Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (60 page)

Newbold died before completing his work, but his “discoveries” were published by his friend Roland Kent. It was at this point that Professor Manly took up the study of the manuscript, and decided that Newbold’s enthusiasm had led him to deceive himself. Examined under a microscope, it was seen that the strange nature of the characters was not entirely due to a cipher. The ink had peeled off the vellum as it dried, so that the “shorthand” was actually due to ordinary wear and tear over many centuries. With Manly’s announcement of his discovery in 1931, interest in the “most mysterious manuscript in the world” (Manly’s phrase) vanished, Bacon’s reputation sank, and the whole thing was quickly forgotten.

Upon my return from Russia, I visited the University of Pennsylvania, and examined the manuscript. It was an odd sensation. I was not disposed to view it romantically. In my younger days, I had often felt my hair stirring as I handled a letter in Poe’s handwriting, and I had spent many hours sitting in his room at the University of Virginia, trying to commune with his spirit. As I got older, I became more matter-of-fact—a recognition that geniuses are basically like other men—and I stopped imagining that inanimate objects are somehow trying to “tell a story.”

Yet as soon as I handled the Voynich manuscript, I had a nasty sensation. I cannot describe it more precisely than that. It was not a sense of evil or horror or dread—just nastiness; like the sensation I used to have as a child passing the house of a woman who was reputed to have
eaten her sister. It made me think of murder. This sensation stayed with me during the two hours while I examined the manuscript, like an unpleasant smell. The librarian obviously did not share my feeling. When I handed the manuscript back to her, I said jokingly: “I don’t like that thing.” She merely looked puzzled; I could tell she had no idea of what I meant.

Two weeks later, the two photostat copies I had ordered arrived in Charlottesville. I sent one to Andronikov, as I had promised, and had the other one bound for the university library. I spent some time poring over it with a magnifying glass, reading Newbold’s book and Manly’s articles. The sensation of “nastiness” did not return. But when, some months later, I took my nephew to look at the manuscript, I again experienced the same feeling. My nephew felt nothing.

While we were in the library, an acquaintance of mine introduced me to Averel Merriman, the young photographer whose work is used extensively in expensive art books of the kind published by Thames and Hudson. Merriman told me that he had recently photographed a page of the Voynich manuscript in colour. I asked if I might see it. Later that afternoon, I called on him in his hotel room and saw the photograph. What was my motive? I believe it was a sort of morbid desire to find out if the “nastiness” would come over in a colour photo. It didn’t. But something more interesting did. It so happened that I was thoroughly familiar with the page Merriman had photographed. And so now, looking at it carefully, I felt sure that it was, in some subtle way, different from the original. I stared at it for a long time before I realised why. The colouring of the photograph—developed by a process invented by Merriman—was slightly “richer” than that of the original manuscript. And when I looked at certain symbols indirectly—concentrating on the line just above them—they appeared to be somehow “completed,” as if the discoloration left by the flakes of ink had become visible.

I tried not to show my excitement. For some reason, I felt intensely secretive, as if Merrimen had just handed me the clue to hidden treasure. A kind of “Mr. Hyde” sensation came over me—a feeling of cunning, and a kind of lust. I asked him casually how much it would cost to photograph the whole manuscript in this way. He told me several hundred dollars. Then my idea came to me. I asked if, for a much larger sum—say a thousand dollars—he would be willing to make me large “blow-ups” of the pages—perhaps four to a page. He said he would, and I wrote him a cheque on the spot. I was tempted to ask him to send me the photographs one by one, as he did them, then felt that this might arouse his curiosity. To my nephew Julian, I explained as we left that the library of the University of Virginia had asked me to have the photographs made—a pointless lie that puzzled me. Why should I lie? Had
the manuscript some dubious influence of which I had become a victim?

A month later, the registered parcel arrived. I locked the door of my study, and sat in the armchair by the window as I tore off the wrappings. I took a random photograph from the middle of the pile, and held it out to the light. I wanted to shout with pleasure at what I saw. Many of the symbols seemed to be “completed,” as if their broken halves were joined by a slightly darkened area of the vellum. I looked at sheet after sheet. It was impossible to doubt. The colour photography somehow showed up markings that were invisible even to a microscope.

What followed now was routine work, although it took many months. The photographs were taped, one after the other, to a large drawing board, and then traced. The tracings were transferred, with the utmost care, to heavy drawing paper. Then, working with deliberate slowness, I sketched in the “invisible” part of the symbols, completing them. When the whole thing was finished, I bound it into a large folio, and then settled down to study it. I had completed more than half the symbols—which were, of course, four times their natural size. Now, with the aid of a kind of painstaking detective work, I was able to complete nearly all the others.

Only then, after ten months’ work, did I allow myself to consider the main part of my task—the question of deciphering.

To begin with, I was totally in the dark. The symbols were complete—but what were they? I showed some of them to a colleague who had written a book on the deciphering of ancient languages. He said they bore some resemblance to later Egyptian hieroglyphics—of the period when all resemblance to “pictures” had vanished. I wasted a month pursuing this false trail. But fate was on my side. My nephew was about to return to England, and he asked me to let him have a photograph of a few pages of the Voynich manuscript. I experienced a deep reluctance, but could hardly refuse. I was still being thoroughly secretive about my work, rationalising this by telling myself that I merely wanted to insure that no one stole my ideas. Finally, I decided that perhaps the best way of preventing Julian from feeling curiosity about my labours was to make as little fuss as possible. So two days before he was due to sail, I presented him with a photograph of a page of the manuscript, and with my reconstructed version of yet another page. I did this casually, as if it were a matter that hardly interested me.

Ten days later, I received a letter from Julian that made me congratulate myself on my decision. On the boat, he had made friends with a young member of the Arab Cultural Association, who was travelling to London to take up a post. One evening, by chance, he showed
him the photographs. The actual page of the Voynich manuscript meant nothing to the Arab; but when he saw my “reconstruction,” he said immediately: “Ah, this is some form of Arabic.” Not modern Arabic; and he was unable to read it. But he had no doubt that the manuscript had originated in the Middle East.

I rushed to the university library and found an Arabic text. A glance at it showed me the Arab had been right. The mystery of the Voynich script was solved: it seemed to be mediaeval Arabic.

It took me two weeks to learn to read Arabic—although, of course, I could not understand it. I prepared to settle down to a study of the language. If I worked at it for six hours a day, I calculated that I should be able to speak it fluently in about four months. However, this labour proved to be unnecessary. For once I had mastered the script well enough to translate a few sentences into English letters, I realised that it was not written in Arabic, but in a mixture of Latin and Greek.

My first thought was that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide his thoughts from prying eyes. Then I realised that this was an unnecessary assumption. The Arabs were, of course, among the most skilled doctors in Europe in the Middle Ages. If an Arab physician were to write a manuscript, what would be more likely than that he should do so in Latin and Greek, using Arab script?

I was now so excited that I could barely eat or sleep. My housekeeper told me continually that I needed a holiday. I decided to take her advice, and take a sea voyage. I would go back to Bristol to see my family, and take the manuscript with me on the boat, where I could work undisturbed all day long.

Two days before the ship sailed, I discovered the title of the manuscript. Its title page was missing, but there was a reference on the fourteenth page that was clearly to the work itself. It was called
Necronomicon
.

The following day, I was seated in the lounge of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, sipping a martini before dinner, when I heard a familiar voice. It was my old friend Foster Damon, of Brown University, in Providence. We had met years before when he was collecting folk songs in Virginia, and my admiration for his poetry, as well as for his works on Blake, had kept us in fairly close contact ever since. I was delighted to meet him in New York. He was also staying at the Algonquin. Naturally, we had dinner together. Halfway through the meal, he asked me what I was working on.

“Have you ever heard of the
Necronomicon
?” I asked him, smiling.

“Of course.”

I goggled at him. “You have? Where?”

“In Lovecraft. Isn’t that what you meant?”

“Who on earth is Lovecraft?”

“Don’t you know? One of our local writers in Providence. He died about thirty years ago. Haven’t you come across his name?”

Now a memory stirred somewhere in my head. When I had been investigating Mrs. Whitman’s house in Providence—for my book
The Shadow of Poe
—Foster had mentioned Lovecraft, with some such comment as: “You ought to read Lovecraft. He’s the best American writer of horror stories since Poe.” I can remember saying that I thought Bierce deserved that title, and then forgetting about it.

“Do you mean that this word
Necronomicon
actually occurs in Lovecraft?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.”

“And where do you suppose Lovecraft got it?”

“I always assumed he invented it.”

My interest in food vanished. This was the kind of development that no one could have foreseen. For, as far as I knew, I was the first person to read the Voynich manuscript. Or was I? How about the two scholars of the seventeenth century? Had one of them deciphered it and mentioned its name in his writings?

Obviously, the first thing to do was to check Lovecraft, and find out whether Foster’s memory had served him correctly. I found myself praying that he was mistaken. After the meal, we took a taxi to a bookshop in Greenwich Village, and there I was able to locate a paperback of Lovecraft stories. Before we left the shop Foster riffed through its pages, then placed his finger on one of them:

“There it is. ‘
Necronomicon
, by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.’ ”

There it was, impossible to doubt. In the taxi, on the way home, I tried not to show how shattered I felt. But soon after we got back, I excused myself and went to my room. I tried to read Lovecraft, but could not concentrate.

The next day, before sailing, I searched Brentano’s for Lovecraft books, and managed to find two in hard covers, as well as several paperbacks. The hardcover books were
The Shuttered Room
and
Supernatural Horror in Literature
. In the first of these, I found a lengthy account of the
Necronomicon
, together with several quotations. But the account states, “While the book itself and most of its translators, and its author, are all imaginary, Lovecraft here employed … 
his technique of inserting actual historical fact in the middle of large areas of purely imaginary lore
.”

Purely imaginary … Could it perhaps be a mere matter of coincidence of names?
Necronomicon
—the book of dead names. Not a difficult title to invent. The more I thought of it, the more likely it seemed that this was the correct explanation. And so before I went on board that afternoon, I was already feeling a great deal easier in my mind. I ate a good dinner, and read myself to sleep afterwards with Lovecraft.

I am not sure how many days went by before I began to experience a gradually increasing fascination with this new literary discovery. I know that my first impression was simply that Lovecraft was a skilful constructor of weird stories. Perhaps it was my work on the translation of the Voynich manuscript that altered my approach to him. Or possibly it was simply the realisation that Lovecraft had been uniquely obsessed by this strange world of his own creation—uniquely even when compared with such writers as Gogol and Poe. He made me think of certain writers on anthropology, however lacking in literary skill, yet made impressive by the sheer authenticity of their material.

With several hours a day in which to work, I quickly completed my translation of the Voynich manuscript. Long before the end, I had become aware that it was a fragment, and that there were mysteries involved that went beyond the cipher—a code within a code, as it were. But what struck me most powerfully—so that I sometimes had the utmost difficulty in restraining myself from rushing into the corridor and talking to the first person I met—was the incredible scientific knowledge revealed by the manuscript. Newbold had not been entirely wrong about this. The author simply knew far more than any thirteenth-century monk—or Mohammedan scholar, for that matter—could possibly know. A long and obscure passage about a “god” or demon who is somehow a vortex filled with stars is followed by a passage in which the primal constituent of matter is described as energy (using the Greek
dynamis
and
energeia
, as well as the Latin
vis
)
in limited units
. This sounds like a clear anticipation of the quantum theory. Again, the seed of man is described as being made up of units of power, each of which endows man with a lifelong characteristic. This certainly sounds remarkably like a reference to the genes. The drawing of a human spermatozoon occurs in the midst of a text that refers to the
Sefer Yezirah
, the Book of Creation in the Kabbala. Several slighting references to the
Ars Magna
of Raymond Lull support the notion that the author of the work was Roger Bacon—a contemporary of the mathematical mystic, although in one place in the text he refers to himself under the name of Martinus Hortulanus, which might be translated Martin Gardener.