just that. “And now I’m going to go get Steve.”
“Should I be worried?” Anne asked after she’d sat down.
“No. Well, yes, sort of. But no, nothing’s going to happen to you. You’re fine and you’re safe. Just trust me on this, ok?”
“Um, sure. Can I have an explanation? I mean, this—” she vaguely indicated his activity by waving her hand in a tight circle, “this isn’t exactly a normal reaction. You know something.”
“I do. And I’m inclined to tell you about it. But I need to talk to Steve and we’ve got to do something first. Sit tight. Don’t worry.” He walked over to the linen closet, took out a stack of sheets and towels, closed the door, and went quickly down the stairs.
Anne crossed her legs and wondered, What the hell is going on here? Are these guys crazy? Are they in on this? Have I actually been kidnapped? Her worries were not allayed when, after the sounds of distant conversation passed, Agent Hunter and John came up the stairs, each with some towels and sheets over his arm and a man-of-action expression on his face.
Steve went into John’s room, and John went to Anne’s door. “Do you mind?” he asked.
Anne shrugged and smiled, shaking her head, “Be my guest. In for a dime …”
When he went in, Anne leaned forward and peered after him. She was baffled to watch him drop a hand towel over the makeup mirror that sat on the dressing table in the room, then hang a khaki-colored bed sheet over her bathroom mirror.
Agent Hunter came out of John’s room and went into the hallway bathroom, his face tight with grim duty and his hands full of the good cheer of a pink and white floral sheet. Okay, Anne thought, if it weren’t a cliché and didn’t remind me so much of what just happened, I would say I was through the looking-glass.
After John and Steve had checked all the other bedrooms and carefully draped every mirror with Bed Bath & Beyond’s finest, they met on the landing.
“Uh, guys?” Anne started. “I know I should be concerned or something, but that was the goofiest thing I’ve seen in a while.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be,” said John, one corner of his mouth turning up. Agent Hunter just shrugged, his Joe Friday mask slipping a bit as his eyes rolled in embarrassment.
“Okay, let’s go downstairs and talk about this,” said John with a sigh.
“Let’s,” said Anne, popping out of the chair.
They sat down at the kitchen table. “I’ll make some coffee,” offered Agent Hunter.
“Okay, Anne,” said John. “Let me preface this conversation with a job offer.”
“You lost me,” said Anne, who couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d broken into song.
“I’d like to offer you a job with the, ah, Coolidge Foundation. Mildred was our Librarian and book expert. We need to replace her. It’s a good gig. The money is good—six figures after taxes, with bonuses at irregular intervals—though surely not what you’d make with Hathaway & Edgecombe. On the other hand, D.C.’s cheaper than New York, and you won’t have to worry about a mortgage. The Foundation owns the house on Linnean Avenue, as well as all the books in it, and you’d get to live there rent-free for your entire career as Librarian. Plus, you get to curate one of the most unusual collections of books in the world. What do you say?”
“I’d say I’d have to think about it for quite a while.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” said John, his brow furrowing. “I really can’t explain what’s going on here unless you work for the Foundation.”
“What?!” Anne pushed back from the table in surprise. “That makes no sense at all. And, frankly, it’s a kind of blackmail. I mean, obviously I want to know what’s going on, but to make me give up my job for less money, move, and work for an entity that you won’t even describe to me?”
“Yep,” said John. “That’s exactly it. Look, I don’t make this offer lightly. Frankly, I’m only doing it now because of what happened to you. I’ve been thinking about Mildred’s replacement for a while, and I very much respect your intelligence and knowledge of books, particularly of occult works, in which our collection is particularly strong. Moreover, your bravery in the face of those lunatics with submachine guns surprised and impressed me. And all the people I talked to when we were checking up on you after Mildred died said wonderful things about your character, judgment, and decency. I think you’d be an excellent candidate for this job, which—as I’ve mentioned repeatedly to your frustration—is more than a little strange. I’m not saying you’ll have to face gun-toting madmen every week, but I can promise you you’ll never be bored.”
Agent Hunter laughed. Anne turned to him. “What do you think about this, Agent Hunter? Will you tell me something, or will you do your cigar-store-Indian impression?”
Agent Hunter smiled with genuine warmth. “Take the job,” he said softly with a little smile and slight nod. He handed her a coffee cup. Anne looked into it, then up at the ceiling, as if trying to find a key that would suddenly make sense of all this.
“Okay, fine. I’ll be your librarian,” Anne said, thinking, I can always quit when this is over and go back to H&E.
“Very well,” said John. “I know you can’t really know what you’re committing to, but I’m going to take that as a serious acceptance.” He offered his hand and Anne shook it, resignedly.
“Now can you tell me what’s going on?” asked Anne.
“Well, what happened to you is good, in a way. We have some idea what we’re up against. Not who specifically, but what kind of person.”
“I’m just as baffled as I was a few minutes ago,” said Anne.
“Okay, let me ask you something that’ll sound random but will eventually make sense. Do you know what The Key of Solomon is?”
“Ha!” Anne laughed. “Of course I do. Clavis Solomonis. It’s the most important and complete early-modern grimoire available. The oldest known copy is fifteenth-century, in Greek, and it shows up in at least Latin, Italian, and English as early as the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth it’d even been translated into Hebrew. It was probably extant in French and German as well, though we only have exemplars of the former from the eighteenth century and after and none of the latter. I once brokered a sale of a particularly nice eighteenth-century Latin edition printed in Cracow.”
“Did you read it?” John asked.
“Of course!” said Anne. “I love that kind of stuff. And I’d read sections of it in college for a History of Magic class.”
“What did you think?”
“It’s fascinating and provides amazing insight into the mentality of the world of the day. It’s the dark side of the religiosity of the Middle Ages.”
“What about the content qua content?”
“What do you mean?” Anne asked. “The theory of magic or the spells themselves?”
“Either.”
“Uh, kind of fun, but I wasn’t exactly worried that reading one out loud would, you know, summon the demon Caacrinolaas who cometh forth like a dog and hath wings like a griffin.”
John laughed. “Nice. That from The Key of Solomon?”
Anne felt herself smirking a little. “No, Wierus’s Pseudomonarchia dæmonum. You might be confusing The Key of Solomon with the so-called Lesser Key of Solomon or Lemegeton, which largely reproduces Wierus’s hierarchy of demons but adds some neat-o symbols for each of them.”
John laughed again. “Okay, ok, you know way more about these books than I do. But do you think there’s anything there?”
“What do you mean?” Anne asked, puzzled. “Do I think there’s any real magic in there? No. I mean, you could change your psychological state pretty dramatically with auto-suggestion, and you could easily get other medievals to believe that you were a magician and then affect them by suggestion as well.”
“I remember your saying that you were interested in monsters as well as magic, right? Vampires, werewolves, and so forth.” Anne nodded. “Now, even if you don’t believe in vampires and werewolves, you do believe there’s a kernel of truth somewhere behind the myths, right?”
“Sure. There are a whole range of theo—”
John cut her off. “But you dismiss the possibility of a kernel of truth behind magic.”
“No, I just told you—”
“Not a subjective psychological reality. An objective, physical reality.”
“Yes, I dismiss that.” Suddenly the penny dropped. “Wait a second, are you telling me that what happened in the bathroom upstairs was magic?”
John leaned back. “Yes. It was magic.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Well, then, congratulations. You’ve either got a sizable brain tumor or you’ve had a psychotic break.”
Anne stared at John, then turned to Agent Hunter. “Are you buying this, Agent Hunter?” Hunter just nodded. “Okay, you guys are nuts. I’m out of here.” She stood up.
“Anne, please. Look, let me ask you an academic question. In medieval necromancy, what sort of spell requires a mirror of some sort and a sinless, innocent child to look into it and report what he sees?”
Anne sat back down, crossed her arms, and chewed on her left little finger’s nail. After a long minute, she growled, “A scrying spell.”
“Which you use to …”
“Spy on someone. Find someone.”
“And we know—”
She cut him off. “That there’s someone after me who’s a little too interested in a book with exorcism rituals. Which are the Godly converse of necromantic demon-summoning rituals.”
