Tales From the Black Chamber (16 page)

“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.”

“Woo!” said Rafe, still adrenalized.

“Wait,” said Mike. “Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys said that this language—if it is a language—has defied generations of cryptographers and linguists. What good does having one more word do? I mean, as Anne says, I'm sure this is a huge historical clue to its origins, but … it doesn't really help us, does it?”

“No, not really,” said John. “But it can't be a coincidence that someone's stolen Beinecke MS 408 and Mildred was killed for this book with the only known sample of Voynich … ish outside the book.”

Claire hadn't taken her eyes off the page since Rafe set it down. “Okay guys, wait. Look here. See these squiggles right under the Voynich-ish? What if that's a translation or transliteration?” She pointed at a group of doodles or practice marks that looked like:

zhæh

“I mean,” Claire suddenly seemed less certain, “I know it's a long shot, but it kind of looks like there are four letters in the Voynich word, and there are four marks here.”

They all squinted at the page for two full minutes in silence.

“It doesn't really look like anything, does it?” asked Anne.

“I don't know,” said John.

“Sorry—” began Claire.

“No, no, hold on,” interrupted Rafe. “Here's one thing for your theory. The first Voynichy word has what looks like four letters, and two of them—the sort of ampersands with tails—are the same. What we've got here is four marks, two of which are the same. Now, if we're to read left to right, we know the first ‘letter' is not the one that's used again. And that's true in the second one as well. Similarly, the right-most ‘letter' in both is one that's redoubled. But … of course, that leaves out the possibility that the final ‘letter' in that second series of marks is actually the bottom-most squiggle.”

Mike walked out of the office for a minute. The rest of the crew stared in silence. Not long after, he came back with Lily, Wilhelmina, and Joe. “Okay, first question is to Lily. Lily, is that Korean?”

She squinted. “No. It's not. It looks kind of like Korean, but that Nike swoosh at the bottom can't be Korean. First, it's swoopy; second, it looks like it starts on the right and then comes left. All lines in Hangul are written top-down or left-right. No exceptions. If it were illiterate Korean, it would say something like
ae
or
i-i
or
e
or maybe
mae
,
me
,
mi-i
or something. And maybe the swoosh would be a final
eu
, just written poorly. But, no, I can't think of a Korean word that would look anything like that, even copied by someone who doesn't know the language.”

“Thanks, Lily,” said Mike. “The next question is for all of you guys. You have any clue what that might be?”

“Hmm. Zero-one-one is three in binary,” suggested Joe.

“It kind of looks like a smiley face with the right eye closed or covered or scratched out. Maybe a pirate eyepatch?” said Wilhelmina.

“Good point. Maybe it's an ideogram,” said John. “I hadn't thought about it as a whole; we've just been looking at the elements.”

“Anyone know any Chinese?” asked Claire.

Lily said, “A little. Mostly through Hanja in Korean. It doesn't look like anything to me, but I'm not an expert. What about another script? Something like Demotic Egyptian. Didn't they simplify the hieroglyphs down to strokes?”

John said, “Great thought. Wait a second, I have some books on Egyptian in my office.” He returned a moment later with an armful of books, including Gardiner's big blue
Egyptian
Grammar
. He flipped through one book and said, “Okay, here's the demotic alphabet. It's pretty much just squiggles to my eye. But it does have a double-vertical-line letter and a swoop. No real circle, though. But still. Could be. You know, what we'll have to do is send this to some experts and see if they can make any sense of it. But for once … I think we're onto something. Excellent job, guys. Anyone who doesn't have plans, dinner's on Grandpa Cal.”